Riley Grace Brett at Gabriel’s Book Store
I met a new local author in the wild over the weekend at Gabriel’s Book Store in Lakeside. Riley Grace Brett volunteers there; she has also released a new novel.
I met a new local author in the wild over the weekend at Gabriel’s Book Store in Lakeside. Riley Grace Brett volunteers there; she has also released a new novel.
Hello from a former Catholic who misses life in Milwaukee, where Pączki Day was a thing. Ash Wednesday was a day when you could walk the streets and see your tribe, and Duluth seems to have none of that. Maybe I walk the wrong streets.
Lake Superior Writers is seeking nominations for the 2024 Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards. NEMBA celebrates books that substantially represent the history, culture, heritage or lifestyle of northeastern Minnesota.
The six categories are: nonfiction, fiction, children’s literature, middle grade / young adult, poetry and memoir.
Review by Max Grace, former professor of molecular gastronomy at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
Northland Sportsmen’s Club Wild Game Dinner
40th Annual All You Can Eat
Saturday, Sept. 28, 2023. Dinner at 6 p.m., drawing at 7.
Duluth Farmers Market, Duluth MN — as fine a farmers market as you could find in the U.S.!
$15 adult, $5 children under 10
~Silent Auction~
All proceeds to charity
Serving venison, bear, beaver, pheasant, duck, goose, salmon and other fish, along with wild rice and many other exotic dishes.
Thank you for your support!
Raffle: Ticket price $5. Tickets available from club members and at the dinner.
– 1st Prize: Henry Golden Boy brass-framed 45-70 lever action rifle
– 2nd Prize: Deep-fryer kit ($800 value)
– 3rd Prize: $200 cash
Many other prizes will be drawn at the Wild Game Dinner
The long rustic-red Farmers Market shack stood on bare dirt. A sunken glade of lower Chester Creek gurgled down below the treeline at the edge of the lot. The trees, conflicted about turning, flirted with the idea. Under a Jovian umber and orange cloudscape, I bought ticket #452 at a gate of day-glo-pink plastic web fencing.
My one unexplained “paranormal” encounter happened on a trip to the so-called Lost Coast of Northern California. I camped there the summer of 1994 with my girlfriend Mary, in one of our relationship’s great death spasms. Near the end of this expedition, I heard the singing of a ghostly choir in the woods around Mount Shasta. It was singing Mary said she couldn’t hear.
This vacation was important to us. Austin transplants, we’d been cooped up at retail jobs in the Berkeley-Oakland sprawl for a year. We hadn’t explored the wilds of California like it really deserved. So when she caught wind of the Lost Coast, we arranged a matching week off to go find it.
We drove north from the Bay Area in her white Chrysler minivan. We were listening to a mixtape of J.J. Cale, perfect road music with his driving early drum machine sound: “They call me the breeze, I keep blowing down the road.” We also had some Jerry Garcia Band, which we’d been seeing at the Warfield during its unofficial residency. And, we were still coming to terms with Kurt Cobain’s suicide a couple months prior, three days before my 25th birthday. His widow’s album Live Through This was released within days and we were listening to that too. We couldn’t believe she recorded the line “Someday you will ache like I ache” months before he died. Now that line screamed across the radio like live anguish. So those were the vibes.
This semester, I will be teaching a class focusing on migration stories. If you have a favorite such story (about human migration, bird migration, software migration), especially one with a Duluth connection, please send it my way: dbeard @ d.umn.edu, or comment below.
Season eight of Perfect Duluth Day’s “Saturday Essay” series has drawn to close, and it’s time to look back with the usual popularity contest. For the second year in a row, Jim Richardson authored three out of five works deemed by Google Analytics to be your favorites. In 2021, he swept the whole top five. It makes sense, because he’s Lake Superior Aquaman. Superheroes get all the clicks.
Comedian Mary Mack presents this short holiday video as a gift to you, noting “I think it may be one of those ‘if you know, you know’ things.”
You know the spiel. All of the content on Perfect Duluth Day can be read for free. It is produced by people who are paid either poorly or not at all. Advertising revenue keeps the operation going; donations help us do more and do it better.
While this post isn’t specifically about Duluth, I am hoping that posting will bring some Duluth stories out of the woodwork.
Below are lists of Saturday-morning cartoons as they ran in my childhood. I remember many of them (Scooby-Doo, of course; repackaged cinema cartoons like Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes; originals like the animated Star Trek).
I’m seeking entries for a community resource list. The category of resource I am hoping to build first is “Freelance Grant Writers.”
If you’d like to be on such a list (one I am hoping to convince the University of Minnesota Duluth would be good to have both internally and to serve its community better), please comment below with your name, your electronic presence (e.g., website, LinkedIn, or social media) and the areas you are comfortable writing grants in (e.g., arts, the environment, education, etc.).
In honor of Bentleyville’s 20th anniversary, here’s a quiz testing your knowledge of Duluth’s famous light display.
The final PDD quiz of 2023 will review the year’s headlines; it will be published on Dec. 31. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Dec. 27.
Jimi Hendrix appeared to me in a vision while I was getting my wisdom teeth out. This was Thanksgiving break 1986, in Houston, Texas. The next day I took LSD. It was a trip full of signs and portents, heralded by Hendrix’s visitation to me at the dentist’s office. At first I thought Jimi was protecting me, but now I think he may have been trying to warn me about that acid trip.
I’d heard Hendrix on LSD the previous summer, as “Are You Experienced?” transformed my boom box. That’s the song where he says he’s experienced, and then he says “Let me prove it to you” and plays a backward guitar solo. Everybody knows that song, but on psychedelics I heard the solo, man. It did prove Jimi was experienced, just like he said he was. I trusted him, an ersatz father figure dispensing psychedelic wisdom.
Why did I get into LSD, you may ask. Well, in 1983 after our father died, my family lived with our Houston grandmother for a summer of grieving. And while we were there, my little brother Allen and I watched the William Hurt movie Altered States on cable like 5,000 times. It’s about a psychedelic scientist testing the limits of meaning and sanity. We adopted it as a roadmap for how to live.