Sunday: His Girl Friday
Monday: Daniel Champagne
Monday: Yousif Sheronick
Tuesday: Sarah Knott
Wednesday: Bunky Echo-Hawk
Wednesday: Duluth’s 1889 City Hall and its Mayors
Thursday: Sonora Trio
Friday: The Brothers Burn Mountain
Saturday: St. Louis River Alliance Winter Walk
Saturday: ’80s Dance Party with Pete Cich
For a complete look at what’s happening today, tomorrow and on into infinity, visit perfectduluthday.com/calendar.
I think I read To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time as a Rochester John Marshall 10th grader sometime during the 1986-87 school year. My most prominent memory of the academic experience is writing five-paragraph essays about the book for three buddies who got higher grades on the assignment (all A-minuses) than I got (solid, respectable B). I also remember watching our teacher, the white, perpetually flustered Ms. Green, have no idea what to do when Scott, the only black kid in that sophomore English section, reacted with outrage after the first time she shakily uttered the word “nigger” while reading an excerpt aloud to us.
The book is seldom far from my conscious thoughts. Partially because it’s culturally omnipresent. It’s tough to have a college degree, love reading, work in education, watch public television, or just be alive and engaged in certain aspects of dominant Baby Boomer and Generation-X zeitgeist without seeing, hearing about, or discussing the book (or the movie version of it) fairly frequently. I’m also sure I would think about it fairly often even if it weren’t ubiquitous. I don’t recall much about my actual experience of reading it that first time. I do know I immediately revered the story and many of its characters. I still do. And I’ve consciously thought about it more than usual for the past year or so, after Duluth Public Schools (Independent School District 709) administrators announced the book would be removed from ninth-graders’ English reading list. A lot of people in Duluth and a lot of other places have had a lot things to say about that decision.
Lake Superior Aquaman reporting. Co-starring my buddy Meghan AKA The Meg
Stephanie Anderson is an illustrator working as The Hillside Creative. She enjoys making detailed, textured drawings with simple tools. And if you’re looking for a pet portrait, she’s ready to help you out.
SA: Ink and watercolor is my medium. There is something that I love about the harsh, black lines of the ink pens in contrast with the free-flowing, vibrant watercolor brush strokes.
Minneapolis Southwest Journal: “Klobuchar launches 2020 campaign from Boom Island”
A parade of local Democratic officials emphasized that grit as they took turns at the podium in the lead-up Klobuchar’s speech. That included a trio of Minnesota mayors: Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, Johnathan Judd of Moorhead and Duluth Mayor Emily Larson, who described the weather conditions — temperatures in the teens under falling snow — as “a perfect Duluth day.”
Also, from WDIO-TV Eyewitness News: “Klobuchar appears on Good Morning America”
One of the supporters who spoke at the announcement was Emily Larson, mayor of Duluth. “We call this a perfect Duluth Day! Or spring, or summer,” Larson joked with the large crowd.
New music video from Duluth’s Breanne Marie & the Front Porch Sinners, shot at Ely’s Peak and Clyde Iron Works with Kevin Jacobsen.
The band plays Feb. 16 at Klockow Brewing Company in Grand Rapids and March 8 at Blacklist Artisan Ales in Duluth.
This undated postcard, published by Bamforth & Co., promises requited love in the flower patches of Duluth. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Essentia Health is investing $15 million in the purchase and remodeling of the 145,000-square-foot former Younkers department store at Miller Hill Mall in Duluth. The Essentia Health Fitness & Therapy Center will move into the first floor this fall. Plans are being developed for the rest of the building and will be announced when they are finalized.
Coyote
A Different Path
(Jan. 8)
Available on Bandcamp
Station Ident
Volume One
Xero Music (Jan. 15)
Available on Bandcamp
Rich Mattson and the Northstars
Totem
(Jan. 25)
Low Forms
Gaze to Bow / The Watchful Eye
(Jan. 25)
Available on Snappy Little Numbers and YouTube
In the segment above, three pairs of Irish people sample four Minnesota craft beers and offer their opinions. One Duluth beer landed in the mix, Bent Paddle‘s 14° ESB. The beer that won a gold medal at the 2017 Great American Beer Festival elicits opinions from the Irish panel ranging from “It’s like a mouth full of pennies” to “It’s grand.”
With a nod to the recent Super Bowl (and a Garfunkel and Oates song), this month’s PDD Quiz explores athletics in Duluth. Step up to the plate, sports fan, and see if you can knock this quiz out of the park!
Zenith City Online was an invaluable source of research for this quiz in case you want to cheat study beforehand.
The next PDD quiz, on the happenings that made headlines this month, will be published on Feb. 24. Please email question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Feb. 21.
Duluth Public Access Community Television has a new website at pacttvduluth.org.
Check it out online or take a tour of the studio, room 328 at Duluth City Hall, 411 W. First St. Call 218-723-3686 to schedule time for a visit and tour.
Monsters are, as you doubtlessly already acutely understand, terribly frightening and dangerous. Many films have been made, detailing the paralyzingly ghastly and gory imperatives on which monsters operate, resulting in rooms fairly brimming with ichor and carnage: Soggy glumps of eyeballs, hanging from sticky ropes of optic nerves like morbid tether balls; piles and piles of viscera, settling and emitting gas like teams of farting snakes; ripped and abandoned limbs, arms and legs stacked like macabre log cabins of ruined flesh and protruding bone, still twitching and dripping the last of their darkening blood. Every shadowy corner, every looming closet, every rickety and ramshackle basement staircase adumbrates the uncanny atrocities monsters are hoping to wreak. They are eager to wreak. It’s their whole mission, in fact. (There’s a perfectly empirical reason for the word “monstrosities,” and it’s precisely what you’re thinking.)
One might reflect on this reality with floppy despondency, and in fairness, one would not be mistaken to do so. Flop and despond, if you need to get it out of your system. But as you’re able, kindly recover your wits, and devote your attention to the following introductory tutorial on the rules by which all monsters must abide, lest they be subjected to the same harrowing and disastrous fates to which they are so devoted to imposing on the human population.
