April 2019 Posts

Selective Focus: Homegrown 2019 Canal Park Night

Select Instagram images from day three of the Homegrown Music Festival.

Honking Tree case remains a mystery 10 years later

Left: July 2001 photo of the Honking Tree from the Two Harbors Forum website. Right: The modern remains of the Honking Tree stump between Larsmont Road and Isaacson Road southwest of Two Harbors. Photo by Mike Creger.

I asked Lake County Sheriff Carey Johnson this month if there was anything new in the now 10-year-old Honking Tree case.

“You mean the white pine murder investigation?” he said straightaway.

Selective Focus: Homegrown 2019 Craft District Night

Images from the second night of the Homegrown Music Festival.

Selective Focus: Homegrown 2019 Opening Ceremonies

Select Instagram photos from opening day of the Homegrown Music Festival.

Homegrown Music Festival 2019 Primer

Duluth’s 21st annual Homegrown Music Festival is upon us, spanning April 28 to May 5. There is a 100-page Homegrown Field Guide available at locations all over town with the details. Updates and peripheral tidbits can be found below.

PDD Quiz: April 2019 in Review

Photo by Jim Rosvold

Put your current affairs knowledge to the test with this edition of the PDD Quiz.

The next quiz, scheduled for May 12, will explore Duluth parks. Please email question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by May 7.

Tweed director Ken Bloom to retire in June

Ken Bloom, director of the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota Duluth since 2004, will retire in June. UMD’s School of Fine Arts made the announcement Friday afternoon, noting there will be a nationwide search for a new director.

Bloom will return to his lifelong photography career and continue to offer his accumulated museum and artistic expertise as a freelance curator and consultant.

“Rule 15” by Ryan Vine

Duluth poet Ryan Vine reads “Rule 15,” from his 2018 book To Keep Him Hidden.

In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.

Best Practices

— a loose companion to a previous essay about teaching

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

I understand why a lot of teachers lust after “best practices.” I get why so many of us grasp at supposedly foolproof methods for making students do exactly what we want them to do. A lot of us have been taught that assigning work then rewarding or punishing students according to how they do it is the gist of teaching. (A lot of students, understandably and heartbreakingly, believe those rewards and punishments are the gist and evidence of learning.) From a certain perspective it makes sense for us to seek information about how to reward and punish as effectively as possible. It also, in some ways, makes sense for administrators to dictate practices they believe will create consistent punishments and rewards throughout a particular course, major, college unit, school, district, or state. The actual of process helping fellow human beings learn — as opposed to the process of meaningless, faux-rigorous punishing and rewarding — is a task of privilege that’s incredibly difficult to do well. I know my own version of feeling desperate for some method or approach that just works.

Duluth-area beer production nearly tripled from 2014 to 2018

A bevy of craft breweries and brewpubs have found the Arrowhead region of northeastern Minnesota and northwest Wisconsin to be fertile ground for growth. Five years ago, area craft breweries produced almost 20,000 barrels of beer. By 2018 that number nearly tripled to roughly 57,000 barrels.

Duluth Band Profile: Bryan Gatten

Bryan Gatten’s The Blue Hour combines new-age soundscapes with virtuoso guitar solos. He explains how the album is a love letter to his new home. Click on the image above to hear the podcast.

Video: Logan Moniot dances it up in the Greysolon Ballroom

Dancer Logan Moniot is featured in this video shot in Duluth’s Greysolon Ballroom by Jasper Meddock Productions. The song is “Bruises,” by Lewis Capaldi.
 

Homegrown photo banners

Once again, we’re looking for Homegrown Music Festival photo banners to rotate at the top of pages on Perfect Duluth Day. Photos of bands, friends, events or general shenanigans. Keep in mind, the photos get cropped to extreme horizontal proportions. If you want to crop ’em yourself (1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high) and send them, super dooper. Or you can send them uncropped and I’ll do my best to make them fit.

Click here for complete submission guidelines, but the basics are: 1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high, e-mail them to [email protected]. We’ll get them in the rotation during the Homegrown Music Festival, starting this weekend.

Lutsen b roll

Brianna Hall-Nelson and 10 of her friends gathered for hygge, music, snowshoeing, and general merry making on the North Shore this January. It’s almost enough to make one nostalgic for winter. Almost.  Videography by Sam Tuthill.

National Bank Notes of Duluth

There are still a few national currency bank notes with Duluth bank names floating around, mostly held by collectors. This type of currency was eliminated in the 1930s. The note above is from Northern National Bank of Duluth and was issued in 1908. In the portrait is U.S. Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, who also named the streets in Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood, including one after himself. (More on McCulloch in the comments.)