April 2022 Posts

Selective Focus: Emily Koch

Left: Photograph of Emily Koch. Right: “Self Portrait” 20×28. Oil on wood panel.

Emily Koch is a surrealist painter from Duluth. She studied fine art at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, graduating in 2020 and has worked as a freelance artist since then. She is drawn to all things queer, feminine and counterculture.

Hotel Pikku, an early Lincoln Park revival project, is up for sale

The building at 1923 W. Superior St. was constructed in 1899 and houses the Hotel Pikku and Hemlock Leather works. (Photo: gregfollmer.com)

A small, stylish boutique hotel that opened in a renovated historic building and helped transform Lincoln Park into a hip, trendy neighborhood is now for sale.

The three-suite, second-floor Hotel Pikku, 1923 W. Superior St., opened after owners Chelsy Whittington and Andy Matson purchased the building in 2016 and spent more than a year remodeling it. Hemlock Leatherworks, a custom shoemaker, is located on the ground floor.

Homegrown Music Festival Field Guide 2022 has arrived

The 24th annual Homegrown Music Festival is less than a month away. The 100-page Field Guide is off the presses and will be available at Duluth-area bars, restaurants and other businesses over the course of the next few days.

Monthly Grovel: April 2022

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Zlata Chochieva? 311? Trampled by Turtles? Weird Al? The only reliable tool to help weigh the upcoming concert options is the PDD Calendar.

Each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar events. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.

The colors of water

 

 

Red: Whiteface Reservoir. Orange: French River. Yellow: French River. Green: Lake Superior. Blue: Lake Superior

MMA Squirrel Fighting: Crazy Carl vs. Buster the Beast

Wild Cam North — a production of Duluth’s Brian Luoma — presents this classic mixed martial arts backyard squirrel battle. It’s a no-holds-barred contest in which Crazy Carl defends his championship against Buster the Beast.

Exploring the Cramer Tunnel

Duluth Urbex recently took an icy trudge through Minnesota’s longest train tunnel. The Cramer Tunnel, about 70 miles northeast of Duluth, connected the former LTV Steel Hoyt Lakes taconite plant with its ore dock at Taconite Harbor.

Minnesota Wolf Pack Sauntering Through a Winter Wonderland

The Cranberry Bay Pack of Wolves at Voyageurs National Park strolled past a trail camera about two weeks ago during a snowstorm.

Ingeborg von Agassiz – “Winter Dreaming”

Duluth-based electro-folk artist Ingeborg von Agassiz performs a new original song. Catch her at Clyde Iron Works on May 4 during the Homegrown Music Festival.

The Return of the Handshake

There was a brief minute at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when I thought I might never shake another person’s hand again. And I was fine with that. If we could take just one positive thing out of the widespread death, illness and cultural disturbance that began in 2020, it might be ridding ourselves once and for all of the compulsion to rub our palms together.

But even when I was in the middle of a long no-handshake stretch, full of wishful thinking about the future, I knew deep down that the germ clutch would soon return. And of course it did.

My prejudicial prediction was that most people wouldn’t want to return to handshaking, but a bunch of insistent jackasses would refuse to let it die. Then it would slowly become normal again and we’d all live with it. I was wrong. Pretty much everyone started extending their hands the moment lockdowns and mandates were eased. There was no resistance.

Surf and Slide – Great Lakes Now

Detroit Public TV produces Great Lakes Now. The show speaks to me of what we share with other Great Lakes residents and how we should quit fighting about whether or not Lake Superior is the Greatest Lake. This episode focuses on ice sailing, and lake surfing (specifically the Surfistas): “It’s about stoke.”

Mary Bue – “Bones and the Marrow”

Former Duluthian Mary Bue released “Bones and the Marrow” today, a track that will appear on her forthcoming full-length album The Wildness of Living and Dying. Bue is marking the song release with a livestream on Sunday at 3 p.m. CDT on YouTube and Facebook!

Quoth the artist: “The song is a reflection on the quest for finding love not only in a pandemic, but also in a wild and brutal post-divorce dating jungle. Ultimately it’s a healing journey of the broken heart — to slowly, gingerly allow the light to stream in.”

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