Wing Young Huie on Immigration
Found at a local antique shop for fifty cents: An issue of Lake Superior Port Cities magazine (now Lake Superior Magazine) with an article and photos by Wing Young Huie.
Found at a local antique shop for fifty cents: An issue of Lake Superior Port Cities magazine (now Lake Superior Magazine) with an article and photos by Wing Young Huie.
My friend John and his wife Chieko left John’s son from his first marriage behind at Stone Farm. Stone Farm, Suffolk, is all I need to write as an address on the letters and postcards I send to him twice a year in the United Kingdom. The family home (occupied by John, Chieko, John Jr., and John’s mother) is older than the United States. When the bowing timbers used to frame the home were cut, the colonies were still colonies.
John spent a week in Duluth. He was to give lectures at the Alworth Institute about energy policy in the U.K. And of course, ostensibly, he was here to visit his friend, David. But John was a fisherman. You don’t cross the Atlantic to talk about U.K. dependence on natural gas to Minnesotans. You come to fish.
We visited Gooseberry, and John took romantic photos under the falls. We ate smoked fish and lobster — John ate at Red Lobster so many times because the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar was so favorable.
Local artist and design teacher Darren Houser presents on his work, among other presentations at the Martin Library at UMD, organized by Pat Maus.
A recent event at UMD spotlighted comics as a scholarly and artistic pursuit.
Last night at Gimajii, the Design Duluth meeting sponsored by the DAI shared copies of An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Contributions to the City of Duluth — a fascinating document that invites us to think about the erasure of indigenous participation and contributions to Duluth culture — and to appreciate those contributions and participation even more heartily.
The drive back from the VFW Hall in central Minnesota was cold, and the snow falling in the dark January night covered the road. I couldn’t tell whether I was drifting too far across the median or too close to the shoulder until I crossed the rumble strips. I probably should have left earlier, but to be honest, it’s dark after 4 p.m. when you are so far north in winter.
Drinks were cheap and not very strong. The bartender didn’t know how to make a Manhattan. I needed to drive home, so I alternated each drink with a glass of water. My friend’s apartment was just blocks away, so she could walk, even if I didn’t offer her a ride. And if I offered, she’d never take it.
We’d met at 9:30, when the jazz trio took the stage (the stage was a wooden platform four inches higher off the ground than the rest of the bar). She and I weren’t particularly close. If we had been, I might not have made the trip. My wife had moved out that morning. It’d been a separation a long time coming, but it still wasn’t something I was ready to talk about. I needed a friend who was not so close that she knew the reason my life was changing. I needed a friend I could talk to about nearly anything except the separation. I wanted someone to drink with, without sharing why I needed a drink.
Visit “I Work for the Web” and learn about the New Media Writing Prize award nomination received by Rob Wittig and students in the Writing Studies majors and minors at UMD.
I am very proud of my students and colleagues.
Not the self-checkout at the Duluth Target, but I like it
I was noting the new self-checkout at Target. I don’t like it. It feels like Wal-Mart, which is enough to make me never use it. But beyond that irrational knee-jerk, it feels like Target would like to create a shopping experience in which I interact with no one whatsoever. If I wanted that, I would shop at target.com. Which I do for things not carried at the Duluth Target. (I still can’t believe there will be only one Target in our area soon. Aldi will still draw me to Souptown, I guess.)
So I was really happy when I decided to try it today, and the coupon system stymied me, and a cashier walked over and hung out until I was happily rung through. Human touch.
Poster of MN Bookstores
So today, I stopped by the Amazing Alonzo used bookshop. It was my second used bookstore adventure in two weeks, and it makes me think about book culture in the Twin Ports.
Since the shooting in the Twin Cities at the Black Lives Matter protest, it was revealed that one of the suspects is from Hermantown.
Nearly 1,000 people marched to City Hall on Tuesday, less than a day after five protesters were shot near a Black Lives Matter demonstration, an apparently racially motivated attack that pushed Minneapolis into the national spotlight.
Minneapolis police said Tuesday that they have arrested three men in connection with the shooting. Allen Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, 23, was arrested in Bloomington. Sources said Nathan Gustavsson, 21, of Hermantown, and Daniel Macey, 26, of Pine City, were taken into custody after they turned themselves in. All three suspects are white. Earlier Tuesday, police arrested a 32-year-old Hispanic man in south Minneapolis, but he was later released because, police said, he was not at the scene of the shooting.
—Minneapolis Star Tribune: 3 men in custody, 1 released in Minneapolis 4th Precinct protest shooting
A friend of mine in the Cities wanted to know how that revelation played out up here. To be honest, his question was the first I’d heard.
Thoughts?
One more post about art and literature this week … some poetry readings and some paintings about the environment, in different ways.
I attended the Wolf/Flow art opening, hosted by Stephanie Johnson and Angie Arden, at the Zeitgeist Arts gallery.The work shimmers with the energy of collaboration, with passion for the natural world, and with exploration of a variety of media. And, if you contributed a line to the community poem at Wolf/Flow 2, you may be happily surprised to see what became of it.
I got lucky today and stopped by Perk Place at the time that Naomi “Sundog” Yaeger-Bischoff was completing her exhibition of recent photographs. Naomi operates the Duluth Daily Photo blog), where some of these works first appeared. (She is also the guiding vision behind the Budgeteer.) The picture above is of the artist and the support staff (daughter) who made the exhibit possible. Swing by and take a look.
In the past few weeks, I have had too much coffee with artists.
Deer Woman: A Vignette, edited by Allie Vasquez and written by Elizabeth LaPensée featuring art by Jonathan Thunder. Winner of the Awesome Foundation Portland’s Peoples’ Choice Award.
The summer is over, and there is so much music I heard that I have not yet written about here.
The most complicated performance of the summer, for me, was watching Tim Kaiser and Robot Rickshaw at Beaners. (All the videos that follow are not the performances I saw, but just tasters.)
It was a study in noise and the relationship between noise and music.
“The Duluth Huskies would like to announce that Greg Culver will be the new General Manager, effective immediately. Congratulations Greg!”
Local tween entrepreneur on KARE-11 in the Twin Cities, in “12-year-old entrepreneur is pedaling profits.”
(Auto-starting embedded video after the jump.)
