Art
The Lie
There is something about a Hardee’s buttermilk biscuit; you have to admit it. Even the ones that have been cooked for too long, left hot and dry under the culinary equivalent of a tanning lamp until they surpassed deep golden and arrived at dusky caramel, sitting puck-like on the stainless steel rack. You can eat them until your lips crack and curl, until your mouth puffs biscuit crumbs like sandstorms in a desert, they’re so tasty.
Regina simply could not resist them. Which was unfortunate, really, because she was already a big woman — more than six feet tall, and built to comfortably support her more than 200-pound weight. When she got hired as the morning biscuit baker it was a pretty good promotion, and one she had sorely wanted. But now she was alone with those biscuits every morning from 4:45 to 6 a.m., when Hardee’s opened, and a person could eat a lot of biscuits in that amount of time.
Regina came from Bartholomew, Kentucky originally, but she had moved to Lexington before her 18th birthday because she had her eye on the assistant manager position, and when one opened up in Lexington, she applied right away. (more…)
Selective Focus: Andy Miller
This week’s Selective Focus subject makes the most of the square format of Instagram with beautifully composed photos of abandoned, forgotten buildings around the area. Andy Miller tells us why he documents them. (more…)
Volunteers needed for local film festival
The seventh annual Duluth Superior Film Festival delivers film, music and art to the Twin Ports region June 1-5. In its short history, the festival has presented a distinctively imaginative and diverse lineup of international, American independent and regional films.
To help maintain the merriment, volunteers are needed. (more…)
Art and Indigenous Community Health
I spent last Friday at the AICHO Complex, in Trepanier Hall for an event about art, health and indigenous communities. (more…)
Coffee Communication
Like many people, I didn’t start to drink coffee until college. Back then, as a newbie, I offset its bitter flavor with too much cream and sugar. I was also an “Equal” person for a while. But, having grown to love the taste of coffee, my cup today holds strongly brewed coffee with only a teaspoon of sugar and a splash of cream, half-and-half, soymilk, that powder stuff, whatever’s on hand. I’m not fussy. In the absence of any of that, I’ll drink a cup black now and then.
This is partly to say that I am not really a coffee snob, although I do engage in some haute coffee culture. For instance, I make my coffee each morning in a press. I enjoy a cup of Ethiopian cold-pressed coffee from specialty shops like Duluth Coffee Co. On the other hand, I sighed with delight over several cups of Folgers made in a drip machine on last year’s cabin-camping trip with my daughters’ Girl Scout troop.
On the other, other hand — and this only makes sense if you’re in the know about haute coffee culture — I have yet to try a cup of coffee with butter in it. Hipsters swear by it. I might go there; we’ll see. (more…)
Selective Focus: Ann Klefstad
Ann Klefstad is an artist who is definitely connected to this area, through her work across many mediums and by the writing, promotion and encouragement she’s given to the arts in our area.
AK: I work in sculpture, mostly, with some drawing, including ink and tar drawing on wood. My real “medium”, though, would be my subject matter. Over the years I’ve drawn closer and closer to doing only work that comes out of the ecosystem I’m in. I’m kind of a literalist, I guess. I love the forms of things, and so I use those forms, I try to learn them and come to know them by imitating them, like a kid learns.
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Charlie Parr in his own words
Charlie Parr strolled into the neighborhood yesterday—barefoot, even though it was cold and damp. We had a nice conversation on my podcast about the hardships and joys of life on the road, dropping out of school, and how he slowly got into making music as a vocation. He’s doing what he loves, and that’s what I’m trying to do: as an author, and an urban farmer. My new urban farm, Tiny Farm Duluth, is slowly coming together. The soil of formerly wasted space within the city of Duluth has been tilled, and seeds will soon be sown. (more…)
Selective Focus: Jonathan Thunder
This week’s selective focus subject has appeared on PDD before; doing the Robot on every street corner in Duluth. He even made the Best Videos of 2014 list. Even more impressive than his dance moves are his paintings. He’s also an animator and filmmaker. Jonathan Thunder tells about his diverse work.
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Meat
The short film Meat, directed by Michael Forstein and shot in Duluth, premiered online this week on the Short of the Week website.
Meat tells the story of an idealistic college student forced to take a job as a door-to-door meat salesman. Highlighting the culture clash between small-town, working-class America and its urban counterpart, Short of the Week describes Meat as “warm to the realities of poor, white, male culture, but clear-eyed to the self destructiveness and fundamental insecurity that underpins its habits. It is a remarkable work that heralds powerful new voices in Forstein and Thomsen.”
The script was written by Duluth native Colin Keith Thomsen and the cast includes Caleb Carlson (Hermantown native), John Cromwell (son of actor James Cromwell), Sari Lennick (A Serious Man; Woody Allen’s Cafe Society), and Pearce Bunting (HBO’s Boardwalk Empire). Before premiering online, Meat screened at over 30 festivals across the United States, Europe and Australia, including the Denver Film Festival, Dallas International Film Festival, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, Rooftop Films, Indie Memphis and the Duluth Superior Film Festival.
Sustainable Design at UMD
I’m lucky to have worked on a sustainable art project on the breezeway leading to Darland Admin Building at UMD with Darren Houser, Mindy Granley, Catherine Meier, Kathy McTavish, and Wildwoods.
Duluth is a bottleneck for bird migration. Birds flying south prefer not to fly over open water, and so follow the coastline until they read the head of the lake in Duluth. (more…)
Homegrown Music Video Fest 2016
The videos from the 2016 Homegrown Music Video Festival have been popping up online, and PDD is archiving them on a page. We’ll continue to add to the collection as we find them or as they are sent to us.
Here’s a sample by Tomas Soderberg – “Machinery” by the Social Disaster
The Art in Mayor Larson’s Office
PDD doesn’t typically post promotional videos, but this one from the University of Minnesota Duluth’s School of Fine Art offers an interesting glimpse into some of the artwork in Duluth Mayor Emily Larson’s office, particularly focusing on Stephanie Boyum’s piece that melds an archival photograph of Fifth Avenue West over a modern-day scene.
Selective Focus: Sasha Howell
With Selective Focus, we plan to highlight a variety of visual artists, giving some exposure to people working in disciplines that don’t immediately come to mind. This week, we have one of those people. Sasha Howell tells us about her corner of the design world.
SH: I am a costume designer! I work with local theatre and film groups in designing and implementing a costume design – usually my own. I also dabble in my own fashion design and anything to do with clothing and textile – shoes, accessories, hair, etc. I originally started student life at UMD with a Studio Art major and quickly realized it wasn’t exactly what I was looking to do – creatively. So I switched to a Studio Art MINOR and gravitated towards the Theatre department because, to me, that was a much more practical and exciting use of my talents and interests. I became quick friends with all the right people and worked closely with the costume shop there. I instantly fell in love with costumes because with EVERY new show there was opportunity to learn new techniques, new history, and to try something new! I quickly became known in town for costumes and demand started to increase. On average, I’m working on at LEAST 2 overlapping shows, but always tossing around ideas on several shows at once. On the side, I also paint abstract series and enjoy making jewelry. (more…)
Tender Nads
For one long moment after I unintentionally swooned over a young man’s testicles, all 70 students in the UMD class I was teaching stayed mostly silent.
The incident happened in 2003, during an otherwise average session of Introduction to Cultural Studies. UMD’s course guide says the class, “Examines how cultural practices relate to everyday life by introducing students to each of the four core areas of the Cultural Studies minor: Identity Politics, Media Cultures, Cultures of Space & Place, and Cultures of Science, Technology, & Medicine.” My teaching contract was in Writing Studies, but the Sociology/Anthropology department faculty member in charge of Cultural Studies heard I might be into teaching something different, and my department head was cool with the idea. It’s been one of my favorite experiences in 20 years of trying to help people learn things.
I seek opportunities to participate in conversations with students and anyone else about how belief, intent, socialization, and other forces intersect to influence our actions. I approached Intro to Cultural Studies as an extended problem-posing conversation. I’d start most days by naming an example of something most of us in the room take for granted or don’t notice, then I’d ask a bunch of questions like, “Why do we do it that way? What happens if we try to do or see it differently. What if we did it for reasons different from the generally accepted ones? Who gets to decide?” (more…)
Selective Focus: Jordan Sundberg
This week’s Selective Focus profile subject is Jordan Sundberg, an illustrator and designer with a deceptively simple style. She tells her story below.
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Sketch Bomb with John Hoban at UMD
Local artist John Hoban organized a Sketch Bomb at UMD.
John Hoban, creator of Captain Artichoke, Apocalypse City, and Night of the Smurfing Dead, lead a Sketch Bomb at UMD on Monday. The event was planned by Pat Maus of the Archives and Special Collections area of UMD’s Martin Library. (more…)
Homegrown Banner Submissions
We’re looking for Homegrown-related banners for that funky horizontal space at the top of the page. The image must be 1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high.
To submit a banner photo, e-mail your JPEG file to: banners @ perfectduluthday.com
We’ll run the banners during the Homegrown Festival next week.
Duluth Book Releases in 2016
In and Out of Context
Photography by Tim White
With excerpts from 21 northland writers
inandoutofcontextbook.blogspot.com
(Jan. 21)
The Duluth Grill Cookbook II
Written by Robert Lillegard
Photography by Rolf Hagberg
duluthgrill.com/cookbooks
(Feb. 29)
Barbarian
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. (more…)
Selective Focus: Marian Lansky
Marian Lansky is part of the team the operates the Kenspeckle Letterpress, one of the most interesting, fun studio/shops in town. It combines centuries-old art processes with modern technology to create loads of great work. There will be an Earth Day open studio and shop on Saturday, April 23, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the second floor of the DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace, an opportunitity to stop in and see the work and meet the artist. Marian and her husband, Rick Allen, will also be a part of Siivii’s Earth Day show, just across the alley from DeWitt-Seitz.
Below, Marian explains her work and process in her own words. (more…)
Nick Robin – “Little Red Squirrel”
Music written and produced by Sean Elmquist and Nick Robin. Video by Nick Sunsdahl.
The Day I Jumped Out a Window
When I was 11, my best friend was Eddie Griffenbacher.* He lived with his grandma, for reasons he never detailed. (*No, it wasn’t. But even I don’t want to talk shit about someone. It’s not because I have class. Eddie would kick my ass.)
He was very, very, impressively naughty.
He came by this honestly: his grandmother was like a David Lynch character. She was short, round, and, I think, chronically intoxicated. She curmdugeoned around her house in a beige sweater-vest over a plaid shirt, khakis and fluffy white sneakers that resembled King’s Hawaiian rolls. Her hair was old-lady-did into fully-formed curl banks, but the back left corner of her head was all matted down and disarranged, like gray-hair crop circles amidst the otherwise puffy rows. She smoked endless Benson and Hedges cigarettes; they dangled eternally from her yellow fingers, the nails of which she kept painted the same bronzey-brown color for as long as I knew her. She was always drinking some ice-cubey alcohol cocktail from an amber-glass tumbler: between the yellow of her fingers, her nail polish, and the yellow tint of her glass, it seemed like everything around her was saturated completely with tar. Somehow, her entire microcosm had become the color of an old fly strip. (more…)
Selective Focus: One River, Many Prints
Starting this week, Selective Focus is changing direction. Instead of variations on a weekly theme as before, we will be posting brief profiles of visual artists and happenings around the area. We start it off with a collaborative project between UMD students and elementary students. (more…)
Dispersion
Adam Dargan, an animator from Duluth who now lives in Minneapolis, “captures the process of emulsion on 35mm film being dissolved in three-dimensional space” in this video. “It explores the feeling of nature and visual landscapes that are created from unconventional sources.”
I Did Love the Place Then
After several hours of splashing around, I pulled myself up to the dock. I held onto the edge and floated. My daughter said, “Your wedding ring is gone.”
What kind of kid notices that? I thought she was kidding. Then, I looked at my left hand. No ring.
I spent the next hour swimming with a scuba mask trying to pull off a miracle. The lake water looks like tea because of the tannins. Or maybe even darker like root beer. As I swam down, I could barely see. I hoped to see a little glint in the gravel. It never happened.
So, now I wear a replacement ring. The ring I put on twenty years ago sits at the bottom of the Whiteface Reservoir, a permanent part of the St. Louis River watershed. I sit like Gollum on the dock, sip my gin and tonic, gaze out over the water, and wonder about my precious. My precious.
When I was a kid, I didn’t notice things like rings on my dad’s hand. But I noticed his finger and where it pointed on the topo map. It was deer season in Plymouth, New Hampshire. I was in high school and an important part of the game plan to fill the freezer with venison.
“I’m going to sit here at the top of this drainage,” my dad said. “You walk down the road on this side of the ridge to here. Come over the ridge and walk up the drainage toward me. If you hear a shot, sit down for five minutes. Then, when you hear two shots, it means I found the deer and you can walk to me.” He said drainage so much during the huddle, I thought he was talking about nasal passages instead of a small mountain valley. (more…)