The spooky season is upon us! Test your knowledge of local Halloween-themed happenings with this week’s quiz (and check out more Halloween hoopla on the PDD calendar).
The next PDD quiz, reviewing the month’s headlines, will be published on Oct. 31. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Oct. 27.
Forty-one years ago, WDIO-TV‘s Liz Wagner filed this report from the Bayfield Apple Festival.
The Free Range Film Festival continues tonight in rural Wrenshall with a slate of films about pets — a pet turtle documentary, a cartoon about a wild game hunt gone wrong, and a full-length feature titled We Don’t Deserve Dogs.
Watching short films in a century-old barn provided a bit of normalcy Friday night with two filmmakers on hand taking questions from a lighter than usual audience. The venue and environs themselves, with three theaters, concessions and an explosion of wildflowers, is worth the drive just south of Wrenshall at county roads 1 and 4. A new slate of films begins at 7 p.m. Masks are encouraged for viewing inside the barn but outside seating is also available.
Indie folk band Bon Iver will headline Honor the Earth’s “Water is Life: Stop Line 3” music, art and cultural festival at Bayfront Park in Duluth on Aug. 18. The event will also feature performances by Mumu Fresh, Annie Humphrey, David Huckfelt, Larry Long, Lissie, Charlie Parr, Corey Medina and Alan Sparhawk, among others.
What’s inside the PDD picnic basket? Treats for you, that’s what. Join us on the deck at Boreal House tonight at 5 p.m. for Perfect Duluth Day’s 18th birthday party.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented a minor math problem for event organizers that seems fairly straightforward and simple to solve. If you promote an annual happening, and it was canceled in 2020, then that year shouldn’t count when you add up how many times the event has occurred. When you announce in 2021 that the whatever annual Whatever Festival is coming up, it should be the same number that it was supposed to be in 2020.
I mean, that’s obvious, right? If I give you an apple every year for 14 years, and last year I didn’t give you one, then the apple I give you this year is the 15th apple, right? It’s not the 16th apple just because I wanted to give you one last year and couldn’t.
The math is fairly straightforward, and for the most part people are getting it right. Take for instance Duluth’s Bayfront Reggae and World Music Festival. The inaugural event was held in 2006. The 2020 event was to be the 15th annual, but it was canceled. Therefore, the promoter is referring to this year’s event as the 15th annual. And that is correct. The 2021 festival will be the 15th in the series.
But I’ve known for quite a while that keeping track of how many times an event has happened in the past isn’t always the top priority of the organizers, who let’s remember have an event to organize with all the tasks that go with it. On one hand, you’d think being willing to get involved in organizing everyone else’s fun might be a thing only math-obsessed nerds do, but that’s just not the case.
Scott “Starfire” Lunt surveys the kickball field in his Homegown jumpsuit.
Ryan Nelson was barking all game from his first base post for the Friday Rawkers. In the eighth inning, he actually uttered something that had a grain of truth: “It almost feels like Homegrown.”
He and 50 other people were in synch Saturday afternoon as an unsanctioned Homegrown Music Festival Kickball Classic broke out at the field in the back of Chester Park. Those who were there will call it good, and witnessed a win by the Rawkers over the Saturday Rollers that now puts Friday ahead in the all-time series, 11 wins to 10.
Thursday’s Homegrown Music Festival content is three and a half hours of livestreamed music from 2104.
The Homegrown Music Festival is underway, with video releases and livestreams throughout the week.
The Homegrown Music Festival is pretty much all online again this year, but things are a bit more organized this time around, with planned video releases and livestreams every day, May 2-9.
We miss live music! We all miss live music … right?
This will be the 11th year of 2104’s Soup Social, dubbed #SoupB4Supe. Last year we were forced into the Live Stream gig … and now Bryce Kastning and I, also with support from a few others, have been producing Music Live Stream’s since April 2020. If you haven’t listened to our streams … you can pick them up as often as you want, they are at youtube.com/duluthiscool or 2104.us. As of this writing, we have created 22 streams from 2104.
The We All Belong Creativity Exhibit, an all-campus art show at the University of Minnesota Duluth with art, poetry and video makes its debut today. It is focused on the 2021 Summit on Equity, Race, & Ethnicity theme: “Being Antiracist, Doing Antiracism.”
Obviously this past year has been about the lousiest live-music year ever, but nonetheless we continue our tradition at Perfect Duluth Day of looking back at a sampling of gig posters. Some shows really happened, with crowds of people, before the pandemic. Others were cancelled. Others were held outside in spaces that allowed physical distancing. And some were streamed online.
This year’s Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour is virtual. Films are available online from Thanksgiving Day until Oct. 24.
Proceeds benefit the Duluth Cross-Country Ski Club if purchased via duluthxc.com. Once there, click “DXC link to BMFF” to get started.
Duluth-based Lyric Opera of the North is creating a virtual experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The theater group is teaming with the newly formed Decameron Opera Coalition, comprised of nine U.S.-based companies, to premiere Tales from a Safe Distance, a multi-week virtual opera inspired by an historic text, Boccaccio’s The Decameron. LOON presents the first act tonight, Oct. 9, at 7 p.m.
