Though the COVID-19 pandemic kept Denfeld’s class of 2020 from gathering in the school’s auditorium for commencement, many of the school’s traditions were kept. WDSE-TV and producer/editor Mike Scholtz captured the highlights in this documentary.
Poetry
Winner: Jess Koski, “Did Geronimo Send Postcards from FL?”
Runner-up: Tina Higgins Wussow, “This is How Scars are Formed”
Short Fiction
Winner: Jess Koski, “Onaabani-giizis—Hard Crust on the Snow Moon”
Runner-up: Vickie Youngquist-Smith, “Autumn Shadow of Death”
Short-short Fiction
Winner: Vickie Youngquist-Smith, “Domestic Duplicity”
Runner-up: Lynn Watson, “But Officer”
Creative nonfiction
Winner: Eric Chandler, “I Have No Idea”
Runner-up: Chris Marcotte, “Holding Hands with an Angel”
Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year’s contest. Lake Superior Writers had 117 entries this year. The organization plans to launch next year’s contest theme in January, with a submission deadline in April.
Twelve photos representing seven dogs and one Great Lake. The past few years, whenever someone’s dog is in the water, I ask if I can take underwater pictures of it. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. Here’s the best ones, including three dogs of winter.
Visual artist Moira Villiard organized a mural project at the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial as part of a day of creative expression on Monday, June 8. People were invited to add to the images she created of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a raised fist. The activities also included interviews of black, indigenous and people of color on the topic of police brutality. The interviews will be used in a documentary produced by DanSan Creatives. June 15 marks 100 years since the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Issac McGhie in downtown Duluth for a crime they didn’t commit.
Duluth You & Me was published in 1993. Since then Duluth has added a fifth Sister City — Rania.
Duluth photographer Kip Praslowicz answers questions every photographer has about the loading and basic usage of the Schnapps-o-Flex.
Minneapolis-based musician Brian Just released a song called “Duluth” on his 2005 album Every Tree and Every Stone.
This Victorian trade card promotes E. Rose’s Boot and Shoe Bazaar, a Duluth retailer of Burt’s Fine Shoes. Info on the store isn’t easy to come by, but a pair of newspaper ads found after this post was initially published indicate the store was open from 1882 to 1886.
Five months before COVID-19 was labeled a pandemic, on a Saturday night back when people gathered together in public places to goof off, I drove from Duluth to Superior to attend an event called “Soup ’n’ Slides” at a place called “The Barbershop.” It might be helpful for me to explain both of the quotation-marked things.
The principal purpose of the event was for a fellow named Nik Nerburn to artistically project a bunch of 35mm slides he had found onto two screens while musicians Alan Sparhawk and Allen Killian-Moore sat nearby, collaborating to provide a live soundtrack to the slideshow. Three pots of soup simmered in the next room for anyone seeking nourishment. Put those elements together and we have “Soup ’n’ Slides.”
The event was held in an old barbershop on Belknap Street that was being used as a music and arts venue at the time simply because no one had been using the space to cut hair for profit. One room had about 20 folding chairs in it, assembled facing the performers who were set up against the back wall. The next room was about the same size, but acted as sort of a lobby. A considerable collection of phonograph records surrounded the small huddles of soup eaters engaged in casual discussion, so that they might at any moment flip through the assortment of albums and change the subject of conversation to the 1983 film D.C. Cab after gazing at the sneering Mr. T on the original motion picture soundtrack cover. And that’s what “The Barbershop” was all about.
Stanislaw Lem was born in 1921 in Lwow, Poland which is now Lviv, Ukraine. He died in 2006 in Krakow, Poland.
He was a Jew who survived the Holocaust, which in Poland was bracketed by two Soviet invasions. He went on to become one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world. His best-known work (in America) is the novella “Solaris,” which became a 2002 film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney. Lem sold more than 40 million books worldwide.
If you want to see Annmarie Geniusz’s original artwork, it’s a “right place, right time” situation. She works in chalk on the sidewalk, and the next rainstorm can carry away the masterpieces in minutes. This week in Selective Focus, Annemarie fills us in on the appeal of doing public, temporary artwork.
AG: I work in illustration, stained glass, and chalk art. This time of year (and since the start of quarantine) my main focus has been chalk art. This is a form of street art that involves drawing murals and 3D illusions with artist pastels on pavement. It is considered a performance art, and is often the focus of summertime “Chalk Art Festivals” across the country.
Take a cruise up Highway 61 in this edition of the PDD Video Lab, featuring old footage from Duluth’s Lester River, past the Loneyville Motel to the edge of Silver Creek Cliff before a tunnel was built there, and on to Gooseberry Falls State Park and Silver Bay.
For music, an excerpt of a cover version of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” by Sparklehorse & Thom Yorke from the soundtrack to the 2005 movie Lords of Dogtown.
For this report we turn to our junior news team at Raleigh Edison Charter School.
This undated postcard from the V. O. Hammon Publishing Company shows the Steamer Easton in the Duluth Harbor. The image can be roughly dated between 1905 and 1917.
Minnesota’s presidential primary is three months in the past, with Joseph Biden winning the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party nomination and Donald J. Trump unopposed as the Republican Party nominee. Other parties will field presidential candidates on the General Election ballot on Nov. 3, but the Primary Election on Aug. 11 will have no presidential candidates. There are also no city of Duluth or Duluth School Board races, although one school board candidate is running unopposed.
