Homegrown Music Festival Field Guide 2016
The 2016 Homegrown Music Festival Field Guide is off the presses, with 20,000 free copies piled up at various shops across the Twin Ports. This year’s cover art is by Carolyn Sue Olson.
So far there are two changes to the Homegrown schedule that happened after the Field Guide went to press:
- The Aurora Baer Band will play on Friday, May 6, 10:30 p.m. at Tycoons Alehouse. (Phillip of Nazareth was originally scheduled for that slot and had to withdraw.)
- Brain Bugs will play on Monday, May 2, 10:45 p.m. in the Barrel Room at Fitger’s Brewhouse. (Dad’s Acid was scheduled for that slot until the drummer’s day job wrecked it.)
Angry people in local newspapers
We need to get in on this! Angry people in local newspapers blog (via Boing Boing)
![Upset-Community-Members[1]](https://www.perfectduluthday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Upset-Community-Members1.jpg)
(Upset community + Cinnamon Roll, courtesy of Banjo Tom)
Selective Focus: The St. Louis River, Recreation
Hansi Johnson, untitled
Somehow this seems both an apt and inapt way to close my editorship of this feature. There are plenty of sites to pore over images of our region’s abundant natural beauty, but few that foreground the real people who live, work, and play here. That was my fundamental ambition; to recognize the vast human capital here, to weekly call for snapshots, pictures of domestic ordinariness, matters not needlessly prettified. Reality, even when it’s harsh is sufficiently beautiful to me. (more…)
American Fur Trading Post at Fond du Lac, 1826
This 1950’s-era postcard depicts American Fur Company’s trading post at Fond du Lac, now a neighborhood of Duluth. German-born John Jacob Astor founded the company more than 200 years ago — precisely April 8, 1808. His post on the St. Louis River sought to capitalize on Ojibwe fur trappers in the area, but the Ojibwe preferred to trade with the French and British, so the venture was a bust in the beginning. After the War of 1812, the United States passed a law excluding foreign traders from operating on U.S. territory, which freed the American Fur Company from its biggest competitors. By 1830, Astor’s company dominated the U.S. fur trade. (more…)
Duluth Band Profile: Lord Montague
Lord Montague channels blues and acid rock to produce The Cave. The band opens up about the inspiration behind its work and gives fans a valuable life lesson. Click on the image above to hear the interview.
View on Spirit Lake, Vicinity Duluth and Superior
“Dear Ed and Edith,” begins the message on this postcard, mailed July 31, 1907. The penmenship gets funky in places, but the rest goes something like this: “Arrived here last night — fine trip up — leave in a few minutes for Minneapolis, where we remain until Saturday. Everything has been grand. Yes, even the weather. Trust you are full of ??? Lake like-?ess. We would be if we could get a ??? in it. Lovingly, ??? and ???”
Hollywood rumor: Will Ferrell will star in film about snowmobile adventure hatched over drinks at Duluth’s Pickwick
Just two weeks ago Perfect Duluth Day linked to a New York Times article about Ralph Plaisted’s 1968 expedition to the North Pole by snowmobile. Yesterday the online infotainment website Deadline reported producers Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen and actor Will Ferrell will make a movie about the Minnesota adventurers.
“They’ve acquired Guy Lawson’s article for The New York Times Magazine, with a title that tells you everything you need to know: ‘Ice Pack: An Insurance Salesman and a Doctor Walk Into a Bar, and End Up at the North Pole,’ Deadline reports. “They will build the film around Ferrell.” (more…)
Skateboarding in Morgan Park School
Eight skaters, two days, granted permission. R.I.P. Morgan Park, you will be missed.
Shot/edited by Mike Rapaich. Additional video by Stephen Pestalozzi.
Aerial Duluth
Jake Moore’s Twin Cities-based video production company RedbellCentral recently completed this Duluth video, with footage from last summer.
In Defense of Duluth Poets
The arts and culture review website Partisan namedrops Holy Cow! Press of Duluth in an article by Harvard English Professor Stephen Burt titled “In Defence of Minor Poets,” published today. The namedrop occurs without actually mentioning Holy Cow! by name, but instead referencing Duluth with a hyperlink to Consortium Book Sales & Distribution’s page about the Duluth publishing company. (more…)
Duluth/Superior Interstate Bridge: “We are all well”
This card traveled from Buffalo N.Y. to Mrs. W.J. Morrison of Lindsay, Ont. in 1906.
The Interstate Bridge opened in 1897. At the time it was pretty much the only way to get back and forth between Duluth and Superior — other than by boat or swimming, or going the long way around by land, or maybe jumping a train across the Grassy Point Railroad Bridge.
In 1906, the steamer Troy knocked the draw span of the Interstate Bridge into St. Louis Bay. Ferry service connected the cities for two years until repairs were completed. (more…)
Commerce on the River: Symphony Boat Company
Marcel LaFond grew up on Kraemer Lake, about 10 miles west of St. Cloud, where he spent nearly all his time around water and boating. His childhood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, which he believes inspired a love of timeless design at an early age. Those influences led him to found Symphony Boat Company three years ago in Duluth’s Riverside neighborhood, where he builds attractive and unique boats from aluminum, marine plywood, foam and epoxy.
“When the economy tanked five or six years ago I found that, like many other people, I was looking to reinvent myself,” he says. Ready to take a risk and follow through with ideas he’d had stewing in his mind for years, LaFond let fate steer him to the St. Louis River. (more…)
Hockey Day Minnesota 2016 Videos
Waiting Room Collective produced this short documentary of the Lakeville North boys hockey team traveling to Duluth to play the East Greyhounds during Hockey Day Minnesota at Bayfront Park. The Panthers edged the Greyhounds 3-2. Below is the Fox Sports North video spotlighting the Greyhounds. (more…)
Duluth Band Profile: Ingeborg Von Agassiz
Ingeborg Von Agassiz mixes electronic soundscapes with folk undertones. She explains how her solo project began with a 1990s Yamaha keyboard and audience feedback. Click on the image above to hear the interview.
New Alakef CEO launches City Girl Coffee
Alyza Bohbot poses in front of Alakef’s original roaster with City Girl Coffee schwag
Alyza Bohbot never intended to take over Alakef Coffee Roasters, her family’s wholesale coffee roasting business. She was living on the East Coast and had just finished a master’s degree in school counseling when her parents, Nessim and Deborah, told Alyza, their only child, of their retirement plans.
Alyza says she had a “gut check moment.” She realized she didn’t want to see the business her parents worked so hard to build leave the family. She agreed to move back to Minnesota for a six-month trial period to determine if it was a good fit. Three years later, with her parents’ guidance and the help of veteran Alakef staff, Alyza is running the company and taking it in an interesting new direction. (more…)
Under the Bridge
I have always loved these buildings, but I never knew so much about them before.
Twohy and Osborn Blocks: Superior’s (Almost) Lost Mercantile Blocks
The PlayList: Virginia City Limits
WDSE-TV’s The PlayList launched its seventh season last week with a special episode shot outside the 218 Taphouse in Virginia. The show features live music by the Christopher David Hanson Band and Rich Mattson & the Northstars.
This Week: sex, sunken ships, Shakespeare and more
Here’s a bit of what you’ll find on this week’s PDD Calendar:
One River, Many Stories gets underway at the DAI with photos and maps and music and more, kids can try a bunch of non-traditional sports at the Heritage Center, the 7th Annual Northland Job Fair returns to help people find work, the Duluth Public Library is the place to learn about Minnesota’s connections to the famously-doomed Titanic (and it’s a swell place for kids to play Minecraft, too) and Shakespeare’s First Folio is celebrated at The Underground.
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Mellencamp brings his bag of hits to the DECC, the latest chapter in the Star Wars saga screens for free in Superior, it’s time for clowning around at the DECC with the AAD Shrine Circus, Caroline Smith returns to Duluth to play a show at the Red Herring, the weekly PDD photo feature “Selective Focus” is celebrated, mad science is being dropped at UWS, it’s once again time to celebrate consensual sex with rock music and several local musicians play to fund a greenhouse in West Duluth.
Steamer Columbia on St. Louis River near Fond du Lac
This postcard, mailed in July 1914, depicts the steel excursion steamer Columbia cruising the St. Louis River. The best synopsis of the ol’ picnic cruise experience of yesteryear is perhaps the one on the back of the card, where “Aunt Carrie” writes to Miss Virginia Stanbridge of Westminster, Mass. If the message and penmanship seem a little too perfect, take a closer look. It’s a fill-in-the-blank card. (more…)
Duluth White Sox Team Photos
In a previous post on PDD it was speculated that photos of pitching great Hooks Dauss in a Duluth uniform are “seemingly nonexistent.” Well, there’s ol’ George wearing #4 in the 1909 team photo above. Search completed. (more…)
Price Check: Frigidaire Dishwasher
Are you sick of arguing with your spouse and children about whose turn it is to wash the dishes by hand? Do you despise the smell and texture of greasy, pruney phalanges? Perfect Duluth Day’s Price Check series has a solution for your loathing: The Frigidaire 24-inch Built-in Dishwasher in Stainless Steel.
This model # FFBD2411NS dishwasher features a spacious, removable silverware basket, a delay start option so it runs on your schedule, a removable, stainless steel filter, five wash cycle options, and a control lock option. (more…)
Dalles of the St. Louis River
The illustration above is from William Cullen Bryant‘s classic book Picturesque America, published by D. Appleton & Company of New York in 1872 and 1874. Bryant was editor of the book; the illustration is by Alfred R. Waud.