Step up to the plate for this baseball-themed PDD quiz! For more on Duluth baseball history, check out the Zenith City website and the Minnesota Digital Library.
The next PDD quiz will review the headlines from June 2022; it will be published on June 26. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by June 22.
The Greatest Cabaret in the History of the World
It is criminal that Emmy Hennings’s books have not been translated from German to English after more than 100 years. She was arguably the founder of Dadaism in 1916, the most important art movement of the 20th century. To the press, she was unquestionably Dada’s tentpole performer. Dada — anarchic, nihilistic, and self-consciously weird — continues to inspire. All Hennings’s male contemporaries have translated books available, so what is the holdup? I’ll buy a German-English dictionary and do it myself if I have to. Her books run hundreds of pages so it will take me the rest of my life. But it’s not fair that German readers hog her work to themselves, especially with modern interest in the female Dadaists. The delay is perhaps explained by continual critical confusion over her true role.
Hennings was a political radical and anti-war activist. She faced prison, morphine addiction, mental health issues, and homelessness. Before Dada, “grinding poverty” drove her into sex work to feed herself. Among the literally starving artists in Europe circa World War I, Dada’s mama had to eat. Then, as artillery shells fell in the distance, she started the greatest cabaret in the history of the world.
Today’s episode of The Boys (season 3, episode 4) contains the following sarcastic line: “I’m sure you and Duluth’s Most Mighty can get the job done.” It occurs at the 15-minute mark in the show. The remark is intended to mean “your unpowered friends and boyfriend are pipsqueaks.” Contains salty language.
Duluth’s Charlie Parr has a new video for a song from his 2021 album Last of the Better Days Ahead. “Bed of Wasps” is directed by Lance Lindahl.
Iron Rangers Rob Wheeler and Jill Burkes make up the folk duo MorningBird. This clip is from their “Live from Studio A” session on WDSE “the North” 103.3 FM in May.
In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
Ticket prices have been on the rise, but the cost to find out that events exist hasn’t gone up at all. The PDD Calendar remains free. However, each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar items. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
The message on the back of this Union Depot postcard is dated June 8, 1912 — 110 years ago today. The names are tricky to read, but the sender signs off from Detroit, Mich. and the recipient was in Beaver Dam, Wis.
Duluth’s Gaelynn Lea won National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016. NPR recently circled back to interview her during her work writing music for the Broadway adaptation of Macbeth.
The Tiny Desk Contest is NPR’s annual search for a great unsigned artist.
Eric Strand’s tradition of running a Grandma’s Marathon Double — starting at the finish line, running to the starting line, then running the official marathon — continued in 2021. The annual video package didn’t make it to YouTube until today — 11 days before the next Grandma’s Marathon — but hey, editing video is its own marathon, right?
Joining Strand on the 52.4-mile trek, which began at 2:30 a.m., are Andy, Andrew, John, Lance and another guy named Eric. All were impressed with the awe-inspiring sunrise over the porta potties at the half-marathon starting line.
This image from a stereograph circa 1872 shows a view of Superior Street in Downtown Duluth looking eastward from roughly First Avenue West. The odd-shaped building in the upper right corner of the image is the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad Grain Elevator A, which was on the shore of Lake Superior at about Fourth Avenue East.
This 50-year-old film is a sort of unproduced mini-documentary about Duluth’s Goldfine family, with particular emphasis on their roles as civic leaders. The family’s entrepreneurial story in Duluth goes back to 1922, so it can be viewed today as marking a full century of Goldfine family enterprises in the city.
The latest from Duluth’s Ingeborg von Agassiz is “a song for basement-dwellers and night owls.”
In the latest backyard battle in Duluth, Furball McGraw takes on the squirrel-weight champion of the world, Crazy Carl in a scaffold match. Video by Brian Luoma of Wild Cam North.
Foggy, rainy, cloudy … but not necessarily gloomy. May was a lot like April. Collected here are select images from the past month, via Instagram.
