A Video Journal of Lake Superior
This video ran on a loop at the Duluth Art Institute’s “Water Works” show June 20 to Aug. 25, 2013. It hadn’t made it to the internet yet.
This video ran on a loop at the Duluth Art Institute’s “Water Works” show June 20 to Aug. 25, 2013. It hadn’t made it to the internet yet.
Bloody Mary: 10/10
The lake is out there somewhere in this desolate wasteland at the peak of human endurance. Pro tip: If downtown is closed up because of blizzard conditions, the Boat Club is still open because it’s part of the Fitger’s hotel, and they’re all trapped in there eating each other, but it’s open. A great place to hole up here in the last outpost of civilization during the snowmageddonpocalypse. That is a vat of pepper-soaked vodka. Bloody Mary review: 9/10.
This informative article refers to the “legend” of Lake Inferior, which originated here at Perfect Duluth Day with my 5/8/21 Saturday Essay, “Lake Inferior: the Underground Lake Beneath Lake Superior.” From a blog post to legend in less than two years — oh, internet! The informative article summarizes the “legend,” linking to the PDD Saturday Essay as the source, which is repeated in a second article seemingly plagiarizing the first:
I asked the AI illustrator craiyon.com “Are you sentient?” Its cagey reply was the pantheistic picture above. So I was eager to see how ChatGPT would reply to the question. I also wanted to test its AI morals. Here’s how it went.
I was watching this YouTube documentary on the Big Old Boats channel, like ya do. It is about the Carroll Deering, which wrecked on Cape Hatteras without her crew in a nautical mystery. But a lot of the footage used is stock footage from other sources, for seaside vibes. So when I saw Ol’ Lifty on screen @17:30-17:46, I wasn’t too surprised. Duluth as generic sea location, thrown into amateur doc about unrelated East Coast disaster.
Sunset a silent H-bomb
Now a burning Saturn, now an apricot pastel dab on slate. Sun zips the sky closed behind it as it goes, now dying, now resurrecting in orange creamsicle. Color cosmologies. Gold birch leaves rattle like paper coins. Leaves crunch, clatter, gather against curbs.
Green-red and other impossible hues
Evaluation of Impossible Colors
On the grounds of the Institute, which really are all grounds, observations were made of maple and oak leaf colors absent from Newton’s spectrum: green-red and other impossible hues. The Institute conducted evaluations along subjective parameters as follows:
Records of Spring: Spotty
Lightbeams solid enough to climb pierce the windows of the Institute for the Study of Light and Water, rousing my eye like a hibernating bear. Dawn presents a temporal crisis. Borges said no one staying up all night welcomes the dawn. So the arrival of spring at the Institute. Records of spring are spotty. The brook babbled after a long vow of silence. The snow was gone which meant April had definitely passed. Cautious leaves popped out. Then the Institute blinked and endless summer began.
800 entries, 250 illustrations, 50 footnotes
Co-written with Allen Richardson. Illustrations by the Richardson brothers using craiyon.com, stablediffusionweb.com, and DALL-E 2
Contents
1. Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
2. Introduction: Superhero Exegesis
3. Index of the Duluth Superhero Community
4. Footnotes
Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
From the Journal of the Morphogenetic Field Technician: I am trapped far beneath the UMD campus in the Novelty Sphere as the global catastrophe intensifies. My team’s experiments in this underground lab are directly responsible for the apocalypse overtaking the planet. The quakes grow steadily. Portions of the lab visible through the Sphere’s cyclopean porthole have caved in. Soon the roof will collapse releasing tons of basaltic bedrock. If the Sphere’s integrity holds, I will have limited air. One thing I have an unlimited supply of: claustrophobia. It is as if I am in an untethered bathysphere sinking into the mounting pressures of the deep. The Sphere’s instrumentation confirms my worst suspicions: this is no mere global extinction. We destabilized probability itself, and the vertical line on the catastrophe graph indicates structural failure of the universal constants. Like a landslide, the cosmos races toward physical destruction. Gravity will be the first to fail, centered on the Sphere. The well of the Earth is popping like an old spring.
