Saturday Essay Posts

Ripped in Toronto in 2000

Jul 12, 2025 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty-five years ago the Sultan of Sot hit the road for a visit to Toronto, Canada, and composed this article for the July 12, 2000 edition of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

“Nobody helps you with your cup
No one could ever fill it up.”
—The Sadies

Prelude: Detroit Metro

It was 11:15 a.m. and I was sitting in one of the many cafes at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Toronto. Everybody else drank coffee and ate pastries. My flight had been delayed two hours. I needed whiskey.

The Price is Right was on the TV above the espresso machine. Bob Barker put his arm around a gaunt middle-aged woman while they watched a cardboard mountain climber ascend a cardboard mountain, singing:

Laaa dee doody
Laaa dee doody
Laaa dee doody dooooo …

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Random , ,

Ice Racing Getaway Driver

Jun 21, 2025 No Comments

1983 St. Louis County jailhouse interview with “Turbo” Ted Van Brunt

Interviewer: Tell me about your escape from Duluth.

Turbo Ted: Escaping Duluth is a coin flip. Half my friends tried and couldn’t reach the velocity, came back after two or three years of getting kicked around out there. I tried a couple times.

What you’re really asking about started a couple springs ago, when it rained then the temperature plunged. The city woke up with a coating of clear ice on every surface. Branches falling in the road. Whole city shut down, nothing could move.

Except my black, street stock, ice racing stud car, a 1976 Chevette with a roll cage and 500 spikes on each tire — sheet metal screws we screwed in ourselves. Fender all chewed up. Commonly called the worst car of all time but it did everything we asked. And Johnny said it was go time. He was the brains, had it all worked, how to disarm the system at the Superior Street jewelers there. He got that with a bribe. It was only a question of when, and this was our crisis of opportunity. “The cops won’t stand a chance,” he said, and they didn’t. They even had chains on but they still didn’t know how to drive. Anyway so Johnny robbed it, but he didn’t get all the alarms. And I was the getaway driver but I still get half. Which wasn’t much — a couple display cases worth of diamond jewelry. Pulled him behind the car on a tether as we blew down Superior through deserted intersections, cross-training for frozen lake ice races at the same time we’re robbing a jewelry store. Just on his feet — no skis, just boots. And of course the cop shop is right there. But their interceptors fell behind. It was beautiful.

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History, Sports ,

What Does William S. Burroughs Owe Djuna Barnes?

Jun 07, 2025 No Comments

A lot of William S. Burroughs kind of sounds like Djuna Barnes. The prime example: Barnes created the character Doctor Matthew O’Connor in her 1936 novel Nightwood, and Dr. O’Connor could easily be confused with the 1938 Burroughs character, Dr. Benway (no first name). Each fictional physician is a comically amoral addict abortionist. I think it’s likely Burroughs created Dr. Benway within a year of reading Nightwood. Burroughs owes Barnes a debt of inspiration, and not just in the creation of Benway — many of his other characters could also be walk-ons in Nightwood, fitting in well among Barnes’ cast of liars, pretenders, and cheats. So it’s safe to say Barnes influenced the characters Burroughs created. I will also show her influence on his voice, style, and themes.

Since the 1980s, a Burroughs blurb appears on the back of every Nightwood edition, saying in its entirety, “I read Nightwood back in the 1930s and was very taken with it. I consider it one of the great books of the twentieth century.” That’s all he ever said about it; it says it all. It is commonly acknowledged that he admired her work, but I think Barnes had a larger influence. I think Burroughs took what he learned from Nightwood and then, in 1959, he wrote the actual number-one greatest book of the twentieth century, Naked Lunch. Barnes’ influence is found there, and throughout Burroughs’ work.

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History ,

Kill the Spider

May 17, 2025 No Comments

When I stepped into the shower, I didn’t see the spider. Once the water was running, I looked down and there it was at my feet, floating near the drain.

They don’t struggle when they’re fully soaked. Instead, they ball up and wait for the tide to take them to a surface they can latch on to.

There will be no escape for this spider, however, because I won’t let it happen. This spider is in my shower, and that kind of disrespect demands an execution.

There are plenty of spider sanctuaries — the utility room, the garage, the shed, the attic — where I’ll look the other way. I don’t enjoy killing them, and would rather not, so I let them be when they know their place.

Although spiders are creepy, they have some positive attributes. Most notably, they eat a lot of insects. It’s probably not intelligent for me to kill something that’s doing so much killing on my behalf.

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Random ,

Ripped at Eagles Aerie 80 in 2005

May 10, 2025 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to Eagles Aerie 80 at 1710 N. 12th St. in Superior, and composed this article for the May 2005 edition of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

So, what is the Fraternal Order of the Eagles? Well, according to the group’s motto, “Eagles are people helping people.” How do they help people? Well, who cares? They help me by selling 34-ounce mugs of beer for $2.50 during “late-night happy hour” from 10 p.m. to midnight. Thank you, Eagles Aerie 80. “People helping people,” indeed.

The Eagles are also big on disaster relief. For example, all this cheap beer is causing a 9+ magnitude gutquake in my stomach, but, this being a Saturday, I can count on a wholesome breakfast to be served tomorrow, right here, hopefully in time to prevent a reverse tsunami.

Right now, however, I’m so fucktarded drunk that, despite being surrounded by philanthropists, I’m seriously thinking about stealing an old guy’s jacket. It’s a Rusty Nail jacket, advertising my favorite South Superior bar, and I think it will look good on me.

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History ,

Avant Garde Women: Elsa the Dada Baroness, Djuna Barnes and Margaret Anderson

May 03, 2025 No Comments

Introduction

The story of Elsa the Dada Baroness transpired in a milieu of literary queer feminist icons circa World War I. This story was best told in 1930, in the book My Thirty Years’ War by Margaret Anderson. Anderson was the radical publisher (with Jane Heap) of the Little Review, the international modernist-Dadaist-anarchist magazine that punched above its weight and first serialized Joyce’s Ulysses. I bought my copy of My Thirty Years’ War hoping for a great first-person account of the landmark obscenity trial that ensued over Ulysses, but Anderson barely mentions it. However she does say a lot about the Baroness. Anderson got to know the Baroness by publishing her poems; every history of the Baroness goes through Margaret Anderson.

My Thirty Years’ War is in the public domain and, as evidence of that, my copy has a typo in the title on the front cover, and a couple pages are in the wrong order. But it has the goods. I also read Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity — A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel. My copy of that has no typos and a hundred pages of footnotes, and it’s where I found accounts of the Baroness by another writer Anderson was publishing: Djuna Barnes. Like Anderson, Barnes became a supporting character in the Baroness’ story.

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Art

What About Today?

Apr 12, 2025 1 Comment

Today is the day. The day to do something. To do anything. Because there is no better day than today.

This is the day you think about more than yourself. You think about your family, neighbors, friends, others around the city, and the vulnerable populations who are struggling with such challenges as poverty and being homeless.

And no matter what time it is when you read this, it’s the right moment to respond and get physical. To stand up. To step up. To speak up. If you wait for another time or day, it will be too late.

Too many of us have never felt a greater sense of angst and urgency. With all the disturbing news, it would be very easy and understandable to distance ourselves, to distract ourselves, to even disconnect ourselves from the harsh reality which surrounds us. But we can’t keep closing the door behind us and walking away from what’s happening out there.

This is not just a bad dream or nightmare. It’s definitely more than that. It’s real. It’s painful. It’s inevitable.

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Random

The FBI Paid for My Co-op Membership: Minnesota Food War 1975

Mar 22, 2025 No Comments

Transcript of interview with former co-op volunteer / FBI confidential informant

Interviewer: How did you become an FBI informant during the Minnesota food co-op wars of 1975?

Name redacted: Well, when co-ops started forming in the late ‘60s, the FBI thought it was a communist plot. That theory got a lot of traction because many early co-op’ers were actual, literal Communists, mimeographing typewritten Leninist newsletters. You would’ve thought downtown Minneapolis was the Red Square. So it was a case of “let’s just keep an eye on these people.” But since there was a cooperative warehouse in Wisconsin serving as a distribution hub, when co-op-related violence broke out, it crossed state lines. So the FBI went from passive surveillance to active infiltration. When the Minneapolis co-op wars spread to the North Shore in ’75, I was on the short list to infiltrate the Duluth one. A native Duluthian, I had worked undercover before, and I was already a Co-op shopper. I was not a member, but knew some of the early Co-op’ers from church. I wasn’t on the anarcho-communist continuum, and I wasn’t a hippie — I just wanted better food. This made my handlers a little nervous. They started thinking I was a pinko. But I told them, “You couldn’t find a loaf of whole wheat bread in Duluth until the Co-op opened in 1970.” They were eating Wonder Bread baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise, but that convinced them. So the FBI paid for my Co-op membership. Then I signed up for member volunteer work shifts to get on the inside. I stirred buckets of nut butter with a drill attachment, but I heard stuff. I wasn’t the only one, the Feds had an informant in Grand Marais too, and some as far south as Iowa. Minneapolis was the hub, of course; the co-ops down there were popping off like popcorn.

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Random ,

Christian Boarding School Texas Football

Mar 08, 2025 No Comments

I still have bitter high school football recriminations. My 1980s Episcopal boarding school in Texas glorified football above other sports. I attended on a scholarship from family connections, not through any academic or athletic merit. And I learned the wrong lesson about authority from the sports program.

A recent obituary in the alumni newsletter helped spur me to write this, although I’ve been kicking it around for 40 years. Nothing personal against Coach P who I don’t have to name. For the purposes of this story he is the universal coach. This is not to disrespect his essential personhood or whatever. But I learned things I did not want to learn about society and all the rest of it — universal things I never forgot.

Coach P’s obituary said he was the decades-long athletics director, had coached thousands of games and taught thousands of history classes, too. He is fondly remembered by nearly everyone, including myself. He was a real Texas character. His knees were busted up and it crabbed his walk. I assumed it had happened on a football field in his younger days, a brutal hit or series of hits marking him, claiming him for the sport. You knew he was committed. He was gray and had the hairy ears of an old man if he let it go, something I noticed sitting behind him in chapel once or twice, and it made me swear to never get old or sentiments to that effect. He wasn’t really that old but he was weathered. He was not without warmth or humor, and he bonded with his players particularly. Like in the Lou Reed song, they “wanted to play football for the coach.” They liked how, when he was consternated at you, he would exclaim “Hellfire, son!”

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Sports

Last Call at the Pilot House

Feb 22, 2025 No Comments

Duluth Herald late-edition special report
Thursday, Jan. 28, 1915
By Joe Crisp, Senior Shipping Reporter

A famed local maritime drinking establishment has shut its doors. This is the ship’s pilot house on the tip of Timber Point in the harbor. For 16 years it has operated as the Pilot House bar. Initially serving a clientele made up exclusively of members of the Great Lakes Life Saving Service, soon it caught on with sailors and dock workers. Older Duluthians recall its origin, as the pilot house of the doomed Marchande which stuck out of the water in the shipping lanes for weeks in 1899. She had sunk by the stern as her cargo shifted, but her nose bobbed up. Using a floating crane, the Life Savers salvaged the pilot house and installed it on Timber Point. There they collectively owned and operated it as a business, until last night.

Because today, as the war in Europe heats up, the 45-year-old Life Saving Service has been officially subsumed into the Revenue Cutter Service. The resulting compound organization forms the newest branch of the armed forces, the United States Coast Guard. The Pilot House is a casualty of new regulations and a wave of retirements. Some old-timer Life Savers don’t wish to adapt, nor to compete against much younger men in basic training, to re-qualify for what will be different jobs. Many jobs are being eliminated. All three of Duluth’s Life Saving stations — at Park Point, Lester River, and Stony Point — have been officially replaced by the single new Coast Guard station in the harbor. The oars and battered wooden surfboats of the Life-Savers have given way to a steel steam-powered Coast Guard cutter, and a modern Life-Saving station complete with radio equipment and a machine shop. Among the sweeping changes are rules prohibiting Coast Guard personnel profiting from salvage. And since all the booze served at the Pilot House was salvaged from local shipwrecks, this effectively puts the bar out of business. Last night was last call.

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Random ,

Minnesota Land Surveyor’s Deathbed Confession, 1907

Feb 01, 2025 2 Comments

The text below is reproduced from a handwritten document that slipped out of a book of maps at the Minnesota Historical Society. Its authentication remains in progress.

I die happy seeing the completion of the Minnesota land survey, and the dissolution of the Office of the Surveyor General. He surveyed himself out of a job. We all did, the great work of our lives. It took five decades. But holes were chopped through the state that cannot be filled. I discovered a flaw in the measurements in the summer of 1855 when we were still just a territory. And I have knowledge of the disappearance of my hated competitor as he fell between the parallels, in the woods of what is now northeast Duluth.

Many surveying companies were employed by the Surveyor General. Mine was one and I was sworn in as a deputy surveyor. Rough work. We camped away from home for months, in 10-man teams: axe-men, chainmen, cooks, and muleskinners. Our families didn’t know if we were alive or dead until we returned (or failed to) for the winter break.

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History ,

Gang of Thieves

Jan 25, 2025 No Comments

Every time he comes into the public library, Marv is mumbling to himself, engaged in an angry conversation with the assholes who live inside his head. Six feet tall, hard faced, his vibe is intimidating, but when he speaks to library staff, Marv’s hissed swearing ceases; unfailingly, he is respectful. Mostly, he’s there to use the computers, and once he’s settled inside the massive downtown building, Marv stays, sometimes spending more than half a day in the climate-controlled, well-lit shelter that is the main library in Duluth, Minnesota. At closing time, he’ll bid workers “Good night!” before he and His Mumbles head outside to unlock whatever bike he’s riding that week.

When Marv leaves the building, he’s accompanied by a library technician, someone who will unfasten and remove the eight-pound chain and small u-lock that protect his bike from theft during his long hours of poking around the internet. Marv doesn’t own a lock. Likely, he doesn’t own the bike. But it’s his for as long as he’s got it, and checking out a library lock assures he’ll have a means of getting to whatever passes as “home” at day’s end.

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The Grateful Dead vs. The Velvet Underground

Jan 18, 2025 No Comments

The 2024 death of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh reminded me: I discovered the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground at the same time. The bands still exist as a unity in my mind, even after I figured out they were polar opposites.

My 1980s high school girlfriend was from the Northeast around Connecticut and New York City. She fused goth, punk, and hippie vibes. When we were 18, we took acid in her Austin, Texas shack. That’s where she DJ’d for me, on vinyl, the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground.

I’d heard the bands but never listened. She played the 1970 Dead tune “Box of Rain,” written by Lesh about the death of his father. Then we listened to “Rock & Roll,” the 1970 VU tune by Lou Reed about music as refuge, with Sterling Morrison on lead guitar. It all sounded like sheer Americana to me.

In the 1990s I became more of a Velvet Underground guy, from the band’s proto-punk stuff. But then I dated a Deadhead in Berkeley, and she took me to some Dead shows. That’s when I really got what the Dead fuss was about. I enjoyed my first show plenty, just for the carnival atmosphere, not having a deep knowledge of their discography. But then they covered “Johnny B. Goode” and the top of my skull lifted off. The secret of Dead shows is they piled crescendo on crescendo until you hit peak bliss, then they kept climbing. Yes I was on mescaline.

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Music

The Most Read Saturday Essays of 2024

Dec 28, 2024 No Comments

Saturday Essay logo generic

For the fourth year in a row, Jim Richardson has dominated the top of the charts. He has authored four of the five most read Saturday Essays of 2024.

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Random

Ripped at Lost in the ’50s in 2004

Dec 21, 2024 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to Lost in the ’50s, 1809 N. Third St. in Superior, and composed this article for the December 2004 edition of the Ripsaw, which was the last issue of the publication in its monthly magazine format.]

Of the five bars located at the receptacle end of Tower Avenue, Lost in the ’50s is the shyest and most understated. Other bars in the neighborhood are known for their horseshoes or their burgers or for being a place to quietly drink yourself to death. Lost in the ’50s offers cheap drinks, a decent juke, bad karaoke and, as the name would suggest, a smattering of velvet Elvis art. For some reason, few people bother to take them up on the offer.

Location has as much to do with it as anything else. The layout of the Tower Avenue/North Third Street intersection tends to lead the drunken eye to the east, away from Lost in the ’50s and toward more dubious places, like Jo D’s Corner Oasis, JT’s or the deathly Tom’s Cedar Lounge. Besides, most people, once they get as far as the Anchor or maybe Molly’s, don’t even think of venturing any farther, because they assume they have all they need. They’re wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.

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