October 2011 Posts

This week: Enger Tower, boxing, theater

It’s a good week for theater with four plays opening around Duluth. On Thursday, The Foreigner opens at the Mainstage Theatre at the Marshall Performing Arts Center on the UMD campus. On Friday, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow opens at the Duluth Playhouse along with the The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the same venue. Audience participation and showing up in RHPS costume is encouraged. If you’re looking for a less raucous affair, the Minnesota Ballet will be performing Dracula for two nights only starting Friday.

Walking Dead

I went to the Zinema 2 last night to watch the Walking Dead.

Zombie Theology, July 2011

Zombie Theology, July 2011

This event was sparked by the Comic Book Guy at DragonPort Games and Comics last year. As I understand it, he contacted the Zinema and co-promoted the event. The house was stuffed to the gills, SRO.

Sushi in Duluth

Ten years ago, zero restaurants in Duluth served sushi.

City Pages did a cover story about Duluth culture in 2001 titled “Hey, we’re in Duluth.” Zak Sally, then bassist of the Duluth-based band Low, lamented Duluth’s lack of sushi in the article.

The singers get their fair share of the world on the road but say they miss sushi. If somebody opened a sushi bar in Duluth, Sally deadpans, the local news would run an item explaining what sushi is. Not that everyone in town is chafing at its limits.

Shortly after the article, sushi popped up in Duluth at the old Bennett’s restaurant (now Midi) and in Superior at the old Sakana (now Marlee’s Caribbean).

Today, sushi is on the menu at a handful of area restaurants:

Black Water Lounge (They still serve sushi, don’t they?)
China King Buffet (no website; opening announced on PDD here)
Hanabi Japanese Cuisine
Osaka Sushi Hibachi Steakhouse (no website; PDD reviews here)
Zen House (Duluth)
Zen House (Hermantown)

Discussion topic: Hanabi is clearly the best and China King Buffet is clearly the least expensive, right?

UPDATE: Commenters note that two grocery stores — Mt. Royal Fine Foods and Cub Foods — both sell sushi in Duluth.

Club Saratoga Ad on Jay Leno

club saratogo polish descent ad

Club Saratoga ad … as mentioned on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Bike Share in Duluth-Superior?

Discussion is getting underway today about setting up a bike share system here in the Twin Ports, modeled after the Nice Ride MN nonprofit in the Cities. In case you missed it, check out this article in the DNT.

The basic idea behind the Nice Ride system is to provide affordable access to bicycles for short trips inside the city, as an alternative to taking the bus or driving a car.

Halloween banners

Who’s got groovy halloween photos? If you can crop them to ridiculously horizontal proportions and still see what’s going on in them, we want them!
We’re looking for Halloween banners to put at the top of PDD.

Some basic rules:
The image must be 960 pixels wide by 167 pixels high. The Perfect Duluth Day logo will be added by PDD’s art department.
The lower portion of banner photos serve as background to the navigation bar, so crop your image with that in mind. Make sure essential elements are not in the area that will be obscured.

If all of this is too much to wrap your head around, or you don’t have the right image editing software, just e-mail the uncropped photo, and we’ll do our best to crop it so it looks good.
Send them to [email protected].

Did anyone else see the kickass rainbow?

Lake-Superior-Rainbow

ARAC Art Project Grants

The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council recently approved grant applications totaling $63,075 to be awarded in ARAC Art Project Grants.

Photographing the Duluth Skyline

A few weeks ago I posted a general guide to photographic locations in Duluth. It was well received so I wanted to write another similar guide. This guide is all about the Duluth skyline. There are maps and directions to seven different places to get a great look at Duluth. Some places may be familiar, others may not. Even if you don’t go to take pictures, these seven spots are amazing for their scenic vistas. With fall in peak color now is the perfect time to get out. Check them out here.

The Infamous Dr. Thunder paints a mural in Indianapolis that MSNBC dubs a “must see”

Superior native Erik Pearson spent part of this past summer working on a mural in Indianapolis, which made MSNBC’s list of “America’s must-see murals.”

You can see Erik’s murals in Superior at Red Mug Coffeehouse and along some back-alley spots, as mentioned in the PDD post “The Infamous Dr. Thunder paints a mural on the back door of Who’s Bar in Superior.”

600 Reasons to See Low

Low, the iconic band from Duluth, is performing a rare benefit concert with opener Charlie Parr at Marshall School Auditorium on Friday, Oct. 14, at 8 p.m. (doors @ 6.30pm).  This concert is presented by Life House, a local nonprofit that helps homeless kids get off the street, and back into a safe environment.

Reward for stolen computer: $400 cash

On the night of October 8 someone broke into my home through a window on the 1600 block of East Fifth Street in Duluth and stole my Apple Macbook Pro 15.4. I’ve quickly spun into depression at the loss of the tens of thousands of photos on the computer I’ve taken and collected over the past 10 years. These in effect are the memories I had of my life since moving to Duluth in 2002.

I just want the computer back, undamaged, with no files missing. No questions asked. $400 cash yours for the return. This has got to be better than what any pawnbroker will offer you.

Any information leading to the return of my Apple computer is also worth that to me.

Contact: egnied @ gmail.com

The Fontanelles – “Stranger”

Video from last month’s “One Week Live” series at Beaner’s Central, edited by Dan Dresser.

LakeVoice News is back for fall semester!

LakeVoice News is back a semester early! We know that last spring we told you that we wouldn’t be back for an entire year, but we just couldn’t let that happen. We will launch our first batch of stories Tuesday, Oct. 18.

We will also be continuing our Week in Photos. Since fall colors are all around us, please send us your best fall pictures. Just send the pictures to lakevoicenews @ gmail.com along with a caption that includes where the picture was taken, when it was taken, who is in the picture and who took the picture. To get a better idea of what we are looking for, look at previous submissions here

Urban Canoeing in Minnesota

Video by Jake Strassman, one of the guys behind …