This week’s quiz tests your knowledge of Superior’s code of ordinances (check out a quiz on Duluth laws here).
The next PDD will review the news that made headlines this month; it will be published on Nov. 28. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Nov. 24.
[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 he filed a report from Mama’s Bar, 1019 Ogden Ave. in Superior. Mama’s went out of business circa 2017. This article appeared in the Nov. 14, 2001 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper.]
There are two kinds of mamas in the world, and Mama’s Bar in Superior is named after both of them. One of the first things you notice when you walk into the place is all the hot mamas. Black-and-white photos of Veronica Lake, Marlene Dietrich, etc. line the wall across from the bar. At the bar, the real-life mamas sit. The 45-year-old white-trash mamas are always out in full force at Mama’s Bar. The place is everything I ever wanted in a filthy dive.
Mama’s is one book you shouldn’t judge by its dirty pink cover. Yes, the exterior of the place is painted pink — but it’s not a gay bar. This, of course, begs the question: What stereotypes can our society possibly rely on anymore? A pink bar called Mama’s, full of straight patrons, does nothing to simplify our already complicated lives.
Is it art? A descent into madness? Or just a scrap of paper with some notes on it, dropped on the sidewalk at the corner of Third Avenue West and Superior Street?
How can you tell your Pepperkakebyen from your Mannheim Steamroller without the PDD Calendar? You can’t. You just can’t. That’s why we reach out each month with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar events. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
Documenting all extant media coverage of my exploits since 2005. Sharing them here. Articles, interviews, TV, radio, all the things:
Los Angeles Review of Books has a brief mention of Duluth in the opening sentence of a review of three books focused on trees. The reviewer, Barbara Kiser, is a former Duluthian who has lived in London since the 1980s.
I haunt the resale shops looking for “records that look like books.” I’m referring to the folios of LPs that were common (a) when prepackaged by the label, as a way to sell extended plays and collections when records didn’t hold too many songs and (b) when sold blank, as a way for an individual collector to store and carry multiple, individually-purchased discs.
When I find a collection stored in the sleeves of such a folio, I snatch it, wondering who collected these masterpieces.
When my father died, I had a surrogate dad waiting in the wings: the work of Ray Bradbury. I was obsessed. I felt I would devote my life to him, a feeling common to loves which last no more than a couple years, as this one did. But they were timeless years. Between my 13th and 15th birthday, with my adult future on the horizon, I was still young enough for summers to last forever.
Now in my 50s, I retain the suite of Bradbury paperbacks I collected back then. I have no use for them, although no library contains merely useful books. I quit re-reading them decades ago. But there are many reasons for books to be collected. I moved on to obsessions with writers less old-fashioned and less overly lyrical, although not before his lyricism infected my own style. Yet even for me, Bradbury is too breathless and too wordy (although not chatty like Harlan Ellison). He wrote terrible poetry. He became a cranky old man. Film and TV adaptations of his work are, by and large, bad. I now consider him (along with his contemporaries Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein) to be a branch of Young Adult (i.e., children’s) literature. But I still give his books a treasured pride of place on my shelves, which overflow with his successors. Strangely, most of my adult favorites also begin with the letter “B”: Burroughs, Ballard, Borges, Bowles … but Bradbury got to me first.
Split Rock Lighthouse stands along the western shore of Lake Superior, atop a soaring cliff. Dressed in cream-colored brick and elegant trim more fitting for a grand house in a genteel neighborhood, it once worked as a watchman holding a luminous light, warning ships about rocky shores at its feet.
It’s a crisp late-October morning. The last day of the season before the lighthouse shutters for the year. From an expansive autumn-blue sky, sunshine washes the landscape in gold. The temperature wanders just north of forty-five degrees. The air breathes softly.
My granddaughter, six, and grandson, four, are with me. It’s their first visit to the lighthouse. Because it’s a weekday and almost the last day the lighthouse will entertain visitors for the year, we are nearly alone on the grounds.
We climb the twisting steps of the lighthouse, just the three of us. We are quiet, and with nothing to arrest my attention, other than the shuffle of feet on the stairs, I travel decades back in time.
I’m still working on my literary history of Duluth. Lake Superior Writers has published or co-published several volumes. If you were involved in some of these collections and have stories to share, message me or comment below.
Lake Superior Zoo‘s colossal pumpkin arrived Oct. 6. Danny Tanner of Duluth Township provides the zoo with the symbolic Halloween squash each year ahead of the annual Boo at the Zoo events, this year held Oct. 16, 23 and 30.
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.
Sarah LaChance Adams and Rob Adams and their family no longer live in Duluth, but Sarah can be heard talking about the philosophy of love, sex and relationships in the October episode of Why? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life. The episode is titled: “How do philosophers talk about sex, love, and desire?”
The spooky season is upon us! Test your knowledge of local Halloween-themed happenings with this week’s quiz (and check out more Halloween hoopla on the PDD calendar).
The next PDD quiz, reviewing the month’s headlines, will be published on Oct. 31. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Oct. 27.
