Michael Charette, also known as Tales of Laughing Fox, is a flute maker and player, animal mask maker and more. He lives in Red Cliff, about 60 miles east of Duluth.
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.
While on patrol I found these two big iron flower petal things not too far offshore, wedged among the rocks. They were about 50 feet from each other in around ten feet of water. I think they may be blades from a large boat propeller. Yes I wore a shark fin for this patrol — a couple years ago I encountered a three-foot muskie in this area, and felt it best I should shark up.
Although this brochure for Denfeld High School has a 1991 copyright, the photos appear to be circa 1987-88. Alert eyeballs will spot current Denfeld principal Tom Tusken and Duluth School Board member Alanna Oswald as students in the photos.
After 9/11, I taught a class in the World Trade Center collapse, looking at it as a trauma but also as a failure of engineering. Mostly, this reflects my mental state in the years after the event:
How did this happen?
If it seemed a miracle to me that there could be two towers, reaching 110 stories into the sky, it seemed even more unthinkable that they fell down.
Four days of Duluth Superior Pride events wrapped up yesterday. Collected here are select images from Instagram of the festivities.
Sunday, August 8, Duluth
I take my grandkids to Brighton Beach once or twice a summer. It’s one of the beaches we visit every year. Today I take them because it’s the last day Brighton Beach will be open to the public for a year, maybe two. The Lakewalk will be extended, Brighton Beach Road will be relocated, and the shoreline will be restored. I wonder how much it will change. I hope “restoring the shoreline” doesn’t mean depositing wide swaths of immense jagged rocks on the beach that become a barrier which hinders kids from pitching stones in the water and from gamboling on the ancient lava formations along the shore.
In retrospect, the weeks before 9/11 are almost better defined by the things I didn’t know. I didn’t know, really, how much people in the Middle East disliked, hated America and Americans, sure. And then there are smaller knowledges that I didn’t know — details of events and of governmental decisions that would become clear after the fact.
Last year the Minnesota historian Peter S. Svenson wrote an unpublished monograph, “The Forgotten Duluth Painter, Edward Alexander Congdon.” Svenson gave me the following information in an interview conducted on Halloween as luck would have it.
Edward Alexander (a nephew of Chester Congdon) lived at Glensheen, the historic Congdon estate. He hid slightly pointy ears with clever hair styling. But, enlisting in the armed forces to fight World War I, he suffered a military haircut. At Belleau Wood a German flame-thrower splashed liquid fire into his trench, and he escaped with his life unlike some of his fellows. But much of the skin had been burned off the top of his head, including his right ear and his eyebrows. Once healed, hair grew toward the back of his head, and the scar tissue of the high forehead became less noticeable with time. However, his eyebrows remained white scars, and the right ear had burned off down to the hole. Aleister Crowley said, “The effect of that, with his one remaining devil’s-ear, was striking.”
Edward Alexander remained overseas for a time after the war. He wandered the world using his unsettling appearance as currency in mediumistic parlors and spiritualist circles. He joined the Ordo Templi Orientis in England, and enjoyed esotericists he met in France. Then he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, mingling with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and W.B. Yeats. He painted, climbed the Eiger, and had lucid dreams of the dead. Returning stateside in 1923, he lived in the Glensheen attic, “like a bat,” Mrs. Congdon used to say.
A collection of three paintings — one dubbed as “rat erotica” — is beginning its five-city tour about 65 miles northwest of Duluth. John Oliver, host of the HBO cable television show Last Week Tonight, explains in the video above that the works will be on display at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids from Sept. 7 to 28.
Photo by Hudconja
I started visiting New York City while I was still a kid in Milwaukee. I used to hop the Greyhound at 10 p.m., catching the connecting bus in Chicago, to a layover, bus cleaning, and reboarding in Cleveland, where large numbers of Amish would board, too. From Cleveland to Pittsburgh to, I think, “King of Prussia” (avoiding Philly, I think). From there into New York City, landing at the Port Authority.
The second video release from the new album by Moors & McCumber, featuring Superior’s James Moors, is for the track “Survival.” The video was produced and directed by Tim Bloomquist of Iowa-based Professional Video.
Survival set for release in October.
On Sept. 2, 1921 — 100 years ago today — crews began laying concrete paving on Miller Trunk Road near Twig. The photo above, by Louis P. Gallagher, was shot when a quarter mile of the 21-mile stretch had been completed, according to the Sept. 5 issue of the Duluth Herald.
This video displays a “fine set of portraits” that were shot “probably in Duluth, Minn.,” and some others taken “probably in Santa Barbara, Calif.,” circa the 1940s. As a bonus at the end there’s a little advice on clearing snow from the porch.
In 1871 the steam dredge Ishpeming finished cutting a canal through Minnesota Point, opening Duluth’s inner harbor to ship traffic. One hundred and fifty years later, the canal remains a focal point for industry and tourism in the Twin Ports.
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.
