Teenage Prayers photo by Orianna Riley from PopMatters.
Teenage Prayers is a band from my days in college radio in Milwaukee. KUMD and KUWS approach the college radio vibe, but in the 1990s, college radio was a thing, and Teenage Prayers was a part of the thing.
One listen to the opening of The Duluth Local Show on the Current and a person gets a sense of the folksy, wholesome veneer the city imparts to its people and out of towners alike when it comes to its cultural musical identity. It’s the birth place of Bob Dylan, in case you didn’t know. But, just beneath the woodsy surface and what hides in so many of the homes in the Hillside above Bob Dylan Way, gulp, are an impressive number of artists plugging in synthesizers, drum machines, samplers … oh my!
Early morning winter cold floods in through the gaps between the sheet and mattress. The cold is so powerful, so penetrating, I imagine it to be as fluid as a rushing river with the ability to seep into minute cracks and crevices. In the chaos of adjusting the comforter and pulling the pillow into my impromptu cocoon, my sleep-hat has gone AWOL. An instinctual desire to escape the cold and fortify the barrier makes me abandon any pursuit of the lost headpiece.
A new form of low temperature has erupted in Minnesota, a reverse volcano maybe. Not a temperature so high it melts rock, but one so powerfully low it could probably fracture silk. This kind of cold, the kind that cracks house rafters, and spiderwebs the smallest chip in a windshield, has blown in from the north. Weather enthusiasts call it a Polar Vortex — something about the North Pole, and cold, and pressure. But at five o’clock in the morning in northern Minnesota, those technical, and normally interesting, scientific truths can crawl into a snowbank as far as I am concerned. Whether it’s a vortex, or cyclone, or Voldemort’s Dementors unleashed, the only truth that encapsulates this moment is something I learned years ago: “cold is the absence of heat.”
Check out a little dueling mandolin action from Trampled by Turtles‘ “Trampled by Thursdays” at First Avenue, directed and edited by Charlie Berg. Each Thursday at 8 p.m. during February, TBT is performing online concerts from the famed Minneapolis venue. Each set has full production and behind-the-scenes footage.
Tickets are available at boxoffice.mandolin.com. A portion of each ticket/bundle sold goes toward Save Our Stages to help independent music venues hit hard during the pandemic. Each ticket purchase let viewers watch as many times as they like for 48 hours after the premiere.
Yet another installment of wheeled-sneaker stunts from former Duluthian James Geisler, also known as the hip-hop artist JamesG.
“Definitely the coolest footage of a wolf pack traveling together that we have ever captured,” begins the YouTube description of this clip from the Voyageurs Wolf Project. Though recently uploaded, the clip is from October. The SD cards on the camera were changed in late January, leading to the recent discovery of the Shoepack Lake Pack footage — seven wolves strolling the beach 120 miles north of Duluth in Voyageurs National Park. The Voyageurs Wolf Project is focused on understanding the summer ecology of wolves in the park.
The father-and-son team of Steve and Austin Lentz transform a block of snow into a beautiful snow globe scene at Ursa Minor Brewing in Lincoln Park.
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.
Twenty years ago today — Feb. 16, 2001 — a mysterious guitar player emerged from the audience at the NorShor Theatre to join Duluth band Bone Appetit for a rendition of the Judas Priest song “Living After Midnight.”
Duluth’s Sydney Hansen has released this music video for her new single “Fallin.” The video is directed by Jeff Sherman and Vanessa Miles and features Hunter Conrad.
Geoguessr is a website that features variations on a rather simple game: you are shown a location through a modified version of Google Streetview. You must guess where you are by marking the location on a map. The labels and location marker normally added by Google have been removed, so you must rely on a compass and clues from the environment. The closer your guess is to the correct location, the more points you get. Each game consists of five rounds. The tops scores appear on the main page for each map, with a tie going to the player who finishes the fastest.
In honor of Valentine’s Day (and this quiz writer’s 100th PDD quiz), we’ll take a deep dive into an oft-covered song that expresses affection (or at least affinity) for the Zenith City: “I Like it in Duluth.” This PDD post may come in handy for cheating studying; those seeking an extra challenge can take the quiz cold!
The next PDD quiz will review this month’s headlines; it will be published on Feb. 28. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Feb. 24.
Marius Anderson of London Road Films shot this aerial footage in Duluth on Tuesday after an ice sheet broke from the shore and took a group of nearly 30 ice anglers out into Lake Superior. The Duluth Fire Department rescued all of the anglers; most of the equipment was lost.
I have some comments and observations about the ice angler rescue on Tuesday, Feb. 9.
First off, I watch ice closely because I am nutty for skating the biggest lake in the world. No, not Lake Baikal, that piece of shit lake. I mean Lake Superior, the queen of the unsalted seas. Ice cover has been minimal this year so I have been sad, and nearly desperate in this COVID season for recreation and release.
But as my house has a decent lake view, I watched with some interest as ice plugged the outer harbor. It seemed too much to ask for that it should become safe enough to skate on — keeping in mind that ice is never safe. But whatever.
The sign I watch for is the appearance of ice houses. Once they appear, I grab my skates. My logic is this: those guys know what they’re doing. I figure the ice angler community is right on top of the Department of Natural Resources, and is tracking ice thickness so I don’t have to. If they feel safe, I feel safe.
