Duluth’s auditory atmospherist Zac Bentz has a new Dirty Knobs album, Songs About Everything Dying Around Us, Including Us, set for release on May 31. The first visualizer is for the track “Sticks on Skins.” Bentz says the “hypnotic, looping visuals are meant as an aid to clear the mind, at least for a few moments, even if the music conjures visions of doom.”
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Nelson has donated some remarkable materials to the archives at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
The Elizabeth Nelson Peoples Temple Collection contains items relevant to the alternative religious organization founded by Jim Jones, best known for a mass suicide/murder in 1978 at its “Jonestown” settlement in Guyana.
It’s been 100 years since Duluth’s original diaphone fog siren was installed at the Duluth Shipping Canal. That siren was decommissioned by the Coast Guard in 1968 and replaced by an electric whistle. In 1983 another old diaphone foghorn was acquired and installed. It was used on a ceremonial basis until 1995, then returned to regular service as a maritime aid to navigation. Community members immediately complained it was too loud. The controversy raged on until the horn was dismantled in 2006.
For the sixth edition of DuluthiLeaks — Perfect Duluth Day’s series in which public documents are presented as if they contain secret information leaked from an anonymous whistle blower — we present “Duluth Foghorn Facts,” a document and collection of images compiled by Jeffrey L. Laser of Bellville, Ohio. At some point after 1996, Laser put together the information below, delving into the nitty gritty of the diaphone foghorn that was housed in the Duluth South Breakwater Outer Light from 1983 to 2006.
Florian Chmielewski, leader of the Chmielewski Funtime Band and a Minnesota state senator from 1971 to 1976, died last week at his home in Sturgeon Lake at the age of 97.
Congratulations to my colleague, Mark Stanfield, on the forthcoming world premiere of his play, Two of Us. It will be performed Sept. 13-21 at the Watford Palace Theatre in England, with a transfer to Home Manchester, and then a national tour in 2025. The play dramatizes a last conversation between Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
More information about the play can be found at the Watford Palace Theatre site.
Every year the Homegrown Music Festival publishes a Field Guide with all the intricate details of the eight-day extravaganza. And every year Perfect Duluth Day kicks out a little rundown of updates, sidebar details and notes about peripheral, unsanctioned or otherwise-related items of interest at party time. This year there is just one official schedule change (so far), but plenty of sidebar updates.
Test your knowledge of April 2024 headlines and happenings with this current affairs quiz.
You’ll be able to get your hands dirty with the next PDD quiz, which will focus on local gardens, on May 12. Submit question ideas to Alison Moffat [email protected] by May 9.
There is no space up here. Ian needs some room to move, but he’s pulled his drums around him as close as he can. John’s bass tilts up a bit. Looks awkward, but he’ll make it work. Jim’s keyboard takes up a lot of real estate, but it is what it is: he doesn’t own a keytar and I’m not sure he’d use it even if he did. The horns, Dale, Jess and I, are in a line, backs to the side wall, which is a bummer because I love jumping around with my saxophone while we play. Leon’s in the middle of the nest, and though he’s in his fifties, he somehow also brings the energy of the newly hatched, his baby blue Gretsch 2127 an appendage. He taps one of the guitar pedals with the toe of his checkered shoe. His pedal board is a skateboard.
“I dunno,” he says to us, swinging his body around, back to the crowd. “Should we get going?”
“Not much else to do,” I volunteer, and though it’s a bad rejoinder, Leon crows.
“Okay then! ‘Go if You Wanna Go’?” It’s not a question, really. Ian counts us in, and we’re off again, a bunch of middle-aged friends making the people dance.
During the Twin Ports Festival of History, my friend Phil Sher gave a speech about the history of the Lithuanian Jewish community in Duluth. Phil is the author of a recent book, Adas Israel, available on Amazon, that was a product of a unique partnership between the University of Minnesota Duluth and the community.
One of Carl Gawboy’s earliest memories is seeing a muskrat skin hanging on the wall in his house. “My father trapped animals and sold them to a fur buyer,” Gawboy said. “That’s when my fascination with trapping began.” Decades later, that interest became the subject of Gawboy’s latest book, Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History, published by Animikii Mazina’iganan: Thunderbird Press. The release date is April 30.
Self portrait of Aaron Reichow, shot in a mirror at the Blush nightclub in 2022.
Aaron Reichow started taking photos of the Duluth music scene around 2014 when one of his favorite bands, Low, was doing a residency at Fitger’s Brewhouse. The band’s music got him through “a lot of periods of my life,” Reichow said. Low was set to play all of their songs in a random order across several Thursdays around the same time Reichow’s youngest child was starting to sleep through the night. “In my marriage, I did most of the child care, all the bedtimes,” he described. “And when they started to get older, I thought ‘well, I can go out again without feeling guilty.’” A practice in photography helped him reclaim the intention of going out again. And with time, his hobby turned into a professional art form. Read more about his work in the interview below.
This undated postcard, published by Odin Ebbesen, shows Superior Street in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood long before the neighborhood was called Lincoln Park. The church at right is, presumably, the Second Presbyterian Church of Duluth, according to text in an appendix of surveyed properties in the city of Duluth’s Historic Resources Inventory for the Lincoln Park Neighborhood.
