Duluth’s Ingeborg von Agassiz has a new single with a Thanksgiving theme. The full version of “Over the River and Through the Wood” is available for listening and downloading on Bandcamp. The song is based on a poem written in 1844 by Lydia Maria Child.
This clip from the WDIO-TV archive is from 40 years ago today — Nov. 28, 1984. It features Duke Skorich asking questions from the then-new Minnesota Trivia Tour game.
Iron Range Outlaw Brigade has a new single, “Rednecks, White Trash, and Blue Collar Blues.” It’s the band’s first release with John Lamar on drums; Glen Mattson has moved from drums to guitar. The video was directed by singer/guitarist Kirk Kjenaas. The rest of the band is made up of John Peterson on 10-string pedal steel and Fred Hanson on bass.
I spent two days this fall with the University of Minnesota Extension’s Northeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, which brings community leadership to the table with the research and educational resources of the University of Minnesota. I’m the last half of that sentence, I guess.
One can hear the anguish in Martin DeWitt’s voice as he talks about artists who are suffering. When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, North Carolina in September, the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers came together with powerful force. The flooding devastated Asheville’s entire River Artist District.
DeWitt, who lived and worked in the Asheville area for more than a decade, had followed the hurricane’s path. “It wiped out the first and second floors of galleries and shops … the water totally demolished them,” he said. “Over 20 galleries and studios … the artwork of over 200 artists, were all destroyed.” The artists were DeWitt’s friends and colleagues.
Get your brain in gear and test your memory of current events with this week’s quiz!
A holiday-themed PDD quiz skis your way on Dec. 15. Please submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Dec. 11.
It can be intolerable to watch a two-minute commercial break in any era, during that era, but somehow watching 13 minutes of them can be moderately entertaining with the passage of time. When commercials are fresh, the cheesiness is just too close; it’s embarrassing to our humanity. As the decades pass, the novelty supersedes the shame.
And so Perfect Duluth Day dusts off the VCR to reluctantly present a thick montage of 20-year-old TV spots.
This unmailed postcard, published by Erickson Postcards & Souvenirs, shows an early 1980s (or perhaps late 1970s) scene of boats clustered outside the Duluth Harbor. The card must have been commissioned for promotional use by KDLH-TV in the 1990s or later, however, because it is preaddressed to David Letterman, courtesy of what was then the local CBS affiliate. Late Night with David Letterman ended its run on NBC-TV in June 1993 and the Late Show with David Letterman launched on CBS two months later.
A group of clowns at Cherry Koch’s clown karaoke birthday celebration at The Embassy. Photo by Jess Morgan.
Various arts experiences featuring clowns, mimes, jesters and circus-inspired shenanigans are having a moment in the Twin Ports arts scene. Some of those fools happen to be on the payroll at Perfect Duluth Day, which makes it the perfect journalistic inside-job for a feature marking the 10-year anniversary of PDD’s Selective Focus arts feature.
It is the most wonderful time of the year — the time of giving and gifting to all the people in our lives. This holiday season is also an opportunity to shop local and support Twin Port businesses. Perfect Duluth Day’s nifty gifty gift guide features items from 15 local artists, shops and creators whose products could make the perfect present for anyone on your nice or naughty list.
Front page of the Nov. 20, 1924 Duluth Rip-saw.
Recently, in my “Minnesota Writers” class at the University of Minnesota Duluth, we spent a week discussing songwriting, and as an exercise in fun, students voted on their favorite songwriter. Then, to get a different perspective, I went to the Music Resource Center and had the same conversation. I thought I would share the results.
Duluth band Torment has a new music video for the title track to its 2022 album Swallow Your Teeth. The group is releasing a new EP, The Pain, on New Year’s Eve at Pizza Lucé with special guests Southpaw, Unfit, Frag and Chippy.
Minnesota 2024 presidential election results by county.
Minnesota’s electoral college votes have gone to the Democrats since 1976, longer than any other state. But unlike Washington D.C., which went 90% for Harris and has given its three electoral votes to the Democrats since 1964 (but is not a state), Minnesota’s politics are a bit more complicated. In its most simplistic form, the strongly left-leaning Twin Cities metro area counters the right-leaning Greater Minnesota population, with a few urban areas creating pockets of blue. But that’s the simplistic version. This post looks at the Minnesota results at the precinct level and includes three Greater Minnesota Geoguessr challenges. One visiting the precincts where Trump had the highest margins of victory, another for the precincts that went most strongly to Harris, and a third for precincts split right down the middle.
[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 the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to the O’Gilby’s, 511 E. Fourth St. in Duluth’s Central Hillside, and composed this article for the November 2004 issue of the Ripsaw magazine. O’Gilby’s closed in May 2008; the location is now a parking lot.]
The great thing about being an alcoholic in a region with so many bars is that there is one to fit each of my moods. No matter what I feel like doing, there is an establishment that caters to that specific type of fun. O’Gilby’s isn’t the kind of place you go to see live music. It isn’t the kind of place where you go to try to pick someone up. It isn’t a place where you go to dance or to participate in illegal gambling. No, O’Gilby’s is the kind of place you go to when you just want to get plastered and sit around like an Ethiopian with flies on your face. And tonight I’m having the time of my life.
