So I sat around a table in the Intercultural Center at Lake Superior College, filling my belly with food from Zhong Hua and filling my heart with stories of people coming to Duluth. It was all part of “We are here. Hear us.”
In 1999 I was living in Minneapolis, listening to the Legendary Pink Dots. In Duluth, Def Leppard was playing. The audio is available on the Internet Archive.
It was his 73rd birthday. He’d been taken into inpatient psychiatric care the night before, a phone call I had received while out at a bar with a group of friends. We were watching a Minneapolite musician, Dessa, play at Pizza Lucé in downtown Duluth. I liked Dessa’s music, but I really liked her writing. She’d detailed her experience rewiring her brain to forget a dangerous, almost obsessive love affair: the mechanics of love, told in poetry and electromagnetic imaging. Before the psychological intervention, she said, she had a kind of wild and inevitable connection to this man who could not be trusted with her heart. They were incendiary together, in good ways and not: a fire started with a glance, burning down the house with everyone inside. I’ve never had a love like that, but I could feel it anyway — her despair, her passion, and the terrible realization that whatever was happening in her was above or beneath her conscious mind, scratched into her whole brain. Every thought she had about anything traversed the rough path of that scratch — removing him from her heart was reductive: she needed to remove him from the apparatus of her Self, the thing that made her her.
I didn’t understand why this was so moving to me at the time, but now I do.
Lakeside Presbyterian Church was founded in 1890 and the building shown in this undated postcard went up at 4430 McCulloch St. in 1921, replacing the church’s previous building there.
Duluth’s Blake Shippee has a solo album titled It All Started from a Whisper. The second music video release is directed by Shane Nelson.
A look at the fall colors and the general peacefulness of the season in Downer Park, a 17-acre undeveloped space in Duluth’s Woodland neighborhood.
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.
I’m plunking about in the Archive.org site, and this video shows the Duluth harbor as a dystopian nightmare of smoke at about 2:30.
What an amazing transformation how we fuel our ships and how we imagine our port.
Meet the Candidates offers up to five minutes for candidates on the Duluth General Election ballot to speak to their platforms.
The latest reference to Duluth in song comes from Maya Hawke, daughter of actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. She released her second album, Moss, in September. The song “Sweet Tooth” mentions an empty theater in Duluth around the 30-second mark.
Who are they? Where are they? When was this? The only clues come from a few scribbles on the back of the photo.
The Duluth News Tribune reports that remodeling of the former St. Louis County Jail is near completion. It is expected to open in January as a 33-unit apartment building named Leijona, the Finnish word for lion.
Get your spooky on with this week’s quiz about upcoming Halloween events! For more seasonal hijinks, check out the Halloween filter on the PDD calendar.
The next PDD quiz will review this month’s headlines; it will be published on Oct. 30. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Oct. 26.
As promised following the initial coverage of the St. Louis County Sheriff race in the primary election, the embedded PDF below contains in-depth interviews with the two remaining candidates, Jason Lukovsky and Gordon Ramsay, about issues that are important to LEAN Duluth. The Law Enforcement Accountability Network is a volunteer-run data-analysis group and public communications resource for organizers working for police accountability.
Videographer Adam Jagunich captures the fall colors around Enger Tower in Duluth via his Yuneec Typhoon H Plus hexacopter.
Dick Anthony of Duluth made popcorn in his basement circa 1952 for distribution to local stores, where it was sold in dispensers. The video clip is from the television series “Industry on Parade,” which was created by the National Association of Manufacturers and ran from 1950 to 1960.
