Art
Selective Focus: Bryan French
Bryan French has been busy over the last couple of years building a photography business as well as the Duluth Folk School. This week we hear about Bryan’s artistic side.
B.F.: I’m a photographer (and director of the Duluth Folk School, an adventure guide with Day Tripper, and on-call naturalist at Hartley). My background includes an undergrad in musical theater (song and dance!) and a master’s degree in environmental education (nature!). I’ve been making photographs for about ten years. (more…)
Selective Focus: Eric Helland
Eric Helland makes things from natural materials. His work shows off the beauty in the texture and grain, and also in the imperfections and missing chunks. (more…)
Experienced piano teacher bouncing with new ideas looking for students
I’m a piano teacher with more than 20 years experience teaching students of all ages and all abilities on the hunt for students! I spent last year getting an MA in Community Music in Ireland, and while that was happening I lost a lot of students (which makes me sad).
That MA is changing so much about the way that I approach my teaching and music making, I decided that I might as well present myself to the world as a brand new teacher, and to do that, I made a brand new website: emilymoepianostudio.com. (more…)
Disfluency
All names in this story have been changed, because this is the internet. But not because of you. You’re wonderful.
If you had told me five years ago that a life could be forever altered by a toddler’s stutter, I would have rolled my eyes deep enough to dislocate my optic nerve. Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. My point is, I wouldn’t have understood. Like so many things, there’s often a pretty good delta between experience and imagination. I know a little better now, because of my own experience, and while this isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me, it actually did change my whole life. This one little thing. A stutter.
I remember how, a week before my second daughter, Lilly, was born, I was thinking about how, in the new Pooh movie, Piglet lost his stutter. I had a little internal dialogue about the ridiculous, reactionary nature of helicopter parents, so sensitive to anything that might hurt … someone … that we couldn’t even joke around anymore. They had probably driven the change in Piglet’s fluency. Except I didn’t know to use the phrase, “change in Piglet’s fluency,” yet. (more…)
Selective Focus: Carolyn Olson
Carolyn Olson takes extremely ordinary daily events and turns them into big, colorful studies of life and relationships. (more…)
GinStrings from Minneapolis at the Gunflint Tavern
GinStrings killed it last night at Gunflint Tavern in Grand Marais. (more…)
The truth about Shakespeare in Duluth
2016 has been full of 400th anniversary observations of Shakespeare’s 1616 death. Having first read Shakespeare in Duluth, I was thrilled to return for my hometown’s own First Folio celebrations, from the exhibit at the Tweed Museum to an early music concert. It was an honor to speak at St. Scholastica, where I was once part of the crew for Cymbeline, with librarian Todd White as the baddie Iachimo. At the Marshall School, I did the lighting for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Maria Bamford (Titania) and Katie McGee (Puck) under the direction of Tim Blackburn. (Our Marshall librarian Louis Jenkins recently teamed up with Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance.) (more…)
Selective Focus: Ken Zakovich
Ken has been working for many years as a designer for print, interactive and other projects that typically make their way through the ad agency where he works. Recently, he’s been applying his design skills to some innovative 3-d and other projects. (more…)
Call for Halloween Banners
We want to see your Halloween photos at the top of this page as banners. Keep in mind the hauntingly horizontal format, it can be tricky to work with, but a treat when it works well.
Sorry, that was terrible.
Click here for complete submission guidelines, but the basics are: 1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high, e-mail them to banners@perfectduluthday.com. We’ll put them in rotation near the end of the month.
Selective Focus: Bill Coit via Valerie Coit
Earlier this year, my friend Val started posting photos her dad had taken to a Facebook album. They were obviously decades old, but they were pristine. These weren’t scans of tattered, faded, off-color prints found in a box in the basement, they were scanned from the slide film her dad shot. A couple years ago, my mother-in-law passed away, and my brother-in-law took on the job of scanning the best photos from a big chest of old pictures and sharing them with the family via Dropbox. All this makes me wonder what will happen as most or all of our family photos become electronic, not physical. (more…)
Entering the story, painting the dump gray, and the last chicken
This is why I think you should go see the production of One River, happening at UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center each night this week until Friday. My experience relayed here might be a bit self-centered, especially the comparison to another touching moment when our dog died in my arms recently, but this is how I was affected by these remarkable young actors. Now I can see the power theater has to really touch the heart. Read more at Ed’s Big Adventure.
Dark in the Daytime
Having populated the northern reaches of this place, atop an oily veneer of civilization, we once more ride our tilting Earth into the shady side of its orbit, where things get slippery. For millennia natives traveled well in winter. Nowadays, however, snow-tires or no, wheels and ice don’t jibe. You probably noticed this the first time your car twirled like the Tea Cup ride at the fair, while sliding through a stop sign. Most types of winter recreation — snowshoes and sleds, skates and skis — not only start with the swishing of the letter “S,” they’re also atavistic. No fancy-schmancy wheels. Recreational snowmobilers are an evolutionary dead-end, though, as one once told my friend, “dinks gotta have fun, too.”
The Norwegians say there’s no bad weather, just bad clothing. Then again, the Norwegians gave Henry Kissinger a Nobel Peace Prize. So take that with enough grains of salt to cure a barrel of cod.
Before the deep snow, or the deep cold, the darkness begins. Is it any wonder that people light up the Christmas season like some sort of Jesus-in-Vegas act? There are long shadows at lunch, and the afternoon light shines all day long. My friend Tim, who no longer orbits the sun, used to putter around his house in late December, muttering, “ dark … dark in the daytime.” (more…)
Selective Focus: Joe Polecheck
Our area has provided plenty of stunning scenes for photographers, but Joe Polecheck’s photos go beyond typical landscapes as he has some fun with subjects, tricks and experiments.
J.P: I’ve always been involved in the arts, both painting and drawing ever since I was a child. I’ve always been able to identify things I liked or not when appreciating photography. About 2 years ago, I realized I’d better put up or shut up and try my hand at it. And as my wife has told me, “nothing can just be a hobby for you” which leads me here today! (more…)
Sixteen Years on the Superior Hiking Trail: Preparations
At some point in the 1990s, I started hearing about the Superior Hiking Trail, a new footpath designed for hikers to see the sexiest peaks and rivers in the wilderness along the North Shore of Lake Superior. It didn’t come up very often in conversation until the year 2000, which is when it began to annoy me that I had never hiked a speck of it — other than maybe wandering away from the waterfalls at Gooseberry and noticing markings that told me I was on the not-yet famous trail I’d been hearing about.
It was April 2000 when an upstart Duluth newspaper called the Ripsaw began publishing weekly and I stepped up to be its managing editor. The paper had a weekly “Adventure” article and I suddenly found myself around people who had taken on parts of the SHT and heard stories about a handful of souls who had through-hiked the whole thing, which at the time meant trekking from Two Harbors to the Canadian border.
There was a rumor going around that Dusty Olson ran the whole trail in two days, which I found almost but not quite believable. The notion that such a feat could be close to true at least led me to think I could do it in fewer than two weeks. Then I heard the first documented person to conquer the trail had a fused spine and partially paralyzed legs, and hiked with forearm crutches. That made it hard for me to make any excuse that I wasn’t physically up to the task. (more…)
Selective Focus: Hemlocks Leatherworks
This week, a little bit of fashion in Selective Focus. We hear from Candace Lacosse who operates Hemlocks Leatherworks.
C.L.: I am primarily a shoemaker (which is a cordwainer, not a cobbler), but I love designing and making just about anything out of leather and waxed canvas: bags, purses, wallets, leather-bound journals, really just about anything. (more…)
Sixteen Years on the Superior Hiking Trail: Introduction
The yearning for adventure is a pretty common human trait, along with the practical good sense to not get into a situation you can’t handle. The old Scout Motto is “be prepared,” a creed intended to make one think practically and plan ahead for potential disaster. There’s a colorful expression for those who are not ready for life’s misfortunes; they find themselves “up Shit Creek without a paddle.”
Not wanting to drift helplessly in liquid feces, people often put off serious adventure and plan to check their dreams off a “Bucket List” at some point between the impractical now and the day before it becomes physically impossible. When a Bucket List goes as planned, it’s a beautiful thing. More often than not, of course, it ends up being a list of unfulfilled wishes. That’s generally preferable to premature death in pursuit of pretty scenery, so lament accordingly.
There are also those perfect people in the primes of their lives, dressing up in expensive wingsuits and gliding majestically down from the world’s most spectacular cliffs. Are they the sons and daughters of the obscenely wealthy or did they persuade a gear manufacturer to sponsor them? Maybe both. Don’t be jealous. You probably wouldn’t take that leap if you could. I know I wouldn’t. (more…)
Selective Focus: Shawna Gilmore
Shawna Gilmore has had a busy year, with four shows in eight months, so chances are you’ve seen her sometimes surreal combinations of nature, kids and animals around town. This week in Selective Focus, she talks about her work and what she’ll do with a little bit of down time.
S.G.: I am a visual artist painting primarily in acrylics on wood panels. I occasionally use graphite and paper, my first artistic love. My style is ever-evolving. . . but my current illustrative style came about from a piece I did 3 or so years ago called “Beneath Her Feet” Everything about that piece made sense to me, from the starry sky and trees/roots, to the vintage woman and her farmhouse. It was really a lightbulb piece for me. I had been experimenting with people in my work, women’s faces mostly, but only the vintage characters rang true for me. Somehow their timelessness and history add the genuineness I need for my more narrative images to transcend current times. I also realized I was most interested in telling stories through surrealistic scenarios in my paintings. (more…)
International Indigenous Beadwork Gathering: A Cultural Exchange
Visiting artists Petrona Guaillas, Victoria Sarango and Paulina Gonzalez said that visiting with beadwork artists from the area was the highlight of their stay. Photo by Caitlin Nielson.
September is shaping up to be a busy month at the American Indian Community Housing Organization. This past Thursday a trio of indigenous beadwork artists from Saraguro, Ecuador visited. They are members of the cooperative Las Mujeres de Teresa de Calcuta and widely known for their netted necklaces. (more…)
Surly Knard 41
Responses to a piece I posted here a while ago suggest at least a few Perfect Duluth Day Saturday Essay readers ride bicycles somewhat “seriously.” Makes sense, I suppose; long cycling sojourns, solo or with accomplices, can foster a deep contemplation similar to one spending time with prose can evoke. It’s also true that riding bikes and reading words can both be nothing more than hardcore reality avoidance posing as time spent admirably. We all have our drugs, don’t we? — mostly ones we tell ourselves aren’t drugs so we can believe we’re better human beings than folks who used to hang out in front of Last Place on Earth.
But whatever. That’s not what this essay is about.
I ride a lot, slowly and clumsily (like a middle-aged oaf whose formative fitness years were spent playing tight end and fearing exercise-induced pain), mostly alone, and with intentions driven by equal desires to sit with and avoid my general mental state. Since 2002 I’ve owned a lot of different mountain, road, and commuting bicycles. After thousands of hours spent poring over Sheldon Brown’s website and mtbr.com forums, tinkering in my back-yard shed, and pestering real mechanics — just mercilessly badgering them with, “How does this work?” and “How do I put this back together?” and “Hey, can I come down and interrupt what you’re working on, ask a bunch of dumb questions, borrow some tools, and inevitably force you to stop what you’re doing and help me?” — I know enough to credibly build and maintain my own bikes. Sometimes I fix friends’ bikes, if they have low expectations. I go through nerdy periods of constantly trying to figure out the “best” way to set up a certain bike for a certain purpose, which means I’ve researched, bought, installed, un-installed, broken, replaced, and perseverated on hundreds of components ranging from whole frames to single 5mm bolts.
But even that’s not what this essay is about. (more…)
The Rumpus Interview with Connie Wanek
In an interview for The Rumpus, an online magazine focused on culture, Duluth poet Connie Wanek discusses her latest book, the challenge of looking back at older poems, and what prioritizing writing looks like.
Link: The Rumpus Interview with Connie Wanek
Connie Wanek said that she only started writing poetry seriously in her late thirties, but since then, she’s been published in Poetry and the Atlantic Monthly, has received a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and been named a George Morrison Artist of the Year, among her many other honors. Her fourth book, Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, was released by the University of Nebraska Press this year, and makes the argument that she is one of contemporary America’s great poets.
Selective Focus: Ryan LeMahieu
This week in Selective Focus, we hear from Ryan LeMahieu. If you click the images for a bigger view, you can better see the intricate line work in his drawings.
R.L.: my name is ryan lemahieu. i work mostly in mixed media but have a tendency to gravitate towards the black pen. you are nearly always able to find a pen and paper which is nice because art is how i deal with severe social anxiety with roots deep in depression. it is my release. i also think everything is better in black and white.
i wish i could purchase a t.v. that was black and white. does anyone know where i can find a black and white t.v. ?
i have been working on developing a “style’ for close to 20 years. i feel like i maybe finally figuring it out.
(more…)
Small Business
Scrolling through files on my computer at work, I can pretty much trace the progression of the business through spreadsheets, price labels and photographs (candid and professional) of events, company parties, and breaks in the action behind the counter. Families have grown, ex-staffers have gone to rehab, become police officers, found god, and earned master’s degrees, prices have more than quintupled, and previously experimental recipes have been honed into lexicon. When I say “progression,” I mean pile: an amorphous mass of guesswork, troubleshooting and triage that has taken shape and could be temporarily (like for the purposes of this essay) deemed linear.
I work for Northern Waters Smokehaus, a small business gone large. The retail side of the enterprise started out 15 years ago with the idea that we were going to offer a small, specialized service (smoked fish and imported cheese) to a specialized audience (those with the monetary means coupled with the proper palettes). We had five employees counting the owner himself, who took care of pretty much everything besides front-line sales (though he did that as well from time to time, and was utterly expert at it — I think a dozen bored housewives fell in love with him that first year we were open, charmed irresistibly by his earnest and passionate obsession for good food). (more…)
How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse with a Special Needs Baby
Immeasurable amounts of Internet memes and quizzes have confirmed that I’m far from alone in daydreaming about my personal preparedness for a full-blown zombie takeover. I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m Doomsday Preppers-level obsessed with the subject, but I do regularly have Z-Day strategy conversations with my husband (which I’m keeping under wraps because we have a legitimately solid plan of operation and I can’t have other survivors flocking to the same rendezvous points or utilizing the same resources.)
These fun and hypothetical talks have evolved over the years as we’ve moved locations from our tiny college town in Western New York, to cities in between, and our ultimate settlement in Duluth. With the birth of our oldest daughter in 2011, the well-worn subjects of head-smashing weaponry, classification of zombies, and go-bag contents expanded to include comfortable long-distance child wearing techniques and fail-proof ways to keep a kid quiet. Unfortunately, we can’t even manage that last one in this current, zombie-free reality.
Then last year I gave birth to our second daughter. Would two kids slow us down? Yes, almost certainly. But we couldn’t leave them behind because that would be totally inhumane, and if we strip ourselves of our humanity, then what is left to separate us from the zombies we might face? (Plus, we’re their parents and stuff so … responsibilities, ya know?) (more…)
Selective Focus: Mary Plaster
Mary Plaster is best known As a papier-mâché artist, and for the Duluth All Souls Night celebration she has led. She tells about her work and the challenges of putting on an event like Duluth All Souls Night.
M.P.: I am a self-employed artist and facilitator, working in a variety of mixed media for 35 years. I paint, sculpt, do graphics, and photography. Fresh out of Missoula, MT High School art classes, I attended Minneapolis College of Art and Design and worked at Children’s Theatre Company in the properties department. I saw my first MayDay Parade in the late 1970s and fell in love with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HoBT). I also attended a mask and physical theatre school near San Francisco. (more…)
Hop In
When I was nineteen my parents dropped me off on US Highway 2. I had a pack, tent and sleeping bag, a couple hundred dollars in one pocket, a polished agate for a lucky charm in another, and a cardboard sign that said “Seattle.” I’d soon learn it’s better to have a sign that says “west” than the name of a specific city almost two-thousand miles away.
The first person I met was another hitchhiker, a distinguished fellow, grey at the temples, traveling the country playing piano in nursing homes for his meals. Though he carried a miniature book of musical scores to lighten his pack, the odd thing was, as he stood along the road waiting for rides, he lifted weights. About fifty pounds worth. He couldn’t see leaving them at home. Maybe it was a ploy to weed out the wrong drivers, some sort of immediate ultimatum: love me, love my barbells. Those fearful of excess baggage need not engage.
A local woman had us throw our gear into the back of her truck and got us out of town. Then, straight out of my youthful road-trip dreams, I was picked up by a semi and rode high in the cab all the way to North Dakota. I spent the night in the open on a bit of scruffy highway median, sleeping in the dew. (more…)