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The ‘bright lights’ of Great Northern Radio Show weekend
We’re headed up to Ely now, getting ready for Saturday’s big Great Northern Radio Show, broadcasting live 5-7 p.m. from the Vermilion Community College Theater. Find out how you can attend or listen here. I love show weekends. Love, love, love. Here’s where we’re going: June 8, 2014 Auroras on Burntside Lake near Ely, MN…
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‘Sometimes a Great Notion’
Come look: Where the big pile of uncracked books rises up against the ocean of my bed, see the wide river of reading failure flow down to the ocean, ebbing back up with the tide of unfinished scripts and banal blog posts. But I did finish reading one book, one big, rickety book that came…
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Great Northern Radio Show heads to Ely
Believe it or not, I don’t sit around thinking about mining and northern Minnesota politics all day. In fact, I try to do as little of that as possible (with middling success). What I’ve really been cooking up here at my woodland compound has been a little show I think you’ll like regardless of your position on…
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‘A hundred years went by’
Last week the leaves popped and it became summer on the Iron Range. Once again we fly the colors of our flag — birch green, sky blue and iron ore red. Our haunted northern Minnesota spring, which revealed all that the snow had covered, dissolves into a comfortable summer — the woods obscured by woods,…
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Oh ya, Yooper is a word now
Last Monday, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary officially enshrined the word “Yooper” in its lexicon. The charming regional entry came with the dictionary’s annual introduction of new words that also included fracking, catfishing and poutine. If you don’t know what a Yooper is, here is the official Merriam-Webster definition: Yoop·er noun \ˈyu̇-ər\ : a native or…
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Great Northern Radio Show to air in Duluth
103.3 KUMD in Duluth will rebroadcast our latest edition of the Great Northern Radio Show, recorded live in Virginia, Minnesota, earlier this spring. The show airs from 10 a.m. to noon on Monday, May 26, 2014: Memorial Day. For those enjoying a day outside or traveling to and from the various Memorial Day ceremonies around…
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Dylan Days opens today in Hibbing
For much of Bob Dylan’s meteoric career arc, most people in his Iron Range hometown of Hibbing called him Bobby Die-lin and wondered what he was singing about. Some still do, but by now the practice is reserved as a sort of passive-aggressive protest by people who wish they could get paid that much to…
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Dylan Days waning in Hibbing
Bob Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, kicked off its annual Dylan Fest this past weekend with a concert and live music. They’ve got more events going on throughout the week. Then, this Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24 (Bob’s birthday), Bob Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing begins its annual Dylan Days event up here on…
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Times a’ Changin’ in Bob Dylan’s hometown
When Robert Zimmerman left Hibbing in 1959, it’s unlikely he or his hometown would predict these facts: That a “space theatre” named for a prominent local grocer would be constructed a few blocks from the Zimmerman home … because, you know, men walked on the moon; That the Zimmerman home would one day be on…
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The forest for the trees
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” ~ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts (Saturday Night Live) Never mind the TV or the Internet. Trees report the real news in northern Minnesota. Is the maple sap running? Are the…
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Antlers for fighting; ain’t easy being a baby bird
I live in a forest. Growing up just outside the red-stained cities of the Iron Range I never considered that I’d one day live even further away from stoplights and pizza delivery than I already did. But here I am in the woods of Itasca County. The deer stroll by out front, more like neighbors…
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The Easter Bunny’s Terrible Mistake
Morning light washes over a pastoral meadow view, bespeckled with budding flowers and flickering sun-touched dew drops. A small grey rabbit tentatively hops into view, sniffing her way toward a long, narrow clearing. She labors to lift a ball peen hammer over her tiny, furry head to pound two heavy iron stakes into the soft,…
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Enjoy Easter weekend with the Great Northern podcast
At long last the Virginia show podcast from my Great Northern Radio Show is online, ready for download and distribution. Right click and download this link, loading the MP3 into your iTunes or whatever system you use to listen to such things. A side note, I am well aware of how annoying it is to…
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Grammy’s Bob Dylan photo exhibit coming to Hibbing
Here’s a stroke of great news amid a rough year for Bob Dylan fans in the music legend’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. The Grammy Museum exhibit “Daniel Kramer: Photographs of Bob Dylan” will be making its United States debut after stops in Paris and London. Not in New York. Not even in Minneapolis. The Kramer…
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On humans, machines and crows
I imagine that the animal world looks at we humans much the same way that we look at crows. We are not exactly beautiful, except to each other and especially ourselves. We are crafty, like crows; exploiting intelligence for what any other animal would call an unfair advantage (if those other stupid animals were smart…