Geoff Gimse saw our film last Thursday evening, at Michigan Tech. Here, Ken and I agree, he nails it, and we especially dig his last comment about the film as “another layer of…memory.” Since the actual facts of the tragedy are impossible to discern, the film instead focuses on how…
“They Try to Create Despair Among the Miners”
One of the small treasures I brought back to New York from Lake Superior is Hannu Leppanen and Daniel Schneider’s 2013 letterpress edition of Tyomies, the Finnish workingman’s newspaper published during the strike of 1913. I’ve mentioned the project here before. Daniel set up his Chandler & Price Pilot Press…
Check Out This Performance of ‘1913 Massacre’
After seeing our film, composer Rob Garcia was so taken with Woody’s song that he developed this original setting of “1913 Massacre.” Here’s Rob Garcia’s Soap Box performing the song at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture last month. http://youtu.be/cAq6uSFxsGg&w=420&h=315 The Soap Box ensemble features: Jean Rohe – vocals Michel…
“Unfinished Business”
Mike Ragogna interviews Nora Guthrie today on Huffington Post about her father and his music. MR: Were there certain topics brought up in his material, such as the plight of the Mexican worker in “Deportees,” that resonated with you more than others? NG: Woody wrote over 3000 songs for every…
First TV Broadcast of 1913 Massacre – Labor Day, 2013
We’re very happy to announce that 1913 Massacre will air on Twin Cities Public Television (tpt) over the 2013 Labor Day holiday. This is the first television broadcast of the film. Showtimes: On tpt Channel 2.1: Monday, September 2nd, at 11:00PM and Tuesday, September 3rd at 5:00AM. On the Minnesota Channel (locally tptMN Channel 2.2): Monday at 12:00am, 6:00AM, 12:00PM, and 6:00PM The online…
Where Is Calumet?
It’s uncanny how this notice from a 1913 newspaper anticipates the opening scene of 1913 Massacre: “Where is Calumet?” That is a simple question, apparently. Almost anybody will say it is a thriving city up in the country where they blow open the earth with dynamite and wrest copper there…
Moses Called The First Strike
People from all parts of Europe made their way to Calumet at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. The copper-mining town attracted so many immigrants — Germans, Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, Cornish, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians — that it’s sometimes jokingly referred to as “the smelting…
Talking 1913 Massacre at the New School for Social Research Doc Studies
Here’s the video of a Q & A we did back in September at the New School for Social Research about the making of 1913 Massacre. We both loved being back in the classroom and hope to do lots more of this in 2013. Ken Ross and Louis V. Galdieri…
It’s 1913 Again In Michigan
I’ve run across a few people drawing connections between the Italian Hall disaster and the school shooting yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut (e.g., here). Maybe listening to Woody’s song helps people register Newtown’s loss, or the horror of Newtown helps us understand a little better what it must have been like…