Weekend Template

By Micah Drew, Jordan Hansen and Darrell Ehrlick

“I was just helping a friend. I didn’t even know what it was for. He just asked me to, and I said sure.” — Scott Boulanger, a the first day of trial for former Montana Senate President Jason Ellsworth. Boulanger said he didn’t know what he was doing when Ellsworth asked him to write a bid proposal for tracking bills.

Last week, I (somewhat accidentally) spent the entire weekend in Butte at the Montana Folk Festival and was again reminded what a great event that is.

I didn’t have the chance to come down from Helena last summer, and prior to that, it had been at least seven years since I’ve been at Folk Fest.

That weekend, especially the Saturday, was among my favorites of the year when I lived Uptown and worked at the Montana Standard. You could always hear music from the Folk Fest on Saturday from the Standard and it was a good treat to go out that night after we finished getting the paper finalized for the night.

I’d initially come down on Friday night for the final meeting of the Butte Press Club and catching up with some of the sports reporters I’d worked around at various sporting events.

Then it just became a weekend full of live music and dancing, which truly are some of my favorite things. I was particularly impressed with Be’la Dona, a group from Washington, D.C. and Sterling Drake, a Montana singer and songwriter out of Philipsburg.

The food was solid and while we did get bits of the big, state-wide heatwave that weekend, there were lots of cooling stations, volunteers everywhere and what’s really nice is that with how Uptown Butte is constructed, the buildings — and the tents — did provide some good shade throughout the day.

In any case, just a wonderful weekend and can’t wait to see who they bring in next year.

~ Jordan Hansen

One of the super cool parts of the job is that you sometimes have cause to careen down a rabbit hole, especially when going through the “morgue” (back issues) of a newspaper. Even though our job is to report about the present, we often lean into previous reporting and Newspapers.com is an amazing resource for historians, genealogists or as a means to embarrass your older relatives.

In addition to being fully digitized, the site is amazing repository of papers that lived a brief life, as well as ones that have been printing for more than a century. While combing through Helena newspapers, I stumbled on a single preserved edition from the short-lived Daily Montanian — just one letter difference than our name. While the masthead on the paper suggested that it had at least 35 editions, the only one accessible through the site was the final, published on Feb. 13, 1885. It told readers that while it appreciated the support of the Helena townsfolk, it was moving operations to a place where the prospects seemed better, Boulder.

There were a lot of fun things to note in the paper, not unlike looking back in any long-ago publication. There are things that make a modern editor cringe, like a column that is simply titled, “Gossip.”

But there was an amazing item that seemed oddly relevant to today, even though at the time, the telephone was considered state-of-the-art technology:

“An electrician predicts that within a generation, a person can stand at the telephone and not only talk to the man at the other end, but see his face and features. That will be carrying the thing altogether too far. It is bad enough to stand in the office and be obliged to listen to and see a person who is trying to talk through the telephone when the wires are crossed or something is out of gear.

“The contortion that he puts his face through would bring tears to the eyes of a pawnbroker. Just imagine a young lady with weak nerves looking at some man at the other end of the line, who is trying to talk to her while the lines are crossed. If the sight didn’t scare her to death, her nerves would receive a shock from which they never would recover. Some men when they can’t make themselves understood, get real mad, and say bad words, and others don’t say anything, but go quietly, get a club and knock a hole in the machine. It will never do to invent a telephone which will allow men to see each other‘s faces while they are talking. One would see the other while he was swearing and think he was making faces at him and there would be trouble right away.”

~ Darrell Ehrlick

Just when you thought you knew one of America’s greatest writers and the father of the horror story, author Mark Dawidziak changes what should be understood about tortured soul, literary critic, self-promoter and poet, Edgar Allan Poe.

The problem is that Poe’s life story was victimized by his own success. He wasn’t the melancholy, fragile brooding writer, clad in black and muttering something about “nevermore.” And even though Baltimore claims the writer, his life began and often intersected with Boston, as well as Richmond and Philadelphia. The one-time student at the University of Virginia as well as West Point adds a layer of complexity to the already mysterious Poe – whose death came to define him. Most people remember the incoherent, bedraggled Poe who died mysteriously. His death – and more than two dozen theories about what caused his early demise – have been the focus of so many scholarly and popular works, that people forget about how he lived.  

Dawidziak’s “A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe” does a great job of intermixing scholarly research, interviews and Poe’s own words to bring to life a man who was more complex and every bit as intriguing as the murder, death and mysteries he left to an audience who still craves his work. If you’re tempted to attribute some of Poe’s best known work as autobiographical – you may risk falling for a trap that Poe himself set.  

If you like mysteries or Poe’s writing, Dawidziak tells the enigmatic story of Poe’s life, not pulling any punches when it comes to Poe’s own self-destructive tendencies, including his repeated hostility to those who were simply trying to help. At barely 240 pages, the book is a lively read without being tedious. The readers must eventually put together their own explanation for the paradoxical Poe – one of the best known, most read authors, and yet one who also led a life that has been largely hidden.

~ Darrell Ehrlick

A group of friends wanted to go see a showing of the Odyssey yesterday afternoon, director Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Homerian epic.

But when we arrived, tickets pre-purchased, we found a sign on the theater door saying that, due to a power outage, it was shut down.

This struck us as odd, because the digital menu behind the popcorn counter, visible through the window, was flashing neon. And the lights were on. As were the surrounding buildings.

After an hour-plus detour to a nearby brewery, we called the theater and were told it was reopened and they had shifted the showings to accommodate those who had waited.

(We later found out it wasn’t exactly a power outage, but a generator that had caught fire and briefly filled a theater with some smoke)

Seems only fitting to have had to under go our own set of tribulations before seeing the tale of Odysseus’ journey!

As is expected of a Nolan film, it is full of a top-tier cast — Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattison, etc. — and, well, epic.

I got out of the three-hour film and one of my major critiques was that it didn’t spend as much time on some of the plot points, and monsters, that I vaguely remember from the tale. I’d have been happy to devour a film twice as long!

~ Micah Drew

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