Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/culture/page/35/)
Just in case you didn’t have enough photos from the Montana Folk Festival in Butte this weekend, here’s another collection of shots, these from Anna Paige, a Billings photographer and freelance writer. Some are of the musicians and some are of people taking in the music, busking and walking the streets of Butte. Continue Reading →
Tom Staples was not delivering a warning or throwing down a challenge, just making an observation on how difficult it is to describe the Montana Folk Festival in Butte. “I don’t know that anyone has captured the flavor,” he said. “You have to be here to capture the experience. There is nothing like it.” (more…) Continue Reading →
VAUGHN — Late last year, building contractor Tom Skovron was at the lumberyard in Great Falls when he ran into Art West. (more…) Continue Reading →
LIVINGSTON — On a gorgeous first day of summer, something like 120 people crowded into an auditorium for the Livingston premiere of “Winter in the Blood,” a movie rich in beauty and brutality. (more…) Continue Reading →
LIVINGSTON — Two books, sent to him years ago by his brother, showed pianist and composer Phil Aaberg that “art could be created on the Hi-Line and from the Hi-Line.” (more…) Continue Reading →
More than a decade after she began writing “The Home Place,” Billings environmental lawyer Carrie La Seur’s debut novel will be released on July 29. (more…) Continue Reading →
Cut Bank, the rugged eastern entryway to Glacier National Park, is where wheat fields fuse with the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, where outdoor scenery is big, broad and brash. But it’s the friendly rhythms of small-town life that keep this community of fewer than 3,000 grounded. (more…) Continue Reading →
Sitting in the bar at Walkers Grill on a Sunday night, you can tell when the out-of-towners walk in. They generally pause just inside the door and stand there staring at the scene before them. It’s almost always crowded, with a clientele running from teenagers to people in their 70s or 80s. (more…) Continue Reading →
Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared in the summer 2011 issue of the Montana Quarterly. We are publishing it today on Last Best News because it is included in a new anthology, “An Elk River Books Reader: Billings and Livingston Area Writers,” which is officially being released tonight at Elk River Books in Livingston. The Mai Wah Building on Mercury Street in Uptown Butte is a Chinese cultural museum these days, but when I lived in Butte in the early 1980s, the main room on the ground floor housed a junk shop. The first time I saw it, the store was closed, so I pressed my face to the window to see what was inside. What I saw, amid the heaps of tools, battered home furnishings, tennis racquets, bottles and decomposing rugs, was a small collection of books. (more…) Continue Reading →
Guitar Odyssey: A Journal of Musical Growth, by Michael Rays, Smashwords, 2013. 59 pages, $4.99. A few years ago, Mike Curtis set two goals for himself. He wanted to write a book and he wanted to master Ritchie Blackmore’s blazing guitar solo on Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.” (more…) Continue Reading →
