Internet disconnect: Getting online in Maine can be painfully slow. And the planned Verizon-FairPoint merger won’t help.

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Most of the objections about the Verizon-FairPoint telephone-company merger proposal do not hinge on whether either of them is providing any kind of worthwhile, valuable, or useful telephone service.

The proposal, in which industry giant Verizon would sell the wired-telephone parts of its business in northern New England (including the wires, switching equipment, maintenance staff, and everything else) to industry midget FairPoint Communications, is relevant in Maine — and New Hampshire and Vermont — mainly in terms of what it would mean for rural customers who want high-speed, broadband Internet access.

Everyone involved — the two companies, the merger’s opponents, and state officials — talks about the deal’s impact on bringing DSL broadband Internet service to rural Mainers. This is indeed a concern in many remote parts of Maine, although state figures show that, overall, 85 percent of Mainers already have the option to choose broadband service via cable-Internet or wireless access, if not DSL.

While the states’ public utilities commissions technically regulate only telephone service, and not Internet access, DSL enters the discussion because it can be provided over regular old copper telephone wires, so long as those lines are properly maintained and equipped.

The trouble with this debate is that DSL is the wrong topic. We should be talking about fiber-optics technology, which transfers data over laser beams through glass wires. Because fiber-optic lines are capable of handling telephone, Internet, television, and other communications of the future, fiber optics is widely accepted as the immediate future of high-speed Internet connections. It is currently being rolled out by Verizon in major population centers around the country, including New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Whether the $2.7-billion Verizon-FairPoint deal goes through or not, the problem is that our state officials haven’t noticed that DSL is the wave of the past.

Lighting the world
Nationally, Verizon operates about two-thirds of the 1.3 million fiber connections to homes, according to the Fiber to the Home Council, a nationwide non-profit agency combining towns, utility companies, real-estate developers, and Internet service providers working to encourage the connection — by whomever is best equipped to do so — of fiber to every home in the US. (Today, just under two percent of US homes have fiber connections, the council says.)

Verizon’s fiber customers are primarily in large urban areas where population density (and therefore the number of prospective customers) is high enough to justify the cost of installing fiber. But many of the homes connected to fiber other than Verizon’s are, perhaps ironically, in rural places where town officials or smaller companies have decided to install it to boost economic development, according to FTTH Council president Joe Savage.

Seems like a good idea. “We’re the slowest in New England as far as download speeds,” says Peter McLaughlin, the business manager of the union representing Maine’s Verizon employees, which is a member of the national Communications Workers of America union’s research project on US Internet-access speeds. The union — looking to expand employment opportunities for its members — is lobbying to get companies to increase bandwidth, and to get government regulators to require universal Internet availability.

Through a variety of initiatives over many years, Maine has been trying to build rural economic development, including DSL-focused efforts to bring better Internet service to the hinterlands. The state is even looking to boost the number of telecommuting workers; Savage suggests fiber to the home may be faster than businesses’ office connections. But not even the few legislators who have commented to the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC) about the FairPoint deal have mentioned fiber; one didn’t even mention DSL.

That’s too bad, because Maine actually has a lot of fiber already. Many Maine high schools and colleges are connected by a fiber-optic “ATM” network, which is mostly used for videoconferencing now. Maine has fiber-optic backbone running throughout the state, between telephone-company switching offices, in major connections by cable-television companies, and in downtown Portland and Lewiston-Auburn. Oxford Networks sells fiber to the home — in Maine. And Verizon is letting homes in a few Maine towns right on the New Hampshire border get fiber service from its Portsmouth center.

Vermont is in about the same place as Maine: Verizon provides no fiber to Vermont homes, though some communities have it, through either municipal initiatives (like Burlington’s) or small, independent companies. New Hampshire is better off, at least in the southern part of the state, where Verizon does offer fiber connections to homes in some areas.

In Maine, aside from those few homes next to New Hampshire, Verizon has no fiber to the home. FairPoint, which has phone customers in 18 states, offers fiber-optics to residential customers in four states (none in New England), but only in sizable housing developments being constructed on land with no previous telephone or Internet service.

Fiber free
If the Verizon-FairPoint merger is approved, FairPoint says it will spend about $40 million ($13 million to $14 million in each of the three states) to expand DSL service to some areas that don’t have it, and roll it out over the next few years to cover as much as 93 percent of their customer base here.

By that time, we’ll be behind again. Savage, from the fiber council, estimates that in 15 years, 80 percent of US homes will have fiber connections.

Not us, though: Maine public advocate Richard Davies (the state official whose job is to represent Maine consumers in public-utilities deals) just made a deal with Verizon in which the company agreed to invest $12.5 million to expand broadband in Maine, but not with fiber. “Because they’re looking to sell out, it was not logical” to ask for anything other than DSL, he says. Verizon, in exchange for installing old technology, gets to wait until next year before PUC officials will determine whether the company has been overcharging customers by as much as $30 million a year for the past six years. (By that time, Verizon won’t be here, and Davies’s agreement will leave the rate battle to FairPoint.)

The head of one telecom company in Houlton (where Internet service is provided by small, independent local companies) suggested the $12.5 million be given to the ConnectME Authority, a state agency set up to bring broadband Internet to rural Mainers without any broadband options at all.

That sum would dwarf the $500,000 the Legislature has allocated to be split among several companies seeking to debut broadband service in rural areas of Maine. The rest of the money to fund ConnectME will come from Mainers, who this fall will begin paying an additional monthly surcharge (0.25 percent) on their telephone and Internet bills.

Of course, ConnectME has no plans to roll out fiber-optics anywhere in Maine, either, and is just hoping to get any kind of broadband at all to rural Maine before we’re completely left behind. “DSL is certainly not the leading technology, like fiber,” says Phil Lindley, acting executive director of ConnectME, “but it’s certainly something that will serve people’s broadband needs for a while.”

Left in the dark
Verizon knows fiber is the real future: the company has been taking profits from Maine and other rural areas around the country (like the rural Midwest and West Virginia), and investing that money not to improve telecommunications in the places the money came from, but to put the real broadband, fiber-optic cables, in densely populated areas like New York City, Boston, and the area around Washington, DC.

Now Verizon wants to get out of northern New England — and its other rural landline businesses (see sidebar, “Verizon Unloads”) — to focus on fiber elsewhere. In getting out, Verizon would leave us to a small, heavily indebted company (FairPoint) whose best plan is to invest less money in system upgrades than Verizon ever did, and to have those system upgrades get Mainers’ service to a level city-dwellers are already beginning to discard as too slow.

What if the deal failed, and Verizon had to stay (at least until it found a new buyer)? Verizon spokesman Peter Reilly said the company wouldn’t comment on what would happen in the “hypothetical” case that the sale — which must be approved by three states and the federal government — could fall through, leaving us to put the pieces together on our own. The picture isn’t good.

In Maine, Verizon is already the subject of some complaints to the Public Utilities Commission from rural customers about the unavailability of high-speed Internet (including one titled “Request for commission action to implore Verizon to implement the use of DSL” from 21 business owners and 12 residents in The Forks and West Forks, the central-Maine home to the state’s whitewater-rafting industry).

Verizon has made clear its lack of interest in being in the landline phone and wired-Internet business here. If the sale to FairPoint is blocked, Verizon will have no incentive to maintain its services, wires, or anything else — in fact, neglecting its customers and employees will serve to shift opposition to the sale into support as people insist on getting decent service.

Davies says the PUC has “very broad powers” to force Verizon to provide minimally acceptable telephone service, though that may involve going to court if Verizon is reluctant to do what is required. And those powers don’t address broadband service, which is not regulated by the PUC or state law.

Davies thinks that if Verizon tried harder to market its landline and broadband services — and if the company expanded broadband offerings in Maine — the company could do better here. As it is, “they’ve sort of said over the last couple of years, ‘we’re not going to invest in the state,’” Davies says.

Seeing the light
And while FairPoint talks a great game about how they will bring outdated, slow DSL to rural Mainers who are still stuck on dial-up, they’ll have to spend a lot more than they’re expecting, to do even that.

There is no outside evaluation of the condition of the wires Verizon would transfer to FairPoint (it’s protected as a company secret), but there are people who have a good idea of what they’re like.

McLaughlin, whose union members maintain the lines, estimates that FairPoint should expect to spend “a couple hundred million” dollars just to repair the existing copper wires to a condition where they can handle DSL traffic.

“Publius,” a pseudonymous Verizon employee who started the VerizonVsFairPoint.com Web site to distribute information about the sale, says FairPoint is dreaming if they think it will be relatively cheap to improve service in northern New England.

“There is absolutely no way” that the installation of the equipment FairPoint is talking about would, on its own, bring broadband to the rural masses, says Publius, who withholds his real name for fear of losing his job.

The wires are in terrible condition, he says, many having been in place for decades and repeatedly spliced back together after wind or trees or car crashes knocked them down. Not all of those splices (of between 1000 and 2000 tiny 22-gauge copper strands in each wire) are perfect, as you might imagine, and there are plenty of places — such as the Concord, New Hampshire, neighborhood discussed in an August 2 Concord Monitor article — where the combination of age and bad connections means that Verizon phone service cuts out whenever it rains.

So repairing them will be expensive. And if FairPoint is going to invest millions — much less McLaughlin’s projection of hundreds of millions — what about fiber-optics?

Rather than replacing the old copper wires with new copper, Savage of the fiber council suggests installing new fiber — he even says doing so can be cheaper in some circumstances, but not really in rural areas where the distances are great.

In places like that, he says, our best bet is to arrange some sort of joint venture between the government — local or state — and telecommunications companies, in which the government would grant some sort of benefit to the company in exchange for bringing fiber to homes.

If only our state officials thought about fiber.

Verizon unloads
For seven years, Verizon has been busy getting itself out of the landline business around the country, and around the world. Here are the highlights:

2000 Verizon sells 133,000 landlines in WISCONSIN to a couple of local telephone companies for $365 million.

SEPTEMBER 2002 Verizon sells its shares in NEW ZEALAND Telecom, a landline company in that country.

SEPTEMBER 2002 Verizon sells 675,000 telephone lines in MISSOURI,KENTUCKY, AND ALABAMA for $2.6 billion to CenturyTel, a publicly traded company based in Louisiana.

APRIL 2004 Verizon announces it will sell Verizon Dominica (serving the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC), and its shares of phone companies in PUERTO RICO AND VENEZUELA, to a couple of Mexico-based telephone companies for $3.7 billion. The deal affects 15 million landline, broadband, and wireless customers.

OCTOBER 2004 Verizon announces the company is looking to sell 15 million of its nearly 50 million landlines AROUND THE NATION, to focus on wireless service and high-speed Internet connectivity.

MAY 2005 Verizon sells 700,000 lines in HAWAII for $1.65 billion to private-equity firm the Carlyle Group (a company backed financially by both former president George H.W. Bush and members of Osama Bin Laden’s family).

MAY 2006 Verizon’s hopes to sell 3.4 million landlines and related operations in ILLINOIS, INDIANA, MICHIGAN, AND OHIO are reported in the Wall Street Journal Online, and is seeking to earn between $5 billion and $6 billion from that deal. In addition, its hopes to sell its northern New England lines for between $2 billion and $3 billion.

JANUARY 2007 Verizon announces that it will sell its NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND operations, including 1.6 million landlines, for $2.7 billion to FairPoint Communications.

Air apparent? McNallica finishes fourth in the US

Published as a Web exclusive at thePhoenix.com

Maybe New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell is a breast man. That’s at least what Jason Jones of The Daily Show implied, as Jones introduced his score for McNallica at the US Air Guitar National Championship, held Thursday at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza in New York City.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

McNallica, the Portland and New England air-guitar champ (who works by day at a Portland mortgage company under the name Erin McNally), had traveled with about a dozen friends and supporters to NYC, after months of practice and performance (see the other stuff we’ve written about her). “I just really want to make it to the second round,” she said, knowing that would make her one of the top five air-guitarists in the country.

She was up against 13 other competitors (12 men and one woman) from around the nation for the US title, which comes with tickets to Finland for the world air-guitar championship in early September. She had prepped in a few special ways for this performance, MySpacing the last US winner in Finland (Sonykrok, from 2004) to “get her blessing,” and getting Jen Moore from Sanctuary Tattoo to bless her fingerless gloves. She was as ready as she would get.

The opening set from New Jersey-based hair band Satanicide warmed up the crowd with such timeless classics of guitar rock as “Pussy and Ice Cream,” a Satanicide original angst anthem about, well, it’s fairly obvious, and “Twenty-Sided Die,” an ode to Dungeons and Dragons.

After a few butterfly-calming PBRs and Buds with her fans, McNallica got serious to prepare for her performance, getting quiet, still, and moving her fingers up and down in the air as if, well, she were playing a guitar. Rhinestones flashed from her arms, and diamond “M”s dangled from her earlobes. “The theme of Finland this year is bling,” she explained.

McNallica went seventh in the first round, introduced by MC Bjorn Turoque, who never won a US championship, but has become the celebrity spokesman for US air guitar. In Boston, at the New England regional championship, he had been a judge and gave her perfect 6.0 scores in each of the two rounds and called her “the future of air guitar.”

This time Turoque reminded the audience that “this woman blew my mind in Boston,” and let her go. She leapt, kicked, fingered, and tongued her way around the stage to Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart,” from the 1989 album Dr. Feelgood.

And then, amid the crowd’s cheers, she awaited the scores. Up to that point, the scores – and the performances – had been dismal, slow, pedestrian, even anemic. But McNallica opened the field, and the judges’ hearts.

Jones and Gladwell (who also wrote The Tipping Point, about the effects of social behavior) were two of the four celebrity judges (the others were Rachel Dratch from Saturday Night Live and Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union).

Gladwell had given Portland and New England air-guitar champ McNallica the first 6.0 maximum-point score of the night (there would only be one more, from Gladwell to McNallica in the second and final round of competition).

She took the 6.0, and Jones’s dismal 5.2 (which got him boos and the finger from the crowd), a 5.7 from Wizner and 5.9 from Dratch, and squeaked into the five-person second round in a tie for fourth place.

In the second round, in which she didn’t get to choose the song, she went first. But as the five finalists were allowed to hear the selected song for the first time, McNallica went wild. She knew the song, chord for chord: “Get Your Hands Off My Woman, Motherfucker,” by Darkness (off 2003’s Permission To Land). She started playing even just standing there on stage with the rest of the contestants, among whom was reigning US champ Hot Lixx Hulahan.

But despite her best efforts – her extensive and complex fingerwork on the fretboard, her lip-syncing, even her throwing of the guitar and her subsequent catch – it wasn’t enough. The only woman in the final five, she landed another perfect 6 from Gladwell, a 5.7 from Wizner, a 5.8 from Dratch, and a 5.7 from Jones (who had given her the 5.2 in the first round). Her total, 23.2 points, made her the fourth-best air-guitarist in the nation. (There was a tie for third place.)

The other four’s performances included crowd-surfing (exemplified by The Rock Ness Fucking Monster’s effort, in which he stayed standing, supported by a few sturdy new friends), acrobatics that lost their grace and surrendered to drunken uncoordination, and spraying of beer and energy drinks all over the stage and the fans.

But in the end, McNallica was a good sport, applauding – even worshiping – as the new champion was crowned, the man who had the home-field advantage from the beginning: William Ocean of New York City.

Will there be a next year? Will she become a coach for other female air-guitarists? Will she get knee replacements to be able to subject hers to the abuse Ocean gives his (she thinks they’re titanium; we think they’re jelly, at least now)? For the answers to these questions, we must wait.

But McNallica, on her way back to Portland on Friday, rocks on.

McNallica heads to nationals

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Portland’s air-guitar champ, also New England’s top atmos-instrumentalist, will compete in New York City on Thursday, August 16, for the US title, which would get her a slot in the world championship competition in Finland in early September.

McNallica, whose unassuming day job is at a mortgage firm, says she has been contacted by some of her 13 competitors, asking for video. No dice, she says. Portlanders, of course, know what her routines look like (see “Music Seen,” May 4, by Sonya Tomlinson and Jeff Inglis; “Support the Portland Air-Guitar Champ,” June 8, and “One Step Closer to Finland,” June 15, both by Jeff Inglis).

But even Mainers who attend will get to see new material, as she has a serious practice regimen: “yoga, the gym, finger exercises, lots of rocking.” Tickets ($18.50) are still available to the show, which starts at 8 pm at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza, between Third and Park Avenues on East 15th Street (near the Union Square subway stop). And Greyhound Bus Lines have a $30 round-trip Boston-to-New York special if you book online.

Live Earth 2007: Where to go, who to see, what to know — even if you don't have a ticket

Published as an online exclusive (with excerpts in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix)

So you’re headed to a Live Earth gig somewhere, whether outside New York City or in a remote outpost in Antarctica. Maybe you’re staying home to watch the various simulcasts online. But Live Earth is more than just a concert — or at least it’s supposed to be. Organizers are calling it “a concert for a climate in crisis,” and what better way to honor Al Gore’s dream of world climate awareness than by thinking green thoughts and seeing a few unsettling sights, to soak in a bit more the waning days of our nice, comfy climate?

Herewith, a brief list of the Live Earth concerts (the one in Istanbul, Turkey, was canceled because the government and potential sponsors are distracted by upcoming elections), what musicians you’ll hear, a (relatively) nearby place to each concert where you can actually see the effects of global warming, and — for the homebodies preferring to use their exercycle-powered computers to experience the human decline — links to Webcams where you can see the real effects of human innovation on our big blue marble.

ANTARCTICA
WHERE: Rothera Station, Adelaide Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula

WHO: Nunatak (an utterly unpublicized and mostly ad-hoc group of scientists and support staff at the British station)

WHAT TO SEE: Open water just south of Cape Longing on the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen A and B ice shelves used to be (before their sudden collapses in 1995 and 2002, respectively). Researchers in February reported that they had found several new species that had been living under the ice shelves for thousands of years, as well as species that moved in after the collapses, abruptly changing the seabed environment.

WEBCAM: Check out life at Rothera Station

And at the other extreme, a North Pole Webcam

AUSTRALIA
WHERE: Aussie Stadium, Moore Park, Sydney, New South Wales

WHO: Blue King Brown, Crowded House, Eskimo Joe, Ghostwriters, Jack Johnson, John Butler Trio, Missy Higgins, Paul Kelly, Sneaky Sound System, Toni Collette and the Finish, Wolfmother

WHAT TO SEE: The Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve, north of Nyngan, New South Wales, which are drier than they should be because irrigation systems upriver from the marshes are taking more water than they are allowed to, as farmers do everything they can to minimize the effects of a years-long drought that has turned many Australians’ attention to global warming.

WEBCAM: This vineyard is not that close to Macquarie Marshes, but is well irrigated, and feeling the effects of drought

BRAZIL
WHERE: Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro

WHO: Lenny Kravitz, Pharrell Williams, Macy Gray, Xuxa, O Rappa, Marcelo D2, Jorge Ben Jor, Jota Quest, Vanessa Da Matta, MV Bill

WHAT TO SEE: The Amazon Rain Forest, which is actually drying out. As the forest area drops, so does the amount of rainfall. The effect is increased by rain-preventing smoke from the slash-and-burn practices of poor farmers destroying the wilderness to make fertile farmland.

WEBCAM: Keep an eye on very localized deforestation in a residential garden in Olinda, Brazil

CHINA
WHERE: Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai

WHO: Sarah Brightman, Eason Chan, Winnie Hsin, Evonne Hsu, Huang Xiao Ming, Anthony Wong, Joey Yung, 12 Girls Band, Soler

WHAT TO SEE: Linfen, Shanxi province, a city the World Bank says has the worst air quality on Earth, as a result of vast amounts of factories, mines, and homes that all burn coal. China is opening an average of two coal-fired electricity-generating plants each week. The country’s carbon-dioxide emissions surpassed the US level for the first time in 2006, though Chinese officials note that per capita, China’s emissions are one-fourth of America’s, and half of Britain’s.

WEBCAM: Shanghai’s air isn’t that clean, either. See what the folks attending the concert are breathing.

GERMANY
WHERE: Arena at Hamburg, Hamburg

WHO: Chris Cornell, Jan Delay, Juli, Katie Melua, Lotto King Karl, Maná, Michael Mittermeier, Sasha, Silbermond, Reamonn, Roger Cicero, Snoop Dogg, Mando Diao, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira

WHAT TO SEE: The Vernagtferner glacier, in the Otztal Alps, near Innsbruck, Austria. This glacier is one of the fastest-retreating in the world, having lost one-third of its area and more than half its mass in the past 100 years.

WEBCAM: This view of a ski lift at a mountain resort in Bayerisch Eisenstein, Bayern province, will tell you how much snow is falling and how fast it’s melting — both key elements of glacier-mass changes. (Yeah, it’s summer now. Keep checking back.)

JAPAN
WHERE: Makuhari Messe, Tokyo, Kanto region, Honshu island

WHO: Linkin Park, Rihanna, Ai Otsuka, Cocco, Genki Rockets, Kumi Koda, Rip Slyme, Rize, Ayaka, UA, Abingdon Boys School, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Rihanna, Bonnie Pink, AI, Michael Nyman

WHAT TO SEE: Well, there’s always the Kyoto International Conference Hall in Sakyo ward, Kyoto, where the Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions was negotiated back in December 1997. (Nearly a decade later, and the US Senate hasn’t ratified it.) But also head to the Tohoku region, north of Tokyo, to the rice paddies, which are seeing increased production of the country’s staple food as a result of warmer temperatures. At the same time, wheat production throughout the country is falling.

WEBCAM: Pay attention to the streets of Tokyo — if a massive rice-fed monster isn’t trampling through them, maybe there’s hope.

SOUTH AFRICA
WHERE: The Cradle of Humankind, Maropeng, Gauteng Province (near Johannesburg)

WHO: UB40, Joss Stone, Angelique Kidjo, Baaba Maal, Danny K, the Parlotones, Soweto Gospel Choir, Vusi Mahlasela, Zola

WHAT TO SEE: The Karoo National Park, a desert ecosystem designated as a “biodiversity hot spot,” with as many as 2000 plant species found nowhere else on Earth. The area is being monitored for its reaction to climbing temperatures, and scientists have already found that some young plants aren’t doing well, because they can’t store enough water to survive the heat.

WEBCAM: Watch for signs of plants in distress in the forest and mountain view.

UNITED KINGDOM
WHERE: Wembley Stadium, Wembley, London

WHO: Beastie Boys, Black Eyed Peas, Bloc Party, Corinne Bailey Rae, Damien Rice, David Gray, Duran Duran, Foo Fighters, Genesis, James Blunt, John Legend, Keane, Madonna, Paolo Nutini, Razorlight, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snow Patrol, Metallica, Kasabian, Terra Naomi, Spinal Tap, Pussycat Dolls

WHAT TO SEE: The London Underground subway system, which in 2006 was partially disabled because of skyrocketing electricity demand from people around the city trying to beat the heat. (Also check out the M25 motorway encircling London; a segment between Junctions 26 and 27 melted in the summer heat in 2003.)

WEBCAM: If London’s roads are melting, be among the first to see them on the BBC’s “jam cams” monitoring traffic around the city.

UNITED STATES
WHERE: Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey

WHO: AFI, Akon, Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews Band, Fall Out Boy, John Mayer, Kayne West, Kelly Clarkson, KT Tunstall, Ludacris, Melissa Etheridge, the Police, Roger Waters, Smashing Pumpkins, Keith Urban, Taking Back Sunday

WHAT TO SEE: Almost any stretch of the legendary Jersey Shore, where storms (of both increasing frequency and severity) continue to do serious damage to beaches, shorefront areas, and homes. As ocean levels rise, areas near the shore will be inundated, according to a recent report by Environment New Jersey, an activist group.

WEBCAM: Look for rising waters in the beach view.

On the Web
Live Earth: liveearth.msn.com

Sources
Antarctica: http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/einzigartiges_oekosystem_unter_dem_ehemaligen_larsen_schelfeis/
Australia: http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Irrigators-want-probe-into-water-theft/2007/06/26/1182623882590.html; http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052407R.shtml
Brazil: http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov; http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/AmazonFire/
China: http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2111124,00.html
Germany: http://www.unep.org/geo/geo_ice
Japan: http://www.epcc.pref.osaka.jp/apec/eng/earth/global_warming/dounaru.html
South Africa: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0804_030804_karoo.html
Turkey: http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=5b7285ea-7f09-4b9a-a4bd-10cae6a51ea7
UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/08/07/nhot07.xml
US: http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/reports/global-warming/global-warming-reports/an-unfamiliar-state-local-impacts-of-global-warming-in-new-jersey

'Ugly' story wins third prize

Published in the Portland Phoenix

A dark trip through Portland’s eyesores written by former staff writer Sara Donnelly and illustrated by Westbrook freelancer Mike Gorman has been honored in the small-papers division of the newspaper competition the alternative press takes most seriously.

The story, “Ugly Portland,” published July 28, 2006, took third place in the “format buster” category in the national Association of Alternative Newsweeklies competition. (AAN defines a “format buster” as an article whose thrust and graphic presentation are contrary to usual newspaper conventions.)

One step closer to Finland: McNallica wins!

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Well, obviously.

Portland-based karaoke star McNallica won the regional competition in the US Air Guitar championship series, held last Friday at Boston's Harper’s Ferry. Next stop, the Fillmore at Irving Plaza in New York City on August 16. Then, if she beats the 13 contenders there, she’ll head to Finland for the world title in early September.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. McNallica, operations manager at a local mortgage company, creamed the local competition at Portland's SPACE back in April. Last week down in Allston, Bjorn Turoque, one of the world’s greatest air-guitarists, gave her perfect scores in both rounds, and called her “the future of air guitar.”

Perhaps the best part (other than that level of praise) came the moment she and the four other finalists heard the song they would perform in the compulsory round: “Metal Health,” the title track off the 1983 Quiet Riot album. While she hadn’t worked up a routine for it, she knew the song, and spent the few minutes she had before going on stage planning a kick-ass routine.

“The whole left side of my body hurts from doing all the windmills,” she said Monday.

McNallica beat — among others — a woman who had flown in from Colorado, a guy who drove up from Washington DC, and Boston hometown favorite Mike “Godfather of Air” Torpey, who won that city's regional competition last year. She now has her eyes on beating Andrew “William Ocean” Litz, two-time New York regional champ, who will be among the most experienced air-guitarists in the national competition.

We’ll keep you posted on the dates, the other challengers, and vicious rumors about the personal lives of air-guitarists near and far, so keep checking back.

Support the Portland air-guitar champ

Published in the Portland Phoenix

McNallica, Portland’s air-guitar champion (see “Music Seen,” May 4), will head to the next phase of the US Air Guitar Championships on Friday, in Boston. And she’s inviting you to go with her.

McNallica could use the support — even though this contest will be judged by actual judges (rather than by popular acclaim, like the local championship at SPACE). She’s polishing up her air guitar for the performance, which she promises will feature “two signature moves” she couldn’t perform at SPACE because the stage was dampened by a previous performer’s fake blood. She’s hoping those, and her extensive prep work (she has choreographed three different 60-second routines to different songs, so as not to repeat music used by another contestant), will get her a ticket to the national finals in New York in August.

The judging will be “based on figure-skating,” she says, with a scale from 4.0 to 6.0. No word on whether there’s a Russian judge, but we prepped her with a couple Russkie niceties to drop, just in case.

To get you there, McNallica is coordinating rides down to the 21+ show at Harper’s Ferry (158 Brighton Ave in Allston, Massachusetts) on Friday evening, arriving in time for the event’s start at 9 pm. If you want a ride, e-mail her at emcnally@meridianmg.com. Get your $15 tickets in advance atwww.usairguitar.com or call 800.594.8499. You’ll also get a glimpse of Air Guitar Nation movie star (and non-winner) Bjorn Turoque, the celebrity MC.

Portland Phoenix Best Music Poll on WCSH's 207 (with Samuel James)

Aired on WCSH's 207

Air guitar competition: Music Seen at SPACE Gallery, April 28, 2007

Published in the Portland Phoenix; written jointly with Sonya Tomlinson

ST For those wondering how the Air Guitar competition went down — the event was beyond sold out. Even when the space available for the film portion came down to standing room only the audience did not hesitate to express their enthusiasm. Despite the close quarters, the laughing, cheering, and clapping during the movie mimicked what would take place in a living room full of your closest friends.

JI In fact, some of the movie’s scenes — and the live post-movie competition — might have been best done in a living room, rather than on a stage or in front of a camera. But with a movie like Air Guitar Nation, if you can’t react to the events and commentary on the screen, there’s fairly little point in seeing it at all. Air guitar is as much about the art of performing as it is about the act of spectating.

ST Let’s get back to that live competition part. There were nine contestants for the first-ever Portland Air Guitar competition. I believe you were in the front of the crowd, right? Something about your wife being sprayed with fake blood by one of the competitors?

JI Yeah, there were supposed to be 12, but a few backed out and a few signed up on the spot, motivated by the movie, no doubt. Anyway, one of them — HammerSmash — had a cup of fake blood, poured it all over himself and drank it, and then tossed it into the crowd. He was one of the few who appeared to have actually rehearsed, and he ended up in the final three. Sadly, as the youngest contestant in the finals, he appeared to be less familiar with the compulsory song — the contestants had chosen their own songs for the first round — and ended up finishing third. That compulsory song, Poison’s “Talk Dirty To Me” (from 1986’s Look What the Cat Dragged In, if you must know) was a brilliant choice on the part of the organizers, and played right into the hands of the woman who stole the show — McNallica. She’ll be competing in Boston sometime soon, and we’ll keep you posted on that.

ST And we can’t fail to mention Free Bird, who came in second. Even his fans dressed up to support him. If you missed out, be sure to catch the local action at http://www.vimeo.com/clip:179839. And you can catch the film, Air Guitar Nation, at the Movies on Exchange May 2-8.

On the Web
More photos at: http://flickr.com/photos/space538/sets/72157600161646975/

Activist says legalize all drugs, not just medical marijuana

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Peter Christ wants to legalize drugs. “Heroin, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD” — all of them. They are so dangerous to people and to our society that “they must be regulated and controlled,” he says, conveniently leaving any specifics to others (doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, almost anyone but a retired police officer, which is what he is).

And Jonathan Leavitt, director of the Maine Marijuana Policy Initiative, wants Christ’s message (Peter Christ’s message, that is — his last name rhymes with “wrist”) to sway Maine lawmakers into relaxing Maine’s medical-marijuana laws in this legislative session, by passing a bill (LD 1418) sponsored by state senator Ethan Strimling (D-Portland).

But Leavitt may have the wrong guy, and Christ may have the wrong message.

Christ is vice-president (pun unintended) of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of former cops, prosecutors, and judges who say drugs should be made legal, controlled, taxed, and regulated by the government, much like tobacco and alcohol. Then, Christ says, society needs to address the social problem of drug addiction seriously, the way it has with tobacco use — cutting consumption significantly by teaching people what’s actually wrong with a legal product.

Christ is, in fact, opposed to Leavitt’s immediate goal. “If they succeed at what they’re doing,” he says, “then we don’t succeed,” because if lawmakers — and citizens generally — agree that drugs should be banned except for small, narrowly defined reasons (such as medical needs), there’ll be no impetus for wider legalization.

Christ does admit that Leavitt’s effort gets him access to newspaper offices and Rotary clubs. And he says that if LEAP wins its crusade for legalization — and control — of all drugs, then Leavitt’s group will also get what it wants. Leavitt believes slow, incremental change has a better long-term success rate in the political realm.

Much of Christ’s bluster is about his real push: to reform media coverage of society in general (and drugs in particular), because he says that is a necessary precursor to legalization of drugs.

Christ wants newspapers to stop writing about “drug-related” violence — saying that suggests a drug-induced high caused the incident — and instead call it “drug-business-related” violence, reflecting that the participants are usually having a dispute over money, or selling territory, or quality of the product.

“Part of the problem is the press,” Christ says, also lamenting reporters’ “failure to question” authorities, calling police “for balance” when doing stories about him and his activism, but not calling him “for balance” when doing stories about the latest drug bust, and whether it’s an effective way to reduce the availability of drugs on the street.

Leavitt, meanwhile, has hired some lobbyists — Betsy Sweet and Bob Howe (who represent various healthcare-related organizations in the state, among other clients) — to push his bill, which would allow any medical professional who can write a prescription — any doctor, physician-assistant, nurse-practitioner, optometrist, dentist, or podiatrist — to permit someone to grow or buy small amounts of marijuana for personal medical use. (Leavitt says doctors are too conservative, and the prescribing power needs to be expanded to let people get access to marijuana for medicinal purposes. No state agency has any data on how many people take advantage of the law as it stands now.)

The bill would also create a state registry of people who are so authorized, permit the creation of nonprofit stores where marijuana could be purchased by authorized buyers for medical use, and allow such stores to be located anywhere retail businesses are permitted under local zoning laws. And it would bar state, county, or local police officers from assisting federal agents in investigations of medical-marijuana use. It is slated for a hearing before a legislative committee on April 23 at 2 pm in the Cross Building (part of the State House complex) in Augusta.

Straight from Peaks to NYC

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It startled even her. Becky FitzPatrick, a Portland cut-paper artist, heard through the grapevine that someone from the Ralph Lauren company was trying to get in touch with her. And when the call actually came, she was again startled to learn why the company was calling.

“Most of my work is small 2-D,” she says, including a piece in the just-completed “Body Parts” show at MECA’s June Fitzpatrick Gallery. But the giant clothing-maker wanted to talk about The Wishing Room, her second-ever piece of installation art, which had been shown at the Sacred and Profane festival on Peaks Island last fall.

The piece, assembled with the help of fellow artist Lisa Pixley, involved hanging hundreds of white paper birds from the ceiling of a large space inside the harbor’s former fort. Visitors were invited to walk through and among them. Ralph Lauren wanted something similar.

It turns out that “the wife of one of the windows team members at Ralph Lauren in New York City,” had had her picture taken with her kids in among the birds. When her husband saw the pictures, he wanted to see more, thinking perhaps a similar work would be good for a smaller display in the store.

“They didn’t even know who I was,” FitzPatrick laughs, noting that Sacred and Profane works are installed anonymously. After seeing more of her work and talking to her at some length, the company brought FitzPatrick to New York for a week to put together her first-ever show in the city. She and a windows crew of full-time and freelance Ralph Lauren workers pulled four all-nighters — installing 600 birds above Ralph Lauren-clad mannequins in the store’s four main windows at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 72nd, a block from Central Park, in the heart of the city’s fashion district. It will be on display for the next six weeks. And FitzPatrick — catching up on her sleep — is now back in Maine, hoping to find more installation work.

Sidebar: The League: A short history

Published in the Portland Phoenix

APRIL 2004 After six weeks of prep work, Justin Alfond (who later becomes the full-time state director of the League) and local activist Jo Horn host a League kickoff event, a book launch for How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, edited by two of the national leaders of the League of Young Voters. Fifty-six people attend.

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2004 League members help Falmouth Democrat John Brautigam campaign door-to-door against Portland Republican David Elowitch for a Maine House seat representing parts of both towns. Brautigam wins by 55 votes. (See “The Year in Citizen Activism,” by Alex Irvine, December 24, 2004.)

2005 Members get more involved in local issues, including the Portland School Committee’s debate on whether to ban the distribution to students of fliers from discriminatory groups like the Boy Scouts of America, and a proposal to allow Portland high-school students to remove their personal information from records released to the US military for recruiting purposes. Members also help coordinate the college-campus campaign of Maine Won’t Discriminate, successfully defeating an attempt to overturn the state’s gay-rights law.

FEBRUARY 2006 The Portland group changes its name from the League of Pissed Off Voters to the League of Young Voters, with the intent of attracting more members and more grant funding.

MID-2006 National organizations step up funding to the League, for its efforts in connecting with people who are not registered to vote and getting them informed and voting. The Maine Blueprint Project, a coalition of activist organizations, asks if the League will help fight the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, a tax-reform bill, on college campuses. League organizers notice that young people — whether college students or not — tend not to know much about TABOR, and launch a widespread campaign to inform voters and oppose the initiative.

NOVEMBER 2006 City Council and School Committee seats in Districts 1 and 2 are filled by first-time candidates, all four of whom are under 35. TABOR fails. The League claims partial credit for each of those results, even though both successful School Committee candidates beat League-endorsed opponents.

JANUARY 2007 A group of Republican legislators introduces a bill to bar college students from voting in the towns where they live while attending college. The League backs a proposal from Portland Democrat Jon Hinck for “instant runoff voting,” a change to the present electoral system that would result in an election’s winner being the person most favored by the largest number of people. Both bills die in committee.

APRIL 4, 2007 The League is honored at the Maine State House, with a proclamation by the governor as well as resolutions by both houses of the Legislature.

INTO THE FUTURE League representatives may be included in discussions of youth issues with state legislators, nightlife policies with Portland city councilors, and other consultative groups. And the League will work to publicize the requirement that landlords disclose apartments’ energy-efficiency data to prospective tenants.

Sidebar: Celebrate with them

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The League is hoping to get enough members and fans together to TAKE A BUS UP TO THE STATE HOUSE on Wednesday, April 4, to represent young people’s political power and energy in the halls of state government. Visit their Web site, portlandme.indyvoter.org, to sign up.

After the trip to Augusta, come back to Portland and stop by City Hall, where the city council will be talking about studying a revised formula-business ban and having an elected mayor, and may make its own PROCLAMATION OF LEAGUE DAY IN THE CITY, if councilor Dave Marshall’s request is approved.

Their REACT FILM NIGHT is held at 6:30 pm every third Thursday of the month at the League offices, on the second floor of 1 Pleasant Street in Portland. (But in April, it's moving to Wednesday, April 18, and will be at SPACE Gallery. The League likes to keep members on their toes.) Their “REAL DEAL” ISSUE-BASED DISCUSSIONS are at 6:30 pm on the second Tuesday of the month at the Reiche School in the West End.

Speaking youth to power: The League of Young Voters heads to the State House

Published in the Portland Phoenix

A hip-hop artist will perform in the halls of the State House on April 4. Perhaps that’s all that needs to be said to explain what lawmakers will experience when the League of Young Voters heads to Augusta to receive the traditionally staid honors with which state government rewards public-interest achievements.

Yes, the League is getting their very own day at the State House — a building League state director Justin Alfond regularly refers to as “our house” — including a proclamation from the governor and laudatory resolutions passed by the House and the Senate. It’s the sort of honor that Alfond and his fellow Leaguers seriously considered before deciding to accept — weighing whether it would be too legit, too mainstream, just too downright stuffy to mean much to a group of civic-minded 20-somethings and 30-somethings who really just want political power for themselves.

The group, formed in early 2004 (just in time to really hit its stride in the ’06 election), is a hybrid political-action group. They mix national political idealism with local activism — taking people who are upset at the direction the country is going and turning their energy to making reforms at the local- and state-government levels. They combine grassroots-style door-to-door campaigning (just like old-time politicians) with software that tracks who reads their e-mail messages and Web postings (just like multinational marketing companies). They get young people out for an evening of hip-hop, spoken-word acts, and art exhibits, and mix in some politics to produce what may be the truest representation of a “political party.” And they cross traditional lines between what activists call “education” (teaching people about the democratic process and informing voters about candidates) and outright advocacy (picking issues behind which to throw their youthful backing).

What the League learns here, and in five other pioneer League states (California, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), will be applied nationally in the coming years, says national organizing and training director Rob “Biko” Baker. The League is working toward a national political takeover, saying on its Web site, “We want a progressive governing majority in our lifetime.”

Data mining
The League’s ability to develop that depends in part on their capacity to motivate people to participate, often using art or music to draw people in.

The Portland League has fit in very well with the city’s hip-hop scene, says SayLove, a hip-hop artist who helps to organize League events. “Hip-hop has always been a social-political movement,” she says, noting its beginnings in efforts to divert inner-city young people from gangs and into more productive, creative activities.

“You really have to find a unique way of grabbing someone’s attention,” says 29-year-old Portland city councilor Dave Marshall. He used his paintings to great effect in his own election bid, setting up a display in Monument Square with both art and campaign information, attracting people with his art, and then engaging them in a political discussion.

But the real muscle behind League efforts is provided by a technology-driven campaign that allows grassroots activity to be measured, quantified, trialed, and refined over time.

As progressive political organizations strive to measure their effectiveness (useful for getting grants from foundations, which are increasingly looking for detailed results of funded projects), they are having to find ways to differentiate themselves from spam e-mails, from the deluge of text messages and cell-phone voicemails, from unsolicited MySpace messages, and from any number of other intrusions attempting to grab young people’s attention. The League is no exception, and indeed is leading the effort in Maine politics.

The systems they use are similar to those commonly applied in corporate public-relations campaigns, which can determine how many people receive an e-mail message, how many actually read it, how many of them follow a link in that message, and how people move around an organization’s Web site.

The measurements aren’t static. With each new e-mail message, each new posting on the Web site, each tweak of a message or page’s design, the results change, letting League organizers constantly fine-tune not only their messages, but also the messages’ presentation, to get maximum attention from as large a group of people as possible.

One recent e-mail, for example, asked in its subject line, if readers were “down with OPP?” — both a reference to League pet project Opportunity Maine (a student-loan-payment tax-credit initiative) and to a 1991 rap song by Naughty By Nature whose refrain asks whether a listener is willing to cheat on his or her lover. The tone and brief content of that message put off Jeff Ferland, a 22-year-old who ran for the Maine House as a Republican last year but ended up withdrawing from the race and endorsing a Green Independent opponent. (Ferland says he may run again, but most likely as a Green.) He says messages like that make it “hard to take them seriously.”

But while it was an honest attempt to convey information to League members, it was really just another trial balloon — if not enough people read it or responded to it, the League will adapt, again.

They are missing a key piece of information, though, one that has an important bearing on the League’s grip on politicians’ attention. Julie Flynn, deputy secretary of state for elections, says there is now no convenient way to gather demographic data on new-voter registrations or to determine the demographic makeup of voters (such as their ages) under the state’s long-held system of election record-keeping. A new statewide computerized system that is “80 percent complete” will allow that to happen, because it will capture voter participation in the same database that will include a voter’s birth date. The Portland city clerk’s office doesn’t track voter ages, either. So the League is left with anecdotal data to make a guess at how many more young people have signed up to vote, and how many actually went to the polls.

Accountability
Even without that data, League efforts are getting broad notice. US representative Tom Allen says the League is “an increasingly important voice for younger voters,” who, he points out, are bearing the brunt of casualties in Iraq, are the least likely to have health insurance, are struggling to pay for higher education, will pay for most of the massive national debt now being incurred, and have “the most to lose” as global warming becomes more severe.

Governor John Baldacci, who was 23 when he first was elected to the Bangor City Council, talks about his own efforts to bring young people into government — including working closely with student interns and encouraging young people to talk about Maine’s future — as a way of saying the League’s efforts are important.

Councilor Marshall, who represents “the youngest district in the city,” the West End, acknowledges the support he had from the League and from young voters generally, in defeating two older candidates.

When League candidates win, “there’s sort of an expectation of reciprocity,” he says. Indeed, Marshall says he will nominate League communications director Brian Hiatt to serve on the city’s formula-business task force. It goes both ways: Marshall says if he ends up needing a petition drive to get a citywide vote on whether to have a directly elected mayor (an idea that has League backing), he would look to the League for manpower to gather signatures. (The League has a couple hundred active volunteers in Maine, according to Baker, the national organizing director.)

Marshall shouldn’t count too definitively on their support, though it’s likely to arrive if needed. Alfond notes that the League’s method of decision-making is largely by committee, whether by an 11-person steering committee (which includes staff and community volunteers) or by a vote of the active members (those who spend eight hours or more with the League over the course of a year). So if enough of them don’t like the idea, Marshall will be on his own.

Ferland, the former Republican, says that committee-style approach results in too little coherence for the group overall. As an example, he cites the League’s opposition to TABOR, rather than “why what issue came up.” Because the complaint was that “people won’t get aid from the state anymore,” the League missed the larger point, Ferland says, that “people are having trouble because the state isn’t functioning.”

Progress
But that’s part of the point for the League — making sure that what they’re doing is what actually interests people, even if it doesn’t always fit into a predetermined plan. And what happens next isn’t clear, even for League leaders.

More young people, like Marshall and others at the city level, may continue to get involved: Maine House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, who first won election at age 25 and is now 30, observes that several legislative leaders are younger people — like Jeremy Fischer (D-Presque Isle), who is the House chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and fellow Appropriations member Emily Cain (D-Orono), who are both 27. House Minority Leader Josh Tardy (R-Newport) squeaks into the “young” category, too, at 38.

And while Alfond correctly notes the general prevalence of left-leaning votes among people under 30, Maine House Speaker Glenn Cummings (D-Portland) says his research showed that people under 18 are more conservative than their slightly-older peers, except in the area of environmentalism. He says he used that information to convince wary Republican legislators to allow 17-year-olds to vote in Maine primary elections, if they’ll turn 18 before the November general election date.

What will happen in Augusta on April 4? Alfond is planning to have hip-hop and spoken-word artists perform, to display visual art created by young people, and will bring “youth culture” to the halls of power. He smiles when asked how he thinks lawmakers will react, and hedges: “I think it’s going to be quite different.”

Portland Democratic representative Anne Haskell, who made the initial request for League Day at the State House because of the League’s efforts to get involved in politics, laughs, “I bet it’s going to be real interesting.”

Baldacci hopes that his peers — and those lawmakers older than his 52 years — will “realize that they have as much to gain, if not more, from younger people” than vice-versa. (He also notes “there will be a lot more rhythm than there is otherwise” in the State House.)

Pingree thinks the reception will be warm. “Older people in Maine love having young people get involved,” she says. Many of them are still serving in part because no one else has been willing. She sees “a real interest — almost desperation” among older Maine leaders to turn over the reins to younger people.

And those younger people may, 30-odd years from now, be in the same position. Haskell makes an analogy between recreation and politics — some things, when you start them early enough, become “lifetime sports.”

Corrections Department obstructs free press

Published in the Portland Phoenix

This week is Sunshine Week, a time when media organizations around the country draw attention to state and federal Freedom of Information laws, to remind citizens and government workers about the importance of government openness and accountability. Maine’s law guaranteeing open government is called the “Freedom of Access” law, a name that is especially poignant in view of the Corrections Department’s restrictive attitude toward the media.

A national press organization — as well as several statewide ones — are joining the criticism of the Maine Department of Corrections, which has over the past several months attempted to block reporters from contacting inmates, in the wake of a series of Portland Phoenix articles (based in large measure on interviews with inmates) exposing mistreatment, poor healthcare, and lack of official accountability in the Maine State Prison — and particularly in its Supermax unit.

The criticism is based primarily on a proposed revision to the prison’s media-interview policy, drafted by associate corrections commissioner Denise Lord and Diane Sleek, the assistant attorney general who represents the department. Ironically, Sleek is paid by the people of Maine to uphold the law — including its provisions that government be open to public scrutiny — while at the same time defending the Corrections Department’s actions, including those that seek to bar scrutiny of the publicly funded agency. (Sleek has objected to my calling her job duties a conflict of interest, but has not responded to my question asking which piece of her job I inaccurately described. The fact that she holds a job in the AG’s office speaks for her responsibility as a public official; her actions on behalf of the Corrections Department clearly demonstrate her opposition to public oversight of the agency.)

Sleek has even defied a judge’s order to move a mentally ill inmate out of the Supermax and into the state’s mental hospital, saying she would keep him in prison until the end of his actual prison sentence — for another ten years — before sending him to get the medical care a judge ordered (see “Arbitrary Imprisonment,” by Lance Tapley, July 21, 2006).

After months of not responding to requests to interview prisoners, in mid-December, the department gave longtime Portland Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley a new form he would have to sign before being allowed to talk to inmates. The new rules were so obviously unconstitutional — including allowing prison staff to read a reporter’s notes from an interview — that the Maine Pro chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (of which I am vice-president) began coordinating a letter from objection from other Maine press groups, including the Maine Press Association and the Maine Association of Broadcasters.

A Maine Public Radio story in mid-January about the complaints broke the news that the governor — who has for months refused to comment to the Portland Phoenix about the prison series — had ordered Sleek’s boss, attorney general Steven Rowe, to revise the media policy in accordance with the state’s constitution and laws. That promise forestalled the sending of the protest letter, but not for long.

After weeks of delay, the department issued a draft of a revised policy, adding more restrictions — including attempts to completely ban video and still cameras and audio recording, and trying to control both the content of interviews and how the material gleaned in them might be used. Several restrictions sought to give prison officials the right to control the content, substance, and nature of both questions by reporters as well as answers from inmates.

The new draft has raised even more objections than the previous attempts by corrections officials to limit reporting on their agency and on their official acts. It has already been protested by the Maine Civil Liberties Union. (The Phoenix wrote a letter as well, arguing that the entire policy was still so blatantly unconstitutional that it should be scrapped and rewritten from scratch.)

More letters are in the works, from SPJ, MPA, and MAB, and the national office of SPJ.

Sidebar: This one won't fail

Published in the Portland Phoenix

When he’s describing Ocean Properties’ plans for a public market at the end of a 1000-foot pier off Commercial Street, Bob Baldacci, the governor’s oldest sibling, sounds a heck of a lot like someone promoting the old Portland Public Market, which closed in 2006 after years of charging tenants elevated rent for low-traffic space.

He talks about an emphasis on local sources of food, how attractive it will be to residents and visitors, how much support for local merchants there is in Portland, how handy the nearby parking will make it as a stop for people shopping downtown. All of which were true at the previous market, but the attractiveness never outweighed the hassle — it was a block off Congress Street, the free parking was always empty, and nobody ever stopped down there just for fun.

But Baldacci's picture changes right at the end: fishermen will be able to unload the day’s catch right at the market, supplying both the restaurant and the merchants. Those merchants will be wholesalers as well as retailers, meaning their sales volume could be far higher than the Public Market’s pedestrian-dependent vendors. (The slow demise of the Portland Fish Exchange could even cause some businesses to move to the new space.)

It might be just the ticket. Or it might be just like its predecessor, doomed to fail from the beginning.

Park it: Both proposals for the Maine State Pier are missing something big

Published in the Portland Phoenix

If you believe the Portlanders who worked on the Olympia Companies proposal for redeveloping the Maine State Pier, the competition between their outfit and Ocean Properties, led by former US senator George Mitchell and Bob Baldacci, is simple: big money versus local ideas. Which isn’t entirely true.

Both firms have local ties, and connections elsewhere, and are backed by incredibly wealthy men. The Two Big Names (respectively, the cousin and brother of the governor) have teamed up through Ocean Properties, a New Hampshire-based firm (owned by a billionaire Mainer whose company is paying a lower business-tax rate than if it were based in Maine), backed by firms from Portsmouth, Portland, and Yarmouth. The Portland-based Olympia Companies (led by a multi-millionaire Mainer) have assembled a collective of nine firms from Portland and two from Massachusetts to do the planning work.

If you believe the local daily paper, the two proposals are largely the same and equally good. That’s not entirely true, either.

The ideas submitted in response to the city’s request for plans to repair and refit the Maine State Pier into something that enhances the city’s waterfront both economically and aesthetically have similar budgets ($90 million for Ocean and $91 million for Olympia) and similar ideas for how much area should be dedicated to retail, hotel, open space, cruise-ship terminal operations, ferry loading, and other uses.

But even on paper, the plans are radically different. And each of them has a major flaw that may prevent either from ever actually turning the decrepit and collapsing Maine State Pier into something other than an ugly remnant of Portland’s working waterfront.

Olympia’s plan shows full-color vistas, including a projected view from the intersection of Commercial Street and the Franklin Arterial that has a wide grassy swath leading down to the water between curved building facades and a clean, convenient ramp for cars to get on the Casco Bay Lines ferries. (Imagine! the picture seems to say aloud, if you could see the water from Commercial Street without looking through dingy alleys or vast parking lots!) This is a view to kill for.

Ocean Properties opens its plan with a three-color sketch of a big-box-store-like “public market” (see the sidebar for why the gov’s bro says this one won’t fail) with an 80-car parking lot right in front of it. Real nice. Just what we need — another parking lot smack on the waterfront. To make matters worse, Olympia’s view from Commercial and Franklin all the way down to the water is, in Ocean’s plan, a 350-space parking garage (that brick facing will look great).

For one project, the parking makes everything ugly; for the other, there’s no such worry. It makes choosing easy for the public, and for councilors, right? Not so fast.

Parking is precisely the difference between the two projects: Ocean Properties’ plan includes that giant garage and the street-level parking lot, for a total of 430 parking spaces, of the 608 the project would use at peak capacity under city guidelines. (The city allows developers to build fewer spaces than their projects would appear to require.) This will no doubt be the subject of major community objection, because parking is ugly.

Olympia’s proposal doesn’t raise that kind of concern. It’s a beautiful plan, but partly because it has no parking at all. Well, that’s not entirely fair. Olympia’s plan does include an unspecified but very small number of “short-term on street parking” spaces for people to drop off or pick up ferry passengers, or pop into some of the businesses in the new development. But the company admits its project would use 440 parking spaces at peak demand under current city guidelines, which would require the company to build as many as 220 new ones as part of the project.

The company has, however, set aside $13 million to spend finding parking, possibly, its proposal says, “with long term leases in either the Casco Bay Lines Garage or the Ocean Gateway Garage.”

That’s a nice idea. Except that the Casco Bay Parking Garage (which is not owned by Casco Bay Lines) has a seven-year-long waiting list to get even one reserved parking space. And the 700-plus-space Ocean Gateway Garage is not yet built, but is sized to accommodate the tenants and visitors in the Ocean Gateway project, so relying on that garage to lease out a large portion of its spaces may be a bit wishful.

The only remaining option will be — you guessed it — building a parking garage. Thirteen million is plenty for a big one: at the going rate of between $15,000 and $20,000 per space to build a parking garage, it could be between 650 and 870 spaces — significantly larger than the city-owned Spring Street garage next to the Cumberland County Civic Center, which has just over 500 spaces.

So Portlanders — and specifically the city councilors — are left to decide between an ugly-but-practical project backed by big names that will not significantly improve Portland’s waterfront aesthetics, or a beautiful project that will require a big shiny new parking garage somewhere nearby. Where, exactly, would it go? That’s a choice we can all look forward to.

Failed suburban paper tries again in the city

Published in the Portland Phoenix

A branch of the Portland Press Herald that couldn’t keep a weekly newspaper afloat in the suburbs has shifted to a new publication geared to compete directly with the Portland Phoenix.

As described, the new paper will be what the industry refers to as a “faux alt” — a “youth-oriented” weekly that attempts to imitate genuine alternative papers such as the Phoenix. A press release announcing the change says the new publication will include coverage of the local arts scene, as well as “household tips and repair ideas . . ., budget tips, . . . (and) recipes” targeted at 27- to 37-year-old people living between Brunswick and Old Orchard Beach, and inland from Portland to Windham.

Similar efforts by other daily-newspaper companies around the country have resulted in terrible failures, including the closure of the Miami Herald’s Street Weekly in January 2005, after six years of financial losses. And this January, the Tampa Tribune’s attempt, Orange, folded after just 20 weeks of publication. Industry statistics show that daily newspaper readership is nose-diving — especially among younger audiences. These faux alts are an admitted marketing ploy to deliver younger readers to advertisers.

The Press Herald has tried before: in the early ’90s (going up against the alternative Casco Bay Weekly in its heyday) the daily planned Go magazine as a stand-alone publication, but after suffering low newsrack pickup, it was demoted to an entertainment insert in the Thursday Press Herald. And in the summer of 2006, there was the Old Port Times, an advertorial product covering Portland night life that appeared briefly and has never again been heard from.

The staff of the new paper will be substantially the same staff as worked at the Community Leader, a three-year-old effort by a division of the Press Herald to attack the Forecaster (owned by the Lewiston Sun Journal, making the Leader part of a daily newspaper battle-by-proxy) in its home turf of Falmouth and Freeport.

In a letter to readers in last week’s final edition of the Community Leader, its publisher — who is keeping his job — outright admitted that former readers and advertisers “are in good hands with the Press Herald and our competitive publishers” — meaning the Forecaster and the Sun Journal won, hands down.

The new weekly publication’s name reflects the Press Herald’s apparent plan: Switch. And while the paper, like its daily parent, will likely depend at least in part on sources answering questions over the phone, Switch’s top brass appear to be following the Press Herald execs’ lead on handling calls they get from reporters — which is not to return them at all.

Portland Phoenix, the best in New England!

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The Portland Phoenix had its best year ever at the New England Press Association (NEPA) awards banquet on Saturday, taking home 15 awards, including 10 for first place.

We also scored the New England-wide contest’s highest honor — George A. Speers Newspaper of the Year, awarded for overall excellence in editorial content and presentation.

Our advertising and production departments won first place in Advertising General Excellence, the highest honor given for those departments.

Both Portland Phoenix staff and freelancers won first place in Local Election Coverage, for reporting on the 2005 election.

Freelancer LANCE TAPLEY won first place in Government Reporting, for “Burning Money” (February 17, 2006), about how the state failed to negotiate bulk-discount prices for its Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides heating oil to poor and elderly Mainers. Tapley also won second place in Investigative Reporting, for his ongoing series on torture in the Maine State Prison’s Supermax unit.

Former staff writer SARA DONNELLY won first place in History Reporting for “Record Keepers” (September 1, 2005), her coverage of Portland historians’ efforts to preserve local artifacts and information. Donnelly also won second place in General News for “Grass Roots Fire Fight” (June 9, 2006), a look at the Maine Green Party’s internal conflicts and struggle to survive.

Freelance writer WHIT RICHARDSON won first place in Sports Reporting for “Sky Society” (July 14, 2006), which profiled the culture of Portland’s Ultimate Frisbee-playing community.

Managing editor JEFF INGLIS won first place in the General News category for “Armory Arts Center” (January 6, 2006), a story envisioning what could become the future of the abandoned South Portland armory. (The building has since been purchased by the city of South Portland and turned into a garage for city trucks and general storage space, as the city council attempts to determine a long-term plan for the building.)

Our advertising and production staff won several awards, as well.

They had a clean sweep of the Local Ad — Color category, taking first, second, and third places. And they won first place in Advertising Campaign, first place in Local Ad — Black-and-White, and second place in Self-Promotion.

Celebrating a year-long effort — alone

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Moes Haven, an alt-rock duo who are just as happy to write and record admittedly “terrible” songs as they are to create good ones, have completed their year-long project of recording a 30-minute album for every day of 2006 (see “An Album A Day,” by Dana Jones, January 13, 2006).

To mark the accomplishment, Matt Farley, one of the band’s two members, will taking a week off work, between February 2 and 10, and listening to his own music (182.5 hours of it) for eight days straight. Farley’s goal is to sit through every song of 2006, in order, without leaving his apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire.

For obvious reasons, he expects to be alone for almost the entire time — except for weekends, when his Moes Haven partner, Tom Scalzo, will make the trip up from Boston to play video games and listen.

Farley has invited members of the media to the party — including representatives of the Portland Phoenix, Late Show with David Letterman, The New York Times, and publications based as far away as Texas, as well as friends and family. “I don’t expect anyone to come,” he says. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a shock: Farley plans to sleep through much of the music himself.

“I have a five-disc changer,” Farley says, noting that he can fit two 30-minute albums onto a single CD. “I can sleep through up to five hours at a time,” before having to wake up and reload the CD changer.

But the effort to create has always been more of what drives Moes Haven than any prospect of what others might define as success. They make “a little money” every month from people who buy selections from their 313-song selection on iTunes. (Farley notes the irony of “strangers paying us to listen to our songs, while our friends and family tell us to turn them off.”)

No one need worry about a live show. “We don’t even know how to play most of our songs,” having written and recorded most of them fairly quickly, and moved on almost immediately to the next.

Next up — apart from a 16-track professionally mastered collection of their best songs from 2006, Victory Is Ours (For Now), due out perhaps in time for the listening party, or shortly thereafter — is a five-year self-imposed silence.

To keep fans on the hook, though, after three years, the group will make some live recordings of new songs and secretly stash them between the pages of books in libraries around New England, as detailed in the last cut on the album that showcases the best songs they wrote in December. It’s called “Moes Haven’s Five Year Plan,” and describes what the band hope will become a popular treasure hunt for their newest material. If history is any predictor, the band’s members will be the only ones to hear nearly all of those songs, too.

On the Web
Moes Havens: moeshaven.com

Phoenix freelancer honored by Maine lawyers

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Lance Tapley, a longtime freelancer for the Portland Phoenix, has been honored with the Excellence in Legal Journalism Award from the Maine State Bar Association, recognizing his work investigating inmate abuse at the Maine State Prison. Tapley will be honored at a dinner next week.

Tapley’s prison features — the first installment of which won first place in the long-form-news-story category in the nationwide competition held by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2006 — has continued for more than a year. The Portland Phoenix series has exposed physical and psychological torture of prisoners by guards, the failure of prison officials to care for mentally ill inmates, the unfulfilled promises of top-level state administrators to make reforms, and efforts by staff in the office of the state’s attorney general to obstruct court orders seeking to improve inmate treatment.

Mainers lead coverage in Mexico and Minnesota

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It might be a bit early to plan your spring break, but whether you head for the snowdrifts of the Great Lakes states or the sun of coastal Mexico, Mainers are already there, set to help you figure out how best to spend your time.

Chris Harte, a former publisher of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram (when they were owned by Guy Gannett), will soon take up the reins as chairman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Minnesota’s largest daily newspaper, after the surprise December 26 announcement that paper would be sold to an investment firm Harte helps lead.

The paper’s previous owners, the California-based McClatchy Company, made news last year by purchasing 12 newspapers from the Knight Ridder newspaper company, for which Harte also worked in the late 1980s.

Harte, an heir to the Texas-based Harte-Hanks newspaper fortune, who lives in Cumberland Foreside and has an office in downtown Portland, is a major investor in the rapidly growing Current Publishing weekly-newspaper empire in Southern Maine. The group he is working with on the Star-Tribune deal also bid on the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which became available as part of the McClatchy-Knight Ridder deal, but ended up not being the winning bidder.

In warmer climes, Aran Shetterly (a Maine native and brother of Phoenix columnist Caitlin Shetterly) and his wife Margot Lee Shetterly have launched what may be the key to the mother of all spring-break trips: Inside Mexico, a monthly magazine for English-reading residents of, and visitors to, our southern neighbor.

To date, the magazine has put out two issues, which have included news and features about English-speakers in Mexico, with an emphasis on improving the quality of readers’ lives in that country. Articles have included tips on how to make sure your American-bought car is legal to drive in Mexico, tips for understanding Mexican politics, traditional recipes, and explanations of cultural icons.

The Shetterlys say there are more English speakers in Mexico than the entire population of Maine, and are distributing the paper in urban and tourist centers throughout the country and in PDF form online (at insidemex.com) to reach as many of them as possible.

Check them out before booking your clothing-optional solar pilgrimage, and make sure their bar and restaurant listings expand from Mexico City to the coast. You wouldn’t want to miss the hottest spots west of Havana.

Media discussion on Maine Impact podcast

Distributed on the Maine Impact podcast

Ideas from away: Forget Yankee independence — try imported ingenuity

Published in the Portland Phoenix

There is plenty of energy in Portland to make this a better place to live, work, and create. Groups from neighborhood associations to local businesses to city leaders are dreaming up schemes that, while untested, seem — at least to their supporters — like they might be good ideas.

But we don’t need to make these efforts entirely on our own, despite New England’s leave-me-alone-I’ll-do-it-myself tradition. Other communities face problems similar to ours, and have come up with ways to solve them that could work as well here.

Homeless cleaners
There are plenty of folks who could use some on-and-off work around Portland. Some of them are panhandlers (some are even the regulars, like the guy whose car seems to be forever out of gas on the other side of the Casco Bay Bridge, or any of the folks who ask you for some cash despite the fact that they asked you — and you gave — just an hour ago). Others have various physical or mental problems that make getting or keeping a job difficult or impossible.

And there’s plenty of litter lying around, from cigarette butts to food wrappers, broken glass, or winter clothing cast off in our “mid-winter” heat wave.

Palo Alto, California, has put these problems together in ways that combat both. The city’s downtown-business promotion association (their equivalent of Portland’s Downtown District) has hired a person (a formerly homeless man) to find and train homeless people to sweep the sidewalks, pick up trash, and weed and plant in public gardens, in exchange for housing, food, and job-skills training. The group, called the DOWNTOWN STREETS TEAM, has been going since May 2005, and has already contracted with the city’s public works department to maintain athletic fields on weekends.

After several months in the program, participants — who are selected based on their expressed desire to find permanent housing and work — are “certified” by the program as job-ready. Eighteen former team members have landed jobs, and several downtown Palo Alto businesses (as well as the usual government and nonprofit agencies) are actively involved in funding the effort.

Prima Vera
The all-ages “scene” in Portland is a sad joke. For years, youth-targeted concerts have been relegated to Sunday afternoon shows at the Big Easy and the odd punk/metal gig at the Station or Asylum. Outside of that, young bands and fans need to get their rock off in ugly halls intended for banquets and church meetings or give in to the only other reliable late-night option: Denny’s. This eternal shortcoming of Portland’s arts community not only breeds boredom and discontent, but the aimless loitering that gives kids a bad rap with their elders. It’s a depressing cycle of mutual resentment, and the blame lies squarely on a town that offers these kids no worthwhile venue to release their creative energy.

This isn’t merely a local concern, but one that’s repeated in small towns and booming metropolises across the country. At least one major city came up with something to do about it: the Vera Project was founded in Seattle in 2000, inspired by a legendary ALL-AGES VENUE of the same name in Holland. Vera’s dual purpose is to provide consistent and positive nightlife for city youth, and, more importantly, foster a creative, cooperative environment for young people. Aside from hosting all-ages concerts every weekend, the Vera Project is also home to punk-rock yoga and break-dancing classes, a screen-printing studio, an art gallery, and open classroom space. The Project is close to raising the $1.8 million needed to build a new home for these events and more, including a recording studio for young bands to record demos and albums.

More than merely a noble idea, the Vera Project has been well received and well supported by Seattle’s youth. More than 17,000 kids attend Vera Project events each year, and more than a thousand have used its other programs and facilities. Portland has an empty Public Market complex and more empty storefronts popping up by the month. It’s time to pony up, put one of those new condos on hold, and give the kids something to do. The next generation of Portland’s arts community will thank you.

Street art, for real
The People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, inspired by an effort from the Other Portland, has put art out on the street in an apparently successful effort to slow traffic at a dangerous intersection. Though you’d think those yellow and red lights would be enough, they’re clearly not, for us or for Mass-holes. A MURAL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD at High and Congress streets could slow cars down, helping out the cyclists and pedestrians trying to make their pilgrimages around the Arts District.

It would also help support a local artist, though we’ll want to choose the artist carefully so as to find someone nimble enough to leap away from the cars while the painting is being created. (It probably has to be a painting — the giant sculpture of Longfellow that is effectively in the middle of the State and Congress intersection hasn’t slowed cars there at all.)

Party, party — and party
Maine’s third-party endeavors are among the strongest in the nation, but they’re still handicapped by a major problem seen most recently in this year’s gubernatorial election: casting a vote for a third-party candidate risks “throwing away” a vote for a centrist candidate who actually has a shot at winning. Greens hate it because it cuts their returns; Dems hate it because if the Greens pull enough lefties away, the GOP might come out on top; Republicans love it because it gives them their best shot at holding statewide office.

Let’s take a page from Ireland, a very strong democracy with a vibrant multi-party system, and institute the SINGLE TRANSFERABLE VOTE. People vote for their first choices, even if those candidates have no real shot at winning, but without throwing away their general preference for more centrist candidates. You rank the candidates in order, and the vote is tabulated according to a few simple rules: nobody can win without an actual majority of the votes; candidates who come in last have their supporters’ votes transferred to the next-highest candidates on the supporters’ ballots; if nobody wins a majority outright, the process of eliminating the last-place person continues until someone actually gets a majority and is declared the winner.

In this year’s gubernatorial election, incumbent Democrat John Baldacci “won” with 38 percent of the vote. Collectively, the three third-party candidates came in second, beating Republican Chandler Woodcock by 8000 votes.

Sadly, we’ll never know how many people voted for Baldacci not because they liked him, but to forestall a Woodcock win. What if those folks could have said, “My preference is for [Barbara Merrill or Pat LaMarche or Phillip Morris NaPier] to win, but if the vote totals show that person is coming in last, my second choice is Baldacci” — or one of the other independents, putting Baldacci in as third choice.

Perhaps enough folks would have supported Merrill or LaMarche to elect the first female governor in Maine’s history, rather than what we have now: a lame-duck governor with no mandate or political capital to get anything done, even within his own party.

Get on the bus
Lots of cities around the country, and even ski areas in rural Maine, pay for (or find sponsors for) buses to take people to and from nightlife destinations. On Mount Desert Island, LL Bean funds a shuttle service that cuts pollution and traffic. Here in Portland, NIGHTLIFE SHUTTLE BUSES could take party-goers around the Old Port and even into the West End, Deering, and the Hill as the night wore on, helping the poor, beleaguered police clear the crowds from Wharf Street in summertime, and in winter saving the rest of us from searching snowbanks for upended drinking buddies who have lost their way.

It would cut drunk driving, give the city’s bus service a much-needed revenue boost (not to mention actual riders), and help everyone have a better time. Maybe, if the bar owners had any free cash after paying their bar-stool taxes, licensing fees, and other city-required costs, they might voluntarily pony up to help their customers get around the city better.

Dial-a-meter
It sucks, hoping for a green ticket. You slid in on the end of someone else’s time, and don’t have any change. But — of course! — you have your cell phone.

In Denver, you can PAY YOUR PARKING METER ON YOUR CELL PHONE, by calling a toll-free number. Then you punch in your parking space’s number and how much time you want to stay. It costs $5.95 a year, plus a 10-percent premium on parking fees (so, here, that 25-cent fee for 15 minutes would jump to 27.5 cents, and $2-an-hour would become $2.20).

Heck, the city could save money in its parking garages by using this system, too — instead of paying those folks to sit in the booth (and they’re never there when I’m trying to leave, anyway), we could pay them to ticket scofflaws in the garage.

Cities love it because, with no way to know if anybody left money in the meter, every person who parks has to pay. But parkers win too: you can pay as you go, without running outside to keep the meter happy. (Of course, feeding the meter beyond the per-spot time limit is technically illegal, but if you think you have 15 minutes’ worth of errands and find it’s taking longer, you can up your payment without leaving the line at the bank.)

And you can get a text message reminding you when your meter is almost up. A possible pitfall: maybe the meter maid will get one too, saying “Check spot 17 on Congress — it has five minutes to go.”

Already happening: Artists working together
Here’s an idea I’d love to claim as my own. But it’s already happening, so I missed my chance.
Inspired by similar shops in other cities, Michelle Rose-Larochelle has opened the PORTLAND ARTIST’S CO-OP in the old Smoothie King space on Temple Street. Thirteen artists are exhibiting work — and all have sold at least one piece in the couple weeks the co-op has been open — and Rose-Larochelle is looking for as many as 30 more.

A jeweler with years of experience working in and managing retail stores for creative works, Rose-Larochelle wants to find local artists willing to work hard at making a living from their creativity.

There’s no need for a super-professional “audition”-type presentation. Just drop her a line, with the subject “Portland Artist’s Co-op,'" to set up a time to stop by with your work — no lighthouses, please.

In exchange for helping with a share of the costs and maybe a once-a-month gig behind the cash register, artists get retail display space and a piece of group-marketing efforts to local, regional, and national buyers, including boutiques and galleries.

It has come together quite quickly, and Rose-Larochelle admits the post-holiday timing could be better. But the Smoothie King space opened up, and she said to her husband, painter Chris Larochelle, “Let’s get it out here and show people it can be done.”

The lease is short-term for the moment — solid only through the end of January — but if more artists (and customers!) participate, she’ll stay. And if not there, “It’ll work someplace,” says Rose-Larochelle, who has already been contacted by a local real-estate company interested in helping find her a permanent space.

The space itself is a big step up from Rose-Larochelle’s garage-gallery in their home in Camp Ellis, open nights and weekends during the summer. If she stays, she wants to use the former kitchen and storage space behind and upstairs from the retail floor as art studios. (Bonus: snacks and smoothie “booster” nutrient supplements are still on the shelves, for those late-night screen-printing marathons.)

This is the first step in Rose-Larochelle’s art-entrepreneur dreams. She wants to start an every-Sunday art festival (based on similar events in London) all along Temple Street with artists making and selling work, musicians performing, and shoppers hitting the downtown at what is now a super-dead time of the week. Rose-Larochelle says that’s just one piece of making Portland’s downtown much more active, by expanding hours shops and restaurants are open to give people who want to spend money places to do it right here.

“We’ve got to make it more appealing for shoppers,” she says. She said it.

Christopher Gray and Meaghan Donaghy contributed to this story.

Selling support

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Carolyn Gillis, a Falmouth mother who attracted national notice in 2004 for founding ClassroomClassifieds.org — a Web site with a yard-sale motif, where families can sell off their junk and donate some of the profit to benefit the town’s public schools — is broadening her reach. Gillis, who has since set up a similar site for the Westbrook schools, has just expanded the model to ClassifiedCircles.org, which channels money to charities in Maine and around the country.

The seller posts info about an item for sale, including a suggested price, and designates a charity from a list of about a dozen (ranging from the hyper-local Another Chance Animal Rescue in South Berwick to the globally minded StopGlobalWarming.org), and chooses a percentage of the sale price that will be donated — from one percent to the full sale price.

Prospective buyers can search for specific items or by product category or, curiously, by the charity they wish to help. Based on the sample ads (all five of them, which are the only postings on the site as of now), a person who wanted to support StopGlobalWarming.org would have to love the water, because the only items offered on that charity’s behalf are a $60,000 sailboat (with half the money to the group), or a $75 kayak (25 percent donated). An animal-rescue fan has a choice of buying a $3000 baby grand piano or, well, nothing. (Anyone can donate directly to the charities through links on the site, and Gillis doesn’t take any cut.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody tried to sell a piece of toast branded with the image of the Virgin Mary, and GoldenPalace.com (a Web-based casino, which apparently has a collection of such artifacts) shelled out $28,000 for the holy bread and sent a sizeable percentage to a nonprofit along the way? Seems to happen all the time on that other online auction site, whose name we just can’t remember right now.