The 100 Carry Project: 12

Published on The 100 Carry Project website

Let's start with the numbers. Armen's five years younger than me (which is maybe five years crazier) and a good 40 pounds lighter than me. Look, I'm just 185, but it's really something to think about a guy smaller than me schlepping me around like that.

Other things: When I'm done with exercise or a bike ride or mowing the lawn or something, I'm usually bathed in sweat, which I am now, too. It's not all mine, though, and there's something about that - not anything gross, because we came by it honestly - but in terms of comingling of selves.

I had thought, when I first heard of this project, that being carried might be a sort of passive thing - that I might be as a sack of rice or a barrel of flour or an animal carcass being carried home from a market somewhere. But it's not - which I cottoned on to after reading a few of the earlier posts here. So I knew it would be an active endeavor, but even so I didn't know how active it would be for me.

I'm pretty exhausted, and still breathing hard now 30 minutes after the carry ended. The discomfort and exertion never really went away in the 80 or so minutes I clung to Armen as we labored up the hill, down the hill, through the flat, back up the hill, and back down it.

Then there were the other options, always just beside us.

As the carry started, a bus pulled up to a bus stop as we were walking by. Even then my body was tempted - my mind said I should give this effort a real try, though, so I did. Next we passed a U-Haul van being loaded up, and I realized there was space in there for us, too. I think another bus went by before we got to city hall, and then when we were in Monument Square there were two huge stretch limos in the middle of the square. One drove out past us as we began the return leg. Coming back past city hall again, a bus stopped to let some people off, and the driver waited for us to walk up even with the entrance door - maybe she thought we'd climb aboard. She called out to us something about getting a back injury, but we kept going.

By then - actually rather well before then - the world had shrunk down to my body, Armen's body, and the 10 or so feet immediately in front of us.

My job was really just to hang on as tightly as I could - basically keeping the connection between us, so Armen could put his energy into moving us forward.

A few people commented as we went past, looking upon our effort as amusement or fun or exercise - and yet we were struggling, working, in pain. I'm mostly still not sure how Armen did it - I am not sure I could carry him that distance. On the other hand, that's some of what this project is about - to suggest to me that indeed I could, if I put my mind to it, even though good sense, logic, even sanity might suggest otherwise.

One thing that helped me - and Armen said it helped him too - was that early on in the carry, I'm not really sure where exactly, I remembered a strategy I had used to keep myself moving on a high-altitude trek in Nepal several years back. With every step, no matter how small a step nor how long after the next, I would recite another syllable of the Buddhist chant carved into rocks all along the trail: Om Mani Padme Hum. I told Armen about it, and when things got really rough on the way back, I chanted aloud to him - and with him, sometimes, when he wasn't needing every ounce of oxygen for his back and legs - and that did help us keep moving, and it helped me find a rhythm to hanging onto him.


We were able to do it - we set out to do it, and we did it. Now we will see what we learned. I wonder, you 11 others who have been carried before, what do you think about the carry now - days, weeks, maybe months from when it happened? I guess I'll see in a while. For now, I'm tired, sore, and curious.

Shifting sands: The real lesson of the Desert of Maine

Published in the Portland Phoenix

If you want to know what the future holds, take a ride up to the Desert of Maine in Freeport. It’s simultaneously an example of how badly we humans have been wrecking the Earth over the past few centuries, and a sign of hope that maybe the planet will recover after all.
The desert, a Freeport “tourist destination” which has been featured in the New York Times and on the Discovery and Travel channels, can teach a few lessons about nature, but it is not quite the “natural” geological marvel that the marketing materials might suggest.
Fortunately, the video on the Web site gives us a couple hints: back in the 1700s, desert owner Gary Currens cheerfully explains, “it was actually productive farmland for several years, and then” — this is where the hints come — “between the clear-cutting, bringing sheep in, not rotating the crops proper [sic], sand all of a sudden started appearing.”
In the middle of explaining how all this sand, deposited by glaciers, began “appearing,” Gary, in the video (and a tour guide at the place itself), admits what you have started to suspect: “the topsoil was eroding.”
Yes, the “Desert of Maine,” the 50-acre swath of sand that would otherwise be forest, was “uncovered” by irresponsibly exploitative land-management practices that resulted in the erosion of thousands of years’ accumulation of topsoil in roughly a century, leaving behind a barren landscape that is, nevertheless, slowly being reclaimed by the forest around it.
The booklets, posters, and Web site call the sand — which once covered nearly 300 acres of former-farmland, and which may in places be as much as a mile deep — a “natural phenomenon,” but what’s most “natural” about this barren expanse in the middle of the Maine woods is that it’s Nature’s warning to any of us who might seek to exploit the land and its bounty. Without care, the blowing sands show us, we’ll lose everything and have to leave.

Wrecking the land
The story goes like this: a big huge glacier moved through Maine about 20,000 years ago, crushing stones beneath itself, leaving behind a sand-like silt with finer grains that you would encounter on an average Maine beach. Between the time the glacier retreated, leaving the sand on the surface, and the late 18th century, the land got relatively little use and was colonized by mosses and lichens, small plants, bushes, and eventually trees, as Maine’s forest expanded to cover most of the state. Roughly eight inches to a foot of fertile topsoil gradually accumulated in this area of the forest.
In 1797, the Tuttle family moved to the 300-acre parcel and raised potatoes, vegetables, hay, apples, and cattle. The family cut trees from the property to create fields and to sell as building lumber and firewood. As the trees departed, so did their root structures, which had played a major role in anchoring the top soil. The Tuttles next brought in sheep to raise for their wool. The sheep grazed very close to the ground, as sheep do, and pulled much of the grass out by the roots. To make matters worse, their hooves cut into the topsoil, loosening it up.
That is when the sand “started appearing,” and when things began to go wrong for the Tuttles. As one of the tour guides told it on a recent afternoon, the family cut down some of the last big trees on the property to use the branches to cover the sandy spots, in a vain effort to halt the erosion. You’ve spotted the rub, though: while they might have slowed erosion where they put the limbs, those last few trees were anchoring other topsoil, which soon sloughed away in spring thaws and summer rains. The sand took over completely.
After the Tuttles gave up and abandoned the place, a few opportunistic entrepreneurs got interested in this much-abused land. One bought it in hopes of selling the sand to brickmakers, but the silt was too fine and the bricks wouldn’t hold together. He, in turn, sold it to a man who wanted to make it a tourist attraction back in 1925, and so it has been ever since.

Preserving the sand
The sand, geologists now know, lies under the topsoil throughout much of Maine, New Hampshire, and even most of the northeastern United States — if it was covered by a glacier during the last ice age, there’s likely sand down there somewhere. (How deep the sand is, and how much topsoil has accumulated on top of it, varies widely.)
As a tourist attraction, the value of the desert is in the exposed sand, so the property has remained largely unchanged by humans for about 80 years. In that time, nature has begun to do what it did after the glacier receded: the mosses and lichens are coming back, the remaining trees are dropping leaves and needles that decompose, seeds are blowing in from nearby plants, and the forest is retaking the sand.
One guide grew up nearby and first worked at the desert in 1961 at the age of 13; after an adult life doing other things, he returned to the desert a couple years back. He recalls the sand covering much more area back then, and marveled at the forest’s return, and that the wind had uncovered some farming equipment buried by sand after the Tuttles abandoned the property. (The sand has also drifted to cover a small shelter built near a spring in the 1930s, where visitors could sit in the shade and have a cool drink of fresh water. But that part of the tour is pretty anti-climatic, as you get to look at a large pile of sand and try to imagine a building underneath it.)
What’s more interesting — and what could one day become the real focus of their efforts — is this recovery, which simultaneously shows both how vulnerable our ecosystem is if we mistreat it, and how resilient it can be if we just leave it the hell alone.



Desert Of Maine | 95 Desert Rd, Freeport | daily 8:30 am-5:30 pm; tours on the half hour 9 am-4 pm | $8.75, ages 13-16 $6.25, ages 5-12 $5.25 | 207.865.6962 | www.desertofmaine.com

A night in Guantánamo: Staying in a replica cell, with no waterboarding included

Published in the Portland Phoenix (with an excerpt in the Boston Phoenix); reprinted in the Orlando Weekly

First thing in the morning, a man stopped at my door, leaned in, looked me square in the eye, called me “a piece of shit,” and spat on my floor. I tried not to take it personally.

I was in a prison cell and wearing a day-glo-orange inmate’s jumpsuit, sitting on a thin mat, where I had sat and slept intermittently — and uncomfortably — through the preceding seven hours.

Amnesty International brought the cell to Portland’s Monument Square and arranged several days of events about the offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, last week to draw attention to the 270 or so inmates still held there, and to highlight the support of some of Maine’s congressional delegation for suspending the legal rights of inmates there, most of whom have never been charged with any crime.

I’d volunteered to spend the night in the replica cell (which is modeled on the ones at Gitmo, which are very like the standard isolation units used in US “supermax” prisons) because we’ve all heard stories about unlivable conditions at Gitmo but can’t come close to imagining what it must be like to live for as long as seven years in a small box with little contact with the outside world, and even less hope of release. I hoped my few hours of simulated incarceration — even without the alleged abuse visited on Gitmo “detainees” by US service personnel — would help me appreciate the nightmare those prisoners endure.

When I first entered the cell, I sized things up. I could take three normal-size steps from side to side, four from the door to the bed; a “lap” around it involved 12 reasonably normal-sized steps. With my arms outstretched to the sides, I could touch the walls; reaching up, I could touch the ceiling with my stocking feet flat on the floor. Lying on the raised platform that served as my bed, my head touched one wall and my feet pressed against the other. The walls and ceiling were white; the toilet/sink fixture by the door was stainless steel; the floor was gray. There was one small window — easily covered by my forearm — by the bed and another in the door.

I was already in the jumpsuit, so I sat on the thin sleeping mat, got out my iPod, put in the earbuds, selected the “Gitmo” playlist, and turned the volume up. (The guards play a wide selection of American music — though mostly dark heavy stuff like Drowning Pool and Marilyn Manson — at high volume, at all hours, as a form of psychological torture for the prisoners.)

I read from the Koran, opening it at random and finding the 36th sûrah (chapter), entitled “Yâ Sîn,” or “O Man.” According to the annotation in my copy, that chapter is often recited by Muslims at times of adversity, to sustain their faith. At one point in the text, a group of believers approaches a city of non-believers to try to convert them: “(The people of the city) said: we augur ill of you. If ye desist not, we shall surely stone you, and grievous torture will befall you at our hands.” But, Allah explains through the prophet Mohammed, whatever suffering his followers must endure will be relieved if they stick to their faith, while those who did the torturing will be condemned to burn in hell. After a few readings, I found my hope rising and my discomfort decreasing, even though I am not a Muslim.

I also read — for the first of three times that night — a book of poems written by Guantánamo inmates, seeking a sense of what they feel and think. Despite great discomfort, hardship, and fear, some inmates are able to transcend themselves and their situation and find hope, and dreams, and a sort of freedom.

It’s really far worse
My night was only a tiny taste of what the detainees held at Guantánamo experience. The most obvious difference, of course, was that I spent just over seven hours in a replica of a cell sitting in downtown Portland. Many of the inmates have spent more like seven years in real cells in a remote base in Cuba. By comparison, my imprisonment was soft time.

A Portland police officer sat in his patrol car outside, mostly to protect the cell itself and its accompanying gear (a generator, electronic equipment, parts of a disassembled information booth), but I took comfort in his presence, knowing that if any harm befell me, aid would be nearby. The Gitmo detainees have their own uniformed, armed guards, but they are as likely to be their tormentors as their rescuers.

It was mostly dark in my cell, though a few streetlights shined in. Some detainees’ lawyers claim their clients are suffering permanent psychological damage because the lights in their cells have been kept on 24 hours a day for years.

I was warm and not hungry, equipped with a sleeping bag and fortified with a good meal at home before going into the cell; the inmates get blankets if they’re lucky and regularly complain about both the quantity and the quality of food served at Gitmo.

I could control the volume on my iPod (and I confess to skipping a couple songs); the detainees can neither control the volume nor prevent a guard from playing one song over and over for hours on end, as happened on at least one occasion with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” from their 1991 eponymous album.

But the biggest difference, the one that really made it possible for me (a somewhat sane person who functions fairly well in this weird world) to handle my time inside, was this: I knew when I would eventually leave. The men held in Guantánamo don’t. Even those who have been declared not dangerous, not worth holding, whose arrests and incarceration are acknowledged mistakes, are held for months before being finally released. One man, Maher Rafat al-Quwari, has been cleared for release since February 2007, but as a Palestinian with no passport or other national paperwork, he has nowhere to go, so he stays in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.

Without a future

I thought about what it would take to close the prison. Calls for just that have come from such high Bush administration officials as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and even the president himself, as well as both major-party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. And yet it remains open, stalled at best by the practical difficulties of moving terrorism suspects into other prisons, or, at worst, held up by people who may not mean what they say.

Maine’s DC delegation is split on the issue: Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic representative Mike Michaud voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. [Please see clarification, below.] It recreated a kangaroo-court show-trial system for “trying” detainees in front of military judges (after a nearly identical arrangement created by the Pentagon was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 2006), and granted the US government the power to indefinitely imprison anyone — even US citizens — without charging them with a crime, and without ever bringing them before an independent civilian judge. Democratic representative Tom Allen opposed it; Republican senator Olympia Snowe didn’t vote, but later voted to overturn some of its harsher provisions.

And then there was that passerby who spit into my cell. I wondered if his attitude, amplified by the isolation of being stationed at a remote military base, and inflated by being allowed to carry large automatic weapons, might turn him into a rage-filled guard who just might do some of the things prisoners have described.

I wanted to judge him, to accuse him of insensitivity, of sympathizing with those who abuse and torture inmates. But I know as little about that man as we Americans do about the people held at Guantánamo Bay. I don’t know his name, and can tell you only the very basic outline of what he did. Without talking to him, without finding out why he did it, or where inside him that feeling came from, I cannot honestly “convict” him of anything more serious than common rudeness.

He walks free, though, so I’m less worried about him. The men in Guantánamo do not. Whatever they may be suspected of, why they were arrested, has never been made public, nor have the results of any subsequent investigations. Little wonder, then, that they have not been convicted of anything either. Justice has been slow in coming, and for some, may never arrive — at least four of them have committed suicide since the camp opened, and at least 40 of them have attempted it, often repeatedly.

Five others, among the most high-profile ones, appear to be seeking death another way. The morning I left the cell, they went in front of a military judge, in a proceeding that was widely criticized by lawyers and other observers for its departure from common legal standards (such as preventing co-defendants from talking to each other). After they were told what charges were being laid against them for their alleged involvement in the attacks of September 11, 2001, some of them said they wanted to be “martyred,” apparently asking for the death penalty. But like their fellow inmates, they wait.

I did, too. As people walked by throughout the night, some looked in, a few asked me what I was doing; others didn’t seem to notice the cell was even there, much less occupied. It was impossible to know what they thought.

I thought of the young men, some as young as 14, kidnapped from the streets of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and sold to US troops as alleged terrorists for thousands of dollars in reward money, who now sit, as I did, in small cells awaiting the next dawn. And when I became cold, tired, and cramped, I reminded myself that they are enduring worse and suffering more. Their fortitude was a thin, cold comfort, but it gave me strength.

Visions from inside
Inmates’ smuggled words show pain, frustration

I discovered during my time in the cell that it is possible to look for so long at one spot — on the floor, the wall, the ceiling — that the spot actually disappears from view. With enough uninterrupted time — or enough detachment from the brutality of the “real world” — it must be possible to make everything you can see just disappear.

What appears in its place? We know some answers, courtesy of the men held at Guantánamo. They have, with the help of their lawyers, published fragments of poetry shedding light on their thoughts, dreams, and visions.

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, published last year by the University of Iowa Press, includes 22 poems that made it past the US military’s censors. The one that struck me most deeply, in the middle of the night as I read the poems aloud to myself, was “O Prison Darkness,” by an author identified only by his first name, Abdulaziz. It ends with these lines.
Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable,
They will shatter.
Those who persist will attain their goal;
Those who keep knocking shall gain entry.
O crisis, intensify!
The morning is about to break forth.

Playlist
These were some of the songs I listened to while in the cell. My selections were based on reporting by Spin, Mother Jones, the BBC, the New York Times, Time, Transcultural Music Review, and FBI documents, all of which listed songs or bands played by soldiers at Guantánamo, usually at very high volumes, as a way to break down detainees’ psychological defenses.
“Soldier Like Me (Return of the Soulja),” 2Pac & Eminem, Loyal to the Game, 2004
“Don’t Get Mad, Get Even,” Aerosmith, Pump, 1989
“Dirrty,” Christina Aguilera featuring Redman, Stripped, 2002
“One Eight Seven,” Dr. Dre, Chronicles — Death Row Classics, 2006
“Step Up,” Drowning Pool, Desensitized, 2004
“Bodies,” Drowning Pool, Sinner, 2001
“If I Had,” Eminem, The Slim Shady LP, 1999
“Take a Look Around,” Limp Bizkit, Greatest Hits, 2005
“This Is the New S**t,” Marilyn Manson, Lest We Forget — The Best of Marilyn Manson, 2004
“The Burn,” Matchbox Twenty, Mad Season, 2000
“For Crying Out Loud,” Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell, 1977
“Whiplash (Live),” Metallica, Kill ‘Em All, 2008
“Meow Mix” radio commercial
“Killing in the Name,” Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine, 1992
“Naked in the Rain,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 2006
“Sometimes,” Britney Spears, . . . Baby One More Time, 1999
“How Mountain Girls Can Love,” Stanley Brothers, 16 Greatest Hits, 2004
“Walking Man,” James Taylor, Greatest Hits, 1974
“The Star Spangled Banner,” United We Stand, Songs for America, 2001

Clarification: The original version of this story did not fully explain the positions Maine Democratic US Representative Mike Michaud took on the Military Commissions Act of 2006. He voted in favor of the bill as it was introduced in the US House of Representatives, but in a subsequent vote changed his mind and opposed it.

Press Releases: TV on the radio

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Starting this past Sunday, regular listeners to WGAN (560 AM) radio heard some new voices giving some news and weather updates. No longer are the folks from WCSH Channel 6 (Portland’s Gannett-owned NBC affiliate) on the talk-radio station. Instead it’s the folks from WGME Channel 13 (the Sinclair-owned CBS affiliate in town) who will be doing both live and recorded segments for WGAN.

The arrangement expands a previous arrangement with WPOR (101.9 FM), which is owned by the Portland Radio Group, to sister stations WGAN, WZAN (970 AM), and The Bay (1400 and 1490 AM).

WGME is overall the second-ranked television-news station in the market (behind WCSH, and ahead of WMTW Channel 8, the Hearst-Argyle-owned ABC affiliate), but it has been climbing. In last May’s ratings standings, News 13 was the top broadcast in both the 10 pm and 11 pm time slots.

Pushing hard to expand its audience, the station has made some traditional deals, such as the one with the Portland Radio Group, and another new arrangement to provide weather forecasts to six Courier Publications weekly newspapers in the midcoast; a similar arrangement with the Lewiston Sun Journal has been going for a couple years now. This type of media collaboration is increasingly common, but may serve to limit the free exchange of ideas; allying with businesses and government agencies risks making providers of news and information less independent.

Some of WGME's efforts to grow have brought the station close to non-media companies, and even to government agencies. In a WGME promo spot running before every movie at the three local Cinemagic theaters, WGME staff tout the cinemas’ technology, and anchorwoman Kim Block calls it “the region’s premier family-entertainment cinema.” But when a projector broke in July 2007, during a midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, WGME aired nothing; WCSH and the Portland Press Herald broke the news.

In a recurring segment called “Fugitive Files,” WGME reporters profile criminals wanted by the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office and urge viewers to call in with tips. And News 13 cameras have gone with police to videotape many of the 22 arrests that have so far resulted from the program. Other news-police collaborations, such as the Dateline NBC series “To Catch a Predator,” have been accused of operating too cozily with law-enforcement officials.

Even more recently, the station has cuddled right up to the government — at the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint at the Portland Jetport, the security rules are explained in a video by WGME’s own Kim Block, who utters phrases like “TSA security officers are here to help you.” (The same video also is played at the Bangor airport.)

WGME news director Robb Atkinson defends all of those efforts, saying they are ways the station can attract prospective viewers. Of the TSA video, which the station made for free as a “public-service announcement,” he says it is part of service to the community required by the Federal Communications Commission of all owners of broadcast licenses.

He adds that TSA officials have told him the video has “helped people go through the lines” with fewer delays, and that it has been more successful than the TSA’s own stock video, which features an androgynous animated character.

All of these — and some others he says are in the works but not yet ready to be made public — are “ways to extend our reach,” Atkinson says. As for whether the TSA video is too close to the feds for comfort, he replies, “We’re all Americans, aren’t we?”

A county primary

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Last week, we told you about the federal primaries most Mainers will get to vote in on June 10, as well as the state-primary choices Portland Democrats will face (see “Top 10 Questions for Maine Voters,” by Deirdre Fulton, May 30). Also, see our endorsements in those races on page 10 of this issue. Now it's time for the super-local stuff.

Four Portland Democrats are competing to represent Portland, Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, and Long and Chebeague islands on the three-person Cumberland County Commission.

The commission oversees the administrative structure behind several departments, which are largely run by other elected officials: the district attorney, the sheriff (including the jail and the emergency-communications center), the register of probate, and the register of deeds. There are a couple other departments, including community-development and emergency management, but much of that involves being a middle-man — or middle-woman — between larger government agencies (like the state and the feds) and smaller ones (like cities and towns). Overall, the county has an annual budget of about $31 million, funded by property taxes paid to cities and towns and passed on to the county.

No Republican or independent candidate has filed paperwork with state election officials to contest the race in November, meaning anyone wanting to contest the race would have to wage a write-in campaign.

Seeking to be the Democratic nominee are:
Jim Cloutier of Portland, a former Portland city councilor (and former mayor);
Diane Gurney of Portland, now serving as the county treasurer (an elected position);
Stephen Hirshon of Portland, a Bayside Neighborhood Association organizer who spends a lot of time in Portland City Hall (as a citizen and on various boards) and is a talk-show host on WMPG; and
John Simpson of Cumberland Foreside, who lost in a 2006 bid to unseat Republican state senator Karl Turner.

Also, bonds
All state voters — including those not enrolled in any party — will vote on a $30 million state bond for “natural resources, agricultural and transportation infrastructure,” including $10 million in highway and bridge repairs and nearly the same amount in railroad improvements. It would attract roughly $30 million in federal and private matching funds.

And Portland voters will have to decide whether to spend $20 million to replace Baxter Elementary School — all but $60,000 of which will be reimbursed by the state.

Nine is fine: Portland's Best Music Poll 2008

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Thanks to the hundreds of you who ventured out right after work (or perhaps played hooky from work) on Wednesday night to attend our ninth annual BEST MUSIC POLL PORTLAND MUSIC AWARDS SHOW. Some people who had told us last year’s was the best ever told us this one was better than that, to which we can only reply, thanks!

We at the Portland Phoenix are very happy to be able to bring together — at least once a year — the entire Portland music scene, with fans, musicians young and old, sound engineers, mastering people, radio personalities, TV stars, politicians, and activists.

It seems every year something new happens to keep us on our toes — this year’s was THE SECOND-EVER WRITE-IN WIN, by the same guy who landed the first such score two years ago, in the BEST DJ/DANCE ACT category. And we had AN OUTRIGHT TIE for the BEST R&B/SOUL/BLUES ACT, in which readers honored both a relatively new-to-the-scene solo artist and a longtime Portland standby. (You’ll have to keep reading to find out who they are.)

This year also saw the return of RUSTIC OVERTONES to the ballot, and to the stage to accept some awards, which is a wonderful development for their many fans in Maine and around the country. But for the first time ever, Rustic didn’t win every category in which they were nominated. That says far more to us about the quality of the other performers in the scene than it does about Rustic, who didn’t lose a step — or a hop — while they were apart.

There were a lot of people who made this all possible, who deserve our thanks and congratulations. First up is CHRISTOPHER GRAY, who about a year ago half-jokingly assumed the job title “local strong-arm,” as well as “8 Days A Weeker” and “the guy you need to send your listings to.” He put his strong-arm talents to work this year putting the whole show together. And then, when all the planning was done, he donned a very sharp-looking tux and spent the night co-hosting the event, for which we are all very grateful. In what might have been the pinnacle of strong-arming (as well as a stroke of sheer genius), Chris also convinced our staff writer, the lovely and talented DEIRDRE FULTON, to add her zip, humor, and funny gestures to the show.

All the other Phoenicians helped out too, lining up food, hanging banners, staffing the door, cleaning up, and generally making the night go very smoothly, so thanks to them.

And the crew at the ASYLUM were great again this year, keeping the beverages coming, and dishing up finger food to absorb at least some of those drinks. Thanks to BUDWEISER for helping out, and to the BAR OF CHOCOLATE, the FROG & TURTLE, BONOBO, and ANTHONY’S ITALIAN KITCHEN, who collectively supplied as much food as we all wanted.

A quick thanks are also in order to MARK CURDO at WCYY, CHARLIE GAYLORD at WBLM, and the crew at 207 on WCSH CHANNEL 6 for having us on their shows to promote the ballot and the awards show; to the local celebrities who turned out to support the scene; to DOMINIC AND THE LUCID, SARA COX, ROY DAVIS, LABSEVEN, and DJ GRAYMATTER for keeping the tunes on all night long; and to you, the readers, listeners, and supporters of the Portland music scene.

Press Releases: Shields up

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Reporters around the state should mark two dates on their calendars. One is July 18, the day the state’s journalist-shield law takes effect, protecting journalists’ confidential sources and information from governmental intrusion. The other is April 24, the day the Maine Supreme Court told government officials in Maine that they can be protected from public scrutiny, even if they mislay or misuse millions of taxpayer dollars.

The journalist-shield law passed the Legislature unanimously and was signed into law by Governor John Baldacci right as the legislative session drew to a close in April. Proposed by Portland Democratic Representative Jon Hinck, it protects journalists from being forced by courts to disclose the identity of confidential sources or the information they reveal, on the principle that such protection will help preserve the free flow of information to the public. (Disclosure: In my role as president of the Maine Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, I testified in favor of the bill and in favor of several suggested amendments, some of which survived the legislative process.)

The shield law does lay a groundwork where none previously existed in Maine, but it still doesn’t address the kind of problem that arose late last year when a Maine judge ordered 15 media organizations to open their notebooks to lawyers for a company that was afraid it might be sued in connection with a 2006 fire in Biddeford. (See “Legislature Moves to Protect Maine Journalists,” by Jeff Inglis, October 19, 2007.) Journalists typically object to having their work used for purposes other than to inform the public — such as to benefit a private party in a lawsuit.

But because the information given to reporters at the fire was not confidential, it would not be protected under the shield law, though “that seemed like a very reasonable thing to have included ... and I was sorry to have it dropped,” says Hinck.

The bill also fails to include a legal definition of the term “journalist.” While that does allow anyone — full-time reporter, Web publisher, blogger, pamphleteer — to make the case that they are one, Hinck worries that it might take several cases in which people are denied shield-law protection before state courts clarify who qualifies and who does not.

On the other hand, you’re screwed
State government agencies picked up a shield of their own recently when the Maine Supreme Court ruled on April 24 that giving the public access to information discussed in a Portland School Committee executive session would be “absurd” — even though what was discussed was the degree to which the superintendent and other employees were responsible for a $2.5-million budget deficit.

The school officials argued that the school staffers’ roles in the egregious shortfall was a “personnel matter.” The Portland Press Herald argued that knowing how $2.5 million in taxpayer money went missing is a matter of great public interest.

And while the school ultimately ended up releasing most of the information the Press Herald had requested, the Supreme Court’s ruling provided all government agencies cover for hiding budget-management problems behind closed doors, if they just call those problems “personnel matters” — as opposed to “who lost the taxpayers’ money matters.”

Preti Flaherty attorney Sigmund Schutz, who argued the case for the Press Herald, says the court has placed the public’s right to know about how taxpayer dollars are managed below public employees' interest in keeping job-performance shortcomings secret from the people they serve.

“The court has put great emphasis on the need for secrecy in governmental affairs,” Schutz says, marveling at the ruling that the newspaper’s argument might “lead to the absurd result that there could never be a discussion in executive session about personnel whose responsibilities are fiscal or monetary.”

But as Schutz notes: “It’s never absurd to find in favor of the public’s right to know.”

Portland Phoenix Best Music Poll on WCSH's 207 (with Dominic and the Lucid)

Aired on WCSH's 207

Union seeking rich person to purchase daily newspaper

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Newspaper employees, 600 +/-, and their labor union in search of rich, secure sugar daddy (or mommy, or daddies, or mommies, or some of each) for long-term relationship to provide stability, income, employment.

The union representing most of the employees at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and its sister paper, the Waterville-based Morning Sentinel, is hoping to find a wealthy local resident (or more than one) to put up the cash that would enable the union, Portland Newspaper Guild Local 128, to buy the papers (and the Augusta-based Kennebec Journal, whose workers are in a different union) from the Seattle Times Company, controlled by the Blethen family, which has owned the Maine papers for the past decade.

The union took out a color ad in Sunday’s paper, asking for people to “invest in local news.” Union officials wouldn’t say how much they paid for the ad, but admitted the paper gave them a discount from the “open rate,” which is the rate charged to one-time advertisers who walk in off the street. The cheapest possible rate, according to the Press Herald’s official rate information, is the 53-percent discount given to the paper’s largest contract advertisers, which would have totaled $3907.50 for the union ad.

At a union press conference Monday — attended by several Press Herald reporters, none of whom took notes — Local 128 administrative officer CJ Betit (a former sports staffer at the paper) said the union is “hopeful in partnering with local investors,” though neither Betit nor other union officials, nor the consultant the union has hired to help construct a bid, would say how much money they’re seeking from contributors.

But the consultant, Chris Mackin, said anyone who comes forward would have to be looking for lower profit margins than Wall Street has sought from publicly traded newspaper stocks in recent years. “I think we’re really headed into a new era of newspaper ownership,” said Mackin (president of Ownership Associates, a Massachusetts firm specializing in employee-ownership arrangements), an era in which private investors partner with employees at newspapers and other media organizations to keep them going, at more modest rates of return than the double-digit newspaper profits of the ’80s and ’90s.

The union’s bid is moving slowly — Mackin said they have not yet signed a non-disclosure agreement, which would allow him to see confidential Blethen financial information that would inform a bid price. Such an agreement, Mackin said, might include a provision that would bar him from disclosing specific details to Betit or other union leaders. Mackin said he had made similar arrangements when representing unions in other deals.

James Oldershaw, vice-president of Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, the New Mexico-based broker the Blethens are using to handle the sale, refused to comment “on any aspect of the sale,” including whether the company would allow union representatives to see internal financial information, or any timetable for further progress toward finding a buyer.

Also on Monday, the union signaled its intention to play a role in any deal, sending to its members a copy of a letter Betit sent last week to Press Herald labor-relations director Maryann Kelly, warning that any prospective buyer would have to agree to the terms of the union’s contract — which was negotiated earlier this year and runs through May 31, 2011 — and citing a 2007 federal arbitrator's ruling that a Connecticut newspaper’s buyer had to preserve the union contract as a condition of the sale.

Press Releases: Staying focused

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Now that the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and its four Maine sister papers (two dailies and two weeklies) are looking for a new owner, the speculation is rampant about who might buy such an operation, and how much they might pay.

Sure, there are a few snickers along the way, at things like PPH editor Jeannine Guttman’s March 23 column describing the sale announcement as a tear-jerking session with family patriarch Frank Blethen, ending with PPH managers “spontaneously” giving him a standing ovation after he announced the paper was for sale.

But a week before that meeting, before she knew the paper would soon have a new owner, Guttman alluded to a relationship other media outlets have with her paper (and other papers around Maine and elsewhere). In a March 16 column defending the paper’s latest layoffs (“Cuts Won’t Affect Paper’s Mission”) she wrote, “What you see on television and hear on radio often is a pickup of news and information that we have reported first ... We have more journalists, more boots on the ground, than any other news organization in Maine."

Guttman told the Portland Phoenix in an interview that she wasn't accusing the broadcasters of stealing, but rather alluding to the Associated Press's "AP Broadcast" wire service, which transmits to broadcast outlets stories from the Press Herald and other AP-member newspapers.

Her point is a good one. Newspapers are under tremendous pressure, due to radical shifts in their business models. Without newspapers, a huge portion of the news that consumers take for granted would not be available.

It's too bad there's not some kind of service that goes the other way, though.

Last week, all three local TV stations scooped the Press Herald on a major local story, one that happened right across the street from PPH headquarters.

The PPH and the TV folks have been closely following the play-by-play of Portland's budget problems, which came to a head on Thursday, April 3, when city manager Joe Gray announced the elimination of 98 city jobs, 22 of which were vacant, and 76 layoffs, including one of the city's highest-profile officials, transportation director Captain Jeff Monroe, who oversees the waterfront and the airport, and has testified before Congress on port-security issues.

NBC affiliate WCSH (Channel 6) had the story Thursday evening; ABC affiliate WMTW (Channel 8) and Sinclair-owned CBS affiliate WGME (Channel 13) had it Friday, including interviews with Monroe. Not until Saturday did the Press Herald tell its readers about Monroe's pink slip (a Friday story was thin on details, saying layoffs were "expected," but with no mention of Monroe).

Guttman called Channel 6's work "a really good scoop" for which "they are to be congratulated." She also said she wants "to take the long view," accepting that sometimes even the state's largest newsgathering organization will get beaten. And though regular readers of this column may be shocked to find me granting the Press Herald two points in a row, she is right.

But there is a problem. It's not the terrible luck that perhaps the "boots on the ground" just needed to traverse a crosswalk, from PPH HQ at 390 Congress to City Hall at 389 Congress, to get this particular story earlier. The real hard part is timing in the larger sense.

Because it’s up for sale the paper needs to perform at peak level, to keep readers, advertisers, and, yes, prospective buyers interested. Reporters and editors need to dig even deeper at this confusing time of tears and applause; it's their chance to prove how vital they are to Portland. This city needs a strong daily paper staffed with people who know the territory. If current PPH newshounds don't stay sharp, they might as well be writing on the wall.

Press Releases: Pressure is on

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The execs over at the Portland Press Herald are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to talking about their newspaper to other media organizations. Publisher Chuck Cochrane and editor Jeannine Guttman don’t normally seem to notice that other media outlets exist — they don’t take phone calls from reporters even when they’re in the office, and never return phone calls or e-mails.

Lately, though, Guttman has not only noticed, but also responded to, comments about the paper published by a less traditional outlet — even holding a meeting with her staff to claim that certain comments were all wrong, and that she did not, in fact, engineer the ouster of MaineToday.com chief Web honcho Joe Michaud, as a PPH-watching blog reported.

Who provoked this startling development? Local blogger and Munjoy Hill resident “Thomas Cushing Munjoy” (not his real name) with a post on his daily-updated blog, PressingTheHerald.

Munjoy “started out sort of simply,” he says in a phone interview. Frustrated with the quality of the local daily, he would send Guttman roughly one e-mail a week with feedback, occasionally asking her questions. But he never got responses, and after a few months, he started blogging instead, hoping public shame would work, as indeed it did.

Many of his critiques are basic editing questions, seeking — or providing — missing context and perspective. Since taking a month-long hiatus in which he dealt with some sudden and severe medical problems, Munjoy’s tone has been more positive, though still strongly critical. A recent post slammed a reporter for failing to look at the facts in a January story that claimed Maine’s home-foreclosure rate was better than the rest of the nation's. But that same post praised another reporter’s more recent story, which disclosed that Maine actually has more foreclosures than the national average.

Munjoy's efforts have even attracted competition of sorts; several months after his debut “T. Flushing Funjoy” appeared, blogging at PortlandPressHarried.blogspot.com with a more acerbic tone (including referring to the Press Herald regularly as “the snooze organ of record”).

All Munjoy wants is for the Press Herald’s leadership to “start taking the coverage of local news seriously,” and not just pay lip-service to it, touting their “commitment” while ignoring waterfront issues and running wire-service stories about days-old international events on the front page.

“These guys just can’t get out of their own way,” says Munjoy, who says he uses a pseudonym because he works locally — not in journalism — and occasionally encountersPress Herald bigwigs at professional and social events. (The ethics of using a pseudonym while trying to make the paper more transparent are questionable, though Munjoy says he has no present or past connection to the Press Herald or any of its corporate siblings in Maine or elsewhere.)

It’s his frustration — amplified by the fact that Guttman still won’t return his e-mails — that has led Munjoy to seek to draw even more attention to the Press Herald’s shortcomings.

He has repeatedly reminded his readers that the Press Herald is in bed with the Plum Creek Timber Company CEO (who sits on two boards that supervise the paper’s parent companies; see “Plum Creek Watchdog,” by Jeff Inglis, December 21, 2007) and that the paper failed to disclose that fact for 18 months, during which it reported extensively on Plum Creek’s plans for the largest land-development project in Maine history.

But in late January, he asked the American Society of Newspaper Editors to weigh in on the ethical implications of issue. Nearly two months later, he has received no responses, and suspects the reason is that the ASNE board includes an exec from the Seattle Times — the Press Herald’s parent paper.

But it still disappoints him. “I just don’t understand why they won’t try to improve,” Munjoy fumes.

Maine's journalist-shield law on MPBN's Maine Things Considered

Aired on Maine Public Broadcasting Network's Maine Things Considered

Sidebar: Slow lane

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Under the terms of the deal, by 2013, 90 percent of FairPoint’s customers in northern New England will have access to DSL Internet service. (Unless, of course, FairPoint takes the extra year Maine regulators have allowed with no penalty, which would mean waiting until 2014.)

In that time, FairPoint plans to provide exactly none of its customers with the option for fiber-optic connections, which is the real high-speed Internet, already available to 10 million homes in the US, but none in northern New England (except a handful around Portsmouth, New Hampshire; see “Internet Disconnect,” by Jeff Inglis, August 24, 2007).

DSL is the slowest of all the services that can be called “broadband,” though it is faster than dial-up. In 2007, as many as 40 percent of DSL customers were dissatisfied with the speed of their service, according to a report by Michael Render, a fiber-market analyst for RVA Market Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Imagine how many people will think DSL is too slow in 2014!

By 2010, three (or four) years before FairPoint’s rollout of DSL will be complete, 25 million homes nationwide (22 percent of all homes) will have access to fiber, Render says.

As everyone else is eagerly awaiting the connection of fiber-optics, we in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont will have our feet up, enjoying life in the slow lane.

A bad idea triumphs: Verizon: $500,000,000 — Public: $0

Published in the Portland Phoenix

From time to time, we all wonder how bad public-policy choices make it through “the democratic process,” being vetted and scrutinized by “the appropriate agencies,” and incorporating “public input.”

The Verizon-FairPoint Communications deal (in which Verizon will sell its landlines in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont to FairPoint for $2.4 billion) is an ideal case study. It’s roundly criticized by nearly everyone. Even the regulators who were asked to approve the deal are wary. At first, Vermont’s regulators rejected it outright, then later voted to approve a revised version. Maine Public Utilities Commission chairman Kurt Adams made it clear he was holding his nose while voting to approve it, and New Hampshire PUC chairman Thomas Getz declared that the initial version was “not in the public interest,” though his board voted 2-1 to approve a revised proposal Monday. (The dissenter, commissioner Graham Morrison, wrote that “the public interest ... requires something more than ... good intentions.”)

Apart from Morrison in New Hampshire, regulators in all three states have chosen the devil they don’t know over the devil they do, by agreeing to let Verizon sell out (and avoid tax obligations of more than $500 million) in the hope that promises from a financially strapped communications company (FairPoint) will give us something better than neglect from an incredibly wealthy communications company.

Bad ideas like this one survive first and foremost because someone thinks they’re good ideas. Not surprisingly, FairPoint and Verizon love the idea — FairPoint gets to collect more money from more customers and pass it on as dividends to shareholders; Verizon gets to keep $500 million it would have paid in taxes and use that money to invest in fiber-optics and cellular technology elsewhere in the country. (Those of us in mountainous rural areas are stuck with older, slower technology, and that’s just our bad luck, as far as Verizon is concerned.)

But even more important to the survival of bad ideas such as this merger is that state utility regulators behave like powerless functionaries whose job is to moderate corporate rapaciousness, rather than seeing themselves as empowered defenders of the public interest.

Even when regulators are presented with fundamentally terrible deals that endanger the public interest, threaten economic development, and may end up risking people’s very lives, they see their responsibility as exacting just enough concessions from massively wealthy companies to let the regulators claim they got something for the people, even when they have given away much more.

It’s not as if they haven’t been warned. Union representatives and industry experts have been railing against various aspects of the deal since it was announced back in January 2007. Customers have expressed significant concerns, in letters, e-mails, and phone calls to regulators in Augusta, Concord, Montpelier, and even Washington DC. And the consumer advocates who represent the public in utilities proceedings in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have all expressed reservations about this deal in uncharacteristically bold language — saying FairPoint’s assumptions are “inappropriate” and “do not reflect reality.”

Wimpy regulators
One member of the three-person Maine PUC didn’t even ask any questions of Verizon or FairPoint during the public hearings. Sharon Reishus remained silent, even though this deal is the largest and most controversial piece of business to come before Maine utilities regulators in state history, and despite the fact that the telecommunications sector is the one that state officials, economists, and activists alike see as a key to Maine’s prosperity for decades to come. But her silence is not the problem: It’s the symptom of the real problem.

Regulators have expressed frustration with Verizon’s well-documented lack of attention to serving residents and businesses in northern New England. The solution, though, is not to hand Verizon a pass on its $500 million tax liability on profit from the sale. Regulators have standards (and can increase the standards), and they have enforcement tools to punish companies that don’t meet the standards, such as fines and penalties.

They have not used these tools very much, or very well. And they don’t seem to feel they are in a position of strength, with Maine officials making the “demand” that if North Carolina-based FairPoint does not roll out its slow-speed “broadband” Internet service, DSL, to enough homes by the end of 2013, the company would get an extra year to meet the same goal, with no penalty. “Our history with some utilities enforcing merger conditions after we issue a decision has not been great,” Maine PUC chairman Kurt Adams admitted in a January 3 hearing.

But rather than hold themselves to a higher standard of performance and actually enforce their rules, regulators have passed the buck — hundreds of millions of them, really — to us, by letting Verizon off the hook. And it is we, the public, who will pay for their complacency.

In the first place, FairPoint’s economic projections were shockingly optimistic (see “No Raises For Seven Years,” November 16, 2007, and “No Raises — It Gets Better,” November 20, 2007, both by Jeff Inglis). And those fragile projections were made before we entered the economic downturn most economists now believe we are in.

Financial peril
There has been a lot written about FairPoint’s financial problems, both current and future. Normally, when seeking to impose conditions on a sale, regulators ask for financial guarantees from the buyer.

Not this time. State officials are so worried that FairPoint is — or will be — in financial peril, that they’ve wrung more money out of the seller, Verizon, making the multi-billion-dollar behemoth throw a few bucks our way as it heads out the door, almost like a charity contribution for the privilege of abandoning northern New England.

Indeed, when Vermont’s Public Service Board initially rejected the deal, it ruled that “FairPoint had not demonstrated that it would be financially sound” after the sale went through, and could end up incapable not just of expanding phone or Internet service, but even of keeping service at the current, below-standards level.

Put charity aside: we are paying Verizon to leave. State officials will probably deny that, but think again. The cost to us is more than just the missing $500 million in tax revenue.

FairPoint is taking on more than $2 billion in debt to do this deal, and the company is expecting not only to pay off that debt, but also to make a profit. Every dollar the company spends on Verizon’s landlines will have to come back in, paid by the customers in our monthly bills. The more FairPoint pays, the more we, the public, will ultimately have to pony up over time.

If FairPoint isn’t making enough money to make its executives or shareholders happy, the company will come back to regulators in all three states, crying poor, and asking for higher rates. Of course, FairPoint really will be cash-strapped and poor, so the regulators will find it hard to refuse. And if they approve rate increases, they and their agencies won’t feel the pinch; we will.

The regulators may even forget that Verizon overcharged telephone customers in Maine more than $30 million in 2005 alone, and that our state made FairPoint promise to cap its rates for five years to help make up for those excess charges. The only way the regulators could abandon their duties more would be to develop amnesia in addition to their weakened spines.

Beat the clock: Does anybody really know what time it is?

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix

“The Earth is a terrible timekeeper,” says Geoff Chester, the spokesman for this country’s official clock-master, the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

The first problem is the Earth, but the second problem is us. We cheat to make the movement of the Sun and Moon match up with the calendars on our office walls, and, at a more rarefied level, we cheat so that physicists and astronomers can synchronize their scientific watches.

The Earth doesn’t rotate exactly 365 times during a full revolution around the Sun. (It rotates 365.2422 times, on average, if you must know.) To make up for that, since the time of Julius Caesar (45 BC), we have added a LEAP DAY to the calendar every four years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII made a slight modification, saying a leap day would not be added in years that are evenly divisible by 100, unless the year was also evenly divisible by 400 (which is why 2000 was a LEAP YEAR; 1900 was not, and 2100 won’t be, either).

That’s still not good enough, though, so we need more cheating.

The Earth doesn’t cooperate with physicists’ super-specific definition of “one second” (derivation of which is so complicated we’ll just mention the outermost electron in a cesium-133 atom and skip the parts about microwave radiation, vacuums, and magnetic fields). That definitely doesn’t change, but the Earth’s rotation is generally slowing (because of resistance from ocean tides and the movement of molten rock at the planet’s center). From time to time, to keep things matching, we need to add a LEAP SECOND. The last one happened on December 31, 2005; the next may happen on December 31, 2009, but maybe not, Chester says, depending on how much the Earth’s spin actually slows between now and then.

We could avoid leap seconds altogether if we were like the physicists who want time to run based solely on the atomic clocks. But that would force some other adjustment at some point. Some propeller-heads have proposed passing the buck to future generations via a scheme requiring someone to add an entire LEAPHOUR to some year a little more than 1000 years from now. Not likely. So we’re probably stuck with leap seconds. Adjust your watches accordingly.

Could be worse: some people are burdened with much, much more. Accountants and other people who need a fixed number of exactly-seven-day weeks per year use an occasional LEAP WEEK, giving some years 52 weeks and some 53. That makes them happy, but is too confusing to the rest of us and generally of very little import.

And then there are the people who use a LEAP MONTH. “The Moon does not go around the Earth exactly 12 times in a solar year,” says Chester. It’s about 11 days behind, which is why events on a lunar schedule (such as Easter in the Christian calendar, and nearly every holiday in the Jewish calendar) are “movable feasts” — i.e. their dates move around a bit from one year to the next. The Hebrew calendar uses a leap month every two or three years to keep itself relatively close to the solar calendar.

Perhaps you’re ready to give up. (I know I am.) If so, try out the Islamic calendar, which is a purely lunar calendar, and ignores the solar calendar completely, not using leap days, weeks, months, or years. Happy February 29!

Press Releases: Gender confusion?

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Press Herald watchers have long since tired of editor Jeannine Guttman’s roughly weekly “Editor’s Note” columns, which more often than not should be called “Painfully Obvious Self-Promotion.”

At least then we’d be warned in advance about the rewritten corporate memos that Guttman passes off as her thoughts on the news business and running the paper. Take as an example her January 27 quote from a middle-level sports editor that the writers the Press Herald spent thousands of dollars to send to Arizona would “cut through the media circus that is Super Bowl week.” She went on to say those writers would bring “Maine perspective and insight” to an event on the other side of the country in which a team from another state competed for a national title.

But Guttman shows herself to be even more out of touch with reality in her latest column, “Poll Shows Gender Gap in News of Interest.” After the muddled headline, Guttman spends 1000 words (including nearly 300 words of direct quotes) summarizing a 980-word report from the Pew Research Center, and still somehow completely ignores the study’s most interesting finding.

She spends most of her space explaining why “gender differences” are the reason “newspapers offer different kinds of content sections and pages — from lifestyle to sports, from recipes to NASCAR.” That’s not entirely accurate: newspapers publish niche-topic sections as much to draw advertisers as readers.

Guttman even appears to find the major point, but then skips over it — twice. She does discuss the study’s report that both men and women are very interested in breaking news and the top stories of the day — including topics such as the presidential campaign and the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. But she treats that idea as an aside, going on to highlight more differences between what topics men and women are interested in, and from what mediums they get their news.

Even in a study attempting to delineate differences, the Pew researchers found similarities. Among the study’s lists of specific recent news stories preferred by one gender over the other were subjects in which both genders reported very significant interest: tensions between the US and Iran, tornadoes in the South and Midwest, and the recall of toys made in China.

This was a national study, so it didn’t test people’s interest in Maine’s biggest stories. It did look at general subjects, though, and found large proportions of both men and women follow news about local government, consumer issues, and the weather. The biggest gender “split” is in sports; the rest are in niche areas such as science, religion, finance, and health.

But when concluding her column, Guttman observes that the Press Herald is a “general-interest medium,” and professes uncertainty about “how to keep the content useful, valuable and newsworthy to a broad audience that includes both men and women.”

The Pew study’s road map is clear: cover major news stories, which are of very strong interest to both genders. Maybe she missed that while looking for story ideas on NASCAR or cooking.

Three firsts at NEPA

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Portland Phoenix contributing writers and staff took three first-place awards at the New England Press Association’s annual awards banquet February 9, and three second-place honors as well.

In first place were: for LOCAL ELECTION COVERAGE, the staff and freelancers, for work published between September and November 2006; for COVER DESIGN, “Why Bath Stinks,” a gas mask against a fetid background by Phoenix staff, published April 6, 2007; and for HEALTH COVERAGE, “What’s Wrong With Healthcare in Maine?,” first-person accounts of dealing with the healthcare system by contributing writers Sam Pfeifle and Caitlin Shetterly, published July 27, 2007.

In second place were: for RACIAL OR ETHNIC REPORTING, “‘I’m Done Killing Hyenas,’” excerpts from a Telling Room non-fiction writing project by local high-school students Ali Mohamed, Aruna Kenyi, and Kahiye Hassan, published May 4, 2007; for GENERAL NEWS, “Unvarnished,” former staff writer Sara Donnelly’s story about the Brookings Institution study of Maine’s economy commissioned by GrowSmart Maine, published September 29, 2006; and for GOVERNMENT REPORTING, “State: One Santa Okay; Another No Way,” about state censorship of beer-bottle label graphics, by managing editor Jeff Inglis, published December 8, 2006.

Behind the mask: What we don’t know about the Valentine’s Phantom — and why that’s a good thing

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The identity of Portland’s Valentine’s Phantom is the city’s best-kept secret, bar none. And that’s not changing here, so if that’s what you expect from this article, turn the page and see what someone else will do for love, because we won’t do that.

In a city where secrets are few and far between — the PortlandPSST blogger; how much Reynolds Wrap the Tinfoil Man uses each year; the real meaning of the “Tracing the Fore” sculpture — this one has lasted. And lasted.

Each year since 1976, someone (or some group) hangs white pieces of paper with bright red hearts on doors, windows, and walls all over town, and caps off the display with a few large banners and flags slung from prominent buildings (though not the Time and Temp Building yet — we’re waiting...). A similar phenomenon has been going strong in Montpelier, Vermont, since the early 1990s, and someone from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, posted a Craigslist note in December expressing interest in bringing the tradition there.

The most surprising thing is that people don’t actually want to know who is doing it. Even here in the office, as we tried to score an interview with one of the perpetrators, we didn’t want to know. It would have been an anonymous interview. It’s much nicer to not know, really. (One person we talked to did relay a message said to be from the Phantom, saying the Phantom doesn’t want to be contacted, and that if the Phantom wanted to surface, it would have happened long ago.)

The first report of a Valentine Phantom in Portland was in the February 14, 1976, issue of Portland’s Evening Express: a photo and a long caption describing the sudden appearance of red hearts on white paper taped all over the city on Valentine’s Day morning. (The three-year-old girl pictured with the unexplained decorations, now an adult living in Wisconsin, says she remembers it “like it was yesterday,” and has a copy of that picture in her family photo album, but disclaims any knowledge of the people behind the hearts.)

There have been other media mentions throughout the years, in local papers and TV stations, and even on CNN. But only once has anyone actually interviewed the Valentine’s Phantom (and nobody has asked him, or her, or them, whether “Phantom” is the preferred term — “Bandit” is the word as often used in conversation).

That was back in 2005, when Portland City Council candidate Carol Schiller claimed to have started the tradition in the early 1980s (see “City Council Race Hearts Up,” by Beatrice Marovich, October 21, 2005).

As we said earlier, the Valentine’s Phantom doesn’t like publicity, but he apparently likes even less the idea of someone else taking credit for his work. He promptly responded with both paper evidence and a phone call to the Phoenix offices, in which he provided, among other tidbits, a receipt from a now-defunct Forest Avenue printing shop, purportedly for making the signs for the 1977 banditry (see “She Said, He Said,” by Sam Pfeifle and Sara Donnelly, November 11, 2005). And he offered more info on the phone, including the night-time temperature on February 13, 1979 (8 degrees), and the number of people helping out that evening (six).

It’s that last tidbit — long assumed by those who spend much time thinking about it — that makes this annual tradition most interesting. The fascination goes beyond amazement at the increasingly brazen and difficult nature of some of the displays — hanging a heart on Fort Gorges (the same night a Casco Bay ferry reported just barely avoiding running over a small boat containing as many as seven people), running a flag up the Central Fire Station flagpole, hanging huge banners from the Portland Museum of Art and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The mystery surrounding the Phantom/Bandit’s secret identities is an integral part of the tradition.

If there were just one person involved, the secret could be easily kept, even for more than 30 years. But if six people helped in 1979, how many more have participated over the years? How many of them have roommates, partners, parents, children who might have noticed a door opening and closing late on Valentine’s Eve?

There are a lot of people who claim to know someone who is involved; we’ve talked with dozens of them this week. Perhaps we have actually talked to the Phantom him- or herself, but nobody admitted anything. That’s the most fascinating part of the secret — we’re keeping it from ourselves. We really don’t want to know.

“Historically, graffiti has been about fame,” says local legal-graffiti artist Tim Clorius. (He denies being part of the Phantom group or even knowing anyone who is; we are pretty sure we believe him.) Graffiti artists seek to get their tags in as many visible public places as possible, earning props from peers for particularly difficult-to-reach or especially prominent spots. But in this effort, the tag being distributed is simply a heart, making the anonymity itself the art.

Clorius sees the hearts as a suggestion for something more. He would love to see small, simple, non-destructive works of art all over the city. There is potential, Clorius says, for “all this site-specific work” to move beyond the basic, friendly message of a red heart on Valentine’s Day and raise deep, pressing questions about our society.

The Phantom’s pioneering work in this realm has made for us a model of direct artistic action, aimed dead-on at the general public — unfiltered by the media or a gallery — and with a message whose impact is heightened by serendipity.

Which, it seems, is the precious Valentine the Phantom is really giving us. That secret, at least, is out.

Heart history
1976 The first Valentine’s Phantom strikes in Portland, and garners reports in the Evening Express and Maine Sunday Telegram newspapers.

1977 Printing the flyers cost $22 at Colonial Offset Printing on Forest Avenue; a Portland Press Herald effort to discover the Bandit’s identity fails.

1978 Hearts went up a day late, and bore a note: “It’s not only ONE day!”

1979 The weather was 8 degrees and windy, according to notes made by one of the six bandits.

1984 Massive heart banners, roughly 20 feet by 35 feet, hang from the Cumberland County Civic Center and the Portland Museum of Art.

1986 A heart banner is hung on Fort Gorges in the middle of Casco Bay.

1991 Down East magazine imagines that “the phantoms roam the city in a pack, dressed in red or white capes emblazoned with huge hearts.”

2001 A heart flag flies from the roof of Portland’s Central Fire Station; a fire lieutenant denies any knowledge.

2005 A heart banner hangs from the roof of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute on Commercial Street.

OCTOBER 2005 Portland City Council candidate Carol Schiller claims to be one of the phantoms.

NOVEMBER 2005 An anonymous phantom responds with information that his effort predated hers, and that she has never worked with them.

2006 CNN mentions Portland’s Valentine’s Phantom in a national report.

DECEMBER 2007 A would-be Portsmouth Valentine’s Bandit posts a message on Craigslist, hoping to get some pointers from Portland. No dice, apparently: “If anything does happen in Portsmouth, it won’t be any of my doing.” Sure. Like we’re supposed to believe that.

Defending the universally loathed: TV: Shopping channels

Published in the Portland Phoenix, the Boston Phoenix, and the Providence Phoenix; part of a multi-part story

TV: Shopping channels
As detestable as they are, someone loves those shopping channels on TV. They bring in more than $10 billion a year to the washed-up non-celebrities pitching second-rate knives, dresses, jewelry, and cleaning supplies.

There is, however, a very compelling reason you, too, should love the shopping channels, and thank your lucky stars they exist: your cable bill would be higher than it is now — by as much as a few bucks a month, depending on where you live — if the “basic cable” package did not include shopping channels.

In many markets, cable companies are required by federal regulations to carry shopping channels. As a result, the cable companies don’t pay to transmit shopping channels (just as they don’t pay to carry other local broadcast stations or community-access channels). But unlike those other channels, shopping networks kick back a percentage of their sales revenues. So the more knives sold, the less likely your cable bill is to rise.

(Sure, nothing is stopping your cable company from racking the rates, except competition from satellite TV and Internet video, but if the feds require cable companies to sell channels individually, you’ll pay more for the same channels, and losing that shopping-network revenue is part of why.)

So every now and again, when you’re feeling bored, check out a shopping channel, and make sure you have a knife for every occasion. If you’re missing one for, say, cutting out your own appendix, go ahead and buy it. It’s just $9.99, you can pay in 15 easy installments of just 67 cents each, and you’ll keep your future cable bills down, too.

Verizon angles to keep state business

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Democratic governor John Baldacci had a private sit-down with Ivan Seidenberg, the president and CEO of Verizon, November 30. The meeting wasn’t publicized in advance and got only a small amount of coverage after the fact.

None of that coverage mentioned the roughly $6 million Verizon earns from providing state agencies with telephone services (that total doesn’t include in-state and out-of-state long-distance calls, which, according to state technology chief Dick Thompson, are also provided by Verizon at a rate of 2.98 cents per minute).

The meeting came just days after the staff of the Public Utilities Commission issued a devastating report recommending that regulators reject the proposed buyout of Verizon’s telephone landlines by FairPoint Communications (see “No Raises for Seven Years,” November 16, and “No Raises — It Gets Better,” online November 20, both by Jeff Inglis).

Neither Verizon nor Baldacci’s folks will say specifically what was discussed, but Verizon Maine spokesman Peter Reilly says the meeting was intended “to discuss Verizon’s role in the state in the future,” specifically the fact that “Verizon is going to be continuing to invest in businesses in the state.”

It’s fair to ask what business, given that PUC analyses of Verizon’s investment in landlines and consumer services such as Internet access suggest the company has done little, if any at all, in recent years (see “Internet Disconnect,” by Jeff Inglis, 24).

The answer may explain why Seidenberg wanted to talk to the business-friendly Baldacci: Verizon will continue to invest in wireless service in Maine, as well as “enterprise services,” Reilly says. He wouldn’t explain what “enterprise services” are, but the company’s Web site does — telephone service and high-speed Internet communications for large businesses.

The meeting between Seidenberg and Baldacci was first reported on VerizonVsFairPoint.com, a blog closely monitoring the merger’s progress, where speculation ran rampant about whether Verizon was trying to cut a deal with Baldacci. All sides deny that.

Asked if Seidenberg was trying to make nice with Maine officials after the PUC staff’s report repeatedly accused Verizon of hurting Mainers by spending too little on service quality and upgrades, Reilly's answer was short: “All I can confirm is that Mr. Seidenberg met with Governor Baldacci.”

But if Verizon was trying to hang onto its revenue from public coffers, Thompson (who heads the state agency that arranges phone service for state offices) may have killed it: if the sale goes through, he says, the state’s phone provider would become FairPoint. Unless the gov says otherwise, of course.

Press Releases: Plum Creek watchdog

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Thanks to a Phoenix reader, Maine residents now know something the Portland Press Herald was not telling them: that the chief executive officer of the development company that wants to build nearly 1000 units of homes and condos plus two resort hotels in Maine’s North Woods joined the board of directors of the newspaper’s parent company 18 months ago.

To call the Plum Creek project controversial is an understatement, as attested by the 60 or so stories and editorials that the Press Herald has published on the subject in the past year and a half.

Yet none of those pieces — not even the editorials that questioned the deal — disclosed that Rick Holley, CEO of Plum Creek Timber, the project’s proposed developer, joined the board of directors of the Blethen Corporation (the family-owned company that owns the Press Herald) back in May 2006. Nor did they disclose that Holley joined at the personal request of patriarch Frank Blethen, as a Plum Creek spokeswoman told the Portland Phoenix last week.

In a December 2 article, PPH environment reporter John Richardson detailed Plum Creek’s donations to Maine politicians, quoting Bruce Freed, executive director of the Center for Political Accountability in Washington DC: “What they’re trying to is develop relationships and influence decision-making and policy.”

But Richardson’s story didn’t mention another way Plum Creek could influence decision-making and policy — namely, through close connections with the newspaper’s owner.

It’s possible, as Poynter Institute ethicist Kelly McBride notes, that the paper’s editorial team may not have actually known that Holley had joined the board. (If they did know, she says, they should have disclosed it earlier.) As it was, the disclosure came after the Phoenix, prompted by posts on thePhoenix.com, called Richardson and others at the Press Herald.

On Sunday, a Richardson article about Plum Creek added that Holley also sits on the board of the Seattle Times Company, though he (or his editors) took pains to distance Holley from the Press Herald, specifying that the company’s Maine newspapers (the Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal, the Morning Sentinel, and the Coastal Journal) have “a separate board of directors” on which Holley does not serve.

But not every article addressing Plum Creek in Sunday’s paper carried the disclosure: columnist Bill Nemitz left out the relationship between the people who sign his paycheck and the man at the helm of the largest private landowner in the country, who just happens to be the proposer of one of the largest land-development projects in Maine history (see “Up Plum Creek Without A Paddle,” by Yanni Peary, November 30).

That omission, and the 18 months of silence throughout the paper, fit a pattern of concealing the connections between the newspaper and Plum Creek: in the 20 mentions of Plum Creek in the Seattle Times since May 2006, none have disclosed Holley’s involvement.

Corey Digiacinto, communications manager for the Seattle Times Company, would not say how many directors the company has, nor whether Holley is a voting member of the board (versus an advisory one). She says the company doesn’t normally talk about its corporate structure, but did so “in this case, for reasons of disclosure.”

Why now, though, if Holley has been on the board for 18 months? Digiacinto referred that question to Press Herald/Telegram editor Jeannine Guttman.

Guttman and Richardson did not return phone calls seeking comment, as is the paper’s general practice when receiving inquiries from other media organizations.

But with Phoenix readers keeping watch where the Press Herald fears to tread, they’ll have to do better next time.

Disclosure: I like plums, and have swum in creeks. With a tip of the hat to the poster named “Jay” on thePhoenix.com.

Courts allow photographs of documents

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Back in September, we told you that a Maine judge had issued a secret, unwritten order barring people from taking pictures of court documents (see "Speak Now, or Forever Pay for Copies," by Jeff Inglis, September 28). The practice, a popular tactic among reporters and members of the public alike to avoid the expense of buying official copies (at $2 for the first page and $1 for each additional page), had been permitted by court officials for more than five years. Last week, a memo went out from state-court administrator Ted Glessner to all Maine court clerks and their staffs re-authorizing the practice.

There has been no formal change of policy, but that too is in the works, according to Maine Chief Justice Leigh Saufley, who says the court system expects to take another two months to finalize new rules regarding using cameras in courtrooms during proceedings. The two topics are related because the no-cameras-in-courtrooms rule at the moment bars cameras from entering courthouse buildings at all, which would obviously prevent taking pictures of paperwork.

In the meantime, regarding the specific act of photographing documents, there will be “an internal order that tells everybody it’s okay,” Saufley says.

“It’s perfectly appropriate for people to use cameras to take photographs of documents,” she says, noting that existing rules — and the ones under consideration to replace them — bar people from photographing only participants in a trial, including judges, witnesses, attorneys, and defendants, without the judge’s prior written permission.

The larger problem is that “every single cell phone sold today has a camera in it,” Saufley says — and many laptop computers, too. Cell phones, cameras, and laptop computers are banned from the federal courthouse in Portland (though laptops are allowed for a “privileged few,” such as attorneys working on cases, according to federal-courthouse staff).

Saufley says the Maine courts have a tradition of being more open to electronics than the federal courts. (Also, the federal limits are at least partly offset by Internet access to court filings, which are not available for state-court cases.)

But while people can again bring cameras into state courthouses for the purposes of photographing documents, and Saufley appears unenthusiastic about banning cell phones and laptops from courtrooms, using cameras during trials and other court proceedings will likely continue to be restricted.

Court officials have talked to members of the state’s television media about their needs, and the state’s advisory Committee on Media and Courts is at work on crafting rules that would, in effect, state that “we don’t want to stop people from bringing cameras into the courtroom,” Saufley says, but “you can’t use cameras” there without advance permission.

Shopping advice from the star: The Marden’s lady lets you in on her secrets of surviving Black Friday

Published in the Portland Phoenix

If anyone in Maine knows how to shop with gusto, it’s the Marden’s lady. You’ve seen her all over the TV — you may have even seen her around town. The woman knows how to spot bargains, values, deals, and great items like nobody else in the state.

She doesn’t give out her name because of “trouble with paparazzi,” but we managed to find her, which led right into one of her problems: “One of my hardest things about shopping is the people that follow me because I am not only glamorous and a sex symbol, but they know I’m a consummate shopper. Sometimes I go in disguise.”

The Portland Phoenix convinced her to take a break from shopping in a quiet part of town, and got her to share her thoughts on how to survive — and even to thrive — on Black Friday.

ADVANCE PREPARATION
“You gotta start early,” she says. “Like about a week and a half, two weeks in advance, you gotta start stocking up on the mini-marshmallows. ... You start drinking cocoa and you think of everything you can stick ’em in. Load the sugar on, because from here on out, it’s gonna be a sprint.”

She also observes that you might not be able to fit everything you buy into your car at once, and advises: “Get a few rental storage units, strategically placed between shopping areas, so you can drop off what you’ve got and go on to the next place. All you gotta do is rent ’em for a week.”

THE DAY BEFORE
“You don’t ever want to eat turkey on Thanksgiving. All that tactrotactlycicerin or trychtelactin, everything that slows everybody down. ... The goal is to get speeded up. My mantra is ‘Caffeine, caffeine, caffeine, burn, baby, burn.’ ... Tofu turkey is never okay. I’ve eaten enough tofu in my life to know that. ... The bottom line of Thanksgiving is to stay away from things with feathers. If the Pilgrims had stayed away from everything with feathers, there’d be a lot more Native Americans here today.”

GETTING READY TO GO
What to bring
“Allen’s Coffee Brandy could come in handy. I suggest you always keep your flask with you. I store mine in my hat.” Also, “Daddy’s wallet. Daddy’s huntin’ while I’m shoppin’. The men are all out wandering with their guns at all hours.” We think that means they don’t need their wallets.

Dealing with kids
“Daddy can’t take ’em huntin’ and you can’t take ’em shoppin’. You gotta feed them a lotta lotta turkey, and you tuck ’em into bed real tight. If they’re too young to be on their own, then maybe you have the neighbor kid look in on ’em.”

Dress the part
“Get deep into your own kind of style, because that is going to help your intuitive being. Do not wear one of those coordinated tracksuits — you’re gonna be confused all day.”

IN THE STORE
Find the perfect item
“It is kind of a religious experience. You walk in the store and you gotta receive, and when you start seeing an aura in a particular aisle, you gotta run. Until you see that aura, I suggest you run in place. You don’t know where they’re going to have hid the best stuff, so you gotta stay ready.”

Handle other shoppers
“I think a Taser might come in handy.”

Keep up your health
“It’s imperative at one point during the day to get some of that fresh-air shopping — do not miss it. Inhale short, quick breaths to recharge.”

If you shop in groups
“Be very careful, because you can avoid strangers, but it’s always your friends that hurt you the worst. If a friend grabs that one item you had your eye on, she won’t put it down. You can will a stranger to put an item down and then you grab it, but a friend know it’s worth something to you. ... I never shop in a herd. I like it when Daddy goes huntin’ alone — it’s safer.”

Share deals with friends
“Stay connected, cell phone at the ready, but hands-free. Do not call arbitrarily. A good friend is gonna buy two — if she finds something she’s going to buy two because she knows you need it. That may be difficult when it comes to ponying up for the things she bought you, though. ... You can lose good friends. If they like it and you didn’t buy them something, they won’t forgive you.”

WRAPPING UP
Find a checkout line
“Pick a cashier that’s smilin’. If they’re not havin’ fun, then you’re not gonna have fun.”

Pay for your purchases
“Always pay in cold, hard cash. However, cash can be hard to come by, so what you want to do and what you end up doing are two different things.”

Get it to the car
“You’ve seen those people on TV who carry things on their heads. There’s a real advantage to that because when the cart’s full, you can push it with one hand and hold more on your head with the other. Also, people get out of your way."