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.

Naughty or nice? The holiday displays that put the bah in our humbug

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Portland-area residents do pretty well when it comes to horrendous light displays. By well, I mean absolutely, over the top, slap-a-ribbon-on-me tacky. I’m not talking about the traditional candles-in-the-windows or the subdued wreath-on-the-door. What I want are the light displays visible as you approach from miles down the street, or coming in from I-295. Or even, as Danny DeVito’s character suggests in the light-display extravaganza Deck the Halls, “from space.” We at the Phoenix found these all on our own, without relying on the movie’s Web site, which at press time lists just two “decked” homes in Maine. Clearly the Deck site is asleep at the sleigh, so herewith, our best of the worst:

Decked out
836 Broadway, South Portland
The top location this year, and with a strong prospect for next year’s showcase, is this home clearly labeled “North Pole” (equipped with a leaning, and apparently wayward, penguin), a Rudolph whose nether end is unlit (no guiding light there), an inflated tree around the site, and, to top it all off, Christmas music playing to passers-by. Don’t miss the Nativity scene, because Christmas is really all about the humble Baby Jesus. He would have loved this setup.

On the market
37 Fall Brook St, Portland
For sale: two-unit multi-family house on half an acre, apparently home to Santa and Mrs. Claus, Frosty the Snowman and a friend, and flashing snowflakes. Asking price $225,000, Santa not included.

Santa on a Harley
7 Woodmere Rd, Portland
A simple selection, unadorned with any other accoutrements, a shades-wearing Santa rides a flaming Harley through the suburbs off Allen Avenue. (No, the headlight isn’t red, and there aren’t any gifts in tow. This is Santa’s ride on a hall pass from the missus.)

Evil tree
460 Ocean Ave, Portland
The red candy canes illuminating this tree at Payson Park make me hungry. I also skipped breakfast this morning, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Frozen fish
230 Commercial St, Portland
Sapporo’s display actually looks better on paper than in real life. Perhaps it’s the reflection of the lights in the window distracting from the web of electrical cords exposed to the elements.

Kiss this
37 Casco St, Portland
Atop the entrance to “The Ambassador” apartment building is a festive green pyramid, but don’t stand under the mistletoe on the awning over the door — the passed-out guy on the top step might wake at any moment looking for love.

Zombie dolls
73 North St, Portland
These cheerful fellows make the most of a tiny Munjoy Hill front yard, but unlike the other displays, you have to catch them during the day — at night, they’re turned off and shrivel to tiny pieces of fabric on the ground, only to rise again the following morning.

Balls to the wall
231 Commercial St, Portland
Ah yes, those glowing balls of holiday cheer I love to hate. Get your ball fix throughout the downtown, but nowhere more abstractly than above Decorum.

Stocking stuffers:

Pole dancing
24 St Lawrence St, Portland
Not much special here, except the effort required to lift a five-pointed, two-dozen-lighted star some distance in the air on the back porch of this Munjoy Hill home. Which is enough.

Armed bear
29 Jordan Ave, SouthPortland
A polar bear carrying two sticks of uncertain origin does an approximation of the robot on the side of this lit lawn.

Three Santas
39 Mona Rd, Portland
A bicycle with “spinning” wheels is the first eye-catcher on this lawn, which also features a waving Santa, two other Santas, motorized dolls in the window, Minnie Mouse and Mickey Mouse dressed up for Mickey’s Christmas Carol, and a penguin blocking the front door.

Festooned follies
267 Brackett St, Portland
While perhaps more sweet than tacky, the moving elves in the front window of this West End townhouse are just plain creepy. And the lights around the door are a bit much.

Nonsectarian snowflakes
558 Main St, SouthPortland
Businesses are not exempt from holiday cheer. This chiropractic office has chosen the inoffensive snowflake as its expression of winter wonders.

Storytelling
963 Washington Ave, Portland
Meloon’s Florists takes a very specific approach, with lifelike statues in a timeless moment from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Is this the part where Santa redeems Rudolph from the status of outcast? Or is it the little-known section where Santa laughs at the illuminated proboscis, just like all the other reindeer? We’ll never tell.

Snow cones?
end of Mona Rd, Portland
It’s unclear what exactly Tigger and Pooh are thinking mounting poor Frosty and the jar of “hunny,” but I’m pretty sure they need some adult supervision.

Choo-choo chintz
921 Highland Ave, SouthPortland
Even the mailbox is decorated at this house, which also includes a decorated garage and a train puffing “smoke” in lights.

State: One Santa okay; another no way

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix

Maine regulators have refused to approve an English beer’s label featuring Santa Claus holding a beer, saying it makes the product attractive to children. But they didn’t balk at approving the label for Gritty’s Christmas Ale, which shows a man dressed up as Santa Claus, also holding a beer.

In October, the state agency that approves beer-bottle labels (yes, we have one; it’s the Liquor Licensing and Compliance division of the Department of Public Safety) wrote to Shelton Brothers, importer of Santa’s Butt (a winter porter), saying the beer’s label (which shows a rear view of a fat-assed Santa sitting on a type of barrel that’s called a “butt”), and two other beer-bottle labels featuring bare-breasted women, are “undignified or improper.”

Last week, Shelton Brothers filed suit in federal court, saying the state’s ban and the rule it is based on violate the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression.

New York and Connecticut have recently expressed similar concerns over artwork on bottles imported by Shelton Brothers, a Massachusetts-based beer importer (headquartered, of all places, in Belchertown), but anti-censorship lawsuits in those states led to the bans being reversed.

In remarks to the press before he began declining to comment on the case, Maine State Police Lieutenant Patrick Fleming, who heads the state’s liquor-licensing agency, elaborated, saying the depiction of Santa might appeal to children.

That doesn’t wash with Gritty’s owner Richard Pfeffer. “Children aren’t really in the beer aisle all that much, unless they’re accompanied by adults,” he says. The Gritty’s Christmas Ale label has met with no problems from regulators, and was re-approved in April.

Shelton Brothers imports nearly 150 beers from around the world, and has run into trouble with a few of them, mostly relating to holiday designs brewed by the Ridgeway Brewery in England, whose brewer — a friend of the Sheltons — collaborates with them on beer and label ideas.

Maine officials have also declined to say whether this ruling means long-approved labels on other beers might also now be determined to appeal to children. (In addition to the Gritty’s Christmas Ale with Santa, several breweries have beers whose labels include drawings of dogs, for example.) Approval by the state does not force a store to display or sell a particular beer; stores can choose for themselves.

Daniel Shelton, one of the brothers who owns the import company, says even if Maine reverses its decision — which state liquor-licensing supervisor Jeff Austin said had not happened as of Tuesday — the lawsuit will continue, to get a court to strike down the state’s rule, which Shelton says is “way too vague.”

In addition to Santa’s Butt porter, Maine regulators have banned sales of Les Sans Culottes (a French blonde ale), whose label features a detail from the 1830 Eugene Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People. The symbolic figure of Liberty is a bare-breasted woman carrying a French flag and a rifle and bayonet. The painting hangs in the Louvre.

A third label to be rejected by the state, Rosé de Gambrinus (a raspberry-flavored Belgian lambic), features a painting specially commissioned by the brewery depicting Gambrinus, an unofficial patron of beers and brewing and legendary king of Flanders, with a naked woman on his lap (symbolizing beer, according to the lawsuit).

The state has yet to file a reply in court.