Gay marriage is a hot-button topic in Maine, but to Chicago-based performance artists Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger, it is an everyday lens through which to explore what it means to be a person in our society. The husband and husband team’s durational and repetitive performances focus “on simple materials and actions pushed to almost Sisyphean extremes.” In brief, they show what a committed relationship looks like, lest anyone still doubt the veracity of gay marriage. They will give an artists’ talk this afternoon, Sept. 2, at 4:30pm in Osher Hall at the Maine College of Art. The duo will also perform on First Friday, Sept. 3, at the artists’ reception at the ICA at MECA for Mind-bending with the Mundane curated by MECA professor and renegade printmaker, Adriane Herman. The ICA show features “a wide variety of media such as photography, performance, performance residue, engravings, bureaucratic documents and installation,” and includes works by Miller & Shellabarger as well as Alix Lambert, Allison Smith and Andrew Raftery.

There’s a great crop of recent documentaries about the visual arts, and SPACE Gallery has picked some juicy ones for their new SCOPE film series. First up on Thursday, September 9th, is a screening of the new documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Screenings will continue monthly for the rest of the year and then bi-monthly in 2011. SCOPE will feature films that focus on artists, designers, architects, collectors and curators in the visual arts. The lineup for the rest of the year includes Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight on Thursday, October 7th; Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine on Thursday, November 11th; and Herb and Dorothy on Thursday, December 9th. All screenings are at SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St. Doors open at 7:00pm and films start at 7:30pm. General admission is $7 and $5 for SPACE members and students w/ ID.

Now that it is time for our kids to go back to school after one of the most beautiful summers in recent memory, some local business think it’s important to remember places where back to school is not business as usual. MaineLine is a new non-profit coalition of Maine businesses founded to provide a direct response to disasters like the earthquake in Haiti. They are hosting their first annual celebrity golf tournament, Do Good with Your Game, on Monday, September 13, 2010, at Nonesuch River Golf Club in Scarborough. All proceeds will directly benefit rebuilding efforts in Haiti, which include building ten new school/community centers over the next year. Darcy Pierce of Envoy, who is coordinating the effort, has posted  videos from a recent trip to Haiti on his YouTube channel. You can register online, and if you run a local company and are looking for a way to help, please consider joining MaineLine.

You can check in with your friends on FourSquare, Gowalla or the new Facebook Places, but the only way to find out where your favorite beers are on tap in Portland is to go to Portlandtaps. The brain child of three beer-obsessed Portlanders, Cory Cronk, Josh Baston and Caleb O’Conell, Portlandtaps helps you perform both geolocation and price comparison for your favorite brews, plus find out about special events and discounts at Portland area bars and pubs. They even give you geeky beer box scores on ABVs and IBUs for local beers (measures of alcohol and bitterness, respectively, for those of us slightly less obsessed). The internet doesn’t get any more relevant than that. Why does this matter? David Calloway on CBS MarketWatch says that, “If the top livable cities have anything in common, it might be good beer rather than good financial centers.” According to the Maine Brewers’ Guild, “Since 1986, Maine has been at the forefront of the craft brew movement. Our state is home to over 20 breweries which produce more than 100 different brands.” For competitive intelligence, Beer Advocate also has up-to-the-minute reviews of brewpubs in Portland. Angela DiMillo just posted an interview with Cory and Caleb on why Portlandtaps is a “necessity” for life in Portland.

The Picnic Music and Arts Festival, this weekend on Saturday, August 28, showcases a layer of creative commerce in Portland that mostly flies below the radar. When people think about craft in Maine they tend to think of the precious woodwork, ceramics, hand dipped candles and glassware that you see in the big tent at the Common Ground Country Fair. Although this year’s third annual festival has been in the works for a year, it does have a feeling of casual spontaneity, like it’s culinary namesake. And speaking of eating, there will be food from Verbena Café in South Portland and the near legendary Skinny Cart BBQ. The real action here, though, is the underground commerce. If freak folk has a material counterpart it would be the quirk craft of Picnic’s 100+ vendors. There are some familiar names here, like Erin Flett and Ferdinand, and some traditional crafts to be sure, but there is also an A-Z of names reminiscent of memorable but inscrutable internet startups, from Akosua to Zooguu, that feature all manner of creative flotsam and ironic jetsam (or is the Jetsons?) As for music, there’s a full schedule of  8 bands, headlined by local indie rockers Phantom Buffalo. The festival will be held at Lincoln Park (corner of Congress and Franklin Arterial) from 11am to 6pm. The festival organizers promise that “The Picnic Booth will be handing out goody bags to the first 25 shoppers,” so come early and make a day of it.

photo by Samuel Cousins

There’s nothing like The New York Times to give you an idea of how people from “away” see life in Portland. This Sunday’s travel article, “36 Hours in Portland, Me.,” in fact, finds a lot of the same things that we’ve been covering in LiveWorkPortland. Reporter Lionel Beehner clearly has some good local informants, perhaps including artist and city councilman David Marshall who gets a prominent mention with his co-op Constellation Gallery. Although we have mentioned most of the places featured in the article, we’ll now play catch up for those we haven’t gotten to yet: Farmer’s Table and Caiola‘s for locavore fare; Peanut Butter Jelly Time and Kamasouptra at the Public Market House on Monument Square; Rosemont Market on Munjoy Hill; hot new restaurants El Rayo Taqueria , Sonny’s and Grace; Novare Res beer garden (best line, “feels more Munich than Maine”); and Bayside building-mates, Maine Mead Works and the Urban Farm Fermentory.  And did we mention that Bayside Bowl serves oysters? The one bit that wasn’t fact-checked thoroughly was the description of modern textile and furniture design studio Angela Adams as “a design store that sells perky home furnishings like colorful trays and pillows,” which is kind of like saying that Picasso was an old guy who painted plates. On the whole, though, they see us much as we see ourselves: creative, ecological, quality minded and passionately local, and for that we say, “thanks, come back soon.”

photo of Novare Res from BrewPublic.com

As part of the integration of the Creative Portland Corporation and the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance, there is an immediate opening for an Executive Director to oversee all of the creative economy promoting functions of both organizations for the City of Portland. This full time job is perfect for someone who wants to be in the middle of Portland’s creative community and enjoys networking and facilitating communication and cooperation between all the diverse groups that are creative Portland. The candidate will have to have a facility for fund raising and grant writing, and for representing creative Portland in public as well as making it all work behind the scenes. Most importantly, the Executive Director will need to have a passionate interest in fostering and promoting the arts, culture and creative economy of Portland. If you think this sounds like you, please see the official job listing and send an email with “EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR” in the subject line with a letter of interest and a resume to the following contacts by midnight on September 4th, 2010: Andrew Graham, President, Creative Portland Corporation;  Alice Kornhauser, President, Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance.

photo by Hint of Plum/Flickr.com

Portland may not be known for being fashion forward, but a pair of young fashionistas are laying claim to our streets just the same. New York transplant Laura Serino and local photographer Nate Philbrook have teamed up to start the Fore Front Fashion blog. Their concept is to document the street looks of Portlanders in all their flannel shirted, Bean booted and thrift shopped glory. They have received some positive press in the Phoenix and Press Herald and are covering fashionable local shops like Ferdinand and Chantal. Just in case you might think they have delusions of being the next Bill Cunningham (legendary street fashion photographer for The New York Times), Laura clearly has things in perspective, “I wanted to start a street style blog to showcase the individuals of Maine…more so than to try and make it about us being a fashion capital, because I don’t really think Mainers are about being super fashionable, they’re about being authentic in their own styles.” Well said—and practical. She’ll fit in well here.

Five or ten years in the making, depending on how you count it, the Bayside Trail is now a reality. There will be a public Ribbon Cutting on Thursday, August  19th,  4-6  pm at the Elm Street Plaza to celebrate the event. Mayor Nicholas M. Mavodones and US Congresswoman Chellie Pingree will be in attendance along with other community leaders that have been working to make Bayside one of Portland’s up and coming neighborhoods. According to the Munjoy Hill News, “The one mile trail has transformed a 13.2 acre corridor that runs parallel to Marginal Way through the Bayside Neighborhood into a ribbon of green that will connect the Eastern Prom with Deering Oaks Park.” This may be overstating it a bit, because although the trail has been completed (hence the ribbon cutting) there is still $1.6 million more fund raising to be done so the landscaping phase of the project can be completed next year. The Portland Public Arts Committee (PPAC) has just posted an RFP for an artist to design benches for the trail, due on August 26th31st. In the meantime, enjoy a walk, run or bike ride through the new public space.

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy picked Portland indie rock band Brenda to be in the first (hopefully annual) Solid Sound Festival that happens at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, this weekend (August 13-15), before they even had a record out. Graeme Kennedy, the founder of McKeenStreet Music (aka Graeme K, the Portland Phoenix 2010 Music Poll winner for best electronic act), played the demo of their debut album Silver Tower (just released in stores and online now, CD, Download and Vinyl!) for Tweedy in March while the Wilco members were looking for acts for the festival. Brenda also played last months Nateva Festival in Oxford, Maine, with Grizzly Bear and The Flaming Lips. This weekend’s festival includes Wilco, in their only east coast appearance this summer, along with Mavis Staples, Avi Buffalo and Vetiver. All the Wilco band members’ side projects are included too, and Brenda is slated to join Jeff Tweedy during his solo set Sunday afternoon as well as playing their own set Saturday. I hope to catch a quick interview with the band and see how it feels to represent Portland in the big time.