Last night I attended the Portland Phoenix’s Best of Portland Awards at Port City Music Hall. The show began at 7:00, but when I arrived at 6:00 it was already filled with some of Portland’s most creative people. Granted there was a VIP special hour before hand, hmmm why wasn’t I invited? (hint, hint, wink, wink) Fortunately a dear friend held a seat for me, and to my delight food was being handed to me left and right from the wonderful staff of Black Tie Catering. Not to mention that as I looked to my right there was a gorgeous fondue table, which was completely swarmed by eager eaters, ooh if only I had a longer reach!

After Marie Moreshead finished her set (one of the night’s three musical performances), the award announcements began They even started with my favorite category, Arts & Entertainment! Boy, I tell you, the crowd was a super zealous one. As each nominee was announced, enthusiastic cheers made winners out of even those who did not receive an award. I was so excited that I tweeted almost every category and winner, my finger actually kind of hurts today!

The Great Lost Bear won for best burger, and when two loyal customers discovered that the owners were not in attendance they graciously accepted the award for them. “Evan Horton and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to accept the award for the Great Lost Bear. We were honored and promptly delivered it of course,” said Robert Barnes of  revDRTV. Now that’s dedication! I am so proud of the city I live in, I wish I could tweet it all!

The opening of Base Camp Gallery last week in Portland was as much about the fact of a new alternative art space as it was about the work that was shown. Everybody there was clearly having a good time and it seemed to me that the real art at play here was social. This is not to diminish the work, much of which could easily be hanging in any number of downtown galleries, but rather to elevate place-making to its rightful place. The place in question is a large warehouse, once used for distributing beer, and now the auxiliary space of a couple of well-established Portland entrepreneurs, a machine shop and an interesting smattering of younger creatives. The entry way looked like an art installation at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, with a lineup of Mercedes and modern furniture mashed up against a sound system and bar (another way of distributing beer). The autos turn out to be part of a bio-diesel conversion project, but no matter, they were fun to look at and added to the cocktail chatter. The overarching theme of the space and the crowd was, in fact, conversational. The artworks to each other, the art to the space, the implicit conversations between the different tenants of the warehouse, and of course, the sizable crowd that came to see what it was all about.

Another kind of conversation will be happening on Tuesday, April 5th. The Maine Center for Creativity will be hosting “From Imagination to Innovation: Maine Participates in Lincoln Center Institute’s Imag’nation Conversation.” This is one of fifty such events that the Lincoln Center Institute has been holding in every state that will culminate in an Imagination Summit in New York this coming July. These conversations are designed to get people talking about “how imagination is a prerequisite for success in the 21st-century global economy [and how] now more than ever, we must teach imagination in our schools and nurture it in our communities.” The keynote speaker for the Maine conversation will be Rockland artist Eric Hopkins, joined by Daniel Bouthot, Habib Dagher, Carol Farrell, Aaron Frederick, Andy Graham and Karen Montanaro, moderated by Patsy Wiggins. The event goes from 4 to 8pm, at Hannaford Hall at the Abromson Center on the USM Portland campus ($20 to attend; $5 for USM students; RSVP is required).

There has been a lot of discussion during the past months (and particularly in the past weeks) about the role of public art in Portland and in the State of Maine in general. The Portland Museum of Art will be holding a free public forum: “Whose Art is It?” on Friday, April 8 from 12-1:30 pm. The discussion will use the removal of the The Maine Labor Mural Cycle in Augusta as a springboard to address the status of public ownership of public art. “Participants will include: Mark Bessire, Director of the Portland Museum of Art; Sharon Corwin, Director and Chief Curator of the Colby College Museum of Art; Christina Bechstein, Sculpture Professor and Director of Public Engagement at Maine College of Art; and Chris O’Neil, Government Relations Consultant for the Portland Community Chamber. Invitations were extended to Governor Paul LePage, who is unable to attend and to artist Judy Taylor [who painted the mural cycle], who has respectfully declined.”

Last fall, proposals for benches for the new Bayside Trail were unveiled to the public to no great acclaim: “Art should be something you feel passion for,” said committee Chairman Jack Soley. “At the end of the day, we felt most of the entries were simply too pedestrian, and we’re not looking for that. We could buy benches from a catalog if that’s what we were looking for.” From what I saw of the proposals, some of them were quite well crafted and others too self-consciously “artistic.” But, to return to the idea we started this post out with, the relevant “creativity” here is not personally expressive, but social. One of the most successful comparable projects in recent years has been the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The seating is indeed functional, but beautifully designed. Most importantly, people use it! The High Line offers many places for people to stop and relax and socialize. The seating has helped to make the space into a place. With luck, this is what the Public Art Committee had in mind when they decided to reissue the challenge: “To Artists, Designers, Landscape Architects, Architects and other interested parties: The Public Art Committee of Portland, Maine has issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) from artists and designers, or teams of artists and designers, to create functional art in the form of seating along the new Bayside Trail in Portland. The RFQ is available for download on the Portland Planning and Urban Development Department web site. The deadline for submission of a qualifications packet is 3:00 p.m., Thursday, April 28th, 2011.” The Public Art Committee also requests that you please forward this post along to other artists or designers who might be interested in submitting qualifications for this project.

Making places for creativity to happen is just as important as the tangible products of creativity itself. The creation of new places like Base Camp and the Bayside Trail adds to the collective happiness that we feel in Portland.

The organizers of yesterday’s St. Patrick’s parade in Portland yesterday were very thoughtful both for the marchers and local businesses. The parade kicked off at noon in front of Becky’s Diner (nowhere finah) on Commercial Street and ended down the road in front of Ri Ra Irish Pub (and Standard Baking Co. and Flatbread Pizza). Like a condensed version of Jame Joyce’s Bloomsday, this celebration of Ireland articulated the half mile journey from breakfast to lunch and pints into the afternoon. A fittingly short voyage for food-obsessed Portland.

Dogfish Head is my favorite brewery not located in Portland, and brew master Sam Calagione (and the company he founded) would fit in just fine in here. Sam has a new show on the Discovery Channel called Brew Masters where he travels the world in search of exotic ingredients that he can brew beer with. Kind of like Tony Bourdain on hops. Sometimes that leads him to Peru for chica or New Zealand for tamarillos, but he came to Maine for cedar. But not just any cedar—surfboard cedar from Grain Surfboards in York. The episode that airs next week follows the trail from cedar shavings left over from the shaping of Grain’s boards to Dogfish’s limited edition “GraintoGlass” beer that was the centerpiece of a Dogfish event at Novare Res Bier Cafe in Portland this summer. Thanks to Tyler Briggs at Corduroy Boutique in Portland for tipping us off on this one. Leftover cedar shavings = delicious one-of-a-kind beer? Now that’s creative economy!

Men’s Journal magazine just came out with an intensively researched (and really quite geeky) list of The 25 Best Beers in the World. And guess what? Two, count ‘em two, of those beers are made right here in Portland, Maine! Allagash Curieux, and Peak Organic Pale Ale made the cut along with beers from California (4) Belguim and Germany (3 each) and Oregon and Pennsylvania (2 each). On the entire list, Portland was only city that was represented by more than one brewery. (Santa Rosa, California’s Russian River Brewing Company, however, did claim two slots). Regular readers of this blog may remember a reference to David Calloway’s article on CBS MarketWatch where he says that, “If the top livable cities have anything in common, it might be good beer rather than good financial centers.” We agreed with him then, but now we have to second the motion.

photos by Bernt Rostad/ flickr and lastonein/flickr