Earlier in the summer we had a garage sale. Technically it was a yard sale, since we converted our garage into an art studio, but in Maine all the listings for yard sales, stoop sales, tag sales, moving sales etc. are listed under “garage sales,” so be it. We posted on craigslist: “Artist + graphic designer + 3 kids unload lots of cool stuff. Furniture (including mid-century). Lighting. Collectibles. Huge music collection (CDs). Books. Toys.” We drew a very nice crowd and sold a buch of stuff. But the important point was the quality of the customers.

There are two kinds of people who go to garage sales (or flea markets, resale shops, etc.), people looking to get ordinary things really cheap and people looking to get good deals on very particular things. We wrote our ad to appeal to the second sort, and for the most part, that’s who we got. This little insight has important implications for the creative economy—both in terms of supply and demand. Simply put, the creative economy needs the creative consumer.

Obviously, all of our creative ventures require audiences that can appreciate them. In Nicole Mones foodie/romance novel The Last Chinese Chef, cooking is presented as a social art, with the chef only being able to find expression through the refined palate of the diner. The Slow Food people also talk about the participation of the eater, but this is equally true of audiences in music, art, film and theatre, or in the members of a crafter’s Etsy circle.

The other side of the coin is that we have to present wonderful, unique things at prices that our audience is willing to spend. Travel the world and you will find many cities that are filled with bulk commodities and luxury brands with very little in the individually crafted middle. It is more difficult to market these kinds of artisanal things, because they are neither wholly familiar nor global brands, but they are things that if you find them here (and like them) you’ll want to buy because you can’t readily get them elsewhere.

And that’s what turns a city from a commodity dispenser into a place: a sense of immediacy that you need experience and enjoy—and buy—what you find because it’s rare or one-of-a-kind or just plain better here. And when we talk about Portland as a great food town or great music town we also mean that we have great appreciators of food and music that allow and encourage these and many other arts to find expression through them.

SPACE Gallery—or just “SPACE”—is a mainstay of the First Friday Art Walk circuit here in Portland, Maine. This downtown nonprofit arts organization also functions as a hub for the city’s most mind-blowing concerts. Shows this year included Dan Deacon, Titus Andronicus, and my favorite, The What Cheer! Brigade, a 19-piece marching band that played Balkanesque beats while snaking impishly through a dance-crazy audience. Throw in events like the four-day screening of Matthew Barney’s epic The Cremaster Cycle, pornstar Annie Sprinkle’s disquisition on “eco-sexuality,” and a live storytelling series called SLANT, and you’ve begun to taste the SPACE mission: to provide a venue for what is contemporary, emerging, and unconventional.

A room that frequently approaches critical mass with sweaty dance parties certainly limits its full potential as a gallery. Installations in the ilk of Dale Chihuly would not be safe near a mosh pit! For many of us, that tension between art and livability gives SPACE its special flavor. Executive Director Nay May describes it as both the gallery’s “greatest strength” and the “biggest challenge” he’s had to navigate over the years. On July 1, and for the first time since opening in 2002, SPACE will move beyond the one room operation. They’ve usurped an adjacent property in order to have more—ahem—space. 50% more on the floor, 75% more on the wall, to be exact.

“SPACE Gallery annex” will form a dynamic duo with the main room and will moonlight as an all-purpose performance venue. In the words of May, “The dire need in this case was for us to allow some projects more room. This separate space will give us a chance to do some projects, installations, etc. that don’t coexist with other things the way we need most things to coexist in our current space.” The first annex exhibit (I was instructed to use lowercase “a”) will run from July 1 to August 5. It’s a drawing show of New York-based artists who work in various media and explore the shapes, textures, and lines of memory. For more information on “Elia Bettaglio, Selena Kimball and Tatiana Simonova: Drawings” click here.

The extra breathing room also means SPACE will be more amenable to working with local businesses and organizations. They’ve occasionally rented out the main floor for fundraising events and the like. The annex will offer Portland more opportunities to bring communities together within the walls of our creative imagination.

So thank you, SPACE, for giving us more of you! We’re looking forward to what happens next.

Above photos on left: Elia Bettaglio’s drawing “Magnifying Glass”. On right, Tatiana Simonova’s drawing “Eventuality 1.” Both artists will be featured along with Elia Bettaglio in the annex’s opening exhibit.

Will South Portland soon become a hotbed of Hollywood-like activity? Maine is a visual paradise—from its billboard-less highways to attractively zig-zagging coastline (which, when you stretch it to full length, measures longer than California’s). No wonder people came here to film flicks like In The Bedroom and The Cider House Rules. But moviemakers have mostly spelunked into our territory to get good film footage, then headed elsewhere to complete the project. They’ve had no capacity to produce their films in-state, as we lack a large-scale commercial production studio.

A few months ago, Maine hoped a guy named Bill Ferrell would follow through on his promise to build two giant soundstages in Camden, which would have made the cozy seaside village the state’s first cradle of the film production economy. Those plans have gone awry, and now South Portland’s city council has snatched the fumbled baton.

Their vision is interesting: transform the vacant South Portland Armory into Maine’s bastion of TV and film production. Starting June 1, South Portland (SoPo) will lease the estimated 10,000 square foot building, which it purchased for $650,000 in 2006, to Fore River Sound Stage. The lease has a buy option, and the base rent is a surprisingly low $550 per month. There are no toilets yet, and major repairs will need to be made since the building has crumbled during its three years of vacancy. Beginning in December, 60 percent of gross rental receipts collected by Fore River will go to directly to South Portland, which will reinvest 40 percent of that money into the building’s renovation. The city council voted unanimously on the contract, but the deal’s naysayers argue SoPo has gambled on Fore River’s ability to turn a profit and boost the creative economy.

The leader of Fore River, Eric Matheson, is an art director and production designer who has worked on Hollywood films such as Amistad and The Cider House Rules. According to Keep Me Current, Matheson plans to invest “a couple of million dollars” into renovations so that the upcoming studio can cater to major motion-pictures, and he said, “Our intention is to purchase the building, through our investors, and as soon as we can possibly do that, we will.” Find more details on the negotiations in the Portland Press Herald.

The armory is one of the first buildings you see after crossing the Casco Bay Bridge from downtown Portland into SoPo. Local jobseekers from both towns will have easy access: Set designers. Stage crews. And Paparazzi? Plastic surgeons? If all goes according to plan, the Portland area may be introduced to small doses of a culture as foreign to Maine as palm trees.

Photo of South Portland’s armory by Current Publishing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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!

Daniel Fuller, the new director at The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, has learned a lot about how to get things to happen in Portland in a very short time. Read Bob Keyes’ story about how Daniel got MECA and the Portland Pirates to collaborate on screening brief artist-made hockey-themed videos on the scoreboard over center ice before three games last month. This month he’s clear-cut the ICA’s normal exhibition schedule to debut an interdisciplinary and intergenerational arboretum of artistic activity. “The FOREST is an opportunity to transform the ICA at MECA into a hive of activity, an open space for dialogues between working artists and students, creators and appreciators,” Fuller says, “each bringing their individual experiences and expertise to the table and simultaneously teaching and learning. The inspiration and aspiration of the space is to create a temporary town square where ideas are considered and discussed.” Visual and performing artists will develop hands-on programs and activities to engage students and the public in unconventional and imaginative ways. FOREST started this Tuesday, April 19, and will run through Friday, April 22, culminating in a forest themed dance party, with prizes for best costume provided by Rogues Gallery. Go to meca.edu/ica for the full schedule and all the up to the minute Forest news.

Still from “Silent Film of a Tree Falling in the Forest” by Mungo Thompson

At some point in my February torpor I became aware, as if only partly waking from a dream, that there was a new media entity in Portland. Like Dom Cobb in Inception planting an idea in my subconscious, the planes of my awareness began to shift around a subtle suggestion. It started with an email invitation to listen to a new 4G web radio station called Maine.fm. I let it play in the background for a few days, enjoying the alternate reality of an eclectic pop radio station that filled its airtime exclusively with music made in Maine (and most of it made in Portland). Then the other day, Krystal Kenville posted something on our Facebook wall pointing to an article she wrote in Dispatch magazine about Marc and Regina Bartholomew of Acadia Recording‘s move into episodic mockumentary video production, Vacationlanders (have a look here to help them kickstart it). Dispatch? Never heard of it. But its tagline, “Bringing you the latest insight into the music and film scene in Maine,” seemed a kindred spirit to Maine.fm’s sonic locavorism. I hazarded a guess that they were sibling media babies (the fact that they link to each other in their main navigation bars was kind of a give-away.) And indeed they seem to be, with Dispatch acting as a highly specific cultural search target that will feed new listeners to Maine.fm. A quick spin through Dispatch‘s first month of posts (during the doldrums of February) revealed a couple of things I had missed: Spose’s hit “I’m Awesome” was mashed up for a promo of NBC’s Monday night lineup (Sell out? No. Payday? Yes!); Ray LaMontagne played on Conan before winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album with God Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise. There were local focused items as well about the new season of Clash of Titans at Port City Music Hall and the 48 Hour Music Festival. [The first of the Clashes is tomorrow night. Only in an ironic universe is The Rolling Stones vs. Thin Lizzy even a contest, but there you are.] They even give a nice shout out to the Maine Radio Project‘s new weekly local music report. Especially nice, since the MRP is an alternative, noncommercial, free-form, dot org counterpoint to Maine.fm. Toggle on over to Maine.fm and find out that Spose has a DJ slot all this week from 2-6pm. You can download their mobile Android app (iPhone and Blackberry coming soon, they promise) and listen on the go, which i think is what the whole 4G radio thing is supposed to be all about. You know, like, Radio. The company behind all this, Intrigue Music, started as a boutique music licensing company in New York (one claim to fame, they handle park of the James Brown catalog. I feel good!) that moved up to Portland last fall. We can see their gears spinning because we’re spinning a lot of the same ones at LiveWork Portland: create high quality, consistent visibility for the local scene, capture the attention of national markets and watch as our artists find themselves getting paid as their songs get snapped up by TV producers and advertising agencies. If this sounds commercial, it is, but the only thing better than living in a place where you have the time, space and audience to develop your own thing, is to do all of that, and get paid well for it, too.

Apologies to Leonardo DiCaprio and Warner Brothers

There are lots of reasons to love SPACE Gallery. There’s something going on there almost every night, and the quality and fun levels are uncommonly high. But beyond good times and a venue for local artists to show and perform their work, over the years, SPACE has become something much more: a place that puts Portland on the map for artists from other creative metros. Case in point: Nonesuch recording artists The Low Anthem from Providence have made a point on their last two tours to play at SPACE. These guys share a label with The Black Keys, Laurie Anderson and Phillip Glass! Oh, and Emmylou Harris too, who invited them to tour with her. You can read all about their elegiac lo-fi eclecticism  in The New York Times and hear them in person at SPACE on March 7th—for 12 bucks! Their tour also includes Montreal, North Adams, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, Glasgow, London and New Orleans. (And here are two nodal side notes about their new album, Smart Flesh: It (and its predecessor, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin) were mastered by the legendary Bob Ludwig at Portland’s aptly named Gateway Mastering. And it was produced by Mike Mogis from Bright Eyes, another freak folk phenomenon that has put Portland on their map thanks to the renewed nodality of  The State Theatre. They play a sold out show there the following week.)  Another case in point: “The Sketchbook Project unites more than 10,000 artists from over 60 countries with a simple call to action: fill a sketchbook and share it with the world. Now in its third year, the Project reflects the DIY ethos of Art House Co-op, a Brooklyn-based gallery dedicated to creating massive international art projects for everyone. Beginning in March 2011, the Project will tour the country as an innovative mobile library, visiting museums and galleries in Portland, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Seattle and San Francisco before returning home to the Brooklyn Art Library. The Library’s unique cataloging system, developed specifically for the Project, allows artists to trace their sketchbook’s journey through many hands, connecting a physical and virtual community that spans the globe.” The Sketchbook Project will begin it’s tour at SPACE from March 30th to April 2nd. So let’s add all that up: Portland, Providence, Montreal, North Adams, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, Glasgow, London, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Seattle and San Francisco. This set of global Creative Economy metros make a pretty big network of nodes—from just two events at SPACE Gallery! Participating in this network allow us to enjoy a cultural experience, and have a cultural impact, disproportionate with the size of our small city.

Photo of The Low Anthem by Ryan Mastro, courtesy Nonesuch Records

All families are different—and some more different than others—but Lauren Wayne at the State Theatre has programmed a weekend of wide ranging (and eccentric) family fun. Tomorrow, Friday, December 3, Eternal Otter Records is presenting “1930s Night at the State Theatre”. This historic and newly renovated venue will transforms itself back into a 1930s movie house with a Technicolor screening of The Wizard of Oz. There will be a pre-show performance of classic vaudeville tunes by Golden Otter recording artists Over A Cardboard Sea. To complete the nostalgic mood in the lobby: tin type photography, silent film projections and Shirley Temples at the bar. And it’s only $5! The show starts at 5:30 pm and the film begins at 7 pm. In a genius spasm of Depression-era frugality, The Wizard‘s alter ego, the cult film event known as Dark Side of the Rainbow (where the uncut visuals from the original Wizard of Oz are paired with the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, with uncanny, and by all accounts unintentional, effect) will be screened at 10 pm for another fiver. And if your idea of family fun involves dancing, Saturday brings the Grandfather of Funk himself, George Clinton, and his entire 35 member Parliment Funkadelic family, to “tear the roof off the sucker.” Um, George, would you mind keeping it down just a little. They just fixed the place…

It is obvious, but true, that Halloween is the quintessential creative economy holiday. Arts, crafts, theater, music, dance, edibles—zombie impersonation—it’s got it all. So no wonder that Portland is enchanted with a coven full of celebrations next weekend. Maine Today has the most comprehensive event listing, including: Spirits Alive Walk Among the Shadows III Evening Tours of the Eastern Cemetery, Portland Improv Experience SPOOK-tacular Halloween Monster Mash at The Maine Studios,”The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” performed by the Portland Ballet Company at the John Ford Theater, SPACE Gallery Halloween Party, “Rocky Horror Picture Show”at the State Theatre, 1st Annual Zombie Bash at Port City Music Hall, Nightmare Halloween Costume Party presented by PortSports Social Club at Two Point Gallery, Nightmare on Mayo Street Haunted House at Mayo Street Arts (see image above), and Sid Tripp‘s Halloween Bash 2010 at Mariner’s Church. And if that’s not enough, you can always go trick or treating.

“Viva la State.” That’s how Lauren Wayne ends her auto-reply email apologizing for not returning messages right away because… she’s got a theater to open! The landmark State Theatre, vacant for four years and now thoroughly renovated (see photo gallery from HillyTown), will open its doors again Friday for a sold-out performance by My Morning Jacket. Wayne is a pivotal figure in the Portland music scene, a nexus for national and local bands, with the experience to tell the good from the great. She will manage about 80 shows a year at the State and continue to book acts for Port City Music Hall. The State, at around 1,500 seats, fits a niche between the larger, more formal Merrill Auditorium and smaller venues like Port City, Empire Dine and Dance and SPACE Gallery, and will attract bands that might otherwise skip Portland. Some examples from this Fall’s lineup are Josh Ritter, Goo Goo Dolls and Michael Franti & Spearhead. The centrally located theater will also be another anchor for the arts district and an important showcase for the Portland Music Foundation, which is holding a free open house this Sunday (October 17) from 1 to 9 pm. There will be performances by local bands Darien Brahms, Jacob and the House of Fire, Brenda, Sidecar Radio, Atomik and Grand Hotel: “The open house will also serve as the annual launch event and membership drive for your favorite neighborhood local non-profit organization, the Portland Music Foundation, which, as you know, aims to educate, inspire, and incite musicians and music professionals throughout the Portland area and help the entire local music industry grow and prosper.” In keeping with it’s history, there will also be big screen entertainment at the State. On Saturday, October 30th, there will be a participatory showing of the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show guided by The Dirty Dishes Burlesque Review, and Friday, December 3rd, will be 1930s Night, featuring Depression-level ticket prices ($5), a special screening of the The Wizard of Oz and a pre-show performance by local vaudevillians Over A Cardboard Sea. So good luck Lauren, break a leg and Viva la State!

photos by Bryan Bruchman, HillyTown