Two weeks ago, environmental activist, author and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, came to the Portland US District courthouse to join a midday demonstration “marking the two-year anniversary of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations unprecedented power to fund political campaigns,” according to a story in the Portland Phoenix. “City councilor Dave Marshall recently submitted a resolution that calls on Maine’s congressional delegation to support a constitutional amendment abolishing the so-called ‘corporate personhood’ codified by the ruling. ‘We simply can’t win the battle against carbon if politics remains polluted by corporate money,’ McKibben says.” Dave Marshall’s resolution was indeed passed that Thursday night. The city council of Portland voted 6-2 to call on the state’s congressional delegation to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing “corporate personhood.” [Here's a good roundup of the issue from CommonDreams.org]

McKibben went on to give a lecture that Friday evening at the Westbrook Performing Arts Center hosted by the University of New England entitled, “Local and Global: Notes from the Frontlines of the Climate Fight.” [Here's the video of the talk.] That talk is being broadcast today on MPBN’s Speaking in Maine public affairs program.

Now Portland likes corporations just fine, but we like living and working to be in balance. We like our people to be people and our corporations to be corporations.

In fact, a lot of the companies that are attracted to Maine, and to the Portland area in particular, are trying to create solutions to the kinds of problems McKibben addresses in his most recent book, Eaarth, Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.  ReVision Energy, Ocean Approved Kelp, Ocean Renewable Power, all presented at this year’s Juice 3.0 conference and are all based in Portland. Other Portland green businesses listed on the Maine Businesses for Sustainability include Blue Reserve Water, PDT Architects, Wright-Ryan Construction, and Coffee by Design. A great resource for local services with green practices is the new green business directory from The Sunrise Guide.

McKibben’s talk was Skyped live around the State to Belfast, Bangor, Houlton, and the Portland Public Library. Bill said he has been to all of these places, but this “is a very low carbon way to get around Maine!” He apologized, in advance for being, “a professional bummer-outer of people,” but then went on to tell what we can all do to make things better. He praised Maine’s initiatives in the local food movement and Portland’s permaculture efforts during the 10.10.10 day of action, but he also said we need to do more.

In particular, McKibben thinks that the injection of money into politics is crippling our government’s ability to make any substantive changes in our energy future. ”I gave a little talk at the Portland courthouse today,” he said, “because there was a demonstration to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United thing that sort of opened up fully the money spigots for corporate America to interfere in our political life. And this is just cheating. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, and Bob Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, is caught giving money to the referees beforehand, it’s a national scandal. Everybody would be outraged, but if Exxon does it, then it’s OK. That’s crazy and we’ve got to stop it, right now.”

McKibben speaks from the deep Yankee tradition (see my discussion with Colin Woodard in relation to this). In fact, in 2010 he wrote a series of articles for Yankee Magazine subtitled How New England Can Save the World. And he was clearly speaking to a receptive audience that night in Westbrook, “The thing that keeps us from fixing things is our cynicism. This is how it’s always going to be. We need to be aggressively naive about this. I think we need to say, ‘This is not right, it’s not fair, it makes no sense. We don’t know how it got started, but it’s time to stop it.’ And we won’t stop it perfectly and all at once, but hopefully we can at least throw a scare into them. So we’re going to have people all over the country and they’re going to be following around their congressman with big signs pointing out how much money they’ve taken. And we’re going to be making up suit coats for them that look like those uniforms that nascar drivers wear, with decals, logos, for each of their companies. It’s shameful what’s going on and there needs to be some shaming done.”

Bill is not a naturally outgoing person and he has taken the mantle of activist leader somewhat reluctantly. In many ways, like many creatives, he would rather sit in his room and write. But there’s clearly something about the momentum of social engagement, and 350.orgs surprising victories, that keeps him going. Returning at the end of his talk to the theme of local foods he concluded, ”The secret is to have more fun than other people have, and part of that involves eating delicious, good things close to home, and frankly i think we’ve reached the point that i’m going to stop so I can eat some of them!”

Much of what makes Portland such a cool city derives from the first half of our name. We are a port, perched on the Atlantic Ocean. Because of that, we are utterly unlike, say, Waltham or Austin or Chapel Hill. With ports come piers and wharves. Facing the waterfront from Portland’s Commercial Street, you can count ten wharves from left to right, each with its own character. So as we prepare to ring in the New Year, lets sing out the praises of these fingers into the sea:

1. Maine State Pier is the most heavily used, since it houses the Casco Bay Lines, whose ferries link Portland to islands across Casco Bay. Come here to watch boats pulling in and out, as seagulls wheel overhead.
2. Next door is Maine Wharf, a true working pier. It’s home to businesses such as Morrison’s Maine Course (wholesalers of seafood specialties), Chase Leavitt (maritime services since 1854), the water taxi (to get a private lift across the bay) and the sea tow (to get your boat back to port when you run out of gas).
3. Custom House Wharf houses Sea Bags, where old sails are recycled into beautiful tote bags, and The Porthole, which many claim has the best breakfast in town. But it’s most known for Harbor Fish Market, perhaps the finest of its kind on the East Coast. “Iconic” + “Maine” = “Harbor Fish Market.”
4. To its right is Portland Pier, a curious mix of J’s Oyster House, small law firms, some condos – and New Meadows Lobster, at the far end.
5. Beside that is Long Wharf. Hardly a wharf, this is more of a huge parking lot, with an adjacent marina and DiMillo’s Restaurant, a converted car-ferry-turned-high-end-eatery.
6. Chandler’s Wharf is exclusively upscale condominiums. You probably don’t come here unless you live here.
7. Widgery Wharf is the real thing, unchanged for decades, chockablock with lobster boats, lobster traps, lobster processors, and a smell to remind you how authentic a town Portland really is.
8. Adjacent is Union Wharf, perhaps the most diverse along the waterfront. You’ll find the Maine Life Raft & Inflatable Service Company, an architecture firm, lobster businesses, the Nine Stones Spa, and the Maine Responder, a large vessel dedicated to cleaning up oil spills if/when they occur (she spent five months in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010).
9. Like the other piers, Merrill’s Wharf has lobster boats tied up along its perimeter. But it also has a warehouse recently gutted and refurbished to house one of the state’s largest and most venerable law firms, Pierce Atwood.
10. Portland Fish Pier (aka Merchants Wharf), the last in the line, is a mega-pier that is home to, among others, the Harbor Master, the Portland Fish Exchange (where daily auctions set the price for seafood locally),  social investment non-profit Coastal Enterprises, and the offices of U.S. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree.

A world unto themselves, Portland’s piers and wharves, sometimes unnoticed and uninvestigated, are your gateway to this unique city by the bay. Make a New Year’s resolution to visit them all.

Photo of Merrills Wharf by John Spritz

As Christmas descends on Maine, it is amusing to meditate on how our mania for making shapes the season. Portland writer Caitlin Shetterly, whose book Made for You and Me documented a failed Californian relocation effort as the recession hit in 2008, has a tonic tale for everyone suffering for post DIY Christmas trauma. Her story, The Christmas Cookies from Hell (and 6 Reasons They Might Be Worth It) on Oprah.com, tells the tale of a unique family recipe for Penobscot Bay Ginger Cookies that maddeningly never quite turns out right—until the last batch. And that glimpse of perfection keeps her and her husband Dan coming back year after year to attain the elusive alchemy of butter and flour, molasses and ginger. The holidays are a time for lofty ideals rarely attained—peace on earth, good will towards man—but also a reminder of our will to make things right, to sculpt the fleeting flux, to be ourselves in what we do. Apparently the cookies taste pretty good too!

For many Portlanders, our Farmers’ Market is just about the best thing in town. Twice a week from April to November, more than 30 farmers descend on Portland, and we get the benefit of fresh, local produce and meats from across Maine.

Come December, the whole operation just moves indoors, to the Maine Irish Heritage Center (the former St. Dominic’s Church). Starting this past weekend, the Portland Winter Farmers’ Market is open every Saturday morning, with farmers hailing from Sumner, Dresden, Etna, Greenwood, Unity, Bethel, up and down the Pinetree State.

This week, your correspondent saw an array of celeriac, Manchego cheese, duck eggs, fingerling potatoes, rabbit pot pie, bunches of winterberries, Anadama bread, cider, sunchokes, bagels, honey, feta marinade, and a colorful bounty of carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, squash, garlic and more. Over on the stage, a fiddler and guitar duo serenaded the crowd with old-timey music. Kids ran around, parents mulled purchases, old friends reconnected, and pretty soon bags were stuffed with the makings of many delectable dinners to come.

Make your way to the big brick church at State and Gray streets any Saturday morning over the next few months, and join the foodie fray.

Photos by John Spritz. Top: Fishbowl Farm

Common Wealth Farm purveys free range duck and chicken eggs…and bagels.

A farmer’s market inside a former church basement? Well, why not?

Soaps, cheeses, and jams from Nezinscot Farm.

The Pickle Jar Defenders playing away.

Part of what makes Portland’s First Friday Art Walks so much fun is that they have no epicenter. As the crowd surges along Congress Street, with smaller group investigating eddies in the Old Port, the Place To Be shifts from one locale to the next. One sure thing: if you stroll enough, and walk through enough doors, wonderful things will happen.

Last night, the December Art Walk that leads up to the holidays, there was an extra energy in the air. You could sense it at Congress Square: on one side, the line snaked into the State Theater for The Fogcutters present Big Band Syndrome (Lauren Wayne posted a video of the finale of the show); the other side of the square featured the Portland Museum of Art (free on Friday nights) and their hypnotic show on classic Shaker artifacts. Meanwhile, in-between, Art Walkers trundled up the stairs of the Flat Iron Gallery, in the pie-slice-shaped Hay Building, to sip and chew and ruminate on Art, Life, and Living in Portland.

Another wonderful thing, as always, took place at Otto Pizza, a few steps down Congress Street. Your correspondent was among the many who stood happily on the sidewalk, waiting in line to purchase a slice of what many consider to be the finest pizza north of Boston (and now Otto is in Harvard Square, too!). When it comes in as ideal and manifold a presentation as Otto offers, pizza can crystallize the creative economy.

Outside Otto, the sidewalk mambo was wending its way down Congress Street to Space Gallery, with many a stop along the way. Inside Space, one of First Friday’s mainstays, there was music, there was art, there was laughter, there was drinking, there were jostling crowds and a buoyant sense of pleasure in the air. There was also an Alternative Gift Market where you could buy donations to a wide range of curated non-profits and deliver them in a selection of limited edition, hand printed cards designed by artists Beth Taylor, Erin Flett and Jacqueline Dubois.

If you prefer your art au plein air, you could step outside of Space onto the sidewalk, where an open-air truck had pulled up to the curb. Just climb the ramp into the truck’s back to observe the paintings hanging within.

The crowd kept surging, now on to the Maine College of Art. Every year, MECA combines their First Friday participation with a huge holiday sale of items by college students and alums. This year, three floors were given over to a cavalcade of holidazzles, and so the crowds were especially strong here. Among the (hundreds of?) tables and booths, there seemed to be a particular emphasis on recycled treasures: playing cards converted into wallets, umbrellas converted into aprons, stamps converted into earrings.

For those who needed to retreat from the gleeful cacophony of MECA, there was quieter contemplation at galleries where one could, for instance, admire scale models, photos, and blueprints celebrating the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Or, upstairs at Cross Jewelers, you could sample “tastings” of various hot cocoas. Then back out into the street and more galleries, more stores, more music.

Until, in the words of Samuel Pepys, one has turned First Friday into First Saturday, “and so to bed.”

Photos by John Spritz

The First Friday Art Walk has entered a new phase in its life cycle as the flagship of Portland’s creative economy. Since July, designer Jennifer S. Muller has been producing a beautiful broadside map and program distributed the previous Thursday in The Portland Press Herald. The way the heavy, uncoated stock of the piece absorbs the ink makes it look more hand made than commercially printed, which is just the right touch for the Art Walk that aims to stoke local commerce through the propagation of fine art.

And building on the uproarious success of the What Cheer? Brigade at the SPACE Gallery Block Party, tonight’s festivities include New York’s Asphalt Orchestra for more street band fun. (Thank you, Portland Ovations) Programs? Marching Bands? And soon food carts? This is beginning to sound like a sporting event for creatives!

Some of tonights highlights include: a performance at 4:30 in Congress Square by The Milkman’s Union presented by the Portland Music Foundation to highlight this year’s Portland entries in the NYC’s CMJ Music Marathon; the opening reception of Good Design is Good Business: The Elements of Branding, the 2011 AIGA Maine Annual Exhibit at the Lewis Gallery, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square; an exhibit of photographs from the Portland Ballet’s “Who’s Your Dancer” project will be  on view at the KeyBank Monument Square branch; and the work of at least one Portland mayoral candidate is on view!

In an increasingly global job market, students must be fluent in science, technology, engineering, and math to remain competitive. This set of topics, often referred to as STEM education, has been at the forefront of school districts’ agendas in Maine. These programs seek interconnections amongst STEM subjects, and use real-world scenarios to teach students critical thinking and problem solving techniques. High schoolers in the Portland area with a strong interest in growing their STEM knowledge will soon have another choice for their alma maters.

The Baxter Academy, a Maine charter school, will open its doors to teens across the state next September. The school is the first of its kind in Southern Maine; the Maine School of Science and Mathematics serves a similar purpose in Aroostook County. Now, students in the Portland area will have opportunities to explore interests in biology, architecture, computer programming, and more while living at home.

“The Baxter Academy gives students more options,” explained John Jacques, Baxter Academy’s Executive Director. “We want to help people find a better fit for their kids. Our mission is to serve a group of students with a more specific set of interests.” To help cultivate STEM skills, Baxter Academy will offer more hands-on, expeditionary style learning. For instance, a biology course might venture on the Casco Bay Line to explore the islands. The school also plans on including an internship component that partners students with local businesses and research centers, like the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

The Baxter Academy will strengthen Maine’s already-strong record in STEM education. The STEM Education Coalition, which gives states rankings based on their public school performance, ranked Maine sixth in the nation for the percentage of high schoolers ready for college based on both their ACT math and science scores. Additionally, Maine is the state with the best pupil to teacher ratio in the country (11.9 students per teacher, versus a national average of 15.47).

When it opens in September 2012, Baxter Academy will accept 80 students for both its freshman and sophomore class. Students will be chosen through a lottery system if more apply than the school can accept. The application process will get underway late this fall, after the Department of Education finalizes the school’s charter. Interested parents and students are encouraged to check the school’s website for updates regarding applications and the ultimate location of the school.

This winter I asked an eighteen year old Burundian, who recently emigrated to the USA and is seeking political asylum, to tell me the story of how he got here. He answered this heavy-handed question in shielded fragments I can’t disclose. I had no idea what’s going on with Burundi’s political parties. Most Americans couldn’t pinpoint the country on a topographical map. But this kid abandoned everything—parents, friends, neighborhood—to seek safety halfway around the world in Portland, Maine, where he refused to commit his life’s big picture to the blank page. And for good reason. So I tried new questions. What’s your favorite sport? Swimming. Where did you swim in Burundi? Lake Tanganyika. Did you swim with friends? Yes. Can you remember a crazy time swimming with your friends?

As if I were slowly helping him turn on a faucet, a story spilled out. He raced with his schoolmates to a rock in a beautiful African lake, hoping to beat them to it and win the prize money waiting on the beach. Then he was sprinting with the same friends toward the same beach to rescue himself from a famous human-eating crocodile named Gustave, who may or may not have been chasing them. At the finish line, they were laughing and tackling each other on the golden sand—a joy-filled scene we excavated together from the unspeakables that shadow his memory of home.

The story glowed, and so did the smile on my student’s face when he saw it in an anthology of young writers, How To Climb Trees, published by The Telling Room, Portland’s nonprofit creative writing center that has been running workshops for youth ages 6 to 18 since 2004. I have given you a mere glimpse of the Telling Room’s award-winning effort to unearth the stories of the Greater Portland community. “Young Writers and Leaders,” a yearlong program of twelve immigrants and refugees from which the above story emerged, is one of The Telling Room’s over 50 writing programs undertaken during the 2010-11 academic calendar. During this time, over 2,000 students (native Mainers and newcomers alike) and nearly 100 volunteers came together in an astounding array of workshops on every literary form under the sun.

Ranging from daylong book-making workshops to yearlong intensive storywriting initiatives, the programs are designed to strengthen literacy, boost young people’s confidence in creative expression, and provide real audiences for student stories through publication and live readings. In the words of Executive Director Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, “When you get kids in the writing zone, the creative zone, they will be more brilliant than they ever knew they could be.” This year alone, the Telling Room published a dozen chapbooks in addition to their annual anthology of the year’s best student work. Each edition tops the charts at Portland’s fantastic indie bookstore, Longfellow Books, which is proof that The Telling Room’s verbal engine of mutual understanding is well underway. This is a community within a community— Portland’s ever-growing nucleus of storytelling and free expression. Now the nonprofit’s rapid growth spurt has garnered two major springtime recognitions.

Fast Company, the progressive business magazine, named The Telling Room 2011’s most innovative company/organization in the state of Maine. Shortly after, The Maine Arts Commission, the Maine Alliance for Arts Education, and the Maine Department of Education recently gave the Telling Room Maine’s “Imagination Intensive Community” award, citing that “The Telling Room has evolved into a community that reaches beyond its own doors to collaborate with a wide variety of local and regional partners, including schools, Portland Public Library, Portland Ovations, and others.” This was the first time the honor went to a community other than a regional school district.

These statewide and national rounds of applause for The Telling Room are much-deserved. But there’s nothing like the rewarding sound of a student reading his or her story in front of a live crowd. Or the news of a former Telling Room rockstar traveling back to his home in Sudan, where he narrowly escaped death, to reunite with childhood friends and help improve education conditions there. A couple months ago that student who is still seeking asylum from Burundi told me he got accepted to the honors program of a top American university. We cherished our high-five’s sweet sting of victory.

If you’re a writer in town, you should visit The Telling Room’s energetic Commercial Street space filled with desks, futons, bean bags, and computers at the ready for young writers’ fingertips. I’m forever thankful to have entered this room’s constant flow of creative community members sharing in the explosion of Portland’s literary imagination—a whole story of stories.

To experience The Telling Room in action, watch this video.

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

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.