The Black Keys played the Portland Civic Center Tuesday night and it’s fair to say that Maine was rocked. Beyond being another inspiring duo that shows how much you can do with so little, the band is a great example of a “minimum viable product” gone viral.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP for short) is a tech term usually associated with apps that, in the words of Seth Godin, is “The thought is that you should spec and build the smallest kernel of your core idea, put it in the world and see how people react to it, then improve from there.” There are many good things about this approach. You don’t sit around thinking and perfecting in isolation. You try to distill your idea to its essence, build the best version of it you can quickly and put it out there. The downside, as Godin points out, is that, “With enough patience and push and consistent enthusiasm, these products have a shot at crossing the threshold [into viability]. But if the mindset is ‘see what works and do it more,’ you’ll often discover yourself giving up long before that happens.”

The Black Keys didn’t give up. Childhood friends from Akron, Ohio, Dan Auerbach plays guitar and vocals and Patrick Carney play drums. Up until this tour, that was it, just the two of them on stage. They formed the group in 2001, and recorded their first album in Carney’s basement the following year. They toured frequently, playing small venues and building a fan base. They also started to make some real money licensing their rough, riff-heavy tunes for advertising. In 2006 they signed with Nonesuch (either a minor major label or a major minor label depending on how you look at it), but it was not until 2010 with their album Brothers that they really sold a lot of records.

Assuming you do stick with it, the minimum viable product model has many benefits. The immediacy of The Black Keys’ music comes from them having identified the irreducible components of rock and roll (the beat, the guitar, the rough vocals) and pushed them hard. There’s something refreshing and direct about their approach. There are no blind alleys or self indulgent solos—everything is in service of the song. Along the way they’ve updated blues vocals and redeemed heavy metal guitar tone for a new generation of alternative rock fans. The music before their set was Otis Redding and after Led Zeppelin. This says a lot about the intergenerational nature of their appeal, but the crowd on Tuesday night was heavy on twenty-somethings.

And although Auerbach is singing all the songs, it is Carney that is responsible for their propulsion. A tall man behind a standard rock drum kit, the effect is of an oversized child at play. It’s like on the web, all the great content in the world won’t get you anywhere without traffic, and in rock and roll, the drummer is the traffic.

At the end of their set, Auerbach (not long on patter, but verbose compared to Carney who wasn’t even miked) said, “We’re definitely coming back. You guys are great. This has been our best show in a long time.” We’re sure they say that to all their “minimum viable cities,” but Portland will hold them to it.

Early last month I went to see local bands AWAAS, If and It, Glass Fingers, and the Sunset Hearts play at 131 Washington Avenue, an abandoned print shop at the base of Munjoy Hill. It’s not the kind of place that you’ll see on Chamber of Commerce brochures, but it’s cheap, and the venue’s neighbors — the windowless Sahara Club, a state parole office, and an overgrown hillside empty lot — don’t complain if the music’s too loud.

In other words, it’s an ideal place for creative people to cut loose. The venue’s founding tenants are setting out to “provide an affordable and accessible creative space in Portland,” with rents for the smaller studios starting at $100 a month (see the Craigslist listing here). To meet that goal, they’ve been hosting a bunch of fundraiser shows in the unfinished space, and they also managed a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise $5,000 for renovation materials. That campaign, now closed, actually raised $5,772 — potentially enough to replace the outdoor porta-john with some real first-world indoor plumbing.

Thanks to 95 Kickstarter backers, a lot of DIY sweat-equity, and even more to the numerous local bands who sacrificed their shares of door revenues at the venue’s first shows, 131 Washington is ready to cultivate a new generation of Portland artists and musicians.

Image: screenshot from the 131 Washington Kickstarter video.

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

Portland was visited by an amazing creative duo last night in the form of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. Their performance at the State Theatre was a riveting testament to how collaboration works and a sustenance to creators of all kinds engaged in the hard work of making authentically original products.

Gillian and Dave have played Portland many times over the years, but they joked about how the places they performed all seemed to close shortly thereafter. The last time they played the State it was in a state of dangerous disrepair, with the balcony all but falling down, and they despaired that they might be killing another beloved Portland venue. So Gillian was clearly pleased to be able to say of the renovated State, “I like what you’ve done with the place,” and declare that their Portland spell has been broken.

Although they maintain that a backstory is not necessary to appreciate art, there is a little bit of a backstory to this tour that illuminates the significance of what we were seeing last night. I go into more detail about it in a recent Forbes.com post (Hard Times: The Creative Teamwork of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings), but the gist is that their latest album, The Harrow and the Harvest, is their first in eight years. That’s about the length of time it took them to produce their first four albums, so clearly there was some difficulty.

“Gillian Welch” is a full songwriting and performing partnership between Welch and Rawlings, and apparently for seven of those eight years the songs didn’t flow. They kept writing and performing the whole time, but the songs either weren’t good enough or didn’t feel like part of a larger whole. The quality control on the first four albums was superb and they must have doubted whether they would ever be able to add to the canon again.

Fortunately, working together on Dave’s first solo album, Friend of a Friend, followed by a long road trip last winter for Nashville to California broke the writer’s block and the new material is every bit as strong as what came before. That’s not to say happy. They have referred to the album as “ten kinds of sad,” (it only contains ten songs!) and slow and sad is indeed their mode of choice. But you leave each song with a sense that sadness has been explored to its fullest, consumed and laid to rest, and that creates a sense of uplift.

And uplifting, too, is their performance style, intertwined yet restrained, respectful bordering on ecstatic. It’s a great example for all creative teams to see how strength can speak to strength, one “plussing” the other (to borrow a term from Walt Disney adopted by Pixar) without either stealing the show. To a Portland audience filled with artists, entrepreneurs and innovators of all sorts it was fuel for the fires of our perseverance. Long may you run.

Photo by Mike McCaw

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!

When Noah DeFilippis left Maine for San Francisco at the age of 17, he sought a sense of the urbane. In his return to Portland a few years ago, DeFilippis found that cosmopolitanism nestled improbably amongst Maine’s famous Pick-and-Paws and flea markets. DeFilippis and his wife, Amy Teh, started “Pinecone + Chickadee,” a business named for Maine’s state tree and bird in a tip-of-the-cap to Vacationland. Pinecone + Chickadee reflects a modern interpretation of old-school nostalgia, and DeFilippis and Teh have allied themselves with other local artisans to breathe life into events like Portland’s Picnic Music + Arts Festival.

Pinecone + Chickadee started when DeFilippis and Teh lived in Brooklyn and attended juried craft fairs like the Brooklyn Renegade Craft Fair, silkscreening cards and clothes with their unique, colorful prints. Upon moving to Portland after the birth of their first son, they noticed that vendor admission to regional craft fairs was granted on a first-come, first-serve basis. While punctuality may be a virtue, it doesn’t always correlate with creation. So DeFilippis and Teh, along with Ron Harrity of Peapod Recordings, Diane Toepfer of Ferdinand, and Sean Wilkinson, co-founder of Might & Main, set about creating the Picnic Music + Arts Festival.

Now in its fourth year, Picnic Music + Arts Festival brings over 120 local creators (with varying records of punctuality, but proven aesthetic juices) to Lincoln Park on Saturday, August 27^th from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m.. Attendees at the free event can peruse vendors’ jewelry, clothes, vintage materials, fine art, photography and more. Bryan Buchman, curator of music blog Hilly Town, culled music from bands with both local and NYC mettle, including Butcher Boy, Weird Children, Toughcats, Sunset Hearts, Bandana Splits, The Outfits, Mouth Washington, Clouder and the always-wonderful Mango Floss. Picnic will also serve up local foods to nosh on while shopping and listening to music.

DeFilippis says that the success of previous years has culminated in the biggest picnic yet. The small town aspect of the city also helps with the process. “Portland is an easy place to organize events,” he notes. “The councilors are pretty approachable, and you can just walk into City Hall to explain what you want.”

In addition to wrangling together Picnic, DeFilippis and Teh have busied themselves opening up Pinecone + Chickadee’s storefront on 6 Free Street. The store boasts the couple’s silkscreen design line as well as vintage finds and the work of local artists, like employee Kris Johnsen. When the two saw the potential storefront, Teh was nine-months pregnant with the couple’s second child. “It was the best and worst timing,” says DeFilippis. “You know what they always say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” With a medley of their creations and others’, and a mind towards refurbishing old treasures in new contexts, DeFilippis and Teh of Pinecone + Chickadee upend notions of Maine while gleaning it for inspiration.

Above photo: Noah DeFilippis, co-owner/designer of Pinecone + Chickadee, poses with nesting dolls from the new storefront on 6 Free Street. DeFilippis and wife Amy Teh, his creative partner, have also been collaborating with other local movers and shakers to bring Picnic Music + Art Festival to Portland.

The summer’s other great sequel was not in 3-d multiplexes but right on Congress street in Portland. Ad Age named the VIA Agency, Small Agency of the Year, Gold. Why the Harry Potter motif? “The Via agency is housed in the Baxter building, built in 1888 as the public library of Portland, Maine. The imposing peaks and gables of the stone facade and wooden beam-studded high-ceiling interior led one Via client to dub the building the “Hogwarts of Advertising.” … And if the building is Hogwarts, then CEO and founder John Coleman is its Harry Potter. With similar rounded black-framed glasses, an affable charm and wide-eyed curiosity about everything, Mr. Coleman even seems to have Master Potter’s magic touch — in the advertising industry at least,” reads the lead of the Ad Age piece.

Careful readers of this blog will remember that VIA won silver for the same prive last year, no mean feat for a Portland agency. But the intervening year has been a very good one for VIA and they attribute at least a bit of that good fortune to being located here. ”To live in a smaller town and to go to baseball games and do the grocery shopping and all of that, helps in understanding the broad spectrum of different kinds of people, but I truly believe that what it really does is afford us the opportunity to think,” Mr. Coleman said. “I love New York, but I feel blessed to live in a place like Portland.”

Go to the Portland section of the Via website and the first thing you read is “Portland isn’t just where we are. It’s who we are.” (I wish we had written that!) They then lead you through three iPad swipes of highlights that tell you why it’s great to live in Portland followed by listings for eight (at last count) really great jobs. Talk about brand story! VIA is itself one of the best advertisements for Portland that Portland’s got. And for those of you who like a little wistful bitterness to temper your jubilation, read Chief Creative Officer Greg Smith’s reaction to the award, “So That Didn’t Suck.”

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.

Lately I’ve noticed innovators across many fields working in the art of circumstance. These are people working with situations as the medium. They write scripts of chance. They orchestrate the action so that one audience member’s potential interaction with another becomes an underlying creative force. Theatergoers become actors. Tourists become attractions. And in the case of an upcoming conference in Portland, Maine, audience members can have the impact of keynote speakers.

TEDxDirigo, inaugurated last year at the Frontier Cafe in Brunswick, is a day devoted to Maine “ideas worth spreading.” This year’s conference, on Saturday, September 10, will take over the more spacious Portland Stage Company. The participants’ exchanges are as central to the day’s success as their attendance at a series of stimulating talks. This is not a conference on a single issue—the goal is to generate interdisciplinary connective tissue. TEDxDirigo gathers over a dozen members of the Maine community with wildly diverse achievements (from beekeepers to musicians, nurses to thinkers on sustainable development). All are asked to give “the talk of their life,” said Jen Boggs, a TEDxDirigo representative. In the words of Executive Director Adam Burk, the speakers give “high impact TED talks that evoke contagious emotion,” following the format of the nationally renowned TED conferences. No two speakers from even remotely similar field will speak back to back. The ordering of talks is designed to generate maximum friction for the audience’s inspired conversations, and Boggs compares structuring the day’s schedule to putting together “a big puzzle.”

The even bigger puzzle, is the audience. The secret ingredient to TEDxDirigo’s art of circumstance begins with the selective application process to attend. Burk relished in this notion of a curated audience, saying “We put a lot of care into building a diverse program for a diverse audience, because you never know who is going to connect with what idea or what person. This is part of the magic, the synchronicity of life. There are other events that focus on single issues or fields. If someone is worried about the depth and breadth of our event, then perhaps it’s not for them.”

Then who, specifically, is this event geared toward? Burk said, “people with a track record of engaging in the power of ideas, such as product developers, social innovators, philanthropists, researchers, entrepreneurs, performance artists, musicians, visual artists, etc.” Selecting a crowd of our community’s most proactive thinkers ensures that the ample breaktime provided in the wake of each talk (as well as top-quality Maine cuisine) will spur attendees to self-organize and move projects forward through collaboration.

Speakers include: singer/songwriter Emilia Dahlin; Executive Director of the Center for Preventing Hate and civil rights activist Steve Wessler; and founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI), Roger Doiron. Videos of all of last year’s talks are listed on the speakers page as well. If you are interested in being an audience member (just like the main TED conference, only much, much less expensive) you can apply to attend here. It won’t be the same without you.