The creative economy in Portland has been getting a boost from some creative financing. The Arts District Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district, established in 2008, sets aside a portion of property tax revenues from the downtown zone between Longfellow Square and City Hall to be dedicated to arts and culture in Portland. Essentially, the TIF allows the city to finance the arts with the future tax revenues that the enhanced Arts District will generate. And it seems to be working. Of the 173 government programs selected for its newly-created Bright Ideas Program, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University selected only one from Maine: Creative Economy Tax Increment Financing, City of Portland, ME. “Bright Ideas is designed to recognize and share creative government initiatives around the country with interested public sector, nonprofit, and academic communities….Creative Economy Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a model for investing in the creative economy through a TIF District. As property tax revenues increase in the TIF District, the city council appropriates some of the additional revenue to the Creative Portland Corporation for investment in the creative economy.” This year’s Bright Ideas will be featured on the Center’s Government Innovators Network, which they describe as “an online marketplace of ideas and examples of government innovation for policymakers and practitioners.” Thanks, Harvard, we feel brighter already.

Bill McKibben, the author who first brought climate change to public attention with his 1989 book The End of Nature, is a man with a mission. Taken as a whole, his most recent book, Eaarth, and his activist organization 350.org, are a global wake up call to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere back to the 350 parts per million, which leading scientists regard as the safe limit for humanities continued survival on earth. Why did Bill spell earth with that extra “a” in his title? Other than it being an unintentional bit of search engine genius, he makes the point in the book that the earth we now live on is a fundamentally different, and less hospitable, planet than the one that has fostered human history up to this point. So what to do now that we are clocking in at 390 parts per million? “Get mad. Then get busy,” say McKibben. To that end, Bill and 350.org are inviting everyone to participate in a Global Work Party comprising a wide variety of local actions all around the world on Oct. 10, 2010 (10/10/10). Currently there are more than 2,500 events in more than 150 countries planned. Last year’s event was described by CNN as, “the most widespread day of political action in our planet’s history.” There are many local events planned, including one organized by Keith Fitzgerald at Zero Station, and a “permablitz” followed by an after party and art contest organized by Lisa Fernandes, founder of the Portland Maine Permaculture Meetup. Please contact them and also go to the 350.org site to find out more. Small, creative cities like Portland are well positioned to become transition towns that help lead the way to sustainable solutions to the climate crisis. I asked Bill how he thinks Portland fits into the equation, and this is what he said: “To my mind, the thing that will let places thrive in a tough century will be community. Portland already has more of it than most American cities, in no small part because of it’s creative enclaves. And the best (of many good) reasons for a transition town movement is to build still more community. We need neighbors, now more than ever!” So get involved and find ways to engage with your community on 10/10/10.

photo by Nancie Battaglia

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 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

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.

Rights of Way, a blog devoted to “better streets and public spaces in Portland, Maine,” has discovered a schematic map of Portland, Maine’s streetcar network, as it was in 1916, beautifully rendered by a German Wikipedia contributor. The Straßenbahns (streetcar lines in German) trace the familiar traffic patterns that still flow through Portland: Congress Street from the Old Union Station to Monument Square, north on Forest Avenue to Woodfords Corner and south across the bridge to Knightsville, in South Portland. Rights of Way covers all the local politics surrounding public transport in Portland and beyond, including the development of the Franklin Street “Boulevard”. Their homepage links to a definitive Google Map of Greater Portland Bike Routes, and a recent post offered a really useful map showing how to bike from Portland to all of the beaches within an hour’s ride in South Portland, Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough. Portland Green Streets shares the mission by “giving people the nudge, the incentive, and the experience to develop new green commuting habits.” If you see a lot of people walking, biking, carpooling and taking public transportation, wearing something green and enjoying “freebies” and discounts from local business on the last Friday of each month in Portland, chances are you are seeing Green Streets Day in progress. These efforts take a page out of environmentalist Bill McKibben‘s playbook as described in his brilliant new book Eaarth (yes, that’s right, two “a“s) where he argues that small, local actions on a large, coordinated scale is the only method of change that will allow our lives on earth to remain livable. The Greens Streets concept started in Cambridge, and has spread through Massachusetts to Portland, Ohio and England. Oh course, the environmental impact of one green-shirted day a month in a handful of cities is slight, but the habit of action, engagement, of taking to the streets together, is a worthy goal in itself, and one that paves the way for a sustainable future.

It’s people that make the creative economy in Portland work, and there’s an incredible density of smart people in all of our different creative communities. These communities overlap and intersect, but in many ways are not visible to each other. People in other cities have a sense of this density from the people that they know here, but nobody really sees it all. Until now. This is an open invitation to all the members of the Portland creative community to add yourself to our new visual directory at creativeportlandpeople.org. We have categories covering just about everything and will add more as people point out what we’ve missed. Our goal is to be the definitive, inclusive catalog of Portland’s creative talent, so please, post yourself and tell your friends and co-workers. The bigger the party, the better for Portland, and for us all.

Full disclosure, Creative Portland People is not an original idea. A young web genius in Portland, Oregon, Chris Kalani (founder of the excellent image gallery site, yay!everyday) built Prtlnd.com (wish we had thought of that name!) to display the creative community that he’s a part of. Back here in our Portland, Kevin Brooks and his partners at Forge migrated the idea for the circle of marketing and media creatives that they know as creativeportland.me (wish we had thought of that name, too!). We liked what they were all doing, and thought they had found a great, easy, visual form to make community visible, but our mission is much broader. So, enter Creative Portland People. We have added a much longer column of tags to choose from and the ability to include a brief tweet length sentence about who you are. Our site is “cobbled” in Tumblr much like Kalani’s original. This means that it’s not completely automated, so PLEASE follow the upload instructions. We do review the submissions before posting, and we will fix what we can or contact you if we need your input, but the closer your submission is to what the template requires, the faster we can post it. Please contact us with any questions or if you want us to add a tag.

Yes, aligning herself with both madgirl Meredith Alex and Bayside Bowling (not to mention Bill Clinton) turned out to be good moves, but let’s hope that Libby’s articulate defense of the importance of the creative economy was part of what got the voter’s attention. In her statement for Meet the Governor we particularly appreciated how she puts technology on equal footing with the arts as the pillars of the creative economy. And those t-shirts are pretty great…

We’ve been looking with interest during the last month for the intersections of the gubernatorial candidates with the creative economy. It turns out, Portland photographer Jeff Scher has been spending that time looking at the candidates and photographing them at the Aucocisco Gallery for the “Meet the Governor” series. Can you guess from looking at the pictures which candidate spends the most time in art galleries? On a related note, the only of the candidates that seems to have hired a bona fide local typographer to design their logo and signage is Patrick McGowan, who commissioned Neil Patel of type studio Greyletter in collaboration with Kevin Brooks and Sean Wilkinson of Forge. It’s an attractive and sophisticated solution, but hard, perhaps, for anyone to compete with the blunt simplicity of Les Otten’s OTTEN signs. And, to one up Pat, Libby Mitchell is the only of the candidates (we know of) that had a bona fide fashion designer create a campaign T-shirt. Madgirl Meredith Alex of the Madhouse turned the gothic letters and lightening bolt of the AC/DC logo into the word MAINE for a very rockin’ statement.

Fraternizing with the design community is no indication of fitness for office, but these two candidates have at least sent a signal of support for the creative and the local. And this may be a reach, but are Steve Rowe’s hand stenciled signs a nod to the artisinal and craft communities? There may well be more examples of these creative Portland intersections out there, so please point them out and we’ll post them.

Photograph by Jeff Scher