How many times do we actually ask you to do anything on this blog? Our tone is usually more of an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of Portland or a suggestion of someone you might be interested in meeting. We’re not really about action items—but here’s one!

At this month’s Portland Greendrinks event, on the second Tuesday (January 10) at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (561 Congress Street) Sean Sullivan from Bowdoin College will be filming for a video about career opportunities in Maine. He will be asking people their name, what they do in Portland and why they love living and working in Portland (and Maine). The footage will be used first for a video “to entice Bowdoin, Bates and Colby students to attend the Maine Based Employers Career Fair (prevent the brain drain!), which Bowdoin is putting on to feature opportunities available in Maine.” But since this also fits in rather neatly with the mission of Creative Portland, we will probably find uses for the footage of Portland-loving people too.

For extra incentives (and to highlight sustainable transportation in Portland), Sean has procured 3 free bike tune ups from Allspeed Cycles (that will be distributed at random to participants) and a discount code (for all participants) that waives the membership fee and gives $10 worth of free time from UCarShare ($35 value).

And for all you architects and interior designers out there, the event is co-sponsored by SMRT, the 125 year old Portland based architectural project management company.

So please, help Maine, help Portland and come to Greendrinks with a face and a soundbite to let the world know why you love Portland!

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

Like many of my generation, I spent a year after my college graduation in the other Portland, where I’d also been a student. The bike lanes and parks were nice, but working the same mind-numbing lifeguarding job I’d labored in all through my college years was a drag. I’d naively thought that my degree in math and economics would be practical, but whenever a promising job opening appeared, I found myself competing against hundreds of other highly qualified, under-employed people just like me.

There’s a problem I have with the phrase “quality of life” as it’s most commonly used. Where’s the “quality” of a life in a place where you need to spend half of your income on rent for a lousy apartment, where there’s no time to spend on your own creative pursuits, and where PhD’s are fighting over barista jobs at Starbucks?

Portland, Maine, does have a fair share of the conventional “quality of life” amenities, and they’re showcased extensively here on this blog (oceanside parks, good coffee, public art, etcetera).

These are great things to have, no doubt about it. But we also have two things in spades that you won’t find in Manhattan, Austin, or San Francisco: opportunity and egalitarianism.

These qualities mean that Portland is still a place where a newcomer can arrive, meet people, and set up a successful new business on a shoestring. It hardly matters whether that newcomer is from Santa Monica or from the horn of Africa. Our city is affordable, connected, and wholeheartedly supportive of small enterprise (this website is but one example, closest at hand).

Still, our sense of economic opportunity and egalitarianism will be harder to maintain as the city grows and becomes more successful.

As LiveWork Portland’s newest blogger, I’m looking forward to crowing more about the city’s more affordable, more authentic quality of life. I hope that this can, in some small part, help attract to Portland more people who share our egalitarian, hardworking values — and by doing so, help to strengthen those civic virtues for our entire city’s future.

Stuyvesant Town photo (above right) by Flickr user EssG.

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.

Creative economies prosper when they think creatively about themselves. In Portland, you can see that in action in the “Springboard” sessions run by Common Good Ventures.

Every month or so, Springboard pulls together local business leaders to think as out-of-the-box as possible about a nonprofit organization’s problem. In just 90 fast-paced minutes, some of Portland’s most resourceful businesspeople cluster around a table and help the organization develop ideas about a better business plan, more savvy marketing or, really, any business issue.

It all happens at the offices of the VIA Agency, in the historic Baxter Library building, which they have completely retooled for their own look and style. Around the table are local representatives from the worlds of marketing, law, finance, media, retail, and more. Up steps the nonprofit’s Executive Director and he/she walks the group through the organization’s background and particular issue.

What follows is a zippity-quick process of tossing out ideas that are posted on the wall, with time for explanations. In a structured format, the conversation goes back and forth boisterously and convivially. At the end of an hour-and-a-half, the nonprofit comes away with a raft of implementable ideas and perspectives. The for-profit attendees come away knowing that they have had direct—and quick—input into a local organization’s core concerns.

For example, a Springboard session this morning focused on Community Television Network, Portland’s cable access channel. CTN wanted ideas on how to boost sales of their video production services, which in turn support their nonprofit programming. By the end of 90 minutes, the wall was covered with colored stickies categorized into topics like Outreach, Cool Quotient, Social Media, Re-Branding, and Local Products.

Will Springboard replace McKinsey’s management consulting teams? Unlikely. But the process does provide a way for Portland’s nonprofit and for-profit communities to interact in a cooperative, non-threatening, results-driven atmosphere. Plus, it’s free for the nonprofit—and fun for the participants!

You can contact Chad Sclove if you want to attend the next Springboard.

Photo by John Spritz

We usually expect to get some high-profile press coverage about where to eat and drink in Portland in time for the summer folk, but hey, this is December! Yesterday, GQ published chef Rob Evans’ list of 10 culinary destinations all within walking distance of his Hugo’s/Duckfat empire. And just the day before, The Boston Globe came out with a piece by Johnathan Levitt on Maine’s New Drinking Culture.

True, it has been uncommonly mild. Maybe it’s global warming, or maybe Portland is just not as cold as people think it is. Whatever the reason, we’ve certainly become a year-round destination for foodies and these two articles do add a few new spots to the map.

Evans calls out Petite Jacqueline, Boda Thai, Otto Pizza and Emilitsa on Congress Street. Then he hangs a right and goes down Fore Street for the new Miyake, Gorgeous Gelato and, of course, Fore Street. Finally, he heads north for a nightcap at Novare Res Bier Café, dessert at Bresca and after-hours Jell-O shots at Sangillo’s.

Photographer and gastronome Johnathan Levitt decided to forgo the food and go right for the beverages. He has cocktails and conversations with the mix masters at The Grill Room, Hugo’s and Blue Spoon and samples the cider and mead at the Urban Farm Fermentory. Levitt then drives north to Freeport for the Cold River vodka and gin at Maine Distilleries before venturing to the midcoast for Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle and Three Tides Bar in Belfast.

The best quote is from John Myers of The Grill Room in The Globe, “When I told a friend of mine in D.C. that I was heading up here [in 2002], he told me that Maine was the perfect place to be when the world ends. ‘Everything happens in Maine,’ he said. ‘It just takes five years to get there.’ The cocktail revolution is right on schedule.’’

Photo of cocktail at Hugo’s by Johnathan Levitt

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

Nobody writes poems about hardware stores. But if they did, Portland’s Maine Hardware would be a worthy subject.

In business since 1935, and on St. John Street since 1978, Maine Hardware is a paradise of practicality. At some point, everyone needs a hardware store, and at some point (or many points) each year, you’ll find yourself blissfully wandering this emporium’s aisles, examining and considering objects you never knew you needed.

If you’re fond of hardware stores elsewhere, rest assured, Maine Hardware fulfills the Four Basic Criteria For A World-Class Hardware Store:

1. Way too much parking.
2. Uniformed staff, each of whom can build or take apart an aircraft carrier.
3. Ridiculously extravagant selections of toilet seats, downspouts and chinking chains.
4. Free popcorn!

Entering the store, you see a circular checkout counter shaped like a 20-foot doughnut. Within, wizard-like staffers, many of whom have worked here for eons, process orders, hunt down arcane objects, and answer more questions than the New York Public Library. The countertop is chockablock with all manner of doodads: Timex watches, lip balm, sunglasses, balsa airplanes, lollipops, magnifying glasses, city maps, and dozens of other tchotchkes galore.

Off to your left is the Rental Place, stocked with a bewildering assortment of machines whose purpose one can only imagine. If it pulls, cuts, tamps, measures, drills, sands, tills, washes, or stretches, it’s here.

Over in the true hardware aisle (what they call “Fasteners”) are hundreds and hundreds of those cute little cardboard drawers, each holding its own trove of metallic goodies. Consider, for instance, the nut. There are separate drawers for breakaway nuts, cage nuts, cap nuts, castle nuts, expansion nuts, hex nuts, jack nuts, jam nuts, knurled nuts, lock nuts, push nuts, rack nuts, slotted nuts, spanner nuts, speed nuts, square nuts, T-nuts and the ever-popular wing nuts. Do you need a knurled nut? Maybe not, but if you do, this is the place.

Roam the aisles and discover acres of extension cords, tons of toilet plungers, legions of lengthy ladders. And when you leave – remember what George Harrison said, all things must pass – pay attention to the smile on your face. You’ve just been shopping, exposed to the beastly belly of American commerce, and you’re smiling. You’re happy, because you’ve been inside a top-notch hardware store. And isn’t that a fine thing?

Photo 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