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

The creative economy runs on coffee, and as you would expect, Portland, Maine, has a plethora of fine coffee and great coffeehouses. If you’re a creative thought worker trying to figure out where to park your laptop when inspiration strikes, the variety can be overwhelming. How do you choose the the right café for you? Contributor John Spritz has come up with a clever psychographic taxonomy based on movie stars for Portland’s java joints to help you find your spot:

Perhaps the current epicenter of Portland’s Coffee Universe is Bard, at the corner of Middle and Exchange streets. Here’s where budding entrepreneurs set up shop early in the morning, laptops open and buzzing, conducting business all day long. There are some obligatory sofas at Bard, but the crackle of commerce (or, at least, intense discussions) is in the air. If Bard were a movie actor, it’d be George Clooney.

For a more relaxed cup, mosey two short blocks to Arabica, at the head of Free Street. You’ll see a few more suits than you do at Bard, because of the nearby law firms, but even so Arabica is a bit more laid-back. It registers slightly higher on the goofiness scale. If Arabica were a movie actor, it’d be Jim Carrey.

Need to dial it back ever more? Meander up to Hilltop Coffee House, on Congress Street. The place to be if you want to run across Munjoy Hill pols or neighborhood technocrats, Hilltop is quiet, quiet, quiet, all except for the hiss of the espresso machine. Movie star? Morgan Freeman.

For many people, downtown Portland means Commercial Street, and the coffeehouse reigning there is Port Bean. It’s a good deal brighter than the other venues, with large plate glass walls and a menu that stretches beyond the bean and leaf to include Real Food. Not much coziness, but a pleasant spot from which to watch the tourist world stroll by. Movie star? Julia Roberts.

Smack dab in the middle of Monument Square is the aptly named Spartan Grill. Good coffee, but hard to linger there. Low on ambience, high on efficiency. Movie star: Tommy Lee Jones.

Coffee by Design is the mini-empire that really built Portland’s coffee culture. Three locations across town offer different levels of funk and squeezed-in pleasure. The Congress Street location is Cameron Diaz, India Street is Will Smith, Washington Avenue is Michael Keaton.

Of course, if you want to wander further afield, there’s Borealis—the one bread bakery of the bunch—on Ocean Avenue (Tom Hanks), Udder Place on Brighton Avenue (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Yordprom—which features a light Thai lunch menu—on Congress Street (Johnny Depp).

And then there are the tea emporia – but that’s another article…

Arabica Coffee, photo by John Spritz

Out of a field of 15 candidates, the people of Portland have chosen their next mayor—former State Senate majority leader Michael Brennan. For the last 88 years, the Portland City Council has appointed the mayors, so this is kind of a big deal.

An even bigger deal is that Portland has elected a leader who articulates positions critical to the growth of the creative economy:

Brennan has committed to “work for a Portland that embraces diversity, acts with compassion, encourages artists as well as business leaders, promotes energy conservation, preserves open spaces, expands buy local and grow local initiatives, builds affordable housing, and offers accessible healthcare.”

He believes in the development of the downtown and the working waterfront: “ I am committed to expanding affordable housing opportunities in the downtown and providing incentives for businesses who locate there.  Our working waterfront is part of the city’s history and tradition that must not be lost.  It should be a significant component of any economic development strategy.”

Quality of life is high on his list of priorities: “We live here because there is no other city in the country that combines natural beauty with such a robust array of arts and culture, population diversity, and progressive social policies.  I want to make every night a “First Night” in Portland and provide our artists and musicians with on-going venues to perform and display their talents.”

Brennan is a locavore: “‘Buy Local’ efforts help support a variety of community businesses and allow us to be less dependent on out of state sources for our food.  Buy local should also include growing local.”

He sees the relationship between education and economic growth: “As a longtime education policy leader, I will work tirelessly to establish a world-class education system from early childhood through higher education and senior college.”

Finally, he knows what it means to represent Portland to the state and negotiate our fair share of the funding: “I will use my years of experience as a State Representative and State Senator to make certain Portland is treated fairly and that Portland and the region are recognized as the economic engines that drive the state’s economy.”

Good luck, Mr. Mayor! You are now another engine driving the growth of Portland.

When people think on innovation and creativity, they tend to think big. And there’s been no one bigger on our minds in those departments lately than Steve Jobs. For everyone intimidated by Jobs’ formidable accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker offers a bit of a revisionist spin: Jobs was a tweaker.

In The Tweaker, Gladwell writes, ”Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him… and ruthlessly refining it.” Jobs himself admitted that his gifts were more combinatorial than generative, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Stepping into the time machine, Gladwell cites an article by the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr to explain why the industrial revolution began in England. Britain, they say, had a “human-capital advantage—in particular, … a group they call ‘tweakers.’ They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.”

Now what has this all got to do with Portland, Maine? Well, I spent last weekend at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden trying to get a handle on how the creative economy and the innovation economy are intersecting in Maine. For that reason, I focused on the break out sessions that featured innovative companies and technologies, and I was not disappointed. I came away with the feeling that some of the most impressive innovations did not involve inventing ground-breaking technologies but in crafting creative ways of delivering existing technologies.

One of the most moving and impressive presentations was by Jon Calame of Thermal Efficiency Eastport during the “Risking Energy Revolution” panel. Calame is an internationally award winning architect with a background in historic preservation. He is passionate about architects’ responsibility to make buildings work for people—especially in challenging times in northern climes. Driven perhaps by the thought that historic buildings can’t be preserved if the people living in them can’t afford to heat them, Jon has taken on the urgent problem that the British have named “Fuel Poverty.” Jon has relocated himself and his family from Portland to the tiny city of Eastport (population about 1,500), which is indeed the easternmost city in the continental United States. Thermal Efficiency Eastport is a long-term project to demonstrate how applying “proven fuels, equipment and structural upgrades … in all kinds of buildings [can yield] clear, measurable advantages.” The real tweak in the project is not some new kind of furnace or insulation, but the packaging of economic arguments that will allow these retrofits to be financed and broadly available to the entire town.

Yes, that got the attention of all the bankers out there! The creative and innovation economies need creative financing. They also need people who can look at technologies and put them together in new ways. And finally, they need people who can tell compelling stories about these innovations to help attract customers and capital, retain workers, inspire students and generally connect the dots. And all of these are jobs for tweakers! Maine has lots of them and Portland is particularly dense in finance, marketing, design and story telling.

The lesson of Steve Jobs for Portland and the creative economy is not only the first part—the obvious part—of his advice to graduating Stanford students, that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” It’s in the second part, the tweaking part, “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. … you’ll know when you find it.”

Portland is as dense with ad agencies as it is replete with restaurants and arts venues. So if you’re new to town how do you get a sense of who is doing what in Portland’s creative AdLand? One easy answer is to look at the list of winners of the biennial Broderson Awards—or better yet, to have been at the awards ceremony last Thursday (October 27) at the State Theatre.

That might have helped Pete Shelly, a young copy writer now based on the outskirts of NYC who is hoping to move to Portland, but he visited portland a week too soon. Pete is so gung ho about moving here that he built a very cool little website announcing his trip here and inviting ad creatives to have a cup of coffee (on him) to talk about Portland.

What kind of welcome did Pete receive in Portland? “I had 5 ad agencies in mind, and I had meetings with principles at 4 of them, all based on the premise of ‘hey, let’s grab a cup of coffee.’” Pete says. “They were all pretty open about lending a hand and giving their perspective. I was kind of blown away by the response. Nobody had to let me come into their office, but they did, and they took the time to sit down and listen to my story. I was anxiously awaiting the list of Broderson winners. I had the opportunity to stop by the gallery they had set up next to the State Theatre, and, having talked to creative directors and writers at each of the agencies, I was curious to see how everyone fared. I think that taking a look at the work produced in Maine just this year is a pretty good way to see how much talent is in this city, and that’s pretty attractive to me. I want to be a part of it as well.”

So here, Pete, is a whirlwind tour of Portland’s advertising creatives, courtesy of the Ad Club of Maine:

First off, the Best of Show award went to creative director Don Fibich of Kemp Goldberg Partners for their “Continue the Journey” print campaign for Sea Bags (great Portland agency building a great Portland brand—this is our kind of story). KGP also scored with their Camden National Bank Annual Report and their logo for the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine.

Virtually owning the big budget TV categories, the VIA agency‘s Teddy Stoecklein, Amos Goss, Ron Clayton, Ken Matsubara walked (half a block) home with medals for Samsung, Fairpoint and Klondike. VIA also won for it’s integrated marketing campaign for Samsung’s tablets, digital work for Samsung and Pediacare, environmental design for DuPont and a “Pitched but Ditched” whiskey bottle design for Pendleton.

Garrand‘s chief creative officer Larry Vine chalked up an impressive 12 (mainly print category) wins for national clients like Dunkin’ Donuts, Hood  and United Way and Maine brands like Gorham Savings Bank, Gorgeous Gelato and Maine Jewish Film Festival.

Several strong in-house departments scored as well: Angela Adams, IDEXX Laboratories, CIEE, Maine College of Art, White Rock Distilleries, Inc. and Coastal Enterprises Inc.

Dearest to LiveWork Portland’s heart, perhaps, were wins by independent creatives and small design studios for authentic local brands, like Leslie Evans‘ logo and brochures for Calendar islands Maine Lobster, Taja Dockendorf of Pulp + Wire’s identity and packaging work for Pleasant River Soap Co. and Erica Hebold of E+M Marketing’s design for the Grace Restaurant website.

Will the winners influence where Pete applies for a job? Or will he just move here, find some buddies and set up his own shop? As Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to tell.”

From the VIA Agency (left to right): Teddy Stoecklein, Jessica Fidalgo, John Coleman, Greg Smith, Dan O’Donnell