A ruling by a federal appeals court yesterday said that the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger, which has already closed four Wild Oats stores (including the one in Portland) and "reflagged" 27 others as Whole Foods, may have taken place without adequate consideration of the effect on the marketplace for natural and organic foods.

The Federal Trade Commission, which brought the request to block the merger, "argued that the Whole Foods' takeover would limit competition and increase prices" among people who buy natural products, according to today's New York Times.

Problem is, the merger has, for all effective purposes, already happened (witness the shuttered store on Marginal Way). "The eggs are already scrambled," antitrust lawyer Richard E. Donovan is quoted as saying. "What are you going to do?"

First things first, a correction: My too-fast fingers misspelled Cyrus Hagge's name in my piece about reporting operations on the Hill. My apologies to Mr. Hagge.

Secondly, some others have weighed in on their thoughts about the Observer, including former MHNO board member Heather Curtis.

"In my personal opinion, the Observer exists to provide a public forum," she wrote in February (while she was still on the board). "Although a cherished right of the people, freedom of the press is different from other liberties of the people in that it is both individual and institutional. It applies not just to a single person's right to publish ideas, but also to the right of print and broadcast media to express political views and to cover and publish news. A free press is, therefore, one of the foundations of a democratic society, and as Walter Lippmann, the 20th-century American columnist, wrote, 'A free press is not a privilege, but an organic necessity in a great society.' Indeed, as society has grown increasingly complex, people rely more and more on newspapers, radio, and television to keep abreast with world news, opinion, and political ideas. One sign of the importance of a free press is that when antidemocratic forces take over a country, their first act is often to muzzle the press."

"Obviously, we will resist attemps to turn the Observer into just a newsletter for the MHNO Board rather than a robust, vibrant community newspaper," she added in an email this week.

If you take the argument from a national level to a state one, this is why Tom Allen is happy about the state Supreme Court's decision to boot Herb Hoffman off the November ballot. Hoffman is still deciding what to do next.

It’s an article of faith among art organizations that public art is unquestionably a good thing. The fact is, most public art is far from a good thing; most of it is plain awful.

Making art good enough to hold its own in a pubic space is special skill, and most artists, even very good artists, can’t do it. Even if they could, most committees, and Portland’s is no exception, can’t make a decision for quality art, even if they were offered it. Horses, camels.

For proof, one need look no farther than  around the town. There is, as far as I know, no good public art anywhere in the city, with the  possible exception of some stones arranged on the Waynefleet campus. The Mierle Ukeles piece at MECA is a obvious throw-together. The recent additions are at best banal and at worst silly. There is some humor value in the accidentally autoerotic (at least when viewed from the west) statue of the fireman in front of the firehouse on Congress Street, but otherwise there is little to lift one's spirits.

The Portland public art committee has good people on it, but it the whole idea of a committee selection process is flawed.  Percent for art has left bad piece after bad piece around the state, all chosen by committees, most of whom were unfamiliar with art at all. Go look, you’ll see what I mean. With the exception of a couple of pieces by Roger Majorowicz, who has a flair for making art that is both interesting and accessible, most are prime examples of what James Wines called ‘plop art,’ or the ‘turd in the plaza’ effect.

Good artists can’t always make art for public spaces. There’s an Isamu Noguchi in lower Manhattan that just shouldn't be where it is. For a while there was a David Smith, a great sculptor by any measure, at Lincoln Center and it looked awful. Mark di Suvero, who depends on huge scale for much of his work, can’t always get it right. Anyone who saw the Richard Serra ‘Tilted Arc’ before it was removed from the plaza it occupied could see it was wrong for that spot. During that same period there was another Serra in park-like area near the Holland Tunnel that was great. His big piece outside the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh is one of the best public sculptures I’ve seen anywhere.

It’s best to get a good one that works where it is. Good art isn’t  always popular, but over time it grows on the passers-by. The big Picasso horse in Chicago was like that. After a few years it was embraced by the community. I’m no great fan of Picasso, but that is a great sculpture.

Mediocre or poorly-sited work has the opposite effect. It may generate a little early opposition, but over time it just looks like nothing. It’s better to have nothing than to have something that looks like nothing. These are the only art works some people will usually see in their lives, and to have it be something pallid is a great shame.

 Here are a few good public art pieces in Maine, in no particular order:

 Sculptures by Richard Serra and Sol Lewitt at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville

Two pieces by Roger Majorowicz, one in downtown Waterville and another at a school in Gardiner.

 I can’t think of any more.

I'm getting a feeling of deja vu. Jamilla El-Shafei, of the Kennebunks Peace Department, is helping to organize a weekend protest march to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport. Bush will visit Kennebunkport on Saturday, August 2. 

The usual suspects will be present: Code Pink, Maine Peace Action, Veterans for Peace, and Carlos Arredondo, the father of a slain soldier who died in Iraq four years ago. 

My questions, asked in earnest, are: Are these protests drawing new attendees every time? What do they accomplish? Do observers start to tune them out after some time? I'm not sure. My call is in to Jamilla to get her take, which I'll post here.

An independent film, co-written by Kennebunk resident Steve Hrehovcik, filmed some scenes in Kittery over the weekend.

27 Down, due out in 2009, tells the story of a Boston cop who gets involved in a hit-and-run and then moves to the fictional town of Canada, Maine (Hrehovcik is obviously fascinated by the abudance of shared place-names in Maine; see below). The crew, led by director John Depew, shot some bar and crowd scenes; one extra documented the experience on her personal blog. They also filmed a scene in the Kittery Police Station. 

Hrehovcik (pronounced Hero-check) and his son, Josh, also write and produce a humorous series called "Bruce McToose: Intrepid Traveler," which takes its somewhat hapless title character to places throughout Maine that aren't quite what (or where) he thinks they are. The first episode, "Norway," has Bruce McToose asking locals where he can find the fjords. New episodes will be online soon.

Um, excuse me.

Yesterday I saw some dude walking around the Old Port with a large snake wrapped around his neck, but I didn't think things were getting this out of control.

Via StrangeMaine, obvi.

It’s in the nature of newspaper scheduling that you don’t always get to write about those interesting events, so I haven’t had the time or column inches to devote to a veteran painter of considerable interest, Charles DuBack at Jameson Gallery in Portland. His show ends this weekend, July 26, so here’s a somewhat belated appreciation.

I never saw his work in New York, although he had been part of the scene there for a long time when I first got there. If memory serves, I first saw his work shown by the late Don Slagel in a little gallery in Waldoboro. I recognized right away that here was an artist who had drunk at the fountain of modernist art with real gusto. He was, and remains, at the age of 82, a believer in the lessons of Matisse and the other pioneers.

 His recent work skirts the edges of true abstraction, with references that make his work both a picture of something it isn’t, while building collection of colors and shapes that are their own content. The anchor of everything he does is color. He uses brilliant hues and strokes, sometimes creating an image and others creating a setting for a barely suggested narrative. As with most good modernist art, there are layers of experience in each of his paintings that only become apparent with time. This is a show to visit slowly.

The Jameson Gallery is at 305 Commercial Street in Portland

As Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, wraps up a rare visit to war-torn Darfur -- where he is accused by the international community of being an accomplice in ethnic cleansing and genocide there -- a leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement will visit Portland on Saturday to speak about the situation in that region, where close to 300000 have died.

Abdul Wahid Mohammed Nur will speak in Portland at 6pm on Saturday, July 26, at the Root Cellar (94 Washington Avenue), “about the current situation in Darfur and the state of the movement for peace and justice in one of Africa's most repressive regimes,” according to an email distributed by local peace activst Wells Staley-Mays. Nur has has been an outspoken activist and an occasionally obstinate party to peace talks.

More Avesta Housing news, strangely. They cut the ribbon today on the Pearl Place Apartments, "Maine’s first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified affordable housing development," according to a press release sent out today. The 60 (cat-friendly) units, located at Oxford and Pearl streets, are also endorsed by the U.S. Green Building Council. They're listed for rent at between $639-1064/month, with income limits. 

If future tenants are properly educated about the green aspects of their digs, sustainable and affordable housing developements are the next step toward ensuring that "eco-friendly" doesn't mean "elitist." 

 This didn't quite fit in Sibilance this week, but we didn't want you to miss out:

F The Portland music scene is getting all kinds of Web-friendly. On July 24, Spencer Albee and Dave Gutter of Rustic Overtones (and As Fast As and Paranoid Social Club) will join Bull Moose co-owner Chris Brown as part of a live chat hosted by the Bull Moose group on Facebook. They’ll answer any questions you throw at them from 4:30 to 5 pm. Any Facebook member can view the chat, though only Bull Moose group members can ask a question, so join the group in advance if you want in. And don’t think this is a totally naked marketing thing — Bull Moose didn’t even start the Facebook group. Some high school kid named Steve Morse did. He just really likes Bull Moose.

 This didn't quite fit in Sibilance this week, but we didn't want you to miss out:

F The Portland music scene is getting all kinds of Web-friendly. On July 24, Spencer Albee and Dave Gutter of Rustic Overtones (and As Fast As and Paranoid Social Club) will join Bull Moose co-owner Chris Brown as part of a live chat hosted by the Bull Moose group on Facebook. They’ll answer any questions you throw at them from 4:30 to 5 pm. Any Facebook member can view the chat, though only Bull Moose group members can ask a question, so join the group in advance if you want in. And don’t think this is a totally naked marketing thing — Bull Moose didn’t even start the Facebook group. Some high school kid named Steve Morse did. He just really likes Bull Moose.

Most 20th-anniversary celebrations are a little more involved than this:

The Gritty McDuff's folks knew 2008 was their 20th anniversary year. But the word on the street is that yesterday a Gritty's staffer (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) realized that July 21 was the actual, on-the-day, 20th anniversary of the founding of Gritty McDuff's. So something had to be done. Raise a pint? You bet!

There in the photo are Gritty's founders Richard Pfeffer and Ed Stebbins with their buddy Mike Kilbride in the basement of the Fore Street Gritty's, celebrating. Look for more events (we hope, things you can actually attend!) to come as they continue to celebrate through the year. There's a slideshow of pics from the impromptu gathering here.

You will undoubtedly see a great deal of media coverage of the upcoming Beach to Beacon road race, slated for Saturday, August 2, in Cape Elizabeth. But the dirty little secret the newspapers and TV stations never tell you is that many of those stories, and even the story ideas, are not generated in the newsrooms of Maine. Instead, they are dreamed up in Arizona by the capable - and friendly - folks at Wolfe PR (they used to be based in Scarborough, but aren't anymore), and spoon-fed to Maine journalists.

As a guide to the stories you'll see on TV, in the local daily, and in weekly newspapers, here's their official media pitch list, in full, as it arrived in the Phoenix's inbox just minutes ago. Note the cheery salutation (Hi Media).

To be sure, some of these are legitimately interesting stories. The problem is that they're being prepped, researched, and fact-checked not by the decreasing number of journalists working in Maine, but by former journalists now in PR all the way across the country.

As reported on the New Yorker's books blog this morning, Maine gets some attention in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-Day Iraq (Atlas & Co), due out this September. Sure, we'd rather get noticed for other, less close-minded reasons, but the story of the Lewiston "Anti-Harry Potter Conference" -- at which activists cut up Harry Potter books rather than burn them (because they couldn't get a fire permit from the city) -- is undeniably entertaining.

For the past couple of decades or so quite a number of artists have been trying to push the limits of decency in art. It’s good business. Remember the piss Christ, the elephant-dung virgin, Mapplethorp’s special nasties? Feces and bodily functions have been a staple of reputation-building.

All that derives from the artistic career model that grew out of the avant-garde offending the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie, as happened in Paris in the late 19the century when Impressionism and its antecedents descendants outraged the art public. They took those things seriously in those days; columns were written and fights broke out in the galleries. Later on the Dadaists and Surrealists self-consciously set out to offend. The bodily orifices, organs and dead animals of recent years are born of the same idea: if you offend them, it must be good, and should make money.

Now comes Portland artist with an action that represents a new low in moral depravity. He is actually (can you believe this?) going to make an art piece from telemarketing. Is there no end to how low an artist will go? Christopher Michael Sullivan is going to make an art event out of cold-calling to sell art. This could get ugly, folks.

Full disclosure: I’ve been marginal participant in one of Sullivan’s art pieces. The pieces usually consist of a number of artifacts, a related event or two and extensive documentation on the actions and their results. I’m also one of a number of persons on an advisory board that is part of his firm, which is in itself a conceptual art artifact.

Sullivan’s satire has a queasy, stretched-wire sharpness to it, not quite laugh-out-loud funny and not quite comfortable, and difficult to apprehend at a casual glance. One doesn’t know whether to chuckle or avert one’s gaze.

A center for homeless women in Portland will be built despite neighbors' complaints, Avesta Housing and Preble Street announced today. When the project was first proposed, developers hoped it would be finished by the end of this year. Now that a judge has approved the conditional rezoning that would allow the project to move forward, developers say it will be ready to house residents in the fall of 2009.

The Florence House will provide 25 furnished apartments, 15 safe-haven units, and 10 emergency beds, according to a press release sent out this morning. Preble Street will staff the center; Avesta will own and manage it. 

Last year, West Enders whose homes would be near the Florence House sued Avesta and the City of Portland to stop the construction, citing problems at a similar center -- Logan Place, on Frederic Street. Two particularly outspoken opponents were quoted in a July 2007 Portland Press Herald as claiming that "the four-story building would dwarf nearby homes, hurt property values and destroy what's left of one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, which has a high proportion of rental properties," the article reads. 

The ruling is a victory for homeless advocates in the city.

“For women who are homeless sleeping on mats on the floor at night and wandering the streets every day has been the norm for far too long,” according to Mark Swann, Preble Street Executive Director.  Florence House was conceived in response to the overflow at the Portland city shelter and the shortage of housing options. The need became an acute crisis when the YWCA closed and 60 additional housing units for women were lost.

Here's where the shelter will be: 

Next to a stack of five boxes of petitions, anti-Real ID activists held a press conference this morning to announce that they fell short of their goal to collect 55,087 signatures in order to get a Repeal Real ID referendum on the Maine ballot. They had 90 days to do so; but by the time the petitions are approved and printed, there are only about 60 useable days, they said. Ultimately, as of today's deadline, more than 500 volunteers had collected 24,125 signatures. 

"We are heartened and awed and incredibly impressed by all of the grassroots effort," said Kathleen McGee, the Bowdoinham citizen who submitted one of two petitions to repeal the Real ID law.

The other petitioner, Donna Bendicksen of Portland, was less composed. "I know that if we had had more time, we would have been able to collect enough signatures. This battle is far from over," she said, before breaking off -- "I'm really upset about this, okay?"

Maine Civil Liberties Union legal director Zachary Heiden, along with other speakers, vowed to continue the fight, claiming that there were other strategies for getting in the way of Real ID. "Real ID implementation is a multi-year process," he said.

When asked what other options the activists have, McGee suggested "approaching the legislature," but declined to elaborate, telling the Federal Street gathering of reporters to "stay tuned."

Both the League of Young Voters (via email blast) and the Family Planning Association of Maine (via Facebook) are reaching out on behalf of Health Coverage for Maine to people who might have signed the Fed Up With Taxes petition without realizing what they were signing. 

Here's the pitch from FPAM's grassroots organizer: 

"Healthcare for Maine needs 5 people who are willing to talk about how they signed the Fed Up with Taxes petition, but were misinformed and want their names off the list.
This Thursday, July 17th is the deadline for Fed Up with Taxes to turn their signatures in. Our intent is to hold a press event this Thurs., but we need these stories and the deadline for them is Tuesday, July 15th, 5:00."

Health Coverage for Maine, a coalition of various social-service and activist organizations around the state, claims that paid signature collectors are spreading false information about the beverage petition in order to gather names.

Addendum, courtesy of Jeff Inglis: "One thing to note - they are trying to kill the petition at this stage rather than fight it at the ballot box, by getting people to take their names off the list. But they have a huge hill to climb: the PPH is reporting that the petitioners have more than 90,000 signatures, and only need just shy of 56,000."

Tens of thousands of FairPoint customers in Maine now have the option to become official second-class citizens on the Internet, and the company is very proud, touting the accomplishment in a press release (in PDF form here) and following it up with a cheery call from a marketing person who couldn't answer any questions.

(To be fair, she promised another person could answer my question about how many of the 31,000 FairPoint customers already had high-speed Internet through another provider, or at least already had the option of getting it through, say, Time Warner Cable. But that person, FairPoint spokesman Jeff Nevins, said he couldn't actually answer it. He was helpful in other ways, though, which we're exploring and will report more on shortly.)

But it's true — now 31,000 FairPoint customers can purchase DSL-speed Internet, which is not only slower than Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner service, but is far slower than the technology that is really the basis for all future high-speed Internet: