Another oil-tank proposal not chosen

Portland Food Co-op moving into Meg Perry Center

The Portland Food Co-op, which I wrote about last year, announced in its monthly newsletter yesterday that it will soon share space in the Meg Perry Center. The space on Congress Street will serve as the co-op's hub for food-buying club meetings, monthly potlucks, and office operations.

Planned Parenthood pulls a switcharoo, endorses Allen

Ouside the federal courthouse in Portland this morning, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England director of public affairs Chris Quint announced that the national Planned Parenthood Action Fund board has "unanimously" decided to endorse Tom Allen for US Senate.

It's a big deal because Planned Parenthood has supported Allen's opponent, supposedly pro-choice Republican incumbent Susan Collins, in previous races. Apparently, this is the first time the organization has switched their loyalties to support the challenger of an incumbent they previously endorsed (via Collins Watch). 

It seems that Collins' vote to appoint Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court was the nail in her Planned Parenthood coffin; Allen, who accepted the endorsement in person, highlighted the "fundamental inconsistency" of politicians who vote one way on legislation, but then turn around to vote in favor of judicial nominees who will undermine the same freedoms. 

"His record [on women's issues]...was predictable," Allen said of Alito, before pledging to remain consistently pro-choice with regard to both legislation and judicial appointees.    

Over at the Huffington Post, blogger Howie Klein congratulates Planned Parenthood on making a principled (as opposed to political) choice. He contrasts today's news with the Human Rights Campaign's announcement in April that they were endorsing Collins. (I can't seem to find the blog post about it, but here's what the incredibly even-handed Christian Civic League had to say at the time.) While Klein describes that decision as being based on "callous political calculations-- that if Allen won he'd be pro-gay anyway and that if Collins won she'd "owe" them," he says that Planned Parenthood's choice is "courageous."

The winning oil-tank design is...

The artist whose design may one day grace some of the oil tanks overlooking Portland Harbor is ... Jaime Gili. (His eye-bending Web site is here.)

He’s a dynamic Venezuelan-born painter living in London, who said at the announcement of his win, “I cannot imagine any bigger project,” and then moved right on to do just that: “I’d like to see my paintings taking over cities.”

See a slideshow of the proposal here:

It’s the work Portland Phoenix art reviewer Ken Greenleaf liked the best of the five finalists (see “Words Over Pictures,” September 5).

Greenleaf wrote then, “His abstract paintings contain strong contrasts and dynamic, almost explosive arrangements of sharp triangles. His proposal for the tank farm is his painting style writ very large, in many ways a relief from the other competitors’ attempts at relevance. ... Based on what I have seen so far, the one design I would most want to drive past on a regular basis would be Gili’s. It’s simple, dynamic, and based on itself. Of the five semifinalists, it would have the most staying power.”

Marc Bessire, director of the Bowdoin Bates College Museum of Art, said he looks forward to looking at what he called “the most beautiful gestural graffiti art that’s been planned” as he drives by the tanks twice a day on his way to and from work. He says the slashes or “splinters” in Gili’s work represent “energy,” whether “the energy of the oil” or “of the Maine coast” or “of our working port.”

Even though the artist has been picked, the work is far from over. Maine Center for Creativity founder and executive director Jean Maginnis said that in addition to the $200,000 already raised to get to this phase of the project, she needs to raise $1.2 million more to actually put paint on steel.

Maginnis said that should take two and a half to three years, and only then would painting begin. (See “It’s Not About The Art,” by Jeff Inglis, September 5.)

Gili, who was given $20,000 as a monetary prize, is in town for another few days, before heading back to London for that city’s annual arts fair. He expects to be back in Portland sometime next year, and is hoping to set up a summertime exhibition of some of his works at a local gallery. “Ideally, I’d like an industrial space,” he said.

Wordle-ing the debate

It's been done before by others, but nowhere yet (that I can find) for tonight's debate. So here you go - employing the efforts of Wordle on the debate transcript (using CNN's near-real-time one)

McCain:

Obama:

Portland Loses Bob Solotaire

Bob Solotaire was a fixture in art in Maine for many years. He was a very good artist and good guy to have around. He was quirky and odd, but in a good way. I first met him in Portland in the late 1970’s and was struck by the coherence of his landscapes, particularly the industrial constructions like views of the cement plant in Thomaston.

He was the only person I ever knew who would drive long distances to places that other people would avoid, just to see some old iron foundries or coal tipples that would make good paintings. In the fall of 1982 I had just moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, living in a  loft in the then-unfashionable north end of that city, near the propeller plant and a couple of soap factories.

I was barely moved in, still working on the loft, when Bob showed up on my doorstep, unannounced. He was driving an old VW, a Rabbit if memory serves,  that was crammed to the gills with painting gear and a few bits of regular luggage. He stopped over for a little while and then moved on, on his way, I think, to Pennsylvania and West Virginia, looking for defunct industrial landscapes. Bob was the kind of guy you didn’t mind if he showed up with no advance notice. And who would go sightseeing in industrial wastelands.

His artistic life was never easy but he stuck to it tenaciously. He had enough friends and people who liked his work so he could get it shown, but I don’t think it ever sold well. For quite a while he ran a rooming house in the west end to make ends meet, a place with a gloriously overgrown yard and a small studio filled with paintings, drawings, studies and general artistic clutter.

It makes me very sad that I will never see him again.

Keeping the election honest

There’s an important use for the Obama campaign’s text-message database that’s not being discussed, and it’s a way to help prevent the Republicans from stealing the election.

We know that Barack Obama’s campaign has done a much better job at getting people’s cell-phone numbers, from his various text-message initiatives (including the contest at the DNC to see which state would send in the most text messages).

We don’t know what, exactly, they plan to do with them. They used them to announce his pick of Joe Biden for veep, but it’s been pretty quiet since.

My guess - and it’s not an earth-shattering one - is that the campaign will send out a huge blast text message on Election Day, reminding people to go to the polls and vote.

But they need to go one step further, to help ensure the validity of the voting - in that text reminding people to vote, they need to ask people to text the campaign back, to confirm that they did vote for Obama.

That way, the campaign will have a rough tally of at least a minimum number of people who cast their votes for Obama in each state. (Sure, some folks will have area codes from states other than where they live, but this is not an exact count.)

The election is likely to end up very close in several key states around the country. Imagine if the Obama campaign had its own rough count of how many people there voted for him. It wouldn’t be an exit poll, nor actual ballots, but a minimum number of people who said they voted for Obama. This will definitely be an underestimate of the votes Obama should get - not everyone who votes for Obama will have gotten a text in the first place, and among those who do get a text, not everyone will reply.

Now imagine that the official ballot count ends up saying that fewer people voted for Obama than texted the Obama campaign to say they did - or even that the official results are very close to the number of those who texted.

Rather than being stuck trying to guess - based on exit polls or other demographic data - whether the count is likely valid or not, the Obama campaign will have its own independent data.

And that data will include information allowing the campaign to actually contact individual voters to let them know what’s going on - to get them involved in the effort to challenge the results, if need be, or to take any other action that might be appropriate.

This may not be an important move in many (or even most) states, but in some battleground states it could make a vital difference.

And of course the McCain campaign (or any third-party campaign) could use the same tactic to ensure accuracy in voter counts, if only they had a database anything like the size of Obama’s.

Oil tank design to be unveiled tomorrow

It had to happen sometime: the Maine Center for Creativity plans to announce the winning design in its Art All Around oil-tank-painting contest tomorrow morning at the new Mercy Hospital building on the Fore River Parkway.

The winner will receive $20,000 and will have his or her (or their) design painted on the tanks just as soon as the MCC raises the rest of the $1.2 million needed to finance the job. (At last tally, the organization had $200,000. I wonder how this glorious economic boom is affecting their ability to reach the goal.)

The effort does seem to be having at least one struggle: its Web site is not working (www.artallaround.com - no link because it doesn't work).

And MCC founder/executive director Jean Maginnis is clearly protecting her pet project - since our stories early last month (see “It’s Not About the Art” by Jeff Inglis, and “Words Over Pictures” by Ken Greenleaf, published September 5), there’s been nary a peep from Maginnis in any media, in Maine or anywhere else.

We won’t pretend to be surprised that she didn’t include our stories - which were critical of the concept, the project, and the art - in the MCC’s Web page cataloging media coverage of the project, nor that Maginnis - who initially refused to give the Phoenix any information about the project at all - didn’t send us the press release about the impending announcement of the winner. (Thanks to Linda at SouthPortlander.com for posting it!)

Here’s Maginnis’s fair warning: she should be prepared to answer, at tomorrow’s press conference, the following questions:

1) How much money has MCC raised to date?

2) How long does she expect to need to raise the rest?

3) When will the painting of the tanks begin?

But before Nader, another third-party candidate

Yes, Ralph Nader's in town tonight, as Deirdre noted earlier.  But a couple hours earlier, at 5:15 pm (that's about 40 minutes from now), independent write-in US Senate candidate Herb Hoffman will be at the First Parish Church at 425 Congress Street with a presentation of his own.

Hoffman is trying to challenge Susan Collins and Tom Allen, but ran into trouble when the Maine Democratic Party successfully blocked him from the ballot, getting the Maine Supreme Court to rule that some of his nomination petitions were invalid on a technicality. (Specifically, he signed a statement at the bottom of each petition page saying he had been present when the signers signed on. For three people, he wasn't present, and the state's high court therefore threw out not only the three individual signatures, but all the signatures on those pages - which left too few signatures for him to be on the ballot.)

At this evening's event, Hoffman will claim that if that same standard were applied to Tom Allen's petition, Allen's name would not be allowed on the ballot either.

It's a clever argument - though its success would mean that Collins would be the only one whose name is on the ballot, an outcome Hoffman likely does not actually desire.

In other news, wanna-be Senate candidate Laurie Dobson will attempt to insert herself into tomorrow's Allen-Collins debate by protesting outside it. She didn't turn in enough signatures to get on the ballot, and has used that fact as part of her basis for claiming that the two-party system is biased against outsiders. (It may be, but I'm still not buying the idea that her failure to get signatures is proof.)

Nader in Portland today

Independent presidential and vice-presidential candidates Ralph Nader (no intro needed) and Matt Gonzalez (a San Francisco politician who came close to being that city's mayor in 2003) will be campaigning in Portland at 6:30 this evening at the First Parish Church (425 Congress Street). Suggested contribution is $10 ($5 for students). 

In recent days, Nader's criticized Congress (and Barack Obama and John McCain) for its actions on the bailout bill and the economy. He's still pushing to be included in the debates and the polls.

Still, he's attracting far less attention (and ire/angst) than in previous years. One columnist thinks the spoiler effect is being overlooked this year. 

Crime bits

Next Tuesday, October 7, at 4:30 pm, Equality Maine and the Portland-based Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence are sponsoring a rally in response to a recent crime uptick in Portland -- with a special focus on the September crime perpetrated against a man who "was perceived to be gay." Attorney General Steve Rowe, Jill Saxby of the Maine Council of Churches, Mayor Ed Suslovic, Steve Wessler of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, and Betsy Smith of Equality Maine are among those scheduled to attend. 

In related news, the public is invited to October's Public Safety Committee meeting, to be held the following Tuesday (10/15), at 5:30 pm in the city council chambers, where West End city councilor Dave Marshall, representatives from the Portland Police Department, and acting police chief Joe Loughlin will talk about recent crime trends and take questions from attendees. 

Local accountability

City Councilor Kevin Donoghue has "re-launched" his blog @ kevindonoghue.blogspot.com. On it, he's posting news bits as well as his daily schedule, in order "to work for more transparency through posting up each of my appointments, both public meetings and one-on-one meetings." This reminds us of an unfortunately unpopular service we read about in Wired recently -- the Punch Clock Campaign to track members of Congress' schedules, administered by the Sunlight Foundation, which attempts to increase governmental transparency. (So far, only nine members have signed up.)

More on Allen -- and the environment

Here's his interview with Grist.org, the leading environmental-policy Web site. In it, he highlights Susan Collins' vote for the (extremely flawed) 2005 energy bill in an effort to draw attention away from her otherwise acceptable environmental record. 

Teachers back Allen, but only because he's a Dem

Back in July, the Maine Education Association - the 25,000-member union representing Maine's teachers and other educators (including my wife) - announced it would endorse Democrat Tom Allen in his bid to unseat two-term Republican US Senator Susan Collins. At the time, union executive director Chris Galgay said Allen's "views are closest to the hearts of educators and his record of support for our issues is outstanding."

But this week, NEA Today, the magazine published by the National Education Association (the country's umbrella teachers' union), took a slightly different tone, suggesting the endorsement was less about Allen's views (which are fundamentally the same as Collins's - they both are graded "A" on the NEA's Legislative Report Card).

It turns out the union was more interested in Allen's party membership, according to the magazine:

"Incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, has a fine record on public education - but so does her opponent, U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, a Democrat. The difference is that if Allen's elected, the Democratic Party has a chance to create a majority in the Senate, and that could make a big different in their effectiveness."

That's a nice way to treat a man who's really not doing well in the polls at all - tell him you don't like him for himself, but for the people he hangs with.

Kudos to Others!

Brad McCurtain, owner of Others in Monument Square, took issue with Brian Duff's description of his lemon bars as "sort of gummy and the crust was pasty," in a review of various desserts earlier this month (see "Treat Yourself," September 12).

But - in a move we find ourselves eager to encourage in other restaurateurs who disagree with our reviews - McCurtain decided not to call and complain, and didn't opt to write us a letter, either. Rather, he cheerfully stopped by our office bearing gifts.

Specifically, he dropped off a check for $6.31 to honor his business's money-back guarantee. (How expensive are these lemon bars, anyway?) And he dropped off some lemon bars as well as a few chocolate-chip bars - about a dozen in all.

The general verdict here is that they're quite good. So perhaps McCurtain was right, and Duff got one from "a bad batch." (UPDATE: After getting more feedback, the final verdict is much closer to Brian's original description.)

Either way, we'll give Others credit for McCurtain's courage and creativity.