![\"colin08\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\")
<\/a>We\u2019ll be a lot more creative when we start thinking of the Portland Pirates as part of the creative economy.<\/p>\nMy wish for the New Year is for both sides of the Cumberland County Civic Center versus the Portland Pirates to stop digging in their heels and consider the economics of audience and the responsibility to have a complete entertainment package for our city.<\/p>\n
Because I\u2019d hate to think the Pirates are falling through a crack in a culture war.<\/p>\n
Recent studies by groups such as Harvard\u2019s million-subject Project Implicit have used voter statistics and polls to determine that self-identified liberals are more likely to move to urban areas, while self-identified conservatives move to\u00a0 suburbs and rural areas: \u201cAmericans might be segregating themselves into red conservative communities and blue liberal enclaves,\u201d writes Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience. From one of the studies : \u201cThe ratio of bookstores to gun stores in a town can predict whether the population votes Democrat or Republican.\u201d<\/p>\n
But shouldn\u2019t a taxpayer-funded strategic plan for a city foster diversity in all respects, including entertainment? Why should Portland pigeonhole herself? I love MPBN programming, but I\u2019d hesitate to have it as my only station. Hockey is the stick that stirs bread and circuses. Like many of the arts, it\u2019s too wonderful to have to fit into an ideological box.<\/p>\n
There are some fabulous businesses listed under \u201cProfessional Groups\u201d on creativeportland.me, including Maine Film Festivals, Maine Media Workshops (of Rockport), Portland Greendrinks, Reverb (\u201ca non-profit organization founded by environmentalist Lauren Sullivan and her musician husband, Adam Gardner [of the band Guster]\u201d). Reverb provides greening programs and educational outreach for music tours. No Portland Pirates.<\/p>\n
The argument that the Civic Center earns more money on a given night via individual performances by the occasional visiting entertainer or Disney on Ice, and that therefore we lose money by hosting the Pirates, is hard to hear. That assumes the Civic Center is booked every night. Mall planners, for instance, often give more favorable terms to an anchor tenant. Life happens when nothing \u2018important\u2019 is going on. Translated against the Civic Center schedule, then, hockey is life. There\u2019s nothing like the ritual of seeing caravans of suburbanites packing up their kids and trekking downtown for their season-ticket seats. Some people would never come into Portland if it weren\u2019t for hockey.<\/p>\n
I love the rough-and-tumble, slapshot beauty of the Pirates and how they invigorate the Arts District, which without the Pirates\u2019 eye-patched heterogeny might be just a little too precious.<\/p>\n
The recent decision of the Cumberland County commissioners to delay until April any change in the makeup of the trustees preserves embarrassing gridlock made worse by an underlying selfishness. If the delay is, as the Portland Press Herald<\/em> has reported, \u201cso the current trustees will get full credit for their oversight of the $34 million Civic Center renovation that\u2019s expected to be completed in late January or early February, [according to the] chairman of the commissioners,\u201d then shame on the commissioners.<\/p>\n As I write this, the newspaper has revealed that \u201c44 people applied recently for the four unpaid trustee positions\u2013most of them after Portland Community Chamber President Bill Becker urged people to apply\u201d to help us \u201c\u2019get the Why the delay? If you guys ever attended a hockey game, you\u2019d know there\u2019s a penalty for icing.<\/p>\n Winterguide 2014 We\u2019ll be a lot more creative when we start thinking of the Portland Pirates as part of the creative economy. My wish for the New Year is for both sides of the Cumberland County Civic Center versus the Portland Pirates to stop digging in their heels and consider the economics of audience and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[79],"class_list":["post-9323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-winterguide-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9323"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14452,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9323\/revisions\/14452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPirates back.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"