Every year, Portland has a very strong connection to the Grammy Awards, thanks to the work of Bob Ludwig and Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering. The two are stars in the world of mastering – the final fine-tuning of a recording – and they master recordings for dozens of star acts. This year, more than […]

BOSTON – If you are headed to Boston over February vacation week, considering adding the USS Constitution Museum to your list of museums worth visiting. Members of the USS Constitution Model Shipwright Guild display the finest of their craft in a War of 1812-themed exhibition. Commemorating 200 years of peace between the United States and […]

The phone call interrupted the harmonies. J. Robert Spencer was rolling across Pennsylvania in a tour bus with the other three members of the Midtown Men. While he talked on the phone, the other three sang in the background. “We’re having a lot of fun,” Spencer said, stating the obvious. “This all comes very naturally […]

“Oooh, honey, less is more,” the flamboyant hair stylist whispers, out of earshot, at Diana (Melissa McCarthy) as she bombs her head with hairspray and trowels on the eye shadow. That’s never the case with McCarthy, the bawdy, rude, larger-than-life comic whose big movie break was “Bridesmaids.” She riffs, tosses back belts of booze and […]

The Richard Blanco literary event that is happening in Portland on Feb. 26 is a Maine success story from every angle. It’s an example of a community coming together to celebrate the success of an individual, and it started because one individual believed strongly it had to happen and was willing to work hard to […]

Which is tougher on a young girl — losing a father to death or losing a father to divorce? That is the question Meg Wilson of North Yarmouth explores in a new novel, “Crappy New Year.” And she explores it honestly and well. As humorist Elizabeth Peavey has observed, this is “a snappy, funny and […]

The baseline mystery of Steven Soderbergh’s masterful Hitchcockian thriller “Side Effects” is “What’s really going on here?” The film keeps viewers emotionally invested yet intellectually off-balance, suffusing even the most ostensibly straightforward scenes with a sense of free-floating anxiety. It pays off with edge-of-the-seat chills, walloping surprises and an uncanny ability to make complex plotting […]

The iconic shape of Maine combines the practical and the abstract. We have both the land’s natural boundaries, such as the coastline and rivers, and then we have the straight lines drawn by men on maps. Modernism in art could be defined as the aggressive introduction of map and diagram logic — flat and based […]

That’s what the Dancing with the Realtors event is ultimately all about — helping to give a low-income family a chance at home ownership.

Is it Bruce? Kanye? Adele? We asked some music-biz insiders to handicap Sunday night’s races.