– Dining reviews practically write themselves when the experience is outstanding, and although less fun (since restaurants do represent a person’s livelihood), they are equally easy to compose when the experience involves a spectacular failure. The creative stumbling happens in the middle, when a meal is “meh.” Since “meh” does not translate as a technical […]

Poet Stuart Kestenbaum’s essays in ‘The View from Here’ illuminate a writer’s progression and the symbiosis of community and artistic process.

Art “The Draw of the Normandy Coast (1860–1960),” European and American paintings and works on paper, Portland Museum of Art. 775-6148; portlandmuseum.org. Through Sept. 3. “Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin,” Portland Museum of Art. portlandmuseum.org. Through Sept. 30. Duane Paluska, new paintings and sculpture, Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick. […]

Supporters of the work done by the Cancer Community Center get in the spirit for the upcoming Fight Back Festival.

Joe Posnanski moved to State College, Pa., to write a much different book. Posnanski imagined his biography of Penn State University’s heralded head football coach, Joe Paterno, would be about the man who, as Posnanski noted in a recent USA Today column, “always said that winning wasn’t what mattered. And yet, he won more games […]

By CHRISTOPHER HYDE My wife just bought me a five-CD set of the complete piano works of Federico Mompou for our anniversary. What makes it unusual is that the set, recorded in 1974, is played entirely by the composer, who was born in 1893. (It is no longer complete, since 80 more pieces were discovered after […]

MAX ALEXANDER

BOOTHBAY HARBOR — Paintings by New York City artist Victoria Wulff will be on view at the Studio 53 Fine Art Gallery, 53 Townsend Ave., Boothbay Harbor, beginning Wednesday. The show will remain on view through Sept. 24. A reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday. Wulff was lured to Boothbay Harbor […]