The old cars on the lawn of L.C. Bates Museum for "transportation day" last Sunday were so reflective that half the photos I took of them were selfies. Even in this shot of the elegantly designed door handle of a maroon Plymouth you can tell I was wearing a pink shirt and a teal raincoat. I took some photos in the various rooms of the museum trying to capture the weird vibe of the place, and although my camera doesn't have a minimally arrested decay setting, I caught an oddball juxtaposition or two and this carriage that belongs on the tattered cover of a old horror novel. Some of it is the low lighting from the working knob & tube wiring that's been stepped down to 12 volts for safety. Reading report: I've just finished Paul Doiron's latest, The Bone Orchard, and declare it his best yet. Now I'm reading The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin. More on that as soon as he says something believable.

Summer is packed full of stuff. On just one day, we did loon count (I never see loons, but I see lots of stuff that needs its picture taken), then Barn Raisers sponsored a Celebrate Unity event and Melissa worked one of her story walks into it, and then we saw our last film festival movie, Dhoom 3, an almost three hour big screen blast of sound and color with huge dance scenes and too many motorcycle chases. Earlier in the week we saw Take Me To The River. Thanks to Nancy and the Neeses for some extra clicks after we had burned through our pass. We may sponsor a film next year.

I am on a committee to brand the town of Unity, to create a logo and a slogan. I took the eight visions done by the comprehensive plan committee and wordclouded them. Then I took my favorite words and put them in some different combinations:
     Unity: Growing Our Future
     Unity: A Community Growing Its Future
     Unity: A Garden at the Crossroads
     Unity: Farming at the Crossroads
     Unity: Growing a Vibrant Future
     Unity: Growing a Healthy Tomorrow
     Unity: Connecting Farms to the Marketplace
The idea is to define our identity both as a farming town and as a services hub for surrounding towns. I think we could lean toward the farming part in the slogan and then in the logo incorporate some stylized lines for the three routes that come together in Unity. And "growing" can mean farming as well as other economic development. We could also have a punchy slogan and a tag line: Unity: A Garden At The Crossroads. Join us in growing a vibrant future. I am eager to see what our professional logo/slogan designer on the committee comes up with, but anybody can play.

When most business people think of economic development, I think they see retail stores, services, and manufacturing. They dream of a company making a big investment in Unity and hiring lots of people. That is a millwork dream and millwork is never coming back. But the pieces have been gathering into place here for another kind of future. About ten times a week I say to someone: farms are businesses, and actually someone is making a huge investment here, but it's not WalMart or a paper mill. Maine Farmland Trust is putting over a million dollars into renovating the old grammar school into a model Food Hub. A food hub is a place for assembling and storing farm products, prior to distribution both to a multi-farm CSA and to more distant markets. There will be space for selling farm products, a commercial kitchen, atmospherically-controlled rooms for storing crops, and space where crops can be washed, sorted, cut, or bagged. This will create jobs and support our many existing farm businesses. MFT plans to set it up as a model for-profit business that other communities can copy. Oh yeah, and the other thing I say to someone about ten times a week: non-profits can be economic development engines.

It's the over-stimulating week of MIFF and in just the first weekend we have seen four films. Opening night was Boyhood, shot over 12 years with the same cast. On Saturday it was Brasslands about a huge Serbian brass band festival. It was scary to see how natural it was for the thuggish Serbians to say about their Roma competitors: "We will wipe you from the face of the earth." Also they are still touchy as hell about the Americans having bombed them for their genocidal tendencies. In the huge international competition, the U.S. was the only country that had women in the band. Take that, thugs! The film which had a bunch of different directors was made by a Brooklyn group called the Meerkat Media Collective which is all about non-hierarchal decision making. In the Q&A following the screening, the Meerkat reps said that one of their other projects is "Participatory Budgeting... a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget." I don't think I was the only one in the room thinking uh we call that town meeting.

On Sunday we went in early to see Heavenly Angle because our friend Ken Chapman is in it and he came up from New Hampshire to see it. We had just a few minutes to visit with him before getting seated for the wonderfully crafted Albert Nobbs followed by Q&A with Glenn Close. Tonight we go back for Take Me To The River, which will take me to Memphis for 90 minutes.

Music was a star in the two films that were not about music. In Boyhood, the dad character wrote country songs and the sound track let us know what year we were in. Glenn Close wrote the closing song sung by Sinead O'Connor in Albert Nobbs, and producer/director Ernest Thompson wrote the songs for Heavenly Angle and got Joan Osborne and Natalie McMaster to sing and play them. Writers write and apparently a song is just a short screen play.

I snapped that picture with my cell phone because the phone hadn't had a cosmo and I needed a reliable witness to how intense that sunset was. It was a happy accident that I saw Mary Ann at farmers market (or as we call it "market") today and found out that Rising Appalachia was playing at a permaculture convergence at MOFGA this evening. Go ahead and say it once more: permaculture convergence. I like RA's politics, but I love their southerness. They sang "Filthy Dirty South." I have wanted to see them live, but I never thought it would be in a field at MOFGA. Walking out of the tent, it was just me and a half moon on the walk back to the car. A safe, fragrant darkness. Those sweet permcult hippies had some of the worst camping weather last night as the remnants of hurricane Arthur skirted up the coast. A total rain event on the 4th made it a good day for working on the comp plan goals/objectives/strategies framework. After the consultants gave us an actual example, the format finally made sense. Summer is just too wonderful and busy with other things to get much work done. That's ok. November will be here soon enough.

This cool old Alden rowing shell is going to live at our house after Bahoosh finishes painting it. Jim and Martha and I all tried it out this morning. The foot holders are wierd antiques, but the seat slides and the wooden oars are amazingly light, and it takes so much attention to get all the motions synchronized that you don't have time to notice your feet. It will take a lot of practice to get it right. The new Alden shells are amazing, but so it the price. Earlier this morning I kayaked around the islands where the herons like to fish and caught this big guy being all stately on his rock.