With the weather turning warmer, my thoughts turn to fresh produce. And with that, CSAs come to mind. A CSA is a program of community-supported agriculture put together by a single farm or by several farms working together, in which non-farming families/individuals can buy shares of whatever is harvested throughout the growing season. Once a week, you go to a designated pickup location, grab a box or two or three stuffed with fresh-grown, fresh-picked vegetables, and take them home to enjoy. By paying for your share up front, you are being more than a consumer. You’re investing in a local farm and the people that run it with their own hands and minds.

Tomatoes on display at a pickup location for the Goldfinch Farm CSA in Lancaster, PA

People in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and D.C. go to great lengths to get shares in CSAs from right here in Lancaster County, PA. There is probably nowhere in the world where the opportunities through buy fresh and local, particularly through a CSA, are more abundant.

Here is a list of the Lancaster County-based CSAs that have well-maintained websites with accurate and up-to-date information. In most cases, you can apply for a share this year online. Move quickly, though, because in many cases the first harvests begin this month (April).

I’ve included information on the pickup locations for each CSA, as well as the price of a full share. Please note that comparing prices isn’t apples to apples (so to speak). No two farms grow the same vegetables, and the growing season lengths vary from one farm to the other. Most CSAs in this list offer half shares for a little more than half the price of a full share. Half shares are ideal for individuals or couples with no children.

Most of the produce from these farms are not certified organic but are grown without chemical insecticides or fertilizers.

A few of the community-supported agriculture programs listed here offer “accessory” shares. That is, they sell CSA shares of eggs, fruit, flowers, and even meat.

Have you participated in a CSA before? Was it one listed here? Are there any Lancaster CSA farms missing from this list?

Goldfinch Farm CSA -  $510 for a full non-working share. Working shares are available and include a discount. Pickup locations are on the farm in Wrightsville, in Lancaster city, and west of the city off Columbia Ave.

Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative CSA – A nonprofit organic farmers’ cooperative of fifty member farmers in Lancaster County. $775 for a full share. Half shares, fruit shares, vegetable shares, and medicinal herb shares available.

FirstWatch Farms CSA – Pickup at the farm in Lititz. $530 for a full share. Half-shares and fruit shares (strawberries and blueberries) available.

Wilmer’s Organics CSA – Blue Ball/East Earl pickup location. $850 for a full share. Half shares, flower shares, and egg shares available.

Goodwill at Homefields Farm CSA – Millersville farm and pickup location. $650 for a full share. Half shares available.

Crawford Organics CSA – East Earl and Lititz pickup locations. $775 for a full share. Egg and flower shares available.

Kauffman’s Fruit Farm – Bird-in-Hand. $480 for full share—fruit only.

Breakaway Farms – Manheim. $500 for a full share—meat only.

Buckhill Farm – Lititz. $675 for a full share. Shares for 2010 are sold out.

B&H Organic Produce in Morgantown has canceled its 2010 season.

For a great directory of CSAs around the United States, check out LocalHarvest.org.

The movement is much more subtle when looking at just the first six months of 2009:

What do you see in these charts?

Here’s a snapshot of the trending of Lancaster County births since 1994.

Lancaster County, PA birth rate, 1994 through 2008

We had a big crowd (Photo by Jeff Geoghan)

Yesterday morning we had our largest turnout yet for a Lancaster breakfast tweetup—twenty-eight attendees in all:

1. jsang Jonathan Sanger made his first appearance
2. jeremywalter was the finance man on hand
3. chuckholt was there and happily told us how well the factoryyouthctr auction went on Saturday
4. poservarial Chad Hamilton returned after missing the last one
5. EACIV Ed Cardwell returned for his second breakfast tweetup and we compared netbooks
6. Amanda Paveglio [links to Facebook] Are you on Twitter yet, Amanda?
7. Odonellsteve Steve and I talked about about babies with beards, fake and otherwise.
8. Ben_the_great was there and it was awesome.
9. Julie_rickards was just trying to keep up with Ben’s radical dudeness.
10. crazywidow Brenda and I pretty much just busted on each other
11. Daniel Klotz Yours truly. I ate a bagel. It cost $4.95.
12. Hdesignr Heather Hough was all pumped up for the soccer game at Clipper Stadium that evening
13. LancasterHomes A huge thanks to Jeff Geoghan for organizing and arranging this tweetup
14. christophervogt Chris and I talked about health insurance, one of those hard-pressing issues of our day
15. Bencraddock Ben was there to share meaningful glances with people.
16. joelwalker just wanted to show off his new haircut that doesn’t get messed up by his motorcycle helmet
17. ryansmoker smuggled in a cup of Square One coffee, which I’ll bet anything was better than what Marriott served
18. Maxtana brought class to the event, and had a good conversation with the aforementioned Chris Vogt about the social Web
19. Trezendes was there with…
20. Benzendes strapped to his chest.
21. neilrhen I hadn’t seen since 6:30 the evening before, so we had a lot to catch up on.
22. regularsm Sean sat with Ken Mueller so I don’t know what he was up to
23. ryanshenhoover was at that table, too
24. kmueller62 thought it was special that he finally made it to his first breakfast tweetup. Consensus: he wasn’t awake enough to be interesting.
25. airport_girl flew in from Harrisburg International Airport
26. WordWidget Cliff Lewis was there, but I totally scooped NewsLanc on this thrilling story
27. beckami Ami tried to keep peace at the kiddie table
28. IJLIFE continued the discussion of what her Twitter name should stand for

1. The rise of what is essentially an economic noble class
2. The spreading adoption of social media by individuals

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. in the 1830s, he was surprised and amazed by the sheer number of civic and social associations—”religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.” He said they exist and thrive because in a true democracy like America, the equality of all individuals is so consistent that no one person has enough influence to make any large impact on society on his or her own. So, Americans naturally form associations, with the intent that a larger number of citizens can be more effective than any single citizen can be.

This was so notable to Tocqueville because in his home country of France, and elsewhere in Europe, there was no such civic equality. A single nobleman could make a great impact on society of a degree that no ordinary group of ordinary folk could rival.

Things have changed since the 1830s. Loose associations crystallized into formal organizations, thanks in no small part to a Supreme Court (mis)interpretation of the Constitution in 1886 that recognized incorporated entities (which are legal fictions) as “persons” under the law, incentivizing informal, organic groups of people to structure themselves as corporate organizations. With this change, over time the citizen who belonged to associations evolved into the “organization man” identified by William Whyte in 1956.

10% of the population controls 71% of the wealth in the United States.

What’s more, the inequality of wealth in the United States has reached such an extreme that we are now living with an economic ruling class. (See graphic, representing information from the Economic Policy Institute.) Think of how that affects social and civic organizations (we’ll leave aside political associations, as de Tocqueville did in this instance). One person can sponsor, say, an entire season at a performance theater more easily than 90 people working together can. We all know how much work it takes to organize the efforts of 90 people. Why bother, when hooking the right one person would take care of things just as effectively?

I know I’m just scratching the surface of the issue here, and I’m treating it reductively. The point is, at least in monetary terms, it takes a lot of ordinary citizens working together to equal the influence of a single member of the economic noble class. That’s a strong disincentive to associate with the hopes of getting anything done.

Economic inequality, meet social media: But what if it suddenly became a lot easier to form associations? What if a bunch of people could get together for a common purpose without the need for a lot of beaurocracy and a lot of money? It would be a good bet that you would see people disaffected by the inequality of power in our society take another shot at teaming up with their neighbors to do something good.

I think it’s obvious that social media makes these very things a lot easier. To take just one example, who’s in charge of Lancaster tweetups? No one. Is there a set system for organizing them? No. Is there any money behind it? No. But, are they well-attended? Yes. Can anyone initiate one? Yes.

In the face of something as powerful, widespread, and simple as Facebook events and Twitter, and in the face of formal organizations of ordinary citizens having far less power than entrenched individuals and corporations, I think we are beginning to see an important trend. The formal organization, inefficient and impotent, is on its way out. The (extremely) loose association, easy and far-reaching, is on its way back in.

I’ll write more about the effects I anticipate in this new social context. If formal organizations are on the decline, we will still have many organizations among us, but the “organization man”—anyone whose identity is defined by participation in formal organizations—will be a dying breed. One of the most important effects of that I anticipate is that “leadership” will become less important and necessary, and followership will take its place.

[podcast]http://www.lancasterpablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/20090706_DeathOfOrganizationMan.mp3[/podcast]

Rumschpringe 2009 poster, designed by Jeff McComsey

Highlights

Above all, there are points of light and reasons for celebration and hope. The Rumschpringe grand prize was shared last night by two very different submissions that were each excellent in their own way. American Terror: Company Man, a collaboration between animator Joseph Krzemienski and graphic novelist Jeff McComsey, displays an edginess of vision and level of technical proficiency that any city arts scene would covet. Green Fans, a documentary by Luis Ortiz and Damien Kalpokas on the passion and ritual of the Philadelphia Eagles’ die-hard fans, includes a spectrum of impressive interviews (with a former owner, former mayor Rendell, and several stand-out fans) and depth of footage that make it the real deal. It’s edited into a strong narrative and is packaged to feel finished—in fact, for a few moments I forgot where I was and felt like I was watching a professional TV special.

Ryan Mast’s two music video entries under his Unitheo production company stood out as well for the strength of the underlying vision and the precision of the execution. In other words, he wanted good shots and got the shots he wanted to, then pulled it together seamlessly.

Disappointments

Entrance to the film festival is through these main doors of the National Guard armory on North Queen Street

The location of the festival and the quality of the screening experience reveal that, disappointingly, Lancaster still is not equipped to pull off this sort of event particularly well. The films are screened in the old gymnasium of a National Guard armory where uniformed guardsmen still walk the puke-green–tiled halls. The screen itself was half the size that should be expected given the size of the space and the audience, and the projector was unable to display the films with the vibrancy and sharpness the images deserve. I hate the term “technical difficulties” because it sweeps the real issue (human mistakes or inadequate equipment) under the rug, and I heard it apologized for no fewer than a dozen time during this afternoon’s screening. (Apology accepted. Still, I expect better.) We were shown the last eleven films and the recorded awards announcement before being shown the first three films. The DVD player froze three-quarters of the way through Green Fans and we never got to see its conclusion.

Speaking of Green Fans, I can only presume that the judges awarded it the category award for best drama even though it is a documentary because there was not an actual drama submitted that warranted the honor.

It was a great shame to see two films, A Cold Room and Cosa Nostra, lazily cast teenagers and twenty-somethings as much older adults, as if there are no actors of the appropriate age to be found. A little networking and reaching out would go a long way and would spare us from having to stifle laughter when a young man calls a a peer actor his father.

Film is a difficult and extroverted medium; casting and location are as important as anything else, and to proceed as if either hurdle is particularly high in Lancaster is to display a lack of courage and willingness to engage the broader community in the production of a film. Mixed Nuts makes the location mistake, using a built-in bar in the basement of someone’s house instead of finding a way to shoot in an actual bar.

As much as I love and respect Derek Lau, I wish he had chosen against filming Craig Robbins’s Helmet Guy sketch, which I found to be neither funny nor in good taste for the way it makes fun of the mentally handicapped.

Amateurs/Pre-Professionals and Mentors

I was shocked to learn that Nik Korablin, who directed Mature for his Age, is a seventeen year-old high school senior. Whatever the film’s technical flaws (primarily in post-production), the individuality of the director and the strength of his idea are whole and rewarding. When I consider Korabin as well as Brendan Krick, who directed the pun-filled Going Bananas, it seems to me that offering more assistance to high school–age filmmakers would yield strong returns. For one thing, as I already mentioned, they (plus college students and other young adults) would benefit from having adult actors at their disposal for occasional small projects.

It’s my guess that Ryan Mast, a friend and a junior at Millersville University, would have felt a deeper satisfaction at his well-deserved award for best music video had there been any real competition. I know that I was disappointed that some of the true mentors of film in Lancaster didn’t contribute to making this year’s Rumschpringe a higher-caliber event and one that provided less-experienced filmmakers with advanced examples to emulate. I’m thinking specifically here of how there were no entries by Mary Haverstick (given the two options, I’d rather see a submission than have her serve as a juror), Allen Clements (whose great contributions to the festival I do not mean to overlook or understate), or Max Zug. Props to Joe Krzemienski for stepping up to the plate on this one.

Overall

All in all, I think this year’s Rumschpringe festival encapsulates Lancaster’s arts scene: it is still emerging. The best talent is top-notch but struggles with pushing itself further while bringing other artists along. If film, as with other art forms, somehow blossomed here overnight, the community wouldn’t be ready for it in terms of an audience base or infrastructure and behind-the-scenes talent.

I’m OK with this, because I believe this is what organic growth looks like. The next indicator we’ll get of that growth will be at the inaugural Lancaster Area Film Festival, which will feature longer films, at Liberty Place in Lancaster city on Saturday, May 2.

LMA is holding an opening reception tomorrow evening for two new exhibits, one of which is “Portraits of Illustrious Persons” by illustrator Barry Moser. I’m thankful to the museum’s director, Stanley Grand, and curator Heather Heilman Loercher for agreeing to let me in today for a sneak peak as they finished hanging the work.

Barry Moser featured on the cover of Image issue 21

I first learned of Moser and his work through Image journal, a quarterly that explores the intersection of faith and art. He was featured on the cover of the fall 1998 issue, shortly after his Pennyroyal Caxton Bible was published, and this past December he was featured as Artist of the Month on the Image website.

I came to know Moser’s work a bit better when I picked up Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith and Mystery, a project completed by Lancaster city’s own Ned Bustard, through his Square Halo imprint. The book is a collection of essays by Image‘s editor, Gregory Wolfe, and features engravings by Moser.

Moser works primarily in wood engraving, though he usually uses synthetic resin blocks in place of wood. He takes on great, often magisterial works, and manages to lift them still higher and to tease out new meanings (or, in the case of his one hundred–plus illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to make the work even more absurd).

Over the past thirty-odd years, Moser has completed hundreds of portraits. The Lancaster Museum of Art acquired original  prints of nearly all of them and has found the wall space to display most. Moser’s choices of subjects tell us a lot about what inspires him as an artist and earns his admiration as person. Moser’s treatment of the subjects reveals an artist with an extraordinary  and sympathetic imagination.

Barry Moser's portraits on display at the Lancaster Museum of Art

A glance at Moser’s carving of Joseph Conrad explains everything about the author who brought us Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. Geoffrey Chaucer’s portrait is dominated by darkness, but for a small, blindingly white twinkle in his eye. After Moser’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrations, his portrait of Lewis Caroll comes as a shock: a saddened man sits surrounded by negative space, seeking consolation in his own thoughts. Robert Frost’s grotesque, splotched face contrasts with his neat suit and tie and serene expression. You couldn’t capture him as a poet any better.

I’m enamored by Moser’s self-portait, in which his face is lit from below, less like he’s telling a ghost story and more like he is illuminated by the light of his own work.

A portrait that wasn’t hung when I visited is Maurice Sendak, which Dr. Grand told me the museum wasn’t expecting but was only too happy to receive.

The exquisitely detailed portraits, which average about three inches by five, include

• Nelson Algren
• W.H. Auden
• 

  Charles Dickens

  Lewis Caroll

• Willa Cather
• Anton Chekov
• Honoré Daumier
• Charles Dickens
• Emily Dickinson
• Frederick Douglas
• Thomas Eakins
• George Eliot
• T.S. Eliot
• William Faukner
• Edward Gibbon
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Ulysses Grant
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• William Hazlitt
• George Innes
• Henry James
• Samuel Johnson
• James Joyce
• John Keats
• Kathe Kollowitz
• 

  Flannery O'Connor

  Abraham Lincoln

• Thomas Mann
• Paul Mariani
• Herman Melville
• John Milton
• Flannery O’Connor
• Sylvia Plath
• Edgar Allan Poe
• William Shakespeare
• George Bernard Shaw
• Henry Tanner
• Henry David Thoreau
• Mark Twain
• John Updike
• Eudora Welty
• Walt Whitman
• William Wordsworth

The Lancaster Museum of Art is on Lime Street between Orange and Chestnut, just up the street and across the street from the YWCA. The opening reception runs from 5 to 8 p.m. tomorrow, and I guarantee I’ll be making a long visit. If you can’t make it for the First Friday opening, the exhibit runs through May 24.

And of course, there’s no time like the present to subscribe to Image.

Lancaster, PA tweetups are on a roll

The twelve of us were Jeff Geoghan, Kate Peteritas, Jeremy Walter, Bryan Coe, Jeff Rumm, Chad Hamilton, Shanelle Lee, Max Phillips, Paul Stoltzfus, Ryan Shen-Hoover, Joel Walker, and myself. We all made it out at 7 a.m. or so for some breakfast, coffee, and conversation.

For me, it was the first time I met Chad, Bryan, and Ryan in real life. We’ve been following each other on Twitter and Facebook for several months, so it’s great to bring it full circle with a little face-to-face time. Good guys, all three of them. Chad was officially the youngest adult at the tweetup. He’s a student at Manheim Township High School and spends part of his time studying graphic design at the Lancaster County Career & Technology Center.

This is the fifth successful tweetup we have now had in Lancaster since we began six months ago:

• Apple store opening at Park City mall – Sept. 20
• Paul Rothrock’s birthday pub crawl down Plum Street – Sept. 27
• Ice skating and chilling in the skybox at Clipper Magazine Stadium – Jan. 23
• Breakfast tweetup No. 1 – Feb. 24
• Breakfast tweetup No. 2 – March 11

There were other attempts, but I haven’t verified that any of them were well-attended enough to be considered bona fide tweetups. (Please fill us in if I missed any.)

To get the scoop upcoming tweetups, keep an eye on the Lancaster PA Tweetups group on Facebook. Planned get-togethers include lunch, late-night diner run, Saturday morning coffee, and who knows what else.

A couple people suggested that we have name tags next time. Paul threatened never to return if we crossed the line into having a sign-in sheet, though. What should we do for our next tweetups?

That insane asshole is dead
I drowned him
and he’s not coming back.

I’m trying to write more like him—spare and contemplative yet rich and bristling with action.

Today I met up with Susan Pogorzelski (20orsomething on Twitter) and Lynn Holmgren at Square One Coffee for our first real meeting as an admittedly small writing group. We each write in different genres and modes, and we each have somewhat different ideas of what we’d like to get out of the group, which keeps it fun, interesting, and flexible.

The simplicity and solitude of the act of writing (as captured here by Andrew Wyeth) doesn't always lend itself to community and networks.

In my networking here in Lancaster, I’ve met relatively few creative writers. The ones I’ve met include Chet Williamson, Kelly Watson, Linda Espenshade, Timothy Rezendes, Jessica Smucker Falcon, and Garrett Faber. Just last week I had the pleasure of meeting Kerry Sherin Wright, who runs Franklin & Marshall’s Philadelphia Alumni Writers House. It’s a priority of mine to meet Betsy Hurley of the Lancaster Literary Guild. Please, tell me what Lancaster writers I haven’t met and need to. Extra points for poets. And if you’re a writer and I just don’t know it, smack me upside the head.

I’m confident that there is a respectable number of creative writers producing creative works here in Lancaster County. We seem to be the least well-networked of the artists in the area, particularly when compared to musicians and visual artists.

This afternoon, Susan offered a line from Shel Silverstein as a writing prompt: “I’m afraid I got too close.” I don’t particularly enjoy sharing early drafts, but in the spirit of sharing and openness, here is my very rough draft inspired by the prompt.

I stood on the brink
of a social life

Thursday nights
were sold-out punk shows

The rest of the week
I stayed home with my dog

I insisted on feeling
I belonged in the way
everyone else belongs

When someone from work
invites me over, I give notice
and leave the state

I take a job in a town
with punk shows
and no dog parks

My Thursday nights
keep solitude away
each time I stand surrounded
I’m afraid it gets too near