Your monthly guide to enjoying life in the pine tree state.

DINING
In Love with Lola
A Portland hot spot offers a simple approach to hospitality.
It's 7:40 on a Saturday night, and Bar Lola is hopping. A handful of thirtysomething diners are perched on the couches surrounding a low table in the entryway, jewel-colored cocktails in hand. At the bar, a hip older couple is sharing an array of dishes and chatting animatedly with the bartender.

In the chocolate brown dining room - a misnomer, really, since the three spaces are just artfully separated areas in one big room - the thirty seats are nearly full.Peals of laughter erupt from a party of five - coworkers, perhaps, or an eclectic bunch of friends - sharing small plates of olives and crusty sourdough bread, while a nearby couple sips their wine and peruses the one-page menu. There's an open table under a broad window overlooking Congress Street - ours, even though we're twenty minutes early for our reservation. "We like to leave plenty of time for people," explains Stella Hernandez, the friendly former business consultant and nonprofit executive who owns the restaurant with her husband, Guy.

It's a smart move. Diners feel no pressure to race through as many as five courses (more on them in a moment), yet tables often open a bit ahead of schedule. The reservations policy is typical of Bar Lola's deceptively simple, commonsense approach to hospitality: Make your guests comfortable and serve them great food. On that last point the Hernandezes are adamant: "It's not cuisine," says Guy, a self-taught chef who, like Stella, originally trained as an architect. "It's just food."

"In the best and most simple way," adds Stella.

Bar Lola's menu is straightforward: five courses (small, salads, medium, large, and sweet), each with five offerings. Dishes range from Italian-inspired pastas to Spanish tapas to California cuisine a la Alice Waters. The approach is similar to that perfected by One Fifty Ate, the South Portland cafe where Guy learned his trade. (The two establishments share more than a philosophy; One Fifty Ate owner Josh Potocki frequently can be found in the kitchen at Bar Lola, while Guy Hernandez still works the odd day shift at One Fifty Ate and even takes an occasional produce delivery there.)

Dishes are uncomplicated, often presenting a few simple ingredients at their peak. At Bar Lola, for example, a small plate of select cheeses and house crackers is exquisite - just a few crisp, homemade crackers, alongside a creamy dollop of Brillat Savarin, a triple-cream brie, with a few sour cherries on the side, and the nutty, sharp taste of an aged Vermont raw cow's milk cheese. Salads are similarly focused, with one described on the menu as roasted beets with baby arugula and goat cheese containing literally nothing else besides a light, tasty dressing.

Things get slightly - just slightly - more elaborate with the medium and large plates (despite the name, even the large bears little resemblance to the super-sized fare many restaurants feel compelled to dish out). Crepes with Pernod cream and vegetables are light and delicate, if a bit bland, while Spanish chorizo simmered in red wine arrives in a small casserole dish, a warm, spicy blend of pork, tomatoes, and red wine. Tournedoes of beef are perfectly cooked, and polenta with pork bolognese is almost decadent, the savory meat sauce complementing the creamy polenta.

The wine list is similarly well edited, with just twenty bottles, ranging in price from $20 to $100, with most under $40. An additional eight are available by the glass ($6-$8) or the bottle. As with the food, the wine's origins are eclectic, with the list hopping from a Portuguese vinho verde to a California viognier to a Barolo from the Italian Piedmont.

The personable servers make it clear that Bar Lola's menu can be mixed and matched any way you like, and prices for each course are kept low (small plates $3-$4; salads $6; medium plates $6-$8; large plates $12-$14) to encourage experimentation. "You might not eat octopus if it's ten dollars," says Stella, "but would you try it if it were three?"

We couldn't resist going whole hog, each of us ordering something from every section of the menu. But the couple across from us, a pair of stylish young marrieds on a dinner date, ordered three small plates, then shared a salad, a medium plate, and a large plate. We were chagrined at having ordered nearly twice the amount of food they did - until we saw their stroke of genius: three desserts. After a few bites of our delightfully mild honey cake and a luxurious chocolate custard, we saw the wisdom of their ways.
-Michaela Cavallaro

OUTDOORS
Pedal Power
For all of its logging roads, dirt byways, snowmobile trails, and inspired scenery, Maine should be a top destination among mountain bikers, but it usually isn't considered such by the single-track set. A recent development could change that. The Appalachian Mountain Club has just launched camp-to-camp pedaling in the woods near Greenville. Based on its famous hut-to-hut hiking system in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the AMC's venture takes cyclists on a seventeen-mile route from its Little Lyford Pond sporting camp to its Medawisla property across old gravel logging roads. There are cushy beds on either end at the AMC's sporting camps (www.outdoors.org/lodging) [1],where you can feel like you're roughing it but be well taken care of. Bikes can be rented for $25 a day at Northwoods Outfitters in Greenville (866-223-1380, www.maineoutfitter.com [2]). Get there before the rest of the world does.

MUSIC
Alone in a Crowd
Like her 2003 album Arrive and her 2000 debut EP Firewater, Crowded Is the New Lonely (www.cdbaby.com) [3] keeps Sara Cox's wonderfully agile vocals at the forefront, propped up with warm acoustic guitar, husband Nate Shrock's resonant electric guitar tones, and subtle time-keeping. Nashville bred, Cox has honed a Maine kind of alt-country approach, thoughtful and wry and willing to delve into pure pop when a singalong is called for. Standout tracks include "At Home with Home," with plenty of naked emotion and a central melody line that's just impossible to get out of your head, and "Anger," where a ghostly guitar backs compelling vocals: "My little son says, 'I'm angry. It's so beautiful'/ I don't know what the hell that means." Cox can tell a million stories with a meaningless "da-da-da," but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to the lyrics. She has always been a songwriter first, and her ability to find meaning in the mundane - missing the school bus, a skinned knee - is here undiminished.

BOOKS
Dark & Stormy
The heroine of Elizabeth Hand's new novel sees grimness and despair everywhere she turns.

Like photographic paper developing in a darkroom tray, Elizabeth Hand's latest novel, Generation Loss (Small Beer Press, Northampton, Massa-chusetts; hardcover; 265 pages; $24), turns into different things at different times. It starts as a character study of Cass Neary, a former denizen of the punk scene with a preternatural talent for detecting damage in others, but not a similar gift for empathy. She's a hard-bitten woman, in love with no one, least of all herself. Across a scar above her pubic bone - legacy of a late-night rape that further blunts her emotional range - Cass has tattooed the words "too tough to die."

Which doesn't mean, of course, she's got what it takes to live fully. Though debauched, Cass is singularly passionless. She spends her days working in the Strand bookstore, acutely aware of her fifteen minutes of fame - now twenty years in the past - as a photographer whose work was one part Sally Mann and one part Cindy Sherman. Which is to say that in her youth, Cass photographed dead addicts and herself dressed as the dead women of famous paintings.

Hand's novel morphs into a mystery when an old friend of Cass' arranges for her to go to an island off the coast of Maine to interview Aphrodite Kamestos, a famous photo-grapher known for her images of places where terrible things (like murder and sexual torture) once happened. Aphrodite is famously reclusive, living in relative seclusion on an island that hosted a commune/artist colony in the sixties and now houses little more than remnants of those days. No one has seen her work in decades.

Because Aphrodite's talents have always impressed Cass, she accepts the interview assignment and heads for Maine. Along the way, Cass notes numerous Xeroxed signs for missing teenagers, news stories of bodies washed up on the beach, and the general bleakness of the world into which she is headed, entirely unprepared. (Throughout the novel she slips around in her fashionable boots, no match for Maine's cold or terrain.) Driving past shuttered lobster shacks and the occasional house, Cass finally arrives at the virtually empty Lighthouse Motel, located on the edge of a working harbor, this fact not signifying life to Cass but instead more unpleasantness: bad smells.

At the motel, Cass encounters a "heavyset gothy kid with cropped hair dyed black, black-rimmed eyes, white skin beneath a flaking layer of pinkish foundation." Cass observes: "She had a stud beneath her lower lip and what appeared to be a bunch of three-penny nails stuck through one earlobe." By the morning, the gothy kid has gone missing, and Cass, as an outsider, is under suspicion. But it is clear she'd be under suspicion nonetheless. This is a Maine where the locals all know each other, and store clerks wear T-shirts that read: "They call it tourist season. Why can't we shoot them?"

Once on Aphrodite's island, Cass is drawn deeper into the twin mysteries of the disappearances and of the island's history. Aphrodite proves to be a ruined old drunk, barely worth study, but the island brims with clues to an untold story, while new characters and puzzles deepen the drama. As the book resolves itself into a thriller, Cass' behavior heightens the danger. Slugging Jack Daniels and popping pills throughout her journey, she recklessly walks into rooms where she isn't wanted, photographs things she shouldn't, offends others, and behaves badly. As unappealing as she can be, she's compelling in her intelligence and fierceness. In her sole allegiance - to art, to art of real vision - she prefigu-res the novel's central questions about art, morality, and exploitation. How far is too far when it comes to documenting damage? At what point does the desire to confront death become collusion with death?

Hand's novel is inventive, suspenseful, and complex, passionately felt, even if some of the psychology, especially toward the novel's end, might not seem thoroughly convincing. Still, Hand clearly knows the photographic world of which she writes, and she knows, too, the darkness in which she immerses the reader. She has a knack for description, whether that be of the photographic images that so fascinate Cass or the sea during a night storm. Leaving this book - and Generation Loss is hard to put down - is a bit like emerging from a drugged dream, one that is unsettling and weird but so vibrant and clearly wrought it feels more real than the waking world. Indeed, though you'd miss the tautness of Cass' language and the edginess of her first-person voice, one could easily see this book as a movie: a classic example of Maine noir.
-Debra Spark

BRIEFLY NOTED
• In An Upriver Passamaquoddy (Tilbury House, Gardiner; paperback; 160 pages; $15), Allen Sockabasin constructs both a primer on his people's history, language, and traditions, and a personal memoir. Filled with rare photographs, as well as a glossary that Sockabasin has created of Passamaquoddy words, the book is an invaluable contribution to Maine's cultural history. (Fans should also check out Sockabasin's beautifully illustrated 2005 children's book, Thanks to the Animals, which should be a part of every Maine kid's personal library.)
• A is for Acadia (Islandport Press, Yarmouth; hardcover; unnumbered; $15.95) is a curious hybrid: part pre-schooler's alphabet book, part science primer for school kids. Mount Desert Island residents Richard Johnson and Ruth Gortner Grierson created the book as an A to Z tour of MDI, with stops along the way at "glacial erratic" (a geological formation found on the Bubbles), "kayak" (you probably know that one) and "zoophyte" (invertebrates such as the sea anemone).

MAINE MADE
Get Fleeced
The onset of truly chilly weather is still a few months away, but there's no denying the nip in the air that appears at this time of year. Still, that's no excuse to pack up the family and retreat to the great indoors. With cozy fleece on one side and silky nylon on the other, Bunnytail Blankets (207-725-8865, www.bunnytailblankets.com [4]) keep little ones warm and dry while you go for a sail on a cool afternoon or picnic in the shade. Avid campers Alicia and Henry Heyburn of Brunswick developed the product for their own kids, who now serve as adorable blanket models. Available online and at stores from Kennebunk to Bar Harbor, the blankets are made in Maine by home seamstresses. So pick one up, toss the kids in the jogger, and head out to explore all that late summer in Maine has to offer.

GETAWAY
On the Waterfront
Castine is the perfect place to commune with Maine's maritime past.
Need a break from the beaten path? Then head to Castine, a waterfront community that has not neglected its briny roots. Four hundred years of history and a premier school for aspiring mariners define this fascinating little town tucked away near the head of Penobscot Bay.

ACTIVITIES In a town noted for its safe and easy walking, one of the best rambles is around the Maine Maritime Academy's handsome thirty-five-acre campus (66 Pleasant St., 207-328-4311, www.mainemaritime.edu [5]). Even better, tour the school's training ship State of Maine (call first to be sure it's in port). To understand Castine's place in American history, take a self-guided tour of the military in-stallations, including Revolutionary War-era Fort George on Battle Avenue and Fort Madison, which dates back to the War of 1812, on Perkins Street. Get some context for it all at the Wilson Museum (120 Perkins St., 207-326-9247, www.wilsonmuseum.org [6]), where prehistoric to eighteenth century artifacts, as well as the building itself, give a sense of life in old Castine.

DINING The most popular restaurant in town is easily Dennett's Wharf (15 Sea St., 207-326-9045, www.dennettswharf.com [7]), with knockout views of the harbor, modest prices, seafood-centric fare, and a good selection of microbrews. If you're looking for a more refined dining experience, try The Castine Inn (33 Main St., 207-326-4365, www.castineinn.com [8]), which features items like herbed risotto with red pepper juice reduction and white truffle oil, or scallops with spicy celery root puree and a cilantro vinaigrette. For pick-me-up snacks or hearty lunches, try Bah's Bakehouse (26 Water St., 207-326-9510, bahsbhouse.com) for fresh-bread sandwiches, thick soups, and scones with various berry fillings. And if you're just looking for one of the best crabmeat rolls you've ever tasted, try the little, mobile takeout place known as The Breeze (parking lot on the Town Pier, 207-326-9200), a local favorite since the 1970s.

LODGING Castine Harbor Lodge (147 Perkins St., 207-326-4335, www.castinemaine.com [9]) offers the best views of the harbor from a converted 1893 mansion with sitting porches galore. The conveniently located Pentagoet Inn (26 Main St., 207-326-8616, www.pentagoet.com [10]) is just a short walk from the Town Pier and most other downtown attractions. Alternatively, if you want to be more removed from downtown activities, try The Manor Inn (15 Manor Dr., 207-326-4861, manorinn.com) with its gardens, pub, dining room, and even yoga classes.

SHOPS Don't miss the Castine Variety Store (1 Main St., 207-326-8625, castinevariety.com), an old-time, creaky-floor soda fountain and catch-all shop offering a little bit of everything. The nautically minded will while away the hours in Four Flags (19 Water St., 207-326-8526), with its charts, books, and a variety of ornaments for any sailor. For upscale provisioning, from custom cut meats to rare fish and shellfish orders, stop at T & C Grocery (15 Water St., 207-326-4818), which also carries wine and many local beers.
-Ken Textor