Yesterday I attended the Brooklyn Blogfest held at the Brooklyn Lyceum. This was the 5th year for the event and the focus was how and why Brooklyn remains such a rich source of material and inspiration.
The event was hosted by Louise Crawford of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and sponsored by Absolut Brooklyn which is a limited edition of apple and ginger. Brooklyn is the only borough to have its own vodka so sorry Manhattan, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island.
There was also a special photo montage of images of Brooklyn by various Brooklyn Photobloggers like Atiba Edwards of Visual Stenographers (He is from Brownsville)
Spike Lee and Lemon Andersen were specially invited guests who spoke and performed, respectively. Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn Borough President, was also in attendance.
Spike Lee spoke briefly on gentrification and how the dynamics of Brooklyn have changed drastically since he was a resident. He also spoke about people not being able to afford to live in Brooklyn because it is becoming to expensive. Spike Lee was very charismatic and funny. He had a lot of great things to say about this great borough.
Lem0n Andersen performed a piece that incorporated all 90+ neighborhoods in Brooklyn. It was simply amazing! The last think he said was “Brooklyn the greatest country in the world, if your not in it your in the way” (So powerful!)
We later broke out into smaller sessions called “Blogs of a feather” and myself and my friend Kim and her friend Shannon attended the arts and entertainment session. It was pretty informative. I found new ways to drive traffic to my site and it was a great time to network. The session was facilitated by Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood and other bloggers such as Elliot Wagner of Now I’ve Heard Everything, were very helpful and knowledgeable.
There was an “after party” where we met comedian Laurence Covington (he was funny) and MUA/Stylist Donna Jaye. I also met Kitty Bradshaw and saw Eb the Celeb (didn’t get a chance to speak).
It was a pretty good event. I am definitely going to attend more blog/networking events. I had a pretty good time.
Great write up! Ppl were dogging the event because of Spike Lee talking about gentrification when he lives in a 7 mill house on the Upper west side. He’s full of crap blah blah. Louise is a sell-out becasue she took $ from Absolut under the table lol… People criticize everything
Wow that’s crazy. Some people are never satisfied, but I guess because he was dogging “them” for moving into and taking over Brooklyn they got offended. Oh well, he was speaking the truth.