When Louise Crawford started up
Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn in 2004, she unknowingly sparked a revolution, inspiring others to follow suit and helping to make Brooklyn the blogging capital of the world through her Brooklyn Blogfests, which gather all of Brooklyn's bloggers in one place to share ideas (it hasn't been officially announced yet, but this year's Blogfest will be on May 12th at the Bell House).
Tonight at 8, she'll be presenting the
Memoirathon along with
Brooklyn Reading Works (a monthly thematic reading series) at the Old Stone House. It'll bring together many local writers (who will be reading diary-style prose) along with photos taken by her husband, Hugh (one of which appears every day on her blog), as well as
Jamie Livingston, a friend of theirs who has recently found posthumous fame with the publishing of his incredible Polaroids, which he took one of every day from 1979 until the day he died in 1997.
HPS: Are you from Brooklyn originally?
Louise: No, I'm from Manhattan. I lived my first year in Brooklyn, though, because my parents were looking for apartments. I'm a twin, actually, and we lived on Avenue J. I grew up on the Upper West Side.
HPS: What brought you to Park Slope?
Louise: They had to drag me here kicking and screaming, in 1991, when my son was little. We looked at Park Slope and finally succumbed. We'd been living in the East Village.
HPS: What do you love about Park Slope?
Louise: I love the look and feel of it. I love the scale. I love the colors of the buildings and the trees. I love that there's small buildings and a couple of main streets, Seventh Avenue and Fifth Avenue. I love the community. I love that you know your neighbors. I really like it here.
HPS: If you could change one thing about Park Slope, what would it be?
Louise: I'd make it less expensive to own a house.
HPS: Why did you decide to start OTBKB?
Louise: I discovered blogging, and it was such an exciting outlet for me. Within minutes of setting up that first Blogger account I came up with the name, and then I had to figure out what that was going to be. At first, what I was really doing, unknowingly, was
Smartmom, for a few months, and then in January of 2005 I met someone that was doing something like a hyperlocal blog in Montclair, and I literally ran home and said, "I have do this, now."
HPS: The Brooklyn blogosphere is really booming right now.
Louise: It is. I like to think that I helped to facilitate the recognition of it as a community, with the Blogfest. I'm proud of that. The face time and the connecting that we did is what made it possible for other people to want to do it. We realized that it was pretty limited and not very diverse when we first did it in 2006, and we didn't want that. We wanted to spread the gospel. I felt like everybody started grabbing their little postage stamp of turf, and we were collectively creating a real hyperlocal network.
Everything is a blog now. It went from being "What is a blog?" to "What isn't a blog?" People in Brooklyn are really a part of their community, because we feel like stakeholders in this culture and community that we've created. Be it education, livable streets, garbage, food, recycling, whatever. That's what the blogs are about, and it's a real positive thing.
HPS: Can you talk a little bit about what's going on tonight at the Memoirathon?
Louise: This is the fifth year. It's a celebration of the memoir, that form. It's about personal expression and experience, and in the past it's had themes. Last year it was about the recession, so it was all about tough times. This year, it's a combination of poets, non-fiction writers, it'll be a very interesting expression of memoir. And on top of that, the visual art element is new. The Jamie Livingston stuff is a fascinating record of one person's life. Hugh is going to be showing his work, too, and he created the Jamie website, which involved re-photographing and digitizing six thousand Polaroids.
Hugh and Jamie were very good friends. In the 70s and 80s Hugh created this other expression of memoir and memory, which is a photo address book. There's a photo of one on my blog with Keith Haring, with his address and phone number under it. This is what Hugh would do, because he has a very bad memory, and this is how he kept track of people. He'll be showing those tonight as well.
HPS: Were you two a part of the downtown art scene back then?
Louise: I met Hugh at the Collective for Living Cinema in 1986, which was an experimental film space. Hugh is an artist--he want to graduate school for photography--and had shows in New York in the East Village, and we had a lot of friends in the arts, particularly in film and photography. He's a great photographer. There's all sorts of subtextual stuff going on.
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Friday, February 18, 2011 at 2:06PM 
