It’s a two-day event, an un-conference if you will, for anyone who groks new and social media — podcasting, blogging, vidblogging — you name it, you’re represented here. There are a number of podcamps in different cities, and the Boston one is at the beautiful Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Why should you go to Podcamp Boston?
1) It’s open to everyone.
If you want to learn, if you’ve got a passion, if you want to share and meet with others who do as well, this is the event for you.

So if you’re in the social media space for personal or professional reasons — you run a business on a blog, or you have a podcast about a hobby, or you just love to share what you love online with a community of like-minded folks — you will meet other people who get it. Who get you. Who get your passion, your struggles, your joys and frustrations. They won’t look at you askance when you start geeking out about this cool thing you discovered about your audience through Google Analytics, because honestly, they’ve been there.

I really like that this is not an event targeted at marketing professionals, though for sure there were many of us there. Unlike so many social media conferences, this wasn’t just PR pros and marketers talking in the same business terms — there were lots of people here from every imaginable walk of life who really love and own their niche (professionally or personally or a combination of both). The diversity of the group really enriches the conversation, as everyone can contribute a wealth of applicable knowledge, regardless of what their niche is. I have to say the discussions during each sessions were some of the most intriguing and engaged I’ve ever heard at any conference I’ve been to. People were really there to make the most of it and not just coast through. And when you have a group of nearly 80 people who all want to get the most out of a conference, you know it’s going to be a valuable experience.

2) It features some of the best and brightest that new and social media have to offer.
The presenters at Podcamp are all seriously A-listers. And they’re gathered here, in this really intimate un-conference, and they’re here to give their expertise, their perspective AND hear yours, too.

I went to sessions by Doug Haslam (@dough) and Chris Penn (@cspenn, pictured above), and they both gave valuable insights AND facilitated wonderful audience discussions, simply because they both made a point to ask us all a lot of questions. This got everyone’s gears turning, so the discussions were really worthwhile. To me it’s the sign of a very knowledgeable and confident presenter when they are aware enough to engage their audience and let the discussion perhaps go down a new and unexpected (but worthwhile!) route.

3) It’s honestly fun.

You’re going to meet really smart, really interesting people at Podcamp. People you didn’t think you had anything in common with. People in your industry that you’ve never met face-to-face before. People who are interested in things you’ve never heard of. People who are interested in things you love, too! And you will have great conversations before/after/during sessions, in the line for coffee, on the sofa outside a room, waiting for the bathroom…

I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to spend their precious weekend time at a conference (er, unconference) but this one is legitimately fun. OK, so this feels a bit like a summer camp letter-to-mom here, but hey, I made a lot of new friends at Podcamp 6. That alone was worth it for me.

P.S. Secret reason #4 — I love the NERD center and all its funky textures and shapes.

Oh yeah, and the 11th floor? KILLER view of the Boston skyline:

There was an interesting post on the Hellenic Voice Facebook page a few weeks back that I couldn’t help from responding to. There was a tiny bit of controversy about the press around Dogtooth/:

Discussion on the Hellenic Voice

I need to make the important caveat here that this is about Greek films that are most commonly consumed outside of Greece. It’s fantastic that there are many Greek film festivals popping up in the diaspora – New York, LA, Montreal – that celebrate the diversity of film available.

To develop on this a little more, what we see a lot of outside of Greece fall mainly in one of these two categories:

• Movies by Greeks about Greece/Greeks for The World (often what I call “Greek Island P**n”) [later edited this word as my blog was getting traffic for ALL the wrong reasons!]




• Movies by Greeks about Greece for Greeks

What I’d like to see more of are:

• Movies for The World that happen to be by Greeks that are not (overtly) about Greece

—and Dogtooth is a great example of film in this vein. And we are sorely lacking in this category. Now, admittedly, I am no expert on Greek cinema, but when I try to think about movies like this, why is it that the only other film that stands out in this category is Z—a stellar masterpiece of a film—but it was made in 1969! True, at its core it is an incredibly important story about Greece, but it’s not overt and it thankfully never resorts to tourist-bait storytelling.

I’m glad Dogtooth made it big. It’s a Greek movie where the fact that this movie takes place in Greece or is about Greeks (and it isn’t, really) is not the central point. That we’re not focusing on one of our Great Ethnic Struggles, to me, is a sign of progress in maturity of Greek film and how people receive Greek work. It’s not that the Greek/diaspora story has been told – that story is never over! – but we’re no longer at a point where we feel obligated to educate people about our basic ethnicity and identity when we have the stage. Now, our background can take a backseat to the creativity we want to convey and instead of the Greek story being the center, it becomes the lens. It’s an influencing factor but not the main event.

So often media of a people becomes its sole loudspeaker and platform to tell its story to the world and it becomes a representative of that people, whether they like it or not. Lots of Greek-Americans that grew up in the the U.S., Canada and Australia got non-stop references to Zorba the Greek and Never on a Sunday from the well-meaning public. In my own generation, it was the same experience but with My Big Fat Greek Wedding. (Thanks, Nia Vardalos!)

It’s a sign of huge progress that the Greek identity has become a bit more secure with itself, as have the various Hyphenated Greeks, that movies from ‘us’ are no longer about Telling Our Story, but Telling A Story—a story that no longer has to be about us.

Food offerings go way, way back and no doubt this has roots in ancient traditions. And who doesn’t like an excuse to bake a delicious cake that has alcohol in it? :) This fanouropita (a cake for St. Fanourios) has half a cup of Metaxa (Greek brandy) and a splash of French orange cognac in it. Best of all, fanouropita is Lenten fast-friendly, meaning it’s totally vegan!

Anyone who has had a decent art history course knows why these pieces are significant both in the context of Greek/classical history and to art history in general. I was very very glad I got to see these masterpieces in person, despite the fact they were not in Greece.

Fresh cut flowers from my mother’s garden, including fragrant daffodils and (my favorite) hinodoxa.

‘Tis the season for house work–it feels like I’ve barely had a moment to sit down and think. Our apartment was de-leaded earlier this summer and since then I’ve been hard at work re-painting our kitchen with my roomate. Any weekend when I haven’t been doing housework I’ve been on the road somewhere, it feels like. So I’m behind on updates. I have about four drafts saved that I just can’t bring myself to post yet.  Instead of keeping you guys waiting, here’s a brief on what I’ve been up to.

In July, my housemate and I took a trip to Eastham on Cape Cod to visit the house of Captain Penniman.  It was such a lovely day on the Cape that we couldn’t just head back afterwards, so we ended up on the beach for a little while. And of course I forgot sunscreen and subsequently turned lobster red.

A few weeks later we were in New Bedford for the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the largest Portuguese heritage festival (excluding Portugal, I can only assume). Most of the Portuguese-Americans in New Bedford are specifically from Madeira, an island that I have been planning to visit in 2009. So while at the festival we dropped by the Museum of Madeiran Heritage, I got a Madeiran food cookbook (well, I do love to cook), and just kind of soaked in as much as I could from the festivities.

Wow! Those are some dresses, huh?

The festival brought back memories of when my family and I used to go to the Greek-American parades in Boston. Greek Independence Day is March 25th, which is a bit nippy up here in New England, so the parades were usually on the cold and dreary side.

So glad I got to go to this festival though. I have been dying to visit Madeira for a few years now and am now more psyched than ever to go and see it for myself. If all goes as I hope, I’ll be able to make a quick stop in Morocco on the way back from Madeira too, but we’ll see about that.  Meantime I have about a year to get ready — I hope I can squeeze in a few Portuguese lessons.

Early in August I was at Otakon with some friends. During the con, I was a guest at the Future of Jrock panel along with a number of industry guests and musical artists. The audience was so engaged and I took a ton of notes from it.  When I’m at liberty to speak more about events from that weekend I definitely will, but for now I’m holding off a bit.

Finally, just yesterday I went on a Boston harbor islands cruise with friends on a lovely sailboat owned by Community Boating Inc (CBI) of Boston. It was a proper sailboat–no motors here!–and I got to help out as crew when I could make myself handy, namely by being the navigator.  I’ve never done nautical navigation before so it was a crash course in reading a nautical map and learning all the different markers. What a great experience!

I now know that this thing here is called a nun:

Nuns, cans, daymarks — oh yea, and Nixes Mate. Until yesterday I had absolutely no idea what any of these things were (basically all marks to tell you where you are!), they were just funny buoys in the water. It kind of got me hooked into sailing now. I’ve always been a bit of a nerd for maps and navigating on the water is definitely a thrill.

(Our final destination for the day was Georges Island, in case you were curious.)

I’d like to note that even though I learned my lesson from the Cape trip earlier this summer and remembered to wear sunscreen AND reapplied throughout the day, I still turned lobster red by the end of yesterday. I can’t win. I’ll be in southern Pennsylvania for Labor Day to visit family, on Martha’s Vineyard the weekend after, doing the Hub on Wheels ride two weekends after and then visiting NYC the weekend after that.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.