Oct 14, 2005

While I was in Milton Keynes visiting my dad several weeks ago, I met up (between hospital visiting hours) at a coffee bar with Ian Mills, author of the 05 Project: he set himself a challenge to post a videoblog every day of 2005. As he recounts in his vlog, this was his first face-to-face meeting with another videoblogger - so I can now testify that he actually exists. Just in case I turned out to be a stalker, he brought along his friend Lee, who did not say a word beyond hello. I guess I was doing enough talking for the three of us.

We did mutually establish, with some embarassment, that we both love to make videos, but are very lazy about watching anyone else's - tacit admission that we'd never seen each others' stuff. I am now trying to remedy that, and can say that Ian's videos demonstrate a dry, deadpan humor that I enjoy very much. Dunno if he's gotten around to seeing any of mine yet, he did give me a nice plug in his vlog the day after we met.

Ian's vlog has been mentioned in Wired magazine, the New York Times, and several other major publications. Strangely, they all said that he lives in "Keynes, England" - has anybody at these professional news organizations ever heard of fact-checking?

Ian has now out-cooled us all so far that even a mention in Wired would not be sufficient to catch up: his videoblog has been visited and commented on by Pete Townshend, and is among the very few featured links on Townshend's own blog.

Closer to home, I was contacted months ago by a young man named Daniele who had been in the Corteo Manzoniano last year, found my videos and photos online, and was keen for me to film this year's edition, which would take place at night, by torchlight. I duly (and happily) did so, though I didn't get much footage because it was much briefer than I expected, and the next day's encore was rained out. I did get some nice images, though, which you can see here.

All the actors are local people, so it's not surprising that some of the faces looked familiar. I was particularly taken with the gentleman playing Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, and got a closeup of him with his white goatee nicely set off by the red cardinal's hat. I asked Daniele who he was, but Daniele didn't know.

Lo and behold, the Cardinal showed up on the train this morning. Probably I had seen him on this route before, which accounts for the sense of familiarity. So I showed him the video on my laptop, and gave him the address of the site to pass on to some other corteo participants who were disappointed not to have been photographed (but do show up in my video).

A couple of weeks ago, I received email from the director of CRAMS, a music school located behind Taverna ai Poggi, one of our favorite local restaurants, which is run by his wife. He had found my site while looking for online references to the restaurant, and, having seen some of my videos, asked if I could come and film a series of band showcases the school was organizing. That ended up being the weekend I went to England, so I wasn't able to film, but he did recognize me the next time I was at the restaurant - "You're the lady with the website!"

So my international videoblog is having the side effect of making me locally famous (well, known, anyway) in Lecco. Interesting.