We just had a family vacation in Portugal. Last summer, we took our kids to Italy for two weeks and showed them Rome, Umbria, and Sardinia. It was a magical trip so we decided to do it again and this time traveled across Lisbon, Algarve, and Santa Cruz for roughly ten days.
There are so many things to love about the country. Some that stood out to me on our trip:
The beaches are beautiful, serene, and remarkably clean. Even on the most crowded of beaches, I don’t think I saw a single piece of trash on the ground.
The view from one of our favorite restaurants, Bronzear
The climate and topography very much remind me of California. The Santa Cruz area is like Big Sur with big cliffs that drop into the ocean. There are beaches here that are totally deserted and wild and make you feel like the last person on earth.
Surfing in Santa Cruz is a super fun family experience, even in the cold water
Like most of Europe, the food is meaningfully different than the US. I am rather disgusted by our domestic food system. It costs an arm and a leg, and it’s practically a full-time job to be able to heat healthy whole foods and avoid processed poison. I feel great after meals in Europe, and Portugal has delicious, fresh and affordable food all around. The seafood is incredible.
One thing I really like is how rest stops on the highway have delightful restaurant-like areas with terrific food you can either grab to go or comfortably sit and eat there. They also have quaint outdoor picnic areas. It was a delight to see a service stop be idyllic.
I barely noticed a police presence anywhere, and at no point did we feel unsafe in Lisbon (which was crowded). We maybe saw two groups of police officers in the city.
Portuguese fashion is awesome and places a focus on sustainability and quality. It’s now up there for me with Japanese apparel, and I am going to go out of my way to shop for Portuguese brands. There are tons of cool stores and places to shop in Lisbon, and street art is part of the culture.
August is becoming impossibly hot to travel in Europe. We will likely do these trips in June and early July to avoid the heat and the crowds.
I am looking forward to returning to Lisbon and exploring other parts of Portugal like the Douro Valley and Silver Coast. I really love our annual summer Europe trip and im glad it’s now a tradition of ours.
The other day I woke up to the sounds of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
We recently bought a record player for our home. Carrie requested one for her birthday. I never grew up with vinyl records, so I didn't "get it." But now I do. It has been a gift that keeps on giving.
One of the best parts about it is that our kids have taken to it in such a special way. They love putting a record on and watching it spin and listening to the music come out of the speaker.
Every morning when he wakes up, one of the first things my seven-year-old does is run to the record player and throw something on. His favorite album is The Best of the Pogues. He picked it out himself when we visited a record store in Kingston called Rhino Records. It's a lot of fun to go record shopping with your family because you get to talk about all the different artists you see. The owner also gave us two free classical records when we checked out, Vivaldi and Debussy, because he wants more people to be exposed to the genre.
This week my wife Carrie, a documentary film producer, took me to see Eno. The director of the film is Gary Hustwit, who previously made the film Helvetica. Eno is a spectacular film and I encourage everyone to see it. I never realized how profoundly special Brian Eno is. He is a true artist-philosopher, the perfect personification of what we may envision to be a master of a craft.
What was most exciting to me is that Eno is a generative film. No two screenings of the film are the same. You will never see the same film I watched the other evening in a sold-out theater, and that is by design. The director, Gary, started building software more than 5 years ago that would enable him to feed footage into a system and for that system to create different permutations of the film, indefinitely.
We just had a family vacation in Portugal. Last summer, we took our kids to Italy for two weeks and showed them Rome, Umbria, and Sardinia. It was a magical trip so we decided to do it again and this time traveled across Lisbon, Algarve, and Santa Cruz for roughly ten days.
There are so many things to love about the country. Some that stood out to me on our trip:
The beaches are beautiful, serene, and remarkably clean. Even on the most crowded of beaches, I don’t think I saw a single piece of trash on the ground.
The view from one of our favorite restaurants, Bronzear
The climate and topography very much remind me of California. The Santa Cruz area is like Big Sur with big cliffs that drop into the ocean. There are beaches here that are totally deserted and wild and make you feel like the last person on earth.
Surfing in Santa Cruz is a super fun family experience, even in the cold water
Like most of Europe, the food is meaningfully different than the US. I am rather disgusted by our domestic food system. It costs an arm and a leg, and it’s practically a full-time job to be able to heat healthy whole foods and avoid processed poison. I feel great after meals in Europe, and Portugal has delicious, fresh and affordable food all around. The seafood is incredible.
One thing I really like is how rest stops on the highway have delightful restaurant-like areas with terrific food you can either grab to go or comfortably sit and eat there. They also have quaint outdoor picnic areas. It was a delight to see a service stop be idyllic.
I barely noticed a police presence anywhere, and at no point did we feel unsafe in Lisbon (which was crowded). We maybe saw two groups of police officers in the city.
Portuguese fashion is awesome and places a focus on sustainability and quality. It’s now up there for me with Japanese apparel, and I am going to go out of my way to shop for Portuguese brands. There are tons of cool stores and places to shop in Lisbon, and street art is part of the culture.
August is becoming impossibly hot to travel in Europe. We will likely do these trips in June and early July to avoid the heat and the crowds.
I am looking forward to returning to Lisbon and exploring other parts of Portugal like the Douro Valley and Silver Coast. I really love our annual summer Europe trip and im glad it’s now a tradition of ours.
The other day I woke up to the sounds of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
We recently bought a record player for our home. Carrie requested one for her birthday. I never grew up with vinyl records, so I didn't "get it." But now I do. It has been a gift that keeps on giving.
One of the best parts about it is that our kids have taken to it in such a special way. They love putting a record on and watching it spin and listening to the music come out of the speaker.
Every morning when he wakes up, one of the first things my seven-year-old does is run to the record player and throw something on. His favorite album is The Best of the Pogues. He picked it out himself when we visited a record store in Kingston called Rhino Records. It's a lot of fun to go record shopping with your family because you get to talk about all the different artists you see. The owner also gave us two free classical records when we checked out, Vivaldi and Debussy, because he wants more people to be exposed to the genre.
This week my wife Carrie, a documentary film producer, took me to see Eno. The director of the film is Gary Hustwit, who previously made the film Helvetica. Eno is a spectacular film and I encourage everyone to see it. I never realized how profoundly special Brian Eno is. He is a true artist-philosopher, the perfect personification of what we may envision to be a master of a craft.
What was most exciting to me is that Eno is a generative film. No two screenings of the film are the same. You will never see the same film I watched the other evening in a sold-out theater, and that is by design. The director, Gary, started building software more than 5 years ago that would enable him to feed footage into a system and for that system to create different permutations of the film, indefinitely.
Ride It to the Sky
Ride It to the Sky
A beach in Algarve
The view atop the cliffs at Praia do Seixo
Crack Kids, a store devoted to street art in Lisbon
Watching my kids play with vinyl records reminds me of how I felt playing and collecting CDs growing up. Sitting on the floor of my room reading the lyrics in the album booklet while following along with the music. I can't help but think that this is a similar experience for them. There's something uniquely physical about it, and stands in stark contrast to a world filled with streams and screens. It's nostalgic, but also extremely present.
I remember several months ago my partner Albert sent me this chart about a resurgence in vinyl record sales.
I now understand why. It's such a special way to experience music. It's very akin to the idea of deep reals. This record player has been a wonderful addition to our home, and it has already become an important fixture in our lives. I'm really happy about that.
The resulting films, while similar in length, are always different. New footage can be added or removed whenever the director wants and the underlying system can be altered in any way. I didn’t realize it, but Brian Eno produced and pioneered generative music in the same way, so it makes sense that this new film format mimics its subject’s unique style.
After the film Gary stayed back for an interview onstage. I asked him if he planned to let other filmmakers use the software, and he said yes. He made it because he grew disenchanted with the linear format of films. It’s the same thing every time, and that constraint was a relic of the past and never adequately challenged. Why shouldn’t a film be a different experience for every view and viewer? Why should its mood not be different in the evening than the daytime, or be influenced by the weather or current events? These ideas are now possible to achieve, generatively.
Gary talked about how there may be novel ways to stream the film. Perhaps it can be customized to a streamer's environment. It's unclear how this would work, but everyone can watch Eno while nobody sees the same film twice is powerful. This is the type of idea that drives people to see bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish hundreds of times. You never know what you're going to get on any given night.
I'm a believer that AI-powered tools will lead to the creation of new media formats and change the way entertainment is created, but this film showed me that generative media doesn't need AI to create content or art. I'm looking forward to seeing what Gary does with this platform. One could experiment with film length, styles, and more. A piece of media that "feels" the same to everyone but never truly is is a new form of art in my book, and I'd love to see what happens when it's unleashed for the world to experience.
A beach in Algarve
The view atop the cliffs at Praia do Seixo
Crack Kids, a store devoted to street art in Lisbon
Watching my kids play with vinyl records reminds me of how I felt playing and collecting CDs growing up. Sitting on the floor of my room reading the lyrics in the album booklet while following along with the music. I can't help but think that this is a similar experience for them. There's something uniquely physical about it, and stands in stark contrast to a world filled with streams and screens. It's nostalgic, but also extremely present.
I remember several months ago my partner Albert sent me this chart about a resurgence in vinyl record sales.
I now understand why. It's such a special way to experience music. It's very akin to the idea of deep reals. This record player has been a wonderful addition to our home, and it has already become an important fixture in our lives. I'm really happy about that.
The resulting films, while similar in length, are always different. New footage can be added or removed whenever the director wants and the underlying system can be altered in any way. I didn’t realize it, but Brian Eno produced and pioneered generative music in the same way, so it makes sense that this new film format mimics its subject’s unique style.
After the film Gary stayed back for an interview onstage. I asked him if he planned to let other filmmakers use the software, and he said yes. He made it because he grew disenchanted with the linear format of films. It’s the same thing every time, and that constraint was a relic of the past and never adequately challenged. Why shouldn’t a film be a different experience for every view and viewer? Why should its mood not be different in the evening than the daytime, or be influenced by the weather or current events? These ideas are now possible to achieve, generatively.
Gary talked about how there may be novel ways to stream the film. Perhaps it can be customized to a streamer's environment. It's unclear how this would work, but everyone can watch Eno while nobody sees the same film twice is powerful. This is the type of idea that drives people to see bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish hundreds of times. You never know what you're going to get on any given night.
I'm a believer that AI-powered tools will lead to the creation of new media formats and change the way entertainment is created, but this film showed me that generative media doesn't need AI to create content or art. I'm looking forward to seeing what Gary does with this platform. One could experiment with film length, styles, and more. A piece of media that "feels" the same to everyone but never truly is is a new form of art in my book, and I'd love to see what happens when it's unleashed for the world to experience.
