03/27/2007
Portugal: sun, fun & Red Bull
I just got back from several days in Porto, Portugal, as a guest of the Red Bull Music Academy . The Portugese Red Bull folks arranged for me to speak in this gorgeous city about the Academy, and, incidentally, my checkered history of music production.
I also gigged at the rather fabulous Pitch Club, which is, without exaggeration, one of the best sounding rooms I've ever been in. The pink bunny artwork here is from their March flyer. Coincidentally, world-famous DJ Tim Sweeney (a personal friend of mine) was headlining at the club the night following mine, so I had a chance to hang with him and hear his banging set on the wonderful system.
Sightseeing time was limited by the fact that parties in Portugal don't get started until LATE. How late is LATE, you ask? Well, the headline DJ (me on Friday, Tim on Saturday), doesn't start until 3 or 3:30 AM, and finishes around 6 AM. Which means that for two days I got back to my hotel at 7 AM, in time to catch breakfast and then go to bed until 4 PM. Even with that extreme temporal dislocation (jet lag can kiss my a**), I still had time to run around Porto with two of the Red Bull folks.
For once - since I knew I was going to have a bit of time to stroll around a lovely city - I remembered to bring my handy, compact digital camera. Unfortunately, I never remembered to take it out of my briefcase, so Saturday afternoon, when I strolled around town with Red Bull honcho Miguel Bello, I have no pictures of the formal gardens surrounding the Museum Of Contemporary Art, and no pictures of the central train station and its beautiful tiled murals.
The next day, I toured around with Lourenco, a former Red Bull student in their 2005 Seattle encampment, and while I was lamenting my cameralessness, he pulled out his photo-and-video cell phone and we got two nice shots, one of him in a square by the River Douro, and one of me standing in front of a tiled wall in a back alley of the old section of town (below).
Lourenco's a university student of economics, and he sent me off with a copy of an interesting lecture series called "Happiness: Has Social Science A Clue?" by a UK New Labour economist named Richard Layard. If you scroll down that page, you'll find links to pdf's of three lectures in the series at the end of the bio.
While there are certainly valid dissenting opinions about Layard's views, I suspect there's something to them, and I'm looking forward to reading the lectures.
That pretty much wraps up the trip. Tim Sweeney and I were luckily on the same flight home to Newark from Lisbon, so we caught up on the dirt trans-atlantic style. I slept for 10 hours and here I am, bleary but unbowed.