“My father practiced an average of eight hours a day in his later years. That his music was so pwerful can only be a testament to the importance and perserverance, dedication, and above all, as he and I agree, discipline. I hope that you, the listener, are inspired by this recording to always work diligently at what it is that makes you and those around you happy and rich in the heart”

– evan evans

The videos confirm that my current biggest problem is footwork; I tend to want to stand flat footed and punch it out, and have a really hard time both closing distance and backing up while keeping the pressure on. my slipping and defense in general is miles better than it used to be, but right now, I tend to either be on defense and offense, and I need to combine the two and work on counterpunching more. I don’t have fast reflexes, but I do have good timing, and can counterpunch effectively when I try. so footwork and counterpunching are the main things I’m going to focus on over the next few months.

a few things I thought I did well here are blocking, using my left hook when inside, and using my long reach and double jab to score a bit from outside.

Too Big To Fail – A great insider’s account of the events leading up to the lehman failure. It’s a real page turner, I found it hard to put down and there are lots of great anecdotes. This is the best business book I’ve read since “A Conspiracy of Fools”.

Mastering Regular Expressions – I read this on the recommendation of the guys who developed django, the python web framework. It’s a great technical book which unravels the mysteries of regular expressions in a clear, systematic way. I’d recommend this book to any programmer, regardless of language or technology you work in. I get more stuff done faster because of this book.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original – A wonderful biography of one of the greatest musicians ever. It’s very detailed, and really gives a great picture of Monk’s world and what his life was like. Dispels a lot of rumors, and offers the best explanation of Monk’s later years than anything else I’ve read.

The Arabian Nights – Fantastic, classic stories. I haven’t finished this book yet, but the stories are short and it’s easy to read just a few.

Still on my list to read this year is Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. Apparently this is a tough read, but I can’t wait.

it was quite hot out, but the ride was beautiful and thanks to the awesome parks system, uninterrupted by traffic, because the hudson river park runs all the way up the west side of manhattan. the cloisters was very cool, and featured a lovely outdoor garden

as well as some really cool stained glass, which I am a huge fan of in general:

afterwards, we stopped at dinosaur bbq for lunch. I had heard this place was awesome, and it was good, but I wasn’t a big fan of the brisket, and prefer both hill country and pete’s waterfront ale house for nyc bbq.

here is all the pictures we took.

it is surprisingly loud, pretty excited to try this out on my gig tomorrow!

The second tune is an arrangement of a tune I wrote more than 10 years ago, when I was in college. I had come home from a classical guitar lesson, it was a perfect 73 degrees outside, and I had no classes that afternoon, so I wrote this tune, entitled “73 degrees”. It’s fairly tricky to play, especially the bridge.
Listen to “Seventy Three” (PDF of score)

Hope you enjoy these new tunes and arrangements. Both recordings are from gigs at Swing 46, recorded using a Zoom H2 recorder, so the sound quality is not the best.

playing fretless is definitely a work in progress, although I wasn’t as hard as I initially thought it would be to play kind of in tune. the guitar has 5 doubled strings and a low drone string similar to an oud, I tune the drone string to C and the rest of the strings are tuned in just intonation relative to that C.

The workout is as follows:
run 1 mile
100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 squats
run 1 miles

The first time I did this was my first workout at crossfit south brooklyn, recently after I stopped boxing due to a hand injury. my time was 45:36. last year, my time was 44:10. this year, I managed to eek out 41:58, which I was pretty happy with, considering I am a year older, and haven’t crossfitted in 2 months as I’ve gone back to boxing.

it was a great day and really fun being back at crossfit south brooklyn, which is an awesome community of people. I’ve missed going to crossfit, but I really love boxing and I am sparring alot now and learning a ton so I’m going to stick with that for the time being, and drop by crossfit when I can.

memorial day reminds me of how lucky I am to live in such a great country, and thankful for the enormous sacrifices so many service people have made on our behalf.