saw wes anderson’s new flick, “the darjeeling ltd”. I liked it better than steve zissou and less than the royal tenenbaums and rushmore. the great thing about watching wes anderson movies in the theatre is everyone laughs in different places.

also went to a gamelan concert this afternoon which was really cool, and recommended by steven smith on his excellent blog. it was a really great show, you really get the sense that everyone is playing a single instrument rather than individual instruments in unison.

last week when we picked up milo we had breakfast at this place in frenchtown, pa. they have these cream cheese eggs that sarah loves, and great granola pancakes. I tried making my own this weekend (just added granola into the batter of regular pancakes) and they came out so good I made them both days this weekend. add raisins if you are feeling extra saucy and have some extra raisins (I was and I did).

milo plays fetch!

things are going great so far, it is a lot of fun having a puppy around. we expected him to cry all night for the first couple of nights, but he has been pretty quiet.

this is a picture of me and milo, our new puppy. we went to visit him this week, and he is coming to live with us next saturday! milo is a king charles cavalier spaniel, sarah’s favorite kind of dog. he’s named after the boy from “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster.

I am listening to the fabulous 1960 recording of the miles davis quintet live in copenhagen. this is the famous 50′s quintet with coltrane, wynton kelly, paul chambers and philly joe. most of this quintet recorded the most famous jazz album ever, “kind of blue”, and the playing (and recording quality) is fantastic. all the tunes are quintet staples, with “so what” being taken way uptempo. it’s very cool to hear wynton kelly playing on this, since bill evans was the pianist on the studio version. kelly’s harmonies are less expansive than evans, but man does he swing his ass off the whole time.

today I picked up A.J Liebling’s “The Sweet Science” from the library. it’s a collection of essays about boxing, sports illustrated called it one of the all time great sports books, so I am really looking forward to it. of course, since I posted my last books entry my reading time has been cut way down by my very short commute, so I haven’t finished “mr. norrell and jonathan strange” yet, although I am really enjoying it.

I got a new zoom h2 mp3/wav recorder, so this past weekend I recorded all my practice sessions, and I’ve been recording all my gigs for several weeks now. a few interesting things to note:

- I get a lot more value out of listening to gigs that I feel went poorly than ones that went well. In general, when things are sounding good I am aware of what’s going on and that we are all swinging together, etc. when things are going poorly, it’s often hard to nail down what exactly is going on at the time, and listening back later is often very helpful.

- It is amazing to me the difference warmup can make. in one practice session, I was kind of sounding rhythmically weird for the first few minutes, then I spent 20 minutes playing along with a jim hall record and I sounded immediately better, and played better for the rest of my session!

- one non-obvious benefit of recording my practice sessions is I tend to stay much more focused for longer periods. often I have kind of a short attention span when practicing and stop to make a cup of coffee, check email, etc. I don’t really do this when I am recording because I listen to the recordings as background music at work and don’t want to have to listen to me making coffee for 15 minutes. I also don’t want the recordings to be too long, so I typically practice in 30 minute increments then take a break to get water/coffee/whatever.

the walk from my place in the heights to gleason’s gym in DUMBO is about ten minutes long if you walk fast. in that ten minutes, you will walk down a street straight out of every movie ever set in new york, a great pizza place, a check cashing shop, and a starbucks coffee. once you are at the bottom of a hill between the two bridges, you will look around at the stores selling fancy furniture to fabulous people, the yoga studio on the corner and the people walking to and from the park. at this point, you are strongly suspecting you have made a wrong turn as this seems an unlikely location for one of the oldest and most famous boxing gyms in the world. if you remember to look up, you’ll see a sign in the windows upstairs for gleason’s.

having never been to a real boxing gym before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. gleason’s is an old school gym in every way imaginable: no air conditioning, almost no place to sit, hand cranked speed bag platforms and two way balls held down with dumbbells. most of the time, everyone is doing something, and you are probably in the way. it took me until my second lesson to realize something very important about training; all exercises are done by the round, which is demarcated by a stoplight and a bell with three different sounds. the first bell (green) signified the start of a three minute round, the second bell (yellow) tells us there are 30 seconds left in the round, and the third signifies the end of the round and the start of the break, which will last a minute.

almost everyone in the gym is moving in concert with the bells, and almost everyone does whatever they’re doing a little harder at the 30 second bell. finishing a round strong is important. my typical routine is something like:

- 4 rounds of jump rope
- 4 rounds of heavy bag
- 4 rounds of technique with my trainer, roosevelt.
- 3 rounds of speed bag

weights, situps and pushups at the end. this weekend I trained on saturday and sunday, about 2 hours each day, and haven’t been this sore in a while.