Month: October 2008

Alright, I thought of another Aly story.  I can’t help it.  Plus Halloween is coming up and it made me remember this particular Halloween story.  I wrote about it in Waiting For My Cats to Die.  Here is that passasge:

“Twenty years ago I sat on the corner in the West Village of Manhattan  where I live, where I’ve lived for my entire adult life.  I was watching the Halloween Parade when a pack of drummers came up.  There had to have been over fifty of them.  I stood up, started dancing in the street and I danced with them for twenty blocks straight.  I didn’t stop until they stopped.  Now, I am not a dancing-in-the-streets kind of girl.  I would like to think I am, instead of the overly self-conscious, trapped, and paralyzed person who chants “I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself,” every morning in the shower … For the next twenty years I would think about it but it wasn’t the dancing I couldn’t forget.  It was the drumming.”

Here’s what I didn’t say.  Aly was the one who got up and started dancing away, following the drummers, and I followed him.  I copied him and had the time of my life.  We danced through the streets of the West Village for the next couple of hours, until the parade ended in Washington Square Park.  It was absolutely exhilarating and one of my best memories.  Even though I described myself as self-conscious and trapped, I’ve never been a shrinking violet either, I’ve always been pretty game.  But I have my fears and also, it just would never have occurred to me to get up and start dancing and following those drummers like that.  Past all those people watching.  What I realize now, looking back, is that it un-paralyzed me.  It gave me ideas.  It was also confirmation that there is little in life more thrilling, more life-changing, more enormously invigorating than doing something you were afraid to do.  You feel so powerful.  Like a happy Godzilla.  I felt very self-conscious when I first stood up to dance in the street, but I knew it was going to be fun and I wasn’t going to let Aly dance away from me and have all the fun.

It’s like that Eleanor Roosevelt quote I posted a while back. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

I still can’t get on planes anymore though.  (A story for another day.) Anyway, so I was thinking, how could someone once so alive like Aly be dead?

The picture is me and my friend Marianne at the Village Halloween Parade, which I drum in every year now.

Good morning.  I took a bunch of pictures just now, but the light changed before I realized something this camera can do and so I will have to try again tomorrow.  I can hand hold the camera in low light without a flash.  I have a tripod, but there is something liberating about not having to use it.  These are two pictures which hang in the bedroom, and you can see my Christmas lights and the window behind me in the reflection.  You can even see the bricks in the air shaft beyond the window.  God, I wonder what else it can do that I don’t know about?

Also, I know zip and I mean NOTHING about post processing.  I’ve seen what people can do and I could really make my pictures look so much better.  I should learn how to use Photo Shop.

Plans for the day: call audio forensics guys back, go to the gym, get together with Howard … that’s enough.  For a holiday.  Also, no offense Italian people, who I love (and who are so good looking) but Columbus Day, with what we know now, it’s just a little weird.  But parades are great.  Nothing wrong with a parade.

While I was out today I looked for that building on West Street, the one in the 1885 photograph I posted a week ago or so.  It turns out the one I thought it was is on Washington Street.  At first I thought it might still be the one, and that in 1885 Washington was the most western street and that the current West Street might was the newer one after landfill.  But then I thought about it some more and realized that didn’t make sense.  They wouldn’t have renamed the existing street from West to Washington and made the new one the new “West.”  Sure enough, I found an 1886 map and West and Washington existed then.

Most of all those old shipping docks are gone.  Some of them still existed when I first moved here, although the shipping companies and ships were long gone.  I was thinking I wished they were all still active shipping line, but I think when they were my neighborhood was seedy and depressing for the most part.

I know it must feel like this blog is all Aly Sujo all the time.  I’ll stop soon.  But with email help from friends of friends (thank you Stewart Bronaugh) I’ve started digitizing the Leisure Units songs.  Jeff also pointed me to Aly’s death notice in the Times today:

SUJO–Aly, of Woodstock, NY and Caracas, Buenos Aires died suddenly on Sunday, October 5, 2008 near his home. Devoted husband of Laney Salisbury and loving father of Sophie Salisbury-Sujo. Also survived by his mother Clara Diament Sujo, his brother Glenn R. Sujo in London, his niece Kim S. Sujo and her husband Carlos Marrero of Caracas, as well as their families and friends in the United States, Venezuela, England and Argentina who pray for his peace in heaven forever more.

I also scanned a few more photographs.  The first two are of Aly and Jeff and Phil and Carol Zaleski at a beach in Massachusetts somewhere in the late 70’s.   Aly isn’t in the third one but Mike McClintock is, along with the Zaleskis and Mike’s girlfriend at the time (I can’t remember her name). Mike was the first Leisure Unit to die.

A long time ago I retrieved all the master tapes of the Leisure Units music from Skyline Studios. I think they may have been about to throw them out, in any case, I gave them to Aly years later. I had cassettes made of their songs and I’d like to digitize them and make MP3s for myself and anyone else who would like them. But two things: I don’t know how and maybe someone has already done this?

If you have could you let me know?  Or, could someone else help me figure out how to do this? All I have to play them is a Sony Professional Walkman, so I need to connect the Walkman to my Powerbook and I guess I could use GarageBand to record them while they play.  Except I don’t know what cable to buy to plug from which output in the Walkman to which input in the Powerbook. I’m sure I could figure this all out, but I thought maybe someone out there would just know.  Or again, someone else may have already done this!

Thank you in advance for any help anyone can give me.  (This is Aly, Jeff Zaleski and me at lunch, last year I believe, in the summer.)