pam berry

favorite language

My first choice wuould be the languge of love, naturally. However being quite out of practice, I'll have to go with choice number two, which is french, a beautiful language! it has the certain je ne sais quoi, I don't know what it is. I had about 8 years of french in shool way back in the day, sometimes I would even dream in french, and you certainly wouldn't know it now. I can still read it pretty well, but when it comes to verb conjugation and a less than laughable accent, I suposse you have to use it or lose it. My friend Emmanuel came to DC for a visit not too long ago and I discovered that my fluency got better with each beer I ad. If I had know that back in school, I might have aced that conversational french exam

Europe kicks the behind the USA in so many respects. I'm a corn ball, but really old buildings get me right here every time, and you just don't get enough of that in the US, sometimes it happens, but nothing on the scale of what I experienced in Europe. I went on a road trip to Nashville with a friend over the last long memorial day holiday to meet another friend for the weekend (Nashville is the halfway point between our two cities), it's only about a 10 hour drive to Nashville but we rented a blazer and took a couple of days to do it so we could stop a lot and cram the car full of stuff from all the thrift stores, antique malls, and flea markets on the way down. We drove through a couple of small towns that seemed to be completely untouched by the last two decades. The yard sales were crawling with odd people but full of great old dishes. The buildings had the best old signs I've ever seen, most of them from the 1930's, when design meant something, dammit! All my polaroids from that trip are of beautiful old signs in towns I might never see again, except for the picture I have of us hefting a beautiful green deco couch we found at a mission onto the top of the car in the middle of the night. When I was in Europe I wasn't working, and that might have more than a little to do with my fondness for it, plus I love train travel, another point for Europe. It would be logistically difficult and expensive to do a big trip in the US by train, the train system isn't as extensive, and all places I'd like to visit here are pretty spread out.

europe usa

night
and
day

What a fave song! It's really hard for me to say who I'd put my money on if Tracey Thorn and Fred Astaire had to duke it out in the Cole Porter ring. They both do the song so well it gives a girl shivers, but with Fred Astaire you get that other bit that is ignored in the Everything But The Girl version, and he sings it simply and perfectly. It's like he's right there sitting next to you (in the silence e of your lonely room, natch) when he sings "like the drip drip of the raindrops when the summer shower is through, so a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you..."

Washington has really grown on me. Every time I go to New York I swear I'm going to move there but I never do. DC is beautiful, especially at night when you're driving downtown and it's deserted and the monuments are lit up, we've got a giant park that runs for miles through the city that's quite amazing to drive through (or bike or jog through if you do that sort of thing, I make it a point not to), scads of museums that are free, good repertory cinema, and excelent thrift stores about a half hour away. I love the neighborhood I live in, it's called Mt. Plseasnt, and it's full of big old victorian rowhouses, lots of flowers, plenty of dogs, the zoo is a couple of blocks away and you can hear the animals at night, it's pretty residential, but as full of Belle and Sebastian fans as any neighborhood you could live in DC, we have a high per capita of popkids in Mt Pleasant. We also have groups of houses of punk kids who have probably never heard Belle and Sebastian but who will, when the world is set to right, one day see the light.
I live next door to my best friends (our drummer Dan and his sister Megan), makes for easy sugar borrowage and plenty of opportunities to rendezvous for nitecaps on the front porch. I've become able to effectively ignore the tourist population, the oppressive crowds and busloads of kids that frequent our nation's capital daily, mainly because I don't work downtown and I don't go there on purpose during school hours. I've also been able to avoid any run-ins with no-good politicians, although for some reason I often end up sitting next to George Stephanopoulous at restaurants and in movie theatres. I have eavesdropped on his conversations more than once, dead boring.

washington
dc

projects

I've got a million of them, all unfinished. Only some of them are music projects. I'm a listmaker, myfeeling is that actually making a list of projects you need to deal with exonerates you from actually having to do the project. Up for consideration this weekend: work on the garden, I have yet to take that first step, the planting of the seeds, but this is my weekend, I can feel it;
> unpack all the boxes piled to the ceiling of my closet so I can get to some summer clothes out from behind them, I'm baking in these thermal long-sleeved tees but it's an insurmountable pile of boxes;
> organize the sewing room, or at least create a patch to walk through it, I have five sewing machines in there and if I'm not terribly grouchy I can stand to crawl over enough stuff to reach one of them for a quick hem or something, but in my dream world all five are accessible and each contains a different color thread!
> fix the backyard fence that fell down last winter, but this is very low on the priority list because it involves a wack plan to use old doors instead of boards and it's another project altogether to get to the salvage shop for doors that I can live with
> frame all the old black and white pictures of people with their dogs I've been collecting for years
> rewire all the thrift store lamps I keep buying, and the fans, too, because it's fucking hot as hades in DC in the summer...

Glimmer is nothing if not the proof to me that it's not always a disaster to finish writing songs in the car on the way to the studioo. Glo-worm never practiced unless we were hankering to do a single or had a show. We hardly ever played shows come to think of it, but I really liked our songs probably more than any band that I've been in, and even though Glimmer is a singles compilation, I think all the songs fit together somewhat nicely.
I can listen to lots of Glo-worm songs without wincing, which is more than I can say for plenty of other things I've ever recorded!. I was pretty bummed out when Terry and his lovely wife Karen decided to move to Australia for a year or so, as much because Terry is a stich at a party as because I'd miss playing with him in Glo-worm. Terry 's got a modest and mysterious way about him that I find intriguing. I've known him for years but still don't really what he does for a living, vague references to desktop publishing have been bandied about, but he could just as easily be a spy. A few years ago he lived overseas and played guitar in St. Christopher for a while, and he's told some pretty entertaining stories about pop luminaries that I don't dare repeat. But anyway, he'll start a story about touring with St. Christopher with the sentence: "I was playing with this band on a small english label, doing some shows in France..." and I really think he assumes the people he's talking to have not heard of Sarah records, or St. Christopher, and I admire that about him. At the same time he probably doesn't realize how very much a label like Sarah has inspired people (like me) to do something, anything, to write songs and put out records, the sad fact that most of them will never come close to being as earth-shatteringly moving and inspirational as tons of records on Sarah, Postcard, él, Creation in the early days, etc notwithstanding. I'm at once completely puzzled by and envious of his dissociation with the importance of a label like Sarah. I mean, I'm not a fanatic, it's not like I worship at the feet of Harvey Williams and his ilk or anything, wait, scratch that, I almost forgot, I DO worship at the feet of Harvey Williams and his ilk!.

glimmer

I think Belmondo happened first, and it has almost always been me and Trish with a revolving line-up on the records. When we first started way back in the day we were all girlfriends of four guys in the same band, they were on tour for months at a time and we thought we'd show them what was what honeys style. Trish and I had been doing music things for a while but Amy and Maria picked up drums and bass from scracth and while it was a good time for a while, schlepping out to practice all the time in the summer heat soon lost its glamour for them. By the next time we recorded, the prolific and everstylish Chip Porter of Veronica Lake fame had moved from Michigan to DC and we did a couple of his songs for the K single...
We've done other things here and there but Trish got busy recording Heartworms stuff with Arch and I got busy making list of projects I was never going to finish, so we did a couple of one-off but pretty much threw in the towel until recenly when Trish and I did a song with our friend Tina on the violin for a Cowly Owl compilation, only because they're frenchy and cool. Belmondo shared a split flexi with Helen Love on Wurlitzer Jukebox, of note only, no I shoudn't say only, because Chip's cover art is great, let me say mainly because it's the last flexi ever pressed in England before the plant closed. I've found that noteworthy things do come to those who wait till the last possible minute to send an overseas fedex.
The Shapiros were me, Trish, Bart, and Scott, scads of songs were mostly written and wholly recorded in a 2-3 week window in 1994 between the time Scott, another 1/3 of Veronica Lake to relocate from Michigan, made it to DC and the time Bart, and australian friend of Yesteryear/brilliant guitarist who crashed at my place for several months that summer left the country. We played a couple of really fun shows then, too, one in NY at a chickfactor party, and the other in Dan and Megan's superstyling pine-walled basement with a built-in bar, next door. It was the first time I played guitar and sang at the same time in front of people. Against Bart's better judgement, we remixed everything when he went back to Australia to suit our whims and three years later, I'm almost ready to admit tha he was right.
The Seashell Sea was something Dan and I did with our friend Eric for a short time after Terry moved overseas and Glo-worm was no more. Eric is a Felt fanatic, not a shabby thing to be at all in my opinion, plus he's left-handed, so he just flipped his guitar over without changing the strings and strummed everything up. We played one particularly traumatic show at a coffee house and recorded four songs way too soon that ended up on various comps before Eric quit and moved to the west coast for a tim.
Dan and I have recruited our friends Brian, Bridget and Tina to play guitar, bass and violin so we could record a cover of the fabba Louis Philippe tune "you Mary you" for Instant Cofee, the él tribute comp out on Le Grand Magistery.

belmondo

shapiros

the seashell
sea

holidays

travel

I have an extremly irrational, debilitating fear of flying that has limited my ability to vacation in style as of late. The last time I was forced to fly and from a work convention I had to attend, I made it to Salt Lake without the donning of a straightjacket, but only just barely. I decided for the return trip to ditch the lightweight prescription drugs and go with something a bit stronger friend from work had gotten me, just in case.
I stayed up all the night before the return flight angsty as hell, but figuring I'd wear myself out with distress and have no choice but to sleep on the flight. When I got to the airport, carrying a nice set of luggage under the eyes, I took a strong valium, which did nothing to abate my fear, not to mention my uncontrollable sobbing. On the plane, I took another two, downed a few glasses of wine, and still it was with the tears, the certainly of inminent death. At the layover in Cincinnati I bolted from the aging winged tin cylinder, rented a car and drove nine hours the rest of the way home, relief of being alive completely overpowering any negative effects the drugs and alcohol might have had on my ability to drive
But I'm over it now, at least in theory. as I've got overseas places to go that can't wait. I know there are knockout drops somewhere in this town with my name on them. Dave and I have been playing in a band with our friend Greg who used to be in the Ropers, we're called The Castaway Stones and we've decide to act on a crazy plan for last october that involves mingling international style and playing some shows in Madrid. Paris, London and Glasgow.

I was a film major in college, but I 'll tell that the last freally great film I saw was Trees Lounge, directed by and starring Steve Buscemi. I went to the foundry in Georgetown for the late show with Megan. The screens are too small there but it wasn't playing anywhere else, and after the movie we came out of theater needing a drink in a bad way. We decided to stop by the black cat because it was the only about 1:30 am, plenty of time till last call.
All the way there I bitched and moaned about how there are no men like Steve Buscemi in DC, and even if there was a man like Steve in DC to drink with, we'd never met him drinking at the black cat because it's not steady enough. We're at he bar and see David, a co-worker of mine, leaving with his girlfriend. We drink till last call and go home. The next day at work David tells me this history about how the night before, apparently just before we arrived, he and his date had been sitting around with a couple of friends at the black cat trying to figure out the title of a movie starring none other than Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Beals and Seymour Cassel, black and white , about a young guy trying to make a film. I wasn't there yet to tell them it's called "In The Soup", a fine film by the way. So anyway his date says: I can't stand it, my roommate will know, I'll go downstairs and call her. She's leaving a message for her roommate when out of the bathroom walks a man who is the absolute spitting image of Steve Buscemi. Her jaw drops, she hangs up the phone and grabs him and says: do you know you look just like Steve Buscemi?
He says people tell him that all the time, they chat about the movie and go back upstairs to the bar, where everyone is wowed out how much this man resembles Steve Buscemi. He leaves, we walk in, nobody has seen him there since.

films

julie
is
her
name

My first experience with Julie London was not as the pouty vava singer, but as the nurse on the television show emergency, which my brother and I watched religiously as kids. When I found a couple of copies of the "Julie is her name" record in the stack of lp's belonging to my mom and dad, I was confused, absolutely in denial that the sexy Julie London on the cover of the record could be the same boring Julie London on the tube.
By the time I went away to college the cognitive dissonace was long gone and I was smart enough to get down to the business of choosing which of my parent's copies to steal for my very own. They both were in in about the same shape, both of them had a cloth name tag, the kind you sew into clothes with script writing on them, taped with scotch tape right onto the front of the excellent liberty spectra-sonic-sound logo. All of my parents' records have the name tags taped onto them, maybe that's why I don't care so much about the condition of my record sleeves and have no fear of writing in books. My mom's copy has her maiden name on it so I'm sure they each had copies before they married, which I find terribly sweet. For all I know their mutual affection for this record brought them together Perhaps that's pushing it. Anyway, for reasons I can't remeber, I stole my dad's copy and as far as I know, he hasn't missed it yet. Julie is her name is probably the first thing I ever stole from them without asking ( I guess it's not really stealing if you ask), I never took money from mom's purse or dad's jacket pocekts or anything like that as a kid like my friends did.
But this absconding of the Julie London record became the first in series of thefts of items of importance my parents would claim they wanted if I was crazy enough to ask them first. I've been, ah, rescuing family photos from their house years. I found two full photo albums of family polaroids from the 60's in the attic a couple of years ago, pictures harking back to the days of us kids getting into shit and my mother looking exhausted but sporting fantastic hair, both on a regular basis.
The last guy that I dated dropped a bomb one afternoon and very casually remarked that he didn't see the appeal of Julie London, she just wasn't all that and not a very good singer. Not a good singer! the alarms should have gone off, I sould have ditched him straight away instead of waiting around for him to dump me later, never trust a Sinatra freak who doesn't give props to the tommy dorsey era of Frank! live and learn. Who couln't swoon when Julie oozes: "...in this world of overrated pleasures, and underrated treasures, I'm glad there is you..."? good god she has the bestest most melancholic voice with just the right amount of breathiness. Just like Jo Stafford ( whose version of I love you admittedly doen't come close to touching the sad brilliance of Julie's), sometimes if I hear Julie London in the car on the music of your life station, I get a little weepy right there in traffic, and I don't yell so much at other divers.