Some (new-to-me) Cher blogs just hit my radar!
Cher News at http://chernews.blogspot.com - your go-to for the latest news on Cherabouts.
Cher is in the air at http://cherisintheair.blogspot.com/ - great pics and alothough it's in another language, there are translation features.
There's a new fan site in town: Cher The Goddess of Pop at http://cherthegoddessofpop.com
Very sleek design. The movie pages include trailers; the album section is still in progress; there's a section with quotes and a current news page.
Check it out!
I love the social media que to "Follow these you bitches."
Saying that Cher World rocks is a good segue into something that does not rock. The Cher Fan Club.
Some history as I know it: this club has been controversial from time to time. I was a member the first year it existed, back when I lived in Yonkers, New York and we were snail-mailed black-and-white newsletters. I got the requisite autographed picture but didn’t love the newsletters; so I dropped out. Years later I heard stories of fans paying but getting locked out of the online version of the club. There were some bad-blood posts on the Cher lists.
Honestly, all official things get punched about by fans. So I decided to see for myself what being a member of an online fan club was all about, especially as an experience for this blog. But as it happened, the club was offline when I started the blog. So I waited for over a year for the re-launch. I was prepared to do a decent review of my year’s experiences. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever but it was fine. I received mostly friendly emails and they had some fun, Cher-related contests and giveaways...none of which I ever won but I was looking forward to a new year of trying.
But then...I tried to renew.
I’ve been a bit down this week. Oh, I definitely have PEW: post election withdrawal. I learned about that condition on the radio this morning. Glad there’s a diagnosis for that. I’m definitely there. I now have now two friends with elderly parents in critical conditions and I’ve been working on a care package for my D.F. sis who lost her bf last week under tragic circumstances. Add to that I found out today I’ve been under-paid by a significant amount all year long.
Okay...we could dwell on those things until I start to hyperventilate or I could just review a Cher website instead. How’s about a Cher site review kids?
A few months ago a Cher scholar brought to my attention Cher Style (http://www.cherstyle.com/). And I’m glad they did. Cher Style is an awesome site and I love the soothing, balmy blue theme. Every time I visit I have a pleasurable experience and I think it’s this very agreeable blue business.
For the viewer the site is clean and well designed. Some tend to be a tad over-designed and often “less is more.” I’m not talking about code here. Is it designed with tables instead of divs? My boss would not like that so much. But the site takes you where you want to go without pesky seconds of delay and the top nav links are clear.
There’s special real estate for audio/visual which includes some radio clips and rarities and a good hodgepodge of video from the 70s to recent. That content is displayed with a lovely and proper use of tables.
There’s some action in the forum but I didn’t join in. I do like the forum-themed Cher pic posted there – a great play on words. The site also has chat. I’ve never done live chatting with Cher fans. I'll save that for a special occasion.
The biography page (courtesy of Warner Bros.) is outdated...woefully back to "Believe" news which kids, do we realize, is about ten years old? Ten years! I can't fault Cher Style too much because Cher’s own fan site has the same issue. There’s a decade of Cher-livin missing! No information about the farewell tour records that were broken, no info about the Caesars project. This lacks 10 years or about 1/6 of Cher’s life, granted not the most drama-packed 1/6 but a decade nonetheless.
The music section is simply a list of her albums, however many of the year dates are incorrect and studio albums are mixed in with re-issues and compilations and this is one of the nerdy things this Cher scholar likes to fuss about.
Likewise the Movie section is really a DVD list and includes exercise videos, tv shows and music DVDs.
What the site excels at: aforementioned slick design (which includes creative Cher-media-mashups), good selection of photos, up-to-date news feed (which takes diligence), and some good items in the Multimedia section including lush wallpapers, fun icons and wicked cool avatars. My favorite sections include the Photos (I love the way the decades are displayed), a fabu selection of quotes by and about Cher, and style corner (some critical Cher scholarship here of her contributions of fashion).
Almost hidden on the home page, you also have:
Cher Style’s strengths are more presentation and media than informational. I’d come back to find photos, eCards or a visual review of Cher’s career. You wont find detailed statistics on record singles or such here but this is the best lookin Cher site I’ve seen. Check it out.
There is a lot I wan't to talk about right now that I hope I can get to next week: a very interesting French/Italian collection of 60s Sonny & Cher songs a diligent Cher scholar sent me last week and my first experiences after joining The Official, International, World-Renowned Cher Fan Club. It was actually fun and I'll divulge my journeys into that early next week. In the meantime, I've been revamping CherScholar.com.
The idea for this came to me last year when I realized I needed to professionalize my publishing credits page and CherScholar.com looked pretty amateurish as it was inter-woven into my other sites. It needed to grow up a bit. Not that it's completely mature now, but it's better.
It's up and surf-able but only in a sort of beta form. When I transfered all the text, encoded punctuations became garbled and I now need to re-read every freakin word of the damn thing to find unfortunate parentheses and dashes a global search and replace surely missed. And that's a major pain in my ass and will take me a few days. I blame Microsoft products. But it's readable at this point.
I've organized the site more like a learning institution and expanded out some of the sections a tiny bit (tabloids, records) and added whole new sections on books on Cher, television, photographs and concerts. And there's a new glossary of Cher terms I hope you'll enjoy.
If you can stand to wade through the typos, spelling errors and punctuation tragedies, check it out at www.cherscholar.com. Otherwise, wait a week!
Yours in Cher scholarship...
The Cher Fanclub is back up (sort of) after a few years of going dark. A week or so the site said it was only open to past members for the time being and I must admit, I feel a little shut out, like a second-class Cher-citizen, as it were.
Now the Join page says “sign up today” but there’s no link, only a button that says “instant enrollment coming soon.” But to clarify: soon is not today. In other words, join today, but not today... soon. Capiche? The site's frames are very complicated and heavy to load. But still...I’m ready to plunk down my $25 smacks a year as soon as someone...returns.. to the register. http://www.officialcherfanclub.com/
This week the 5th Cher Convention happened in Las Vegas this week at Caesars Palace to coincide with the current block of Cher concerts. I haven’t seen any Cher group posts about it yet but initial newspaper reports say there was a low turnout and Cher didn’t show. You can lead a Cher Convention to Cher...
It’s hard to be a super-Cher fan sometimes. It really is. But as Cher has proved recently, her show is selling out amongst American hoards. She don’t need no stinkin’ superfans. Sigh.
Lots of links happened last week. More later as I settle back in to my life! Not to be melodramatic about it but I’ve had a rough two weeks. Where the hell have I been? I was on jury duty (with loud court-disturbing coughing bronchitis no less) and when I got home was too exhausted to even type out a distress message to y’all about where I been.
Imagine Cher Scholar driving to a criminal courtroom in the Compton area of Los Angeles for a gang trial with intent to sell cocaine allegated, a defense attorney who looks and talks like Yeardley Smith and a prosecutor who looked like Tyra Banks. A petite and pretty Japanese-American judge who proceeded at the speed of frozen molasses. Imagine a deliberation scene somewhat like 12 Angry Men. An acquittal struggling to happen: 4 to 8, then 9 to 3, then 11 to 1, then 11 to 1, then 11 to 1. Almost a hung jury until the white Redondo Beach juror releases a angry fist of his racial-profiling-prejudices against the face of a melting pot of peer pressure.
It was stressful but I learned a lot. Did you know the Bloods wear St. Louis Cardinal and Boston Red Sox gear cos it’s red?
In the Cher-meanwhile, my bfs co-worker gave him an article to give to me with some fabulous pictures of Cher’s live show in full-spread-out color. The article is about how her stage and effects were built. The magazine is Live Design and the issue is August 2008. I have no idea where one would get a copy of one’s own. Start with http://www.livedesignonline.com/ and have a good, healthy, stress-free, jury-duty-free weekend.
Cher.com has changed!! OMG. Nothing really on it except Vegas tickets...but a change of any kind...is a good thing in web world.
The news is already outdated and the forum is only linked from the bottom of that god-awful scroll-box that’s hard to use (style without style); but at least that useless initial refresher page is gone.
Find the forum directly here http://cher.yuku.com/directory. Is it me? Why can’t I get into forums? Like Susan Sarandon says in Witches of Eastwick, “sometimes I just can’t face it.”
And...after years of leaving us on the edge, Cher Fan Club also promises big things "coming soon." Am I a fool to keep believeing?
It looks like there are only two promotional photos left in the Cher universe.
Don’t mind me.
(I’m really not that catty in person.)
I haven’t done a Cher site review for eons. But my friend Jeffrey sent me this fabulous photo of Cher’s bling-bling nails circa the 1960s. The photo came from an absolutely even more fabulous Russian site called Cher Love: http://www.cherlove.net/
Home page photo of Cher doing a 360 is a tad creepy and the colors are gray and gloomy with an odd spray of pink. It’s almost like a subliminal political statement about a modern cold war.
Sections include:
to addGallery is organized by:
My favorite photo on the site so far is this one to the right above. I love that picture - so grunge-glam.
Plus an added benefit: you learn the Russian translations for all your favorite Cher words, like Mask is Маска. Cher Love: Worth it’s weight in rubles! Bravo.
As part of my day job, I've been reading books on website usability, learning about how web surfers typically behave on websites and what they hate most. Some things used to big usability problems, but aren’t so much anymore: for instance putting on a background of wallpaper that takes five minutes to download or putting up an “under construction” sign. As it turns out, people hate that with at passion. But its not a modern usability issue anymore because rarely do designers still do it.
Well, turns out one site is still doing it: The Official Cher Fan Club. Mr. Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, “the world’s leading expert on web usability” (according to his book jacket), says there’s no “coming soon” about it.
You either have it or you don’t.
And the official fans have had that silly message posted for over a year now...which means:
They don’t know the definition of soon.Sometimes I feel there should be Cher usability studies for all the “coming soon” rumors in her oeuvre. Mame, Vegas, the next CD or movie rumors.
It’s been a few days of weird gossip, actually: Sonny’s son Chesare’s rumored affair with Lindsey Lohan while in rehab (and strangely, it’s not the Lohan angle of that story that bothers me most), no CD, no Vegas show. I think we’re all just feeling restless for Cher product. Constant delays to current projects have prompted recent chattering on the Cher list that Cher might be seriously ill. Someone brought up the idea that she counseled Farrah Fawcett on cancer treatments in Germany because she had personal experience with said treatments. This is just a rumor, of course; but we’re feeling preemptively sad about that kind of possibility. Like Sonny was Cher’s Dumbo’s Feather, for many fans, Cher is their Dumbo’s Feather. :-(
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