I Found Some Blog...by Cher Scholar

Rejected Blog Title #5: My Bloggie Shot Me Down

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 is outdated...woefully back to "Believe" news which kids, do we realize, is about ten years old?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:

• a good farewell tour retrospective with radio audio, tour pics and a smattering of tour ads
• a section on the Sotheby’s auction with photos
• a section on Cher at the Caesars with pictures of the store and an adorable bulletin board graphic
• a super fine section I almost missed: eCards. This site’s eCards are actually outstanding, very well matched to some unique and handy occasions.

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.

    

New CherScholar.com Cooking

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...

   

My Whereabouts

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.

Big Happy Sigh of the Week

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.)
 

Rejected Blog Title #4: And The Blog Goes On

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:

• Film – a flat list with release dates; some personal commentary would be nice to add
• Multimedia – a good video collection from 2005-2008 including Cher’s Keep a Child Alive commercial and a C-span appearance.
• Biography – nothing for non-fans and nothing for 80s Geffen-era or Believe fans.
• Forum – the forum is in Russian so I didn’t bother to join. I will have my Russian-speaking friend dig in to it.
• Music -  Flat list with release dates. My only quibble with the list is that the line item "1973 The Two of Us" should be in compilations since it was basically a re-release of two S&C early 60s albums.
• Links – Small list that’s a good to start doing your Cher surfing. I noticed yesterday that EverythingCher.com is back offline again. Sad face. So I took it off my favorites list. Another sad face.
• News – only began two months ago but is up to date. I like that it posts movie alerts when Cher movies appear on cable. Legitimate news that is always overlooked on other sites.
• Awards – Way cool awards list. So kewl I printed it out.
• However, the best section is the gallery which is absolutely a delicacy: http://www.cherlove.net/gallery/ It’s organized very efficiently - how Russian of them.

Gallery is organized by:

• Public events
  Various public events, and other appearances.
• Television
  Captures, press photos, interview, and other images from television series and specials. 
• Candids
  Various paparazzi photos.
• Professional
  Photoshoots, and modeling.
• Films
  Captures, press photos, and posters.
• Magazines
  Covers, and scans.
• Live Tours
  Live tours, and concerts.
• Other Photo
  Books, parfume, posters, art works, and other.

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.

   

Fan Clubbing

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:

1. They don’t know the definition of soon.
2. They’re probably waiting for Cher to do something which would be very frustrating if they’ve been waiting like that for over a year.
3. They’re officially dead to me, and
4. I completely missed my blog’s one year anniversary! Happy Birthday, My Blog! I can’t believe I’ve been bullshitting about Cher for over a year. Time flies when you’re blogging about celebrity obsession. 

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. :-(

    

Danny Boy and the Thirteenth High School Confession

I'm back from my bittersweet high school reunion. The trip was great. Gave my bf a big hometown tour of me. Don’t worry, he didn’t suffer. There were plenty of river boats, historical re-enactors and pre-historic mounds to keep him happy. Story and pics coming soon.

In the meantime, Cherworld has posted an amazingly unusual Cher interview (it’s European, of course). Give it a looksee. Something about it will relate to my high school reunion story.

For my bf’s birthday last year I gave him two Laura Nyro CDs. He had expressed interest in my Nyro/LaBelle CD which I bought because I love Patty LaBelle. Still, he didn’t like Laura Nyro at all (although since yesterday, I discovered he secretly has been listening to one of them at work) and these two CDs have been on my list of things to listen to for about a year. Two days ago I finally put on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, her breakout album on the Columbia label with then-manager David Geffen.

First of all, I had placed Nyro in the mid 70s, not late 60s. Knowing this tid-bit unlocked a door for me. I can say I finally get it: her fluid genre-melds are pretty amazing for the time and her lyrics are poeticly playful. I’m still not very fond of her soprano voice. It’s too shrill for me most of the time. But I love “Sweet Blindness” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Poverty Train” has really grown on me. And best of all, I finally see from where came Nelly McKay!

I’m a bit overwhelmed with catching up on Cher news this week but I did join my first Facebook Cher group: If You Don't Love Cher, You Are A Dirty Dirty Communist. Good questions are not really brewing there yet but I did see a good question on the Yahoo!Chergroups list posted by daniel martinez:

What Cher song has the most meaning to you and why?

This is a particularly difficult question for me. I’m not very sentimental about Cher songs. I’m much more academic and cerebral about my love of Cher music. Her albums do notate the timeline of my life but mostly as a background soundtrack. For instance, we used to yell the chorus of “Laugh at Me” before doing belly bombs into our neighborhood pool. I also remember re-enacting the storyline of “Send the Man Over” from Cherished. However, I was only 8 years old and the major sexual innuendos in the song went over my innocent five-foot head. I guess the two songs that tug on my heart-sleeves would be "Somebody" and "Danny Boy."

"Somebody" reminds me of being five or six years old in the mid-70s, listening to Sonny & Cher on my parents phonograph in our front living room – lots of New Mexico sunlight, the jump rope as my microphone. Groovy times. I love Cher’s vocal on that song. And "Danny Boy" always makes me vaclempt. The sadness in her voice. Speaking from beyond the grave. It’s all there. You can read more about my top 10 favorite Cher songs on Cherscholar.

      

Cher Clips Made Easy

Last week I found this wonderful catalogue of Cher YouTube clips under the site Vid-arena’s experiment of pitting different divas against each other in YouTube dominance.

http://www.vidarena.com/cher-vs-madonna-video_767_5_vidobPDuaIWfvE.html#videos

I haven’t surfed all the clips but there is a touching tribute to Gregg Allman found there set to the music of “My Song” with some fine candid shots. You might find some new stuff you haven't seen before.

   

Rejected Blog Title #3: Bell Bottom Blog

Building CheEmpires and Education

Cher Castle
I had horrendous pop-up issues with this site all three times I tried to get get on (from two different computers even). Many links are broken – it’s possible this is a ghost town of Cherness. The graphics are worth a looksee...that cute winking photo...but I couldn’t bring up the forum or the chat. The biography was scrolling text too fast for me to read. Most annoyingly, I couldn’t resize the window to get to all the menu items.

...not to be confused with Cher Palace which is now a Yahoo! Group of 800 some people.

To support a palace or a castle, you need an Army of Cher is a fan database, basically another brand of social site, a place to chat with other fans and create fan profiles. There’s a small amount of multimedia here and the design is the least Cher-sparkly of any I’ve seen for a while. Interestingly conservative. It’s unusual. It intrigues me. I wish I could join all the social hubs of Cher out there. I really do.

Cher University!
Oooh...Cher Scholar loves school! Cher Scholar wants to go back to school. There’s a page of firsts and a list of facts, and active forum, an album database and 102 members in the Yahoo! Group section. It’s a good start but I need more stuff - a syllabus, more homework, more tests! I did love playing with the bubbles.

Cher Web Sites in 1997

This all reminds me of the year of 1997 when I was at Sarah Lawrence studying poetry. My fiction writer Julie had to leave for a semester and she asked me to go into the college computer lab (a place I had never been before and thought must be filled with computer geeks) and send her school news via her email account. It was scary. What if I couldn't figure it out? What if I broke something?. Julie emailed about web surfing and starting up an online opinion magazine (this became Ape Culture in 1998). I had no idea what web surfing was. I went to the Yahoo! site she pointed me to and typed in "Cher" for lack of any other ideas. And that's how I learned how to use the world wide web. (It's also how I learned to use those green periodical books at the library). At the time, there were only two sites about Cher, something vaguely official looking with Cher informercial pages and a great site from the UK called Cher Dedication. It had scrumptious essays, invaluable postings about Cher appearances (this was around the time of the "First Time" book tour) and the first web postings of "Believe" clips. I remember thinking "eh, not too catchy."

Later that year after I got my first computer, a Micron.  I spent a whole day surfing through every site on the web that mentioned Cher. Isn't that mind-blowing? In 1997 I managed to find all Cher references on the freakin' Internet! One-hundred monkeys couldn't do that today.
   

Cher-Its and Bits

Toodle-loo

My Cher Friends, you will be getting four posts this week. This is because I’m leaving Saturday for nine days of vacation bliss in Amish country, Pennsylvania. The bf and I are visiting my family there for small-towney 4th of July celebrations in Lititz, which is near Blue Ball and Intercourse. You’ve all heard the joke; now I’m living the dream. Actually, Amish country is very interesting, not just for the Amish, but for the other old, alternative religious orders that flourished there in Pennsylvania during the early American centuries. Read previous Ape Culture reviews about Amish country.

Cher Site of the Month

I have been remiss in doing my Cher site reviews for months. But someone on Chergroups found this one recently. It has a Myspace feel but a great catalog of pictures:
http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MID=367137231&MemberId=3668384741

Anniversary of an Ending

Tyler from Chergroups reminded us all that June 26, 32 years ago, was a sad day in Cher history: it was the day in 1975 that Sonny and Cher's divorce was finalized in a courtroom in Santa Monica, California.  Happy day for Cher who was preparing to marry Gregg Allman…but what about us???

Songs Cher Should Cover

If Cher were my bf, she'd say "Don't should on me!"

However, I’d really love to hear Cher go spiritual. Her songs of late, like "Human" and others from her last three Warner Bros albums, indicate Cher’s picking of more introspective material. She’d do a groovy gospel  (1971s "Somebody" is a testament to that). She could even give it a California twist. Two songs would easily accommodate: Allen Toussaint's’s recent gem “We Are One” and a song from the last Norah Jones album, “Humble Me.” Not quite the wailers you'd hear in church, but contemplative little pieces about brotherhood and humility. She could still sing them in a unitard with sequins. God can get jiggy with it.