I Found Some Blog...by Cher Scholar

This Is Cher, A Cher Zine #3 has been reviewed!

Back in 2005, Zine World reviewer Anu Schnuck called Golden Greats: A Cher Zine 2 “a must for Cher fans.” Australian zine-reviewer Dann Lennard of Betty Paginated and Zine World recently posted his latest reviews including one of Cher Zine 3 from the point of view of a non-fan.

 

"As a massive non-Cher fan, I still found a disturbing amount of interesting material to absorb. Like Cher’s tenure with Casablanca Records in the late 70s – including her flirtation with disco, heavy rock (with her band Black Rose), pioneering music videos and…Gene Simmons. Or the making of her obscure 60s hippie flick Chastity (which I somehow managed to see on an Aussie regional TV station when I was a kid). The lengthy piece on Cher’s infomercial career jumps the shark (nine pages…seriously?). But this zine did the near-impossible for me, it made me care about Cher. Hell, I may even pick up her Black Rose CD off eBay now."

I have to concede that the infomercial article is very long, but as the only Cher-infomercial defender out there, I had to make an airtight case for my argument. Besides, the Casablanca article is 17 pages long!

I am disappointed no one has made special mention of the racy Sonny centerfold.

For more info on Cher Zine 3: http://www.cherscholar.com/zine.htm

 

My Journey with Whitney

When it was reported yesterday that Whitney Houston had died suddenly in the Beverly Hilton Hotel (reportedly in a bathtub), everyone seemed surprised and sad (and a few even thought the news was a Cher-like Twitter joke). Brian McKnight appeared on CNN today scolding us all for jibbing at Houston when she was alive and struggling, but pitying and missing her now that she had died.

I've been rummaging through my own significant shock and sadness. For most of her career, Houston has aggravated me to be honest. But unlike other erratic-behaving stars like Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, I never expected her to die imminently. I just assumed, at worst, she’d end up as an old-lady addict. I always assumed, since she looked so utterly healthy and feisty all her life (give or take a drug-bender or anorexic appearance on a 30-year-Michael-Jackson anniversary special) that her body would take the pummeling and persevere. I also didn't ever take her for a suicide. Too proud.

Which brings me to my frustration and fascination with Whitney Houston over the last 27-something years. I was 14 years old when "How Will I Know" hit MTV in 1985. It was clearly a corporate-made video, so polished and different than the DIY-videos I was used to seeing on TV. The video was so colorful and playful with the paint splashes and Whitney skipping around so happy, bouncy and pretty. It was addictively refreshing and perky. I remember listening to the album Whitney Houston at my friend Mandy's house. My favorite tracks were the duets with Jermaine Jackson. Jermaine is my favorite Jackson and I loved the smooth sounds of "Nobody Loves Me Like You Do" and "Take Good Care of My Heart." The album was full of other hits: "You Give Good Love," "Saving All My Love for You," "All at Once," and “Greatest Love of All.”

Then in 1987, my senior year, the album Whitney came out. Another happy-go-lucky, colorful video of Whitney singing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” It cheered my dark, depressed teen outlook. And finally she came through my city on a live tour. My friend Mandy and I saw her at the Muny Opera House in St. Louis. I was so expecting to see that happy, fresh young girl from the videos. When boys threw out catcalls, she took great offense and told us she wanted to be respected as a serious artist not a sex object. So self-serious. I was disappointed. My image was deflated.

And I didn’t enjoy the bombastic ballads and dance hits that followed, “Didn’t We Almost Have it All,”  “So Emotional,” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.” The performances and videos didn’t have the fun rainbow feel of the early video I loved. Whitney wanted to be seen as a confident diva now. She wasn’t dancing and flirting with us teen girls anymore; she was beholden now to no one but herself. I’m sure this was empowering to many young black girls. And maybe if I hadn’t first imagined her as the innocent, free-spirited teen instead of the now-irritated, knowing diva, I wouldn’t have been so irked.

In any case, she now wanted to be respected as a powerful, in-control lady. So in 1990 when I’m Your Baby Tonight  came out and she started dating the bad-boy Bobby Brown and suddenly, inexplicably chasing this kind of tough street-cred, I got really annoyed. Last decade she was the princess of soul from a gospel and easy-listening entertainment dynasty, not to mention the church; but now she’s sassy and urban from the rough streets of Newark. Right. I completely ignored the single “I’m Your Baby Tonight” and “All the Man I Need” (which I now can’t even remember).

I also ignored The Bodyguard. Have never seen it. Don’t like Kevin Costner and I know this is sacrilege but I prefer Dolly Parton’s much less bombastic version of “I Will Always Love You.” As for the single “I Have Nothing”…no thank you.

I did however love, love, love her gliding version of “I’m Every Woman” (Chaka Khan!) and I loved her version of the National Anthem in 1991 enough to buy the cassette single.

In 1998 I was living in Yonkers, New York, having just finished an MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. I remember first hearing the song “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” from the album My Love is Your Love while sitting at a light on the Saw Mill Parkway. I thought what a catchy-empowering hook and (finally) she’s gotten a clue about bad boy Bobby Brown! We’re probably ready now to move on to the next phase of her life, sans Bobby, which I hope is a revisit of that beautiful, fresh-faced happy teen thing.

Not to be. Things got bad, very bad. Through it all, Bobby went to jail and there was this melodramatic reunion on his release, the 2001 Michael-Jackson special's alarming weight loss, the marijuana bust in 2000, in the early 2000s failing to show up for scheduled performances and being fired from an Academy Awards show, the attitude problems in her interview with Diane Sawyer in 2002 (“I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. Okay? We don't do crack. We don't do that. Crack is wack!”), her spat with Wendy Williams, the disoriented behavior on that international trip to Israel, and the final nail to her image being the 2005 reality show Being Bobby Brown. Her biggest enemy always seemed to be her own ego.

I don’t even remember Just Whitney being released in 2002, the holiday album in 2003 or I Look to You in 2009 (the first album cover where Whitney looked pretty haggard).

Going back to the beginning, I must tell you the song “Greatest Love of All” grated on my nerves. And everyone I knew used to make fun of the lines: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.” The accompanying video included Whitney’s own mom, gospel singer Cissy Houston, and told the indulgent story of how a young Whitney was guided to be the strong, secure woman she grew up to be. It was full of empowerments: “I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadow. If I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe. No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity. Because the greatest love of all is happening to me. Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all. And if by chance, that special place that you've been dreaming of leads you to a lonely place, find your strength in love.”

None of which turned out to be a life-giving truth for Whitney Houston. Which is what grates me most of all. I had a friend in high school who exactly reminded me of Whitney Houston. She was beautiful and talented and full of false bravado. Piously righteous before suddenly capitulating to the demons of the hardest vices.

Whitney Houston was the soundtrack of my young life to be sure. All that I loved and was frustrated by. I took for granted what teens before me could not, that beautiful black people could be pop mega-superstars. And because in many ways I still take that fact for granted as right and obvious, I feel I can say how I really felt about Whitney Houston. Why gloss over the unpleasant truth in respect for the dearly departed voice? As talented as she was, I wish she had been the strong character she once convinced me she was. Or at least the happy, angelic sprite I always wanted her to be.

 

Cher RIP

So! Cher was rumored to be dead.
For like 12 hours.
And no one emailed me.

For the love of God. Not a peep from ANYBODY.

Were we all holding our breaths? I'd like to believe that because, I have to tell you, I was a little put out.

I only learned of the not-death Friday afternoon because cherscholar.com was down for a few days due to a server switch. I was logging into a very popular online mail service to double-check my site's new email addresses and, per usual, I scanned the top-ten online searches while I was loggin in. To my surprise, the number one search at that moment was

"Cher not dead."

What the? Cher is the number one search!! I don't think she's been the number one search term ever...as long as I've been scanning number one search terms anyway. And besides, she's been not dead for 12 hours, from Thursday night to Friday morning. And nobody told me!

The Twitter scam even had another Armenian-celebrity, Kim Kardashian, fooled. And because Kim is one of the nations top five tweeters, the story went off the rails.

Meanwhile, this was not the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth I will come to expect from Cher fans.

In one brief second of comprehending that Cher was not dead, Cher's life flashed before my eyes. Or rather my life of being a fan of the Cher product and having that icky realization that products do not have mortality, people do. It threatened the death of a comforting obsession for this heterosexually  queer gal; and seeing as I've been a fan since I was four or five years old, it threatened a final death knell to my childhood, something I've managed to hold on to into my 40s.

But...this isn't entirely about me. Cher's friends did not take kindly to the twitter scam. Loree Rodkin posted, “Whoever started that stupid rumor needs to have their face dragged across concrete." Yikes. Imagine Paul McCartney saying that.

Cher was the number one freakin' search term and a Kardashian was embarrassed. It's kind of funny, unless you're Cher I guess.

To celebrate Cher's very aliveness and hopefully resting in peace this evening, I am posting my three favorite Cher photos, which were taken during the Norman Seeff sessions in 1975.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2012/01/cher-twitter-hoax-kim-kardashian.html

Paul McCartney, Jeff Goldblum and Cher. What an odd-ball rumored-to-be-dead club.

Tango...Another Transgendered Story

One of my favorite New York City experiences between 1995 and 1999 was going to see Kiki and Herb Christmas shows every year with my friend Coolia who was a big fan of theirs.

Kiki, a character developed by Justin Bond, was an amazing experience of drag cabaret comedy unlike anything I'd ever seen. Kiki was an alcoholic has-been lounge singer who did hilarious lounge-recreations of Christmas songs mixed with modern hits like "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Kiki was both achingly bitter and inspiringly hopeful as she recounted the sad back-stories of both Kiki and Herb, my favorite quote being, "it aint easy being a gay Jew 'tard." Well...you had to be there. The DVDs do NOT do the show justic e, the music, the humor or the pathos. Amazingly, Kiki would go through this imperceptible slide towards  public drunkenness during the duration of the show in a tour de force performance.

Recently, Justin has gone through the transgender process, reborn as Justin Vivian Bond. I received his memoirs for Christmas and read the 136-page book, Tango, in one sitting. The book is mostly a touching focus on his childhood experiences, structured around his relationship with the neighborhood cad "Tango."

This is an interesting alternative take to adult-transgendering of Chaz' Transition. Interestingly, Cher makes three appearances in this book, too. In once scene, Justin gets in trouble for illicit behavior just after buying "Sonny & Cher's latest album."

My greatest role model on television was Cher. The Sonny & Cher Show always had a segment where Cher would one-up Sonny her putdowns. Any chance I got to show my finely honed skills at bitchiness was okay by me. I really didn't think of it as being mean. I thought of it as having fun.

Justin Vivian Bond is a master storyteller and I hope this is simply the first installment of a longer memoir series.

 

Plastic Surgery in "Joyful Noise" and Other Recent Books and Movies

With Mr. Cher Scholar and our recent visitor, my Los Angeles friend Christopher, I've been seeing a lot of movies and discovering some interesting book-fare from watching Book TV.

Christopher wanted to see Joyful Noise because we both like Dolly Parton. I was hesitant because the trailers looked pitiful. But he talked me into it and I must say I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. You might chalk that up to lowered expectations but I would defend the musical numbers as fun, kind of like a gospel Glee episode. Also, Queen Latifah (who I love dearly but cannot continue to support her crappy movies) had an absolutely awesome performance in the movie in a scene where she chews her daughter out in a hotel elevator bank. And finally, you have to see the thing just to make some sense out of Dolly's latest plastic surgery.

Cher's usually our fall-girl for this kind of gripe to be sure. And how frustrating because this is a ridiculous no-win situation for our aging female stars. I heard my friend watching TV and saying about one star, "she really should get her neck fixed." But she can't win because if she "fixes it" we get this, the latest face of Dolly, which clearly doesn't look right. All through the movie, she had to overact to get her face to even work, and her smile resembled the face of The Joker's. Her lips didn't fully close! It was creepy. To stay-off the aging process, Dolly went right from pretty (if pancaked with makeup) to grotesque. Surely this wasn't the goal. In fact, this is a sure backfire.  I watched the movie thinking Dolly looked like a frail grandmother. She's Cher's age!

This insanity must stop. To see the beautiful Dolly Parton come to this.

We also saw the documentary Urbanized at the local Santa Fe art house. It was a fascinating look at how cities are thinking creatively about how to handle urban problems. The city of LA was noticeably absent from the world-wide cities showcased and citizens of LA could surely gain something from watching it. One South American mayor changed my whole idea about the usefullness of subways!

My husband and I also saw Gainsbourg (Vie Heroique), the French movie about Serge Gainsbourg. With animation, a puppet altar-ego, much music and beautiful surreal elements, I only wish Cher could have a biopic this cool someday. My favorite songs from the movie were "La Javanaise" and "Initials B.B."

Book TV also lured me into purchasing Justin Frank's Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Frank also covered George W. Bush with this psycho-analytic treatment. We learn how Obama's early childhood and lack of contact with his parents possibly shapes his behavior in the White House and with the Republicans.

Book TV also showcased a book I haven't purchased yet, Hollywood Left & Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics by Steven Ross. He explores in depth Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and recounts that although the Left gets a lot of screen-time, the Right has actually made further inroads in Washington with their cadidates and policy. And at one point he says something like "because you're a celebrity doesn't mean you give up your citizenship." Very true. Sometimes I am critical when celebrities endorse candidates (more because I feel the clash of their celebrity brands working against the cause). But all citizens have the right to feel the passion and get involved.

 

Christmas with Billy the Kid

Sigh. Life continues to get in the way of Cher schoalring. For Christmas, Mr. Cher Scholar and I headed down to southern New Mexico to visit the Billy the Kid locales of Fort Sunmer (where he was kilt) and Lincoln (where he made his brazen escape). Then we headed to Roswell for the night. Sadly, my Uncle Ben (really my Dad's cousin but practically an Uncle to me) passed away on Christmas Day and the funeral was set for the following Wednesday. So we decided to head home, on the way seeing our remaining sights of Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. Mr. Cher Scholar poses to the left with Billy the Kid; Franz poses below on White Sands snowy beach.

In the meantime, I've been saving up a few links from friends.

Cher groups at Yahoo posted this link to USA Today's own version of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame --the fashion edition and Cher sits here with some reputable company: http://mediagallery.usatoday.com/Women%27s+role+in+rock/G2245?csp=lfmpg

Cher scholar Tyler sent around this interesting link -- a story about one-time Cher Show and Sonny & Cher Show writer Iris Rainer Dart who wrote Beaches with Cher in mind. Oh, how sweet that would have been.

In fact, she was apparently the only female writer on those TV shows, saying,

"she had to prove her mettle, mostly by "not crying," even when criticism was rugged. Brutal honesty was the name of the game and no one was too concerned with hurt feelings. Still, as the sole woman on the show, she had a close relationship with Cher, who ultimately became the model for the lead character in "Beaches." Initially she had hoped Cher would play the part in the film version, but in the end it went to Bette Midler."

And finally, Cher scholar Dishy was kind enough to recall my frustration that not enough non-"Believe" Cher mashups existed in the Universe and sent me this new mashup, Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" mashed with "Song for the Lonely."

I so love mashups. I really do.

 

Open Letter to the Horror Movie Industry

Happy Halloween. My favorite holiday. And since I'm on a rant-roll, I thought I'd make a few complaints about the state of the American Horror Movie Industry.

I love horror movies. My favorites tend to be really creative ghost stories. But I have plenty of sci-fi horror flicks on the list, even some classic slashers. I even appreciate many things about Italian and Japanese horror.

Like the "American Western" or closed poetry forms (ex: metric verse, sonnets), there's an architecture of rules made to be followed or, for the more gifted artist, rules made to be broken.

Ever since the mid 1990s, I feel like I've been avoiding more horror movies than I’ve been watching: the formulaic slasher has evolved into the "apocalyptic masochistic slasher." I see this as the result of a decade of Gen-X irony. But as iconic writer David Foster Wallace said when I saw him at a reading in Los Angeles (a year or so before he killed himself), haven't we taken irony as far as we can? Essentially irony implies we don't really care. And how long can we not really care? Isn't it time to return to a little sincerity?

As much as I love the mose recent Japanese films, which are artful and scary, they are ultimately dissatisfying. Sure, it may be a cultural thing: American like happy endings. Europeans and Asians find those to be drippy and unsatisfying. Why should our hero always survive?

Due to irony and Japanese influence, no one has survived a horror movie in about 20 years. The movie Insidious was highly recommended to me recently as a very creepy ghost story. My last straw broke in the final scene where the whole cast will likely die at the hands of our hero, suddenly possessed…after all that freakin work to persevere.

Rob Zombie movies...so awesome looking, but again with the message that all the work one might do to survive is for naught. It this any more realistic than the hero always succeeding?

I’m depressed by these movies.
I’m bored by these movies.

I'm bored with the storyline of a parent who has lost a child and can’t go on (and doesn’t have the will or energy to fight the monster). Of course losing a child is THE worst storyline. But people did used to be able to survive it. Give them some hope of survival for chrissake.

I’m bored by the storyline of the ingenue who is smart and brave but will be undone by evil forces much larger than she is…just because. Just because what? Just because she's a girl?

This era of our lives: a bleak economy, hateful crowds, rampant narcissism, real lunacy, horror and abuse in people’s real lives: I want to see that horror can be overcome. I don’t want to be shown over and over characters who can never overcome in situations that cannot be overcome. 

Why would I keep watching this over and over again?

Snap out of it.

How thrilling was it back in the day? Back when Linda Blair made it over that fence (finally) in Hell Night? If she can do it...hell, we can do it.

 

My Stuff Marooned on My Parents' Lawn

This is a picture of some of the last of my stuff that I've had stored in my parents basement for the last 20 years as it's being loaded on to a United Van Lines truck.

This is a shipment that includes about 30 boxes of Cher stuff, all my childhood tchotchkes, that green chair I inherited from my grandmother and many, many other things.

It also includes this somewhat large dollhouse you see in the picture. When I was a baby, my grandmother from New Mexico gave me savings bonds (probably for college or something). When I was eleven, I instead cashed them in for a Victorian dollhouse that my Dad ended up building shingle by shingle. When I was about 19, my grandfather moved in with us from Reedsport, Oregon. He helped me finish the outside work on it. I remember how he used to spend about ten minutes organizing all the glue and wood before we got going each night, telling me how important organizing things was.

My Dad had actually already built me another dollhouse (from scratch) when I was about 4 or 5 that looked like The White Hosue. Then when I was 27 years old, my parents moved from St. Louis to the Lancaster Pennsylvannia area. Before the move, my Dad told me he would only move one dollhouse, not both of them. What? It was a very traumatic decision somewhat like Sophie's Choice. I chose this one.

And I'm 42 years old now and it's time to get my stuff moved out so I can finish the dollhouse project before I die. My mom emailed me this picture this morning as the truck was being loaded. I guess my stuff has kind of gotten attached to my parents. I think the dollhouse was symbolic of something...like my childhood...because seeing the thing out on my parents lawn has made me weepy all day.

I've very happy to get my stuff and all; I guess it's just a bit sad to be finally moving out.

 

Friday May 20th

Okay, so the last time it was Friday, May 20th (a date I tend to remember because it's Cher's birthday), I went to see the documentary Inside Deep Throat with my friend and caught my boyfriend at the theater (The New Beverly) with another girl. He told me earlier in the day he was babysitting his kids (as he said he must do every Friday night). 

 

 

I learned some things that day:

1. LA is a small town and you keep running into people you know.
   
2. Don't trust any man who says he can't go out on Friday nights.
3. I can't sit through a movie I've wanted to see for months after I've just caught my boyfriend cheating.

I still haven't seen Inside Deep Throat and I've become a little superstitious of May 20ths that fall on a Friday.

I have my fingers crossed about today.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of a camping trip John and I took earlier this week. It was a place called Mills Canyon in Harding County, New Mexico, an awesome canyon in the middle of the high plains. In the late 1800s, a man named Melvin Mills once had an orchard empire down in the canyon. He also ran a stagecoach hotel. He used innovative irrigation for the time. Unfortunately his bad karma caught up with him (he was a somewhat suspect Santa Fe Ring politician) and a massive flood at the turn of the century wiped out his orchard. He never recovered from the loss and died penniless.

But his outbuildings are still there in the canyon, some fruit trees are left, and many forms of wildlife, including Barbary sheep, eagles, turtles...

We let the little Blue Gill go.

 

Our evening watchman:

 
   

 

Cher Tweets on Missouri Puppy Mill Ban

Cher and fans have been discussing Missouri’s Puppy mill issue in her tweets lately. This got my attention because I was raised in St. Louis (mostly), and Missouri was then horrifically reported to be one of the biggest puppy mill abuse states in the country. So I followed this anti-puppy-mill vote closely last year. It was sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States.

Catching up to the legislative aftermath, it seems the Missouri legislature scaled the law back considerably in favor of law-abiding breeders and agricultural interests who claimed the "puppy" bill extended to far out toward other animal interests. God forbid!

Democrat Governor Jay Nixon seemed to be caught in the middle and was trying to broker a compromise between voters and the Missouri congress. The Human Society is against the compromise. Both sides appeared in Jefferson City to protest.

Some good articles:

• http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/20/2815663/lawmakers-offer-deal-to-nixon.html
• http://www.lakenewsonline.com/news/x1508086725/Missouri-governor-will-look-at-proposed-changes-to-puppy-mill-law
• http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2011/04/20/nixons-puppy-mill-compromise-threatened.html
• http://kc.citizen-publications.com/news/missouri/capital-hosts-dueling-prop-b-protests-1887

I also checked the website of The Animal Legal Defense Fund. Their action item recommendation based on news from March was to write the Governor: http://www.aldf.org/article.php?id=1596

Their Update--March 17, 2011: Missouri legislators have voted to repeal Prop. B, endangering countless puppies in the abusive puppy mill industry. Please send your urgent letters to Governor Jay Nixon asking him to veto this repeal:

Office of Governor Jay Nixon
P.O. Box 720
Jefferson City, MO 65102