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Name Dropping at the Academy of Country Music Awards

April 21, 2010 / / 5 Comments

DCher-cma Does Cher plan to lasso some young and defenseless country singer with that chain on her hip?

The funny thing about Cher's Sunday appearance on the ACMA's is the sound of Reba McEntire introducing her. God love her, it came out more like ChhErr.

And Cher got a Standing O from this surprising audience. Well, it shouldn’t be such a surprise that they love a good femme-Elvis when they see one. Awww, they’ll all just closet fans, you know it.

But to back it up, Cher talked about her "country creds." You know, creds…credentials…authenticity. Hmmm. I would have bought it more if she had worn a cowboy hat.

I would seriously like to hear more details about her mom  Georgia Holt's gig with “a little band called Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.” Cher also teased us about a duet with “my good friend Merle Haggard (wouldn't that be sweet!); but then she followed it up by saying she had a "hard time wrapping her head around "Haggard & Cher." She also spoke about the first song her mom ever taught her, "Hey Good Lookin."

At the end, Cher introduced Blake Shelton, who performed his No. 1 hit “Hillbilly Bone” with Trace Adkins. Blake had this to say:

“I’ve never met Cher, probably never will, but knowing that she said my name on national television – that’s badass.”

His girlfriend, Miranda Lambert, who scored various awards the same night for Video of the Year, Album of the Year and Top Female Vocalist of the Year, attended the show with her little shelter dog from Ada, Oklahoma, a dog coincidentally named “Cher.” During the show, the puppy waited backstage in the dressing room.

Jeremy Helligar of True/Slant had this to say about Cher's appearance:

Phase Two of Project Cher’s Comeback officially began on Sunday night with her appearance at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas, where she’s been performing regularly since 2008. (Phase One was her presenting gig with Christina Aguilera at the Golden Globes in January.) She’s no doubt hoping it culminates with her third Oscar nomination for Burlesque, her first movie since Stuck on You in 2003.

Cher is the kind of star that we simultaneously love and laugh at, so there’s a surge of optimism surrounding her comeback hopes (or maybe that’s just among her gay fans). Though the presence of her more polarizing costar Aguilera means it could go either way, when it comes to Cher, who launched previously successful — and improbable — comebacks in 1979, 1987, and 1998, anything can happen, and it usually does.

Sources:
http://www.okmagazine.com/2010/04/miranda-lambert%e2%80%99s-dog-cher-brings-good-luck/

http://trueslant.com/jeremyhelligar/2010/04/19/a-cher-resurrection-j-lo-redux-what-will-be-the-greatest-comeback-of-2010/

An old People Magazine about Georgia Holt (who's larger story seems like it would be a very interesting tale): http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20071447,00.html

 

The Blog Post of Leaked Things

April 15, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Cherlasvegas The Burlesque script has been leaked: http://cher.yuku.com/topic/10365/t/Burlesque-Spoiler-But-Really-Cool.html

Good lord, exactly what piece of this movie will be a surprise to us come fall? I plan to do a 5-minute reenactment of the movie for my husband this Friday nite. That’s the risk of constant PR/leaks. That or fans will be whipped up into such a frenzy they might spontaneously combust. Not a pleasant way to die.

But somewhat less pleasant than being the scientist with an idea to cure cancer who dies at a Cher show with other "nameless, faceless" putzes in a Cher-grand-entrance tragedy, as was so put in Cher’s year-3 opening monologue leaked this week.

My Husband Shoulders Through The Casablanca Years

April 15, 2010 / / 0 Comments

6369420150_large Imagine my husband trapped in this car, which looks similar to my ride sans pimping.

Because I'm working on a zine article about Cher's Casablanca tenure, my husband was made to suffer listening through three Cher albums last night while I was driving us to Hollywood. First we stopped on LaBrea to eat in Little Ethiopia at Rahel's. It was amazing and vegan. Lovely interior. We were the only ones in there all night. Then I took us to Amoeba Records where I picked up 3 Cher lps and 2 used CDs. More on those later. I usually try to even out my Cher purchases at Amoeba with some Elvis Costello or some Eels…just because the place is so painfully hip. But not this time. The horn-ripped-glasses-wearing attendant didn't even seem phased. In fact, he tried to cross-sell me the Half Breed album that was sitting in the Recent Arrivals bin. Then we went to Hustlers to spend the wedding shower gift-card we received almost a year ago. I can’t tell you what we purchased there but let's just say it involves The Munsters.

So after a full run through of Take Me Home, Prisoner and the bulk of Black Rose, I have to tell you John did not hold up well. And he is usually loathe to critique Cher in front of me. Even at the aforementioned wedding shower during the cut-throat Newlywed Game. When asked to name something he was sick of hearing about, he refused to say Cher. This is despite the fact that all other guests were imploring him to say Cher. I said Cher without skipping a beat. He said Barry Manilow. It was an odd moment of pop culture shame for me, that wedding shower moment: a) because my celebrity obsessions were public knowledge and even I am creeped out by this, and b) Barry Manilow? I didn't even talk about Barry Manilow when I was 10 years old and obsessed. There's just nothing to explicate with Barry Manilow. There really isn't.

By the end of the car ride last night John was reduced to yelling at policemen who were holding up the 405 freeway and gesturing frantically for our exit. All I can say is I've had to listen to plenty of The Decemberists over the last four years.

Sonny & Cher…Get It?

April 9, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Sunni & Shi'a

Sunni-shia

Wow. Hasn’t it been since like the late 70s since we’ve seen a good Sonny & Cher political cartoon?

(Thank you JeffRey for sending this to me.)

So I spent Easter day in San Diego and I must stay it was both a culturally enriching and perilous experience. Due to my old age and utter glee at being able to afford a short trip, I, many times over, forgot to pay attention to the GET GAS light that was blaring at me all morning. At one point my husband says, “Do we need gas” and I noticed the red and bright dashboard notice. Immediately after that, we passed the big blue inflatable King Kong waving to us from the east side of Highway 5 and I pulled off to the very next off-ramp…which alarmingly turned out to be the La Jolla Parkway! My beloved Bluebell sputtered and chugged out of fuel just as we were trying to make it over the steep Parkway overpass, a quarter of a mile from the gas station. 

Thank God, John mentioned gas when he did because just moments and ten yards of pavement sooner, we would have been stuck on a death-defying, shoulder-less stretch of lane-merging Parkway. The nearness of a possible wreck made me start to hyperventilate soon after we pulled over. John called AAA and we got gas within 20 minutes. But in those 20 minutes of waiting I was convinced a speeding, merging SUV would veer off the road and crush the three of us (our furkid Franz was along for the ride), smashing us into a little tin can. I couldn’t help but think of two things: 1) at least I will die with those I have most loved and 2) was I just singing “There But For Fortune” this morning when we passed that wreck on the 405?

But on the bright side…

We saw the lovely San Marcos area, took a hike with ocean views, ate at the scrumptious Los Primos Mexican takeout place in Carlsbad, walked around Old Town (where a new “heritage” cul-de-sac of Victorian houses hovers intimidatingly over the old adobe streets) and Balboa Park, where we marveled over the Easter flowers and international cottages. We took home some BBQ from Kansas City BBQ near the Martin Luther King promenade and the Gaslight Quarter. It wasn’t very good and I almost wished we had instead patronized Jim Croce’s wife’s restaurant Croce’s.

Because I love Jim Croce songs.

We were driving home during the big Earthquake happening just below the border, one that everyone else felt except us (even our friends up in LA felt it). Was it because we were driving? We stopped at a rest area around that time and our furkid went nuts, barking at everyone and sniffing the ground. I thought the stress of being stranded on a highway with half-wit human parents who keep stranding him on highways (if he remembers Christmas day getting stuck between Barstow and Needles with a blown-out tire and a Needles gas station worker telling us angrily “No one will help you today! It’s Christmas!”) and all this highway shoulder time was finally taking its toll on him. But quite possibly, it was his heightened sensitivity to Earthquakes.

  

Would Marcel Proust Pastiche Cher?

April 1, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Proust I find Cher scholarship everywhere…even when I'm wallowing in high-art subjects like French writers.  Listening to a books on tape during my daily commute, I've been enjoying the biography of Marcel Proust by Edmund White.

At one point, he talks about how Proust enjoyed writing “voluntary pastiche” (or impersonations) of famous society types, writers and actors of the day. He called them voluntary because he was willfully impersonating them in order not to “involuntarily” copy them later on in his own works. In other words, he did send-ups of other famous writers to get their iconic styles out of his system.

White states that Proust liked to pick writers like Flaubert and avoided others like Voltaire because their “simple and straightforward style was difficult to parody,” White continues, “just as Drag Queens avoid doing unadorned beauties such as Audrey Hepburn and are inspired by highly-constructed women such as Mae West and Barbra Streisand.”

Interesting way to put it: highly-constructed woman vs. simple and straightforward. It's the best reason I've heard put forward as to why certain celebrities are more easily and wantonly impersonated. If something is organic or direct, there’s no layer of added style to grab on to. And reasonably, it would be hard to do something as inauthentic as the art of impersonation on subjects so intensely authentic.

Cher in the Sun

April 1, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Chersurfs Okay, so usually there's the ubiquitous paparazzi shot of Cher in a clown-white beauty mask walking to her car from a Beverly Hills health clinic or spa. In fact, I've been fatigued by all the most recent paparazzi shots. Are they really worthy of re-posting and consuming? But then these shots pop up this week: Cher on the beach (okay, not unheard of) but actually enjoying the water…what an anomaly! I almost can’t get my head around it.  There was that paparazzi shot back in the 80s of Cher sunbathing on a boat with her ass tattoo unveiled. These things exist, I suppose. It’s just not as common for us to see Cher frolicking in the surf as it is to see Cameron Diaz doing it. Beauty mask shot is much, much more common. Flipping off the a-hole taking the picture…not at all unusual.

Do you think we’ll ever uncover pictures of Marlene Dietrich or Katharine Hepburn in the ocean??

No.

Exactly!

Well, we did see Katharine Hepburn golfing, I guess. But I don’t think my astonishment has as much to do with the intrusions of the paparazzi, (which are granted and I feel an uncomfortable voyeur's guilt), as much as I am surprised with the idea that this is a sport of Cher’s time and she's partaking of it in spite of us.  

It’s a weird moment of Cher being a media object and stubbornly refusing to be a media object. Of Cher being timeless (more and more becoming part of the secured rank of Hollywood's old glamor guard) and her being solidly, modernly of her time.

Oh, for Christ's sake, I’m starting to talk like Proust now!

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/usa/2914350/Boardings-Cher-bliss.html#ixzz0jnknUAluChersurfs3

Cher has been caught having a fantastic time enjoying paddle boarding off the Hawaiian Island of Maui. Cher has a little trouble at times keeping her balance, but the pop queen ended up walking on water.

Walking on water? See? We jestly deify. We make timeless. Yet by paddle boarding, she stays in resolutely in time.

What Would Cher Do on a Date?

April 1, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Ron-galella-cher-and-gregg-allman How would Cher handle a date who had passed out into his plate of pasta? 

The College Code of Cher, by Sara Cox, is all about how college students should take the advice of Cher songs and date like an empowered woman. Things start off with a nifty description of Cher and introduction of the article's premise…

As an iconic American performer, Cher is a woman known by all. In fact, we know some pretty intimate details about her life. However, very few of us appreciate the sound advice that her melodies and lyrics have to offer. College is a time in our lives when many of us are deeply involved in the dating game. We suffer through multiple break-ups, back-ons and variations of the word ‘commitment’ during our time on the college campus. As dating faux pas occur commonly on college campuses (often, embarrassingly enough, in public places), I offer you the words of Cher to curb your dating mishaps and to help you further enjoy your time in the college dating circuit.

Can melodies offer advice…technically? I only dated one person in college. I feel like I missed the whole "circuit."

What follows is an explications of "I Got You Babe" with its lightness and fun:

Enjoy the relationship without taking it or yourself too seriously, “Let’s see what happens” isn’t the worst thing a friend or loved one can say.

Then, we look more deeply into the song, "If I Could Turn Back Time":

Don’t be distracted by the thong and sailors in the video; Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” can teach us to select our words carefully in a disagreement with our significant other as well as to admit when we are wrong…We should all take a look in the mirror when reading this page of the Code of Cher and make a conscious effort to up the level of foresight as well of maturity in all of our collegiate romantic encounters.

Code of Cher. Sounds more like a perfume than a manifesto. But what about "Believe"?

Don’t be the subject of Cher’s song, BE CHER: end the relationship, move on, and don’t let lingering bitterness get in the way of the happiness that you deserve! When Dating in College, Live by the Code of Cher.

Thank you, Sarah Cox. That's actually not bad advice for anybody in the early stages of dating no matter what their age. And I would add that in my experience people will mirror back to you what you project to them. So pick your attitude wisely: gloomy and needy or wise yet fun.

http://buquad.com/2010/03/16/when-dating-in-college-live-by-the-code-of-cher/

  

Two New Great Mashups

March 25, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Rem Or new to me rather.

R.E.M. vs. Cher – “Losing My Believe”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6kY3o5TjnQ

Cher vs. Alice Deejay – “Better Believe Alone”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nZ1o-ypo2M

Both are top notch. “Better Believe Alone” actually works like a call and response, one song arguing with the other.

Alice These are actually my favorite of all the “Believe” mashups (so far); but seriously, who do we have to f*%k to get a mashup of “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves?

 

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