Category: Cher in Art & Literature (Page 1 of 7)

Cher Scholarin Out in the World

January 4, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

So I noticed a few things at the end of last year while Cher Scholarin.

One was when I was coming home from a family reunion in Cleveland, (where my parents now live), and I was using Spotify logged in as Mr. Cher Scholar to locate Cher’s new Christmas album. I noticed that the Cher Scholar playlists were coming up kind of high. (See left.)

But then I thought maybe that’s because Mr. Cher Scholar might have played those playlists once before and he was getting a personal shuffle. It’s hard to be scientifically objective in the universe of algorithms.

Results are definitely not consistent. You don’t even get the same major categories searching via phone app versus phone browser or desktop app.

I also visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this visit to Cleveland. Julie had gone earlier in the year and saw the electronic board of fan votes. At that time (May, 2023) Cher was in the #8 position and Britney Spears was the next female #10. She sent me a picture.

Cher was at #4 by the time I visited in November and shockingly Cher was not only the highest-ranking woman but still the only woman (solo or in a band) in the top twenty! Britney Spears was the next female listed at #21. Unbelievable.

But you can chalk all of this up to the kinds of people who visit the Hall of Fame (it’s not a cheap ticket). It’s also not a pristine sample of everyone’s views by any means. It’s just a sample of the views of people who have the money and interest to travel to Cleveland and visit the RnR HoF.

I myself dutifully voted for Cher, as did Mr. Cher Scholar but I think that was probably just unspoken peer pressure. I don’t think he honestly cares a whit about Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artists.

Some of us have been theorizing the many reason’s Cher, as a record breaker, is not in the HoF: the silly perception of her from the varsity show, the lack of her cool factor in music, dislike of Sonny’s promotional (possible payola) background. My friend Christopher told me last weekend that HoF founder Jenn Wenner (recently removed from the HoF board due to some asinine comments he made about female and black artists), vowed never to let the band Foreigner in due to a personal grievance, which Christopher said was particularly egregious due to the impressive variety of their output.

But then on some basic level I just don’t understand Hall of Fames. We went through the Football Hall of Fame (also near Cleveland) on the same trip. To make sense of them, (and don’t get me started on museum theory and the idea of false scarcity: we’ve been there already), I spent the time counting both footballs (103) and guitars (167). There were no guitars at the Football HoF and no footballs at the Rock and Roll HoF. Go figure.

ASMR

So ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and it’s like the pleasure sensations you might get from certain tactile ambient soundtracks. I first heard about it from the trendy kids at the community college here in Albuquerque. It was a “thing” a few years ago to seek out ASMR videos which include things like people tapping their fingernails on hard surfaces, quietly whispering or silently unwrapping things, samples of vocal fry (okay, if that’s what you’re in to).

I was already primed to like this shit. Mr. Cher Scholar says one of my favorite movies, Into Great Silence, is just one long ASMR movie. I can also locate it near my love of really prominent movie foley (like from the 1970s-era) and my love of the sound of my feet walking over the plethora of varieties of New Mexico dirt paths.

So for a while now I’ve wanted to collect up all the Cher-related ASMR videos. Years ago these videos were very pleasant. But I’ve noticed a trend for ASMR practitioners to be too too repetitive (and almost too loud) these days. Full minutes of tapping the outside of a Cher shirt is just silly.

Also, unboxing videos have taken on a life of their own and some don’t even have any ASMR quality. People just like watching things be unboxed as it turns out.

Here’s a playlist for you of both ASMR and unboxing videos:

Unboxing the Christmas album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z24VNjbzgFQ&t=46s
Unboxing a Believe CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF2zUUo5IXo
Unboxing the Believe CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpz4UWLa1B4&t=231s
Unboxing the It’s a Man’s World CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAN99o3mXk
Unboxing It’s a Man’s World vinyl box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OneddA7ZTOg&t=124s
Cher’s Eau de Couture perfume unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKGcxNgmNM (classic ASMR)
Unboxing the Chersace shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F1uc7rz6lI&t=146s
Some lucky fan got a box of Cher stuff and unboxed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywlU2kdvPV4&t=2154s
Unwrapping the I Paralyze CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgAoAStxayA
Unwrapping the Living Proof CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdONiBIIdA
Cher samples of vocal fry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKJxbNynro8&t=261s
This funny lady enthusiastically whisper-reads a Cher magazine while chewing gum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NZ4rLUvrGQ&t=238s

Cher in Literature

I’m always surprised when I find references to Cher in very fine literature. Last year I found two instances of this. Earlier in 2023 I started reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I really enjoy Murakami and have been working my way through his books. 1Q84 is a tome at 1,157 pages of awesomeness. And the book kept coming back to references of Sonny & Cher and the song “The Beat Goes On.”

Here’s the novel summary from The Encyclopedia Britannica: “Set in Tokyo in an alternate version of the year 1984, Murakami’s reality-bending novel explores star-crossed lovers Aomame and Tengo’s involvement with a mysterious cult. References to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four abound explicitly and thematically.”

Page 499

Page 534

Page 544

Then right before Christmas I read a Donald Barthelme story from the book Forty Stories called ‘Porcupines at the University.” In the story the Dean of a college thinks an oncoming herd of porcupines are all about to enroll at his understaffed university. But a cowboy porcupine wrangler is simply driving them across the country in order to seek his own fame and fortune for his trail songs. He dreams about appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show or The Sonny & Cher Show (which were never concurrently showing but never mind.)

Cher in Literature

October 9, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I came across another instance recently of Cher in a poem. This one is by Anita Endrezze.

La Morena and Her Beehive Hairdo

1965-1970

The Dark One sported a beehive hairdo
where she once hid her brother Alfonso.
His girlfriend had a husband who carried a switchblade
pretty as a butterfly in his back pocket.
Alfonso camped out in La Morena’s dusky hair
until the coast was clear, at least as far a San Pedro.
Then he vamoosed to Tucson
where he married a young hairdresser
from the Yaqui barrio.

Without any family responsibilities, La Morena felt light-headed.
She changed her name again. Old Lady. It was the sixties, man,
and she was everyone’s old lady. She really dug those long-haired vets
from Nam. She wore granny boots and long paisley dresses
and carried a small baggie of white horse
in her leather fringed purse. Everyone called her
Indian Princess and said Cher looked just like her.
She slept around, snorting coke up a straw
until she saw red stars galloping around her heart
and herds of tiny white horses dying in nights of Black Velvet.

I won’t ask her if she remembers. It was real
but it wasn’t true. She was living in someone else’s mandala
because it was on the top-ten chart. Somewhere
along the way she lost herself. It’s the Yaqui Way
of Knowledge by Carlos Coyote-Peyote.
When we found Jesus, we held out our palms
for coins, Bibles, good-looking Indian Boys.
She was my sister. Kneel down, little sister, she said.
And we did, down in front of altars of bees
and tubes of pale lipstick, crosses made of lovers’ bodies,
broken shoes, floods of moons, Janis Joplin, rowdy measures
of life. Those summers, slab dancing and picking up guys,
were the best times, she says, the best. When she was young
and I was just beginning my own story, my own howling
at the American moon.

2000

More Cher in Art and Literature

May 24, 2021 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

There is so much Cher to catch up on. To paraphrase Jane in Witches of Eastwick, sometimes I just can't face it.

Now that my projects have calmed down somewhat, I can get back into the swing of things and start blogging again. But if you ever need timely Cher news (and who doesn't?), you'd be well served to follow Cher Team Universe on Twitter. They get the scoop. I've never been a good scooper, sadly.

Anyway, I'm feeling daunted by the sheer volume of Cher happenings right now. So I felt today it would be good to start with new developments in Cher in art and literature. Then we can move on to the juicy videos, documentaries, biopics, new music….all that stuff.

My friend Mikaela texted me a photo of the following beautiful, beautiful poem by Chen Chen from the 2017 book When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities:

Nature Poem
by Chen Chen

The birds insist on pecking the wooded dark. The wooded dark
pecks back. It is time to show the universe what you are capable of,
says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month.
But what I am capable of is staring

at the salt accident on the coffee table & thinking,
What sad salt. I admire my horoscope
for its conviction. I envy its consistency. Every day. Every day,
there is a future to be aggressively vaguer about.

Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme
headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone
& at peace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden,
which is a fine temporary substitute for peace, except I still

have email, which is how I receive my horoscope, & even here
in the wooded dark I receive yet another email mistaking me
for another Chen. I add this to a folder, which also includes
emails sent to my address but addressed to Chang,

Chin, Cheung. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier
was convinced I was Chad. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier
did not quite finish the n on my Chen, & when my tall mocha was ready,
they called out for Cher. I preferred this by far, but began to think

the problem was Starbucks. Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop
needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you
to look at me, even as the coffee accident
is happening to my second favorite shirt?

In my wooded dark, I try insisting on a supremely tall,
never-lonely someone. But every kind of someone needs
someone else to insist with. I need. If not the you
I have memorized & recited & mistaken

for the universe—another you.

Buy the book.

Then later I was reading the thesis on Cher by Orquidea da Conceição and there's a poem referenced and included in the back appendices called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cher" by Margaret McCarthy from the 2015 book Notebooks From Mystery School." The poem is really about aging and the loss of relevance and I feel it misses the cubist focus on its purported subject that is so interesting in Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." This poem is really 13 ways of looking about aging instead of contemplating Cher's struggle with same, but there are interesting ideas here about protection by transformation and the avoidance of looking old (the dogs yowling one way or another). Although this is part of Cher's craft, it's not all of her craft. Also good meditations on creating versus re-creating, an interesting switch from the blackbird to a raven, and the reference to Sisyphus (which always reminds me of Cher's 1972 song "Down, Down, Down"). Although I've never written very good Cher poems, this makes me want to do a 13 Ways Cher poem, too. Let's all do one.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cher
by Margaret McCarthy

Why can't she just accept
it
the gravity
of the situation, the downward tug then spiral?

The raven black hair easy
to transform.
The smooth, hard sheen
of protection, her craft.

III

A miracle!
But now we know the nature of the cell is immortal.
She knew this first;
the raven heart told her.

60 years can be called
miss. Is this
what 60 looks like?

I do not know which to prefer, creation or transformation; what I make in this world,
or the re-making of myself.

Upkeep's ceaseless effort, Sisyphus
rolling back over
gray time,
over and over.

VII

The mirror's incisor lines, Imagination
flies forward and back

VIII

I know the pressure
of the rock bearing down, and I know that bird vision is involved in what I push.

The dogs yowl
at imperfection;
the dogs yap
at perfection's attempt.
The sweet bird flies
above the noise of beasts.

Must the crone die?
Is the perpetual maiden the proper keeper of spirit's wisdom?

The shadow of each equinox casts fear.
She thought the nature of cycles impossible.
Is balance possible?

XII

Is it culture's rock or time's?
The bird's eye sees time's river moving around rock and our desire
to transcend
rock and river.

XIII

The bird's shaman heart understands
evening is going to cast its shadow all afternoon. Matter
has been brought or bought
to match spirit.
In my raven heart I know
she's right.

Buy the book.

The pop-art piece above is available from https://artandhue.com/shop/cher/.

Cher Copies at the Met Gala 2019, a Cher Meme and Vincent Price

November 10, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

Dresses

Looking at a recap in Cosmopolitan magazine, I noticed two dresses at the 2019 Met Gala that seemed very derivative of past Cher dresses. I don't know why but the Kim Kardashian dress reminded me of Cher's 1998 dress for the Academy Awards. Is it me?

And Jennifer Lopez wore Cher's "Take Me Home" dress (live version).

Cher Meme (I’m here)

Cher set off a meme October 21 when she simply texted "I'm here" after being away from Twitter for awhile. Many people responded to finish the thought. For example, Alanis Morrissette replied "to remind you."

My version was "I'm here…I said to the cobwebs forming in the bathroom we use everyday."

Read other responses:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/cher-im-here-meme

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/9472313/chers-im-here-tweet-alanis-morissette

Vincent Prince on the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

A few months ago I watched the early 1970s Dr. Phibes movies and got really into Vincent Price, "the Gable of Gothic," even buying one of his cookbooks and reading Vincent Price, A Daughter’s Biography by Victoria Price.

I found I have a few things in common with Vincent Price, including St. Louis, Missouri (growing up there I already knew that), Albuquerque, New Mexico, a love of Native American art and a love of the horror genre. So I've been watching a lot of Price movies on streaming.

Plus, one of the long lost episodes of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour is the Vincent Price episode so I was interested to know if Victoria Price would mention this episode in her book. I actually had trouble finding it at first. Turns out her parents were going through a divorce that year which took up most of the chronological section of the book in 1973. In chapter 29 where she catches up with Vincent Price’s early 1970s TV appearances she covers the show:

“…I did meet a few famous people who really impressed me. During my one allowed hour of television I often watched reruns of I Love Lucy, so when my father guest-starred on The Lucy Show in 1970, my mother took me to watch the taping…A few years later, my father took me with him to tape an episode of The Sonny & Cher Show [really really the Comedy Hour]. I had seen the famous duo on TV, and was causally interested in meeting them. Their daughter Chastity was a baby, and I was introduced to both mother and daughter in what seemed more like an exotic boudoir than a typical studio dressing room. But much more exciting than meeting Cher was meeting their other guest star, George Forman, who had just been crowed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He seemed so big that when he shook my hand I was afraid he would crush it. But he had the gentlest handshake. I was thrilled to meet him because I was a sports fanatic. Growing up in Hollywood, I never idolized movie stars. I never found them glamourous because it seemed to me that they were simply my father’s colleagues. But sports were another thing. And animals. For my tenth birthday, I was taken to meet my favorite movie star—Lassie.”

Chastity too was duly impressed by Lassie when the dog appeared on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.

George Foreman actually didn’t end up airing with the Vincent Price episode. This isn’t unusual as guest stars were probably filmed, cut and aired as needed. Vincent Price’s episode aired with The Temptations on December 5, 1973 (Jerry Lewis had the Halloween spot for some unfathomable reason). George Foreman ended up in the #56 and #60 episodes which aired on December 12, 1973, and January 16, 1974 respectively.

Cher Once Did Needlepoint; Now She Valiantly Defends the United States Post Office

August 26, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

Cher Works to Save the Post Office

Excuse my title up there. I really didn't know how to tie all these disparate stories together.

First off, fans have been delighted to see Cher fighting for the U.S. post office in recent protests, phone calls and Twitter pics.

I hope if she starts volunteering for the post office, Bob Mackie designs her some "sensible shoes."

Cher and Needlepoint

Months ago someone was requested photos of celebrity needlepointers like Dinah Shore and Rosey Grier. I found as many as I could but one photo I remembered proved elusive to locate. Then Cher scholar Drew asked me a question and I went searching for the answer to that but instead found the missing needlepoint pic. Maybe someday I'll locate the answer to Drew's question while I'm looking for something else.

Anyway, Cher once did lots of needlpoint. She did so much she joked, "Then I took up needlepoint—my God, I needlepointed everything. I could have made a needlepoint stove!"

Cher needlepoints on airplanes:

Cher needlepoints circa 1978/9.

I also captured an image of Sonny pretending to needlepoint in episode #49 of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour:

And here are some needlepoints of Cher:

The Time Magazine pillow belonged to Bob Mackie and sold for $448 on Julien's Acutions.

You can buy the Moonstruck needlepoint pattern on Etsy with a companion Nicholas Cage!

What is a Silkwood Shower?

For the Chersonian Institute, I was filing old magazines and found something interesting. Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a Bullseye pieceon the last page? Do they still do that? Anyway, one I found had a disparaging arrow regarding a rumor that Bret Michaels and Miley Cyrus’ mom were dating. ET says the rumor has sent them “running for a Silkwood shower.” Ok, that's a big rude. And I wondered if that was like…a saying. Apparently it is. Urban Dictionary has a listing for it with this example:

“I had to take a Silkwood shower when I got home from that party since I smelled like an ash tray cooked on an open flame BBQ grill covered in hot sauce.”

So "snap out of it, Moonstruck eggs and the Jack speech are not the only iconic references from a Cher movie.

Here are some shots of a Silkwood shower. It's a pretty serious and scary thing and Meryl rocks it (as did Sudie Bond earlier in the movie).

Cher Concert Reviews

Concert reviews have changed. I've learned this lesson over the last year from various sources from current reviewers and from the deceased reviewers. Is this overwhelming evidence of capitalism taking over PR? Probably. Which is no such a great thing. Buyer beware, there are no objective reviews in the land of corporate conglomeration.

So it’s good to look back at a positive review and interview from 1999 (when bad reviews still existed) and this one was by T’cha Dunlevy at the Montreal Gazette is one of those. She was 30 when she reviewed the Believe-era concert and said she

“regularly feels aversion to refuse-to-die ‘60s rock acts. I had no convulsions of revulsion at the Camp Queen’s coup. Maybe it’s her synthetic, timeless beauty or her go-with-the-flow versatility, but Cher has somehow kept her proverbial cool over her three-and-a-half decades in the spotlight…a repetoir of personae, including pop-ditty princess, serious actor, 'I’m-in-love-with-a-man-half-my-age' bachelorette, reactionary mother of a lesbian [remember this was 1999] and, in her 50s. back to the top of the pops without coming off like a circus side-show act.”

“…'How many fingers and toes have you got?’ she asks, queried about whether she’s ever thought of giving up. ‘(It happens) all the time. It’s frustrating. I’m a very mercurial, emotional person, more childish sometimes than grownup. I’m not very calculating. But it’s the only think I know how to do and really love.’”

The end of the interview also notes that both Cyndi Lauper and Wild Orchid were opening for Cher at the time, the same Wild Orchid that produced Stacy Ferguson a.k.a. Fergie Duhamel a.k.a Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas.

Cher in Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler

June 25, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

A good friend of mine sends me lots of good books for birthdays and Christmas, some of them collections of short fiction. I've accumulated so many I need to start reading them to clear off a book shelf. Not all of them are my cup of tea so I usually attempt to read each story at least. If the writing doesn't grab me right away, I move on to another story or book. I keep the ones I really like.

So it came time to read this one, Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler and Cher was a prominent feature in the first three pages of the title story. Here are some screenshots. It's too much to retype.

The story opens in a bar. The Cher part on page one reads:

"Rows of cut-glass decanters filled the shelves. Schilling ran his towel over their glass stoppers. In the corner, on the big screen, Cher danced and sang a song for the U.S. Navy. Schilling had the sound off."

The reference on page two:

A drunk man comes in requesting booze. "'I don't have any money,' said the man. Cher closed her eyes and opened her mouth."

The reference on page three:

People are drinking, minding their own business: "A second shaft of sunlight appeared in the room, collided with the mirrored wall. Inside the sunlight, barely visible, Cher danced."

Then "a nightmare in the shape on an enormous post menopausal woman" comes in holding a hatchet and a rock and she "hit the big screen dead center with the rock. The screen cracked and smoked, make spitting noises, blackened."

End of Cher in the story.

This was actually nothing against Cher, this woman smashing the monitor. She was a Fire-and-Brimstone messenger come to scare the patrons over the evils of alcohol. After all the violence in the bar which runs for a few pages, we switch to a scene with a DEA agent and I lost interest here. I ended up not finishing any of the stories in the book.

Sometimes when you have too many books, you gotta make some tough choices.

From the Chersonian Archive: Joni Mitchell Lyrics

May 21, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Apologies to the Cher scholar who brought these lyrics to my attention. I printed them out to look at later and then years and years went by and I recently dug them out of the Chersonian Institute's messy archive.

There's speculation that references to Cher can be found in the lyrics of two Joni Mitchell songs. Here's what we do know: Joni Mitchell, Cher and David Geffen lived in the same house for a time while Cher was dating Geffen in 1973-74. Mitchell and Geffen are quoted mentioning this situation. When Cher left Geffen for Gregg Allman, Geffen admits he was distraught to distraction and had to seek therapy. He also states Cher was his only girlfriend. So the pool of possibilities here is very small (like Cher) if in fact Mitchell is referring to David Geffen in these two songs.

Let's take a look. Good sleuthing Cher scholar!

From her song "Love or Money" from the 1974 concert album Miles of Ailses.

Full lyrics: https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=190
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfplwJaBN1E

Specific lyrics that seem David Geffen related:

The firmament of Tinsel Town
Is strung with tungsten stars
Lots of forty watt successes
He says where's my own shining hour
He's the well kept secret of the underground
He's in debt to the company store

Specific lyrics that seem Cher-related:

His only channeled aspiration
was getting back the girl he had before…

All because that ghostly girl comes haunting
Just out of reach outside his bed
And she kicks the covers off his sleep
For the clumsy things he said
She commands his head she tries his sanity
She demands his head tonight unknowingly

Vaguely she floats and lacelike
Blown in like a curtain on the night wind
She's nebulous and naked
He wonders where she's been
He grabs at the air because there's nothing there
Her evasiveness stings him
With long legs-long lonely legs
Bruised from banging into things
One day he was standing just outside her door
He was carrying an armload of bright balloons
She just laughed
She said she heard him knocking
And she teased him for the moon…

he tried but he could not get it down
for love or money

This song was recorded in March and August of 1974, in the turmoil of Geffen and Cher's relationship.

Form "Off Night Backstreet" from the 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.

Full lyrics: https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=169
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrsub53A9EE

There are no overt references to David Geffen in the song but these are the possible Cher-related lyrics:

You pimp – laughing and strutting her to my chartered seat…
now she's moved in with you
She's keeping your house neat
and your sheets sweet…

who left her long black hair
in our bathtub drain?

This is a much later song, the album was recorded in 1977 and could be referring to another Mitchell relationship and another mysterious girl.

Cher Scholar Digs: Mad Magazine, 1967 Interview, Moonstruck

May 1, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

The picture to the left is Cher reading Mad Magazine in the mid-1960s,

So I've been organizing Cher loot during the Great Shut-In and I'm finding some good stuff….and some not-so-good stuff, like this Mad Magazine spread from March of 1973, which is ironically exactly where we're up to in cataloging the TV episodes.

Mad Magazine loves to take the piss out of popular things. So the tone of this isn't surprising. I don't tend to enjoy their sense of humor, although I enjoyed Spy vs. Spy as a kid. There's another clipping I once ripped out of one of my older brother's 70s-era issues that had a predictive age-progression for Cher's face. It was wildly inaccurate (looking back as it assumed she would never change her hair style) but I remember feeling a sense of dread about it (and not just because I destroyed a possible eBay sale from my brothers' future). I'll post it here if I come across it.

Here is the comic I was able to locate online. Click the thumbnails to enlarge. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

I think part of the un-funnyness is knowing that the premise of the critique (Cher being a bitch who pushed Sonny around) was based on a tragically false assumption. I also think this is a macho response to an emerging feminist subtext occurring in this show. And I'm not just trying to be an academic wonk. (Liar!) This kind of response sort of proves that something unnerving was happening. It's like that disturbing quote from Chris Hodenfield in the 1973 Rolling Stone piece where the author's male friends were hoping Sonny "beat the shit out of her with a tire iron" which was also a macho-Rolling Stone-reading male response to seeing a woman (a wife, no less) like Cher on television daring to act assertive and critical when, at most, macho male audiences were used to seeing only the challenges of tentative but cautious characters like Marlo Thomas' Ann Marie or Mary Richards or Gloria on All in the Family. And then there's Maude. Look, Cher isn't even included in the list: https://www.thoughtco.com/sitcoms-of-1970s-3529025. But she got this kind of blowback. Why was that?

There's an interview with Sonny & Cher in the book “Inside Pop” book by David Dachs (1967). The most interesting parts describes a Cher modeling shoot for Vogue and calls out the uniquely packaged deal of Sonny being a writer, producer, provider of arrangement ideas (if not fully the arranger), music editor, and the one who chooses the master. The author says they were able to keep a lot of their royalties this way. The article also states that in his pre-music-biz life, Sonny was a masseur. I wonder if Cher got free massages during their time together. The interview also references Sonny's early compositions including “Koko Joe” and “You Bug Me Baby," recorded by Larry Williams, which I first heard on my local oldies station a few months back.

There are also lots of mistakes in book: describing Georganne as Armenian, completely misrepresenting Sonny & Cher's age difference.

The author calls them an ingratiating couple and talks about their upcoming planned movie Ignaz (never came out) and says the movie was concerned with “mind expansion.” The author finally concluded that they “aren’t all 'camp' and kooky clothes.”

What a hip word to use. Susan Songtag's essay "Notes on Camp" had just come out in 1964.

I found an old local newspaper from when I was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the year 2000. The American Film Institute had came out with this list of the funniest movies of all time.

Moonstruck is #47.
https://www.brainerddispatch.com/news/3372065-some-it-hot-tootsie-top-list-100-funniest-american-movies

Stories on the Sleeve: Take Me Home

April 11, 2019 / Cher Scholar / 3 Comments

So earlier this year Mr. Cher Scholar found out about a call for submissions from the New Mexico Humanities Council. They wanted stories appreciating record album covers. I knew I could do something good with a Cher cover. I literally starred at them for hours after purchase, memorizing all the names. Cher's first inner sleeve was produced for her Casablanca album Prisoner in 1979, the album after Take Me Home.

I chose Take Me Home and the entry had to be 100 words or less and I kept to that limit (although I noticed many other entries in the show did not). Here was my entry:

I was 9 years old in 1979 when Cher released her only disco album. My mother balked buying it for me, saying the cover was too risqué. Forget side boob; this cover was all boob! She relented and I spent hours perusing the cover and credits to search musicians, like members of the band Toto she usually worked with or whom she thanked. She gave boyfriends and kids affectionate nicknames. I loved the burst of green Barry Levine used for the background of the photographs. A make-up malfunction resulted in the airbrushing of her face. Her outfit was designed by Bob Mackie with inspiration from then-boyfriend Gene Simmons from KISS. It was less a costume than a set piece, Viking plates and capes of shining gold. This was the time of backlash against disco, where angry white boys were gleefully burning piles of records. Cher sat on her fabulous cape, quarter-turned to us with her devil-may-care stare, as if to say “I’m going to outlast your hate and go on to play “Take Me Home,” (the title song went to #8 on Billboard’s Hot 100), to sold-out shows in big arenas well into my 70s.
And so she did. — Mary McCray, January 2019

Here are the front and back covers (click to enlarge):

The reception was last Thursday. My entry was first in the display but last in the discussion. Surprisingly the show was SRO. Here's what the full spread looked like:

Other albums were prestigious competition in record collecting: the obligatory Beatles, Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones covers, but also RUSH, Laura Nero, K.D. Lang, Simon & Garfunkel, Stan Getz, Jackson Browne, Iron Maiden, Jackson Browne, Deep Purple, Joy Division, Sufjan Stevens and two local New Mexican albums. There was thankfully one Dolly Parton album and one other disco album, Donna Summer's Greatest Hits.

I paid close attention to what the girl record collectors were talking about. The Dolly fan talked about growing up in rural New Mexico liking Dolly and feeling Dolly shame in front of her peers. The girl talking about Donna Summer also took pains to say her other cover submissions was a Doors cover. Girls talked about the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Joy Division and Sufjan Stevens entries.

The wife of the Stan Getz collector told my friend he would only listen to cool jazz and so she was unable to play her Miles Davis records. The RUSH and Iron Maiden stories were a bit intimidating in subject matter and funny presentations. But since everyone went before me, I had a chance to reconfigure my speech. Here's me talking about Cher.

I started by saying how I came from a record collecting family, including my Beatles-loving brothers and my country-and-western collecting Dad, and that when at 5 years old I decided to collect Cher records, this wasn't received well. I also retold the story of my mother not wanting to buy the album for me and what she said recently when I reminded her about it over email. She wrote me, "have I ever denied you anything?!" And I had to admit that was true…but what was the word she used? The word was "risque" and that was also true (considering I was only 9 years old and all). Anyway, I talked about the sexy viking costume design concept by Gene Simmons, who Cher was dating at the time, and how Bob Mackie made it. And how I had recently found a similar design on a Mae West dress so that cut-out boob-design wasn't anything new. Here it is from the 1933 Mae West movie, I'm No Angel:

I then talked about how record collecting wasn't easy after Take Me Home because Cher disappeared as a tab in the record bins for almost 10 years and how we all thought her career was over. But she came back to the stores in the mid-1980s and even last year at 72 her last album charted.

I talked about photographer (now movie producer) Barry Levine and the makeup snafu and how they had to do a bad, late-1970s airbrushing of her face. I also went on to talk about the musicians on the album, the three players who were part of the band Toto (and how they were also part of Sonny & Cher's backup band earlier in the 1970s and how Cher used them off and on through the early 1990s) and keyboardist Paul Shaffer.

I also talked about why I picked the album cover of all of Cher's over 40 album covers (I mentioned that every album but two have been released on vinyl). I talked about how Cher didn't want to do disco and how Casablanca talked her into it and how unpopular disco was at the time (for possibly homophobic and racist reasons in retrospect) and how looking back I think about the male gaze and how Cher is starring so strongly and defiantly back and how when I was nine (although I didn't know what the male gaze was at the time) I probably understood this as a model for how to be a confident and defiant Cher fan.

Everyone had the chance to play a sample of a song from their album. So the show ended on the song "Take Me Home."

I was most interested in the women in the show who picked artists who were very unlike them in some way. The Laura Nero album was picked by an African American woman who talked about Nero's quality of whiteness and her facial expressions captured on the cover. The Dolly Parton album was picked by the Hispanic woman from rural New Mexico. These choices opened up conversations about identity and how you relate to each other as women. The Laura Nero woman told me later she really liked my presentation, as did the man who did the RUSH cover. I appreciated that.

The Iron Maiden cover was picked by a man writing a book about Greek mythology in Heavy Metal. I will be sure to purchase it and discuss.

Mixed Bag of Honors and Accomplishments

October 23, 2018 / Cher Scholar / 5 Comments

First of all Cher's Believe album will be out on vinyl in December.

In Music

A few weeks ago Cher's album Dancing Queen made its debut on the Billboard album chart at #3. This felt disappointing as Cher and the fans were aiming for #2. Although the album did hit #1 in the list for Top Album Sales. And the song "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" reached #5 on the Dance Club Play chart. And the Gimme remixes were recently released.

So it felt a bit short at the time but my Billboard guru friend tells me I was off my meds to think this way:

"For me, I am super impressed with her position on the chart. The year is three-quarters done, so for her to have the largest week of sales for an album in 2018 by a female pop artist is a major achievement. It means she sold more albums in her debut week than 20-something Ariana Grande, who is the hottest female pop star in the U.S. currently, when she released Sweetener a few months ago. It means that the only female in any genre to post a larger one week tally this year is Cardi B. Were this released four years ago, before they started incorporating streaming into chart calculations, she would have debuted at #1 on the Top 200 chart, rather than #3 (and #1 on the sales chart). The last female pop artist to exceed this level of sales in a single week was none other than 20-something Taylor Swift who remains the biggest U.S. female artist of the last ten years. Not shabby company to keep. The fact that it is a sales sum that has only been surpassed by one other pop artist this year (Justin Timberlake) is truly remarkable.

Mary, please think of it this way–over 50,000 albums across genres are released in the U.S. each year and our 72-year-old beloved can in 2018 sell more in a single week than literally any other pop artist on Earth except one, and more than any other female artist on Earth except one. That is stupendous."

So that perspective was great. But then in week two the album feel from #3 to #43.

In Movies

Anyway, there was another Billboard list that made me feel better again: Billboards list of 100 top musician performances in movies. Cher ranks #1. J. Lynch has this to say:

Cher’s Oscar-winning turn in the 1987 romcom Moonstruck remains the standard by which you mentally check all others. Cher brings that mixture of reluctance and romantic recklessness to the screen with a self-effacing realism and millisecond-sharp comedic timing. Few performances are this irresistible, hysterical and believably low-key — and the fact that it came from one of the 20th century’s biggest pop stars leaves us unable to snap out of loving Cher in her deservedly Oscar-winning performance more than 30 years later."

The Kennedy Honor

And then there's the incredible Kennedy Honor. Maybe not in and of itself but for the fact that fans and Cher-watchers have been lobbying so long for Cher's simple induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To be beset with yet a larger honor was fully unexpected. And a bit disorienting quite frankly. But what a big deal. As my friend Christopher described it, “the government's highest form of recognition for artists…its official intention is to identify and honor artists for their lifetime contribution to the culture of the United States. That is no small potatoes.”

Especially since nobody's been noticing Cher's lifetime contribution to the culture of the United States.

The awards will be televised on December 26 on CBS at 8 p.m. Eastern.

Some articles about the honor:

The New York Times
W Magazine
Malibu Times
KennedyCenter. org
Wikipedia on the honors and past recipients

Here is the 2016 batch with some unsmiling Eagles (I take that back, 2/3 unsmiling Eagles), James Taylor, Martha Argerich, Mavis Staples, and the incomparable Al Pacino.