Category: Cher in Art & Literature (Page 4 of 7)

I love it when my obsessions collide. Poetry and Sonny & Cher. It rarely happens but when it does…happy day!

So I'm reading this great book of poems last week by the poet David Trinidad called The Late Show. It's a book of poems Cher would probably like because it's full of references to watching old late-show movies. The first poem, "The Late Show," is about Trinidad's memories of scenes from his favorite old movies. One poem is entirely about the film Penelope and ends with a reference to Turner Classic Movies. Another poem is just a creative listing of old movie titles. Yet another poem does the same thing with only Bette Davis movies.

One of my favorite pieces in the book is called "Hack, Hack, Sweet Has Been" and goes into depth about the making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush, Hush…Sweet Caroline as well as briefly cataloguing all the horror movies Joan Crawford and Bette Davis did after Baby Jane.

And of course the poem "Watching the Late Movie with My Mother" reminded me specifically of Cher.

Trinidad's poems remind me of Frank O'Hara (think "The Day Lady Died") and he's also a Barbie collector. The final poem is about how the worlds of poetry and Barbie-collecting intersect. It's called "A Poem Under the Influence" and surprisingly it referenced Sonny. Unfortunately the poem is too long for me to quote in its entirety (it's over 30 pages!) but here is the pertinent excerpt:

"I remember that What a Way to Go! was on a double bill with That Man From Rio,

but don't remember how (or if) I responded to Jean-Paul Belmondo's homely good looks.

The Beatles (already a sensation: "I Want to Hold Your Hand" topped the Billboard charts in

February '64) would soon clue me in: contrary to popular sentiment, I thought Ringo was

the sexy one. Later: Sonny Bono and Bekim Febmiu (of The Adventurers) turned me on.

I believe I saw a photograph of the latter wearing a skimpy black bathing suit in a magazine.

Cher gets all the credit for being a Gay Icon but maybe Sonny had a gay following, too. It explains the Truman Capote come-on as described in the new Cher biography.

Anyway, Trinidad is strummin my life with his fingers when he talks about the cut-throat world of poetry and how this can in any way coincide with collecting Cher dolls.

So one of the reasons I've been lagging at posting in the last few weeks is I've been finishing up a University of Pennsylvania MOOC (massive open online course) on Modern American Poetry.The class (attended worldwide by about 35 thousand people!!) was haaaarrd. Harder than the graduate poetry classes I've taken. Not only did it require hours of lectures and four essays but the poems were mostly experimental and difficult, starting with Emily Dickinson and going through head-scratching modernists like Gertrude Stein, the language poets and experimental conceptual poets. Our last essay tasked us with writing a mesostic poem.

A mesostic is similar to an acrostic poem (where a word spells down the left spine of the poem) except a word gets spelled down the middle and the source text is a jumble of words from a "found" text. There's a complicated set of rules on how to select individual words from the "seed text" that has now been developed into a computer program developed for an experimental poet named Jackson Mac Low and used heavily later by experimental artist John Cage.

We were asked to find a source text and pour it into an online program called a Mesostomatic. The program would do the calculations and produce poems for us based on the formula. Since this is not typical creative authorship, it is called writing by "chance operations." Most people think this type of writing is hooey but some writers believe lovely art can come from chance operations (Jackson Pollock was one) and some fans of these mesostics call the program an "oracle" for the eerie results it produces. I believe humans read into all art something of themselves. If you want to see something, your mind will see connections. And that's the real oracle about it. But whether you believe in divine intervention or the power of the human mind, it's all fun.

Since I've been in Sonny & Cher TV Land for so many weeks, I decided to use Sonny & Cher lyrics. I also had to choose "spine words" for my poems, those words that flow down the middle. And I had to produce an essay "explicating" (reading meaning into) the output. Here's what I did:

"My source text is composed of three of Sonny’s three most popular songs (composed for Cher to sing: “Bang Bang” from 1966,  “The Beat Goes On” from 1967, and “I Got You Babe” from 1965), and one song lyric that was a collaboration in authorship that included Cher (a 1973 reworking of a Seals and Crofts lyric for the song “Chastity Sun,” a tribute to Sonny & Cher’s then-daughter Chastity—now Cher's son, Chaz Bono).

The spine terms I chose were BIOGRAPHY (because Cher text raises many questions of reinvention, identity, drag, authorship and autobiography); SONNYANDCHER (because the lyrics—and Chastity—were all “authored” in some way by Sonny and Cher); DAUGHTER (in light of Chaz Bono’s recent gender reassignment and the fact that Sonny and Cher both conceptualized their child as a daughter); and the term POSINGATARTIFICE (“posing at artifice” because Sonny and Cher have consistently attracted controversy around the idea of “being artificial”). This final long phrase, however, seemed too much for the Mesostomatic and returned the least amount and the least sensical results.

Because “posing at artifice” produced no usable results, I made that the title of the completed set. I deleted the mesostics I didn’t like, added punctuation, a word or two (noted with an asterisk), and re-ordered them.

The results were very cryptic and I definitely used matrixing (a term from the show Ghost Hunters for the human tendency to try to make meaning from noise) to make my meaning. My biggest “ah-ha” moment in this exercise came with an awareness that being a fan (of anything including poetry) involves the same kind of matrixing.

The formatted poems are attached here: http://cherscholar.typepad.com/files/posing-at-artifice.pdf [13 KB]

In Section 1—Biography, I see black as dealing with being an outsider and a fighter, juxtaposed with the idea of Sonny & Cher music as light music for teenyboppers. The emphasis on rhythm connects to Sonny Bono’s emphasis on the rhythm section when producing albums. 

The next stanza refers to lines from “The Beat Goes On” and speaks to “times a-changing” in the mid-1960s. This stanza into the next continues with the idea of perseverance (“climbing, I got so tight”) and asks, are hits proof of value? I tampered with the line (changed his to make it hits…it was so close!), but you can find a feminist reading if you revert the word to “his.” The stanza ends with a kind of a confrontation of the 1960s term baby or babe.

The next stanza can be read as Cher’s image-making and costumery juxtaposed with her alter-ego as a activist tweeter, ending with the Sonny & Cher ethos of simplicity and togetherness.

Section 2 deals with Chaz Bono and his struggles in being Chastity (how she grew “Round”), how he altered his life and “his-tory” and gained “gROUND” in transformation. Stanza two deals with sexual identity and rage, ending with an emblematic sign of femininity/sexuality, the miniskirt. Stanza three brings God into the picture. I was surprised how many times the Mesostomatic invoked God from the text. I read this stanza as ‘God is Good,’ as an affirmation of sorts.

Section 3 is more universal and asks us not to over-intellectualize history and culture (good luck with that) and possibly is the machine's subtle dig at my attempt to make “posing at artifice” a spine word, although history has changed music by changing the means of production, creating a mass-production consumer culture, especially affecting young girls.

Stanza two says “I got this, baby,” an understanding of the hidden perils of innocence, who God ultimately loves, and how endings are beginnings. The third stanza is one that brought the most chills. We kiss Sonny goodnight (in death) and the stanza expresses a kind of one-ness between Sonny, God, and Chastity as all coming from the same source.

I included a coda of the scraps the Mesostomatic generated after each spine word grouping. Again God is invoked, along with will and hesitation."

So, the point of this is to show how explicating art takes work and some amount of matrixing and that randomly generating things can be pretty at times.

I created a page for this Sonny & Cher Mesostic (including youtube song clips of the source text and references) from: https://cherscholar.com/cherblog/sonny-cher-mesostic.html

The Armenian Reporter is doing a story about an 89-year old Arizonian, Christian, Armenian painter Charles Garo Takoushian, (you know he's Armenian because his name rhymes with Armenian), who has refashioned the Madonna holding Jesus in Cher's image.

Before you lose it, (with outrage or laughter, depending upon your religious point of view), listen to his argument:

"As for the image of Cher as a Madonna, I thought —
well — she is a Madonna," he explains. "When I first saw Cher's
picture on the cover of a magazine, I felt there was a similarity to
Madonna. When you get down to the reality of it all, who knew what the
Madonna really looked like?"…"In Cher's case, her beauty
continues to prevail, despite the years that have befallen her," he
points out. "She's accomplished so very much with her life and hasn't
forgotten her Armenian heritage. I took some liberties with the
painting."

The Cher painting served as a
focal point during an exhibit at St. Apkar's Armenian Church festivities
last November. But speaking of stars who ignore thair fan mail (or fan Madonna paintings), the Armenian Reporter asked him if Cher will ever get to see it? He says,"I offered it to her but never got an answer from her agents."

Well, imagine all the fan portraits that have "befallen her" along with all those years. However, this one gets the Cher Scholar blue ribbon for fan-tastic originality.

Two weeks ago I found this poem about a Turkish novelist who spoke out against Armenian genocide. The poem was anthologized in the book Language for a New Century, Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, and was written by Lebanese-Canadian poet Carolyn Marie Souaid (pictured).

I thought it was an apropos message to post in light of Cher's twitter risks. (See my post on the Tweets)

Apology to Orphan Pamuk

Comrade, how is it so?
Fined by the high court—

for what? Trafficking a thought?
You, an accomplished lover

of the pen

Who challenged the Turkish flank
for far, far more than a girl.

How do I walk these streets?
How do I breath this air?

While, heroic, you stand

eulogizing the thousands
flattened on your land?
Risking an emporium bullet,
your name in the news.

I, who am one of you
and not of you.

Flattened by the minutiae of Art:
Idolizing my muse

and the metaphorical prisons
of the heart.

Carolyn Marie Souaid's Author’s Note: In January 2006, the [Turkish] court dropped charges against the novelist [named in the title of the poem], accused of insulting the Turkish republic for openly writing and speaking against the genocide of Armenians in 1915, a taboo subject and one that officially never happened, according to the Turkish government.