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Category: Cher in Art & Literature (Page 6 of 7)

Cher Inspired Disney Villain

January 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

ImagesSo is it irony that Cher now has a bonafide Disney villain inspired after her "look" when all she wanted as a wee tot was to be light and blonde because the only dark-haired girls were Disney villains?

Cher was the inspiration for Disney's latest villain, one of the film's director's has revealed.

Byron Howard looked to one of the biggest icons in the entertainment industry when he was working on new animation Tangled. He says Cher’s exotic look cemented his decision to base Mother Gothel on her. The animated feature tells the classic story of Rapunzel who finds herself trapped in a tower by a wicked witch.

“People keep coming back to this, but it’s true!” Byron told Cover Media. “I guess it’s because Cher is kinda gothic and exotic looking and definitely she was one of the people we looked at visually as far as what gives you a striking character.”

“Donna Murphy also really influenced what Gothel would look like. She was a hard one to crack,” Byron added. “In this version she’s not really a witch or sorceress, she has to be very intelligent, compelling, manipulative character who is very smart and can convince this poor girl she is her mother. So in order to contract her with Rapunzel, who is very petite with blonde hair, we need to go completely in the opposite direction with Gothel.

Chertangled “She is very all, curvy and voluptuous, and has this very exotic look. We’re trying to say: this is not Razunzel’s mother.”

http://www.musicrooms.net/movies/24902-cher-inspired-disney-villain.html

Hmmm. I see Cher's point.

 

If You Look at Half Breed in a New Light, You Will See That It Is a Punk Song

January 6, 2011 / / 2 Comments

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Went to the Lancaster Pennsylvania for Christmas to see my parents.

Two things happened over my holiday break. First, on New Year's Eve John and I watched the Marx Brothers' movie marathon on TMC (saving Night at the Operafor a few days ago). John loves the Marx Brothers and watching TMC reminded me how fun it would be to see Cher host late night movies there.

Secondly, on the flight to and from Baltimore, I read a book my friend Coolia gave me for Christmas, Cassettes From My Ex, Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves edited by Jason Bitner.

I guess my generation (X) was the unfortunate cassette generation. I never bought cassette albums myself. My older brothers adamantly taught me that vinyl albums had a far superior audio quality. But blank cassettes I bought in mass amounts to do what my cassette generation did best: make mix tapes for ourselves and all our friends. I made a ton of them and received many in return, all of which I have treasured and saved.

And these days there are many books about our tendencies to make these personal eclectic mix tapes. This latest anthology of mix-tape-stories focuses on cassettes we received from our lost lovers and the love stories steal the show, both bittersweet and fond memories of lost teen-age and young-adult love affairs. I enjoyed every one. The mix tapes themselves were 99% alternative, indie and punk mix compilations.

So imagine my surpirse to find Cher represented twice on mix tapes memorialized in the book. "Half Breed" appears on the 1990 mix Vinnie Angel’s received from an old flame. And "A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done" appears on a mix tape Gretchen Phillips received in 1982 from her girlfriend Teresa.

  

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.

A New Year, A New Caesars Program

December 17, 2009 / / 2 Comments

Dollhouse-queen-mary Give to Caesars what is Caesars.

Last weekend, a friend of mine went to Vegas and stayed at Caesars Palace. One morning, she said, there was no hot water…those Vegas hotels–even the nice ones get a little rickety. And she dropped by the Cher store for me to pick up the new Cher program Vol. 2 which is now available. But she changed her mind when another fan informed her that only 2-4 pages had been added. Allegedly, only the new Mackie costume sketches were put in.

Ahem. "Update" and "Volume 2" are two very different concepts.

Another inhumanity of lazy product reselling! Bah humbug, Cher.

In me news: this was a week of moving my Cher junk out of an office and it reminded me how much I love my Cher posters and Cher fan art. Which made it so timely that Cher scholar Peter sent me a wedding gift of two Cher art pieces. I love them and I’ll try to grab a picture soon as I unpack my camera. They are very kewl!

Here’s what Peter had to say about them:

Of course I did those!  I did them in HIGH SCHOOL!  All my art projects were based on Cher.  The WITH LOVE print was a silk screen – I still have 4 in various colors which I have been meaning to have framed individually for my hall…. I have to say  I just LOVED that image of the album cover so much and I thought I TRULY represented Cher….. the STARS is a block print – I still have the original block.

This reminds me that whenever I had to learn something in school–or now–how to search the library periodical books for magazines and news clippings, how to use the Internet, how to use a new online shopping services or databases (like allmusic.com), I always start by searching for Cher things.

Anyway, someday I hope to flesh out my office full of posters as phase one of the Chersonian Institute.

But for now I only have next year. And I’m excited about next year. I’m ready to get some work done, some new pottery, some new writing, I want to turn my old dollhouse into an art piece (I bought it when I was 11 and inspired by Queen Mary's Buckingham Palace dollhouse–pictured above). Hopefully we will have more interesting interviews for Cherscholar.com. I also plan to start the third Cher Zine in January. From Cher we should get a new movie (Drop Out) and hopefully a new album. Who knows what that will turn out to be: oldies, duets, repackaged old albums?

Now that I’m a married lady, I think it’s time I bought a sconce.

   

My Cher Fantasies

December 11, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Barry-manilow So I don’t have fantasies of hanging out with Cher like most of my other straight female Cher fans (all five of us). Because when I try it, it never ends well. In those types of fantasies Cher and I would disagree over everything, like why we have to go shop for shoes all the time; or I would egregiously bore Cher with my whining about shopping for shoes all the time; or Cher gets cross at me for the lame shoes I’m wearing (pretty much my Keens every day, with flip flops on special occasions). So these hanging-out-with-Cher fantasies are not fantasies that are useful to me in any way.

My fantasies involving Cher, going back to when I was eight years old, do involve Cher doing duets with other people I am celebrity obsessed with. I know this seems like a very narrow type of fantasy situation in terms of possible plots…but it does keep me entertained on rainy days, of which today is one.

My first childhood Cher fantasy, after imagining Sonny & Cher getting back together in dramatic soap opera scenarios, was my fantasy of setting up Cher with Barry Manilow. Now I know what you’re thinking. Spare me, please. I NOW KNOW WHAT A BAD IDEA THIS WAS. Inconceivable (and yet I did conceive it), ridiculous…but you imagined it for a minute, didn’t you. And now you’ll never be able to get that out of your brain’s data bank now.

But let’s move on.

Last week I had a fantasy that Cher and John Waite would unite to record a cover of Elbow’s awesome song “One Day Like This.”

And I just wanted to share that with you.

Jimmydeanpartee sent me his Cher poem he mentioned last week in a comment and I hope he doesn’t kill me for posting it here. But I think this very fine Cher poem goes a long way toward showing that JDP and I are sharing thoughts in some weird way about both Zen Buddhism AND the discomforts involved in hanging out with Cher.

Cher

What if we met
on a lone beach
below
your malibu digs….
 
And sat on a BIG rock.
 
Would we
have something
to
talk about???
 
I think
we would be
silent….
 
And breathe.

Designer Jill Stuart Inspired by Cher

September 23, 2009 / / 0 Comments

http://blogs.wsj.com/runway/2009/09/14/not-for-the-shy-jill-stuarts-neo-cher-collection/

Stuart’s noon show at the New York Public Library today. Stuart says this collection’s “angel rocker girl” look was inspired by Cher. A silver mesh dress was cut so low in the front and back that it prompted the question about what underthings one would wear with it. “You can’t,” Stuart said with a laugh. “You have to be pretty risky to wear that.”

Her clothes were described as Neo Cher. I don’t know what Neo Cher means. Do you?

  

Healthy Perspectives and Fan Obsessions

September 10, 2009 / / 3 Comments

Big_fan_377x566 Not only do I wade in my own celebrity obsession (a fact proven by the existence of this very blog) without apology and quite naturally if I don’t say so myself (I have some mad skillz in this particular brand of nuttiness); but I also partake in studying and discussing the larger issues and problems with celebrity obsessions in general, which are many.

Two pieces of pop culture have come to my attention this week dealing with the topic on fandom gone bad. First I plan to see the new movie Big Fan this weekend starring Patton Oswalt and written and directed by Robert D. Siegel (of The Wrestler).

The synopsis of the movie from imdb:

Big Fan follows the life of Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a devout New York Giants fan, and parking garage attendant. Paul plods along through his life, living with his mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz) in Staten Island… We soon see that the only thing that Paul really cares about is football, or more specifically, the New York Giants. Paul meticulously crafts rants about why his Giants are "destined" for glory and calls in to a local late-night sports radio show where he is a known contributor and enemy of Philadelphia Eagles fan, Philadelphia Phil. Things then take a turn for Paul as a night out with his best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan) results in a sighting of his favorite player Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm). Paul finally builds up the guts to go over and talk to Bishop and in a drunken state Bishop misinterprets something Paul says and beats him to a pulp. The rest of the film follows Paul and his struggle to figure out his life as everyone around him tries to get him to sue, and imprison his hero, all while his Giants stumble and fall from their path to "destiny"

Wow…this goes right to the jugular of the problems of living your life inside of another life (your celebrity’s) instead of your own.

From the Sundance Film Festival website:

What starts out as a dream come true turns into a nightmare as a misunderstanding ignites a violent confrontation, and Paul is sent down a path that will test his devotion to the extreme. Patton Oswalt is perfectly cast as Paul, infusing him with a humanity that renders him empathetic instead of pathetic. Siegel has an innate understanding of—and reverence for—his characters but finds humor in every scene by perfectly capturing the details of their world. From the posters on the walls, to the NFL bed sheets, to the ""spontaneous"" smack talking, he nails it. Big Fan resonates with truth and insight, and the result is a film that will make you laugh and wince at the same time—a very winning combination.

The Rolling Stone review:

Paul is a setup for an easy joke on losers. That the joke never comes is a tribute to writer Robert Siegel who makes a potent directing debut with a scrappy movie that refuses to sentimentalize or ridicule its besieged hero worshipper. His pain, like his loneliness, is palpably real.

A film all obsessed Cher fans should see. http://www.bigfanmovie.com/

Secondly, my friend Christopher also sent me an album by a band-or-singer (I'm not sure) called Fisher. The second song on the album is another gem about fan obsession called “Biggest Fan.” The lyrics are a bit chilling:

You go outFisher-thelovelyyears_large
You hide out
But we all want to know you
Every once in a while
You send a photograph

And if I met you on the street
Would you be really nice to me
Or would you ignore me and make me feel stupid
I feel like I know you like a friend
Seen every movie you’ve been in
If you ignore me, I’ll hate you
Cos I am your biggest fan

I love your garbage
To touch it is to touch you
Every once in a while I sell a piece for cash

Of course the story denegrates from there into screaming and an arrest. Get a copy at your nearest iTunes location.

The Cher Cupcake

July 4, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Cupcake During my convalescence, it cheers me to know someone somewhere is eating a cupcake inspired by Cher.

My friend Coolia took this iPhone picture of The Cher Cupcake and emailed it to me.

This confection is the creation of the pastry genius at The Nickel Diner in downtown Los Angeles: http://www.5cdiner.com/, an eatery located on S. Main Street.

What makes the Cher cupcake Cherlike, you ask?

It has pop rocks in the frosting!

Coolia says it is yummy and that the pop rocks look like sequins.

I hope someday to be well enough to journey to experience this iconic mini-cake myself.

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