Category: Cher in Art & Literature (Page 7 of 8)

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.

A poet named Aaron Smith did the Cher essay in the book My Diva, a book of gay male writers making tributes to their females muses. I wondered if Smith might also have a Cher poem. He did! 

His first collection, Blue on Blue Ground, has a poem called “Cher Uncensored” (although one wonders exactly when Cher is censored). The poem is a prose poem, which means no line breaks, a relatively new form (your ballads, ssonnets, villainies being older ones) of the last 30 or so years. Prose poetry is sometimes compared to what fiction writers call sudden fiction, meaning really short, short stories. So where does sudden fiction end and prose poetry begin? There’s no academic answer; it’s a fuzzy line there.

Line breaks serve to focus attention on pacing in a poem. Line breaks also focus your attention to certain words or literary devices, like alliteration, going on in the poem.  For me, different forms have their different physical movements, somewhat similar to visual art. For instance, paper-cutting pictures are detailed, precise, somewhat placid; Jackson Pollock paintings are fast and full of action. As a writer, when you feel your poem is speeding toward its conclusion, sometimes line breaks make no sense or seem arbitrary, and they should never arbitrary in good free verse.

In this case, the poem can almost be considered one continuous line. You can also see prose poetry as more of a complete scene of fiction than a typical lyrical poem involves, ssomething between an image captured in time and a full-blown narrative story. 

Cher Uncensored

Walking to lunch I am Cher in Moonstruck, freshly fucked, kicking a can down the street in last night’s sultry, strapless gown the color of pennies, my thick black hair still stunning, lips swollen from kisses, coat dark as the heart-shaped hickey on my neck. I think of Nicolas Cage and falling for his speech after our secret date when those damn snowflakes fell on cue like they do in movies, his annoying lecture on their imperfection, like the imperfection of love, and the bullshit of fairy tales, how nothing turns out as we plan, and taking his wooden hand I follow him up the stairs to his surprisingly well-decorated apartment out of the cold and out of my panties into his bed where we do it for hours like rock stars, the naked moon exposing itself like a pervert. I clutch his unusually hairy body to mine, and our oily screams drench the room in a disjointed operatic soundtrack: Oh Nicolas! Oh Cher! Oh Nicolas! Oh Cher! Oh Cher! Cher!  Cher! Cher!

I could see this poem working either with line breaks or without. The run-on nature of this rambling re-creation of scenes in Moonstruck does work as a prose poem and Smith flows seamlessly between typically vulgar language to funny asides. The point of view also seems to float from a his own perspective on these movie scenes to a full inhabiting of Loretta’s character. There's jjuicy alliteration in “freshly fucked” and “sultry strapless” and his sentences are full of floating, sexy rhythms.

The book is full of other good stuff, too: another great prose poem called “Keep Him There” about going back through a relationship with tender regret, back to the first street-corner greeting. Smith also has other celebrity-related poems on JFK, Brad Pitt ("Have you ever been fat, Brad?"), and Matt Damon. Good lyrical pieces include “Psalm: West Virginia,” “Dr. Engel Teaches the Poet How to Swim,” and “Notes Composed on a Sidewalk.”

His book also deals with his struggle with his sexuality and how he relates to his primary family relationships. One poem in particular, “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother” skillfully gets under your skin with its pacing, allowing you to inhabit his character’s full-blown rage.

I was also inspired by the Cher poem to do a quick Internet scan on visual Cher art.

Continue reading

I love literature…so you know I really love to find Cher references in literature.

My bf and I went to see a play at the Los Angeles' Autry Museum of the West. It was basically a one-woman show (with funky musical accents added by the fabulous – and fabulously sexy — guitarist Larry Williams) depicting Joy Harjo's early life story. Harjo is a pretty major poet of Mvskoke Nation descent.

According to her story (which she said was loosely biographical), her father was an alcoholic who eventually left the family, her mother was a thwarted singer who clung to abusive husbands and Harjo herself struggled through life on her own.

The title of the play does the show no service; the story is much more realistic and gritty than Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light implies and is more about the identity and social struggles of a young native American growing up in the 60s and 70s with a harsh home life and a poetic soul.

Harjo seamlessly splices together musical moments with direct storytelling interlaced with Native American parables. Every parable works as an effective punctuation to points she is making about her struggles to find meaning in heartache and feelings of abandonment.

Line by line, sheer poetry. It was amazing to watch. At the end, Harjo passed out gifts for audience members, a gesture of thank you for coming. I felt a pressure in my chest, realizing the show was over. Than I realized, that was my heart spinning!

I was moved and inspired. Doesn’t happen every day.

I purchased Harjo's poetry collection The Woman Who Fell From the Skyand on the back cover feminist-powerhouse-poet Adrienne Rich descirbes Harjo's writing as "precise and unsentimental." And this was the power of her show. It was stunningly stark and the “Spirit Helper,” hollering, props and songs all served to say something deeper about her main points, instead of ornament them in a stereotypically new-agey way.

So about the Cher reference…Harjo describes an episode during her young adulthood, partying sometime during the 1970s outside with some cross-dressing Native Americans, which is an amazing image in itself. One "Navajo drag queen" is spangled out in a flamboyant dress and is drunkenly trying to celebrate the birthday of Cher. He eventually gets arrested and in avoiding arrest herself, Harjo meets the father of her children.

I'm not yet widely read on Harjo, but here is a poem from an anthology that I really loved, a poem that was also the title of one of her collections, She Had Some Horses

http://www.renaissanceindian.com/Joy%20Harjo.asp

The last lines seem both Zen-sounding and still Mvskoke philosophy.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

You need to read the entire poem to feel its momentum and strength.

Here's another review of the show which has left LA and is moving to other points across the United States.

“The Cher Within” which artist Paul Richmond says is “all about embracing our inner divas”.

Our inner divas in lingerie?

http://paulrichmondstudio.blogspot.com/2009/01/last-night-with-cher.html

As I was reading Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems edited by Susan Grimm, I came across a Cher reference in the essay "Order & Mojo: Informal Notes on Getting Dressed" by Beckian Fritz Goldberg:

…the best order for a manuscript is one that suits the personality of the work. If you're Cher you can wear a sequined Bob Mackie gown. If you're Willie Nelson you'd better try jeans and T-shirt. So you wouldn't necessary put your ms. in a tight dress if you are an expansive poet like Larry Levis or Gerald Stern and you wouldn't wear blue jeans and an old T-shirt if you were, say, Anna Akhmatova.

So…in review:

Cher in sequins and Cher in jeans.

 Larry Levis

(from "Winter Stars")

I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.

I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.

Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—
Which may be all that’s left of you & me.

When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.

That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.

Gerald Stern

(Note: it took me a looong time to find a Gerald Stern poem that didn't give me a headache. This is the best I could do.)

Behaving Like A Jew

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds – just
seeing him there – with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
— I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

Anna Akhmatova

"I Was Born In the Right Time…"

I was born in the right time, in whole,
Only this time is one that is blessed,
But great God did not let my poor soul
Live without deceit on this earth.

And therefore, it's dark in my house,
And therefore, all of my friends,
Like sad birds, in the evening aroused,
Sing of love, that was never on land.