Category: Peripherals (Page 21 of 21)

Last week I started a new job doing content updates for a company in Internet governance. My commute is less than three miles and I sit in a quiet office with a view of the lovely marina in Marina Del Rey. I love it! I’m mostly swapping out War-and-Peace amounts of Internet policy documents. Not exactly sexy in the land of Hollywood and pop culture but I like it. It appeals to my inner nerd. I also get to learn Dreamweaver, web compliance standards, and how the Internet works. Never considered that before. I look forward to the next few months of coding, editing and watching LA sunsets from my window.  Plus the bathrooms are clean. Which is more than I can say for my last LA office job downtown. *Shudder*

As I was doing laundry this weekend, I read up on my Ann Wylie/PRSA newsletters full of writing tips. There I found out about a new word: verbidical which means “ a condition that exists when a person believes he or she is skilled in the use of words (a verbalist), but in reality is grammatically challenged.”

For some reason, this word immediately reminded me of Cher peripheral Elijah Blue Allman. Maybe this is because I just perused the latest Deadsy CD (Phantasmagore – their second album). I caught up on Elijah news and Deadsy history with Wikipedia. The CD was released last August, 2006. If you remember, Elijah went on Howard Stern to promote it and made headlines for his comments about Paris Hilton being unclean in her nethers.

Where do I start with Elijah? Why talk about Cher-spawns at all? Normally I would say leave the kids out of your celebrity obsessions! However, Cher’s two children are very public by choice: both have put out either records or books, or made reality TV or radio appearances. And both talk about life with Cher; so their experiences seem relevant to my continuing, albeit pointless, Cher scholarship.

In trying to process the Deadsy project, I’ve had to wade through an onslaught of artifice that leaves even Cher in the dust. Such artifice includes:

1. Band mates all having pseudonyms: Elijah only goes by Phillips Exeter Blue I. But hey, when you have an unusual name to begin with, self-picking an even odder name has no effect.
2. Deadsy image making is so heavy-handed. For the album Commencement, the images were about boarding schools, secret societies, uniforms. But it was a vapid message; I never gained any insight into these institutions.
3. In this albums incarnation, the band has color-coded outfits intended to represent the following categories: academia, leisure, war, horror, and medicine/science. There’s some overlap here: academia encompasses medicine/science and horror overlaps with war. And what does this gesture serve anyway? The album’s lyrical content doesn’t fully support the gimmick. Instead, I just feel the sudden urge to play Trivial Pursuit. Or maybe we’re already playing it.
4. In interviews Elijah likens the lyrics and band to an art project or a David Lynch film but not any specific school of art or specific David Lynch film. And here is where I feel Elijah and the band are intellectually lazy. Their art gestures are too general.
5. The band has a logo: a TV Test Pattern which reflects back to artifice #3. I know. Why?
6. Wikipedia claims the band has a manifesto. I know I should have read it but as Susan Sarandon says in Witches of Eastwick, sometimes I just can’t face it.
7. Deadsy refers to their fans as legions. This fact elicited laughter from my significant roomie who declared, “that’s the most ironic statement of all.”

If there’s truly irony or satire here, it’s empty overkill. The fact that the project may be ironic and may be serious is a weak position. You have to be brave with satire and irony.

Elijah, being the product of two unique vocalists, is likewise unique. However, his hardcore, menacing vocals feel inauthentic to me. Like he’s trying too hard. But far worse are his interview snippets in reviews where he attempts brilliance that try even harder. What results are nonsensical posings. It doesn’t even work as satire. These antics are the predictable exercises of every budding artist….in high school. But from a man who’s just crossed the threshold of 30, it’s plain adolescent. And the content just doesn’t back up the bravado.

Okay, maybe I have a bad attitude about Deadsy or Elijah or the whole circle of 30-something nere-do-wells who produce the bulk of Hollywood gossip right now. I did go see Deadsy a few years ago at the Roxy in LA. The band kept stopping mid-song (I don’t like it when Lucinda Williams does it either – but at least she is truly brilliant). Elijah blamed “electricity.” On Howard Stern he said his performance wasn’t up to par due to jet lag. Snap out of it!

And must you have contempt for everything? The problem is he doesn’t come across as any smarter than what he has contempt for.

As I read aloud funny interview blurbs, my significant roomie weighed in with this conclusion: When you grow up in the cradle of celebrity and money, you don’t get to say how stupid society is. Because you’ve never truly lived it, slum around all you like. It’s like William Shatner & Joe Jackson singing Common People:

"Smoke some fags and play some pool
pretend you never went to school;
but still you’ll never get it right
when you’re lying in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall.
If you call your Dad,
he could stop it all.
You’ll never live like common people;
you’ll never watch your life slide out of view
and dance and break and screw
…because they’re nothing else to do.”

(Banks, Doyle, Mackey, Senior & Cocker)

You have plenty else to do: like get a record deal or visit Howard Stern and talk about screwing Paris Hilton (call her unclean); or talk about screwing Bijou Phillips (3 o’clock slop) or screwing Heather Graham (dumb as a shoe). 

Elijah as a person owes us nothing. As an artist, he owes us something for our attention. I wish he would just give us something honest about his life experience instead of this elaborate junk which just accentuates what is possibly a low self-esteem. Maybe not. But if all the drama with heroin, goth artifice, and hatin’ on women hadn’t betrayed him yet, the emptiness of Deadsy will eventually.

Not that anyone asked…(aw heck, I ask myself)….if I were Elijah what would I do? I would strike the slate clean. Revamp, refurbish, rethink it. Take it all down and start from a more genuine place. Own up to who you are. There’s nothing wrong with being a son of celebrity. It’s one thing to say that; it’s another thing to believe it. Besides, you have no choice. And what’s left to be said about artifice in 2007 anyway? Even David Foster Wallace is giving up irony and digging the riverbed for solid gold sincerity.

So what do I like about Deadsy? Well, the z-tar. I like their “Paint it Black” cover. I am intrigued by Elijah’s influences in the low registers as I tend to like same. I have a theory that Elijah and I were both fetuses inside deep-voiced women. My mother’s smoker’s voice puts Lauren Bacall to shame. While Elijah was in Cher’s womb and Cher was on TV shows singing 70s pop songs like "Rhinestone Cowboy," she must have sounded like a hump-back whale to little fetus Elijah. Possibly we are drawn to those sounds because we listened to them in the womb.

Also — Elijah rarely bad mouth’s his mother or his half-sister Chastity. I like that about him, too.

What is going on? First Rusty Dennis dies and now Robert Altman succumbs to cancer? It’s been a shocking two weeks of Cher-movie-related passings. Robert Altman! Where do you start? He’s an motion picture giant, and yet a Hollywood outsider. My Ape Culture co-hort (an Altman aficionado) did a very good job summarizing what it was that made his pictures landmark movies. Read her short piece about him.

I think there are four men who are pivotal in Cher’s Hollywood story. Sonny Bono was entirely responsible for masterminding a very unlikely, versatile, almost-vaudevillian songbird version of Cher. Then David Geffen untangled Cher from the contractual quagmires of Sonny-Bono-schemes after their divorce and gave Cher new avenues as a solo artist. That was no small job. All the while, Bob Mackie has been crucial in eliciting Cher’s colorful personality with costumes that, decade to decade, define her iconic image. And Robert Altman is the father of Cher’s movie career. He “discovered” Cher as an actress. She was a rock star and a television star, but the movie people pooh-poo’d her for years. So, would we have an Oscar-winning Cher without Altman? I’m not so sure we would. In 1981, he took that first chance on Cher. He cast her in the Broadway role of Sissy in the Ed Graczyk play, “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” which was later turned into a movie. No one else wanted to give Cher movie roles although she had been trying to become an actress since the mid-70s…really, since she was a teenager, before she was derailed by Sonny Bono’s folk-rock ambitions. Which was lucky or we might not have had the folk/torch/pop/rock-star version of Cher today either.

So, not only did Altman give Cher’s acting career a shot, he did so with a juicy, dramatic role that gave Cher options for other Oscar-worthy roles to follow. Mike Nichols (who rejected Cher for a part in The Fortune) came backstage during the Broadway run of “Jimmy Dean” and asked her to play Dolly in Silkwood. Her performance in Silkwood helped the writer of Mask visualize her for the role of Rusty Dennis. Both roles proved to be dramatic, award-winning roles for Cher. So, if you’re a fan of Cher on the actress track, to Altman you owe your gratitude.

Cher’s performance of Sissy is really a wonderful thing to watch. She’s physically natural and emotionally raw. See my review of the movie on Cher Scholar. It’s another one of Cher’s best performances. I really hope there’s interview footage somewhere of Altman talking about how it all came together, that performance. And did he ever realize what a blockbuster, award-winning, virtually third career he ignited for Cher?

The photo above was taken at an AMFAR event.
Review the Altman ouvre.

Well…still no fan club sign-in on the official website. I carry on. Maybe it’s time to catch up on our Chastity Bono news.

• Earlier this year, Chastity appeared on eight episodes of VH-1’s Celebrity Fit Club Season 3. She lost weight alongside Cosby Show’s Tempestt Bledsoe, Taxi’s Jeff Conaway, Moesha’s Countess Vaughn, Hollywood Squares’ Bruce Vilanch, Kelly LeBrock, and rappers Young M.C. and  Bizarre. You can read my episode-by-episode account of the saga on Ape Culture. I did get engrossed in a marathon of season 2 one Sunday in 2005, but mostly I find this show to be kind of boring. Not as boring as Who Gets the Dog, mind you, but pretty slow nonetheless. Even worse, however, is the inane weight-loss blather the show tries to present as information. And the early episodes with Jeff Conoway seem to push the boundaries of celebrity-sploitation. The fact that there’s one episode titled "The Meltdown" followed by another one titled "Jeff Goes Into Rehab" followed later by "Gunnar’s Hair Cut" should speak volumes.

Chastity also appeared on A&E’s Sell This House where she had her house in West Hollywood blinged-out for prospective buyers who had been hatin on it in prior showings. Vampin houses just aint Chas’s thang like it is her mummys. I can relate cos collecting Christmas cookie jars aint my thang either. Although if my mom decides to part with her shot glass collection, I’ll find storage space for that.

There are reports that Chastity is working on the development of a coming-out movie for the gay TV network here! Chas is co-writting "In the Name of Love" with Garth Belcon who wrote a 2004 movie called Froterz that Chastity appeared in. No word yet when this movie will be coming out, no pun intended.

Chastity has also talked about working on a  book about growing up with her parents, S&C. No word on the progress of this project either. Her previous books, The End of Innocence: A Memoir written with Michele Kort (2002) and Family Outing: A Guide to the Coming-Out Process for Gays, Lesbians, & Their Families written with Billie Fitzpatrick Fitzpatrick (1999) were both good reads.

Chastity really needs her own website. She has a Gene-Simmons-like amount of projects going on.

Today I was about to join the Official Cher fan club, especially since I recently received my Barry Manilow fanclub newsletter in the mail. Although I haven’t been much of a Barry Manilow fan since I was 15, I still enjoy their entertaining and informative fanclub activities. This bi-yearly newsletter was no exception, with photos of Barry’s August Las Vegas convention (which he attended) and his own heartfelt fan Q&A column. It was exceptional, I must say. But alas, the Official Cher Fanclub website will be down for days unknown due to some kind of update.

So I guess I’ll take this opportunity to chat about Cher peripherals. Peripherals are characters in the Cher orbit and may include children, lovers, co-workers, or the entourage. They have an interesting shelf-life in and of themselves. Peripherals like her kids would normally be afforded some kind of deference of privacy unless they make their own gestures towards fame, such as write autobiographical books, participate in reality TV shows or release industrial goth-rock albums (allmusic.com’s words, not mine). Cher has cute nicknames for these peripherals when she refers to them in press interviews. If they have names with more than two syllables, she breaks it down to one, such as Chastity to Chas or sister Georgeanne to Gee; if they have one-syllable names, she pops them up to two syllables, such as Gregg to Gregory or Gene to Genie.

I happen to be watching the Genie Simmons reality show these days as my friend Coolia is a KISS fan and Family Jewels on A&E is always on her Tivo. Cher and Gene were a media super-couple in the late 1970s. They met in February of 1978 at a party for California Governor Jerry Brown thrown by Casablanca record-label head Neil Bogart. The met just as Cher was beginning to make disco albums on the same label, which was also KISS’s label. To orient KISS fans, their relationship started just as KISS started making the TV kitsch-classic KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. Gene and Paul Stanley (and Cher secretly) claimed to have hated disco at the time, although Casablanca was a heavily disco-centric label, also being the label to Diana Summer among other disco acts. Rumor had it the Take Me Home album cover Viking-fit  was inspired by Gene and that Paul Stanley also dated Cher’s sister, Georgeanne. Common scenes in tabloids featured Gene with his face obscured by a handkerchief (because no one was supposed to see KISS without makeup until they relented this charade in the early 80s) and his arm around what appeared to be a suddenly very tiny Cher. None of her other boyfriends or husbands ever seemed so tall before.

Cher stories abound in endless KISS biographies. In KISS Behind the Mask (paperback pgs. 86-88), Gene talks about how Cher was the first real relationship of his life, how he thought Cher was “real Hollywood” and yet never really part of "that scene," how the industry felt their relationship was just a Casablanca publicity stunt.

You can also find juicy details about Gene’s feelings in his own biography, Kiss and Makeup (hardcover pg. 140-159). There’s a funny passage with Gene learning how to jog on the Malibu beach with Cher, Gene in leather pants and snakeskin boots. As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, they run into Neil Diamond. Gene also recalls how they were refused habitation at The Dakota in New York City, the building depicted in Rosemary’s Baby and where John Lennon lived and where he was murdered. On page 140, there’s a picture apropos of the time, with Gene, Cher, Bill Sameth and Neil Bogart.

KISS and Sell the Making of a Supergroup (softcover pg 180-186) recants their relationship and the breakup as well, with Gene leaving to Diana Ross and Cher to Les Dudek.

Years after all this KISStory was published, I’ve seen many cocky Gene appearances, from record release parties to video interviews to lectures, all with Gene posing arrogant and debauched. The family series, although a far cry from surprising innocence of Ozzy in The Osbournes, turns this Gene-myth on its head. However, many of the situations on the show feel inauthentic, like phony reality show setups (such as long-time girlfriend Shannon Tweed sending Gene to fat camp and Gene bribing a driving instructor to win a driving test). Despite this, the take-away from the show is how decent Gene comes across and how normal and cool his kids, Sophie and Nick, seem to be, especially the witty and charming Nick. (If only I were 16, I’m just saying.) Tales of the playboy Gene seem like all too much shtick. This isn’t a far cry from what Cher told People Magazine circa 1978 and 1979 that underneath all the showbiz bravado, there was a big softie underneath.

There was a smattering of brouhaha involving Cher during early publicity for the show. Apparently on Howard Stern, Gene and Sharon bickered over the fact that Cher still sends Valentines to Gene. There’s also been one episode so far invoking Cher’s name. Cher sent Genie a picture of herself and Shannon tells of swapping out Cher’s photo but keeping the frame. It’s hard to take even this drama seriously when you watch Family Jewels. Shannon doesn’t sound convincingly pissed and one can’t but wonder if Cher was probably just professional networking.