Category: What This Really Says About Me (Page 6 of 15)
Can you believe it? Cher Scholar got something done besides Cher Scholarin’. And it wasn’t easy, I tell you. But I loved the experience of doing this and more books are on the way.
Dear Cher friends, if you want to take a chance on some poetry and you like occasional deep thoughts about space exploration and new frontiers, then this might be a fun read for you.
Seriously, as poems go, these have the same humor and accessibility you’ve come to expect from Cher Scholar. You won’t find no stinkin’ experimental brain teasers herein.
And it’s priced to be affordable for the average Joe or Jolene.
Why Photographers Commit Suicide
by Mary McCray (2012)
Trementina Books
ISBN 0985984503
87 pages/8 illustrations by Emi Villavicencio
9×6/paperback and eBook
Paperback $13.00 Buy
Kindle $2.99 Buy
Other eBook formats $2.99 Buy
If you like it, please tell your friends about it, give it as a Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa gift or feel free to drop me a line
or leave your comments on the book’s Amazon or Smashwords pages.
And no there are no Cher poems in here but there will be some in an upcoming book of LA poems.
I’m releasing the book near Halloween because….everybody knows poetry makes great zombie food. It’s good for the brains!!
I hope Cher Zombies enjoy it too!
Do you ever wonder why Cher exists? As a fan, does this silly question ever come up in your obsessed head?
There are many types of Cher fans. There's the casual fan, the unquestioning cult-member fan (Cher Zombie), the obsessed collector of Cher product (that would be me). Aside from the casual fan (and do they really count?), the other two can get a little crazy from time to time.
I know a few Cher collectors are getting a bit crazy due to all the delays in new Cher product. Get used to it; she won't be around forever. I hope her family doesn't go all Elvis on us after she's gone and continue to produce Cher lunch pails, Cher singing wall clocks and other facsimiles way into perpetuity.
And I also know some fans are aggrieved that she doesn't ever do their preferred material (I am guilty of this).
Things Cher has deprived the world of include:
- a torch album
- a torch tour
- a country album
- a Christmas album
Speaking for myself, I'm tired of Cher appearing in half-baked (half-funny) comedies. I'm dying to see her:
- in a Western
- playing a villain
- playing a partial-villain
- in some profound drama.
Collectors are a different kind of fan. Cher is not my messiah. So I feel I can critique the lazy crap (the video collection, the same song opening three tours, any given video commentary that craps out after 15 minutes).
That said: we all need to face the cold hard facts of life. Cher does not exist to be an object of art in our lives. She's got this thing we call free-agency.
The cold hard facts of life….like Porter Wagoner, who comes home from bowling to find his wife snuggled up on the couch…dressed in some refurbished-hotel bed-spread.
Introducing Bianca Jean. We just picked her up at the animal shelter last weekend. Which is why I've been offline for so many days. She's a complete sweet-pea but the addition threw our lives out of kilter in a big way. I'm just now getting back into any kind of routine.
I'm working on a book as well and in the final throes of challenges. In a weekend of depression over it all I impulsively bought two Cher items.
One is the CD Sonny & Cher the collection, the newest Cher compilation from Rhino. The CD copy seems to have been written by a Brit who uses words like CV for resume. Maybe it was my foul mood but I was really annoyed with this thing. First of all, the liner notes written by Michael Heatley misspell her last names as Sarkasian Lapier. He also perpetuates the rickety stereotypes of Sonny as a "swarthy Italian with a nose for talent" and Cher as "half Cherokee Indian." Then he repeats the legally false claim that they were married in Mexico in 1964. After these PR retreads, I completely ignored the chart number claims not wanting to fill my head with erroneous and possibly incorrect facts.
I did like his describing of their sound as "sunshine pop" and labeling Cher as a "bestockinged siren." He also quotes Cher as saying her best quality is that "I just don't stop." There's something simple and profound in that idea.
What is to say about the compilation itself. It's simply a mish-mash shuffle of their duet Atco albums. Nothing special a'tall. And the text on the back cover is worthy of a snicker:
There is much to enjoy in this comprehensive collection of 40 sunshine pop classics from a couple who, as they looked down from their stools on Top of the Pops, had the world firmly at their feet.
Looked down from their stools. Tee hee. Indeed, something about this does smell of shit.
Then I went and bought the 2010 book Conquer the Cosmos–Use Astrology to Attract a Man, Money, and Happiness You Deserve by Bridgett Walther just because Cher wrote the foreword to it. Barely. The foreward is no more than three short paragraphs and a sentence and the idea seems ridiculous that Cher actually wrote any of it.
In the text Cher, who says she is a Taurus with Cancer rising by the way, insists she was always surrounded by astrology grouping up because she was "surrounded by my parents' friends" and they were always discussing astrology. Now, I'm far from a Cher intimate, but I don't think I've ever heard Cher say "my parents." She would talk about them individually but not likely as a unit as they were never together in her memory. Also, she never spent any time with her father's friends, if she knew them at all. She has said she only got to know her father after she became famous, when it was practically impossible to really get close to him.
I do however believe that she would call Bridgett "at the crack of dawn" to get the astrological lowdown on one of her life crises.
I read the introduction and all about the signs pertaining to me. The book is written for women, and I get the idea her ideal audience is Los Angeles women for the unusual amount of of plastic surgery mentions in the Leo section. I did find out that due to being born in the second week of Leo, I'm probably more of a Sagittarius. After reading up on a Sagittarius for the first time in my life, this made sense to me. I've never felt like a legitimate Leo and always chalked this up to my parents probably lying about my birth date and actually finding me in a basket floating down the river.
This week Cher expressed praise for the material Pink submitted for Cher's new album:
"Had meeting 2nite w/Record Co. They Love (the) Song I've done! Got 2 New (songs)! Pink Wrote them! Co(mpany) wants it out end (of) yr. pic'd single… Alecia (Pink) wrote 2 Great Songs!… Pink is Definitely My Girl! She's Talent! Luv it."
Since I am broke, I am waiting like a pauper for my birthday to get the new Paloma Faith album, which is available as an import only now. I love her song "Agony" and the song and video for "Picking Up the Pieces."
Hopefully I'll be in the flush with cash again soon. I just started a new job at the Institute for American Indian Arts. I'm pinching myself to be in this creative space. Check out their museum, ground zero for contemporary Native American and Alaskan art: http://www.iaia.edu/museum/.
Meanwhile, Cher Scholar Dishy has been turning me on to some awesome stuff. Through him I watched the Siouxie and the Banshees video collection. Although I only really loved "Kiss Them for Me" as a song, all the videos blew my mind; the special effects still hold up. I also watched his copy of the videos for The Eurythmics' album Savage which I can't recommend highly enough. Now I finally get the "I Need A Man" video. You get to see this amazing characterization of the blonde chick as she evolves through the videos. I see elements of Kiki DuRane in the whole trajectory. Interesting to me that Annie Lennox was working on similar feminist characterizations as Madonna but not getting the credit for it, because hers was more to the jugular and it made everyone uncomfortable.
Watch the sequence:
- Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)…This video introduces us to housewife versus the little brat the unruly woman is created from. After watching it, Mr. Cher Scholar told me about how they used to discourage women from listen to Beethoven because his music excited them.
- I Need a Man – Unruly woman gets unhooked!
- Heaven – Unruly woman does LA.
- Wide Eyed Girl – If you wait to the end of this very-80s video, you see what might be the unruly blonde as worn-out mother.
- Savage – Unruly woman runs out of steam…beautifully.
- You Have Placed a Chill in My Heart – Unruly woman and house-frau battle for Annie Lennox's soul.
Dishy also alerted me to the new album by Americana-lyricist Lana del Rey, Born to Die. Have yet to spend real quality time with it but I love the atmosphere and the smart lyrics so far.
If you love pop-culture references, you might like the videos too:
- National Anthem (Is that Marilyn Monroe meets President Obama a.k.a. A$AP Rocky? That's awesome enough but it gets better!)
- Video Games
- Born to Die
- Blue Jeans (Because everybody has to do a black and white video…this one has great water shots, like the video for "Just a Dream," the masterpiece from my STL-homie Nelly.)
Alison Calthorpe, 17, 
is seen to the left, drowning in her Cher stuff. It's all too familiar to us isn't it? Soon her Cher stuff will rise above her bedroom window and drown out the sun.
David Sanderson of The Winnipeg Free Press did a story on Alison, the newest Cher Zombie to sprout in Canada, hooked on Cher after, of all things, seeing the dread-haired diva's appearance on Dancing with the Stars.
Cher Scholar is quoted heavily in the article, talking out of her ass no doubt. I hope I didn't say anything too embarassing although I am now questioning my comments on the prices of collectibles.In my head I was thinking about what I paid for both the Dark Lady and Half Breed posters when they appeared on eBay and how cheap you could get them a few years later.
I did almost faint after getting the Sonny & Cher Theater in the Round toy for my 8th birthday, although I didn't mention that to Mr. Sanderson in the interview. He picked it right off cherscholar.com: http://www.cherscholar.com/toys.htm. No matter how scholarly you try to appear, you can't hide the crazy collector within.
Welcome, Alison, to this motley tribe of fanatics. I hope you have a sturdy inheritance through which to burn for Cher doll outfits.
Back in 2005, Zine World reviewer Anu Schnuck called Golden Greats: A Cher Zine 2 “a must for Cher fans.” Australian zine-reviewer Dann Lennard of Betty Paginated and Zine World recently posted his latest reviews including one of Cher Zine 3 from the point of view of a non-fan.
"As a massive non-Cher fan, I still found a disturbing amount of interesting material to absorb. Like Cher’s tenure with Casablanca Records in the late 70s – including her flirtation with disco, heavy rock (with her band Black Rose), pioneering music videos and…Gene Simmons. Or the making of her obscure 60s hippie flick Chastity (which I somehow managed to see on an Aussie regional TV station when I was a kid). The lengthy piece on Cher’s infomercial career jumps the shark (nine pages…seriously?). But this zine did the near-impossible for me, it made me care about Cher. Hell, I may even pick up her Black Rose CD off eBay now."
I have to concede that the infomercial article is very long, but as the only Cher-infomercial defender out there, I had to make an airtight case for my argument. Besides, the Casablanca article is 17 pages long!
I am disappointed no one has made special mention of the racy Sonny centerfold.
For more info on Cher Zine 3: http://www.cherscholar.com/zine.htm
When it was reported yesterday that Whitney Houston had died suddenly in the Beverly Hilton Hotel (reportedly in a bathtub), everyone seemed surprised and sad (and a few even thought the news was a Cher-like Twitter joke). Brian McKnight appeared on CNN today scolding us all for jibbing at Houston when she was alive and struggling, but pitying and missing her now that she had died.
I've been rummaging through my own significant shock and sadness. For most of her career, Houston has aggravated me to be honest. But unlike other erratic-behaving stars like Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, I never expected her to die imminently. I just assumed, at worst, she’d end up as an old-lady addict. I always assumed, since she looked so utterly healthy and feisty all her life (give or take a drug-bender or anorexic appearance on a 30-year-Michael-Jackson anniversary special) that her body would take the pummeling and persevere. I also didn't ever take her for a suicide. Too proud.
Which brings me to my frustration and fascination with Whitney Houston over the last 27-something years. I was 14 years old when "How Will I Know" hit MTV in 1985. It was clearly a corporate-made video, so polished and different than the DIY-videos I was used to seeing on TV. The video was so colorful and playful with the paint splashes and Whitney skipping around so happy, bouncy and pretty. It was addictively refreshing and perky. I remember listening to the album Whitney Houston at my friend Mandy's house. My favorite tracks were the duets with Jermaine Jackson. Jermaine is my favorite Jackson and I loved the smooth sounds of "Nobody Loves Me Like You Do" and "Take Good Care of My Heart." The album was full of other hits: "You Give Good Love," "Saving All My Love for You," "All at Once," and “Greatest Love of All.”
Then in 1987, my senior year, the album Whitney came out. Another happy-go-lucky, colorful video of Whitney singing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” It cheered my dark, depressed teen outlook. And finally she came through my city on a live tour. My friend Mandy and I saw her at the Muny Opera House in St. Louis. I was so expecting to see that happy, fresh young girl from the videos. When boys threw out catcalls, she took great offense and told us she wanted to be respected as a serious artist not a sex object. So self-serious. I was disappointed. My image was deflated.
And I didn’t enjoy the bombastic ballads and dance hits that followed, “Didn’t We Almost Have it All,” “So Emotional,” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.” The performances and videos didn’t have the fun rainbow feel of the early video I loved. Whitney wanted to be seen as a confident diva now. She wasn’t dancing and flirting with us teen girls anymore; she was beholden now to no one but herself. I’m sure this was empowering to many young black girls. And maybe if I hadn’t first imagined her as the innocent, free-spirited teen instead of the now-irritated, knowing diva, I wouldn’t have been so irked.
In any case, she now wanted to be respected as a powerful, in-control lady. So in 1990 when I’m Your Baby Tonight came out and she started dating the bad-boy Bobby Brown and suddenly, inexplicably chasing this kind of tough street-cred, I got really annoyed. Last decade she was the princess of soul from a gospel and easy-listening entertainment dynasty, not to mention the church; but now she’s sassy and urban from the rough streets of Newark. Right. I completely ignored the single “I’m Your Baby Tonight” and “All the Man I Need” (which I now can’t even remember).
I also ignored The Bodyguard. Have never seen it. Don’t like Kevin Costner and I know this is sacrilege but I prefer Dolly Parton’s much less bombastic version of “I Will Always Love You.” As for the single “I Have Nothing”…no thank you.
I did however love, love, love her gliding version of “I’m Every Woman” (Chaka Khan!) and I loved her version of the National Anthem in 1991 enough to buy the cassette single.
In 1998 I was living in Yonkers, New York, having just finished an MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. I remember first hearing the song “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” from the album My Love is Your Love while sitting at a light on the Saw Mill Parkway. I thought what a catchy-empowering hook and (finally) she’s gotten a clue about bad boy Bobby Brown! We’re probably ready now to move on to the next phase of her life, sans Bobby, which I hope is a revisit of that beautiful, fresh-faced happy teen thing.
Not to be. Things got bad, very bad. Through it all, Bobby went to jail and there was this melodramatic reunion on his release, the 2001 Michael-Jackson special's alarming weight loss, the marijuana bust in 2000, in the early 2000s failing to show up for scheduled performances and being fired from an Academy Awards show, the attitude problems in her interview with Diane Sawyer in 2002 (“I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. Okay? We don't do crack. We don't do that. Crack is wack!”), her spat with Wendy Williams, the disoriented behavior on that international trip to Israel, and the final nail to her image being the 2005 reality show Being Bobby Brown. Her biggest enemy always seemed to be her own ego.
I don’t even remember Just Whitney being released in 2002, the holiday album in 2003 or I Look to You in 2009 (the first album cover where Whitney looked pretty haggard).
Going back to the beginning, I must tell you the song “Greatest Love of All” grated on my nerves. And everyone I knew used to make fun of the lines: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.” The accompanying video included Whitney’s own mom, gospel singer Cissy Houston, and told the indulgent story of how a young Whitney was guided to be the strong, secure woman she grew up to be. It was full of empowerments: “I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadow. If I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe. No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity. Because the greatest love of all is happening to me. Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all. And if by chance, that special place that you've been dreaming of leads you to a lonely place, find your strength in love.”
None of which turned out to be a life-giving truth for Whitney Houston. Which is what grates me most of all. I had a friend in high school who exactly reminded me of Whitney Houston. She was beautiful and talented and full of false bravado. Piously righteous before suddenly capitulating to the demons of the hardest vices.
Whitney Houston was the soundtrack of my young life to be sure. All that I loved and was frustrated by. I took for granted what teens before me could not, that beautiful black people could be pop mega-superstars. And because in many ways I still take that fact for granted as right and obvious, I feel I can say how I really felt about Whitney Houston. Why gloss over the unpleasant truth in respect for the dearly departed voice? As talented as she was, I wish she had been the strong character she once convinced me she was. Or at least the happy, angelic sprite I always wanted her to be.
So! Cher was rumored to be dead.
For like 12 hours.
And no one emailed me.
For the love of God. Not a peep from ANYBODY.
Were we all holding our breaths? I'd like to believe that because, I have to tell you, I was a little put out.
I only learned of the not-death Friday afternoon because cherscholar.com was down for a few days due to a server switch. I was logging into a very popular online mail service to double-check my site's new email addresses and, per usual, I scanned the top-ten online searches while I was loggin in. To my surprise, the number one search at that moment was
"Cher not dead."
What the? Cher is the number one search!! I don't think she's been the number one search term ever…as long as I've been scanning number one search terms anyway. And besides, she's been not dead for 12 hours, from Thursday night to Friday morning. And nobody told me!
The Twitter scam even had another Armenian-celebrity, Kim Kardashian, fooled. And because Kim is one of the nations top five tweeters, the story went off the rails.
Meanwhile, this was not the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth I will come to expect from Cher fans.
In one brief second of comprehending that Cher was not dead, Cher's life flashed before my eyes. Or 
rather my life of being a fan of the Cher product and having that icky realization that products do not have mortality, people do. It threatened the death of a comforting obsession for this heterosexually queer gal; and seeing as I've been a fan since I was four or five years old, it threatened a final death knell to my childhood, something I've managed to hold on to into my 40s.
But…this isn't entirely about me. Cher's friends did not take kindly to the twitter scam. Loree Rodkin posted, “Whoever started that stupid rumor needs to have their face dragged across concrete." Yikes. Imagine Paul McCartney saying that.
Cher was the number one freakin' search term and a Kardashian was embarrassed. It's kind of funny, unless you're Cher I guess.
To celebrate Cher's very aliveness and hopefully resting in peace this evening, I am posting my three favorite Cher photos, which were taken during the Norman Seeff sessions in 1975.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2012/01/cher-twitter-hoax-kim-kardashian.html
Paul McCartney, Jeff Goldblum and Cher. What an odd-ball rumored-to-be-dead club.
One of my favorite New York City experiences between 1995 and 1999 was going to see Kiki and Herb Christmas shows every year with my friend Coolia who was a big fan of theirs.
Kiki, a character developed by Justin Bond, was an amazing experience of drag cabaret comedy unlike anything I'd ever seen. Kiki was an alcoholic has-been lounge singer who did hilarious lounge-recreations of Christmas songs mixed with modern hits like "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Kiki was both achingly bitter and inspiringly hopeful as she recounted the sad back-stories of both Kiki and Herb, my favorite quote being, "it aint easy being a gay Jew 'tard." Well…you had to be there. The DVDs do NOT do the show justic e, the music, the humor or the pathos. Amazingly, Kiki would go through this imperceptible slide towards public drunkenness during the duration of the show in a tour de force performance.
Recently, Justin has gone through the transgender process, reborn as Justin Vivian Bond. I received his memoirs for Christmas and read the 136-page book, Tango, in one sitting. The book is mostly a touching focus on his childhood experiences, structured around his relationship with the neighborhood cad "Tango." 
This is an interesting alternative take to adult-transgendering of Chaz' Transition. Interestingly, Cher makes three appearances in this book, too. In once scene, Justin gets in trouble for illicit behavior just after buying "Sonny & Cher's latest album."
My greatest role model on television was Cher. The Sonny & Cher Show always had a segment where Cher would one-up Sonny her putdowns. Any chance I got to show my finely honed skills at bitchiness was okay by me. I really didn't think of it as being mean. I thought of it as having fun.
Justin Vivian Bond is a master storyteller and I hope this is simply the first installment of a longer memoir series.
