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RIP Stars Re-Release

May 16, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 3 Comments

So the Cher tweet says it all. Cher did not, in fact, know WTF about the Stars re-release, despite some articulate licensing bravado from Binge! Music.

Cher tweeted on Saturday. My full refund floated back across the bank-o-sphere on Sunday lacking any customer service reason. That felt weird and cagey. By Sunday, Binge! Music's website was also down, along with their Facebook and Twitter pages.

I would like to imagine Cher's henchmen making clandestine phone calls with threats of concrete shoes. It helps ease the pain of not having a legitimized, sanctioned, and scholarly-considered re-packaging of a historically important Cher album working itself through the CD-presses as we speak.

On a Cher Scholarship note: I've never heretofore seen such fan excitement to a piece of Cher news. I think this is yet again another piece of evidence that suggests Stars is Cher's most beloved album. And that this is the life of the Cher fan. Highs. Lows. Longings. Old-age dispairings.

Cher Toon and Milken Conference

May 11, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Someone on the Yahoo! Cher group posted this Blank on Blank cartoon today from an interview Cher gave in 1999. It's very cute, creative and actually a great, candid interview.

Most interestingly she says, "Gay men understand not being part of the whole" and that's why they relate to her. I think this idea of mass popularity or fitting in as being "the whole" is very interesting conceptually.

Anyway, what I love about this cartoon is that it reminds me of the 2010 Serge Gainsbourg movie, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life which I love and was based on a graphic novel by its director, Joann Sfar. This is the kind of creative movie biography I hope Cher gets someday, artful, surreal and letting the animation provide some emotional punch.

Cher spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference last week. Of course her hobo hat stole the show and not what she had to say.

Well, that's not entirely true. Billboard Magazine did focus on some of her anti-government comments and other comments around the Flint water crisis in Michigan.

I guess there were some issues at the conference around the lack of respect for female business founders. If you have LinkedIn, you can read this Pulse story about some prominent female business founders who were treated with less than full respect.

From the story: “Nearly 90% of venture capitalists are male. If Wilkis Wilson’s statement is true, and a vast majority of VCs refuse to see the market potential of markets focused on diverse audiences, female founders targeting female customers are doomed.”

RIP Ret Turner

May 11, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Costume designer Ret Turner has died. He started working with Cher back on the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.

See his obituary in The New York Times.

Turner often worked alongside Bob Mackie. I was never sure who did what. I always thought maybe Mackie did the big pieces and Turner did the rest. Does anybody know?

Here are some of the Comedy Hour pieces that were memorable to me. Send me pics of yours favorites.

(click the pics below to enlarge)

Updated-Big News: Stars on CD Has Arrived

May 11, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

Big news gone bad: this story has been updated.

Big news, huge news! Did you think you would live to see the day that Stars would be released on CD? Thank you Binge! Music. Get your pre-orders in!

From the blog post by The Second Disc: “Licensing information on the label’s website indicates the involvement of both Warner Bros. Records and Cher’s Isis Productions, which should quell speculation elsewhere about the legitimacy of this release."

Cool beans!

What excites me is the scholarship that might happen in the liner notes.

Need a reminder about why Stars is so awesome? Check out The Soul of Cher: Stars Reviewed.

Cher Museums, Musicals, Endorsements, Coachella, The Milken Institute, Toons and Ads

April 28, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

So…my trip to LA was good. I went to two conferences, the Los Angeles Time Book Festival at USC and a Google Analytics workshop for CNM. But I got sick the first day with the stomach flu and that was pretty much my week. Then everything-and-his-Uncle fell apart when I got home. Oh, and I got sick again with a nasty head flu. C’est La Vie.

Cher has been a tweetin' and a hollarin' in the meantime. Here’s a recap:

Election Tweets

The celebrity endorsement of the week (Washington Post)
Funny that the Washington Post should call this the celebrity endorsement of the week, considering it’s actually a celebrity re-endorsement after a deep, dark night of questioning of the Bernie soul.

By the way, it makes me crazy that people send hate tweets to each other. As one woman put it to Norman Goldman a few weeks ago, “Sending angry tweets isn’t political activism.” So it was enlightening to come across this great Guardian article on hate comments.

Cher keeps the heat on Trump

Cher tweeted the above New Yorker cartoon this month and this Cabernet and Cake sign.

Movies

This is an absolutely a great piece (don’t miss the trailer at the bottom) on Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean and celebrity obsession.

Cher Scholarship Abroad

There's a new Cher museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Coolia sent this to me. Sounds like a good time for a road-trip Cher quest!

I also found this video footage of another Cher museum! Someone should develop a Cher museum app for these things!

Cher tweeted about being scheduled to speak at the Milken Conference:

Proud,my frnd Karen(Flint mayor)is coming 2stay.We'll speak at Milken confrence 2 tell story of FLINT,to 3500 MAJOR LEADERS,IN ALL FIELDS

I used to work for Mike Milken. In fact I worked at his Prostate Cancer Foundation, (upstairs from the Milken Institute), when Cher performed for his PCF fundraiser during her Farewell Tour, in between those many faux-final shows. Here's detail about the event. I hope some think-tank braniac attends this and tells us how it goes.

A Coachella breakfast at Sonny & Cher's former estate:

http://wwd.com/eye/parties/rebecca-minkoff-smashbox-lunch-coachella-2016-lunch-sonny-and-cher-10412504/

http://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/gallery/rebecca-minkoff-and-smashbox-host-coachella-2016-lunch-at-sonny-and-chers-former-estate-10412618/

Outfits

Bob Mackie talks Cher and Carol Burnett

Biography Musical News

The Cher musical is continuing to make news like it just might grow up to be something someday.

Recycled Cher Products

April 28, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Another thing I got from the late Christmas exchange was a Mermaids Cher notebook not unlike this Moonstruck one! Both were made from recycled VHS boxes.

Getting it make me take stock of other Cher recycled products that have gone functional out there.

Including record album cover notebooks:

And record album tote bags:

People are so crafty!

While I was looking for these I came across this awesome bit of fan art for Stars:

Cher for H, Cher or Jaden Smith, 15 Facts, 1975 Tabloid

April 8, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

Agh! I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed lately. And I'm ridiculously exhausted. But I….must….blog.

I’m in an Infinite Jest reading group (we do only 100 pages every two weeks but it’s a challenging novel so that’s not saying much). I’m taking a New Mexican art history class. I’m in the middle of a whole survey of American poetry online courses with HarvardX and the new class starts Friday. I’m in physical therapy for my knee. I'm attending a Google Analytics training workshop next week. I’m still trying to fart out some chapters for a novel. I'm planning trips to help my parents who are moving. And on top of everything else it’s already National Poetry Writing Month challenge again and I'm trying to keep up with the poems! (This year my theme is election angst.)

Speaking of which, Cher threw her support behind Hillz last week in a very interesting logo graphic mashup. I myself will be also throwing in for Hillz (and am enthusiastic about it) but I also like and would vote for Bernie in the general election.

On another Cher note, here is a website that challenges you to guess whether tweets are written by Cher or Jaden Smith: http://www.gq.com/story/cher-jaden-smith-twitter. And here are "15 Interesting Facts You Don’t Know About Cher" from ppcorn.com. But who are they kidding because Cher fans already know all these things.

There's also more news on an upcoming bio-musical, the title announcing that something is confirmed. Is that meaning the rumor is confirmed or the progress of the work has been confirmed? This is a far cry from the theater space at The Ethyl Barrymore being confirmed. Just the plans is all. You wonder how many news stories plans can generate.

My LA friends and I celebrated a late Christmas two weeks ago and one of my gifts from Coolia was a Motion Picture Magazine. The magazine looks like a tabloid and possibly was considered a tabloid back in 1975 but the strange thing about these old rags is that the articles are actually more legit and quoted than you would think. The titles are actually more tabloidy than the features. Gregg Allman was quoted heavily here and the article catalogues the time between Cher’s first divorce announcement from Gregg Allman to her appearance on The Tonight Show with Sonny (Sonny's swath of chest hair never gets old) after rumors Allman had beat her up (there were rumors like this too when she divorced Sonny) to her return to Gregg in New York state and their marriage.

After unwrapping the magazine I kept starting at Gregg's unruly hair and commenting about how young Cher looks on the cover. It was only later when I took the magazine into another room I even noticed the watermark overlay of Sonny & Cher on Allman's head. What a bizarre photo layout. Sonny doesn't even look like Sonny when you see it closeup. How did I even miss it? The magazine is also a bizarre collection of weirdly sexist cigarette ads and vibrator classifieds.

Ah, the nostalgic 70s.

The Bloids and Celebrity Abduction

March 23, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Celebrity Prisoners!

Sooo…a tabloid story did come out, I guess, although it wasn’t The Enquirer. It was Radar.online claiming that Cher has been brainwashed, drugged and put “under the spell” of someone close to her. And then there was this denial story which seemed as implausible for some reason as the original story.

But the stranger part was that last week a similar story cropped up that Richard Simmons was similarly being held hostage in his own house because he hasn’t been seen in public in over two years. In that story Richard Simmons phoned in to tell Entertainment Tonight that he was fine and had recently had knee surgery. Interestingly he refrained from including a photo.

So here are a few takeaways for us:

Is anyone else out there outraged that all these 1980s fitness gurus (Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons, both whom I followed and still do) have had knee problems in their old age? I mean, as I start doing physical therapy on my own knee this week, the thought does occur to me: did we ruin our knees doing too many high impact aerobics?
What is going on with all the celebrity abduction mythologies? These aren't even the first two! Remember the conspiracy of celebrity napping perpetrated by Randy Quaid and his wife before they hightailed it to Canada? A few more stories like this and even I might start believing in Star Whackers.

Cher seems to be feisty and fine, however, as these Twitter stories suggest:

Here's Richard Simmons back in the early 1980s. I wrote him a letter about my eleven-year old dreams of distinction in grade-school chorus.

Read these "35 Incredible Richard Simmons" quotes.

Sonny & Cher on the Newsstands

March 8, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

I received a message from Cher scholar Robrt last Saturday while out shopping for next weekends family reunion, (my third in so many years). He said it was suddenly 1975 on the newsstand again! And sure enough, Sonny & Cher are sitting by the checkout stacks right alongside Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani. Do the millennials even know who Sonny is?

It's a brief story in Closer about the history of their relationship. It's pretty well summed up for such a short piece. With all the hubub going on with Cher's Twitter posts last week and talk of nasty tabloids, those hemorrhoids of journalism, I was confused about whether I should even purchase a magazine called Closer. Was it a tabloid? Closer Weekly in UK sure seems to be by all accounts of my Google searches.

But my perusal of Closer so far leads me to think it's made up of mostly soft-stories about celebrities. There's nothing erroneous in this S&C piece. Nothing new either. Just some quotes from biographer Taraborelli, and old co-worker Hal Blaine. They even dug out Cher show producer George Schlatter commentary. The story that follows is a equally soft piece about Dolly Parton, the boon there being an elusive picture of husband Carl Dean.

If you pick up a copy and read it, you'll surely come to see what an amazing art newsstand cover copy really is.

The Daily News also ran a roundup of shocking celebrity couple breakups that included Sonny & Cher.

Music

Top 40 website also did a list of Top 10 Cher songs. I beg to differ with some of these. It feels more like a reshuffling of her hits.

Chaz on OWN, The Leopard Moment, Feminist Anita Sarkeesian

February 25, 2016 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Chaz on Own

Mr. Cher Scholar and I have been home sick for the past two weekends. So it was a home-bound surprise to find that my DVR had taped Chaz on Oprah’s Where are they Now? show (first air date: 2/6/206) a few weekends ago. Chaz looked good, talked about new ventures including a clip from a new movie. Orpah and Chaz also had further discussion on life before and after transitioning and whether Chaz’s experience reading as a woman gives him any insight into that gender (spoiler: no it did not). There was also an update in regard to his relationship with his mom (sounds much better).

Disappointingly, I find Chaz can be kind of Sonny-ish on the topic of women. Interviewers probably set him up for this, as if to say “you’re a man now…say something sexist!” For instance, his example about not understanding women involved a comment about how they are so mysteriously offended all the time. He still doesn’t have any more insight into that.

How many stoic women do I know in relationships? A lot. How many men do I know who get easily offended, much more so than their wives and are uncommunicative about why? A lot. I’ve never heard Mr. Cher Scholar say anything like this. I rarely, if ever, hear my contemporary male friends say this about their spouses. I don't think I've even every heard my Dad make a comment like that. But I have heard some of my friends with same-sex partners complain about it with their partners. The issue seems to defy sex and has more to do with character and relationship dynamics. So it’s kind of an guy trope, this thing complaining about how sensitive women are, and an old-man trope at that.

Having read as a woman for so long should have provided Chaz with some insight into the idea of, shall we call it, female hysterics, simply for the fact of possibly once being erroneously accused of it. I simply don’t buy the idea that you’re born with male prejudices. You opt to have them. Maybe I know some extraordinary guys. Chaz has the option to be an extraordinary guy.

The episode also included an awesome update on Linda Blair where she revisits her feelings about The Exorcist. As you know, William Friedkin is one of our peripherals here because his directorial debut was the Sonny & Cher epic Good Times. In just over a decade he would go on to make his most iconic classic. I still maintain that if you carve out all the gore and bugaboo from this movie, the scenes are quietly and delicately constructed. It would seem Linda has made peace with that movie and is also working an adorably furry charity venture. Her eyes still creep me out a bit though! Watch the show’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31SUgyocMZo.

Cher History

Remember the scene in Cher and Other Fantasies where they tie Cher's hair and outfit up into a tree? A good tribute to that popped up online last week. I love how Cher specials are getting some well-deserved revisionist love.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)

There's also a great new interview/dialogue between Cher and Zendaya where they talk about girl power and fashion as empowerment. Great candid and friendly tone from Cher.

Relative?

Every few years my nieces or nephews will solicit me for magazines subscriptions for school fundraisers. I always purchase Time Magazine for a year and then spend three years reading it in the privy. In one issue from 2015 I recently came across a familiar name in their most influential people list: Sarkeesian. It’s only one letter away from Sarkesian! Amazingly I’ve been reading about this woman for years but have never put a name to a story! From Time:

Anita Sarkeesian, 31 year old activist and gaming feminist advocate, one of Time’s 2015 most influential people. She became the “target of vicious, misogynist harassment, death and rape threats and pornographic vandalism on her Wikipedia page and an effort to have her Kickstarted flagged as terrorism. All of this because she wanted to have a conversation about the way women are portrayed in video games. Anita is just the latest women writer to prove the law coined by journalist Helen Lewis: that the sexist comments onany article about feminism justify feminism…Anita has refused to back down…As her detractors grow increasingly unhinged, we have proof that her efforts are working.” Written by Wil Wheaton.

Anita is actually Canadian but she went to college at Northridge in the Los Angeles area. She is the other Sarkesian you should be following. Wow. I never thought I’d have occasion to say that.If you don’t think we are still in need of feminists in the new millennium, just read her Wikipedia page.

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