I'm reading an anthology of Middle-Eastern and Asian poets and I came across a poem by this fellow here, Barouyr Sevag, whose last name does not rhyme with Armenian as I am accustomed to.

But anyway, not only was he an Armenian poet but his deciphering of a type of unending yearning reminded me for some reason of Cher…

The Analysis of Yearning (Garod)

I know the dark need, the yearning, the want,
in the same way the blind man knows
the inside of his old home.

I don't see my own movements
and the objects hide.
But without error or stumbling
I maneuver among them,
live among them,
move like the self-winding clock
which even after losing its hands
keeps ticking and turning
but shows neither minute nor hour.

And dangling between darkness and loneliness
I want to analyze this want
like a chemist
to understand its nature and profound mystery.
And as I try
there is laughter
from some mysterious tunnel,
laughter from an indescribable distance,
from an unhearable distance.

A city sparrow with a liquid song
changes its ungreen life
into music from an unechoing distance,
an unhuntable distance.

And words start hurting me
as they mock, echo from the unhuntable distance,
this merciless distance.

I walk from wall to wall
and the sound of my steps
seems to come from far away
from that merciless distance,
that impossible distance.

I am not blind
but I see nothing
around me, because
vision has detached itself
and reached that distance
that is impossibly far,
excessively far.

I run after myself,
incapable of ever reaching or
catching what I seek.

And this is what is called
want and longing or "garod."

Translated from the Armenian by Diana Der-Hovanessian
(whose last name does rhyme with Armenian)

Drama!

So you know originally this thing was due in December. Since then Amazon.com has canceled my order twice; so I contacted someone at Bluewater two weeks ago on February 13 (actually three people: the first email from their contact page came back undeliverable, the second guy was on vacation). I finally received an email from someone who said the comic would be out the next Wednesday February 15. Sure enough that day a blog post went up saying the comic was out and to check your local comic store or to buy one through Amazon.com. As of today Amazon still doesn't have any copies and my comic store in Santa Fe had never heard of the comic. Rumors were spread that it had sold out already.

I'm not sure about that but check your local comic store just in any case. You can download a Kindle version from Amazon now if you're desperate. A dear Cher friend snared me a copy from the comic book store at Grand Central Station in New York City. And for that, many thank yous!!

What a mess this whole thing is, folks.

But the slight little thing is a fun retrospective. In true comic book fashion there is a surprise ending (with Chaz as a plot point). Cher is one of a kind, to be sure, but the artist seems to have difficulty rendering her. In a few of the drawings, she looks a tad Asian even.

At least they writer spelled her last name right. Some oddities: they show her as a teenager, not a baby, when she went into a foster home; and often throughout the pages, her hairstyles and clothes are confused between the 1960s and 70s.

I loved the album cover re-drawings. But she did not actually date Elvis. I also don't believe her divorce from Sonny drew out until 1979 (or maybe just the ramifications of it). Gregg Allman is drawn to to look more like Chastity and Elijah doesn't even exist in this comic-bipic.

What is that bottle doing in the picture of her singing "Turn Back Time"? Is she in the shower?

Here's a review: http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2012/02/25/comic-review-female-force-cher/

Oh my God! Cher scholarship, where have you been all my life!!!

This book, Off-White Hollywood, American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom, came out in 2001! What rock have I been living under? I've been so starved for critical pop-culture writing, I've been pouring over some really dry stuff…like The Diva's Mouth and The Adoring Audience and Guilty Pleasures and what seems like the textbook from Duke University's Culture Studies program Hop on Pop. How thrilling to see some critical feminist writing about Cher…and ethnicity! And Cher on the cover even!

In Cher Zine 3, I catalogue my trials trying to track down feminist pop culture writers who were even willing to talk about Cher. I finally found three or four brave women to interview. But here was Diane Negra's book sitting right under my nose! This book is truly awesome but be warned: it's full of really academic egghead stuff.

I've heard many girls-of-color (Latinos, Persians) comment on Cher's non-whiteness as being of significance to them–especially growing up in the 1970s, but I never hear anyone else talking about Cher in an ethnic context.

Negra starts with her thesis, how over the years in Hollywood, movies have made meaning of whiteness and ethnicity and how studios have manipulated, absorbed or rejected ethnic female stars to further American social and political ends. She says the six stars she chose to discuss "have been substantially neglected….stars who are economically, industrially and culturally significant, but for whom there is a vacuum of critical commentary." Amen.

She talks about how ethnic women are often delegated to stereotypically virtuous or villainous roles. And how this fact throughout the years reflects existing American cultural values.

Chapters two and three are on two silent screen stars, Colleen Moore and Pola Negri. With Colleen Moore we see how her Irishness was co-opted in roles of the child waif, with the fresh-faced-innocence of Irishness co-opted to undercut fears of Irish Immigration. Cementing her image as an innocent also served to undercut the image of the New Woman, the Flapper, who was liberating herself from Victorian repression. Publicity represented her as an innocent doll, a hard-working Irish girl, the ideal woman for the patriarchy of the time.

Pola Negri's chapter details how a star persona failed to sublimate herself to American values. Negri, with an Italian name, a Polish heritage and a German career, thwarted Hollywood's attempt to create a persona for her. She was left with the image of a vamp (short for vampire), a villainous image of ruthlessness and blood-lust, that served to enforce America's fears about people from Eastern Europe.

Chapters four and five deal with the Classic Hollywood Era with stars like Sonja Henie and Hedy Lamarr.

Sonja Henie's Norwegian heritage was given the Scandinavian treatment and her whiteness was hyper-personified. Her image was charming, virtuous, healthy, blonde, and white. Very white. Everything she owned or wore was white. During the depression this served as a distraction from the images starvation and poverty. Embracing a Scandinavian also reflected America's dispatch of Isolationism and the country's growing desire to spread American culture abroad and acquire foreign objects. The foreigner went from being dirty and scary to being someone worthy of Americanizing.

Hedy Lamarr was able to acclimate to a fully American persona as well, although she imported a scandalous nude scene from a Czech film in her past. When the whiteness of types like Sonja Henie became "flat erotically," Lamarr served as the erotic beauty standard. Now you could be a desirable trophy wife to the patriarchy even if you weren't so white.

Chapter six jumps to the modern ethic persona of Marisa Tomei. Here we explore how a current "exhaustion of ideas" prevailed American culture in the 1970s and 1990s and how ethnic rediscovery and performance became acceptable and exploitable and seen as more natural and authentic.

Cher is the seventh chapter. And because she has a sort of "free-floating ethnic identity," she troubles the facile assumption that whiteness and color are self-evident and mutually exclusive categories." Negra describes how Cher started as a patriarchal production (of Sonny Bono, Bob Mackie, David Geffen…and even with director's such as Robert Altman, Mike Nichols and Peter Bogdanovich) with her ethnic displays of Native American (and other ethnicities easily assumed in a variety TV show format), but how her coup from the patriarchy, her current persona (and self-awareness of it) "represents a transgressive figure involved in her own self-production."

Cher is a "complex persona that indicates a confusion of gender, class and age distinctions and problematizes the security of whiteness." Negra dissects the variety show vamp (which include the ethnic songs of "Gypsies Tramps and Thieves," "Dark Lady," and "Half Breed"), the movie Suspect, the "Perfection" performance in the Heart of Stone tour (where with a male impersonator she acknowledges herself as a fictionalized production), and the X-Files episode tribute to her.

"Cher makes spectacularly visible the paradox of social expectations for the female body." (speaking of Dolly Parton in Joyful Noise…see the next post) Negra says. Cher "strenuously resists the properties of white femininity"….and is "indigestible to mainstream conservative culture."

Just when all things seem swell, Negra finally has to call Cher out, criticizing "plastic surgery as empowerment," saying surgery and the enforcement of thinness are "antithetical to the interests of women" although these things "serve the economical interests of others"….that being the economic interests of The Man.