Friday, August 14, I received a field report from my friend Christopher who loves to peruse online videos:

Mary–
 
Okay, so people make fun of this "Walking in Memphis" remake [mostly, our other friend Coolia makes fun of it], but it one of the best remakes of all time.  And this video, as you know, is such great fun.
 
And she looks GORGEOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   So natural and alluring.  PERFECT hair–the hair that any woman would be covetous of.  And her legs look phenomenal.  And all this at 50!  
 
My favorite moments are at 2:13-2:16 and 3:41-3:43.  What a beauty!  
 
If we agree that the rightful top of the pantheon is composed of Cher, Bette Midler, Vanessa Williams and Barbra Streisand–all of whom have had sustained, massive and well-respected successes as both singers and actresses, only Cher and Vanessa also got blessed with beauty, and Cher alone has exoticism. 

And have you seen the mash-up that was always meant to be?      
 
3:03 = M'am/Man I am tonight!!!
 
ENJOY!!!
 
Christopher

Well, you know I love Cher’s old lips but she is really beautiful in this video as both herself and Elvis Presley. I love this video for four reasons:

1. She looks so lovely.
2. She emotes. You can feel real emotion watching it; she relents on the tough-chick persona (which is nice but…) and it feels honest, human and refreshing.
3. She sublimates her gargantuan persona into another gargantuan persona (amazing enough) and she does it with honest love and fun admiration even though it makes her look smaller somehow in the process, smaller as a legend (however, I truly believe she will rival Elvis in her legendary status someday), and in a particularly physical sense. As Elvis, she looks much more diminutive and you realize how much her costumery serves to make her seem very tall.
4. For all of these reasons above, this one of the few artistic pieces she's ever done. Therefore, it is a treasure among treasures.

I flipped out watching the mashup video. Totally awesome editing…both musically (artfully swaying between two entirely different records) and visually (lovely overlaying of Marc Cohn and Cher). I LOVE THIS FAN ART!! Pinch me!

No, don’t pinch me.
  

To those of you who thought I overreacted last week about the bad Cher compilations, let me just say I appreciate your concerns. However, the fact is I care so much…because I love too much. And I just want each little compilation (each one like a fuzzy misfit in an overpopulated bunny farm)  to be the best little compilation they can be.

That and it would be nice to save a few trees and a barrel of oil. Frankly, the last thing this troubled world needs is another bad Cher compilation. And a good Cher compilation is as rare as a Vancouver Island Marmot.

On my birthday a week ago, I visited the Amoeba record store in Hollywood where I did the obligatory look through the used CD and record bins for Cher stuff. Besides the aforementioned bad Cher compilation, I also bought my third copy of the All I Ever Need is You(KS 3660) album, but this one was with the pink and orange Kapp label as opposed to the black label my parents had. I wondered if the pink vs. black label might explain the differences in the gospel choir endings in the song “Somebody.” My latest thesis was that maybe only the black Kapp label printings had it. Maybe this would explain why other fans didn’t know what I’ve been taking about all these years?

“Somebody” happens to be my favorite Cher song. I talked about this on Cherscholar.com years ago:
http://www.cherscholar.com/topten.htm#somebody and I won’t regurgitate that bit here but I will add that I still love the whimsical bass line, the honking horn that almost blares like a headlight flash, Cher’s smooth intro and then singing like Sonny (d.b.a harmonizing) in the second half of the song, the nasally sax, and most of all the gospel send-off at end.

To my surprise and glee, the pink-label Kapp version didhave the accented wailings at the end. Compare your All I Ever Need The Kapp/MCA Anthology CD version (and my CD bootleg version is also robbed of this ending) to this copy I have burned from the Amoeba album (see link at bottom of page).

There’s a fuller gospel sound at the end, complete with some solo stand outs (including the final “Iiii said!”). Now there’s even a third version, the 45 which predates the album version, with completely different ending lines, but discussing that is for another day.

Download 02_Somebody_(with_wailers)

There’s a new Cher mashup. Sweet!

“Believe” layered with Deadmau5’s similarly electrified track “Moar Ghosts N Whatever.” The result: “Believe In Ghosts.”

http://djzax.com/2009/08/11/cher-vs-deadmau5-believe-in-ghosts-dj-zax-2009-club-mix/
 

Okay so my actual 40th Birthday was hellish. Basically a chaotic work day of disaster. I got home and my bf had set out two sets of flowers (roses and orange daises that I like), the daises displayed very cutely in an old coffee thermos because he couldn’t find another vase. He also set up both champagne and champagne cake, too. We watched ghost shows. 

The next day was my 40th celebration day — officially. We went to a DVD-signing at Dark Delicacies in Burbank to visit our friend Akiko Shima who is in the DVD, a horror flick called Ghost Month. Akiko is very creepy in the movie and has a great death scene.

Then we went to buy my present: a VHS-DVD-R dubbing contraption that will help me convert a lifetime’s worth of Cher clips on VHS over to DVD. A very generous gift in so many ways.

I will also be able to re-watch quite a few John Waite videos taped a thousand times. We also found the wedding guestbook pens we’ve been looking for at an art store and then we cruised over to dinner at Maloon Sunset, my favorite restaurant for their spicy corn on the cob, salsa trio appetizer and hotter-than-hell shrimp diablo. I’ve been there four times and always get the exact same thing.

Then we went to see the new Harry Potter movie at Mann's theater over on Hollywood Blvd. Potter was great, per usual, except for one fatal flaw. They cut out all the back story on Professor Snape (played by Alan Rickman). Not only is Snape my favorite character but his development is the point of this whole book (The Half-Blood Prince). It explains all his prejudices (the book does, with real heart – it’s Wuthering Heights-esque), and not only does this prepare you for the series finale, it serves to knock you off your own prejudices about good and evil and who is on who’s side.

You could say Snape and Potter are the characters that define the whole series and its main theme. Cutting out the meat of the book made me feel emotionally robbed and also robbed of major plot foundation, and then confused about why the movie-makers decided to even keep the title if they were barely going to refer to it. They tried to cover that fact by a throwing in a scene at the end to quickly resolve that elephant-in-the-room, and that scene was frankly insulting to the book’s readers.

Since birthday weekend, I’ve been dealing with work craziness and car issues. So not a great week starting my somewhat-middle-age.

This week I also checked out a Cher compilation CD I found at Amoeba Records, a compilation I didn’t think I had – although there are so many Cher compilations now, I’m starting to forget.  This one is The Best of Cher The Early Years, a two CD Set — undated.

A waste of God’s good materials if you ask me. 

I always wonder how songs are picked for these when they’re not actually comprised of real hits. The producers quirky choices? Random selections out of a hat? This set is divided like as follows…

CD 1: Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves (I appreciate the attempt to correct the spelling of 'Gypsys' but is it better to be a good speller or misquote history?)

1. The Way of Love
2. Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves
3. He’ll Never Know
4. Fire & Rain
5. When You Find Out Where You’re Goin’ Let Me Know
6. He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother
7. I Hate to Sleep Alone
8. I’m In the Middle
9. Touch and Go
10. One Honest Man

Okay kids, so this is basically a redux of Cher (1971), the album later re-titled Gypsys Tramps & Thieves. Maybe the re-release of the CD is already out of print, thus necessitating HALF of this compilation being taken up by a re-re-release of the whole damn thing. More likely, it looks like somebody had a mass of old Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves album CDs without cases, vulnerable to repackaging just like those old Mego doll Cher heads in the late-70s that were left over and stuck on cheaper plastic barbie bodies. Atrocities to Cher heads, that was.

Half Breed is what the second CD is titled and I’d think we’d be getting the full Half-Breed album, if I've learned anything from what’s on CD 1. What was I thinking? Trying to use logic on Cher compilations is thankless.

1. Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves (inexplicably again!)
2. Don’t Hide Your Love
3. The First Time
4. Let me Down Easy
5. Half Breed
6. Dark Lady
7. Carousel Man
8. Song for You
9. Train of Thought
10. The Way of Love (inexplicably again!!)

At first I thought we were getting Cher’s Greatest Hits (1974 MCA) until I hit “The First Time.” What hodge-podge of hits and non-hits is this? And WTF, two songs repeated twice? And the same song beginning and ending the entire compilation…for no purpose!!

Listen, I don’t care if you try to rip me off with cheap compilations, you scammy record-companies. But just don’t throw crap at a wall. Is that too much to ask? Can you at least put ten minutes of thought into this junk before you send it on its merry way? With all of Cher’s recordings in the world, ten monkeys could type out more coherent, cohesive compilations combinations. 

Okay…maybe that’s my lack-of-transportation-frustration talking.  But come on. Is it me?