It must have seemed that Cher was losing her mind, particularly when she undertook culinary experiments that flirted with insult: demanding nachos in a fine French restaurant! Yet, really she was ahead of her mind. This same woman would later make Auto-tune into an art form, change the way elderly women dress forever, and write an avant-garde book of prose poetry. (In the prose poem “The Demon of Analogy,” written in 1984, she depicts a woman—presumably herself—wandering the streets, repeating the phrase “The penultimate is dead.”) With this meal (and accompanying photo which she herself arranged), Cher has passed into what she calls the “void of signification”—a realm of the “virtual” in which food dissolves into a succession of imagery and therefore poetry. The meal reads like the beginning of a story by Poe that ends in a chamber of horrors. But the experience proves to be more liberating than terrifying. The protagonist keeps on walking—“believing in life after love.” The singer has hit upon her principal method, which is to combine food in unexpected ways and thus to create a “new food” in its place.
NACHOS ONLY NACHOS 