It Hurts to Think

Elvis Presley Blues

2010-01-14T20:44:00Z

I meant to post this on Elvis' 75th birthday last week. It's Gillian Welch singing her haunting"Elvis Presley Blues." Watch it, and listen to the lyrics, and you will understand all there is to understand about Elvis, and about following your heart with no regard for the consequences.

Every time I listen to this I get chills.

12 Days of Christmas Albums That Suck

2009-11-29T21:22:00Z

Another holiday season, another round of Christmas albums from pop artists who should know better. Money must be the motive for these abominations. Artistry sure isn't. Bob Dylan's Christmas album, anyone?

Charity is often cited as the reason for these unspeakably horrible Christmas releases. Proceeds from Dylan's "Christmas in the Heart" will go to Feeding America, a charity that provides food for the needy. My guess is a lot of needy people will stay hungry because this one will not be flying off the shelves or onto the iPods.

Here's my list of Christmas albums that should never have been made, in order of the degree to which they make me envy the deaf. Given a choice between a lump of coal in my stocking and one of these albums, I'll take the coal.

10. REO Speedwagon, "Not So Silent Night" (2009)
Wow, Kevin Cronin and the boys appear to be spending more on highlights these days than Bon Jovi. In a trifecta of bad taste, the band played this album rink-side on an NBC special "Scotch Brand Holiday Celebration on Ice" that featured figure skaters in Little Rock, Ark.

9. Michael Bolton, "This is the Time" (1996)
It's even worse than you imagine.

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Christmas Time Again" (2006)
Make. VanZants. Stop.

7. Lynyrd Skynyrd and .38 Special, "Christmas" (2002)
And you thought a Skynyrd Christmas album was a bad idea.

6. Mariah Carey's "Merry Christmas" (1994)
Yes, Mariah Carey has been making your ears bleed and your head hurt for more than 15 friggin' years.

5. Twisted Sister's "A Twisted Christmas" (2006)
Watch the video for "Come All Ye Faithful," which has the same intro as TS's 1981 hit "We're Not Going to Take It," and ponder how badly hair metal bands age.

4. Jethro Tull, "The Jethro Tull Christmas Album" (2003)
Some original songs by Tull, but they should have stuck with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

3. Rosie O'Donnell and various artists, "A Rosie Christmas" (1999)
Rosie duets with Cher, Billy Joel and Elmo, among others. And you can buy this used on Amazon.com for one cent. 'Nuff said.

2. Rosie O'Donnell and various artists, "Another Rosie Christmas" (2000)
Holy shit, they made two of these. This time Rosie duets with the likes of Sugar Ray and Ricky Martin.

1. Jimmy Buffett, "Christmas Island" (1996)
Look out, there are original songs on this one from a singer-songwriter who has outlived his songwriting ability by 30 years.

What gets your vote for Worst Christmas Album Ever?

Best Bars to Ease the Pain of Thinking

2009-11-05T03:04:00Z

So Esquire has posted a list of America's Best Bars. It's a fun read, organized state by state with blurbs putting the bars in their local and historical context, and sidebar telling you what you're going to be eating or drinking there: Rum Rickey at Burt's Tiki in Albuquerque, tequila shots with beer chasers at Los Ojos in Jemez Springs, N.M.

I scanned the list and was startled to see how many of these bars I had been to. I spent my 20s and 30s living the life of a journalism gypsy, working at one paper after another, so I sat in bars pulling info out of sources in many area codes. Other nights I spent evenings at these same bars in drunken, witty banter with my colleagues about the current events we were covering -- a time-honored fourth-estate social hour reimagined in the NPR show "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me."

So here the bars from the Esquire where I've tossed back a few:

ALABAMA
The BlueGill
Mobile
A supper club in the true Gulf Coast tradition. It stands in Mobile Bay on pilings, and gets knocked down about every six years by a hurricane.

Callaghan's Irish Social Club (below)
Mobile
In the Oakleigh Historic District and housed in a converted 19th century meat store. Perfect place for Sunday afternoons and nights after the Mardi Gras parade.

COLORADO
The Cruise Room
Denver
Original art deco bar where the curving, vaguely nautical lines of the bar and walls and stools suggest Fred and Ginger and Capt. Stubbing and Julie, all at the same time.

FLORIDA
The Bahi Hut
Sarasota
A tiki bar where you can drink mai tais till you see iguanas on the ceiling -- or walk into the oncoming traffic out on the Tamiami Trail.

Linger Lodge
Bradenton
A 1930s era hunting camp turned RV lodge. Kick back with a Bud and be afraid of the walls of taxidermied endangered species.

LOUISIANA
Napoleon House
New Orleans
This ain't some French Quarter tourist trap. Locals go here. Try the Sazerac.

Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop (above)
New Orleans
The most romantic bar in New Orleans. I was once sat in the cold gloom of the 300-year-old place with a boyfriend, both of us warming our hands on a candle on a table in a broken down corner of the broken down building. We were arty rebels against the world, too creative to go to a bar with central heat.

MASSACHUSETTS

Doyle's Cafe
Jamaica Plain
Irish bar in an Irish neighborhood. There's Guinness on tap, fish and chips, and lots of politicians out trying to be seen in a bar where the politicians are supposed to be seen doing their deal making and fixing.

NEW MEXICO

Tiny's Restaurant and Lounge
Santa Fe
Screw the faux adobe. Tiny's is in a mundane strip mall on Santa Fe's busiest suburban street.

The 49er Lounge
Gallup
Housed in the uber-retro El Rancho Hotel where John Wayne and other stars stayed in the 1940s when they were filming westerns in the surrounding New Mexican desert.

Silva's Saloon
Bernalillo
True New Mexico. It's no wonder Sam Shepherd set his play "True West" in Bernalillo. The locals are tough, and they come to Silva's to drink Tecate beneath the cowboy hats of their dead ancestors.

ue
Burt's Tiki Lounge
Albuquerque
Retro kitsch rules in this Route 66 tiki lounge. You gotta go.

Los Ojos
Jemez Springs
Roadhouse in the Jemez Mountains just north of 'Burque in a town where there's no stoplight but one rehab center for priests who, um, stray. And lots of bikers. I had a bowl of green chile stew here once with Ron Howard. He was in Jemez shooting his movie The Missing.

There are scads of bars I'd add to this list: The Florabama in Orange Beach, Ala.; the The Old Salty Dog on City Island, Fla.; The Buckhorn Saloon & Opera House in Pinos Altos, NM. (below) and Manci's in Daphne, Ala.

How about you? What bars would you put on the Best list and why?

When do we take newspapers off the ventilator?

2009-10-27T17:31:00Z

How do people who run newspapers get out of bed anymore?

The latest stats show daily newspaper circulation is at the lowest number it has been since before World War II when the industry began making circulation records public. Only 12.9 percent of the public buys a daily newspaper now, down from 31.1 percent in 1940.

Average daily circulation at the nation's newspapers fell 10.6 percent since last year.

And before you point to the fact that newspaper web sites are getting more traffic than ever, remember, no one pays for those page views. The newspapers are giving away their content online and getting bupkus for it. They haven't figured out a business model that supports online content. They can't sell ads against it effectively.

Newspaper advertising revenue is plummeting and layoffs continue. The NY Times, the third highest circulation paper in the nation, announced this week it's laying off 100 newsroom employees.

The situation is so bad that some newspapers are considering charging people to read their material, again. But how do you get people to pay for a product they've grown accustomed to getting for free?

Like I said, I don't know how newspaper editors keep going.

For those of who love newspapers, this has been painful to live through. What will the post-newspaper world look like?

Movies on The Weather Channel?

2009-10-21T17:46:00Z

I'm not one to complain about opportunities to watch George Clooney. But The Weather Channel's plans to begin airing weather-themed movies is just stupid. The AP reports"The Perfect Storm" will air on TWC on Oct. 30, the 18th anniversary of the real-life storm depicted in the film starring Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Other movies slated for airing on TWC: "Misery," "March of the Penguins," and "Deep Blue Sea."

TWC hopes to attract a broader audience than its current base of weather nerds -- and get more advertisers, of course. From the piece:

For The Weather Channel, the risk lies in alienating its regular weather-obsessed viewers, who tune in for news of high pressure systems rather than high drama. The potential reward is that new fans will tune in, and they'll stay on the station for a longer period, pleasing advertisers.

This just in, TWC honchos: People watch The Weather Channel because they like weather forecasts. Really. I'm one of those people, a weather devotee who tracks hurricanes on a paper storm chart every summer and who has TWC on my TV with the sound muted all the time. I want an on-air meteorologist standing in front of a map of the United States on my TV 24/7. It comforts me. I like to know about the high pressure system in the Midwest and the cold front in New Mexico. I know tomorrow will happen if there is a weather forecast. I don't want anything messing with my endless loop of predictions about tomorrow's temperatures. Not even Clooney.

This is a Category 5 screw-up. What next, fire Jim Cantore?

When history calls, history calls

2009-10-15T22:21:00Z

And it's calling me to get back on here and start writing about what's going on the world from high pop culture to low politics.

Every writer should have a patron like my buddy Dan Faber, who has encouraged, goaded, even nagged me into backing away from the Facebook, the middle-aged inertia and the corporate stress and get writing again.

So here I am.

Thanks Dan.

So what do you all want to talk about? Obama and that Nobel? Dave Letterman and those female staffers? Conde Nast's dire financial situation?

The Great Schlep (or how to keep the geezers you know from voting for McCain)

2008-10-07T21:14:00Z

You have GOT to watch this:

Panic attack

2008-10-07T18:53:00Z

OK, I know McCain has pulled out of Michigan, a key state, and Obama is ahead in the polls, but I'm having a panic attack that the GOP is going to win next month.

Obama's lead just isn't fat enough for me to sleep well. I fear the stupids are going to win, again.

Someone tell me something to reassure me.

Three years ago today....

2008-08-29T04:58:00Z

..... Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Here's the warning the weather service in New Orleans issued the morning the storm hit:

Urgent Weather Message from NWS New Orleans

WWUS74 KLIX 281550NPWLIX URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA

1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

HURRICANE KATRINA MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969. MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. ATLEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED. THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED.

CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE. HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT. AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...

AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK. POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS. THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...

BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BEKILLED.AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEARHURRICANE FORCE...OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE...ARE CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS. ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET...DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!

LAZ038-040-050-056>070-282100-ASSUMPTION-LIVINGSTON-LOWER JEFFERSON-LOWER LAFOURCHE-LOWER PLAQUEMINES-LOWER ST. BERNARD-LOWER TERREBONNE-ORLEANS-ST. CHARLES-ST. JAMES-ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST-ST. TAMMANY-TANGIPAHOA-UPPER JEFFERSON-UPPER LAFOURCHE-UPPER PLAQUEMINES-UPPER ST. BERNARD-UPPER TERREBONNE-1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28, 2005.

About 24 hours later, we watched the city drown. Wear a fleur de lis today in memory of New Orleans and the rest of the northern Gulf Coast, much of which remains in ruins and under tarps.

The Cult of Heath Ledger is born

2008-07-21T03:15:00Z

So I tried to go see the new Batman flick this weekend. No luck. It's sold out for the next 3 weeks at the local I-Max theater, and sold out for the next 5 days at the local 24-screen multiplex where it's playing 58 times a day.

Holy summer blockbuster. Entertainment Weekly is reporting The Dark Knight did $155.3 million this weekend, the biggest opening in box office history.

Christian Bale is making a repeat performance as Batman, and he is the best of all the move Batmen. But the Batman party belongs, of course, to the late and great Heath Ledger, who kicks bat butt as the Joker. You can see the deep dark brilliance of the performance even in the trailers.

This is the weekend the Cult of Heath Ledger was born.

And yeah, I'm back. My blog burnout has healed.

Yeah, I suck

2008-04-01T03:18:00Z

Forgive me blog readers, I have sinned. It's been more than a month since my last confession, er, blog entry.

Since my last blog entry, I've had about 30 days of the winter blahs. I slave for Scripps Networks Interactive all day, doing my part to make the shelter category online a better place for you and me. At night I lay in bed and watch "Law and Order" reruns. My TiVo spends the day recording them for me while I'm at work, because L&O airs on some cable channel, somewhere, every day. I try to guess the cast members before the opening credits. I only watch the ones with Jerry Orbach in them. Or young Chris Noth. I delete the ones with Paul Sorvino. And I don't even record the L&O: Criminal Intents with Vincent d'Onofrio in them.

Yeah, it's a rut.

But I've been blogging somewhere for 7 years now. I'm due a break.

Sephora is coming Knox Vegas!

2008-02-25T04:12:00Z

O.M.G. Sephora is opening a store in Knoxville this week!!!

For those of you with penises, Sephora is the most fab cosmetic store on the planet. They have brands like LORAC, Bobbie Brown, Urban Decay, Philosophy and Nars. Best of all, they encourage you to play in the makeup. It's all out in the customer's reach, with makeup applicators nearby.

Now if we can just get a Trader Joe's in Knoxville, the place will be officially part of the first world.

The Trib dies

2008-02-23T21:25:00Z

The Albuquerque Tribune published its last edition today. Here's a video piece from abqtrib.com about the paper's closing, featuring long time staffers (most of them my former coworkers and forever friends) talking about the Trib. I can't tell you how sad I am about the Trib's death. I worked at the PM newspaper from 1994 to 2000, and the place made me a better journalist and better person. The world is a dimmer place without it.

Voting for a new future --- in a barn

2008-02-12T02:53:00Z

Well I changed my mind on Super Tuesday. The swing happened when I got into the voting booth in a failed patio store in deepest West Knoxville. The place had been a barn once --- Cows, horses, hay, animal manure. After barn came retail, and now it was empty except for the voting booth and the folding tables. The brick silo still stood just outside, across the parking lot from the Pizza Kitchen and the sushi joint. The pasture was now a parking lot filled with $40,000 cars and SUVs

Yes, I was about to cast my primary vote in a barn. Insert Tennessee joke here.

The strip mall surrounding the barn reminded me just how fast things change in this country. A few generations ago our ancestors were scratching substinence crops out of a craggy Tennessee field. Now I'm at the same spot sipping a $5 latte, trying to decide whether to vote for an African-American man or a woman for president.

It's a brave new world. The changes never stop, and most days I'm glad for it.

Change is a chance things might get better.

On that thought, I pulled the Obama lever. Bring it, Barack.

Heath, we hardly know ye

2008-01-24T05:20:00Z

Jake and Heath in a scene from
"Brokeback Mountain."

I'm stunned, stunned, I tell you, that Heath Ledger offed himself before Britney Spears. No one with a bet in the Troubled Young Stars Death Pool saw this one coming. Is there still enough mirth remaining in the nation's withering newsrooms to run death pools? They were such wicked fun. I won the whole pot in the summer of 1999 for putting JFK Jr. at the top of my list of famous people most likely to die soon.

The autopsy results for Heath aren't back, but all the ingredients for suicide or accidental OD are there: naked on the bed, surrounded by sleeping pills. Discovered by the housekeeper. He never got the massage he'd ordered in, so he died with tension in his shoulders. The same old sad Hollywood story, youthful talent and promise cut short by mood altering substances. It'll take a few days to find out what mood-altering substances felled handsome Heath. What a waste. Heath had an Oscar ahead of him and a 2-year-old daughter to raise.

I keep thinking of that Lucinda Williams song "See What You Lost When You Left This World," the one where she gently chides a friend who has taken his own life, reminding him of all the little moments he'll never have again.

Renfro in the 1992 Renfro in a 2003 police mug shot
film "The Client."

You gottta feel bad for Brad Renfro, another, lesser known actor who died last week in Los Angeles of what appears to be an overdose. He was 25. He'll be completely eclipsed by the coverage of Heath Ledger's death. Heath was taller, blonder, better looking and had been nominated for an Oscar. Renfro became a child star at the age of 10 when he starred alongside Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in "The Client", one of those John Grisham legal thrillers in the early 1990s. He did the child star thing and adolesced into a mood disordered man with a receding hairline, a drug problem and a propensity for making bad script choices. Renfro was buried this week in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., in a misty rain.

A pair of toxocology reports will tell the tale in coming weeks of Hollywood dreams gone bad.

Whole Lotta Hair

2008-01-18T03:57:00Z

Forget Led Zep's reunion. Let's talk about Robert Plant's hair. Holy Hairclub for Men! The guy is 59 years old and he still has a head of a hair a 28-year-old would envy. Yeah, I know he's bleaching his thick halo of ringlets to hide the gray, but he still has the thick halo of ringlets. Look at the photos. Below left, Bob Plant in 1972. Below right, Bob Plant last month.

Bob's hair hasn't thinned or crept back his forehead a single centimeter. It's still bouncy. Wow.

I'm not the only person to notice his eternally young mop. New York magazine asked some hair stylists to weigh in on Bob's locks. "Robert Plant definitely has a perm," stylist Rodolfo Valentin tells the magazine. "I call this the mucho-mousse-and-gel look."

All the stylists agree Bob isn't wearing extensions. It's his hair, and it's a little overprocessed. Stylist Carlos Vega says, "If only he used a curling iron—it would have been a lot prettier."

If you're wondering who I'm voting for

2008-01-17T07:43:00Z

Hillary Clinton is my homegirl

I've wavered between Hill and Obama. And I like Edwards a lot because he started his campaign in New Orleans, to remind the rest of the nation that the Gulf Coast -- my home region -- is still in ruins more than 2 years after Katrina. But Obama needs to come up with some specifics. Charisma is a wonderful thing, but it takes more than charisma and an Oprah endorsement to get my vote. Oprah has been recommending bad women's fiction to me for years. Why should I listen to her about a presidential candidate? As for John Edwards, enough already with the labor Democrat schtick. The last time that worked was when John Travolta fit into his white disco suit. Come on, John Edwards, get with the times.
Hill can get us out of the mess Dubya has left the country in. Yeah, she gave Socks the cat away when she no longer needed him to put some warm and fuzzy on her image. But she's tough enough to do what it takes to change the course this country is on.
Plus, I'd love for the first president my 6-year-old daughter remembers to be a woman president.

I'm back online!

2008-01-17T06:50:00Z

Well guys, after an eight month hiatus, I'm back online with a new blog for the new year. It's a Go Daddy prefab design, no custom work here. I'd rather write words than write code.

So why was I offline? My other website was swallowed by a failed web hosting company. They also let my domain registration lapse, so I lost leannepotts.net to a squatter. I was evicted from my own damn site. To make a long story short, I got leannepotts.net back, along with leannepotts.com, and got tired of arguing with ipower, the web hosting service you should avoid like the plague (or Mike Huckabee) about getting my content off their servers. So fuck them. I'm on Go Daddy now. And who needs all my old published clips from newspapers, books and magazines?

I am reborn online.

Let's get rantin.' We've got to make some sense out of this president-electing, Iraq-War-losing, sliding-into-a-recession country of ours.