[jeffm@jeack.com.au]

thanks kate.

this brings up an important moral point, and it's really interesting to
read other's points of view on this.

let's look at this again.

we all want him to write honestly.  about everything.  life on the road,
relationships with band members, audience, blah blah blah.

now, my guess (and half of it is supported) is that we don't want him to
write his honest reflections, if they summarize something we think he knows
little about, especially if they are negative.  however, if he was to write
critically about things that he knows most about - ie. relationships in his
life (band members, family, mates, etc.) we would applaud him for his
honesty.  don't we see something inherently wrong here.  wouldn't we be
conveniently forgetting the lives of his mates and families - and a
confidentiality he had possibly betrayed?

surely, my idea is that a good man (if he was to write critically /
honestly) would be more direct about things (certainly people) that were
less close to him.  

and if we're going to take the line that people have a right to know about
private behaviour, then pity us all...

to boil this all back down again, i guess if we see his critisms of
cleveland as a problem and something he should not do, then we have NO
RIGHT to ask him or anyone else to be honest about things / people or
places that are closest to him, that bring far more and greater possibility
to hurt.

cheers,
joffa

>
>At 06:14 PM 10/13/03 -0400, Virgil Thomas Alexander Morant wrote:
>>Again, my own favorite remark about my own hometown: "This [Cleveland] is

>>a town only a mother could love, what coastal Americans dismiss as 
>>'fly-over country'" (122).  That's just a blanket statement about 
>>Cleveland, the subject of his statement.  It's not a subjective 
>>observation from an admittedly brief observer of the town who only saw a 
>>small fraction of it for a couple of days.  He just says it flatly.  It 
>>was, as was a lot of the rest of the book, a great, big, bad conclusion, 
>>stated objectively, about something he knows very little about.
>
>I have been to Cleveland several times and I have to say that I was not 
>impressed with it, either as a business traveller, passing through or on 
>private visit, or when I was there to interview and had someone actively 
>selling me on living there.  I'd certainly pick it over Detroit, were
those 
>the only choices, and it's rock-and-roll history would lead it to edge out

>Pittsburgh too (where I have been multiple times). Then again, I first 
>visited NYC in 1985 and was dumbstruck horrified and beyond overwhelmed by

>the place - a perception that changed drastically by the mid-1990's.  I 
>haven't been to Cleveland that recently.
>
>That said, picking on Cleveland is at best a trite joke.  While the
comment 
>is well-stated, Rob is politely pandering to the collective sense that 
>Cleveland is an iconically awful city - not only sprawling, uncultured and

>polluted but boring as f**k too ... all for an audience who have likely 
>never been and likely never will be there.  I agree with Virgil that it 
>isn't good writing.
>
>
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>Kate Parker Adams
>kate@dnki.net
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>She's gonna dream out loud" - U2 (Zooropa)
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>go Out Of Mind ... http://www.dnki.net/blog
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