LETTERS

Thanks for the kind words in the Las Vegas Weekly article ("Kid Rock," February 2). I really appreciated the fact that I pour my heart out into my music and in your words, that are so conveniently posted all over the Internet—I'm terrible. What a way to make me feel like shit. "Tori Amos Whining."

I'm a good friend of Sheila's and Mehrey's as well—and I don't expect everyone to love my style, or my music, or my voice. You can hate it—that's fine. But I do expect someone who is supposedly a music critic to at least give feedback. Saying someone is "terrible" is not a critique. It is a low blow that comes from someone who needed to rip on somebody and since you are friends with everyone else who played that night, you thought you would make that person me. I flew out to Las Vegas specifically for that show. The only reason I was late was because my flight was cancelled and then I couldn't get on standby—I spent six hours at the airport doing my best to get there—hitched a ride with random people to get there—and I was playing for a damn BENEFIT show—I believe in Sheila's cause with LadyFest.

Anyway—I'm sorry that my music was such torture to listen to for you. But next time, at least have the balls to come and say it to my face after the show —instead of humiliating me for everyone to read and then hiding behind an Internet article.

Chuck Twardy's February 2 Culture Club column "Fiction Factions" is relevant and pertinent. It has, over the past decade or so, become more difficult to understand what is reality and what is perception. Much of this is due, probably, to the show business nature of the news media—specifically: television news, where every report becomes a breathtaking, "amazing" and "breaking" story, when the report turns out to be nothing but a fancy rehash of old news.

Twardy's column subliminally points to the reason why education is important. How else can you understand news and nonfiction without having a basis to make an educated decision about whether or not what you hear or read is, in reality, fact? Recently, a reader of the Million Pieces book said she didn't care if it wasn't all true—emotionally she gained something from the reading. Her statement was a perfect example of the way propaganda functions. Hitler's Goebbels perfected the method of "lies becoming truths" in the thinking of his listeners, and that is something that continues to this day in many aspects of political life.

And like it or not, our government succumbed, to some degree, to the "fiction factions." When we say that Islam should be a respected religion, we're believing fiction. Islam was a very productive religion over a thousand years ago, when it contributed to science, philosophy, and the best interests of mankind along with non-Muslims or believers in Islam. Today Islam is no longer the great world religion it once was, but instead, like so many other groups, demonstrates that it is focused only in the protection and spread of its current beliefs.

As long as we continue to have the masses of people enrolled in educational systems which no longer produce individuals with the ability to understand history and what is occurring around them, "supposedly true but fictional" news will continue to prevail—proof that even though we are technologically advanced, our common intelligence is still stuck in the Dark Ages.

Dear Editor,

This letter is about a Love Jones [ad] in the Las Vegas Weekly a few months past. The photo—a full view of a gorgeous, statuesque blond with long hair covering her shoulders and neck. She stands in a sexy pose with a shy, subtle smile and dreamy, closed eyes. THE BEST I'VE EVER SEEN. She is now in a frame on my wall. Is it any trouble to have her back again?

Editor's note:
Joe, you scare us.

My Beloved Angel,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.

I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

As for my heart, there you will always be—very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me.

I rise up every moment saying to myself, "Come, I am going there!" Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything.

I feel foolish and happy as soon as I think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation!

Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders' threads.

O, my darling Eva [Eva?? It's the Las Vegas Weekly!] , you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talk to you as if you were there. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful.

Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself "she is mine!" Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!

How absolutely wonderful that the Weekly now has a new! bigger! "Nightclub section"!

How absolutely wonderful that we tourists and residents of Sin City have so many drop-dead glamorous $20,000,000 discos from which to choose, and the impeccably inscrutable Paris Hilton and other pornstars to be our hostess, and umpteen breathless articles about the latest super-hot this-or-that international record-spinner DJ come to town.

I have a suggestion though, for a new! bigger! "Anti-War section".

As long as this wonderful country in which we live is spending hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars and sacrificing thousands of young Americans on the altar of Bush-Cheney's urgent "war on tair", why not add a special Iraq page. Perhaps every week until we oh-so-concerned good citizen Americans DEMAND an end to the war, the Weekly could feature a winsome photograph of one of our young blown-apart GIs, brains and intestines spilling out from yet another perky pesky IED, to, oh you know, remind party-hearty Las Vegans that maybe there's more to think about than getting past the casino bouncers Saturday night and rushing to claim our $400 table-setup bottles of vodka ...