TAKING THE GRUNGE PLUNGE

The alternative music crowd should stop worrying about how the greedy mass media are cashing in on its scene (“Grunge ‘R’ Us,” by Ann Japenga, Nov. 14). The entertainment companies go where they smell a quick buck, and that will never change. Instead of becoming discouraged, the underground should realize that maybe some great music could come out of this.

Why don’t these bands start singing about the people--baby boomers mostly--who run the companies that exploit them? The mass media would still cash in, but that’s not really important. These bands could empower an entire generation to produce music that would be truly their own, not just some uncreative rehash of the past. There are still things to sing about.

TAMMY SMITH

Santee

Rebellion is only gratifying when there’s a tangible, suited “other” against which to rebel. We baby boomers had the advantage of staging our youthful rebellion to a prim, frowning, arms-akimbo older generation, the World War II moralists who clucked ominously over our free love, disdain of ambition, blue jeans and long hair.

Today’s young people are stuck with mommies and daddies who want to borrow their clothes, not give them to Goodwill. We greedily consume the trappings of today’s youth, as though that could give us back our own. We are the generation that will liposuct, face-lift and aerobicize into eternity, rather than turn into our own moms and dads. Yet, the prim frown and the wagging finger might be precisely what today’s twentysomethings need to feel vindicated.

JOANNE G. MURPHY

Los Angeles

Although Madison Avenue can capitalize on a fashion or musical trend, it cannot profit from, and may even be threatened by, a belief or value system that may be attacking it.

By reducing a counterculture belief system to a fashion trend or a few new musical bands, a culture (read “Madison Avenue commercialism and consumerism”) allows people to rebel against it merely by adopting those modes of dress or musical tastes. Meanwhile, things go on exactly as they always have, and no one takes any real action for change.

ANDREW TILLES

Los Angeles

It was a shock to discover that Do It Yourself was invented by the punks. Perhaps Walt Whitman didn’t qualify as countercultural. And Thoreau, as influential as he may have been, probably wouldn’t have claimed to be a part of some “scene.” More likely, he’d have been appalled at the idea.

Ironically, the modern mass media, which Japenga sees as throttling fragile infant countercultures, in fact seed, feed and proclaim the births of these pseudo movements to satisfy their always-hungry gullets. The media’s prerequisite for rebellion is of a piece with their requirement that laundry detergent be new and improved, so that the very existence of “alternative art” is now a conservative, mainstream notion. This has rendered rebellion so predictable that every several years we know with sad certainty that there will be yet another group of what Japenga calls “scruffy young people dreaming wild ideas that at first seem preposterous.”

RICHARD LEVINSON

Van Nuys

Japenga’s article and the graphic illustrations of David Goldin are frightening and profound. The Riot Grrrls and other underground nonconformists protest that they are being destroyed by the media attention they so desperately “grunged” themselves to avoid.

Psychologists tell us that ignored children will go to any length to get attention. Is the new problem too many ignored children? The one-way trip from “obscurity to celebrity to obsolescence,” as Japenga describes it, also applies to media-discovered adults who get worldwide attention one day and are forgotten the next. It all comes with the media’s voracious appetite.

BARRY SHIPMAN

San Bernardino

SILENT WARS AGAINST NATIVE AMERICANS

Thanks for “The New Indian Wars” (by Margaret L. Knox, Nov. 7). I’m originally from the Flathead Reservation in northwestern Montana, and I can tell you that there’s nothing new about the attitude or mentality behind this war. It’s just more organized and better financed than in the past.

It’s about time that these silent wars against Native Americans are brought out into the open.

LAURIE J. CHAVIRA

Whittier

Most Americans are ignorant of the true history of this country’s first inhabitants. This is due partly to the way Native Americans are represented in elementary and high school textbooks.

And too many times, when a tribe is lucky enough to obtain a reservation with natural beauty and a healthy ecosystem, non-tribal members try to get a piece of the pie. Then, when they are denied, they complain. I wonder if it ever occurs to these complainers that those lands may be in as good a shape as they are because their true caretakers know when to exercise a little self-control?

The reservations are the last parcels of lands that Native Americans have control over, and if a non-tribal member lives on one and doesn’t like the way things are run, that person can always choose to live under United States jurisdiction instead.

EMILY CREELY

Costa Mesa

A PATT ON THE BACK

If David Letterman doesn’t somehow try to incorporate into his TV show the second half of Patt Morrison’s “Ready or Not?” column, he’s really missing the boat (Three on the Town, Nov. 14). It’s on a par with or even funnier than his lists. I was in stitches.

MOLLY B. SEPSIS

Hollywood

SKIP IT

Regarding the origin of Skippy (L.A. Speak, Palm Latitudes, Nov. 14): If memory serves, Skippy was a cartoon-strip character, a Dennis-minus-the-menace type who wore golf-style knickers. One of the Jackies, not Coogan but Cooper, played him on screen. It’s possible that this character also served as inspiration for the name of the peanut butter.

CLEO ROGERS

Burbank

TROUBLED BRIDGES OVER WATER

In Cityscape (Palm Latitudes, Nov. 7), we are led to believe that the distant structure with the Xs is the Henry Ford Bridge. It is the Commodore Schuyler F. Heim vertical drawbridge. The Ford bridge, a more traditional tilt drawbridge open only to rail traffic these days, is virtually obscured in the photograph by electrical poles to the right of the Schuyler Heim.

Second, it is implied that the photograph is recent. But to the left of the Schuyler Heim is a water-tank tower. That tank was a part of the old Ford assembly plant that was razed more than three years ago.

Third, “A misty morning view of San Pedro”? The photographer was standing in Wilmington, and we are looking at (but cannot see because it is too low) the Long Beach end of Terminal Island on the left and the L.A. Harbor end of Terminal Island on the right. San Pedro is out of the picture to the right.

Just think. Someday someone may be sitting at the Schuyler Heim, waiting for a ship to pass, thinking that they’re in San Pedro and that the Ford Bridge is a vertical drawbridge--and cursing the wrong bridge for the wait.

JARY S. JARRETT

Long Beach