L.A. WeeklyLA MONICA
DEAR EDITOR:
Three cheers for “La Monica's Story” [April 28]! In one deadly accurate satirical stroke, the entire shallow, inescapable circus of Monicagate was both embodied and disemboweled. It worked as commentary, as representation and as high parody. Ms. Vaginal Davis, we kneel at your sequined hem, and humbly thank you for sharing your divine gifts with us. Kudos to photographer Michael Powers for so ruthlessly capturing the style of the Andrew Morton trash fest, and to the Weekly for printing it. It almost made up for the last two years of the media blitzkrieg over a blowjob.
–Charles Fogarty, David Nichols
Los Angeles
DEAR EDITOR:
The grotesque cover on your most recent issue could only be redeemed if it were accompanied by a humorous article. Unfortunately, the article lacked cleverness and subtlety. What was the point? Are you lowering your standards to appeal to a particular demographic? Like, say, the illiterate and tasteless?
–David Treciak
Torrance
DEAR EDITOR:
Your April Fools' prank on the cover was very amusing. However, what I didn't find amusing was the use of my name — Lamonica Jones! It makes me wonder if I'll ever be able to work at a government job should someone in the government take this prank seriously. Oh, by the way, Lamonica is not Swahili — it's Italian!
–Lamonica Jones
South Corona
TRAILER BRIDE
DEAR EDITOR:
Re: “We're Earnest, and Contagious” [April 915], I hope it's that your critics are too far from Sacramento and Nashville, rather than raw urban naiveté, that they so wholeheartedly miss the cuspidor when it comes to country. It's embarrassing when a name-dropping L.A. critic muddles country's lesser styles into one catchall label — no one outside of your Glen Hirshberg and a few record-company flunkies ever thought Wayne Hancock was anything but roots country. And he would have done everyone justice to mention Uncle Tupelo, whose early-'90s album gave an (unneeded) label to the alternative country “movement.” While Hirshberg and the L.A. Weekly deserve kudos for shedding a light in the dank roadhouse of alternative country, both the Weekly's editors and Hirshberg should blush at such a hackneyed, directionless piece highlighting the writer's pretensions while distracting from a well-deserved nod to Trailer Bride.
–Andrew Bulkeley
Frankfurt, Germany
MILITARY TARGETS
DEAR EDITOR:
I'm sending this e-mail in regard to Lalo Lopez's article about Mexicans in the U.S. armed services [Mexiled, March 1925]. Being a Mexican-American in the service, I can't fully agree with what Lopez has written. I was no Reagan supporter, but to suggest that joining the military is wrong is, in my mind, an ignorant statement. I joined the Army to serve my country. I could have gone to college and gotten financial aid, but I wanted to earn my way into college with money I had worked for, not money that had been handed to me.
In the service, I not only got a great job as a signal-intelligence analyst, I got to travel the world and visit Germany, Belgium, France, Holland, Bosnia, Russia, Italy and other places. I also got to work with other people of different backgrounds. Now that I'm out, I live on my own, have bought my own car with my own money, go to every community meeting in Boyle Heights (my home) and plan to enter school this summer.
All this confirms my old beliefs about how fortunate I am to be an American citizen. I have been called a sellout by my fellow â Chicanos for going into the military. These are people who can't even read in Spanish, who think May 5 is Mexican Independence Day, who smoke weed that supports the drug lords in Mexico who give money to the corrupted PRI. These are people who tag all over beautiful Mexican murals and then say they have brown pride.
I'm sick of this “us against them” attitude. That's the reason we never progress. I've been held down more by my own people than by any other group. We're always also fighting against ourselves instead of working together. And it's not the “white man” making us fight against each other; it's the ignorance and jealousy of our own people that keeps us down.
–Carlos Amador
Los Angeles
DEAR EDITOR:
Let's take a look at this cartoon [L.A. Cucaracha, April 915]. A NATO jet flying in on an American target, a gated community. For what purpose? Ethnic cleansing? What ethnic group are you proposing to cleanse? Senior citizens in a Florida trailer park? An Army base such as Fort MacArthur? A gated community in Culver City or Thousand Oaks? Lalo Lopez doesn't say, because, the way I see it, he is a hateful, small-minded coward. He wants people to guess about what he is saying, and when they accuse him of racism, he whines, “But I never named any one group specifically.” He should be ashamed of himself. He is no less a hatemonger than the Washington, D.C., DJ who got fired for his recent racist remarks toward African-Americans. Both of them are cowards who hide behind the weak excuse “But it's only a joke.”
–Jim Deschenes
North Hollywood
DTV
DEAR EDITOR:
Re: Gary Davis' “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Off” [April 28]. The industry's use of the term DTV in place of HDTV is playing right into the hands of the media giants that control the broadcast-cable-satellite infrastructure. HDTV is real, and it is here, and over-the-air broadcasts are being made every day. The satellite and cable interests want to label their service DTV in order to transmit a picture with less resolution (sharpness), so that they can save bandwidth and, in turn, not invest in capital improvements to their signal-delivery systems. In other words, the customer comes last and profits come first.
–Peter Herbert
Tolland, Connecticut
DEAR EDITOR:
Gary Davis states that neither Canada nor Mexico is expected to adopt the U.S. DTV standard. This is incorrect. Canada adopted ATSC A/53 in November 1997.
–John Golitsis
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
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