The women will wear tight leather pants, and long earrings, and be sexy; the guys will wear leather jackets and ride big, powerful motorized wheelchairs referred to as Big Macs.

The purpose, of course, will be to destroy pity and replace it with powerful, sexy, hip images.

I, for one, am sick of the person with disability who is always viewed as angelic! Barf! Who needs that?

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If Spike Lee wants to contact me about doing this film, let him have my e-mail address!

-- Tamar Raine

Read "Axl Rose: American Hellhound."

I first heard of GnR while living just off Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in late 1985. A kid approached me on the street and asked me if I was going to the show at the Roxy. He was exited, stoked even.

I had never heard of them, so I said "no" -- 99.9 percent of the L.A. bands playing the Strip in 1985 were no-talent clones in hairspray and leotards. I figured they were just another one.

My loss. Little did I realize that the lead singer of the band -- albeit an egotistical, bipolar misogynist jackass for the most part -- would turn out to be one of the only "public figures" of the late '80s/early '90s that was genuine to the core.

He was fed up with the political correctness and double talk that permeate this society, and he had the balls to get up and scream about it.

I believe Axl is pretty much how he represents himself to be in his songs and onstage. That was no act. No B.S. about that anyway.

-- Joshua Vaughn

While Guns n' Roses (and particularly Axl) were a cultural phenomenon in their heyday, I think the article you published on Axl was misleading and critically underwhelming. For example, the claim that his anger "directly" led to Rage Against the Machine's is unsubstantiated and less than compelling. Axl may have been angry, but his anger was never directed at political or social causes in any significant way like the Clash, the Dead Kennedys or many other bands that probably influenced Rage Against the Machine. Comparing Rose to Robert De Niro because his wardrobe "draws you in" is downright silly. Other inconsistencies, like claiming "the bitches' brew has only grown stronger over the years" and going on to say that later in their career the "music seemed to suffer," further undermine the author's ability to make a valid point and construct a cohesive article.

Axl Rose and his impact on American culture make an interesting subject, but not in the hands of someone who sees him as a cultural icon primarily because he wears a bandanna. In general, the quality of writing at Salon is so high I found this article surprising in its daftness. Besides, everyone knows Izzy wrote the best songs.

-- Mark Yokoyama

Read Bill Wyman's essay on Bob Dylan.

Bill Wyman's concluding vision of Bob Dylan spending his life, "true to a voice inside ... trying to communicate it faithfully whether people listen or not, whether people like it or not," while "Mick Jagger shills for Budweiser" and "respected new stars like Moby sell entire albums' worth of songs to corporations" can only have been written in ignorance (perhaps for the reason, always excusable to a U.S. readership, that it happened in Canada) of the all-time lowdown shill to shame them all, committed by Dylan himself.

Dylan, of course, didn't have to sell an entire album. To paraphrase Faulkner, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is worth any number of young Mobys. But, yes, that's what he sold, two years ago, to the Bank of Montreal, for use as background music on a TV commercial -- a low-glitz, black-and-white video collage "grimly purveying" Canada's oldest and biggest chartered bank to potential young investors in the prime-time audience.

Stunned and incredulous Canadian viewers in the near-50 age group desperately sought excuses, suggesting the commercial might be a hoax, or else an unfortunate arm's-length arrangement (you know, maybe like the sale of the Winnie the Pooh rights to Disney, unbeknown to Christopher Robin Milne), till Barb McKenna, a Prince Edward Island newspaper columnist, phoned Dylan's agent and asked point-blank, "Did Bob know?" and got an unequivocal "yes"; Dylan had personally approved the deal, and declared himself highly satisfied.

For many fans who, like me, had been prepared to overlook Dylan's nasty streak out of respect for what we thought his songs meant, this sorry bit of business set "the last moving target of '60s rock" in rigid perspective.

As for what keeps Dylan on the road, headed for another joint, to the tune of 96 shows a year? Likely the same thing that made him sell "The Times." Trying to make a buck, faithfully or otherwise. Positively Fourth Street, Bob. You could have done better, but never mind.

-- Fred Louder

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