Yes.
Here’s why Slumdog Millionaire is such bullshit: the father of Rubina Ali (who played the young Latika in the film) is trying to sell her into adoption for 200,000 pounds. Walking out of that theater, the majority of Americans who “loved” that film were filled with feelings of charity and self-satisfaction: as if the act of seeing the film were penance for a life spent not giving a shit about brown people. And the fact that the film ends with everything working out…well, that’s a little more than convenient for our consciences. But the reality is a thousand times worse. It is the movie inverted. Nothing is solved. No one makes it out. The children got paid fuck-all, and they’re no better off than before. Anyway. Fuck Slumdog Millionaire. And fuck the father. What a piece of shit.
Bob Dylan on Bob Dylan
| Bill Flanagan: | Does that mean you create outsider art? Do you think of yourself as a cult figure? |
| Bob Dylan: | A cult figure, that's got religious connotations. It sounds cliquish and clannish. People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers - bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn't change. |
| Bill Flanagan: | But you've sold over a hundred million records. |
| Bob Dylan: | Yeah I know. It's a mystery to me too. |
This Week’s Twat: Tea bags. Utilized by the fringe right and general tax evaders as a symbol and locus for their anger at Obama and indignation at their loss at the polls not six months ago, tea bags have never been such big twats. It used to be that I would take one of these cheesecloth pockets filled with aromatic leaves, steep it in hot water for 3 to 5 minutes, then sip and enjoy the warm, soothing sensation of the liquid coating my throat. Now it’s some old Libertarian Minuteman separatist dipping his saggy ball sack down my esophagus. Or at least his ideas. Which are about as palatable as the aforementioned saggy ball sack. So it goes. This week, tea bags, you guys are twats.
The danger with Beck is that he takes hysteria and conspiracy theories and makes them seem palatable.
This Week’s Twat: Peter Arnell. Mastermind of the unnecessary and complete-fucking-waste-of-money $10 million dollar overhaul of the Pepsi logo and the disastrous (and since reverted) change to Tropicana’s branding. Peter Arnell: you, Sir, are a twat. Read an article about him over at Newsweek.
Louis C.K. talking about shit.
