Liberty Bell said:
Harvey Weinstein, who obviously wants no feud with the folk legend, said, "Bob Dylan has lived an unbelievable and at times, an elusive life. He has countless fans who will now be able to really gain insight into his fascinating life."
When I sing along with my favorite songs, it's about my life and how I identify my stories with the words and feeling of the music. I honestly don't care about who shagged who to inspire the song, unless of course it's me--and wouldn't you be flattered to have been the subject of "Like a Rolling Stone", horrible put-down though it is? But when I hear that song, I think about how that Miss Lonely reflects on my own life at that age. So, it becomes personal. Who Bob Dylan was singing about--even Bob Dylan himself--is secondary to the music itself.
I have lived with the ambitious and worked with the famous. It's an oxygen-deprived environment. I wish them all well, but we little folks gotta breathe, too. I don't care who Bob Dylan did or did not shag in 1965 or 2007. I just know that "Desolation Row" still makes me cry. I don't know who that spoon-fed Casanova really was to Dylan, but I've known everybody and every circumstance in that song in my own way.
There's a universality to Dylan's music like Shakespeare, that same understanding of human nature and motivation which is lacking in so much of the arts these days. Much of the feeling expressed in contemporary pop music and film is so overblown, infantile, and spoiled. I've heard so many minor key dirges about how bad someone makes the singer feel, but no sense of the bigger picture of relationships: no irony, no nuance, no poetry, no toughness, no humor, no distance. It's all crybaby, "You make me feel bad" rhyming couplets, everybody's swallowed up their newfound power of feeling unpretty emotions and expressing them. On the other hand, Dylan's paints an intriguing and complicated scene, and shows you how unclear and fascinating people really are. Nobody, no relationship, is all that simple.
I'm afraid the Factory Girl film will have the same simplistic, causal explanation for Edie Sedgwick's life that current pop music has--somebody made her
feel bad, so she went and did
bad drugs, and was around inexplicably one-dimensional-yet-thoroughly glamorous
bad people. In my mind I can see countless Edie clones running in slow motion with their eyeliner dribbling down their teary, perfect tweeked-out faces in the 10,000 inspired-by music videos I hopefully will never have to suffer through. Her boyfriend broke up with her, and "she feels bad, she feels sad, she misses the bestus pal she ever had." (A paraphrase of Fats Waller singing "After You've Gone"--he had more of a sense of humor and irony about life in the 1930's, for God's sake! Where's the Fats Waller biopic? I'd pay to see that done right, Weinsteins!)
Word. I would much rather eat guacamole with my buddies than throw $12 in the trash (basically) 
listening to his interviews, his tapes, his comments on Vietnam, on politics, on protest singing and on the Middle East. Much of my ipod is full of Dylan speaking and he is often contrary, rude and dismissive of the generation he is seen to lead. This is not a comment on his art, but a comment on aspects of his iconisation. 
Ah egotism....
