“At his rally tonight, Trump says the government is unable to violently attack immigrants, someone in the crowd shouted ‘Shoot them!’

“The crowd & Trump erupt in laughter & cheers. Trump says, ‘Only in the panhandle can you get away with that statement.'” .twitter.com/SgQd2OH9ti

— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 9, 2019

Got up late, slow to start, interruptions aplenty. A high point was learning how to mirror iPhone content on the Sony HDR 4K 65-incher. Suddenly it was 4:30 pm and time to hit Runyon Canyon. I might be subconsciously downshifting with the big flight to Stockholm and then Nice only three days away (Saturday at 6 pm). Tomorrow’s another day.

5.9 Update: I can’t do this. Too many last-minute, 48-hours-and-counting errands and clean-ups to take care of. The clock always speeds up and actually oppresses when you’re about to leave on a longish journey.

Wednesday, 5.8: Tomorrow morning Hollywood Elsewhere will be attending what boils down to a Pete Buttigieg rally. It’s technically a “Yes on EE” rally but c’mon. It’ll happen at SEIU 99, 2724 West 8th Street in Los Angeles, at the corner of 8th and Hoover. (Four or five blocks southwest of MacArthur Park.) The event, which Mayor Eric Garcetti will also attend, begins at 10:30 am. I’ll need to jump on the Yamaha rumble-hog so I can arrive at 8 or 8:30 am. A big crowd is expected.

Legend has long had it that sometime in late ’65 the once-friendly Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs had a falling out. While riding around Manhattan in a long black limousine, Dylan, who was into his “uptown Bob” phase, played a new unrecorded song for Ochs (reportedly “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?“) and the latter, who had gradually developed a view that Dylan’s post-1963 material was too vague and mercurial and not political enough, told Dylan he didn’t like it.

“Whaddaya mean you don’t like it?” Dylan asked. “It’s not that good,” Ochs replied. Dylan told Ochs to get out of the limo.

I haven’t listened to “Window” in ages, and it’s a lot better than I’d remembered. I’m not saying Dylan was justified in giving Ochs the boot, but I understand why he might have succumbed to an angry impulse. It’s a good song. Ochs was wrong.

Dylan will turn 78 later this month. I don’t like to say or even think stuff like this, but he’s a year and a half older than effing Joe Biden. Like DeNiro and Scorsese, I wish Dylan could somehow stop aging and be allowed to remain on the planet earth forever.

At 10:30 pm on Friday, 5.24, Sylvester Stallone will take the stage at the Grand Lumiere in Cannes with three motives in mind. One, to screen clips from Rambo V — Last Blood, which Lionsgate will open stateside on 9.20. Two, to be celebrated with a career-tribute montage and an SRO from those in attendance. And three, for a screening of a 4K restoration of Ted Kotcheff‘s First Blood (and not Rambo — First Blood as the Cannes press release states).

Rambo V — Last Blood was directed by Adrian Grunberg (Get The Gringo) and produced by Millennium Films (aka Alchemy)?

Rambo V synopsis: “In the fifth episode of franchise, when the daughter of one of his friends is kidnapped, Rambo, who has been working on a ranch, crosses the U.S.-Mexican border and quickly finds himself up against the full might of one of Mexico’s most violent cartels.”

The script is by Stallone and Matt Circulnick. The costars include Paz Vega, Adriana Barraza, Oscar Jaenada, Joaquin Cosio and Yvette Monreal.

For anyone with half a brain, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig‘s N.Y. Times report about Donald Trump’s massive losses between 1985 and 1994, as revealed by Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, totally pops the myth-bubble about Trump being a shrewd, swaggering, super-rich businessman.

Trump was in fact propped up all those years by his father, Fred Trump, and was subsequently propped up, most likely, by Eastern European or Russian interests at some point within the last 10 or 15 years.

Will the popping of this myth have any effect on the blind loyalties of Trump’s hinterland, red-state supporters? The basis of his legend, after all, is that he’s a powerful financial hotshot who knows the ins and outs of the system and how to finagle things, and now it’s clear he was never a winner and in fact was a clumsy, profligate loser through and through.

Will this make a difference in Bumblefuckland? Of course not. All they care about is Trump as a symbol of rich-white-guy power and the way things used to be when The Brady Bunch was a hit series. As long as he continues to push back against immigration and embraces the fossil fuel industry (and thereby helps to hasten the end of the natural world as mankind has known it for thousands of years), they’ll stand behind him.

The most entertaining portion of this Last Word discussion comes when Lawrence O’Donnell tells Craig that the IRS transcripts that she and Buettner drew upon to write the story “have to have leaked out of the IRS.” Craig says nothing, but her facial expression (a slight nod, a smile) is priceless.