HE re-welcomes the great Owen Wilson once again, but wait, wait, wait a minute…look at the size of those elephant collars! Guys haven’t worn shirts with collars the size of Dumbo ears since the mid ’70s. Are you telling me that contempo designers are trying to re-ignite these godawful things? Is this part of the normcore thing?

The scruffier get-up that Wilson wears inside the current issue of Esquire…that’s totally cool. But the guy who said “hey, I know….let’s bring back elephant collars!”…that guy needs to be hunted down with shotguns and machetes and poison darts.

My first chat with Owen happened over the phone in the summer of ’94, when he was 25. It was actually a three-way — myself, Owen and Wes Anderson. They were parked in Houston at the time but about to leave for Los Angeles for the development (guided by James L. Brooks and Polly Platt) and making of Bottle Rocket, which was no picnic. 27 years ago, man…time just flies out the door, doesn’t it?

Now we’re living in a completely different culture and a wholly different realm…just about everything that seemed loose and casually cool and pocket-droppy in ’94 is now highly suspect. For “we the people” are now living under the lash of woke terror. Once it was an extremely cool thing to be a pair of young white Texas dudes with a dry sense of humor and voices all their own…okay, let’s not get caught up in this.

The 52 year-old Owen has just been profiled by Esquire‘s Ryan D’Agostino, the idea being to promote (a) the Disney + Loki series in which Owen plays Mobius M. Mobius, even though it’s been running since last June, and (b) Anderson’s forthcoming The French Dispatch (Searchlight, 10.22), which was shot eons ago but was delayed, of course, by Covid.

Congratulations to Tatiana Antropova for passing her U.S. citizenship exam (written and oral) this morning with flying colors. She will officially become a U.S. citizen on Friday at 10 am when she takes the oath. Hollywood Elsewhere expects to capture the ceremony on video, of course. A bottle of champagne inside an ice-filled bucket is another good idea.

Early this morning Steve “reprehensible scumbag” Brody was escorted out of the HE building by two beefy security goons. He asked for it repeatedly, and he finally got it. His absence is not regretted.

I’ve been attending all morning to a post-operative situation regarding Anya, who was neutered a week ago. Vet inspection, cat antibiotic, etc.

“The most frightening moment for our team came when our producer, Brent Swails, was taking some video on his iPhone and two Taliban fighers came up with their pistols and were ready to pistol-whip him, and we had to intervene and scream and it was actually another Taliban fighter who came in and said ‘no, no, no, don’t do that, they’re journalists.’

“But I mean really…I’ve covered all sorts of crazy situations [and] this is mayhem, this is nuts. This impossible for an ordinary citizen, even they have their paperwork….no way [are] they running that gauntlet. No way are they going to be able to navigate that. It’s very dicey, it’s very dangerous and it’s completely unpredictable. There’s no order, there’s no coherent system…and to me, it’s a miracle that more people haven’t been very serious hurt.” — CNN’s Clarissa Ward, 8.18, 5:26 am.

"Two Taliban fighters just came up with their pistols, and they were ready to pistol whip [our producer who was taking video]. We had to intervene and scream…” pic.twitter.com/3mvCCTlSQR

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 18, 2021

Days after the Taliban reclaimed control of Afghanistan, CNN's @ClarissaWard reports on what life looks like in Kabul at the moment. https://t.co/lyKq0HKUjV pic.twitter.com/G6S4W1qNLu

— CNN International (@cnni) August 18, 2021

Somebody recently said it would be great if Ridley Scott was on Twitter, because he’d be telling people “say what you like, mate, but otherwise fuck off and get bent” because he knows what he knows after several decades in the business and don’t tell him, etc. It would be so great! Shafts of sunlight piercing down from the clouds!

But of course, one of the reasons Scott has survived as long as he has is because he’s not stupid enough to be on Twitter in the first place.

There are almost certainly thousands of bright, experienced, knowledgable fellows who could transform the Twitterverse into a much more candid, blunt-spoken, less bullied environment, but they all have friends and publicists who’ve told them “good God, are you insane? Don’t even think about having a Twitter account.”

But oh, what a glorious world it could be if there were dozens or hundreds or thousands like Scott on Twitter, telling the jackals to go stuff it because he knows what goes.