Driving to the office today I saw a plane, a very large plane, flying from the east towards this large group of skyscrapers. My whole body tensed up. I watched the plane fly towards them or maybe behind them. I wasn't sure yet. Would it come out the other side, or was it about to fly into them? I watched and waited. Any minute I was going to see one of the buildings burst into flames because the plane crashed into it. God don't let it happen. When the plane finally appeared from behind the group of skyscrapers I breathed a sigh of relief. But I spent the next two hours very sad because of 9/11. Things are different now. Every time we see a plane.... Things are different for us in America. As soon as you think of it you just feel like crying.  

Elliot Smith is dead.

Elliott Smith Dies

Singer-songwriter was thirty-four

1969-2003

Elliott Smith, whose fragile melodies and voice positioned him as a Nick Drake for a new generation, died yesterday of a knife wound to the chest, an apparent suicide; he was thirty-four. Smith's body was found at his home in Los Angeles by a friend yesterday just after noon. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead an hour later.

Last screening: presidents’ series; the four hour biography of Ronald Reagan. Interesting man. Raised a gypsy early in life, college football player, heroic lifeguard, actor, mediocre governor who raised taxes, increased spending, and decreased welfare help to poor people, and called the national guard on protesting students at Berkley. Responsible in the fifties for putting many actors and writers out of work and in prison in the blacklist communism witch trials. Because he really didn't like communism. Spent most of his life as a liberal democrat before finally switching to republicanism. President of the country when fed deficit was highest it had ever been in history and we were in the midst of the worst depression we had seen since the great one, unemployment the highest it had ever been, on and on. But somehow he turned it all around for a while. Great personality. One of the best we've ever seen in the presidency. Hard to judge presidents really. Not all black and white. And after the last few years of studying I am starting to think that you really can’t blame the economy on the president. I think that regardless of how good or bad the economy is it’s a cop out to try to pin it on one man. But it is inevitable. His economic program called Reaganomics that he finally got by the then democratic congress is blamed for leading the country to a fiscal disaster we had never seen. Cutting benefits to the poor and giving tax breaks to the rich. Sound familiar? But again things started turning around. He really believed that the only way to get peace between us and USSR was to build and build. We had the biggest protest in our history during his presidency---against him—against building up our nuclear armament. But he didn't care. He went insane building arms because he really believed that was the only way to defeat Russia—was through a position of strength. At one point pentagon spending to build the military reached 34 million dollars per hour on building weapons. He brought America to the highest deficit we ever had in our history. Still today we are feeling the effects of his spending. But he was right. it worked. Not only did he get Russia to start signing disarmament treaties, he downright brought them to their knees from trying to compete with us. Their whole damn empire imploded. Reagan was an idealist and a revolutionary. He did trade arms for hostages. But he got hostages back. And he did use the money to fund the contras in Nicaragua. But that is because he was trying to defeat the communist Sandinistas. I like that about the guy. You kind of walk away in awe of Reagan after studying him. I don't know if we’ll ever have a president like that again. what a different kind of guy. very heroic. Even if you don't agree with a lot of the things he was about. He brought the damn Berlin wall down and he was in his late seventies flying all over the world trying to make it happen. Unbelievable. I was alive back then but I was too young to know what the hell was going on. I didn't understand the significance of what he was doing. Now we can see it. 

Current Spin: my morning jacket, at dawn. This group is awesome. I am sure they will be entirely ignored.