Archives for November 2, 2003

If you came here after seeing our URL in this morning’s New York Times (or via the link on the Times‘s Web site), welcome to “About Last Night,” a 24/7 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from…Chicago.

(In case you’re wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you’re seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)

All our postings of the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry’s start with “TT,” Our Girl’s with “OGIC.” In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking “ALN Archives” at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about “About Last Night,” by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You’ll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry’s most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and “Sites to See,” a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you’re curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you’ve come to the right site: “Sites to See” will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to “About Last Night.”

As if all that weren’t enough, you can write to us by clicking the “Write Us” button. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you’re minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that “About Last Night” is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren’t sure which way to turn.

If you’re one of the above, we’re glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

I was out of town giving speeches when Louis Armstrong’s house, located in Corona, Queens, and now owned by the City of New York, was finally opened to the public as a museum on Oct. 15. That was a celebration I hated to miss (especially since I’m just about to start work on a new Armstrong biography), but I was lucky enough to have been given a private tour a few years ago, back when the house was still being restored to its original condition. I wrote about it in an essay that will be collected next year in A Terry Teachout Reader:

Most jazz musicians, black and white alike, come from middle-class backgrounds, while most of those who are born poor strive mightily–and, more often than not, successfully–to join the ranks of the middle class. Anyone who doubts that Armstrong filled the latter bill need only visit his home, located some seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part of Queens. It is a modest three-story frame house whose elaborate interior is uncannily reminiscent of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s gaudy Memphis mansion. From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets of the master bathroom, the Armstrong house looks exactly like what it is: the residence of a poor southern boy who grew up and made good.

Unlike Graceland, though, it is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As one stands in Armstrong’s smallish study (whose decorations include, among other things, a portrait of the trumpeter painted by Tony Bennett), it is impossible not to be touched to the heart by the aspiration that is visible wherever you look. This, you sense, was the home of a working man, one bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but from what he did. The American dream has had no more loyal exemplar. “I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don’t have I don’t need,” he wrote. “My home with Lucille [his fourth wife] is good, but you don’t see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain’t gonna play your horn for you. When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate they ain’t got no breath to blow that horn.”

You really should go and see for yourself. The Armstrong House isn’t the easiest place in the world to reach from midtown Manhattan, but it’s perfectly feasible, and absolutely worth a day’s pilgrimage. For information about the house, including directions, click here. It’s a trip you’ll never forget.

While I’m at it, I also want to put in a plug for Michael Cogswell’s Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo, the newly published “official” book of the Armstrong House and Archives (of which Cogswell is the curator). It’s a coffee-table tome crammed full of unpublished photos of Armstrong at home, backstage, and on the road, and I highly recommend it as an antidote for the blues. You can’t look at Louis–or think about him, or listen to his music–without smiling.

Courtesy of artsjournal.com, my invaluable host (which you can visit by clicking on the artsjournal.com logo in the upper left-hand corner of this page), this wonderful story from ARTnews Online about the ten works of art currently in private hands that are most coveted by collectors and curators. The piece includes some jaw-dropping numbers:

“We all have our wish lists but we don’t go around talking about them. It gets in the way of our getting the work,” says Miami art collector Donald Rubell. “We hope that when our friends die, their children won’t like their art. Those are our silent wishes.”

Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer, a prime 1947 drip painting owned by the Anderson Collection in San Francisco, is so coveted it could fetch $50 million or more, sources say, were it ever to come on the market. (Don’t hold your breath: entertainment mogul David Geffen, who owns Pollock’s coveted Number 5, 1948, offered the Andersons $50 million for Lucifer in the mid-1990s, according to sources, and was rejected.)

Shipping magnate George Embiricos owns C

I can’t quite believe I’m writing these words, but Frank Rich is really good in this morning’s New York Times on Shattered Glass, the new movie about Stephen Glass, the “reporter” who wrote fictionalized stories for The New Republic before being caught and canned (and whose life story you couldn’t pay me enough to see). He nails the superficially jaundiced way in which journalists are now being portrayed in film and on TV:

“Shattered Glass” does show that its ambitious villain was less turned on by being a reporter than by being a Somebody worthy of a Pulitzer (though apparently no one told him that Pulitzers are not awarded to magazine writers). But more often the movie doesn’t puncture so much as perpetuate the star-worshipping celebrity culture that attracts a Glass. “Shattered Glass” is as pompous about The New Republic as its fictionalized New Republic staffers are, portraying the publication as the biggest thing to be handed down from on high since the Ten Commandments. As one oft-repeated line of dialogue has it, The New Republic is “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” an inflated claim to glamour that the magazine has never made for itself. The movie even opportunistically wraps itself in the tragic celebrity of the former New Republic editor Michael Kelly, by invoking his death in the war in Iraq in the final credits. Mr. Kelly was covering the war for The Atlantic; in the movie proper, his actual role in the Glass saga, while still at The New Republic in the 1990’s, is substantially fictionalized and downsized.

I expect the movie to tank, by the way. Most journalists are dull, even when they’re dumb and dishonest. Ordinary moviegoers don’t care about their lives, and will rarely go see films about them, nor do they wish to read you-are-there books about their misdeeds–with good reason. Rich is devastatingly right about the chronic narcissism of the reporterati. Screw ’em.

P.S. In case you don’t know, I write on occasion for the Times, and have a piece in this morning’s paper. But if you think that has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that I’m writing in praise of Frank Rich, you were born late yesterday night. (The frequency with which this blog links to The Minor Fall, the Major Lift should serve to dispel any possible suspicion of favor-currying on my part.)