– Cost c. 1910 of Louis Armstrong’s first cornet, bought from a New Orleans pawnshop: $5

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $102.65

– Price for which the instrument was sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 2001: $115,000

(Source: Michael Meckna, Satchmo: The Louis Armstrong Encyclopedia)

Ah, the apple trees,

Sunlit memories

Where the hammock swung.

On our backs we’d lie,

Looking at the sky

Till the stars were strung,

Only last July when the world was young.

Johnny Mercer, “When the World Was Young” (after Angele Vannier)

I’m in The Wall Street Journal today, where you’ll find my description of what it’s like to spend the night in two rentable houses that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright:

For all their essential similarities, Wright’s houses affect their occupants in very different ways. The Peterson Cottage, built in 1959 on the edge of an isolated, heavily wooded bluff overlooking Wisconsin’s Mirror Lake, is so tranquil and serene that I felt as though I could sit in meditative silence by its great sandstone hearth for hours on end. The 3,000-square-foot Schwartz House, on the other hand, is located in a built-up residential neigborhood and has the friendly, slightly down-at-heel look of a place that has been occupied by children ever since it was built in 1939. To put it another way, the Peterson Cottage feels like a work of art, the Schwartz House like a comfortable home that just happens to be heart-stoppingly beautiful….

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning’s Journal (price, one dollar) or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, than which you’ll search long and far to find a better bargain.

– Collecting art changes your relationship to art objects in all sorts of ways, some of them surprising. In my own case, it’s had an unforeseen effect on my fantasy life. Before I started buying art, I dreamed of owning such pricey objects as, say, a Degas pastel or a Matisse cutout, none of which I could hope to acquire without first taking up a new line of work (bank robbery, say). Now my wildest dreams have become considerably more practical: I’ll never be able to afford a C

Thomas Waller, universally known as “Fats” for self-evident reasons, is one of the few great jazz musicians who was for a time popular with the public at large, though not for his hugely influential piano playing. In the Thirties and Forties, Waller led a combo billed as “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” that featured his maniacally gleeful singing of ephemeral pop songs. (This is my attempt to transcribe his vocal on “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.”) Waller’s eye-rollingly comic side has always made priggish critics squirm, but it was in fact central to both his character and his artistry. Had he never sung a note, he’d still be remembered for the poise and fluidity of such unaccompanied piano solos as the exquisite “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” but it is because of his life-enhancing singing that he was–and is–beloved.

Most anthologies of classic jazz recordings appear to have been put together on the how-could-they-possibly-have-left-that-one-out principle, but the aptly named The Quintessence: New York-Camden-Los Angeles 1929-1943 (Fr

– Robert Mitchum’s weekly salary in 1944 as a first-year contract player for RKO: $350

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $3,739.19

(Source: Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care”)

“Pictorial life is not imitated life; it is, on the contrary, a created reality based on the inherent life within every medium of expression. We have only to awaken it.”

Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real

I awoke very early this morning, took a look at our world map, and saw that “About Last Night” was being read in Australia, China, the Czech Republic, France, Great Britain, India, Iran, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, and Ukraine.

Hello out there!