About Last Night

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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 It’s a coffee-table tome crammed full of unpublished photos of Armstrong at home, backstage, and on the road, and I highly recommend it as an antidote for the blues.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.

“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

“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.)

W.H. Auden (on jealousy), in Modern Canterbury Pilgrims

Rather than try to describe what a Cornell box looks like, I yield the floor to Fairfield Porter, who did the job once and for all in a 1966 review collected in Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975. Here’s an excerpt:

The boxes are 12 by 15 inches more or less…A sheet of glass in front is held in a carefully and imperfectly made frame, whose mitered corners do not fit tightly. The finish looks worn and handled, and a foreign newspaper may be varnished over the surface. The inside is usually white, clean, cracked and peeling. The contents vary greatly. There may be a round column on one side establishing the space of the room, and a horizontal bar from which hangs a piston ring. There are actual objects like wooden parrots on a perch, coarse screening, springs, cork balls like fishing rod floats, wine glasses whole or broken, clay pipes, a bearing plate of a pocket watch, a dried starfish, bits of driftwood whose shape indicates that they were once part of something used, nails, coins; sand colored navy blue, pink, yellow, white….

A list of the contents is misleading, because it does not tell about Cornell’s sense of how little is enough, like an actor’s sense of timing or the Japanese sensitivity to the value of emptiness and the isolated object. As composer he is director and stage designer both, with the director’s feeling for the emotional value of each actor’s part, and the most efficient use of the space allotted to him.

I don’t much care for surrealism, but I’ve always loved Cornell’s little universes, at once troubled and serene, into which one peers raptly at a parallel world where nothing is as it seems. I’ve looked at a lot of Cornell boxes over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many at one time, and most of these are incredibly choice examples. Go, and go again. Don’t be oppressed by the fancy address and locked door–buzz and you’ll be admitted, even without a jacket and tie–and don’t be fazed by the Monday-Friday hours on the Feigen gallery’s Web site. At least for now, the gallery is open on Saturdays, and if you bring along a couple of hundred thousand dollars you can even take a box home with you. (Which reminds me to mention that one of the most intriguing aspects of the show is the price list. Why do some Cornell boxes cost more than others? As far as I can tell, the ones with more stuff in them are the most expensive.)

“Joseph Cornell: The 100th Birthday” coincides with the publication of Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay…Eterniday, a staggeringly well-done coffee-table folio containing an all-about-Cornell DVD-ROM that’s worth the price of the book all by itself. I can’t even begin to recommend Shadowplay…Eterniday strongly enough.

I also went to a Helen Frankenthaler show, “Prints: A Survey,” up at Jim Kempner Fine Art (501 W. 23rd St. at 10th Ave.) through Nov. 29. Frankenthaler is one of the greatest printmakers of the postwar era, and several of her very best efforts are on display, including Broome Street at Night, a deceptively simple, wonderfully involving aquatint from 1987 which I’d happily hang over my fireplace if some well-to-do reader of “About Last Night” would care to buy it for me, or for OGIC. We get along quite nicely and would be glad to consider a joint-custody agreement.

As you know, I haven’t read The Human Stain, nor am I likely to. I’m one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Roth: they all leave me cold. But my guess is that the makers of the film version have made a good-faith effort to preserve the essence of Philip Roth’s novel, and that this is part of the problem with the movie.

None of the characters, after all, are actual human beings–they’re all symbols made as flesh, the usual Rothian walking archetypes. And therein lies the chief obstacle to filming The Human Stain, which is that you can’t cast it. If you had to pick a movie star to play the part of an aging American classics professor who pretends to be Jewish but is really black, Sir Anthony Hopkins is obviously the last person on earth you’d choose. But…who would you choose? Who could you choose? You can write about a character like Coleman Silk, but you can’t put him on screen.

This fundamental implausibility–the inability to believe in the existence of any of the major characters as embodied by the cast–sinks the film before the first reel is over, in spite of the best efforts of a whole bunch of talented actors. They’re so good, in fact, that they almost make you believe what you’re seeing. The emotions seem real, but the dramatic framework that holds them in place is absurd. (If it were any more plausible, of course, you’d be forced to confront all those awful Portnoy-redux clich