. >> and he compared himself to jackson pollack who was a great friend and contemporary. were great mates but jackson pollock represented, as we say in the play, everyone's romantic ideal of what an artist should be. whereas rothko was the stoll lid rabbinical sober serious man of letters. but he recognized that was the cliche and stereotype of what an artist is perceived and he had no interest in doing that. >> rose: could this be chance a enter entered into the dialogue? (laughter) >> a bit. you have to ask the thespians. >> rose: what does he say about jackson pollack? >> that's interesting. there's a wonderful sequence in the play where after ken responds to an admonition of mind that he hasn't read certain things and he comes back and says i read all those books you told me about and i want him to tell me what he's learned from it and he makes what rothko thinks is a simplistic analysis between the difference of rothko and pollack and how they stack up against each other. and rothko's response to that is to really reanalyze pollack from his point of view. and it star

. >> admirers included kingsley amos, jackson pollack, the composer virtual thompson called him a mastert davis whose abstract paintings were full of jazz inspired pictures inspired him as a model of greatness. is it any wonder so many munitions long to play the way he play and sing the way he sang? it was no accident that they usually referred to armstrong not as satchmo, his own favorite nickname, but as pops. he was the father figure of jazz and what his children wanted was to be him, or at least come as close as they possibly could. why did armstrong spend so many hours scribbling on a pad or hunched over a typewriter? partly because he was a gregarious man who enjoyed sending chatty letters to his friends and fans. we actually have a gentleman in the audience tonight you has a couple of letters that armstrong sent him. but also because he believed he had something of value to tell the world. having been born desperately poor, he had worked desperately hard, first as a boy and then as a man and this he had much in common with ragged horatio alger whose burning desire to grow a propel