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eight july ninety eight eleven a m
good frank and bad frank
I don't know if I have a lot of dreams where I'm a fugitive of some kind, or whether I just remember more of those because they disturb me enough that I come awake at the end. This morning I was involved in some elaborate scheme by one man to trap and find another, younger, man. The older man was Frank Sinatra. It wasn't until I woke up and thought about it that I realized the younger man was Frank Sinatra also. Good Frank and Bad Frank.
Unfortunately I never knew the young skinny heartthrob Frank. I knew Vegas king mafioso thug Frank, the old rude man with the ego and the heavy connections. And this may be why I don't miss Sinatra. In fact, I have a hard time understanding what all the mourning was about.
It's generational. Being thirty, and thus in between two large herds of demography, I usually find myself thinking with the adults. On Sinatra, I find myself thinking with the kids. He was an old dude who sang bad loungey music, like "New York, New York," a song I overdosed on permanently after hearing it three times.
I grew up on New Orleans piano boogie. I grew up on my mother's love of Glenn Miller. I grew up on Elton John and eighties technopop. I grew up on real bluegrass. The crooner range of the spectrum is one I'm colorblind in. Even if Frank hadn't been a thug, I probably wouldn't have liked his music much.
As I was composing these thoughts in my head, I went in to get my morning coffee and the store was playing Frank's version of "Anything Goes" - a perfectly fine, perfectly silly Cole Porter song that he ruins by oversinging, by stroking his personality in front of the microphone. That's Sinatra to me.
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