frank sinatra - "embraceable you" (from the best of the columbia years : 1943-1952 boxed set, available for purchase here.)

there's a story that goes along w/ this. there always is, but it's nothing to do w/ frank sinatra or w/ the gershwins--but the more i think about, maybe it does.

the sound is not ideal on this, it's from the 1940's after all. yet, even through the fuzziness and treble, one still hears the indelible mark sinatra left on a record on december 19, 1944, the date of this recording. time has done its level best to efface this performance, but even so one can see sinatra standing to the microphone, close and then closer, singing one gershwin's melody and the other's words. better still, one hears it.

i'm still clearing my head, you see; this might all be jumbled. i think the point is this : memories remain; single moments are ineradicable. even through this v. vague telling, something is expressed; through the dim fog of my grasping for coherence, i feel that something crucial dances about the margins and haunts the hard breaks. maybe one day the tale will be told; for now this smudged fingerprint is all that shows through. and committed to print, hurled out into cyberspace, and unfair as it may be, this, as has been said elsewhere, is the only immortality you and i may share.