On the resurgence of one of my favorite artist :
“He’s a dead man,” the talent agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar declared of Frank Sinatra in 1952. “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.” Maybe not, but Frank Sinatra could. Literally overnight—after the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 1954, where he won best actor in a supporting role for From Here to Eternity—Sinatra brought off the greatest comeback in show-business history. And he had done it all in Hollywood, a ruthlessly Darwinian company town that reviles losers but has the sappiest of soft spots for a happy ending. His Oscar underlined the fact that he was also a freshly viable recording artist with a new contract at Capitol Records, where he and a brilliant young arranger named Nelson Riddle had begun creating the string of groundbreaking recordings that would revolutionize popular music in the 1950s.
On a more personal level :
Frank’s restlessness—in his art, his personal relations, in everything—was his genius and his illness, and a permanent condition. There was always the dark undertow—the inner voices that told him that underneath it all he was nothing and nobody, a little street guinea from Hoboken. The furies that would frequently blind him when his vulnerabilities were touched. The terrible impatience—with the incompetence and stupidity that were so rife in the world, with things he needed to happen instantaneously, and so rarely did. The realization that he was like nobody else, and therefore destined to be alone. His terrors: of aloneness itself; of sleep, the cousin to death. And always, always, the vast and ravening appetites.
