Serendipity: Weltschmerz With Fangs, Or, Sweet Vampire Love Redux

I’m being purposely obscure in all this because this is a movie one should see for oneself.  It’s a wonder of visuals and sound, including Yasmine in the Moroccan nightclub at the end reminding us once more of the love of music, just as the non-Tangier parts of the movie take place in Detroit, “Motown,” even now still a center of music as well as a city on the decline.

Thus begins the conclusion of my review of Jarmusch’s film ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (see June 26).  So I’ve now been to Detroit — albeit not for the music scene — and seen some of the squalor though, I suspect, hardly the worst.  And then, yesterday, at my writers group we discussed one story (by me, called “The Ring”) in what I would call the “bored vampire” subgenre, of which the film also is an example — the existential crisis the prospect of near-immortality might bring one once the novelty of it has ended.

But what of the music, that which showed Adam in the film that “unlife” was still worth living?  Through the wonders of the internet I blundered across a YouTube offering of Lebanese-born singer/songwriter Yasmine Hamdan — Yasmine in the movie — performing the song Adam hears in Tangier.  Adam, we should realize, has been himself an underground musician, uploading his own work onto the web back in his now-compromised Detroit hideaway.

But would this be enough to cure a vampire’s funk?  You can judge for yourself by pressing here.