Chris Palazzolo is so charmed by Only Lovers Left Alive (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 2013) he’s written a little blurb for it.

In the second decade of the 21st century, what city would you choose to live in if you were a vampire? Jim Jarmusch has the answer in Only Lovers Left Alive. Tangier and Detroit. Husband and wife vampires, Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton) are at the stage of their marriage (1000 years, give or take a century or two) where they don’t need to be together all the time, but can go and pursue their own interests at opposite ends of the earth fully trusting each other’s love and loyalty. Each has their favourite city which they choose to live in. Eve lives in Tangier, city of refuge on the southern Mediterranean for 2500 years, and in modern times, port of call and meeting place for generations of European, Middle Eastern, and American artists, intellectuals, poets and spies. There she lives the  life of an aristocratic ex-pat, collecting curios and hanging out with other vampire ex-pats like Elizabethan playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe (reports of his murder in 1593 were greatly exaggerated). Adam lives in the post-industrial ghost city of Detroit, home of the US car industry and Motown records. There, in a Rockefeller era three story house in a neighbourhood of abandoned houses, he is left alone to compose grunge dirges for independent record labels. He is effortlessly the best of his peers in that scene, because, of course he has no peers; he’s been composing funeral music since the 16th century (he even collaborated with Schubert) and the fuzzy guitars and industrial percussion of grunge music just happens to be to his taste.

Life for these vampires is fun. They are old enough to have learnt how to do everything perfectly and to know exactly what they want to do. They are not troubled by the doubts that afflict the mortal. The only necessity in their lives is a regular supply of quality blood, which has to be sourced from medical outlets because, in the 21st century killing people is just too much trouble. Should that supply be interrupted though, well, what choice do they have? In the meantime life is forever leisure, doing what you want to do, staying up all night, and sleeping all day. Naturally they become the philosophers, leaders of taste for mortals (zombies as they call humans) sensitive and patient enough to listen because they never shout. Best of all they can live wherever they want to, wherever they think real beauty and style survives. And beauty and style must always have a bit of suffering and neglect in it.

Jim Jarmusch is the poet of the regional city. Throughout his career his cool/dorky characters have struck their hip postures in once legendary small American cities, increasingly overshadowed by the relentless New York focus of US popular culture; cities like Memphis, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, St Louis and Detroit. His vampires are paragons of good taste. They would never be so vulgar as to settle in Los Angeles or New York, self-promoting, celebrity obsessed theme parks of mediated urbanity. Real beauty, real style, is quietly industrious; it doesn’t care whether you notice it or not, because it knows it’s the best and doesn’t have to loudly assert itself. This is the wisdom of the undead. They have long long pasts, but they are the future too.
.

   – Chris Palazzolo

 —————————————————————————————————–

Teasing Threads is Chris Palazzolo, novelist and poet, editor at Regime Books in Perth, radio host on 6EBA FM North Perth, and was, until recently, manager of one of the last video shops in the world. His novel, Scene and Circles, is available from https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/449419