Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Only Lovers Left Alive

    Only Lovers Left Alive

    I have never been so admiring of Jim Jarmusch as have his acolytes, but he seemed the perfect choice to direct a vampire movie and had the good taste to include a scene of Yasmine Hamdan singing in a café, so I was drawn without resistance to ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. There is a lot…

  • Yasmine Hamdan

    Yasmine Hamdan

    It can be a special gift to listen to a song in a language that you neither speak nor understand. A language has its own rhythms and tonalities, just as musical forms and genres do, and when there is singing, the musicality of language merges directly with that of the instruments. The deepest engagement with…