John Lurie is a musician, painter, actor, director, and producer. He co-founded The Lounge Lizards in 1979. Since then, he has recorded twenty-two albums (not including those by his alter ego Marvin Pontiac), acted in nineteen films, including Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, composed and performed music for twenty television and film works, exhibited his paintings throughout the world, and produced, directed, and starred in the Fishing with John television series. His new series, Painting with John, debuted on HBO in January 2021.
There is a purity to John Lurie's writing that feels almost spiritual--the stories unspool from him, seemingly effortlessly, with the fluidity of a great jazz player. Lurie has lived many lives--'More than once I have witnessed the inexplicable, ' he tells us--and this book moves us through them all. --Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City No other human's strange struggles and triumphs are like this. I was transfixed reading Lurie's yearning to make sense of it all, slamming his fist through the precious veneer of the early eighties New York art/music scene. Yeeeooooow. --Flea, author of Acid for the Children Look behind John Lurie's adventure so far and see how it flows from epiphanies: their arrival, their loss, the very possibility of them. Epiphanies consign an artist to life as a hunter-mystic, in a world where the impeccable and the tawdry are equally sacred--a hell of a place, and it's from here that Lurie's candor throws us epiphanies to take away. This is not a book headed for bookshelves; it's coming to crash on your couch. --DBC Pierre, author of Vernon God Little, winner of the Booker Prize By turns comic, pissed off, and desolate, his raffish picaresque captures everything. . . . The result is an energetic, raucous reprise of an adventurously offbeat life. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)