John Lurie is a musician, painter, actor, director, and producer. He co-founded The Lounge Lizards in 1979. In the decades since, he has released albums (including those by his alter ego Marvin Pontiac), acted in films, composed and performed music for television and film, exhibited his paintings throughout the world, and produced, directed, and starred in the Fishing with John television series. His most recent series, Painting with John, debuted on HBO in 2021.
“A fantastic read . . . [John] Lurie is an ace storyteller with
perfect pitch.”—Shelf Awareness
“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)
“Lurie proves to . . . be a wry, sly, furious, and vivid
storyteller. His raucously frank, sardonic, sex-saturated,
compulsively detailed, and hard-charging memoir is incandescent
with illuminations of his musical mission, including his film
scores, his friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and his conflicts
with Jim Jarmusch. . . . Lurie leaves readers wanting
more.”—Booklist
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