{"id":144653,"date":"2022-08-17T19:12:05","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T03:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=144653"},"modified":"2022-08-17T09:23:59","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T17:23:59","slug":"why-did-john-lurie-disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=144653","title":{"rendered":"Why Did John Lurie Disappear?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tad Friend writes in The New Yorker August 9, 2010<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

* Celebrity is the power to rivet attention, and Lurie realized that his riveting faculties had lapsed. He told Perry, \u201cWhen I went into my house, I was famous\u2014I come out six years later and nobody knows who I am,\u201d meaning it as a cultural observation: I am Rip Van Winkle, returned but unknown.<\/p>\n

* Palm Springs is a golf-obsessed retirement community, and he doesn\u2019t get recognized there, even when he buttonholes strangers at the local Starbucks for a little conversation. Lurie said, \u201cThis thing that\u2019s happening now wouldn\u2019t be happening if I were more famous, Tom Cruise famous, because I\u2019d be insulated. And it wouldn\u2019t be happening at all if I were less famous. Somehow I got it just exactly wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

* From Grenada, Lurie sent a Facebook message to Perry\u2019s brother, telling him what was going on and saying, \u201cI think [John] is in deep trouble. . . . I am certainly not asking you to do anything against your brother but to help him. Or to suggest to me how I should proceed.\u201d Lurie simply wanted guidance, but Perry took the message as a strike against his own vulnerability: his anxiety about his privacy and his reputation. Lurie\u2019s friend and former sound engineer Patrick Dillett said, \u201cThe two Johns know each other so well, their emotional strengths and weaknesses, that it\u2019s like \u2018Spy vs. Spy\u2019 \u201d\u2014the Mad cartoon about equally matched belligerents. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like fighting with yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

* That Lurie\u2019s requests for help from hired advisers and even from friends kept boomeranging only stimulated his suspicion that human beings sort of suck. He\u2019d been so generous with his friends, loaning them money, even buying them houses\u2014where were they now? Lurie said, \u201cThere were sixty people at my fiftieth-birthday party\u201d\u2014in 2002\u2014\u201cand only five are still in my life. It was all too much for my friends; they started to lose interest. It was like Darfur.\u201d A number of Lurie\u2019s friends now felt that Perry was his default topic, and paranoia his default mode. Patrick Dillett told me, \u201cIt had reached the point that if I said I saw John Perry in an \u2018I Love John Lurie\u2019 T-shirt John would have said, \u2018That\u2019s because he wants to kill me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

* I drove Lurie back from Joshua Tree late in the afternoon. He slumped in the front seat, saying that his head was roaring. As the sun slipped behind the Little San Bernardino Mountains, Lurie said, \u201cIllness has a beautiful way of bestowing a glow on you. You notice the way the light hits the top of the trees.\u201d Then he fell silent for thirty miles. As we passed the outskirts of Indio\u2014a scatter of isolated houses braced against the darkness\u2014he said, \u201cHow do these people end up here? Do they all have stalkers?\u201d<\/p>\n

The dream of artists\u2014which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified\u2014is to plant themselves in other people\u2019s heads. By that standard, John Perry has created a masterpiece. Last summer, Lurie wrote a friend that Perry \u201chas been in every facet of my consciousness for months. . . . Every dream, every brush stroke. He has infected my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death. Curiously, though, the struggle seems to have inspired them both; artists sometimes require an enemy. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From The New York Review Of Books, Aug. 18, 2022<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n* Lurie, the band\u2019s saxophonist and front man, was already fairly well known as the breakout star in Jim Jarmusch\u2019s breakout independent movie Stranger Than Paradise (1984), and the follow-up, Down by Law (1986). He epitomized a flavor that everybody wanted around the mid-1980s: a real artist with outstanding personal style, an offbeat sense of humor, and a rebellious streak, making his mark on the world through unconventional channels. I was so impressed with how outside the box this promotional stunt was. This is the way, I thought. He\u2019s figured out how to own the means of production, without involving the music industry. It looked as radically avant-garde and hip as Devo did the first time I saw them, and Lurie immediately became dear to my heart as an animal more substantial and interesting than his prevailing East Village It Boy image suggested.<\/p>\n

His image was an indelible one in the 1980s. When it came to arousing blizzards of strange, forbidden female desire, he was on par with swaggering former SNL star Pete Davidson today\u2014a charmed, confectionary Marilyn Monroe for the female of the species to have impure feelings about; a respected artist; a kind of emotional porn star. Lurie had the Jean-Paul Belmondo baggy suits, the lanky, concave frame, the saxophone, the bent nose, the street and Hollywood credibility\u2014everything you needed to be a French New Wave star in the 1980s, including the black-and-white art films. \u201cFrom 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face,\u201d wrote Tad Friend in The New Yorker in 2010. (It is an article that Lurie openly reviles, and not for nothing: Friend devoted it primarily to legitimizing the career of Lurie\u2019s stalker, and painted Lurie as sick, paranoid, and bedeviled; it ultimately suggested that Friend was delivering his long-awaited punch to Lurie\u2019s face.)<\/p>\n

* He eventually settled in New York and sated his hunger for spiritual enlightenment when he shot heroin for the first time\u2014there, he sort of found nirvana, for quite a while. \u201cAt this exact moment my spiritual quest was gone,\u201d he observes. Nonetheless, certain Eastern spiritual concepts seem to have burrowed their way into his consciousness. \u201cThere is no such thing as talent,\u201d Lurie declares. \u201cThere is only cleaning the mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a young artist in the East Village circa 1977, he lived off Supplemental Security Income (SSI) after faking a schizophrenia diagnosis (which he felt a little bit guilty about, though he says he did sometimes hear voices). SSI was how a lot of artists got by in those days, although Lurie still had to augment it with \u201ca lot of petty crime, dealing pot, traveler\u2019s check scams\u2026. I got the idea to steal my own horns and collect the insurance.\u201d He lived in a government-run railroad apartment on East 3rd Street for fifty-five dollars a month and did wacky performance art pieces with titles like Leukemia. He made avant-garde movies on Super 8 with a group of like-minded bohemians, dropped acid, and hung around the Mudd Club on a nightly basis. He used to practice the sax late at night in the subway station on 14th Street and First Avenue.<\/p>\n

* \u201cAndy Warhol would be in the front row. It is amazing how fast one becomes arrogant.\u201d That arrogance, essential to Lurie\u2019s image, didn\u2019t always advance his career. When record company executives came by the dressing room to express interest, the entire band would scream at them to get the fuck out.<\/p>\n

* “To be thrown into that kind of fame is very unbalancing. It is worse for your chemistry than drugs, in a way. You want the attention and the adoration, it gives you a buoyancy, but it rarely leads to anything real.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tad Friend writes in The New Yorker August 9, 2010: * Celebrity is the power to rivet attention, and Lurie realized that his riveting faculties had lapsed. He told Perry, \u201cWhen I went into my house, I was famous\u2014I come … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[921],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebrity"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=144653"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144663,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144653\/revisions\/144663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=144653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=144653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=144653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}