The quintessential depiction of 1980s New York and the downtown scene from the artist, actor, musician, and composer John Lurie
“Ferocious and wise, funny and tragic, raging and forgiving, and I loved every page.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to life the whole wash of 1980s New York as he developed his artistic soul over the course of the decade and came into orbit with all the prominent artists of that time and place, including Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Boris Policeband, and, especially, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic prodigy who spent a year sleeping on the floor of Lurie’s East Third Street apartment.
It may feel like Disney World now, but in The History of Bones, the East Village, through Lurie’s clear-eyed reminiscence, comes to teeming, gritty life. The book is full of grime and frank humor—Lurie holds nothing back in this journey to one of the most significant moments in our cultural history, one whose reverberations are still strongly felt today.
History may repeat itself, but the way downtown New York happened in the 1980s will never happen again. Luckily, through this beautiful memoir, we all have a front-row seat.
About the Author
John Lurie—musician, actor, producer and, most recently, exhibiting painter—was born in Minneapolis in 1952. Having first emerged in the late 1970s as a saxophone player leading the avant-garde New York jazz group the Lounge Lizards, Lurie has since established himself time and time again as a formidable presence in the New York cultural scene. Recognizable from his scoring and acting, Lurie has scored over 20 films and starred in several cult film and TV classics, including Stranger than Paradise, Down By Law, and Fishing with John, which he also wrote and directed. He was nominated for a Grammy award for the score of Get Shorty. Lurie has been a visual artist since the 1970s, and has exhibited his works at Anton Kern Gallery and Roebling Hall, New York, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam, Galerie Lelong, Zurich, the Montreal Musuem of Fine Arts, and in 2008, the new Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg. In 2006, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center hosted Lurie's first solo museum exhibition, John Lurie: Works on Paper.
