193 words about Painting With John

They call it "voice."

John Lurie has this way of talking—well, everybody has their way of talking—but John Lurie has this way of talking that’s very circuitous until it arrives at a particular detail, an image or idea that excites him. And then he pummels its syllables. A loud, loud restaurant where the servers run around with big, heavy plates. The roughness of his voice could sand off mountaintops. His voice used to be more nasal, kind of a whiny Manhattan art brat affect, but now it has an inevitable old man power behind it, the sound of waves against the shore, a woodchipper going about its business. It helps if you care what John Lurie is talking about—New York in the ‘80s, double-parking to run up to your apartment, murder an eel, and photograph it for the cover of your jazz group’s album cover—and if you like close-up pictures of watercolor paint blooming against a canvas, drone footage of his jungle-y Thai backyard. But fundamentally Painting With John is about listening to a person speak, the peculiarities of the speech itself. What we remember and what it sounds like when we tell other people about it.