I’m writing about this profile, because I think this profile is a failure. Let’s be clear about why I’m writing about this profile, before going further, this profile about which I have been thinking about for a some months: I’m writing because I am a very partisan adherent of Lurie’s music, and an acquaintance of the man himself, and, I suppose, because I am a person who cares about what Lurie stands for: art, aesthetic ambition, sensitivity, openness, generosity, unpredictability. Then he finishes the graph with a bit of slang that is not quite slang-“He was the man.” Which means what exactly? What does this sentence ever mean? That masculinity consists in the foregoing, in punchability and fuckability? Friend slyly alludes to the seduction part of the profiling job in sentence two, as shown above, and he completes the betrayal part of the job in sentence three-with fisticuffs. He has fashioned one of the surpassingly obvious examples of seduction and betrayal-so straightforward as such that it should serve as a template for those considering profiling or allowing themselves to be profiled. If the operative words for the magazine profile generally are “seduce and betray,” then Friend, whose eager surname might have tipped Lurie off, has done us all a service. And the profile does not improve in the column inches that follow. Or punch him in the face.” A curious and disheartening opening. Tad Friend’s profile of John Lurie in the 8/16-8/23 issue of the New Yorker from last year starts thus: “From 1984-1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie.
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