JOHN LURIE: Previously, on Painting with John...
Why do I have to be the bad guy? You have to support me on this.
She's a child. She deserves a childhood.
I don't wanna do my homework. I don't wanna do my homework.
♪ ("PAINTING WITH JOHN NEW OPENING" PLAYING) ♪
♪ Ah-dee ♪
♪ Ah-da ♪
♪ Ah-dee ♪
♪ Ah-da ♪
♪ Ha-dee ♪
♪ Ah-da ♪
-♪ Ha-dee ♪ -♪ Ha-dee ♪
♪ Ah-da ♪
-♪ Ha-dee ♪ -♪ Ha-dee ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
♪ Ah-da ♪
What is this shit? You-- you see it online, like,
"Ha-ha-ha, he's old."
John Lurie's old now. They do it to everybody.
What is-- I don't...
hold the theory "you're supposed to respect your elders."
I think you should respect everyone.
Until they give you a reason to not respect them any further.
And most people will give you that opportunity.
But...
Man! I mean the odds were against me.
I survived some stuff in this life,
and I'm proud that I'm still here.
And I put beautiful things into this world.
And I hope to keep doing that.
So isn't it kind of more like, "Ha-ha-ha! You're young, kid."
And well, almost without exception,
your music sucks.
♪ ("THE EMPEROR OF CAMELDOM" BY JOHN LURIE PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
(INHALES SHARPLY) Ah!
Ooh!
Macaulay Culkin.
John the Baptist.
One good thing about getting older,
for a man anyways,
is that your penis no longer rules your life.
And you kind of miss some of the wildness,
some of the excitement, but in general... (CHUCKLES)
...it's a good thing.
You used to wake up in the morning
and it would just be standing there and saying,
"You have to fly to Frankfurt." And you would go.
Fucking penis.
One thing is odd to me or it seems unfair,
where it's like as you get older and your body, you're not--
You can't run as fast, you can't jump as high.
Your-- Everything is decreasing. Everything in you is decreasing.
Except...
the body's ability...
to produce pain.
Or-- That's does-- That's not right.
The pain shouldn't be as intense as it--
as it is when you're young. It should be less.
I don't know who we talked to about this,
but we should work this out.
-(BIRDS CHIRPING) -(CAR ENGINE REVVING)
This is my trash can.
♪ ("FLOATING NESRIN" BY JOHN LURIE AND STEVEN BERNSTEIN PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
♪ ("SEA MONSTER" BY JOHN LURIE PLAYING) ♪
Once I encountered a sea monster.
I've tried to tell this story before
and it doesn't really catch.
I tried to paint this sea monster and...
was about three weeks into painting it
and then it wasn't--
It didn't have much. It wasn't great.
And then a flood destroyed the painting.
It's not fair to call this thing a monster.
It felt benign.
But I don't know what else to call it.
I used to go swimming right near the house.
I try to go every day, try to swim every day.
And...
the beach I normally go to, there was some local holiday
and so that there were tents and music and lots of people
at the beach where I swim, where there usually is nobody.
So Leroy drove me like about a mile down the road
to another beach where there was no one.
There was one tourist lady with her two kids
playing in the sand but otherwise,
I was the only person.
I was the only person to go swimming.
And I used to swim out far.
Like a dolphin.
And I'm swimming, and my goggles are kind of fogged up.
So I come up and, you know, cleaning them off.
I see this shape, this black shape up ahead of me.
Which I'm just assuming is like some patch of rocks
or something. But I'm in very deep water,
so I know that can't be the bottom.
That's gotta be something else. What is that?
And I put the goggles back on and I go under there,
and I look at this thing.
It's about 20 feet away,
and you can't really see so good
with those swimming goggles. But it's--
It's about 11 feet long.
And it's not a shark, 'cause it's like,
just hovering there under the surface.
It wasn't a Manta Ray. It wasn't the right shape.
It wasn't a Manatee. They don't come around here.
I don't know what it was. It was like 11 feet long
and it was gray and black and white.
And looking at this thing.
And I swear it had a head that was...
proportionally small to the rest of the body,
and it turned and it looked at me.
And there was intelligence in the look.
So, I swam back to shore as fast as I could.
I went to go visit this lifeguard I knew here,
who worked at one of the hotels.
I tell him what I've seen...
and it's not like he didn't believe me,
it's just like...
he didn't really care.
But he could-- He said that, "Ah, that's a manta ray."
But it wasn't a manta ray.
And then he said, "Well, my rule is,
if I encounter something in the water
and it's not afraid of me, then I think maybe
I should be afraid of it."
Which is reasonable advice but...
I wanna know what this thing was.
I'm curious.
So...
I ask other people here and nobody's curious
what this thing was.
And I try to tell the story and I couldn't really tell it,
like on camera, so it made any sense.
And I tried to paint it and that painting got destroyed.
And so I said, "Okay,
leave the sea monster story behind."
And I'm working on this camel head painting,
I was going to paint a concrete wall
and I wasn't sure if it was gonna have arches
or it was gonna have blocks.
I thought I'd make them pretty ornate.
So I just did the first band with black and gray and white.
The first band of this concrete wall.
And I just leave it here for a second like this
and see-- see what I think.
So I go upstairs to my room and you can see down
to the painting table from upstairs.
Kind of a great thing, you can make decisions...
that you wouldn't make ordinarily.
So I'm looking down and I realize
that this thing that I've painted...
is the sea monster.
♪ ("SEA MONSTER" CONTINUES) ♪
JOHN: It's the same, the colors are perfect.
The shape is perfect. The vagueness is perfect.
Even the size of its head is perfect.
It's like, so...
brought the sea monster back.
So I felt like I had to tell the story now.
But now, I don't go swimming way out deep.
I don't try to swim like a dolphin anymore.
I stay close to the shore.
I mean, you know, younger people are always laughing
at older people for getting scared,
but like...
I get nervous every time I light the oven here,
but it exploded once.
And I saw a sea monster. So...
at least before I'm gonna go swim out into deep water,
I wanna know what the hell that was!
(BALL THUDS)
-(LAUGHS) -(GRUNTS)
-(GLASS SHATTERING) -(THUDS)
♪ ("DOTS" BY JOHN LURIE PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
Well, that's clearly Mary Magdalene.
I mean look, that's Mary Magdalene.
I'm painting something very beautiful
that requires extreme concentration.
NESRIN WOLF: Oh, perfect timing to come in then.
JOHN: Why?
NESRIN: (LAUGHS) Because I love interrupting you.
Why do you like interrupting me so much?
It's so much fun.
It's getting cloudy. Oh, no. The shorts.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
-JOHN: The what? -NESRIN: The shorts.
It's getting cloudy.
We have to be careful with the shorts because...
-There are ten of them. -...during the rainy season,
they all start to smell like mildew.
So we have to catch the spots of sun...
which surprisingly go away in moments.
-Right, Nesrin? -That is right, John. (CHUCKLES)
That is very true. Whatever you say.
I always agree with John. That's my job, always.
(HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING)
JOHN: Coming up next, on Painting with John...
Oh, God. They found us.
(BOTH GASP)
♪ ("DISAPPEARING ALLIGATOR" BY JOHN LURIE PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
(CRICKETS CHIRPING)
Hi, Moon.
(CHUCKLES) How are you?
I fell asleep on the couch.
I had the weirdest dream. I was a cab driver.
And Russell Crowe got in the cab.
And then he kept-- He was chewing tobacco
and he kept spitting it on the floor of my cab.
I didn't know what to do.
Because it just seemed like the only way I could stop him
was to fight him.
And then I woke up.
My dreams have been really weird.
You don't even know-- Yeah. You don't have dreams.
Yeah-- No, I'm not sorry. I mean, I'm sorry I got angry,
but no, I'm not sorry.
I mean, you stood me up and then you lied
and said you were there, but you weren't there.
So, if somebody just lies to your face...
I mean if you were a person, I would just avoid you
going forward, but since you're the moon
and you're always up there, I gotta--
Yeah, Russell Crowe, the actor. Wait, don't change the subject.
He-- I’ve...
You're used to it because all the moons--
All the moons are a bunch of liars.
Yeah? Why don't you change that?
You could be the first.
(SCOFFS)
All right. Yeah, I'll say hi to Russell Crowe for you.
All right, bye.
(CRICKETS CHIRPING)
JOHN: When I was like...
four years old...
it was a Sunday afternoon, I remember.
And my parents were expecting these people, this couple
that they really liked and respected.
And we were looking forward to these people coming.
And this couple had a son...
who was my age...
that I was expected to hang out with this son,
so that we were out of the way.
When I recognized what was going on
and I didn't like this kid.
I didn't like him, like at all.
And they had just come from a fair or a carnival
or something and...
he had a helium balloon...
♪ ("HELIUM BALLOON" BY JOHN LURIE PLAYING) ♪
And we're off in another room, supposed to be playing,
but he's just playing with his balloon
and basically bragging that he has this balloon
and I don't have one.
So after about half hour of this, I got fed up.
And he wouldn't even respond to me,
he would just play with his balloons.
So...
I grabbed the string of the balloon...
and ran through the kitchen...
pushed through the screen door and let the balloon go.
I mean, I knew the balloon would go up,
but then it went up like it did, like,
up into the heavens, you know, like,
it was way the fuck up there.
It made me feel like, I was falling off the planet.
Almost, like, and...
So of course he started to cry. (MIMICS CRYING)
He runs in the house to complain to his parents.
And when I come in, I think I'm in for trouble.
But it's been decided that I couldn't have realized...
that the balloon was gonna float away.
And I think my dad--
I mean, I think it was one of those lies that was told,
that everybody just accept it to make the thing over with.
But...
my parents knew that I would have been smart enough
at that age to realize that the balloon
was gonna float away.
And so it was over. I was off the hook.
Except that night, I'm in bed.
And I'm overwhelmed with this horrendous feeling.
I just feel awful.
And I don't quite understand it,
but I had just learned about conscience,
like having a bad conscience.
And I realize that this is having a bad conscience.
This is what it feels like.
I'm never doing anything wrong again.
So, I never did anything wrong after that.
♪ ("SEA MONSTER" PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪