Muggings on Avenue C, punk bands at CBGB, parties in a nascent SoHo, dropping out from the famous Music & Art High School. In this episodic, coming-of-age memoir, Josh Karlen chronicles growing up in New York’s Greenwich Village and crime-ridden Alphabet City in the 70s and early 80s. Lost Lustre recaptures a New York suffering its gravest financial crisis and soaring crime, yet staging a spectacular resurgence of the arts. Karlen shares a fascinating personal history of the punk rock scene through the prism of The Lustres, a band that played venues that launched the Talking Heads, Patti Smith and the Ramones. In the title chapter, Karlen poignantly pays homage to the band’s charismatic and talented lead singer, whose life in many ways seemed to mirror his times in both its shining creativity and nihilistically destructive force. Lost Lustre is a reverberant, strata-rich memoir, written with a relaxed and endearing fluency and modesty. I was engrossed. — Edward Hoagland, author of Notes from the Century Before
Editorial Reviews
Review
Engagingly fuses memoir with a social history of the post-1960s New York. An important testimony to a period of New York’s history that is woefully understudied, over-romanticized and often misunderstood.–Chrisopher Mele, author of Selling the Lower East Side
Every page radiates pleasure at finding some detail, some part of the past alive and present, as if to belie the book’s wonderfully apt title.–Joel Agee, author of In the House of My Fear: A Memoir
Growing up in the shadow of the Sixties, parented by the Sixties, Josh Karlen fills the space created by the hippie, radical movers and shakers. The story of what it was like to come after, to belong to the past and to make your own present, is impressively and elegantly told in these fine essays.–Jenny Diski, author of The Sixties
Lost Lustre is a reverberant, strata-rich memoir, written with a relaxed and endearing fluency and modesty. I was engrossed.–Edward Hoagland, author of Heart’s Desire: The Best of Edward Hoagland: Essays from Twenty Years
Many of us who remember the New York of the 1970s and 1980s can’t put our fingers exactly on what we miss. It isn’t the dirty streets, high crime and poor services but certain grittiness and, paradoxically, luster that went along with simply surviving the Lower East Side or similar neighborhoods that felt simultaneously desolate and exciting. Josh Karlen can and does put his finger on this lost lustre as it were: describing the now-defunct clubs like CBGB and Danceteria with the same verve he gives to accounts of having his face smashed in by a derelistc. One gets the feeling that given the choice of doing it all over again, Karlen would still take the trade of a broken nose, suicides, muggings, etc. for that je ne sais quoi that was New York City circa 1980. By the end of the book, you would, too.–Dalton Conley, author of Honky
From the Back Cover
Muggings on Avenue C, punk bands at CBGB, parties in a nascent SoHo, dropping out from the famous Music & Art High School. In this episodic, coming-of-age memoir, Josh Karlen chronicles growing up in New York’s Greenwich Village and crime-ridden Alphabet City in the 70s and early 80s. “Lost Lustre” recaptures a New York suffering its gravest financial crisis and soaring crime, yet staging a spectacular resurgence of the arts. Karlen shares a fascinating personal history of the punk rock scene through the prism of The Lustres, a band that played venues that launched the Talking Heads, Patti Smith and the Ramones. In the title chapter, Karlen poignantly pays homage to the band’s charismatic and talented lead singer, whose life in many ways seemed to mirror his times in both its shining creativity and nihilistically destructive force.
About the Author
Josh Karlen, a former journalist, grew up on the Lower East Side and in the Village. He lives with his wife and two children in Manhattan. He currently works in media relations.
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