“Hip” is not the first word that comes to mind.

“When somebody says, ‘John Lurie is hip,’ it’s like sticking worms on my back.”

“I’ve been declared hip for so long that it makes my skin crawl,” he says. Within two years he’d caught on with the crowd, and was officially dubbed an arbiter of taste, a “hip” guy. Lurie, who also composed the Bartok-like score, is no stranger to the New York art, music, and low-low-budget movie scenes he’s been a “cult figure” since he moved to the Lower East Side in 1977, when his friends remember him as looking like a lunatic and walking into walls. Directed by Jim Jarmusch - whom Lurie got to know seven years ago smoking hash on an East Village stoop at four in the morning, talking about director Nicholas Ray - the movie is currently breaking records at the small Cinema Studio. But the real reason Lurie’s phone keeps ringing is his starring role in the surprise hit of the festival, Stranger than Paradise, the acclaimed “oddball odyssey” about two guys and a Hungarian émigré. “Vincent Canby made it sound as if I was doing Wenders a favor being in his movie,” Lurie laughs. For several seconds they saw him looming over Nastassja Kinski as the manager of a classy whorehouse in Wenders’s Paris, Texas. Many movie critics caught their first daunting glimpses of John Lurie at this year’s New York Film Festival. And, oh yes, he is the subject of a Village Voice profile, which brings its own set of obligations. Wim Wenders has asked him to play a crook in an upcoming film. He’s rehearsing the Lounge Lizards, his quasi-jazz band, for three or four gigs in New York and a European tour next month. The William Morris Agency wants the actor/musician for a client and has already arranged an audition for a part on the television show Miami Vice. I woke up at three o’clock today.” His phone, he says, hasn’t stopped ringing. “My manager just bought me a watch,” he declares, as if to account for his delay. A lanky six-foot-three-inches with his hair brushed up high, he flops down at the table and holds up his wrist. John Lurie, known to his friends as “a pain in the ass” and “a very sweet person,” arrives at the bar about 15 minutes late.

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