Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
David Lester’s graphic novel The Listener arrived from the printer this week. Beautiful, heavy and shiny, like all great works of art should be. In June, we’ll launch the book in Canada. In Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. I’m creating an adaptation of David’s book, which includes a Mecca Normal performance. Several characters will come off the powerpoint page to discuss the story, and David, playing the part of the author, will interrupt to interject history. In Mecca Normal, I am story and David, on guitar, is history. Story and history run concurrently in music, which, like history, repeats itself.
As Dave and I rehearsed the adaptation for the launch event, I started thinking about finishing the video for Mecca Normal’s song “Malachi.” It came out as a seven-inch single on K Records in November 2010, and I hadn’t figured out how to complete the video. The song is about an activist who lit himself on fire to protest war. His action went largely unnoticed due to extenuating circumstances. I wrote the lyrics before I realized that a song about his action might increase opposition to war, which was, I believe, part of his intention.
It wasn’t until I was watching the video for the third or fourth time that I made a connection between “Malachi” and The Listener, the part where the old people express regret. They were complacent at a significant juncture in history, and Hitler was able to rise to power.
In the first run-through of the adaptation for The Listener, I told a story about being on tour with the Indigo Girls, when Jane Siberry and I worked out this weird little skit where it appeared as though I smashed her head into her keyboards while she was playing a song. The purpose of the Siberry story within The Listener event is to demonstrate that we don’t know how art or actions will be regarded. Art, in my opinion, should abstract and obscure the realities that we can otherwise simply experience.
To take the point of the Siberry story further, I piled a lot of David’s MAGNET illustrations into the linearity of the video-making program and immediately noticed that my brain (“the brain”) very much wanted to connect the images to the story being told. I found the results to be quite interesting. I used David’s art for my own purpose, beyond his intention, and created something else. It could just as well be otherwise.
