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.
On tour, Mecca Normal stays in the homes of librarians, academics, scientists, artists and fans, and we frequently see Nikki McClure‘s calendars hanging in kitchens while up early to get back on the road, David and I try to figure out where the nice people still asleep upstairs hide their coffee beans. In this way, calendar page by calendar page, city by city, we know the scope of the community that Nikki infiltrates and conspires within.
There is the story of Nikki finding me on a pile of top soil in the middle of the night eating raw oysters out of the jar with my hands. Or the time she chased a possum around the house with a broom while David and I stood on chairs shrieking. Or how it was that her calendar on the wall of a Lower East Side apartment tipped me off to the possibility that perhaps I was not in my lover’s bachelor pad, but that a woman—his wife more than likely—had tapped the nail into the wall and hung Nikki’s calendar there.
Nikki McClure is an elegant communicator of vital information. Beyond that, she has the ability to both inspire and soothe—her work is a simultaneous call to take action and a call to save your strength. Her ideas and work occupy places of honor in museums, on the minds of activists, in books gripped by the hands of children and hanging on kitchen walls—in those annoying spaces between windows where you knew there was something missing.
