Every week, 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 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
An exercise in self-taught language theory, Dead Bird’s Feet (mounted on the wall) is based on seeing this exact thing and grappling with how it had meaning to another culture.
In a way, it’s like how I interpreted the punk scene in Vancouver when I first became aware of it and made assumptions about what would happen when I wrote and performed songs about things that were bugging me, like how the punks wrote about what was bugging them.
I ended up doing a search for “the origin of punk in Vancouver” asking if punk was primarily about class the same way it was in the U.K. The long convo with an AI chatbot took a few unusual twists and turns in episodic hindsight that addresses the four-guys-onstage boys’ club that existed in the 1980s.
“Dead Bird’s Feet” from Water Cuts My Hands (K, 1991) (download):
