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 41-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
We have a bassoonist rendered in what looks like blue ballpoint pen. The gauntlet has been thrown down, for sure. Sometimes David and I function in a loosely nuanced form of competition. This may be one of those times, but I will prevail! As you know: David does the drawing and I write the caption, keeping the song in mind.
Firstly: I love that carpet (color and texture), especially in conjunction with the wall! Have I told you about our long Thursday-night phone conversations where we discuss paintings online, ideally ones we can zoom in to within an inch of their surfaces? We’ve been on our landlines weekly, making remarkable observations, for almost a year. It’s utterly thrilling to, after all these years, have found a new thing we love to do together!
The longer I look at this piece, I’d like to add that this must be a punk-rock bassoonist, because they’re only using one hand. That’s right. Punk isn’t always the stereotypical black-leather jacket and three-chord guitar. Think of all the punk climate-change scientists, punk anti-COVID activists, punk writers illuminating late-stage capitalism, working independently and collectively, so that the general populace, if it cared to take its eyeballs off Diddy and misinformationists afoot, might see through the “Vacant Night Sky to places where hope and inspiration freely mingle with expressions of all kinds. Including unlikely looking punk bassoonists.
“Vacant Night Sky” from Sitting On Snaps (Matador, 1995) (download):
