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 29-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
From a sun-bleached chair with missing rungs on a porch of weathered boards, a book is dropped on broken spine. Rigid man walks inside. The pages arch up, turning. The paper is torn and gray. And he still doesn’t know what it means. He lives in strange desolation. Stopped by a thought in time. He’s decided the book has the answer. Its extraction is long overdue. He’ll return to the porch, sit down in his chair and start again with obsession. Fingers smoothed-tipped from ritual turning. Every day he thinks about stopping. Humiliated by a failure to learn. The method outlasting the tool.
“Rigid Man In An Ice Age,” from The Eagle & The Poodle (Matador, 1996; Smarten UP!, 2009) (download):
