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 30-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Most of songs on the new Mecca Normal album, Empathy For The Evil, are about narcissism and the abuse of power—concepts we’ve heard quite a bit about in recent months. Much has been said about the Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby situations, and, in Ghomeshi’s case, how the term BDSM (interpersonal activities of dominance and submission based on consent) can be exploited and used to imply consent where none was given.
Lyrics on this album are directly out of my two most-recently completed novels. In Obliterating History – a guitar-making mystery, domination & submission in a small town garage a 54-year-old woman carefully selects a partner to explore BDSM. Trust is paramount in their relationship.
In my other novel, The Black Dot Museum Of Political Art, narcissist Martin Lewis explains, “It isn’t that I enjoy hurting people, but I do enjoy the reaction to pain. The surprise. The fear. The confusion. It’s very empowering to make people react. It’s as basic as that.”
The song “Odele’s Bath” provides back-story about Lewis’ mother—who grew up poor on a potato farm in New Brunswick. In the song “Maisy’s Death”, we go back farther to the death of Odele’s mother, to gain some insight into how that may have impacted Odele in her formative years, when her father basically treated her as a stand in for her mother.
While reading about Ghomeshi, I found a very thoughtful article by Gabor Mate, in which he too illuminates possible scenarios in which narcissism might develop in formative years.
In researching novel-writing, I kept hearing that readers—especially women—want female characters to do important and exciting things, so I figured I’d go ahead and have my protagonist cure narcissism, which is actually an incurable personality disorder. The song “Normal” illuminates the background of the woman who ends up curing narcissism.
“Held” from Dovetail (K, 1992) (download):
