mecca normal free album downloads Mecca normal free album downloads. Mecca Normal updates, videos and art on FaceBook. Mecca Normal blog for artifacts through our 35+ year history. Opening for The Julie Ruin in Portland, 2016. "Wasn't Said" from "Empathy for the Evil produced by KRAMER. Many of the lyrics are directly out of two of Jean Smith's unpublished novels. Jean Smith is represented by the Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency. David Lester and Jean Smith's ongoing collaboration on Magnet Magazine -- free Mecca Normal download every week. YouTube Playlist of Mecca Normal's recorded songs. Unreleased, live songs, and interviews on BandCamp. "Arguably the greatest rock band without a rhythm section ever, the duo of acid-voiced singer Jean Smith and guitar hero David Lester must be seen to be believed." -- Douglas Wolk. Jean Smith is a major writer of our generation." -- Ronnie Pontiac, senior editor Newtopia Magazine. "An unbending advocate of thoughtful indie culture for two decades now, the Vancouver guitar-and-voice twosome doesn't just make demanding music, they also make books, paintings, photos, cartoons, among other things." -- San Francisco Chronicle. Read the four star Rolling Stone review. ------All Content � 2000 - 2020 Lester/Smith unless otherwise noted. Mecca Normal - Frozen Rain at the Fast Forward Festival, 1994, Holland. Mecca Normal CDs, books, posters, t-shirts and art on BuyOlympia.com . BOOKS: The Listener is distributed in Canada through LitDistCo , in the USA through AK Press , and in the UK through Global Book Marketing . The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism by David Lester -- the revised, second printing is in stock at buyolypia.com . Available in Canada from Arbeiter Ring and in the US from AK Press . Black Dot Museum of Political Art -- features David Lester's Inspired Agitators poster series including "Malachi" about war protester Malachi Ritscher. || "The Family Swan and || other songs" Jean || Smith's lyrics from the || new CD. || " Afternoon Descends || To Night" graphics by || David Lester. || Mecca Normal has a few || t-shirts designed by || Jean. Maybe one of them fits you. Newsletter. Irritated by the standard four-guys-on-stage scene in the early 1980s, Mecca Normal – Jean Smith and David Lester – formed their voice-and- guitar duo with one thing on their mind. Changing the world. Weirdly, they succeeded. Frequently cited as an inspiration to the co-founders of Riot Grrrl, Smith regularly spoke from the stage between songs in the 80s and 90s, encouraging women in the audience to form bands of their own, and a few key figures did just that. “Jean Smith was really poetic and had feminist ideas at the core of a lot of her songs and she wasn’t ashamed of it. And when I saw her, I was just like, that’s it. I’m done. I’m sold.” Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill (The Fader, 2010) For a few years in the 90s, Vancouver’s Mecca Normal headlined (and sometimes sold out) shows on the west coast and in the Northeastern USA, yet, until now, there hasn’t been a live album. For a brief time in the mid-90s, New Zealander Peter Jefferies (Nocturnal Projections) was on drums. Known for the intensity of their live shows, this one borders on incendiary. Recorded at The Cabaret, a beautiful little theatre in Montréal, Québec on April 16, 1996 for later broadcast on CBC’s Brave New Waves, Smith’s unparalleled delivery of songs about injustice is viscerally enmeshed with Lester’s furious guitar. As for the drums… while there is wisdom in not allowing romantic partners in a band, that tension had been intensified after the couple in question started a new band (2 Foot Flame on Matador) while living in New Zealand. “Maybe it’s just me, but I figure the guitar and the drums are both trying to get the last word, while I felt I needed to elevate my performance to justify the drama,” Smith recently divulged about the show. In 2016, Mecca Normal opened three shows for The Julie Ruin (Bikini Kill members) at which Kathleen Hanna said from the stage: “Their music is still as relevant as it was 25 years ago when I first saw them. It makes me happy that their music is still relevant because they’re doing it better than ever. And their new songs are so fucking great and hilarious.” Jean and David’s incredible creative partnership continues, but its focus is currently visual art. Lester’s graphic novel about the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 is out now, and Smith has sold over 600 of her ‘$100 USD brand’ paintings on FaceBook. Mecca Normal’s long-running association with the CBC’s Brave New Waves included many interviews as well as songs recorded by Kevin Komoda at DNA Studios in Montréal. Mecca Normal’s Brave New Waves session is released on vinyl, CD, and digital formats. The digipak CD comes with a short interview with Brent Bambury, as well as bonus cuts from the CBC archive. Released on Toronto-based Artoffact Records. Limited edition 12″ vinyl on see-thru green wax with insert of Jean Smith’s $100 USD paintings. 1. Water Cuts My Hands 2. Prize Arm 3. Don’t Shoot 4. Tower Island 5. Revival of Cruelty 6. The Dogs 7. Drive At / Peach-a-Vanilla 8. Ribbon 9. Man Thinks Woman / Strong White Male / I Walk Alone 10. Armchairs Fit through Doorways 11. Are You Hungry Joe? Limited edition digipak CD with bonus tracks 1. Water Cuts My Hands 2. Prize Arm 3. Don’t Shoot 4. Tower Island 5. Revival of Cruelty 6. The Dogs 7. Drive At / Peach-a-Vanilla 8. Ribbon 9. Man Thinks Woman / Strong White Male / I Walk Alone 10. Armchairs Fit through Doorways 11. Are You Hungry Joe? 12. Crimson Dragnet 13. Brave New Waves CBC interview, 1986 14. You’ll Never Know 15. Black Star 16. Hideous 17. Alibi. Peter Jefferies, Jean Smith, Patti Schmidt (Brave New Waves host), David Lester. Mecca Normal. Mecca Normal ( Jean Smith , David Lester ) started in 1984 with the express purpose of changing the world. Mecca Normal is known as a fore-runner and inspiration to the riot grrrl movement in the 90s. As part of the regional D-I-Y scene at that time, Mecca Normal co-founded the Black Wedge – anti-authoritarian poets and minimalist musicians "setting wild hearts free, spreading the damn difficult word of how to combine poetry with activist resistance culture". At the Black Wedge show in Olympia (1986) Jean and Calvin Johnson met and traded LPs – Mecca Normal's first album (later to be re-issued on ) for the first Beat Happening record. Mecca Normal has released thirteen albums on assorted labels including Matador and . Jean Smith. “Unlike most portraits, especially the ones men tend to paint of women, these were not made to be looked upon. The subjects were equal partners in the looking. You stared at them and they stared back. Smith’s women seemed to have rich interior lives and sometimes wore uniforms to indicate what they were doing before you, the viewer, so rudely interrupted.” – Nick Marino, New York Times Magazine, January 10, 2021. FOLLOW me on FaceBook to see $100 USD paintings for sale daily. I’m currently focused on creating groups 3 or more LARGE (16 x 20″ $600 USD) paintings based on the various “themes” I already paint. I will create a private album / page for you with options based on themes that interest you. Join my 3 or more LARGE painting GROUP on FaceBook when you have selected themes and are ready to buy. Please include which country I’d be shipping to. One Man’s Anger. From the Mecca Normal album Empathy for the Evil, released in 2014. Vocals, lyrics, video and illustration by Jean Smith. David Lester guitar. One Man’s Anger. This one man’s anger this one man’s rage this one man’s fear – it comes from pain oh ohhhhhh – it comes from pain. No matter what look is on his face what words he choose to say this one man’s anger comes from pain. it can fool you – you can be tricked he will tell you otherwise – otherwise. But as he’s walking down the way you will know his anger comes from pain comes from pain. This one man – is not a bad man, no he’s not a bad man in any way but this one man’s anger and rage. Coming out again is from fear of pain. And in the hollows of the shallows of the dark setting in In a quiet time. A look on his face – just a flicker like a flame will allow you to see his fear is his pain he fears the fear he fears the fear of pain. This one man’s pain and his angry ways the fire versus the flame the fire and the flame credits. Normal History. I collaborate on a weekly illustration, caption and song column for Magnet Magazine with Mecca Normal guitar player David Lester. Normal History is billed as The Art of David Lester, but at many points in the 612 volumes, my captions turn into small essays. Along the same lines (pardon the pun), David’s illustrations aren’t, strictly speaking, “ visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 36-year run “. We’ve gone way off track on many occasions, unless you consider our band’s history to include pretty much any social justice, labour history, feminist issue or event we care to “document” within the parameters of David’s illustration, a Mecca Normal song (free download from all albums running in sequence) and my “caption” – which we do… consider to be within the realm of our band’s history. The lyrics on our last studio album (2014) were closely hinged to the novel I was writing at the time. “The Black Dot Museum of Political Art” (literary fiction) is about a museum curator who cures narcissism, but part of the story takes the reader back to the narcissist’s childhood and his mother’s origins on a farm in New Brunswick, Canada. I was completely devoted to writing novels for 15 years. I had a part-time job at a gym for women and wrote many hours every day, getting up at 3:00 a.m. for long pre-work sessions. I completed four novels, secured a literary agent (no mean feat) to send one of them out to publishers. I had two novels on small presses in the 90s, but, as a next step, I wanted to go with a larger publisher. Five years ago, painting replaced the world of part-time jobs and the novel I was working on went to the back burner. Turns out painting and novel writing don’t really go together in terms of time management and creative organization in my brain. The manuscripts are there. Perhaps the painting will attract new interest. The ability to convincingly move a character through a plot is incredible skill to have. At a certain point I became aware that it was manifesting as a sense of personhood in my portraits. I don’t paint likenesses. I paint emotions, but beyond that it feels like I create individuals in the same way I do in fiction. Quite a few people tell me my portraits look like someone they think they know. No one specific, but they do possess that quality. They resonate as existing people in the same way a character in a novel does. In the succession of Mecca Normal songs (for which I write all the lyrics), I’m currently putting together “captions” for a couple of songs that endeavor to examine how “The Black Dot Museum of Political Art” protagonist Martin Lewis may have ended up a narcissist. Evidently the personality disorder may be the result of a traumatic incident in formative years, one that was too much for the child to deal with. Martin’s mother Odele had an emotionally-impoverished upbringing. Her mother Maisy had to contend with five kids and her brutish husband Nestor. I went through paintings from 2018 with these characters in mind and found four that resonate. In the summer of 1936, Maisy died and without missing a beat, Nestor turned and began hurling his high-pitched railings at Odele, like javelin tips landing sideways in the tender field of her heart. Odele was fourteen when she took over the chores – the watering, weeding, the picking, trimming and slicing of green beans, making meals, just like before. It fell to her to tend the garden, carefully latching bean tendrils to the brittle netting that stayed out all year, weathered to grey. The beans were blind – reaching out into the vastness of her tiny universe – in the opposite direction, until Odele unfurled the coil of filigree and let it touch the net. The beans hung like slender green trout, green eggs plump in their green bellies. So much green – too much – and so much for the natural order her father talked about; the hopelessness of beans left to fend for themselves, on their own. After her mother’s death, realizing that as a female she was interchangeable and therefore he’d be trying to fill her up and kill her too, Odele developed a penchant for very long baths with bubbles. Her father wouldn’t have dared to yell at her while she was naked, but she had her blanket of bubbles just in case. The tub was behind the woodshed where her two brothers’ bottoms had been paddled until they were old enough to endure a leather strap across the open palms of their pre-pubescent hands. The strap was for the boys and the soap was for Odele, the only girl, and it was appropriate. The boys were always in some kind of trouble that involved their quick fingers and plump hands – taking money, raiding fruit trees or fighting on the dusty shoulder of the road home from school. The strap across the hands was fitting for the boys and likewise, it was Odele’s mouth that got her into trouble – sassing back to her father, expressing her opinions unasked. The soap, it was for Odele. Their cast iron clawfoot tub was raised up on bricks to make room for the fire beneath it. After supper, the bath regime began with Odele’s father climbing in first to soak for the better part of an hour, after which, when her mother was alive, she’d be next, but she tended to make it quick. After her – the boys, one at a time. Finally it was Odele’s turn. Frequently she had to chop more kindling to stoke the fire and wait until the water warmed up again. She pulled the sash of her pink chenille bathrobe tighter and swung the axe more accurately than either of her brothers, splitting wood like she was slicing bread. Truly alone, she sat on her thinking rock, poking embers, vowing that one day she’d take baths twice as long as her father’s and soak in bubbles until the cows came home. When she had a child she’d spoil it. It could eat cake all day long for all she cared. Odele shifted the wood with a twisted iron rod so familiar in her right hand that it was invisible to her. All week it hung beside the leather strap in the shed, next to the soap, until bath night when, individually they held it like a mediaeval weapon, jabbing it into the heart of the fire as heat flushed their faces and alone, they allowed themselves to imagine episodes of liberation – and even retribution – as they prepared to bathe their scrawny hillbilly bodies in murky water beside an unnamed stone on which sat the soap. Unnamed by everyone except Odele. It was her thinking rock, although she’d never said it out loud to anyone except herself. It was here that the term ‘run through with an awl’ played over and over in her head and she blamed the rock for making her think it. This was what happened when she sat on the thinking rock. It made her think awful things about her father. She blamed the rock for putting things into her head and she thought it best to say them, to let them out, rather than save them, in her head, fearing that she might blurt out ‘run through with an awl’ instead of please pass the potatoes at dinner. Odele kept her small bottle of bubble bath in the pocket of her chenille robe. As she dribbled it across the dirty water she repeated her mantra, ‘run through with an awl’. Naked, one foot on her thinking rock, she used the soot-blackened poker to agitate the water, to make bubbles, and she laughed at how she must look, the real Odele, and she added to her chant – if all eyes were on me now. The saving grace of her otherwise woefully lacking existence was that her father was not a man of god. Unlike her schoolmates traipsing off to church, Sundays were her own. Not to run through fields of buttercups, but to catch up on chores. Odele sometimes found herself glancing skyward while she squeezed dirty water out of a mop, thanking god that her father was not religious, thus cracking herself up enough that she twigged onto how humour worked – it split apart the dark tendrils tightening in her gut and around her heart, soothing her like a slug of moonshine, but laughter didn’t burn and make her cough. Odele tried to find external sources to make herself laugh, to reduce the internal grumbling in what she knew was not her soul – nor was she hungry, unless what she felt could be called a hunger to express herself. If she laughed or cried her father got angry. He was a man who was staunchly confused about most things, but in his role as head of the household, he felt compelled to have strong opinions. Anger was the only emotion he let his family see. He pontificated wildly, combining nuances of opposing stances, putting on a show. All bluster. Odele tried to follow his logic, but when she was nine she heard the word irrational uttered by her mother while they were going through the remnant bin at Hester’s Dry Good Store. By the time she left the farm at sixteen Odele had eaten enough green beans to last her a lifetime. Emancipation from what she regarded as emotional tyranny came by way of the SMT Eastern bus line and her overwhelming determination to never again eat anything green. Odele (Martin Lewis’ mother) as a young girl Maisy (Odele’s mother) Nestor (Odele’s father) Martin Lewis (the narcissist) Between Livermore and Tracy. On the stretch of road between Livermore and Tracy, Altamont Speedway is where the 60s are said to have ended. During the making of a documentary about the ill-fated Rolling Stones event, Mick Jagger watches footage of a Tina Turner performance and rather smugly says, “It’s nice to have a chick occasionally.” The end of the 60s. Still a lot of work to do. Between Livermore and Tracy, at the time of writing it, felt like the end of something more personal, a milestone within my lifetime, at what was the beginning of many more hospital visits for my father, who could very well have died at that juncture, but lived on another 6 years. The “found” footage is entirely unrelated to my experience, yet prompts a sense of human connectivity in a document from another era, one that my parents would have occupied and evolved from as they, along with everyone else on the planet, hurtles towards death. The death of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old African American man, at Altamont was regarded from many angles. His sister Dixie had evidently suggested he take a gun to the concert, warning him of potential racism. Mick Jagger evidently didn’t realize that hiring the Hells Angel to do security in exchange for beer, wasn’t in keeping with his documented promotion of the event as everyone getting together for a nice time. Pandemic Art Sales: Seattle. Since the end of March Seattleites have bought 19 of my 11 x 14″ $100 USD paintings. Some are collectors of my work and others are new buyers who either know of my band Mecca Normal or have discovered my paintings for sale on FaceBook. Others have read an interview in The Tyee about my intention to open a Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change. Profit from painting sales (after $1000 USD for monthly expenses) and my savings is getting very close to a reasonable amount to purchase a facility. I’ve sold over 1500 paintings so far. Mecca Normal has played in Seattle many times over the years (since 1986) and have been included in MoPOP Museum (when it was the EMP) as part of the Riot Grrrl Retrospective. The cancellation of our March show at the Paramount opening for Bikini Kill was part of the initial wave of restrictions on gathering. It has since been rescheduled for September 2021. My FaceBook page is a hopeful place where paintings often sell within the first few minutes and, as funds come in, options for property are discussed. I think people want to look towards something positive and quite radical. As a single woman over 60, selling art to buy a house for the purpose of accommodating visiting artists intends to disrupt how property acquisition is typically regarded. Page Not Found. We're sorry, we can't find the page you're looking for. Or just start typing to search. Search Myspace. Your search did not return any results. Please try again. You're now in slide show mode. Hitting < pauses the slideshow and goes back. Hitting > pauses the slideshow and goes forward. SPACEBAR resumes the slideshow. Press ESC to exit. Sign in to Myspace. Use Facebook, Twitter or your email to sign in. Don't have a Myspace account yet? No worries, joining is easy. Forgot your password? Password request sent. Join Myspace. Getting in is easy. 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