Newsletter

January, 2012

Jean Smith is seeking a literary agent for The Black Dot Museum of Political Art (literary fiction, 80,500 words). Read the query, synopsis and the first ten pages.

Mecca Normal is heading back into Kevin Chong’s creative writing class at the University of British Columbia and playing at the 25th anniversary of B.C. Teachers for Peace and Global Education.

Mecca Normal’s guitar player David Lester is the author and illustrator of The Listener graphic novel.

The Listener: A dense and fiercely intelligent work that asks important questions about art, history, and the responsibility of the individual, all in a lyrical and stirring tone.” — Publishers Weekly (New York)

REVIEWS

BUY $19.95 or less

Photos of the performance adaptation of The Listener featuring Mecca Normal at Word on the Street in Vancouver.

VIDEOS: David Lester book signing event. University of British Columbia presentation in Kevin Chong’s Creative Writing class. Short videos about The Listener

Mecca Normal (Jean Smith and David Lester) Anacortes, WA, July, 2011. Judith Baumann photo.

Obliterating History – a guitar-making mystery, domination & submission in a small town garage. A novel by Jean Smith. David Lester comments after reading the manuscript.

The weekly Magnet Magazine series continues. David Lester’s illustration paired with text by Jean Smith – includes a Mecca Normal download. Currently at Vol. 102.

New 7″

K Records — November 9, 2010

order here – $4 Malachi b/w Blue Sky & Branches – part of the International Pop Underground singles series. Malachi is about free speech and anti-war activist Malachi Ritscher (1954-2006).

Spring 2010 – Jean created The Black Dot Museum of Political Art and Kill Rock Stars founder Slim Moon was named museum manager. The Black Dot Museum of Political Art – features art by Nikki McClure, Tae Won Yu, Norman Nawrocki, Clive Holden and EE Miller. The Museum Screening Room features Jean Smith’s introduction to How Art & Music Can Change the World

The Black Dot Museum of Political Art – FaceBook

2010, April into May — The Black Dot Museum: Political Artists from Vancouver, a four-person exhibit in Olympia. Mecca Normal played the opening.

$1.00 songs on BandCamp.com Conform, The Arrogant Man (1984 – 86 unreleased) more to come!

Smarten UP! Records – the re-release of two early Mecca Normal albums, originally on K Records and then on one CD on Matador. Individual songs for 99 cents or as the album, the way David and I intended for it to be heard.

Calico Kills the Cat (1989, K Records, Matador CD with “Water”)

Water Cuts My Hands (1991, K Records, Matador CD with “Calico”)

David’s The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism is required reading for a course called English: Academic Writing Strategies at Capilano University. Another 150 copies of The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism sold – a donation was made to the Canadian Centre for the Victims of Torture (approx. $2,000 raised so far).

David’s poster of Howard Zinn was Poster of the Week at the Center For the Study of Political Graphics (Los Angeles). David’s poster series — Inspired Agitators – became part of the permanent collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (Los Angeles).

David Lester — Painter on FaceBook

David Lester paintings

MungBeing online magazine is featuring artwork by David and Jean’s painting, poetry and excerpts from her forthcoming novels Broke Like Me. and Love Wants You. – including Genius Beans, The Entirely Bearable Lightness of Being Single and Shadowing the G-Man. Jean is seeking a literary agent for Love Wants You. — a novel about deception and online dating and deception.

Jean Smith bio on BC BookWorld.

2010, April — Mecca Normal played Sarah Utter‘s art opening at Land Gallery, Portland.

2010, May — Mecca Normal recorded three songs with Calvin Johnson at Dub Narcotic Studio. Jean played timpani and piano. The songs are: Malachi, Blue & Sky Branches, and an improvised piece called After the Next.

2010, June — Jean’s film “Kent State” and David’s film “Hitler’s Sketch” were screened in Seattle at Hollow Earth Radio House and at the Capitol Theater in Olympia, as part of the Olympia Experimental Music Festival Film Program.

Jean made a video for I’m Not Into Being the Woman You’re With While You’re Looking for the Woman You Want.

2010, August – Jean made a series of short films on Montreal activist and artist Norman Nawrocki

Jean made three films while recording at Dub Narcotic Studio:

Calvin & Jean Talk About 70s Rock

After the Next

A Short Film About Recording With Calvin

August – Jean started a new series “Winter at the Pond”

Jean completed a series of paintings: Discovering Utopia — two have sold.

Links

How Art & Music Can Change the World

Facebook Pages

MySpace

Reviews

Lecture Reviews & Articles

Smarten UP! Records

Get To The Point Editions

May 5, 2011
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: jeansmith . Comments: Comments Off

Fifth Estate Magazine, Spring 2011

Ron Sakolsky on Mecca Normal

Ron Sakolsky is a scholar covering the intersection of music, revolution and radio. As of 2005, Sakolsky is Emeritus Professor of Public Administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield. For more than twenty years he taught at the university on music and social justice issues, originally attracted by its innovative and radical courses.

Over the last 25 years, Mecca Normal has consistently turned up the heat on the theoretical relationship between music and social change by furiously stirring them together in the fiery cauldron of artistic practice. In the process, they have boldly created a unique body of work that has challenged the downpressing gravity of the authoritarian life with a yeasty combination of outrage and subversive laughter. In essence, they have defied gravity, and, in doing so, have urged us all to refuse to be held down when we could be soaring to the outer reaches of possibility, or, better yet, demanding the impossible. Their music is not designed to present us with a dry polemic on the “one-best-way” to be politically active or offer a pat answer on how to live our lives according to anybody’s party line. Instead, it is a direct call to see through the bullshit and make our own choices.

Historically-speaking, the house of Mecca Normal that Jean and David have built has been widely acknowledged as one part of the foundation of the Riot Grrrl movement which burst on the punk scene in the Nineties throwing down the gauntlet to male supremacy and laying the groundwork for Ladyfest solidarity. Before that, Mecca Normal was the spark that lit up the radical political landscape of the late Eighties with the Black Wedge tour. That tour was an anarchist antidote to the self-congratulatory left/liberal Red Wedge tour in the UK, which aimed at unseating Boss Margaret Thatcher, but ultimately led to the reign of Boss Tony Blair, who became the staunch Labour Party ally of Boss George Bush in the “war on terror.” Black Wedge, on the other hand, placed its rebellious emphasis on a politically-engaged music and poetry that wanted nothing to do with the electoral realm and focused instead on denouncing systemic abuse and countering the spectacular politics of everyday life.

Many recording artists naively, or perhaps conveniently, believe that music can only be used to change the world by trading on their own status as stars who are recruited to support the least obnoxious political candidate or who involve themselves in do-gooder charitable activities that condescendingly distance them from those that society attempts to victimize. Mecca Normal has never played such shallow celebrity games. Instead, the name of their record label, Kill Rock Stars, says it all. As Jean Smith once explained in an article she wrote about Black Wedge for the 1995 anthology that I co-edited with Fred Ho, Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution, “The Black Wedge functions/agitates in the crawlspace of resistance, under the big house of capitalism.”

And that original Black Wedge tour has provided a seminal source of experiences and ideas that have animated Mecca Normal’s music, writing and visual art ever since. Their most recent 2009 tour, whose overriding theme was “How Art and Music Can Change The World,” is a case in point. More than a mere retrospective of their work, the tour opener that I caught at the Vinegar Factory in Vancouver was a reaffirmation of their inspirational power and continuous resilience. Both Mecca Normal tours represent plateaus in relation to their ongoing commitment to cultural activism. Yet, the latter, by combining a seasoned performance-based pedagogy with a raw emotional and lyrical intensity, is the culmination (so far) of the rock solid artistic integrity that has made Mecca Normal into an underground legend in its own time. –Ron Sakolsky

BC Bookworld entry:
http://www.abcbookworld.com/view_author.php?id=4434

Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Sakolsky