secret comics

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Mingering Mike!

that's right, i said Mingering Mike!  here's more info on the story that is more interesting than anything else i might have to say:

A Well-Imagined Star
By NEIL STRAUSS
February 2, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - The term diggers applies to those obsessed souls who dig through cardboard boxes and milk crates at flea markets and thrift stores in search of rare record albums. And according to the unwritten bylaws of diggers, the location at which any vinyl treasure is discovered is strictly confidential. This is a way of protecting one's turf, even if that turf is just a dust-covered wasteland of hand-me-downs. So it shall be that the location of one of the greatest digger discoveries of our time must remain a secret. The diggers were Dori Hadar, 29, and Frank Beylotte, 32, friends from Washington who met a year ago at a Salvation Army store while mining for funk and soul gold. "I went to a flea market, and there was a huge record collection there, at least 20 boxes," Mr. Hadar said, recalling the morning of the discovery. "I was going through that very happily when I came across this box full of strange hand-painted album covers. I realized they were fake and was about to put them back, but then I looked at them more closely." Pulling the records out of the sleeves, he was surprised to find that they were made not of vinyl but of cardboard. Each had been cut in the shape of a record, with grooves and a hand-lettered label painted on. Nearly all the albums were credited to an unknown black musician named Mingering Mike, and dated from 1968 to 1976.

The front covers were intricately painted to look like classic funk albums; on the spines were titles and fake catalog numbers; the backs had everything from liner notes to copyright information to original logos; the inner sleeve was often a shopping bag meticulously taped together to hold a record; and some actually opened to reveal beautiful gatefold sleeves. A few albums had even been covered in shrink-wrap and bore price stickers and labels with apocryphal promotional quotes.

What Mr. Hadar found was a cache of seemingly nonexistent music: soundtracks to imaginary films, instrumental albums, a benefit album for sickle cell anemia, a tribute to Bruce Lee, a triple-record work titled "Life in Paris,"songs protesting the Vietnam War and promoting racial unity, and records of Christmas, Easter and American bicentennial music. He had discovered, perhaps, an outsider artist. "There are quite a few folk art collectors that are salivating to get their hands on this collection," said Brian DiGenti, the editor of Wax Poetics, a leading journal for record collectors. "I think without a doubt that when all this settles down, this collection will be in a permanent gallery, and it will probably be one of the more important folk art collections there." As Mr. Hadar examined the albums, a crowd gathered. He knew what had to be done: he bought all 38, for roughly $2 apiece. Excited on returning home, he posted his findings on soulstrut.com, a digger Web site. A fellow collector, Mr. Beylotte, responded, telling him that he had been to the same  flea market and had seen similarly decorated seven-inch singles and eight-track tapes along with cassette tapes and reel-to-reel recordings. He believed there might be music to accompany the conceptual albums.

"A lot of times flea-market vendors acquire their wares from a storage facility that's auctioning off the possessions of someone who hasn't paid their bills," Mr. Beylotte said. "So we're used to digging through these windows into personal lives through records." He and Mr. Hadar returned to buy the rest of the Mingering Mike stash, including photo albums and correspondence. Afterward they put a cassette tape in the stereo and heard their quarry's music for the first time. It was mostly a cappella - a cross between doo-wop, field hollers, gospel, the soul and blues - accompanied by what sounded like sticks on a bucket keeping a beat. Though they lacked instruments, Mingering Mike and his collaborators - known as Joseph War and the Big D - seemed to have the arrangements in their heads and would mimic string glissandos, trumpet blasts and bass lines vocally. For words, Mingering Mike and the Big D talked and sang, mostly about how they wanted to become famous. "We should be stars," went the chorus of one song. "Stars in the eyes of man." A few of the albums and labels were decorated with pictures of the Washington Monument, so Mr. Hadar and Mr. Beylotte figured that if Mingering Mike was still alive, he was probably in the Washington area. Fortunately Mr. Hadar happened to be an investigator for a law firm. (Mr. Beylotte works for the American Psychological Association.) On one of Mingering Mike's earliest seven-inch singles they noticed that he had put down his actual name. And in a stack of his letters, they found street addresses. Mr. Hadar said that he chose the address most likely to be current, and drove there. A cousin of Mingering Mike's answered the door. Wary of a stranger, the cousin would tell Mr. Hadar only that Mingering Mike lived in southeast Washington.

Undeterred, Mr. Hadar sifted through court records and other public documents until he came across Mingering Mike's last known address. He went there with Mr. Beylotte, finding a small apartment building in a rough neighborhood, he said. They knocked on the door, and a man answered. They recognized him instantly: he was a little older and a little heavier than in the pictures they had seen, but it was definitely Mingering Mike. When they told him they had found his album covers, they recalled, a broad smile spread across his face. "My babies," he said. On Thursday I joined these three men at Mr. Hadar's house. Mingering Mike said it was his first interview. He had never released a real album; he had only fantasized an entire career on cardboard. Mingering Mike is a large, good-humored, round-faced man who wore a black jacket and black slacks on Thursday. He did not want his real name published or his face to be photographed. The reason he gave for maintaining his anonymity was that he had two jobs and was worried that the attention would "disrupt things at work." The name Mingering Mike came about, he explained, when he saw a street sign for "merging traffic" and twisted the word in his head to create mingering. His music making began in his teenage years, he said, when he locked himself in the bathroom (for the good acoustics) and tried to come up with a song. Once a complete song finally tumbled out of his mouth a year later, he couldn't stop. In the years that followed, he said, he wrote more than 4,000 songs on everything from legal pads to matchbooks to diaper boxes.

Eventually he gathered family members to help record the music. When asked what he used for percussion, he laughed and replied, "You wouldn't believe it." The music was not recorded with an overturned bucket after all, he said, but from either beating an Afro comb on a bed or hitting a telephone book with hands. Occasionally, he said, his cousin, the Big D, would roll up a piece of paper and blow through it to replicate the sound of a trumpet.  But just writing and recording music wasn't enough, Mingering Mike said, so he started making the album jackets so that "if it all came together one day, I'd be ready." He said he would spend as long as a week making his album jackets. He originally put the cardboard records inside because the covers were too flimsy otherwise. And then he began adding fake promotional stickers, seven-inch singles to accompany the records, lyric sheets, gatefold sleeves, fan club information and nearly every other detail imaginable. "I wanted everything to be my own stuff and my own ideas," he said, "and not copy from anybody else." Mingering Mike's dream, he said, was to be known for his music, and for his songs to inspire people. Thus, he tackled subjects like the growing drug problem in the United States on the cover of "The Drug War" and compulsory military service in his apocryphal reissue of an apocryphal soundtrack to the apocryphal film "You Only Know What They Tell You." A recurring theme, which appears on the album "The Two Sides of Mingering Mike," is the choices that one had to make during the Vietnam War era between military service and civilian life. The logo for his spurious Decision Records label depicts two hands, one reaching for a microphone and the other for a gun. But outside of performing a few shows at St. Elizabeths, the historic mental hospital here, in an act with his brother, an amateur magician, he attempted to seek a wider audience for his music only once. He responded to an advertisement in the back of a magazine promising to set lyrics to music, but he soon realized it was just a scam. Mingering Mike's uncle and musical collaborator, known on the records as Joseph War, helped unravel at least one of the mysteries of Mingering Mike, as well as his logo for Decision Records. "At that time it was the Vietnam War," he said, "and he was AWOL, so he couldn't go out. He had to do it all on his own." (Joseph War, who owns 10 to 15 of these album covers, added that Mingering Mike was later pardoned through President Jimmy Carter's amnesty program.) After more than a decade of making music, Mingering Mike realized that he needed to focus on paying rent, so music took a back seat as he worked as an administrative assistant, a building maintenance engineer and a security guard. When he fell behind on payments for his storage space, most of his possessions were auctioned off to the flea market, where Mr. Hadar and Mr. Beylotte found them. What the pair discovered in the end was not just a conceptual funk star and an unusual folk artist, but a fellow digger. In addition to his homemade work, Mingering Mike had 4,000 actual albums and 2,000 seven-inch singles to his name, from the Temptations to Lalo Schifrin to Barbra Streisand. In the inside sleeve of one of his albums he had written on a piece of paper, "Records are my 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. love," before calling himself a "recordholic." Before he left Mr. Hadar's house, Mingering Mike did not ask what would become of his "babies." Mr. Hadar and Mr. Beylotte have said they would like to see the albums in a gallery and the music on CD. He asked instead if he could borrow a copy of the 1974 funk classic "Breakin' Bread," by Fred Wesley & the New J. B.'s. "That's my favorite," Mr. Hadar said of the album. Mingering Mike smiled  knowingly. "We're like brothers," he said, "brothers in music."

maybe this is old news, oh well...

Attn: LA friends

Secret Comics received the following message this afternoon:

Hellos to my Bros and Bras,
Happy Thanksgiving.
I will be playing this Friday 11/25  -8:30pm at
Genghis Cohen in West Hollywood.
740 N. Fairfax.323.653.0640
If you're out of town, tell your LA friends.
Harvey Sid

He who has ears, let him hear.

Harvey Sid also included the below info, apropos of... well, re-heating leftovers and whatnot:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Johns Hopkins has recently sent this out in its newsletters.

This information is being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Dioxin chemicals causes cancer, especially breast cancer. Dioxin are highly poisonous to the cells of our bodies.  Don't freeze your plastic bottles with water in them as this releases dioxins from the plastic.

Recently, Dr. Edward Fujimoto, Wellness Program Manager at Castle Hospital, was on a TV program to explain this health hazard. He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us.  He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave oven using plastic containers.

This applies to foods that contain fat. He said that the combination of fat, high heat and plastics releases dioxin into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body. Instead, he recommends using glass, Corning Ware or ceramic containers for heating food. You get the same results, only without the dioxin. So such things as TV dinners, instant ramen and soups, etc.,should be removed from the container and heated in something else.

Paper isn't bad but you don't know what is in the paper. It's just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc. He reminded us that a while ago some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons.

Also, he pointed out that plastic wrap is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be cooked in the microwave. As the food is nuked, the high heat causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food. Cover food with a paper towel instead.

maybe you care about fake bands, maybe you don't.  i kinda do.  so when i read this challenge to find fake bands not already in the rocklopedia fakebandica! i came up with two off the top of my head.  of course i checked and checked and checked the rf! (and checked), and they... appear... nowhere to be found.  i am a little paranoid that i somehow missed them -- well, not paranoid as much as excited that maybe i stumbled across some uncontributed fake bands and not wanting to set myself up for disappointment.

the bands?  taranchula and limozeen, of course.  more taranchula here and here; the limozeen discography is a little more extensive.  buy some of their tunes while you're at it.  guess what?  i spent way too much time on this.

i guess it has been a while since i've posted anything so...

maybe someone can tell me why i own a schick quattro razor (the plain version, not electric or shocking blue or whatever) but the only razor blades i have are for the gillette mach 3.  it obviously makes no sense, and suggests that i may be losing it more than previously thought.  i have no recollection of purchasing the mach 3 razors, let alone why i would have thought i needed them.  as a result i have not shaved in several days and am starting to look a little rough.  i probably need to go and buy the correct razors.

here is something else razor-related.  then this.  these folks pointed out the connection a while back.

super fucking duper. texas voters just approved a brand new anti-miscegenation law. enshrined it in the state constitution. voting is stupid. texas is stupid. i voted... in texas, making me double stupid. fuck anybody who's happy about this. i am in a bad mood, so good night and fuck off.

watch pandas and ignore everything else

fear paisley, but don't try to say anything worthwhile

play a game that's pretty fun despite not technically being fun

late

it's national novel writing month, apparently.  or NaNoWriMo, which i like better.  superinky girl clued me in.  maybe i... erm, make that you and i should get in on this.  we could make up the time, i think.  50000 words/30 days = 1666.67 words a day.  that's not so hard.  maybe this can be an exercise in being ok with being terrible, which is a pretty valuable lesson.

to the bakery folks

not to complain
but seriously--

that peanut butter cookie
was completely wrong
on at least three levels

halloween candy reviews

all reviews refer to "fun size" bars--

• 100 Grand: never seems to live up to its potential.  meaning the idea of a 1000 Grand bar is always better than the reality.  the caramel isn't chewy enough.  was the caramel chewier when we were kids?  something was different, anyway.  label says "30% Less Fat Than the Leading Chocolate Brands".  maybe that explains it... "it" being that the 1000 Grand is kind of suck-ass.
• Snickers Cruncher: tuh-errible. what was i thinking when i grabbed one of these -- besides "free candy"?  nothing, that's what.
• Baby Ruth: retains a mysteriously distinct flavor despite not being all that different from several other candy bars.  something to do with the nougat i guess.  pretty ok.
• Milky Way: walking a fine line between a semi-subtle, pleasant candy bar and kind of forgettable.  these are better frozen, right?  maybe you don't get enough with a single "fun size" bar to savor the full milky way experience. mars bars are way better.
• Hershey's with Almonds: blech.  hershey's chocolate is only good by itself, and then only in small doses like every couple of years or so.  why almonds?  almonds add nothing to this equation.  i misread the label when i grabbed this one.
• Almond Joy: high point of the haul.  it's no bounty bar, but it certainly shines in the "fun size" format.
• there were no Butterfingers or Three Musketeers to be mooched, which is a shame.

do they have "fun size" cadbury candy bars for halloween in the UK?  wait, actually i don't want to know.  how depressing would that be?  not for them -- for them it's ten pounds of fuck yeah in a five pound bag.  depressing for us and all the crap american candy we get stuck swiping off other people's (peoples?) desks the day after halloween.