Mingering Mike
One of the nicest looking books that’s come across my desk in quite a while is Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar. The (true) story goes like this: An avid record collector was digging through the crates at a Washington DC flea market one day, when he discovered dozens of soul albums from the ’60s and ’70s by an artist named Mingering Mike. The collector, Dori Hadar, took a closer look at the records, and discovered that they weren’t actually LPs at all, but hand-drawn and -crafted works of individual art. The artist—Mingering Mike—had created beautiful, original albums, of which he was the star performer. He even went to far as to draw individual grooves on the cardboard records. Hadar was a private detective by day, so he sleuthed out this Mingering Mike, who agreed to have his incredible artwork shown to the public for the first time in this book.
The Morning News has a great gallery of the albums, as well as an interview with Dori Hadar.
Richard Wanderman wrote:
Reminds me of the late Donald Evans who drew postage stamps from imaginary countries with all sorts of imaginary cultural history. Great stuff, thanks.
Posted on 24-Apr-07 at 3:47 am | Permalink