proud Floraphile

Musician Mike Keneally is a Floraphile.

Info on Mike at AllMusic, and here's his website.

Photo by my brother Dan Chusid, October 2014.

The book he's holding is our 2013 anthology

The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora.

The High Fidelity Exhibition

You can buy our fourth anthology The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora and browse the man's legendary album illustrations between book covers. Or you can attend Jalopy's similarly named exhibit and be surrounded by four walls of Flora. Those walls will be adorned with vintage LP and 78 covers, proof sheets, and oversized reproductions from our fine art print catalog. The Brooklyn-based club's exhibit opens Friday June 13 from 6 - 8pm, during which yours truly will be on hand to: 1) sign your copy of The High Fidelity Art; 2) spin Flora-centric music (trad jazz, swing, and hard bop, with a smattering of Third Stream); and 3) chat about Flora. Admission is FREE, and you don't have to buy a book to attend. Jalopy has a restaurant next door to the club, and the fare is scrumptious.

Jalopy is located in Red Hook, Brooklyn (315 Columbia Street, specifically). It's not that hard to get to, though locals have a saying, "It takes people in Red Hook two hours to get to Red Hook." You can find it. It's a very cool place to hang, and it's run by a cool couple, Lynette and Geoff Wiley, who recently gave birth to a couple of cool twins.

Hipsters, Flipsters ...

Richard Myrle Buckley was born 108 years ago today in Tuolumne, CA. He later self-applied the deferential appellation Lord and became a fixture on the New York jazz nightclub scene, transforming into what his biographer Michael Monteleone described as "a strange but intriguing mix of a proper English peer of the realm and a street corner jive hipster." He played the Vaudeville circuit, was friends with gangster Al Capone, appeared on The Tonight Show, married six times, and died broke, leaving an idiosyncratic legacy of oral literature, some of it captured on tape, vinyl, and film.

You can hear one of his Lordship's epic declarations here. It's the title track from the very rare 1955 10" record (above) with a famous Flora illustration. The cover is available as a limited edition fine art print at JimFlora.com. Or you can order a Buckley portrait rendered by noted illustrator Drew Friedman. The Friedman portrait looks like Buckley. The Flora portrait looks like ... well, like Flora.

music and art in the crib

Flora, grinning (ca. 1985)

Flora's daughter Roussie Jacksina has received her complimentary copy of The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora. She writes:

Hi Irwin, I received the book today and it is GORGEOUS! Where on earth did you find all that new material? You are amazing sleuths and the book is stunning. Assuming Dad is among us in the 4th dimension, I'm sure he is grinning wide.

I think the first music I ever heard was a record of Josh White singing "One Meatball" and I heard it in my crib. It's because of Dad's musical influence that I dropped out of college to hang out in jazz clubs and art galleries—not that that was his wish for me, nor was he very pleased.

Thanks so much for the copy. You, Barbara, and Laura did a fabulous job.

Roussie

Gene Deitch: Flora had an "overpowering influence" on my style

Animation legend GENE DEITCH was a longtime friend of Jim Flora, a friendship that commenced in the 1940s and ended only with Flora's death in 1998. Today Gene wrote to us:

Pete Jolly Duo EP from back cover of
The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora

THE HIGH-FIDELITY ART OF JIM FLORA arrived!  This latest treasury of Jim's art is the closest to my heart, as it covers the exact material that led me to him in the mid 1940s—and which had an overpowering influence on my own graphic attempts.  Everyone who followed my work in the Record Changer magazine, reproduced in the Fantagraphics book, THE CAT ON A HOT THIN GROOVE, knows that much of my stuff was flat-out Flora imitation-emulation, though I clearly knew all the while that Jim's endless graphic invention was inimitable.

Jim himself was in many ways a parallel of his iconic images, a sum of many parts, just as all the convoluted sassy segments strung-out in space joined into a dazzling whole.  A genius of his order may have had every reason to be arrogant, distant, or cold—yet Jim was downright jolly, warm-hearted, caring and helpful. He never berated me for stealing his stuff, but rather encouraged me and worked with me. I tried to work more with him, but am grateful that I was at least able to produce animated versions of his FABULOUS FIREWORKS FAMILY at Terrytoons and LEOPOLD, THE SEE-THROUGH CRUMB-PICKER here in Prague. Best of all, I am proud that he became my close friend and regular correspondent.  His final letter to me lingers in my heart. This new book of his further ensures that I will never forget him.

Gene's The Cat On a Hot Thin Groove was recently republished by Fantagraphics with a new cover:

The Miraculous Mambo Returns!

In 2012 we sold our 200th and final oversized Mambo For Cats screen print, the last of a limited edition produced by Aesthetic Apparatus of Minneapolis in 2006. Almost immediately, a legion of Floraphiles—especially those fond of felines and Latin terpsichore—began clamoring for this work to be restored to our catalog. The nature of limited editions precludes us from issuing the work in an identical (or even comparable) format. Two hundred hand-numbered, Flora family-authenticated, 20"-square Mambo screen prints (and two dozen proofs) exist. There won't be any more. Want one? You'll have to search on the secondary market—which means find someone who bought one and wants to sell it. We don't control that market, and price is determined by supply and demand.

But we do control the underlying image, and limited edition print protocols permit us to issue the work in an altered format. Consider it done. To celebrate the publication of The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora, our fourth anthology—and one which specifically features all of Flora's known album covers—we've revived Mambo for Cats. This week we're launching an edition of 200 hand-numbered, 11-1/2"-square, archival-quality fine art prints. It's about 40% smaller than the screen print, and is produced on different paper with different inks via an entirely different printing process (inkjet, or giclée). The giclée image is slightly smaller than a 12" LP cover in order to accommodate a 3/4" margin on an untrimmed 13" x 19" sheet of 310g Hahnemühle stock. (A smaller margin would make matting problematic.) One other significant difference: the screen print was on cream-colored stock; the giclée stock is white.

Upon learning about the new Mambo edition, ears began to perk up in the Flora community:

We also offer a Mambo mini—a 7"-square archival quality print. This is an open edition, meaning the prints are not numbered nor is the edition limited. To date we've sold about 150 minis.

We can't guarantee these Mambo kitties will have nine lives, but for now they're happy to embark on their third.

The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora

Our fourth Jim Flora anthology is officially available today.

Our first book, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (2004), featured Flora's known album covers. Since that book's publication, more vintage covers have been found, as well as the artist's rough drafts and rejected illustrations. The Mischievous Art went through two editions, but is now out of print, highly sought and available only at high prices through rare-book sellers. So we decided to compile a complete collection of Flora record covers (including recent discoveries) and unpublished sketches in one volume, augmented by music images not included in previous volumes. The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora is the definitive anthology of the maestro's visual compositions, reflecting jazz, classical, and Latin music. Regarding his jam-packed canvases Flora once said he "couldn't stand a static space." There's nothing static about the images in The High Fidelity Art: they wail, dance, bounce, and swing from the chandeliers. They hit notes that shatter glass. This is art to which you can tap your toes and snap your fingers. Flora had a knack for grooving with a paintbrush.

The book features a 1998 interview with Flora which I conducted at his home on Bell Island, in Rowayton CT, just a few months before he passed away from stomach cancer. The interview has not been previously published. We also obtained from the Flora family previously unpublished photos of Jim and rare visual artifacts.

The book is published by Fantagraphics, who have created a spate of High Fidelity Art links for your web perusal:

> Flickr video/photoset <

> YouTube video <

> Facebook photo album <

> Google+ photo album <

> PDF excerpt download <

> Embeddable excerpt on Issuu <

slight makeover

The JimFlora.com homepage, long overdue for an update, finally got one. Besides our forthcoming book, The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora (due September 7 from Fantagraphics), you'll find a first announcement about a Flora centennial exhibit at Silvermine Arts Center in September 2014. We've also added Amazon.com links for our two Flora children's books reprinted by Enchanted Lion. In the coming weeks we will post information about several additions to our fine art prints catalog.

Too Much Information - Part 1

One of our representatives will be with you shortly. Your visit is very important to us, and we look forward to answering your questions. Such as: What's up with the Flora blog, the website, and Jim Flora art in general? The paucity of new posts in recent months does not connote inactivity in the Florasphere. Here's breaking news—and news which has previously broken:

Flora co-archivist Barbara Economon and I have completed a new book—our fourth— for Fantagraphics: The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora. It's a dual-purpose volume: 1) it replaces our long out-of-print and highly sought book from 2004, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora, which featured the Flora album covers known to us at the time (along with a bunch of other cool stuff); and 2) it showcases the Flora album covers we knew in 2004 and others we've since discovered, along with a plethora of vintage Flora music-oriented art, most of which has not been previously published in our Flora anthologies. It rocks, it bops, and swings from the chandeliers. Projected publication: August or September. The book, which can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com, includes cheeky back cover blurbs from Gary Panter, Arnold Roth, James Lileks, Georgia Hubley, and Joost Swarte.

The Double-E Company (Eva and Elsa) have teamed with Astek to create several designs of Jim Flora wall coverings. Above is an example (piano not included). Here's another. And another. And here's the entire collection. Our books and website are attempting to spread Flora across the planet. You can do your part by spreading it across your home.

Enchanted Lion has reprinted two early Flora children's books, The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957) and Kangaroo for Christmas (1962). English is our favorite language, but editions of these books have now been reprinted in Italian, French, and Spanish.

Artifact Puzzles has produced a 302-piece wooden jigsaw puzzle of Flora's mid-1960s painting Big Bank Robbery (above). It comes packaged in a pine wood box, which (when you complete the puzzle) can be re-purposed as a parakeet coffin.

And finally, next year marks the Flora (born January 25, 1914) centennial. We're exploring several exhibition locales, with a strong possibility at Silvermine Arts Center in the historic Silvermine district of Norwalk CT. Flora and his wife Jane were members of the Silvermine Arts Guild, so it would mark a homecoming of sorts for the artist's works. Details forthcoming.

That's TMI Part 1. We'll post more updates in a day or two.