The perils of owning too many records ...

Holly of Sweetheartville, a self-described "bitch kitty on wheels," finds a vintage Flora cover in—well, you'll never guess where.

She also observes that "covering a dining room wall with record sleeves hung with thumb tacks [is] too college." Perhaps decoratistas can agree on a Flora exemption.

UPDATE (02 MAY 07): Mr. Hall wonders if we're "making fun of [Mrs. Hall] in some way." No way!

Did Flora invent South Park?

Jim Flora passed away in 1998, one year after the TV debut of SOUTH PARK. We don't know if he ever watched it. Yet there is incontrovertible evidence that Flora telepathically transmitted artistic ideas to series creators Matt and Trey.

Exhibit A: In the New York Times, March 15, 1959, Flora depicted the stork delivering a litter of South Park denizens:

Forty years later, the above figures would have reproduced in sufficient quantities to populate a small Colorado town.

Exhibit B: In an undated, untitled, and unpublished early 1960s Flora tempera, Kenny makes a cameo appearance:

There is no indication that Flora repeatedly killed the above figure and then inexplicably brought him back to life. Research, however, continues.

Satchmoose

Bet your moose can't toot his own horn! Know why? Three reasons:

1) You didn't sign him up for lessons;
2) Clumsy, cloven hooves—can't work keys; and,
3) He's not a Floramoose!

Detail from December 1942 Columbia-Okeh new release monthly. Complete booklet featured in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

Another zoological curiosity

We guess that's a three-legged dog and we suppose he's got a bone. That could be the moon peeking through the curl of his tail. But perhaps we're being overly literal. Detail from an untitled work ca. 1960s. Another detail appears here.

"Baroque and subversive"

Eloquent, music-skewed review of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora over at J.B. Spins, a blog devoted to "jazz and improvised politics."

Insomnia

New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1967

Is that an Amberol cylinder in his pocket, or is he just feeling frisky?

The music business is infested with characters who are unpleasant — few more so than Courtney T. Edison, a.k.a. "The Old Codger," who occasionally hosts radio programs at WFMU. He plays nothing but 78 rpm records—"Like they're goin' outta style," he asserts, with a spray of saliva. The Codge is a nasty piece of work—an ornery, crusty, useless, misanthropic, cigar-chomping anachronism. How old? Allegedly between 116 and—well, at his age they mark birthdays by the decade. Claims he knew Ambrose Bierce—when the latter was a wee lad.

Codger despises all musical storage media except 78s and cylinders. Has no use for CDs, mp3s, LPs, 45s, cassettes, or 8-tracks, and gets volatile if you attempt sonic rapprochement. He'll duel you to the death with a chromium stylus. Elect him president and he'd make surface noise the national anthem. Rumor has it that for about three days in 1930 he was known as "Mr. Nice," but this incident may be apocryphal. For the most part, he refuses to budge from his perch atop Mt. Cranky.

Courtney served as poster coot for Columbia Records in 1943 (he was old then!), and Flora was assigned to render his sordid portrait.

In an unpublished memoir, Flora later recalled drawing from the model: "He was gratuitously mean-spirited and uncooperative. It was all about him. Yammered on and on about 'the good old days'—even in 1943! Tucked in his nostalgia blankie, he blathered with self-absorbed gusto. I worked faster than usual, just to get away from him sooner."

A few years ago, the Codger was inveigled into recording a few songs backed by DIY legend R. Stevie Moore. He expected the tracks to be released on a 78 album with a Flora cover. However, some young upstart at WFMU (currently in the second week of its annual fund-raising marathon) posted the tracks in the iTunes Music Store and didn't tell Courtney. Please don't spill. It would break his heart. Really, don't even try to make contact by calling him. He's had the same home phone number since 1892—it's "6"—but you didn't read it here. Resist the impulse to dial. Leave the geezer cocooned in the sanctity of his own delusions.

Digging Flora's "fossils"

Year Zero in the Flora Revival was 1992 when Michael Bartalos cold-called the 78-year-old artist to ask about his 1940s and '50s album cover illustrations, which evoked a mothballed era to the robust, productive retiree. Recalling Mike's curiosity, Flora later said, "I felt like a fossil that had just been dug up."

Thus began the archaeology, which continues to unearth ancient marvels. The above flashbulb-bleached vignette was snapped at A-D Gallery in June 1943 during Flora's first NYC exhibit. Flora (R) is seen chatting with Alex Steinweiss, the man credited with (at least) two major artistic developments: 1) the invention of the illustrated record album cover (for Columbia, in 1938); and 2) the hiring of Jim Flora (also at Columbia, 1942). Flora's quirky illustrations for the label's ads and new release monthlies attracted enough attention in one year to warrant an exhibit at this very prestigious gallery.

But—what are those inscrutable petroglyphs on the wall behind these gents?

The photo, provided by Flora's son Joel around 2003, appeared in our 2004 book The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. Naturally, we puzzled over the whereabouts of those amazing artifacts viewable only in grainy black & white and partly obscured.

When the Flora family accorded us access to their late father's immense private collection in 2005, we discovered the following:

This tempera on paper matches the lower work displayed between Flora and Steinweiss. A name scribbled on the back reveals that it's a portrait of the aptly named New Orleans jazz legend "Bunk" Johnson, an early trumpeter whose lips blew smoke in more ways than one.

However, the topmost work on the A-D Gallery wall was not in the collection. Barbara scanned the pic at very high resolution and sharpened the image in Photoshop to reveal the following:

A procession of Calder-strung cowboys and cattle heads. The whereabouts of the work remains a mystery.

In late 2006, Joel discovered a number of his father's sketchbooks in a trunk. Among them was a deteriorating scrapbook in which the artist had glued several hundred pen and pencil drawings from the early 1940s. One sketch depicts a rough outline of the above work, and supplies the title:

Our search for the finished version of Stampede continues.

Invading your earspace

I've hosted a radio program at WFMU since 1975. Thirty-two punch-drunk years.

WFMU is a non-commercial, Free-Form station—one of the charter FF outlets, being entertainingly anarchic since 1968. We play anything—popular/obscure, new/old, good/bad; the tasteful juxtaposed with the creepy. We're an aural curio shop, and "Genre" is a poltergeist who got discouraged and went a-haunting elsewhere. A typical WFMU program sounds like an overactive iPod shuffle. The station has a four-decade reputation and retains an eccentric identity, with an unpredictable and Fun approach to radio. In the late '60s, there were dozens of such adventurous stations. Today there are—well, let us know of ANY for whom the three-letter 'F'-word is a guiding principle.

WFMU is not partnered with any Public Broadcasting system. NPR, PRI, MPR, APM, and PBS stylistically comprise the Starbucks Radio Network, a standardized upscale chain whipping up audio lattés for affluent Boomers. We're head-scratching lower primates—like you! We're not owned by a university (Upsala College, from whom we purchased our license, went out of business in 1995). We own ourselves. In fact, we own our headquarters (a.k.a. the Magic Factory) situated in a tony Jersey City enclave. We bought when real estate values were down. We have a tenant. A realtor. THEY pay rent to US.

And no, we're not a bunch of aggrieved Pacifica burnouts—we're a Breughelesque swarm of misfits and malcontents scratching out risk-taking radio on the cheap. Air staff does not get paid. Our operating expenses are covered by the checks and PayPal accounts of listener-supporters (many of whom volunteer in our offices throughout the year). No commercials, zero gov grants, no corporate underwriting. Two weeks a year are devoted to an on-air fundraiser called a Marathon: a ragtag rent party, auguring fourteen days of staff self-abasement. Our devoted audience invariably comes through, because we're part of the primeval food chain in which LISTENER = MONKEY, WFMU = BANANA.

What does this have to do with Jim Flora?

Over the years, WFMU has adapted Jim Flora art on bumper stickers, T-shirts, hoodies, a fund-raising mailer, and elsewhere. Not because the art was offered free of charge (it was)—but because WFMU appreciates Jim Flora. His mischievous images befit WFMU's idiosyncratic character.

The WFMU 2007 Marathon begins Monday, March 5, and concludes Sunday, March 18. You can listen, you can volunteer, you can donate. WFMU has always been a quirky phenomenon that works in practice, but not in theory. Flora has made a posthumous artistic contribution. While you're still alive, you can contribute financially.

Bulbnose walks the 9-legged hound

From The X-Ray Eye of Wallingford Hume, a proposed children's book, 1943. Project abandoned, images unpublished.

It's a Flora World. We just live in it.

The Flora Juggernaut appears unstoppable. Our new book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora, now in its 15th printing since publication a fortnight ago, leapfrogged two Harry Potter totboilers to perch Kong-like atop the New York Times Best-Seller list. Statues of the artist are currently being commissioned in his birthplace of Bellfontaine, Ohio, and in Rowayton, Connecticut, his adopted hometown. Premiere editions of the new U.S. Postal Service's Mambo For Cats first-class stamp became sold-out collector's items upon first day of issue.

Unfortunately, all has not gone smoothly: witness the crushing disappointment of thousands who purchased the Jim Flora Goats 'n Boats 2007 Hunk-a-Monka Wall Calendar. The calendar was discovered to be defective, with August preceding March, the June grid listing nine Sundays, and November—well, it was there when we sent files to the printer. Refund checks are in the mail. We apologize for the misprints and are working to improve our calendars to 99% accuracy by 2012. Meanwhile, please stay on the line. Your call is very important to us.

hyperkinetic hepcats

'Tis the season to Pete Jolly! A new silk-screen print has been introduced to our growing line of iconic Jim Flora merch—the artist's swirly 1955 RCA Victor EP cover for the Pete Jolly Duo. This sleeve rarely turns up on eBay, and Floraphiles have been known to liquidate 401(k)'s to own battered copies. We don't know much about pianist Jolly or his bassist, but apparently they couldn't quit bopping long enough to sit still for this caught-in-the-act portrait by Flora, who gifted Pete with a pair of bonus arms!

Similar to the Mambo For Cats silk-screen print, the Pete Jolly Duo was produced in a limited edition (125) by Minneapolis print and design studio Aesthetic Apparatus, using Flora archivist Barbara Economon's digital restoration of a vintage printer's proof. Prints measure 20" x 20" (much larger than the 7" x 7" EP version), and use three acrylic screen printing inks meticulously matched to Flora's original colors on archival 100-pound off-white cover stock. Each print is numbered on the front and authenticated on the reverse with stamped seals from Jim Flora Art LLC (a Flora family enterprise) and Aesthetic Apparatus. The name "Flora," which was typeset on the original cover, has been replaced with the trademark "Flora" signature from the period. In addition, the musician's names, which appeared in obtrusive typeset (non-Flora) blocks in the original, have been removed to better highlight the vibrating figures.

The first 50 numbered copies will be sold for $125 each, unframed. Further copies will be priced higher as stock depletes. Prints can be purchased here.

the hazards of city life

That's not what this work is titled. It has no title, and it's a detail from a larger, possibly unpublished pen & ink mid-1950s cityscape. But it's typically, Florifically, curiously sinister. And while alligators don't really live in urban sewers, we have it on good authority that giant gophers burrowed the NYC subway system.

"a mid-century deconstructive rebel mindset"

Artist Ward Jenkins reviews The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora at his Ward-O-Matic blog.

Our friend Ward had previously posted about Flora's 1957 kiddie caper, The Day The Cow Sneezed, showcasing some rarely seen draft illustrations.

Flory does Ory

Another early jazz legend revisited by Flora in his later years was New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory, composer of "Muskrat Ramble." Among Ory's bullet points: around 1918 he had the prescience to hire a promising teen trumpeter just starting a music career: Louis Armstrong. Here's Flora's classic 1947 Columbia Records 78 rpm album cover:

Forty-six years later, Flora portrayed Ory shouldering a musical blowtorch:

The above unpublished 1993 pen and ink rendering was actually the third time (at least) that Flora captured Ory. The below unpublished pencil caricature was glued in a scrapbook of early 1940s sketches, and features Ory with fellow trombone legend Honore Dutrey.

sooted up for work

Along with beasties, boppers and boats, trains were a perennial Flora motif. During the Great Depression he defrayed his tuition costs for the Art Academy of Cincinnati by working the moon-tan shift at a railyard. His uncle Charlie Royer (sketched below in the early 1990s, some sixty years later) was an engineer.

Flora wrote in 1988:

My uncle John Royer was night foreman of the Cincinnati Railroad Terminal Roundhouse. He was able to get me a job wiping the soot off the huge old steam locomotives. I would go to art school from 9:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M. and then work in the roundhouse from 5:00 P.M. until 1:00 A.M. It then took me an hour and a half to get from work to my furnished room and to bed by 3:00 A.M. I was always yawning from lack of sleep.

Besides sleep deprivation, the job afflicted Flora with black spots on his lungs. Late in life, he could afford to be nostalgic about the railyard, secure in the knowledge that he could ride through it—and artfully render it—without ever again having to work in it.

Gene mutation

On one of his earliest album covers for Columbia Records, Flora, with typical anatomical perversity, endowed jazz drummer Gene Krupa with four legs and five arms, the better to swat a Mattel-sized trap set amid a lemon meringue backdrop. Krupa's face also got a makeover—the red and black checkerboard skin tint was Flora's way of proclaiming, "I can't do likeness!" (The cover was featured in The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.)


FF to the early 1990s: Flora was retired, but his artistic impulses remained vibrant. He had undergone countless stylistic turnovers, including years of decorating huge canvases with marine motifs: ocean liners, cruiseships, sailboats, and harbor panoramas were Flora's métier in the 1980s. In 1992, during an adulatory visit from artist/fan Michael Bartalos, Flora learned that a younger generation admired his 1940s and '50s album covers, which had become avidly sought collectibles. This put the artist in a reflective mood. As he later told interviewer Steven Guarnaccia, "I finally painted myself out of ships. Tried to go back to my roots and see what I could do again."

He unshelved some of his early sketchbooks and studied half century-old drafts, which sparked new experiments with old techniques and themes. He created lusty caricatures of beloved Swing and Bebop legends like Zoot Sims and Coleman Hawkins, commemorating a musical age that inspired his "rhythmic design." In 1993, he reworked the 1947 Krupa in pen and ink.

government cheese

This three-tiered illustration appeared in the January 25, 1955, issue of Look magazine, accompanying an article by Fletcher Knebel entitled "The Welfare State is Here to Stay." It reappears in our new book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora. The Nanny State storyline caught the attention of our friend, economics blogger (and Floraficionado) Donald Luskin, who asked permission to post it at poorandstupid.com.

The original illustration has not been found, and most likely wasn't returned by the art editor to the artist—which Flora said was common in that era. Either industry practices changed or the artist asserted a possessive streak, because the Flora archive contains hundreds of his original commercial illustrations from the late 1950s on. However, the classic stuff from the 1940s and early '50s—probably tossed decades ago.

Fauna by Flora 1

A Flora zoo would be a wondrous place to take your three-armed, six-eyed kids. The animals are exotic—often you can't tell what species they belong to. Dogs and pigs, cats and cows, monkeys and donkeys—Flora rendered them with affection but disdained the laws of zoology. In Floraworld, four-legged critters could fly or drive cars, and the color of their fur or hide was a Pantone dart-toss. Here's a curious Flora bestiary (montage by Barb). More to follow.

And now a message from our sponsor ...

Flora + cats + the mambo = a 1955 record cover that bags beaucoups bucks on eBay and nobody even cares if there's a disc inside because they aren't bidding for the music. We can't sell you copies of this rare LP, but if you'd like a 20" x 20" limited edition, numbered, archival, acrylic silk-screen print of this iconic Flora design, click here. If you don't want it on your wall, but prefer it on your chest, you can wear it by clicking here. And if you don't wear art but your appliances do, click here.

If you don't like cats, make nice with the doggie:

But beware of this guy: