New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1967

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…

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…

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…

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 Project abandoned, images unpublished.

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…

‘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…

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.

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.

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…