Of course, everything sells at the Flying M auction for S.N.A.P. but I’m glad to have had my joint, “HEART” go for $300.00 this year. It’s a great cause and although I didn’t make it to the “artists only” party this time around I always dig being part of this show.

I did post a couple of NewNews’s toward the end of last year but because I didn’t like one and felt the other was a little too easily de-code-able, I hit the delete button and lost two others I didn’t mean to get rid of. Anyway,
“Art is hard work…” Prince Andrew

Am currently working on 33 illustrations for two separate books, have 5 commissions for paintings and am doing 3 weeks worth of art for a comic strip to be submitted to the various syndicates this spring… and you wonder why I don’t keep this forum updated.
Oh! Don’t forget to go see and bid on my piece at Flying M Coffee House during this year’s “Valentine for AIDS” - February 7-17. I illustrated the lyrics of the song “Heart” by Rockpile … it’s cool and for a good cause, get ta biddin’!!!

As this year’s Basement Gallery show winds down we have posted the pieces in the “PAINTINGS” section for those of you who were unable to attend and for those who might like a second look. Thanks to everyone who did visit, especially those who bought art and drinks and as always a special thanks to Mr. Perry Allen, owner and ringmaster of the subterranean circus we call the Basement.

We’re happy to announce the opening of M.Flinn’s Fallout Shelter- your online source for swag emblazoned with Mike Flinn’s distinctive designs. Our first offerings feature the irrepressible Ival Eyeball and the logo from Flinn’s Boise Weekly editorial feature Mondo Gaga. Be the first to sport gear or raise a cup with everyone’s favorite world-crazy optic orb! That’s cafepress.com/mflinn Come back often and keep your EYE out for new designs, see you there!

Mike Flinn will be exhibiting at least 13 all new oil paintings at Basement Gallery (928 Main Street- Boise, Idaho - 333-0309) during the months of September and October of 2007. The works, designed for this specific show and space, were executed since March of this year and will be highly sought out by collectors and fans of Flinn’s colorful absurdist/expressionism style that combines the unthinkable with the laughable, the horrific with the mundane. The artist will be in attendance at a reception on Thursday, September 6th beginning at 6pm. You are invited!

The Record Exchange is involved in a fund-raising effort called “Rock For Detox” and I was glad to participate by painting a “Munny” for the cause. What’s a Munny? Well, it’s an 8 inch collectible vinyl toy, no, not THAT kind of toy, sir, or madame, as the case may be! It’s a blank vinyl model that the good folk at RX have supplied to area artists
to paint, draw on or otherwise artistically play with and submit for auction to help raise funds for a really needed Detox Center here in the City of Trees. (To see a Munny go to www.kidrobot.com ) It’s a very cool thing the RX is doing. The “Unveiling” will be at RX’s Bonus Club party on Monday, December 4th at 7 pm, and bidding will begin then. Bidding will continue through December 22nd at 7 PM.
Hey, this is a great cause and something Boise really needs, so get down there, bid a bunch and make this community a community and get some great art at the same time.
Thanks, Charlotte for the invite…
Flinn, over

A couple of events went by without notice here and I mean to make up for it.
The Boise Weekly Auction of Cover Art was a lot of fun and from what I hear it made some money, good! Boise Weekly also held a party for their free-lance artists and writers, it was great fun and I got a chance to talk to Idaho’s Best Writer for a little while. This is my little, very late way of saying thanks to the Hosts over at BW, they are very nice folk, and if you get the chance you should go down to their extremely cool digs and bother thems while they are trying to work, hehhehhehhheh, I know they’ll appreciate it, say Bill sent you.
Flinn, over

That was the working title for a comic book I wanted to write when I was a younger man, I still like the idea. It was about flies, you know, the kind of flying insect you swat away at but THESE flies had little Ninja Turtle attitudes and could fly backwards and forwards in time and be the “fly on a wall” at some of the great moments in history. They had really dumb super powers that could change the courses of history. I still love the idea - please note: “TIME FLIES” is a copyrighted feature so don’t think about stealing it, I have really powerful Lawyers who can move backward and forward in time and prosecute you, no, really. What brought this to mind the other day was that I was watching “Flavor of Love” and was reminded that all of my Fly characters wore clocks, big ones, around their necks on chains - just like FLAVA FLAAAAAVE!!! No shit, and this was waaay before Hip Hop settled in amongst the white crowd who seem to live in it today. That “Flavor of Love” show is nearly like watching a train wreck but I watched the damned thing to the crash at the end, man, ‘could NOT deal with women as bold as that, NO WAY NO WAY NO WAY!! Luckily, I don’t have to, I just sit here in my little world and dream up shit like “TIME FLIES”, I feel much safer here, thank you very much, New Yahk!
About the original reason I am writing this post - I have once again neglected my responsibility to up-date this thing…but TIME FLIES, see? Thanksgiving is upon us and I haven’t posted dood-dah-diddely squat since the 8th of November, well, actually I have, but took several posts down the day after I posted them for legal reasons and the clear light of day, don’t you know. Anyway here’s a big Thanksgiving BEST WISHES to any one reading this tonight or tomorrow or forever. And hang in there, I promise to post right after the TRIPtophan wears off, on Tuesday. Maybe…
Flinn, over

1984 by George Orwell

Preface by Walter Cronkite, 1984 Commemorative Edition

American reporters, given a glimpse of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran at the end of 1982, were saying it was like 1984. It’s Orwellian, one added.
“Big Brother” has become a common term for ubiquitous or overreaching authority, and “Newspeak” is a word we apply to the dehumanizing babble of bureaucracies and computer programs.
Those coinages have passed into the language with lives of their own. They are familiar to millions who have never read 1984, who may not even know it is a novel written thirty-five years ago by English socialist Eric Blair, who became famous under the pen name George Orwell.
Seldom has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power. How is that? Because they were so useful, and because the features of the world he drew, outlandish as they were, also were familiar.
They are familiar today, they were familiar when the book was first published in 1949. We’ve met Big Brother in Stalin and Hitler and Khomeini. We hear Newspeak in every use of language to manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh realities with the soft snow of euphemism. And every time a political leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience the mental process Orwell called doublethink. From the show trials of the pre-war Soviet Union to the dungeon courts of post-revolutionary Iran, 1984’s vision of justice as foregone conclusion is familiar to us all. As soon as we were introduced to such things, we realized we had always known them.
What Orwell had done was not to foresee the future but to see the implications of the present - his present and ours - and he touched a common chord. He had given words and shapes to common but unarticulated fears running deep through all industrial societies.
George Orwell was no prophet, and those who busy themselves keeping score on his predictions and grading his use of the crystal ball miss the point. While here he is a novelist, he is also a sharp political essayist and a satirist with a bite not felt in the English language since the work of Jonathan Swift.
If not prophecy, what was 1984? It was, as many have noticed, a warning: a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.
Orwell drew upon the technology (and perhaps some of the science fiction) of the day in drawing his picture of 1984. But it was not a work of science fiction he was writing. It was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.
1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass. That warning vibrates powerfully when we allow ourselves to sit still and think carefully about orbiting satellites that can read the license plates in a parking lot and computer that can tap into thousands of telephone calls and telex transmissions at once and other computers that can do our banking and purchasing, can watch the house and tell a monitoring station what television station we are watching and how many people there are in the room. We think of Orwell when we read of scientists who believe they have located in the human brain the seats of behavioral emotions like aggression, or learn more about the vast potential of genetic engineering.
And we hear echoes of that warning chord in the constant demand for greater security and comfort, for less risk in our societies. We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedom lost.
Critics and scholars may argue quite legitimately about the particular literary merits of 1984. But none can deny its power, its hold on the imaginations of whole generations, nor the power of its admonitions . . . a power that seems to grow rather than lessen with the passage of time. It has been said that 1984 fails as a prophecy because it succeeded as a warning - Orwell’s terrible vision has been averted. Well, that kind of self-congratulation is, to say the least, premature. 1984 may not arrive on time, but there’s always 1985.
Still, the warning has been effective; and every time we use one of those catch phrases . . . recognize Big Brother in someone, see 1984 in our future . . . notice something Orwellian . . . we are listening to that warning again.

Walter Cronkite, 1984