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Catharine MacTavish's avatar

I apologize to the fellowship for an overly wordy and exuberant comment, that was supposed to be in response to Dennis' reply to the first comment, and best relayed off thread. I sense you have forbearance for misteps unless they are habitual. The writing here delivers a powerful charge for which my loins need to be girded, lest the sense of significance spurs me to spew like a garden hose until simmering down.

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Catharine MacTavish's avatar

I'll try to start posting on Substack or find you via email so I don't overload your Comments; but I'm burnt out on learning different, not necessarily better ways, to connect online. It's like having to keep tying shoelaces with different knots, when the basic bow worked well enough. Because I started with computers in 1975, research assistant at SFU with the genius mystic Doug Seeley inventing the user friendly interface, then on through the first Macs etc., imagine how many times my procedural memory had to take on board yet a different set of steps to perform the same operation. Now it just goes Pfft when confronted with new icons.

About DETAIL, slagged as devilish, yes. Such paintings are dismissed as "obsessive", and I was branded "unprofessional", for sound reason when the meaning of "professional" became business-like, under a marriage of marketing+academia, that yes enabled art to survive economic changes, while asphyxiating party art. I could only nod, yes, yes. Exactly. Unprofessional. I have nothing to profess. Flares of free spirited culture here keep getting snuffed by the covetous, wielding gobbledygook perversions of social justice campaigning, that has been subdued somewhat under Trump's hail.

For me, ""detail" was on a resolution gradient, that relates to SCALE, which is interesting when in the course of shifting rules become moot. Yay. All of a sudden, When small enough, classical laws can be violated! As above is not as below. Thank goodness, the overlordship so moribund. Something can be everywhere it possibly can be. Time, if operative at all runs forwards and backwards. Reality turns out to be granular, which comes as a relief, dispelling childhood nightmares about infinity, exacerbated by Disney's Fantasia, those endlessly multiplying mops. SCALE has an impact on data, and what physicists call "blurring" at the limit of our power to detect, measure, and it turns out that everything we are and experience happens in that fuzzy, myopic margin of error, on borrowed time. Our reality is illegitimate! Marginal off grid outsiders are more sane than what safely toes the line.

I tried to quit art as impractical, only for it to not quit me, so discovered, giddily, that the premise that art is moot if unseen outside the hovel is false. Trees falling unwitnessed in the forest don't make a sound; they sing. So I got to carry on without, you know, complicating opinions, rules and regulations.

I'll try to contact you through email. I don't have a phone, refused the first mobile device. What? Be tracked and stalked? Nope nope nope. I found Peggy Thompson. There are plans for a show in Vancouver in the fall, and I wondered if you'd be interested in resurrecting party art, just for a night, a Point Zero Eight occasion, punk geezers drumming up Al Neil's spirit, yes, as you put it, dastardly cursing! I squirrelled away a little cash for venue, tek and nurses. You can rock and I'd do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRanxKB9qA&list=PLaDJmj4dAhNfCocyWdlpr5CB_p-F7OOho

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