Take That Step #12

via Somewhere I’d Like to Live

1) My favorite art writing is by Roberta Smith, the art critic for the NYTimes who retired last year — after 32 years and 4,500 reviews. I love this story, which I’ve heard her tell more than once — in conversation with the Brooklyn Rail and on the talkART podcast:

Rail: What was your first awareness of “form”?

Smith: We were visiting my aunt in Hastings-on-Hudson in New York; she was a real estate agent and had a Mercedes-Benz. When I got in that car it was intense. Oh my god, some things really are a lot better than others of their kind. I just knew that it was “quality,” incredibly made and thought through. I guess you could say it was rigorous, which is probably the least you can expect from luxury goods.

2) Zen proverb:

"You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour."

Foto via Vice

3) This illustration (via @ spiritdaughter) reminded me of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of becoming. Perhaps the knowing in the image below is a becoming:

“Becoming” is certainly and first of all change: no longer behaving or feeling things in the same way; no longer making the same assessments. Without a doubt, we do not change our identity: the memory remains, loaded with everything we have experienced; the body ages without metamorphosis. But “becoming” means that the most familiar facts of life have changed meaning, or that we no longer maintain the same relationships with the usual elements of our existence: the whole is repeated in a different way. For this to happen, something from the outside must have intruded: someone or something has come into contact with something or someone other than itself, something has happened. “Becoming” therefore implies, secondly, an encounter: something or someone does not become itself except in relation to something else.

4) And this Apple AirPods 4 ad directed by Spike Jonze starring (my crush) Pedro Pascal, featuring a hit by the Brazilian duo Tropkillaz? I loved it and, as a New Yorker, I identified myself with this ability to give a soundtrack to the city as you listen to music. Pascal rocked Tanisha Scott's choreography:

5) From Egon Schiele’s diary”

Primordially eternal is God. Man calls him Buddha, Zoroaster, Osiris, Zeus or Christ. And timeless as God is the godliest thing after him, which is Art. Art cannot be modern; Art is primordially eternal.