Take That Step #24

Mistress and Maid (1666–67)

1) Imagine an exhibition that, with just three paintings, manages to be one of the most impactful of the year in New York…! It’s called Vermeer’s Love Letter.

The unprecedented installation of paintings gathered in the exhibition Vermeer’s Love Letters brings together a canvas from the Frick collection with loans from the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery of Ireland. The presentation in a single gallery offers, for the first time, the opportunity to reflect on Vermeer’s approach to the theme of letters, as well as his representation of women from different social classes.

As I looked at each canvas, I thought about the crucial role that a message, a letter, or a message of love can have in people’s lives. Johannes Vermeer’s paintings almost always reveal moments of intimacy, which is, as Benjamin Moser says, “a hero of the non-heroic”. And it’s worth remembering that the Dutch painter completed less than 50 canvases in his lifetime, of which 34 survive.

It will be on display until August 31 at the Frick Collection.

2) The Brazilian film Latin Blood is now on Netflix! It tells the story of Ney Matagrosso, the beloved singer who was also the leader of Secos & Molhados. The iconic band inspired the cover of Kiss’ album:

3) When I would still put my kids to bed, we read a lot. Children's books, when well written, are the best! Some of my favorite were A Single Shard and Angry Mom by Jutta Bauer (sadly not translated to English).

And the classic, which we read non-stop, was Toda Mafalda (the complete strips). I couldn't believe it when I found out that Quino's comics had never been translated into English...

That's why, last week, when the first edition was released, I dragged my children to my favorite bookstore and we listened to a conversation between Alvaro Enrigue and Lucas Adams discussing the most beloved cartoon in Latin America.

For me, teaching them to love Mafalda was almost an obligation. Understanding that little girl would be like understanding being Latin American. Rereading them, as we grow up, only makes the comics better. Get yours here.

4) Fernand Deligny, Le Croire et le Craindre, 1978

You know how a raft is made: you have tree trunks bound together quite loosely, so that when a sheet of water hits, the water passes through the gaps between the trunks....

When questions hit, we don't close ranks-we don't bind the trunks to make a tight, solid platform. Quite on the contrary. We retain only those aspects of the project that bind us together. So you can see the primordial importance of bonds and of the mode of attachment, and that the very distance there may be between the trunks is also important. The bond must be loose enough, but without losing hold.

5) In my philosophy class we talked about Deleuze (full text here):

To clash with power is the destiny of modern man (the infamous man), because it is this power that makes us see and speak,” says Foucault (1992). However, there are always points of resistance to power (resistance is the double of power), but where are they? How do we cross this line of force? Perhaps by entering another line, the line of the Outside, the line that is beyond knowledge and power relations. “I believe that we ride such lines every time we think with sufficient vertigo or live with sufficient force,” says Deleuze (1998a, p.137).

The line of the Outside is our double, with all the otherness of the double. (...) this line is deadly, too violent and too fast, dragging us into an unbreathable atmosphere. It destroys all thought (...). It is nothing more than delirium or madness (...). It would be necessary to cross the line and make it livable, practicable at the same time and thinkable. Make of it as much as possible, and for as long as possible, an art of living. How can one save oneself, how can one preserve oneself while confronting the line?

This is where a frequent theme in Foucault appears: one must be able to bend the line, to constitute a livable zone where one can lodge, confront, support oneself, breathe — in short, think. Bending the line in order to be able to live on it, with it: a matter of life or death. The line itself never stops unfolding at crazy speeds, and we, we try to bend the line, to constitute ‘the slow beings that we are’, to reach ‘the eye of the cyclone,’ as Michaux says: both things at the same time. (...) Folding and unfolding, this is (...) the operation proper to an art of living (subjectivation) (Deleuze, 1998a, p. 138-9).

Jacob Lawrence

6) Feeling Summer ready! I just got this dream Left on Friday x Loeffler Randall bikini: