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In this entry: A short piece about something that's on so many of our minds & new recent obsessions!
Richard Linklater on Overcoming Phone Addiction With Art 🤳🎨
Some Much-Needed Wisdom From One of My Favorite Filmmakers
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Analog living. Embracing slow media. An end to doomscrolling.
Open up any personal blog or aesthetic YouTube video and these kinds of topics are all over the place. Because so many of us are rightfully feeling it: our phones are vampires. These screens are manufactured to steal our time and are sucking the life out of us with every scroll, tap, and the endless bombardment of ads.
So, when I was listening to one of my most essential podcasts, The Big Picture, and Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater—two of my favorite artists and thinkers—were interviewed for their latest brilliant collaboration in Blue Moon, and I heard Linklater drop a magical monologue of wisdom, I immediately wrote it in my pocket notebook.
What he said has stuck with me since. It would be an injustice for me not to share it with you all here:
Yeah, you've got to save yourself. You've got to admit you're addicted. We just need a group session, you know. Like, no, you have to put that down. But I'm seeing it a lot. You know, my film society in Austin, I see these young people. Just when you thought, oh, they grew up watching YouTube and TikTok… The audience is full at the theater of young people in their 20s really discovering movies—the history of movies, current movies—out in the lobby, talking about them, having a drink with friends: community.
So each individual has to kind of save themselves by participating in community and humanity and art and giving a shit and just realizing, oh, that's a fun life. Wherever you fall in the spectrum of art: an appreciator of art, or consumer… Just know, it's more fun to be engaged with art and other people.
So that's how you save your own soul.
— Richard Linklater
Mic drop. 🤘
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Recent Obsessions:
I panicked at the end of October, when I saw on Goodreads that I was 14 books behind schedule for my annual reading challenge goal. I knew I needed some quick wins, so I started listening to some short audiobooks to try and catch back up. A four-book series I came across was that of John Kenney's Love Poems, and I immediately became obsessed. Seriously, these are some of the funniest books I've ever read. All of them are so worth checking out!
Please trust me. While this is a heartbreaking film, it is so, so beautiful. It's on Netflix. Do yourself a favor and watch it ASAP. It is one of the biggest surprises of the year for me, and I am so pissed I didn't catch it in the theater.
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Thank you so much for reading! See you at the next one. 🙏
Cheers,
Cristian
P.S. Do you have an encouragement, comment, or recommendation? If so, reply to this email! I'd love to hear from you.
And if you know someone who might enjoy Cristian's Commonplace, forward this to them! 🫡
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