Bill Murray, everybody’s favorite dude, is going to “host” a Christmas special… I KNOW.

“A Very Murray Christmas” will air starting December 4 on Netflix. Watch the glorious trailer below.

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What’s It Like Being You? Bill Murray Has the Perfect Answer

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When it comes to the tough questions, one man always seems to have the answers: Bill Murray.

As a kid, I was fixated with the thoughts in my brain. Not the content of the thoughts, exactly (unless they included chocolate), but the fact that they were just there being thought in my head. How was it that I was thinking this or that? Was there a God in my head making me think?

For a long time, I sort of just assumed that everyone had a similar mind to mine. Thoughts come into our consciousness and we tend to them as needed—deciding how to deal with an urge to pee, or to roll around in the grass (OMG, am I a dog?), when or what to eat, what it means to be alive.

But as I got older, I became increasingly aware that my hive mind theory was total bullshit. Other people thought way differently than me. Like, another planet different. And not people on the other side of earth, but my own parents, siblings, neighbors. Our ability to communicate and cooperate with others is kind of amazing when you consider just how differently our minds work.

In today’s world, we gawk at successful people (and criminals) because they seem so different than most of us. We try to imagine what it’s like inside their heads. You know, what it’s really like, not the stuff that comes out of their mouths, but the other stuff. It’s a weird human fixation, one Bill Murray says we need to stop, “we get confused sometimes…[we] try to compete” he recently told a reporter at the  Toronto International Film Festival, who asked Murray what it’s like to be Bill Murray.

Who we are, he suggests, doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we just are this person or that person. Identities, after all, are constructs. Transport us to another time, another place, and surely the thoughts in our heads, the idea of what it’s like to be us, completely changes.

“It feels good to be you, doesn’t it? It feels good, because there’s one thing that you are — you’re the only one that’s you, right?” Murray asked.

“So, what’s it like to be me? You can ask yourself, ‘What’s it like to be me?’ You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is.”

Check out Murray’s interview here.

Find Jill’s brain on Twitter and Instagram 

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Our culture will go down in history as being obsessed with all sorts of celebrities—some worthwhile, others not so much. But actor Bill Murray inspires a different kind of fascination.

“The fact that you have to ask shows me you aren’t ready.” That’s a response I got to the question I asked Facebook about why so many of us seem strangely obsessed with Bill Murray. And that response feels a little right, like Bill Murray and his legion of fans are onto something special, something you either get immediately, or perhaps, sadly, not at all. Maybe I’ll never get it, but I won’t stop trying to understand what makes this man so appreciated. And it’s not just me who thinks he’s so unique. A Google search for the actor returns results like:

20 Reasons Bill Murray is the Coolest Human Being Alive

The 9 Greatest (Real) Bill Murray Stories Ever Told

10 Reasons Why Every Man Should Be More Like Bill Murray (*bookmark!)

My dad put it in a context I’d never considered before, “He’s James Stewart with a modern snarkiness,” he said. As a classic movie fiend as much as I love modern films, that comment made a lot of sense once I thought about Bill Murray playing George Bailey, which he kind of sort of did in “Groundhog Day.” Stewart’s work was always unimpeachable and Bill Murray exudes that same enigmatic quality, even if it’s a bit more awkward and unpredictable. And it seems more likely that if Stewart were acting today he’d be a lot more Bill Murray-esque than, say, Tom Hanks.

“He does crazy and cool shit because he wants to and has the leverage to,” another friend wrote in response to my query. EcoSalon’s own Scott Adelson called him the “total package.” My brother commented on the way he presents himself, “he appears to have no inhibition,” he said.

“For over 30 years, he’s played outside of Hollywood’s rules, appearing in blockbuster films and indies alike. He’s also reinvented himself several times over, but you get the sense he’s not doing it to conform, but to keep himself entertained,” said Bram, another Facebook friend.

“He’s very outside the box,” wrote Autumn. “[H]is brand of deadpan and quiet personal life let us like him and project what we want onto him,” my friend Paul wrote.

And it’s that off-screen personal life that also inspires a bit of our cultural obsession. Stunts like getting into strangers’ cars and letting them film it, playing guitar with Eric Clapton, leading a school marching band, or appearing behind the bar at parties serving up drinks just because he can, make us wonder why he doesn’t have better things to do.

I had my own off-screen encounter with the actor that if I hadn’t been there myself, I wouldn’t have believed because it felt so strange. He didn’t behave like a celebrity having an interaction with an ordinary person (I’ve had a few of those to know the difference), but more like, an ordinary person who just happened to be a celebrity. That may be a testament to his acting skills, but it’s also really easy to believe that’s just who he is: an ordinary guy with an extraordinary life doing both ordinary and extraordinary things.

“His energy encapsulates the combination of hope and hopelessness that feels descriptive of contemporary American rasa,” my friend Regina said on Facebook. “[He is] disenfranchised, but a spark of snark remaining lit within,” she noted. And watching him on screen does impart a sense of hope and hopelessness all at once, particularly in roles like Bob Wiley in “What About Bob?”, Frank Cross in “Scrooged”, Raleigh St. Clair in “The Royal Tenenbaums” and of course, Phil in “Groundhog Day.” We fall in love with him even when he’s a perpetual source of frustration for other characters. He takes us full circle through our angst and discomfort. Is it cheesy to say that we may even love ourselves a little bit more after watching him in roles like these on screen? I’m saying it anyway: Bill Murray makes us better people.

Call him snarky or strange or just downright hilarious, but Bill Murray offers us reprieve from the ordinary through his commonplace awkwardness and unabashed relationship with his characters, something we desperately need today as we drown in pop culture and fabricated celebrity nonsense. Another Facebook comment, from Ashlie, noted that in almost every film, he looks directly at the camera as if he is saying, “I get you, and can you believe this?” And that may also be why he’s so valuable to modernity. We want to believe in something that’s both ordinary and special all at the same time because so much of our other options are utterly inflated episodes of bullshit – all while very real issues are competing against the nonsense for our attention. Bill Murray delivers performances–on screen and off–that say “your time is valuable.” And that it’s okay to take time to be entertained in the midst of the world’s chronic insanity.

Back to my dad’s comparison to Jimmy Stewart, it’s that old-school integrity where actors respected appearing on the screen for what it was: a job that mattered to lots of people, not a means to inflate self-importance. “One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself,” he’s said. He’s also been quoted as saying, “No one really wants to admit they are lonely, and it is never really addressed very much between friends and family. But I have felt lonely many times in my life.” And perhaps that also informs his performances on and off screen. Maybe he’s hoping to keep us from feeling lonely as much as he’s doing it for his own sense of community.

Whatever our reasons, our love for Bill Murray falls somewhere between respect and gratitude and is probably a little bit of both. It’s akin to the feelings we have for the person who always makes those awkward social or family gatherings feel less awkward and more delightfully special. Not in the there-he-goes-again-crazy-drunk-naked-in-the-streets sense (although, that’s special in its own way), but as the person who makes us feel like we are experiencing something meaningful because we all matter, even when we’re doing nothing more than watching a movie about busting ghosts. Or gophers. They matter because we want them to. Maybe Bill Murray does too.

“The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.” – Bill Murray

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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In case you missed the news, naked celebrity photos were recently stolen and leaked on the web, bringing with them scores of discussions, debates and even an art exhibition.

Aside from our monster junk food, monster house and monster car obsessions, Americans also have monster celebrity obsessions as well as some fairly unhealthy relationships with the naked body. We idolize both celebrities and nakedness for what they represent, rather than what they are. (Which is to say: they’re people and naked people, respectively.) So should we really be surprised by the insane amount of media attention that’s been given to this ‘news’?

It all got me wondering why we’re so fixated on people we don’t know, let alone why we clamor to see them naked. I get the whole seeing people naked for, you know, practical purposes, if you will. But the level of gawking people are doing at an undressed Jennifer Lawrence isn’t serving a utilitarian function like pornography (although I’m sure it has for some)—it’s mostly being approached in the neck-turning effect driving past car wrecks have on us. We simply want to see something incredible.

But why?

This whole scenario got me thinking about the time Bill Murray and I shared our spit. Yes, that Bill Murray, and no, we didn’t make out. He was shopping at a health food store about ten years ago when I was there for a South American tea company. The tea, yerba mate, is traditionally drunk out of a gourd from a metal straw (a bombilla). The gourd is filled and shared as a ritual, which we were attempting to emulate in this humble north Jersey strip mall, when from behind me I heard the store owner say, “Hey Bill, you have to try this stuff.” Mr. Murray wasn’t the stock boy I thought I’d see when I turned around, and the shock and awe hit me hard, making my job to explain what I was handing over to one of my all-time favorite actors and asking him to sip, quite the task. As all this was registering in my head in super slow-motion, Bill Murray did what only he can do so well—he filled the awkward void with his even more awkward humor, asking me silly questions like ‘will I die if I drink the stuff?”.

Eventually I sort of mostly got my heartbeat down to a manageable thumping and was actually able to converse with Bill Murray about the reported benefits of the tea. He was clearly curious. After all, he was in a health food store looking for healthy products. And while I may have been able to share some information with him that impacted his life for the better, it was the lesson he shared with me that I’m reminded of anytime the media encourages us to go extra ga-ga over celebrities and idolize them in these unhealthy spectacles. It may sound so simple, but it seems we need reminded that celebrities are people too. Sometimes they’re just looking for a healthy energy drink. Sometimes they snap naked pictures of themselves on an iPhone. (And really, can you blame them? If I had a body like Rihanna, I would probably want to see it from all angles too.)

Which brings us to the issue of our strangeness over nakedness. The irony here of course is that some of these celebs have been next to naked in public, in films or videos. It’s not hard to imagine the rest, is it? But that’s not why we freak out over these photos. We freak out over the candidness, and the naughtiness of something we know we’re not supposed to see. We’re blindsided by the reality that these celebrities, are in fact, actually just sitting around being bored people who get tempted by the same iPhone camera opp as any of us.

Chuck Klosterman once wrote that television has turned us all into voyeurs. It’s a valid point. We spend countless hours each week just watching other people do mundane things. It turns us on in ways we’re largely unaware of, or unwilling to admit. We watch others, whether it’s in a pornographic setting or a romantic sitcom, to give our own lives perspective. We unravel a bit of ourselves in observing how we’re similar and different to other people, what we like or don’t like. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that setup. But idolization brings with it a slew of problems. Rewind thousands of years to the stories of deities that ruled cultures across the globe (and still do) and you can glimpse into the overwhelming power these people we elevate above our own lives has on society—and just how dangerous that can be.

What’s really dangerous today is that we let our celeb-obsession turn unhealthy in new ways. We’re encouraged to, in fact. Girls starve themselves to look like their heroes and boys wield weapons to emulate theirs. Multi-billion fashion and beauty industries prey on our insecurities and desires and we buy into them, no matter the cost. In today’s world you either have to be a celebrity, or work damn hard to look like one for your next Facebook selfie. That we now have these little slivers of fans in our own social networks gives even more fuel to our celebrity obsession.

And of course, the more distracted we are with celebrities, clothed or naked, the less time we have to inspect the real news of the day, the things that may outrage, inspire and motivate us to become more active and involved in ushering in real change on this planet.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t enjoy celebrities. We absolutely should enjoy them. They’re talented, beautiful, inspiring. But can we enjoy them more in the same ways we enjoy videos of puppies and kittens (who, by the way, are almost always also naked) than in our dehumanizing obsession of naked celebrity photos? What if we all take off our clothes and take naked selfies, whether we look like J-Law or not and then share them on the Internet? Maybe that will even the playing field. It will at least make things more interesting.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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