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Third Row Center: "Bill Murray Stories" is a Great Doc on Not Taking Things So Seriously

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The new Bill Murray documentary “The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man” on Netflix is worth a view, if for no other reason, it gives us some perspective. It’s all about not taking yourself too seriously, something that we lose sight of from time to time. Murray on the other hand appears to view life as one giant improv, which it is if you really break it down. You can choose to “yes and” life or you can “no, but” it and find yourself swimming upstream during a hurricane. He transforms the day-to-day of random people’s lives into something quite a bit more. I’ve loved Bill Murray since the mid seventies, so much so I have a tendency to simply call him BM (okay, maybe not). When Stripes came to HBO, I remember recording the movie by sticking my cassette player up to the television. The reason I did this is that I heard about Stripes from older kids in the neighborhood who would act out parts and deliver dialogue leaving all of us who couldn’t see Rated R
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"Man on a Porch" Progress

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It's been a fairly productive day of creating this illustration. There's been some grouping and erasing, but for the most part I am pleased overall with the picture. It's still not finished though. I think I need some tightening and additions made to it. A great deal of it was working on the background of the porch, and I enjoyed that. I like the rustic feel of the man in contrast with the fairly modern look of the porch itself. Most of the time, I kept the colors fairly consistent with the reference photo. Liberties were taken around the  window sill, the structure of the porch itself. I will be adding in modern items as I continue. I am thinking earbuds for the farmer, and the image on the front of the newspaper he is reading will have some strange paradoxes. I also like how he does look entirely too big for the chair itself.
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Man on a Porch

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One of my resolutions this year is to be more diligent in my sharing of art. I may stop in some places, do it more in others, and see where it gets me. This is me in the middle of doing my latest illustration of a farmer from the Depression Era on a porch. The Porch is a modern reference photo and the farmer is vintage. I want to add some surreal aspects to the illustration, but I will be careful where I add them. Hope you like it!
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Remembering Nick Hornby and a Review of Juliet, Naked

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I went to go see “Juliet, Naked” and before anyone thinks I went to a strip club, it’s a movie based on a Nick Hornby novel. Nick Hornby and Bradley Cooper are names I previously could not remember, and now I do which means there is something in my past I have finally let go of. Perhaps it was my first day of school, or some important life lesson in the third grade. Something about the importance of flushing. It’ll come back to me. For the longest time I couldn’t remember Bradley Cooper or Nick Hornby. I kept thinking Bruce Hornsby for Hornby and Bradley Cooper wasn’t being recalled at all. The reason why the block remained so long is that I could just google things like “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Hi Fidelity” and look at their IMDB, and thus I haven’t remembered it without googling until now. Still, that’s just the way it is, some things will never change. - Bruce Hornsby and the Range This means there will be other things to come that I will not remember.  New hurdles o
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Laziness, Inefficiency, and Guilt Abide in the Life Creative

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I am way too hard on myself, and I bet to an extent, you are too. If you think you can trash talk me, I should share with you the transcripts of some of my daily “self-talk”. If you could see it, you'd probably think to yourself He’s got that angle covered. If you're looking for harsh words or tough love to incite me to action, dream on. Even using such language on myself, it doesn't work. From an early age, I thought of myself as lazy. I’m the kid that wanted to carry seven suitcases at once. My dad called it “the lazy man’s load.” That stuck with me, and every time I tried to bite off too much too fast, I thought of it as lazy. There is a fine line between efficiency and laziness. I have often crossed that line, and there were other times I didn't even enter the arena. I would half-ass things scholastically. I was a B-C level range student. I wrote a paper on A Clockwork Orange without really reading it. I would cram for tests the night before. I wouldn’t cheat,
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Third Row Center: Solo Makes Some Questionable Choices and Goes into Rocky Territory.

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So I saw Solo, Directed by Ron Howard and written by Lawrence and John Kasden against the wishes of those who wanted to boycott the movie. Trolls and extremists aside, I found myself again empathizing with them a little, though I am not onboard with a boycott. See it or don't, it's up to you and let the market decide. Overall, my take is that once again, it’s been proven that it’s hard to write a Star Wars movie. By the way, spoilers abide, so don’t read on if you are sensitive to that sort of thing. First what I liked.  I love the heist scenes. That was good fun. The movie centers on two different missions to get some very expensive and volatile fuel rods. The scenes, one involving a train, and another which  involved the famous “Kessel Run” mentioned in episode IV are when the movie is running on all thrusters. There is a lot of great moments in the initial train heist scene involving pirates, droids, and near-misses. I also welcomed a lot of the actors in this movie t
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I don't remember signing up for that...but okay.

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Sometimes I think these notices are sent out as a reminder that at some point, we signed up for them. I bet a lot of these sites are happy about the GDPR as it gives them an opportunity to update you on what you signed up for back in the day. How many sites have you signed up for, forgot about, only to be reminded by notices like this? I think for me it has to be at least in the high teens or low twenties.
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Wilson!

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I recently decided to resurrect a blog I abandoned a number of years ago known as The Burnished Isle. This is my mental island home, a vacation from the worries and woes of civilization. So paint your volleyball with a bloody handprint, remove a tooth with the blade of an ice skate and hang out and enjoy!
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Alone and Apparently a Great Lover

So this somehow got into my Facebook feed the other day: The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person--without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”    This was written by Osho, who is an Indian spiritualist. You can look up his name on the internet.  At first glance, this seems very profound, but to me I didn’t like the exclusive and sometimes vagueness associated with it, so I decided to break it down and examine it, after all, isn’t that what we are supposed to be
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