Author: Michael Murray

It has been said that the genius of jazz legend Miles Davis was that he played silences the way that other people played notes. He allowed space to come into his music, and it was into this emptiness that an unmistakable melancholy often settled.

The Chateau Lafayette was divided into two halves. There was the tavern side and there was the escorts side. The tavern side had the best juke box in the city and was characterized by unpredictable drunks—hippies, bikers, drug venders and drug users.

When Crash won the Oscar for Best Picture back in 2004, it struck me as an excellent example of the slightly deranged and self-indulgent perspective the Academy usually brings to their voting. Not only were they championing a movie about L.A., but they were also voting for a film that suggested depth without actually bothering to deliver…

Although I grew up in Manor Park, I’ve always loved New Edinburgh. It seemed urban, almost gritty in comparison. The houses — as mismatched as laundry hanging from a back-alley lane — are all scrunched together, giving the neighbourhood an authentic, unplanned feeling. It wasn’t developed in an architect’s office, but was built from the…

My wife Rachelle wanted to see the movie Shame on Sunday. “This looks good, we should see it,” she said on Saturday night as we watched a trailer for the movie on her laptop.

After desiring a relationship with writer Michael Murray for some time, Guerilla determined that the best course of action would be to buy his affection. We took it slow and kept things casual, suggesting only that he contemplate what he might like to contribute to our pages for the standard fifty-dollar honorarium. As we’d hoped,…

Shortly after I started high school, I went to the Towne Cinema on Beechwood Avenue in New Edinburgh and saw a midnight screening of Quadrophenia. It’s a rock opera composed by The Who, and pits the mouth-breathing Rockers against the dapper Mods, who all look like they own espresso machines.

It used to be that I never gave celebrities any credit at all. It was my presumption that they’d reached the lofty heights of adoration, not by talent, but by an unwitting physical charisma. They were stars in spite of themselves, and I always figured that all they had to do was just stand there…

For a long time, I’ve ridiculed both the Wheel of Fortune and those who count themselves among its fans. Some have claimed that I did so because I had a deep-rooted fear of wheels, but this is not the case. The truth is that I wanted people to think that I considered Wheel of Fortune just…