Author: Michael Murray

After my floor hockey team lost its fourth consecutive game by a double-digit margin, my teammates and I trudged off to a sports bar in order to complain about how dirty the other team was. The place was packed with men wearing hockey jerseys and baseball caps. Eating chicken wings and nachos, they used swear…

hey there eight minute dating people: the first question i have– and i mean this very sincerely– is whether this event is lame or not. when i get there will i want to shoot myself in the head? will i want to flee in despair? i’m also worried about the complimentary cheese. is it going…

Erected in 1903, the brick smokestack towered over Lansdowne Ave. until recently. Photo by Tanja Tiziana

Heroic qualities are infrequently associated with the name Walter, which is old-fashioned and lacks charisma and dynamism. It’s more likely the name of somebody who works as a high school chemistry teacher than somebody who, say, deals drugs.

Shia LaBeouf is the owner of one of the more absurd and pretentious names in Hollywood. Whether it was the burden of an “I’m Special” name that helped shape him into the apparent asshole he is, or whether it’s actually his native asshole capacity that keeps drunkenly asserting himself, is immaterial.

January 16, 2012 Dear Harvey: As you know, I’ve been looking for a signature role in a career-defining picture for a number of years now. As I do so many things at a high level (actor, academic, teacher, artist, sex symbol, philanthropist, Oscar host, film maker, serious writer, etcetera…) the public is having a difficult…

Toronto’s iconic Regal Constellation Hotel now languishes in a state of modernist limbo, of suspended demolition. We poke around inside the guts of a Toronto that once was.

It could be argued that a celebrity is somebody who cares more about what strangers think than the people who actually know them. Ceding their identity in exchange for the corrosive heat of fame, they end up living as projections of somebody else’s imagination, which is surely a path to self-obliteration and madness.