Song of the Day: “Tennessee Waltz”
Every music genre shifts its boundaries over time, and soul music has done so time and time again, beginning with its heyday in the 1960s. Sam Cooke, who achieved fame first as…
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Max Gray
260 posts
Read more of Max Gray at Big City Sasquatch or follow him on Twitter @City_Sasquatch. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Encounters, Mount Hope, Conte, tNY.press, and English Kills Review. He co-hosts the etymology podcast Words For Dinner and is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program.
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Brandon Hicks takes an irreverent look at economic ironies in “Competitive Marketplace.” Then, setting is paramount in the Saturday Rumpus Review of Antonio Ruizpalacio’s film, Gueros. The director’s vision of Mexico City, writes Alex…
Song of the Day: “Strange Brew”
Since the Wu Tang Clan introduced their own version of the word in the 90s, “cream” has come to be associated with the almighty dollar bill. But the first musical act…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, the Rumpus exclusive video premiere of The Size Queens’s To The Country. Then, in the Saturday Review of Mad Max: Fury Road, Devin O’Neill explores the movie’s seeds of feminist thought. Though the film is…
Song of the Day: “Living For The City”
Stevland Hardaway Morris, aka Stevie Wonder, got his start playing for Motown Records in 1961. Today, he boasts a back catalog of some of the most iconic and original soul…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Brandon Hicks takes an illustrative look at a few hypothetical situations. And in the Saturday interview, Anna March talks with Salon editor and author Sarah Hepola about alcoholism and the distorted…
Song of the Day: “Purple Rain”
Our history of rock-stars-turned-movie-actors goes back a long time, but one highlight has to be Prince’s performance in his bizarre 1984 drama, Purple Rain. Though chock full of laughably weird moments—critics dismissed…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Barbara Berman reviews Stanford academic and author Eavan Boland’s poetry collection, A Woman Without A Country, a rumination on Irish American identity, motherhood, and “literary citizenship.” Boland’s “straightforward brilliance” make…
Song of the Day: “Coney Island Baby”
When listening to Tom Waits’s stately ballad, “Coney Island Baby,” one pictures an ancient Italian grandfather, standing on a windswept boardwalk, boasting about his granddaughter to anyone who will listen. “When…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, in the Saturday Essay, Alana Hauser remembers the evil spirit from David Lynch’s eerie TV drama, Twin Peaks. The “parasitic” spirit, named Bob, is “a frightening reflection on the pervasive reality…
Song of the Day: “Sunday Candy”
In an interview with XXL magazine in 2014, Chance the Rapper pointed out the complex relationship between rap music and profits. He argued: “I don’t think selling [songs] is the…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Judy Bolton-Fasman examines her Cuban-American parents in the Saturday Essay, in particular her mother’s struggle to read Don Quijote in its original Spanish for her master’s degree. Her parents’ heritage…