Song of the Day: “Try Me”
The resilient R&B singer Esther Mae Jones adopted the stage name of Little Esther Philips at the age of 14, allegedly taking it from a gas station sign in Los Angeles.…
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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
For Days 11 and 12 of National Poetry Month, we have work from Aziza Barnes and Daniel Priest. Aziza Barnes’s innovative poem, “How To Purchase A Flight,” subverts the experience…
Song of the Day: “Shoo Fly Marches On”
The distinctive drum beat behind The Meters’ funky classic “Hey Pocky A-Way” did not originate there. In fact, their influential drummer, Joseph “Ziggy” Modeliste, first came up with the beat…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
To start, love gets metaphorically steam cleaned by Grant Snider. Brandon Hicks adds his two cents with “The Hierarchy” of artistic and literary achievement. Meanwhile, Oliver Bendorf experiments with line…
Song of the Day: “Hey Pocky A-Way”
The loose and infectious melody of “Hey Pocky A-Way” has been covered and re-recorded many times since its first release in 1974 by New Orleans funk heavyweights The Meters. The…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Grant Snider wonders, in cartoon form, what happens to lost ideas. Then, in the Saturday Essay, Britney Spears superfan Sarah Sansolo admits that the Britney critics “were right about some…
Song of the Day: “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo”
Road trip songs occupy a plush seat in the American canon—right underneath the fuzzy dice. They are often harbingers of summer, and “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” is no exception.…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
In the Saturday Essay, Scott Borchert wonders about the symbiosis of author James Agee and folklorist Harry Smith. Though it is unclear if they met in New York during the…
Song of the Day: “Electricity (Drugs)”
The Talking Heads were among a crop of epochal, genre-bending artists that emerged from New York City in the mid-70s. The music scene centered around the famous punk club CBGB, where…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, was Jen Girdish’s first brush with Leonard Nimoy’s mortality. Nimoy’s role as the famously stoic Spock captures Girdish’s attention in the Saturday Essay…
Song of the Day: “Straight To Hell”
The Clash are famous for their album London Calling and their ubiquitous single, “Rock the Casbah,” which is notable perhaps for its incendiary political message—a denunciation of the Iranian ban on Western…
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Julie Marie Wade points to Tod Marshall’s skillful use of call and response in his new poetry collection, Bugle. The theme of mortality punctuates this “fierce” and “stunning” book.…