So, What's the Rumpus?
So, what's the Rumpus, you ask? In brief, it’s the primary outlet I’ve employed (for over a decade now) in doing my bit to turn cool people onto cool music, and to (ideally) get said cool people out of the house and experiencing said cool music in a live setting.
There are a couple of other things I should probably mention. The first is that the Rumpus isn’t entirely music-based, as other cultural events (e.g., notable author readings, film festivals, shows at art museums) also appear with regularity, but the vast majority of the content you’ll see here is going to be music-centric, and all of the content is a result of my particular tastes and passions. If it turns out that you share those tastes, we should get along famously. If not, well, there are a million other music blogs out there. The other item of note is that, unless noted otherwise, all of the events included in the Rumpus take place in the Washington, D.C. area. Hint: If you live in a major U.S. city (or even a semi-major one), odds are probably good that the same bands will be visiting your town too, so if you hear something you dig here, I encourage you to check your local listings.
Anyway, after years of listening to a variety of friends encourage me to create the Rumpus as a blog (rather than just the limited-by-design email version), I’ve finally decided to take the plunge. With thanks to my friend Sean for suggesting that Posterous would offer the perfect solution, in that I could simply keep doing what I’ve always done, and just add one more email address to the email distro (the Posterous address for this page), I ultimately came around and decided to make it so. I don’t foresee gussying it up for the online edition, but I suppose anything’s possible.
I should also note that I did take one baby step along the way to committing to the Rumpus as a blog, and that was when I posted the most recent “edition” over on my friend John Scalzi’s Whatever blog during a six-week guest blogging stint I did in that space. That "test pressing" seemed to be pretty well received, so I’d like to thank Whatever readers (and, especially, commenters) for providing the final impetus I needed to set the Rumpus free from its email shackles and try and make its way in the world.
After all, I’ve gotta figure that by widening the potential audience of the Rumpus via Posterous, I’m far more likely to accomplish its primary goals (recap: turning cool people onto cool music, and getting said people out of the house and experiencing said music in a live setting more often), so what the hell, why not go ahead and add my voice as just one more drop in the ocean of amateur rock writers out there in the blogosphere?
I’ll leave you with this, and then we’ll get this party started:
Discover some new music … go see some live shows … like milk, it does a body good.
Even more importantly, it’s good for the soul.