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For roughly three weeks now in New York City, the temperature has hovered around 87 degrees Fahrenheit. You wouldn't say it's unseasonably humid--this is plenty seasonable--but it's unbearable nevertheless. The city's denizens crank the A/C, break out the fans, and glumly accept higher electric bills. Everyone walks around coated

My first summer job was as a secretary in the office of an orthopedic surgeon. I wanted to work at J. Crew (or, barring that, any retail store who's wares I enjoyed, as I wanted free shit) but they wanted references, and I had none. My dad was friendly with

By the late 1970s, Sonny Sharrock was an obscurity living in quasi-retirement. As jazz was fusing with rock and an emergent avant-garde in the decade prior, Sharrock was a sideman on several classics (including an uncredited appearance on Miles Davis’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson) and recorded a defining

Casket was another gem of an AbsolutePunk discovery from my freshman year of college. My computer had 500GB of built-in storage and I carried an iPod classic with me everywhere I went, which meant that I: a) kept my entire mp3 library on my computer's whirring hard drive and; b)

In summer 2011 I got certified as a waterfront lifeguard. The final test was designed to simulate rescuing a swimmer who’d sunk below a lake surface. Students would jump from the diving board, swim a dock-length, and dive for a ten-pound weight suspended by a yellow rope tied to

One recent afternoon, after feeling a nagging unease that too much of my recent music consumption was coming from the homepages of major music websites, I went diving around the Bandcamp page of one of my favorite weirdo DIY labels: Rok Lok Records. I got hip to Rok Lok from

trib·u·tar·y /ˈtribyəˌterē/ noun: tributary; plural noun: tributaries 1. a river or stream flowing into a larger river or lake. What is Tributary? Tributary is a newsletter focused on music that isn’t available on most streaming platforms (i.e. Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) Why am I starting