subscribe to this page
What you are witnessing is a ridiculously-realistic virtual version of New York City's Lower East Side, a.k.a. the place where every angst-ridden, music-loving teenager (that means you, or maybe you a few years ago) dreams of running away to. This teensy neighborhood is so brimming over with cool bands, fun hangouts and bars, and pretty people that it can take about ten years to come out the other side once you move here.
So vLES wants to send you there now to give you a head start. You can create a little person and then walk right into faithfully recreated virtual versions of legendary LES venues and see real bands play. And if you're in a band (and who isn't), this is where you can get yourself heard. vLES is going to be so totally the opposite of boring, you don't even know.
The first time I heard anything about people in the sewers in Colombia was back at the beginning of the 90s when ABC Primetime Live did a piece about all the children living down there. It became a fairly big humanitarian story in the media for a while, with other networks in America and Europe sending in crews to cover it and folks setting up charities abroad. And rightfully so—the situation at the time was a complete fucking nightmare. The sewers were filled with packs of kids living waist-deep in shit and taking in copious amounts of glue and crack in order to cope.
This was at the height of Colombia's "Dirty War", and the whole reason the street kids had gone down into the sewers in the first place was to get away from the violence. But then the paramilitary death squads who had chased them off the street started to come into the pipes and shoot them or douse them in gasoline or rape them. Ten-year-old girls were giving birth and trying to raise babies in the middle of sewage (the early onset of puberty having been brought on by the constant molestation by adults and older kids as well as the general stress on their bodies). It was about as fucked as things get.