The Spinto Band - The Living Things
In honor of the finally improving weather here in NYC, I’ve recorded a homemade version of one of the greatest songs ever written.
The download is free if you want to take it with you!Mr. @CaseyShea welcomes the new weather with a home recorded cover of The…
When I help my girlfriend do homework…
I enjoyed this piece of art very much. I noticed a fine use of beard and black that was displayed so visually. The artist’s name was Grandpa Tombstone. He was a friendly old fellow with a brittle old back. I am sure that he liked to wear hats when he painted, for he sported a lovely neon green beret when we met him. I imagine him painting in his bathtub while eating a sandwich and yelling at the imaginary children that he often hallucinates about. ART ROOLZ!
It’s crazy that I lived in this country for two years.
In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
