i’m not necessarily the first to have this thought, but let’s not mock, autotune or otherwise meme-ify Charles Ramsey. just a thought. he’s not like a “character from the wire” as one paper put it. he’s a person who did something brave and spoke compellingly about it.
Deerhunter - ‘Monomania’ (Live on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon)
Damn. Rock is scary again. And incredible.
(via pitchfork)
Bradley Campbell used some napkins to diagram the narrative structures of radio shows.
These are brilliant. Can’t wait to hear Rob Rosenthal’s discussion on this.
THE UNITED KINGDOM: Musically Gifted.
I’m all about maps lately. Here’s one of a selection of bands from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Solo artists: Where they were born/grew up.
Bands/Groups: Where they met/formed.If you missed the last one AMERICA: The Home of Television (113 tv show locations)
Both of these are for sale in my shop! High quality prints, super classy.
(If there are any inaccuracies, let me know! That way I can update them before I print and ship ‘em)
For those music lovers looking to start the day off with some visual pizzazz.
Def Leppard and Jarvis Cocker are from the same place?
There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was painted by hand. This sounds unremarkable until you actually think about what that actually means.
(Sign painter Chancey Curtis in Mankato, MN, ca. 1930. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton…
Roman (and Ben) are always great, but this one meant a lot. My mother’s stepdad was a sign painter and a true weirdo. He was also brilliant with a brush. The last time I saw him he was wearing tape as a bandage and living in a workshop above a terrible grocery store. He told me that directly across the street from the store, he used to own a sign shop. A couple doors down from the shop was a Mexican restaurant where he met my grandmother. We stood in his workshop and he showed me a picture of what it all used to look like. He and my grandmother hadn’t been together for decades and across the street there was just an empty lot. A whole block of empty lots.
Wild animals still roam in Manhattan.
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.
Whenever my dad went back to El Salvador to see our family, he said I couldn’t come. It was too dangerous. I know I’m being a bit of a chicken about it, but I wonder if I’ll ever go. And I worry for family that I barely know.
