Virtual Lower East Side

Vice magazine's bizarre Second Life/MySpace/corporate integration experiment vLES (for Virtual Lower East Side, 'natch) has gone live, so feel free to set your hipster avatar loose on Ludlow Street. The introductory video starts off with a bang, with some exterior shots of Katz's Deli and a dude sitting in Max Fish who says, "This neighborhood is basically a mecca for every music loving suburban kid growing up in the country."

[via Curbed]

I'd be interested in seeing vLES '99, when Pianos was a funky (yeah I said it) place to see experimental theater and the streets weren't yet totally crowded with douchebags... or vLES '81, where you could just walk into a random building and see DNA or Tuxedomoon performing and Deborah Harry would appear as a fairy godmother in an alley.

That sounded curmudgeonly and confused.
More coffee, please...

The truth is, vLES seems very cool and well executed, and is potentially a bigger time sucker than MySpace.