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Is Your Girl Really A Secret Assassin?

Jason Howe and girlfriend Marilyn / Photo: Jason Howe

This dude’s was. Photojournalist Jason Howe fell in love with his girlfriend Marilyn and later found out she had a slightly sinister secret life: an assassin for death squads in Columbia. Howe set out for the countryside of the coke-torn country to interview and profile the real deal Columbians about the internal politics of the drug trade. That’s where he met his girl Marilyn. She invited him to come meet the fam and allowed him to use her house as a sort of home base, allowing the photog some freedom in patrolling around the region and shooting the coca fields and the paramilitary soldiers that guard them. After gathering what he needed, he left for a few months, but eventually returned to see Marilyn. It was then that she dropped this bombshell:

Norman Mailer Had ‘The Faith of Graffiti’

Pulitzer prized author, journalist, founder of the Village Voice, filmmaker and tireless button pusher Norman Mailer passed away this Saturday. Although he’s renowned for his countless award winning works, we’ve always known him for his lesser known essay that served as the text for the groundbreaking book, The Faith of Graffiti. It was an oversized masterpiece with photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar detailing the mysterious emerging art form on NYC’s subway trains. The notoriously tough guy author intellectualized the graffiti movement in its early beginnings—’Faith’ was published in 1974—when hand styles were still being developed and most of the letters were very primitive. Mailer was fascinated by the art form, writing, “What a quintessential marriage of cool and style to write your name in giant separate living letters, large as animals, lythe as snakes, mysterious as Arabic and Chinese curls of alphabet.” In honor of the pugilistic legman and the groundbreaking book on graff, we’ve assembled some excerpts and images:

New Barking Irons Hoodie Is Walt Whitman’s Fault

We’ve been big fans of Barking Irons long before Johnny Drama and the Entourage crew rocked their gear, but this new hoodie, with an extra touch of velour, just doesn’t do it for us like their iconic historically-inspired tees. It figures that the impetus for their new collection was from none other than Long Island born, closet homo poet Walt Whitman. Not that we have anything against the gays, but he’d write shit like Song of Myself, and then publicly denounce masturbation. Anyway, if we had to guess which author inspired this collection, we would have totally put our money on J.R.R. Tolkien. After all, this velour hoodie with big buttons is really only suitable for those peaceful walks in the Shire, or on that long and cold road to Mordor.