Look, I don’t decry anyone’s initiative to get in shape, work out, slim down, beef up or pursue their favorite sporting activity, but the last several years have seen a wide swathe of downtown Manhattan practically overtaken by a wave of nouvelle fitness ventures to the extent that it’s become a veritable Fitness Corridor, running sweatily from Union Square to Houston Street between Broadway and the Bowery. From Barry’s Bootcamp, Soul Cycle, Rumble, David Barton’s and Crunch to Barre on Broadway, Equinox, Crossfit Union Square (which I bitched about here), Blink Fitness and SLT -- and probably a half-dozen other spots I’m forgetting -- gyms of this sort have handily overtaken banks, frozen yogurt shops and big-chain pharmacies as the inevitable businesses to swiftly set up shop when some age-old concern closes. Only cannabis dispensaries are more plentiful, but that’s a bug-eyed rant for another day.
Among these enterprises came the Overthrow Boxing Club, a style-heavy facility dubbing itself “the Home of Underground Boxing” that opened in 2014, occupying the former site of the Yippie Building at 9 Bleecker Street, on the storied strip between the Bowery and Lafayette. In this modest space where activist Abbie Hoffman once roused rabbled with the Youth International Party there is now a gymnasium with a fully equipped boxing ring wherein patrons can throw hasty haymakers and pound the living daylights out of each other.
Regular readers might remember an entry I posted back in 2015 in which I expressed my dismay and gradual disdain for the Joey Ramone mural that suddenly appeared just across the way that depicted the late, lanky Punk pioneer sporting a pair of boxing gloves. I winced at the appropriation of the neighborhood’s former character being used as a means to market a business that, to my mind, had absolutely nothing to do with Punk Rock. I mean, for better or worse – Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, Johnny Thunders, Jayne County, Stiv Bator, Debbie Harry, Cheetah Chrome, David Byrne, Clem Burke, Lenny Kaye, Joey Ramone, James Chance, Lux Interior, Patti Smith --- these characters were very much not ripped pugilists with abs of steel. By and large, New York City’s Punk Rock diaspora – from the early pioneers to the No Wavers to the Power Popsters to the Hardcore Kids to the Noise Merchants and all points in between – were not generally known for their athletic abilities. Admittedly, an over-rhapsodized portion of it came with the palpable threat of physical violence, but it sure as shit wasn’t conventional boxing. I mean, yeah, I guess the Dictators were big fans of professional wrestling, but that’s a totally different thing. And sure, legendary Stimulators drummer and burly Cro-Mags founder Harley Flanagan accrued a reputation for being something of an easily triggered combatant and is now an avid practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but I think he’s a bit of an exception to the rule.
Regardless, Overthrow continues to strive to legitimize some sort of connective tissue between itself and the neighborhood’s swiftly fading bohemian notoriety, and I find that kind of unseemly and disingenuous. This is precisely why I started furrowing my brow upon seeing these pasted everywhere downtown….
For those who don’t recognize it, this a modified version of a John Holmstrom illustration that appeared in the original run of Punk Magazine, which Holmstrom published alongside Legs McNeil in the late 1970's (I wrote about both of them not too long back). Holmstrom’s signature artwork graced the cover of many of that trailblazing periodical’s output. He’s also responsible for the cover art of the Ramones’ Road to Ruin after an initial design – which strangely ended up being sold on t-shirts by Brandy Melville – was abandoned for being too metal.
In any case, the second I started seeing these, I started to get a little irritable, assuming that Overthrow was – again – laboriously trying to assert some innate kinship with the ephemera of all things NYC Punk. I was further riled when I saw someone on Instagram wrongly credit the iconography to another source, blurring the context of the images’ true provenance. I wasn’t having that.
But wheat-pasted street art was one thing. Pricey street-wear was another. I suddenly started seeing people in the neighborhood sporting brand-new, dayglo t-shirts and knit caps with Holmstrom’s inimitable Punk font and illustrations on them. This was no longer just a furtive bit of pilfered imagery – this was fuckin’ commerce, which led me to confirm my sad suspicions with just a quick Google search.
Given the harsh realities of his chosen vocation as a cartoonist and underground `zine editor, I’m relatively certain money has never come easily to the great John Holmstrom, so – honestly -- who the fuck am I to preciously decry his getting into bed with the cred-hungry entrepreneurs at Overthrow? Sure enough, Holmstrom entered a deal with Overthrow and age-old athletic-wear company Everlast for a collaborative line of clothes and accessories that extol the merits of the gym, the brand and Punk Magazine. At a kickoff party, folks who’d I would have otherwise assumed to share my skepticism at such an enterprise – people like filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Kembra Phaler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, legendary photographers Bob Gruen and Godlis, former Ramones manager Monte Melnick, mainstay L.E.S. documentarian Clayton Patterson and a host of other notables – seemed perfectly okay with it. Again, who am I to bash something that generates awareness --- and hopefully revenue – of Holmstrom’s amazing work?
But I’m not gonna lie … it still kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
What say you?
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