IGX

T200 wrote:

Dr. Agkistrodon wrote:

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Goddamn it. herr doktor uses that as his version of rickrolling...this is only the 21st time I fell for it.

I been waiting to play that card a looooong time. The fact that I found one with Cap'n Kirk was just bonus.

Peter Macia, with The New Yorker wrote:Earlier this spring, a resident of Clinton Hill called his landlord to report undesirable conditions. His morning serenity had been pierced by anguished moans and troubling thuds rising from the apartment below, occupied by the rent-stabilized building’s newest tenant. Over the phone, the concerned resident detailed the frequency of the moans (every five minutes) and the duration (7 A.M. to 2 P.M., Monday through Friday), along with his recent observation (made while slowly walking his dog) of an upright metal frame, with straps and peculiar objects hanging from it, positioned in front of the new tenant’s first-floor window. In order to expedite the landlord’s response, the resident suggested that the new tenant may (or may not) have been torturing people. The landlord promised immediate action.

Several weeks later, the resident, still hearing the daily sounds of suffering, descended a flight of stairs and knocked on his potentially sadistic neighbor’s door. Greg Ramirez, a youthful forty-four-year-old native Las Vegan with bedhead and near-zero-per-cent body fat, answered, wearing drop-crotch thermal underwear pants pulled up to the knee and no shirt. Recognizing the unannounced visit as a reckoning, Ramirez immediately began his pitch. “You should come down and see what me and the bros are doing,” he said, backing away from the door, and sat on a stool near the kitchen window. A black cat slept on the sill. In an adjacent room, sitting on the fully padded floor near a picture of an unusually muscular Jesus on the Cross, was the apparatus in the window. “You probably thought I was down here torturing people, huh?” Ramirez asked. “It’s actually an advanced-movement studio.” It’s also The Gun Club, so named by its tortured moaners, and it is, essentially, a fitness speakeasy in Ramirez’s living room.

Since February, the Gun Club’s membership has grown, via word of mouth, from a handful of neighborhood friends working out together to an assortment of increasingly buff bartenders, chefs, barbers, investors, casting agents, actors, artists, guitarists in a psych-rock/free-jazz band, and others. Most are current or former residents of Fort Greene and Williamsburg who are well-acquainted with the aesthetics and unwritten laws of the speakeasy lifestyle. People Ramirez met through his previous jobs as a cook and barman in various city establishments. People with nicknames like Chef and Spicy Pickles. People to whom Ramirez refers as “the dudes” or “the bros,” whether they are men or women.

One of these bros, a lanky thirty-six-year-old record-label owner, father, husband, and ardent runner named Keith, came to the Gun Club through his longtime friend and neighbor, Johnny. On a recent Friday morning, the two were put through a particularly gruelling session by Ramirez, who wore a sleeveless T-shirt and vibrant floral bikini briefs. The session centered around Bulgarian bags, handled leather sacks filled with somewhere between eleven and fifty pounds of sand, created by the former United States Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling coach Ivan Ivanov to build functional strength. After warming up and stretching through several yoga-like poses, the three men completed four sets of exercises with the bags in fifteen minutes, with only a minute’s rest between each set, all designed to keep their hearts pumping at maximum rate and meet the Five Pillars of Human Movement, a platform espoused by the former Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion Steve Maxwell.

“He’s my guru. He’s my coach,” Ramirez said of Maxwell. “I’ve been doing this dude’s DVDs in my one-bedroom apartment for the last five years. He’s what I think is an innovator, but all he’s doing is going back and taking old exercises and bringing them back.” Keith, Johnny, and Mike performed several of these old-looking exercises in quick succession, as reggae played from a laptop on the floor. They dragged, spun, hurled, and snatched the bags while Ramirez positioned their bodies in planks, lunges, and squats. This was followed by ten to twenty push-ups, hands on the prone Bulgarians. By the final set, all three men sweat profusely, moaned miserably, and tried (and failed) to gently set the bags on the floor. At the end, they were barely able to lift their arms for high-fives.

Between its unpredictable “real-world strength” workouts and communal vibes, the Gun Club resembles CrossFit, but its origins more closely resemble a mythical martial-arts movie. A couple of Ramirez’s friends, noticing his fitness, asked for tips. In early sessions, Ramirez merely led them through his regular workouts. When he left for six months to work in an ethical meat-processing plant in northern California, the friends urged him to come back and become a full-time fitness instructor. Luckily for them, the plant laid off Ramirez; he returned to New York, and the Gun Club was unofficially born.

“I don’t really even know what CrossFit is,” Ramirez said after the Bulgarian session. “These dudes just come in, and they pick up weights, and I know if it’s too light or if it’s right on. Like, we don’t keep track of anything. We don’t keep any score—except for the dudes that break each other’s balls—but it’s not competitive at all. It’s just exercise.” And it is certainly not making him millions. Ramirez and his girlfriend (and her dog, Wesley) share the apartment’s bedroom. “I can’t see doing it here much longer,” he said. “We can’t live in the Gun Club. Our kitchen is attached to our studio apartment by a dojo.”

DARTH wrote:

Dr. Agkistrodon wrote:

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Goddamn it. herr doktor uses that as his version of rickrolling...this is only the 21st time I fell for it.

I been waiting to play that card a looooong time. The fact that I found one with Cap'n Kirk was just bonus.

100 Punk Points on that!

ImUndaYourBed wrote:Has Steve Maxwell unwittingly started an anti-Crossfit movement? This article smacks of Crossfit hallmarks (anything douchey and obsessive about fitness). "The Gun Club" is some kind of alternative, grassroots fitness thing in a guy's apt., and the writer clearly wants us to at least compare the Gun Club and Crossfit.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/c ... l?mobify=0

Peter Macia, with The New Yorker wrote:Earlier this spring, a resident of Clinton Hill called his landlord to report undesirable conditions. His morning serenity had been pierced by anguished moans and troubling thuds rising from the apartment below, occupied by the rent-stabilized building’s newest tenant. Over the phone, the concerned resident detailed the frequency of the moans (every five minutes) and the duration (7 A.M. to 2 P.M., Monday through Friday), along with his recent observation (made while slowly walking his dog) of an upright metal frame, with straps and peculiar objects hanging from it, positioned in front of the new tenant’s first-floor window. In order to expedite the landlord’s response, the resident suggested that the new tenant may (or may not) have been torturing people. The landlord promised immediate action.

Several weeks later, the resident, still hearing the daily sounds of suffering, descended a flight of stairs and knocked on his potentially sadistic neighbor’s door. Greg Ramirez, a youthful forty-four-year-old native Las Vegan with bedhead and near-zero-per-cent body fat, answered, wearing drop-crotch thermal underwear pants pulled up to the knee and no shirt. Recognizing the unannounced visit as a reckoning, Ramirez immediately began his pitch. “You should come down and see what me and the bros are doing,” he said, backing away from the door, and sat on a stool near the kitchen window. A black cat slept on the sill. In an adjacent room, sitting on the fully padded floor near a picture of an unusually muscular Jesus on the Cross, was the apparatus in the window. “You probably thought I was down here torturing people, huh?” Ramirez asked. “It’s actually an advanced-movement studio.” It’s also The Gun Club, so named by its tortured moaners, and it is, essentially, a fitness speakeasy in Ramirez’s living room.

Since February, the Gun Club’s membership has grown, via word of mouth, from a handful of neighborhood friends working out together to an assortment of increasingly buff bartenders, chefs, barbers, investors, casting agents, actors, artists, guitarists in a psych-rock/free-jazz band, and others. Most are current or former residents of Fort Greene and Williamsburg who are well-acquainted with the aesthetics and unwritten laws of the speakeasy lifestyle. People Ramirez met through his previous jobs as a cook and barman in various city establishments. People with nicknames like Chef and Spicy Pickles. People to whom Ramirez refers as “the dudes” or “the bros,” whether they are men or women.

One of these bros, a lanky thirty-six-year-old record-label owner, father, husband, and ardent runner named Keith, came to the Gun Club through his longtime friend and neighbor, Johnny. On a recent Friday morning, the two were put through a particularly gruelling session by Ramirez, who wore a sleeveless T-shirt and vibrant floral bikini briefs. The session centered around Bulgarian bags, handled leather sacks filled with somewhere between eleven and fifty pounds of sand, created by the former United States Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling coach Ivan Ivanov to build functional strength. After warming up and stretching through several yoga-like poses, the three men completed four sets of exercises with the bags in fifteen minutes, with only a minute’s rest between each set, all designed to keep their hearts pumping at maximum rate and meet the Five Pillars of Human Movement, a platform espoused by the former Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion Steve Maxwell.

“He’s my guru. He’s my coach,” Ramirez said of Maxwell. “I’ve been doing this dude’s DVDs in my one-bedroom apartment for the last five years. He’s what I think is an innovator, but all he’s doing is going back and taking old exercises and bringing them back.” Keith, Johnny, and Mike performed several of these old-looking exercises in quick succession, as reggae played from a laptop on the floor. They dragged, spun, hurled, and snatched the bags while Ramirez positioned their bodies in planks, lunges, and squats. This was followed by ten to twenty push-ups, hands on the prone Bulgarians. By the final set, all three men sweat profusely, moaned miserably, and tried (and failed) to gently set the bags on the floor. At the end, they were barely able to lift their arms for high-fives.

Between its unpredictable “real-world strength” workouts and communal vibes, the Gun Club resembles CrossFit, but its origins more closely resemble a mythical martial-arts movie. A couple of Ramirez’s friends, noticing his fitness, asked for tips. In early sessions, Ramirez merely led them through his regular workouts. When he left for six months to work in an ethical meat-processing plant in northern California, the friends urged him to come back and become a full-time fitness instructor. Luckily for them, the plant laid off Ramirez; he returned to New York, and the Gun Club was unofficially born.

“I don’t really even know what CrossFit is,” Ramirez said after the Bulgarian session. “These dudes just come in, and they pick up weights, and I know if it’s too light or if it’s right on. Like, we don’t keep track of anything. We don’t keep any score—except for the dudes that break each other’s balls—but it’s not competitive at all. It’s just exercise.” And it is certainly not making him millions. Ramirez and his girlfriend (and her dog, Wesley) share the apartment’s bedroom. “I can’t see doing it here much longer,” he said. “We can’t live in the Gun Club. Our kitchen is attached to our studio apartment by a dojo.”

Kazuya Mishima wrote:ShariBaby is back (alert Shapecharge)...talking all about her addictions, and disorders, and broken hearts, and all the other shit you would pretend to care about in order to slide in them pants one good time...

Kazuya Mishima wrote:I'd take her for a ride in Professor Kazuya's Rape Van if she's not afraid of a little carpet burn on her knees and elbows.

Shapecharge wrote:If only we could get Shari and the Diva together in a lezbo hot oil 69'n session the entire internets would be logged onto IGx.

Shapecharge wrote:Shari needs us!!! I am so gonna rub one out to this video later. If only we could get Shari and the Diva together in a lezbo hot oil 69'n session the entire internets would be logged onto IGx. Mario would shit a gold baklava brick. Fuck that...I'm not waiting till later to rub one out. I'm doing it rhlgtt mmw.

Kazuya Mishima wrote:

Shapecharge wrote:If only we could get Shari and the Diva together in a lezbo hot oil 69'n session the entire internets would be logged onto IGx.

Oh, you magnificent bastard!!!

Dr. Agkistrodon wrote:

Kazuya Mishima wrote:

Shapecharge wrote:If only we could get Shari and the Diva together in a lezbo hot oil 69'n session the entire internets would be logged onto IGx.

Oh, you magnificent bastard!!!

Frankly I'm amazed that Shaggy hasn't somehow worked that out already.....

My drug choice was meth.... I was jaundiced......