Monthly Archives: May 2008

Click for Reservations

I have some reservations, and they are not at Tony Starlight’s Supper Club in Portland, OR. Mine have more to do with not falling off this wagon, and incorporating riding into my frequent travel schedule. You however- are free to click the link and set yourself up for a night of crooning and spooning with your favorite sweet young thing.

I spent some time yesterday morning in the stacks. The great unexplored archives of my past. Tony is one of those trail angels who took me in for a night or two along the way, and it is good to see the King of Swing is still knocking them dead.

I met Mr. Starlight during the transition from Montana Carhartts to Portland bowling shirts and without his help I would have never known how to order a gimlet or talk to a woman with shaved legs in the forever-bored, long deep sigh of a city like PDX.

Until I get the Summer mileage program cranked up, you can expect to meet some of the legends of Juancho’s hit parade in this interlude I like to call; The Hit Parade.

-Juancho

Clydesdale Hall of Fame-Marshall Ledbetter

I came across this bit of Tallahasseecana during my fevered wanderings on the internet last week. who remembers when Marshall took over the Capitol building?

Sadly, after years of incarceration in Chatahoochee, it is reported that Marshall took his life in 2003.

For what it is worth which is decidedly not much, I hereby induct him into the Clydesdale Hall of Fame for his great, misguided and oversized balls.

I also remember seeing him roaming from party to party on his bike.

I’m taking this tubercular show on the road to north Georgia today so y’all be good.

-Juancho

The Great Plains Re-Migration

I was talking with Mel(not his real name) the other night about why young people move to sketchy, dangerous, over-priced neighborhoods in NYC in an effort to live a more real existence. Maybe it is the age gap starting to show through like a carefully combed-over bald spot, but to hear young white professionals discussing why they carry a blade on their commute commenced our Generation X eyes to rolling.

Of course we are no better. During the exact same age and stage of our own development we, and near everyone I know worth knowing, were engaged in the same similar true believer questing in other venues. Dude Ranching, Rock Banding, Bosnia-saving too cool for school crunchy hipsters, that is what we were. Bike messenging, Kombucha mushroom tea drinking, first-edition only collecting, Beastie Boy sycophants, and we were proud of it.

Now, it has all been done. Back to the landers, Swing era revivalists, retro-hippies, neo-hippies, Alex P. Keatonists, and new urban revivalism, everything old has become old again.

Except one thing. Generations of young Americans have worn grooves like a rocking chair on a sandy floor from East to West, and South to North in search of something real, but nobody has re-interpreted that least glamorous of American traditions- the settling of the Great Plains. You heard it here first everyone, the graduating college classes of 2010 will head to the middle. Endurance sport enthusiasts will evolve into endurance farming enthusiasts; watch for the 1st Annual

Furrow like a Burro: 24 hour Hand Plowing Invitational.

With the Manatee and Grey Wolf already taken , the Giant Palouse Earthworm will become the media darling of Neo-(neo)/Revivo-Enviromentalists. Abercrombie and Fitch will re-invent the overall (with sag through window in back.)

Sod roofs will come in Pampas, Kentucky Blue, or Bermuda, and they won’t be cheap. Extreme sports enthusiasts will harness the power of tornadoes until they are a manageable risk no different than big wave kite-surfing and base-jumping (it will likely involve a combination of these disciplines.)

The new Plains Re-Settlers will spurn the under watered West, and cluck at the Northeast Urbanites whose glasses frames have finally become so heavy they can no longer look to the roofs of their re come de-gentrified properties.

Because just like us, the new Plains Re-Settlers will have figured it all out for themselves.

-Juancho

The Quicksand Flu

The more you try to do the deeper you sink. I thought about calling this the Protestant Work Ethic Flu, since I am not so sick that I can’t process information and communicate, work is the primary benefactor of the illness.

Not looking so good for Saturday’s departure to the mountains, but I remain ever hopeful for a miracle recovery.

-Juancho