John Rexer
Website: http://www.ilegalmezcal.comJohn Rexer, the founder and editor of La Cuadra Magazine, expatriated himself from Los Estados about 6 years ago because he couldn't stand seeing his city, New York, lobotomized by the metastasizing sameness of WalMart America and didn't have a pillow large enough to Chief Bromden the place out of it's misery. After knocking around Mexico for a while he landed in Antigua, Guatemala - broke but certain about the decision to stay out of the States. Without much of a backup plan he opened Café No Sé (with a rusty credit card) on a residential street, in this sleepy, third world, Colonial town with the intention of creating the best bar in the known universe. For those of you who've been through Antigua, you know he succeeded. Primary mission accomplished, a few years ago John started "creatively transporting" mezcal from Oaxaca into Guatemala with the intention of creating a multi-national company that would deliver the finest agave spirits to the citizenry of the world. That company, Ilegal Mezcal, is a work in process with the first major shipments being made to American and Europe by the end of 2009. La Cuadra Magazine, an idea hatched years ago in a booze fueled bitch session with current Editor in Chief, Mike Tallon, is actually just the first step in larger plan to develop a publishing company that will create a genius literary movement in this new century in much the same way that Ferlinghetti's City Lights project launched the Beat Movement of the 1950s. Writ short, his aspirations are as big as his liver. Or, as Mike has noted on a number of occasions, John Rexer puts the "messy" back in "Messianic."
Stories by John Rexer:
Letter From The Editors – March / April 2010
Semana Santa is presently washing over us like a tsunami of purple robes with thousands of floating – then sinking – now sinking, now floating again – cross-bearing effigies. It is a beautiful time of year. Neighbors get together and make gorgeous alfombras, the intricate flowered carpets that take hundreds of man-hours to create and… »
First Person Shooter – Part Time, Part One
I’ve had some jobs in my day.
It always happened like this. I needed some money so I found some way to make it. The thought of a career never really was my thing. Being something – a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief just didn’t ring true. The sense of permanence, grown-up-dom, self-importance, and lack… »
Letter From the Editor – October / November 2009
Cobbling together La Cuadra has always been like a drunken acrobat doing a high wire act over a blazing fire. There is a good chance things will get messy, but in all likelihood the end result will be oddly entertaining.
We begin the process in hermetically sealed rooms, insulated from the outside world, with the loftiest… »
From The Recesses – The Mob and Me
The bowl of spaghetti with a red clam sauce would normally have been large enough to feed me for a week. But I was famished. It was July and hot, and this was the lunch special for $7.95. It came with a salad, bread and thick red wine served in a small water glass.
The spicy… »
Letter From the Editors – Squeal Like a Pig, Bite Like a Kitten, Die Like a Pigeon
With all the pig fuckers on Wall Street, in Washington and around the Financial World, it was probably only a matter of time before a swine flu outbreak threatened to ravage our increasingly polluted planet. Our insider information tells us that, in order to save on manufacturing costs, pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-Smith-Kline off-shored research, design and… »
From the Recesses – Whorticulture
I’ve been thinking about prostitutes lately, as one does, right?
Whores, harlots, prostitutes.
Kind of like, “lions, tigers and bears, oh my.” But not exactly.
Yes, that is what has been on my mind: ladies of the night, tarts, trollops. And, besides the obvious reason, DEPRAVITY, I am not exactly sure why.
Perhaps it is because a friend of… »
Local Business Association Review – ASADE
One of my favorite slogans of the 1960s Yippies is, “We are not Marxists. We’re Groucho Marxists.”
Groucho Marxists used comedy and outlandishness as a political tool. They believed revolution should be a party, a circus, a festival of irony and absurdity that raised political awareness and paved the way for real… »
Thus Spake Barathustra – The Wisdom of the Drink
Have you ever had a conversation with a non-drinker? It’s like eating sand and snorting chalk. It’s like plastic flowers. It’s conversational Styrofoam and as sexy as a K-Mart bra.
Reformed drinkers can be interesting, but teetotalers give us insight into a hell beyond Dante’s: one of platitudes, clichés, and an eternity of tedium. Arguably even… »
Letter from the Editors – November / December 2008
Merry Something-or-Other and a Happy God-Knows – What from the editors, publishers, writers, artists, alcoholics and enablers of La Cuadra. You might not be in the holiday spirit just yet, but as our next issue won’t be hitting the streets until early January, we figured we’d “Kringle it Up” with this edition.
Of course, we’re doing… »
Special Commentary – Collateral Damage and Damaged Collateral
TITS UP!
The Global Financial Markets.
Tits up, tits up, tits up!
The Pseudo Free Market-All-OnCredit-Capitalist Charade.
TITS UP!
Gnashing, Insatiable Metastasis of Consumer Madness.
TITS UP!
Not to belabor the point, but TITS UP!
This is how it is.
Take your choice. Tits Up, or the less prosaic, Dick in the Dirt.
Not normal tits, BIG TITS! Trillion dollar tits.
The empress has no clothes…. »
From the Recesses – Horses and Cigarettes
She has green eyes and blonde hair. There are curves that would lead you around the bend and off a cliff, happily. There is a coltish twitch to her walk. In her teens she rode and trained horses. She has won many equestrian medals. Every so often we’d see her in her riding outfit patting… »
Special Commentary – Fuck a Duck
You know the famous Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. Well that’s me. I’m standing on a bridge, mouth agape, hands pressed to the sides of my head, looking like some agonized ET. Behind me is a smeared, blood red sky. I contemplate jumping.
Then I look down and ask myself, “Do I really want to be… »
Just Damn Funny – Remembering a Right C_nt
For those of you who did not know Brendan, he was a “right cunt.” Now before you abandon this story hear me out. A: Brendan would be first to refer to himself in this way. B: Any story about Brendan must include heaps of vulgar language or it will lack — how shall… »
Special Commentary – A Financial House of Cards
In the world of high and low finance there is a wonderful concept known as The Greater Fool Theory. In a nut shell the concept is this: there will always be a bigger sucker out there to buy from you the investment you just bought – and at an even higher price. Surely based on… »
Featured Story – All the Sinners Saints
After 30 odd, very odd I might add, years of drinking tequila and mezcal I have managed to emerge relatively unscathed. Yes, there was the night in New York back in 1979 that led to the morning where I awoke in the apartment and bed of a “female” Scottish weightlifter. We met in a bar… »
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