M. David Hornbuckle

Blog

  • 9/11 Didn’t Change Everything

    I was in Manhattan that day. I saw much of it first-hand, in real time, not on television. It was horrible. There are things I saw that still haunt me, that I still don’t want to talk about.

    Perhaps that’s why I find all the public hoo-ha about the tenth anniversary of it to be disturbing.

    A lot of people died tragically that day. A lot of people, including myself, were scarred by what they saw. It is appropriate for those directly affected by the tragedy to recognize this day in some private and personal way. That is what I will do. It makes sense for the government to heighten security. For the rest of America, it’s my opinion that they should not worry about it so much.

    That day changed the way a lot of people thought and felt about a lot of things. Much of what changed was wrong. Much of it validated what the terrorists wanted in the first place, which was to make us all terrified.

    I’ll tell you what I felt on that day and have felt ever since. It was horrible. It was tragic. It was disgusting. It was depressing. It was angering. But I would be damned if I was going to be terrified.

  • STR Editor’s Note, Issue #7

    Reposted from Steel Toe Review.

    I recently updated STR’s profile on the Poets and Writers website. In the “Tips from the Editor” section I wrote, “We don’t want traditional Southern lit. We want literary and experimental work that touches on themes of interest to Southerners. Interpret that however you like, but don’t assume this limits you to talking about trailers, hunting/fishing, fried food, and race relations. In fact, avoid talking about those things unless you have something really original to say about them.”

    It seemed necessary to clarify this. We get a lot of submissions from people who think they are sending us something “Southern” because their story takes place in a trailer park. This is bothersome for somewhat obvious reasons. Conversely, there are many writers from the South who go well out of their way to remove any trace of Southern identity from their work. This often results in generic writing with flat characters and no sense of “place.”

    This latter issue is particularly problematic for young Southern writers who equate “being Southern” with a distant past for which they have no affection. It’s not surprising that writers who happen to be born in a certain geographic area would resist being associated with racism, extreme religiosity, and cultural backwardness. And in fact, many younger writers have little experience of that past. The youth of today are increasingly “citizens of the world,” a world where the internet and suburban sprawl have a tendency to equalize experience no matter where you happen to grow up.

    Of course, I don’t want to be associated with those terrible things either. In fact, I would very much like to show the world a South that has made strides in moving past these embarrassments, even if it has not erased them completely. But that is just part of my own personal and political agenda, not necessarily the agenda of Steel Toe Review.

    Here at STR, Southern identity is only one of our pet interests. We have published and will continue to publish all sorts of things by all sorts of people.

    One of our short stories for this month is by and about an Indian-American woman who lives in San Diego—a far cry, some would say, from the interests of most Southerners. However, we might point out that in this story, there is a strong sense of character and a strong sense of place, two qualities associated with traditional Southern writing. Moreover, the character and the place are somewhat at odds with one another in that story. There is an inherent struggle of identity between the place she is from and the place where she is.

    Sound familiar?

  • September Gigs

    September is full of gigs. Here’s the lowdown:

  • Best of the Net Awards

     

     

     

    Steel Toe Review has nominated the following contributors for the 2010/11 Best of the Net Awards. Congratulations to these authors.

    In fiction:

    “Serial Killers” by Melissa Studdard
    “At the Fish Tanks” by Louis Bourgeois

    In poetry:

    “My Magnum Opus” by Catfish McDaris
    “Auburn Memory” by Katie Berger
    “In the Garden” by Matt Layne
    “Holy” by Curtis Rutherford
    “Red Paint Hill” by Chris Hayes

  • Birmingham Free Press Print Issue Hits the Streets

    So here’s much of what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. Actually, Brent, Stephen, and Lee did most of the work. Mostly, I’ve just bossed them around. And now we have a newspaper.

    Here’s the proof.

    There are boxes downtown, in Southside, at UAB, and in a few other locations around town. They should all have actual papers in them by later this afternoon. We will have copies inside many businesses also. Pick one up, and let us know what you think.

    And now we have to start getting together the next issue, and we need all the help we can get. If you are in the Birmingham area and interested in writing something, contact me. We also need people to sell ads. Need some extra cash? We ‘re offering very generous commissions.

    See www.birminghamfreepress.com for more information.

  • Editor’s Note #6

    Reposted from Steel Toe Review

    Welcome back. We hope you had as fun and productive a summer as we did.

    Over the summer we did some tweaking of our look and our process. We are now using submishmash for our submissions, which will help keep us better organized and hopefully improve response time. We think our visual redesign is sleeker and more professional looking.

    Throughout August, we will be gradually posting the material we’ve selected for this issue, starting with the winner of our first ever fiction contest. We would like to congratulate George Sawaya for winning what turned out to be a very difficult challenge because, stupidly, we picked a theme that, in retrospect, was overly narrow.

    However, we got some very interesting entries, and Sawaya’s “Mind the Gap” was the clear winner. We are also going to be posting honorable mention stories from Sean Hogan and Lucinda Dupree.

    We have lots of other great fiction and poetry this month as well. Keep coming back to see what’s new.

    -M. David Hornbuckle

  • Saying Goodnight to Sipsey Tavern

    Tonight is the last night my favorite bar in Birmingham will be open for business. A couple of months ago, Red Mountain Development refused to renew Sipsey Tavern’s lease in the historic Terrace Court building on the corner of Highland Avenue and 12th Avenue South. And now the lease is up.

    A year ago when I moved back to Birmingham, I found my home away from home at Sipsey Tavern. I became friends with the owner Matt Mauldin and his staff. I saw dozens of amazing bands there. My own new band made its debut there last January and has continued to play there regularly. I fell in love with a woman who lives in the apartments upstairs from the bar (at least until Red Mountain Development eventually kicks her out too, which is now inevitable and much more upsetting even than the bar’s closing… that will have to be another blog post). Almost everybody that has become my friend in the past year became my friend at Sipsey Tavern.

    Sure, the service was sometimes slow, and they ran out of Guinness more often than they should have. But Matt and his crew worked extremely hard to make it a nice place and to bring customers in the door. They had the best trivia night in town, but people didn’t come out for it regularly enough so they canceled it. They booked some of the coolest bands in the area that you would probably never hear of otherwise. They struggled, but they were reportedly just starting to make money. It was the best kept secret it Five Points.

    I’ve been there every night this week so far, drowning my sorrows in the Maker’s Mark that Ryan/Jay/Leslie/Jennifer almost always have poured for me before I even reach the bar stool. Last night I saw yet another great show with Piss Shivers, Necronomikids, and Red Mountain Family Band. I’ll be back tonight to see Motel Ice Machine, Ian Sturrock Memorial Pipe Band, Zach Doss,  Brain Eaters, Renegades of Folk, and Jasper Coal. But mostly I’ll be there just to say goodbye one more time.

    There are a lot of rumors about what Red Mountain Development has planned for the building, but I’m not going to speculate about it here, despite the evidence and plausibility of one of the more disturbing stories going around. But I do think it’s incredibly disingenuous at best that their website boasts, “Red Mountain Development believes there is more to long-term value than short-term profit. … we specialize in developing property responsibly.” And ironically, I guess, Terrace Court is listed right at the top as one of their flagship properties.

    And the question now is, where are we all going to hang out now? Some will go to Stillwater Pub, others to the Upsidedown Plaza. Maybe a new bar will open up. Maybe eventually, Matt will open a new Sipsey Tavern at a different location (rumors of them re-opening in the Lakeview district are unfounded, according to Matt). But Five Points will not be the same after tonight.

    Tonight we drink. Tomorrow we thirst.

  • Shows I Saw Last Week

    Skeptic?/Kids on Coffee/Original Shake Charmers
    Sipsey Tavern – July 23, 2011

    The sound at Sipsey Tavern is punishingly loud. A dozen dudes, most of whom are over 30, are moshing like juveniles. I was one of them. Before long, all these dudes have ripped off their shirts—shirts that advertised bands like Fear, Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag, the best of ’80s hardcore. Skeptic bottles up this esthetic and delivers it with authority and authenticity. Singer Barron Skeptic keeps popping up, like a groundhog, at various points above the fray. His vocalization is not so much singing as it is a pronouncement or perhaps a scolding.

    Before Skeptic was Kids on Coffee, a Descendents tribute band from Montgomery. Their repertoire comprised mainly songs the Descendents recorded between 1981 and 1987, a period during which the band recorded their most memorable material, most fans would agree. KoC’s renditions are very true to the originals and brought back a lot of memories for me. The first time I heard them, driving to New Orleans one hot summer night, I asked the girl driving who this band was, just as Milo sang, “We’re the proud, the few, the Descendents.” The punk rock girl driving the car rolled her eyes and said, “The Descendents. Duh.”

    The openers, Original Shake Charmers, set the goodtime mood with traditional surf/garage rock. The band members wore matching shirts, as fits the genre. Front man Lars Espensen toggled between singing and playing surfy, 60s style tenor sax.

  • Recent Bigfoot Sightings in East Alabama

    I had to re-post this from Birmingham Free Press because it is awesome. Happy weekend everybody.

    http://bfpparanormal.blogspot.com/

    by Stephen Smith

    There have been two Bigfoot sightings this year in Tallapoosa County in Eastern Central Alabama. Both were along Alabama State Road 22 near the town of New Site. The two sightings occurred approximately four miles apart from one another, the first on March 11 and the second on April 4. The witness, who wished to remain anonymous, described the beast to Jim Smith of the Alabama Bigfoot Society, as “very large, thick shouldered and tall. At least seven feet tall… [and] very dark brown.”

    Though the lion’s share of Bigfoot sightings take place in the Pacific Northwest, Alabama is a surprising hotbed of Sasquatchian activity. Jim Smith told the Birmingham Free Press that most of the sightings in Alabama occur around Mt. Cheaha and in the nearby counties of Tallapoosa, Talladega, Clay, and Randolph. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a bar in Waldo, AL called the Bigfoot Lounge, so named because of sightings in that area. The earliest recorded Bigfoot sightings in Alabama were in the early 1960s.

    According to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), there have been over 60 sightings in the state since 1980. Nationally there have been over 3700 Bigfoot encounters in the same period, the majority of which have been in the last decade. That’s a lot of Bigfeet.

    Smith believes the sightings are becoming more common because of logging activity in the Bigfoot habitat. He thinks there may be as many as 50-60 Bigfoot creatures in the forests of east Alabama.

    Scientists remain skeptical of the existence of Bigfoot due to a supposed lack of physical evidence, but according to the BFRO, “[p]hysical evidence is found every month in various areas across the country. Distinct tracks that do not match other animal tracks, hairs that match each other but no known wild animals, and large scats that could not be made by any known species.”

    It’s worth remembering that the gorilla was considered mythological until its existence was verified in 1902. The number of gorillas was estimated to be around 100,000 until another 125,000 were discovered in 2008 in the Republic of Congo. New species of mammals “discovered” in the past decade include the Annamite striped rabbit, the Arunachal monkey, the Australian snubfin dolphin, the blond capuchin, the Sunda clouded leopard, the collared peccary, the Dingiso, Goodman’s mouse lemur, the grey-faced elephant shrew, the highland mangabey, Jackson’s mongoose, the Laotian rock rat, the leaf deer, Lowe’s servaline genet, the Manicore marmoset, Mittermeier’s mouse lemur, the mountain brush-tailed possum, the Prince Bernhard titi, the Pygmy three-toed sloth, the Sambirano woolly lemur, the saola, the tube-lipped nectar bat, and the unfortunately named goldenpalace.com monkey. In addition to the nearly 100 mammals identified in the 21st century, Dr. Ian Poiner of the Australian Institute for Marine Science has estimated that there are at least 750,000 undiscovered species on this planet alone. Given the reality of the situation, the whole Bigfoot thing doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

    There are a number of Native American Bigfoot legends. The term “sasquatch” is an anglicized derivative of one of the 60 or so native-American names for “big man” or “hairy man.” People that report sightings are by no means charlatans or particularly gullible. According to the BFRO, “[t]he patterns among eyewitnesses are not demographic, they are geographic—they are not reported by certain types of people, rather by people who venture into certain areas. This simple pattern suggests an external cause.”

    What exactly Bigfoot is remains a mystery. Artist and Bigfoot researcher Charles Middleton believe the creature is “a relic of primitive man. Some think Homo erectus, some Homo heidelbergensis. As far as pure ape—no!” Jim Smith appears to agree, saying, “It may be an undiscovered ape, but I believe it will be an early evolution humanoid. My reason being it is much too intelligent.”

    Whatever one believes concerning the Bigfoot phenomenon, there is certainly no lack of evidence, anecdotal or otherwise. Past hoaxes have made the scientific community gun-shy but we here at the Birmingham Free Press want to believe.

    http://www.bfro.net/
    http://alabamabigfootsociety.com

  • PopCanon Reunion is ON, Motherfuckers!

    That possible PopCanon reunion I mentioned here a while ago is actually happening. After almost a full month of maddening 6-way emails about schedules and other details, we finally settled on a date of October 15.

    It will be in Gainesville, Florida (naturally) at a new club called Double Down Live (not to be confused with the ZZ Top album of the same name). As always, our good pals Squeaky will open. The famous PopCanon Fight Song has new lyrics for the occasion.

    We are scared to death.

    It’s been more than ten years since we’ve played together as a group. Some of the band members have not been playing much music at all in the past ten years. Ned said on the phone to me, “This is going to suck, isn’t it?”

    I said, “Maybe. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve sucked.”

    Ned replied, “Yeah, but we haven’t sucked on stage in ten years.”

    I said, “Maybe you haven’t, but I still do it all the time.”

    In all likelihood, it will not suck. We will have a couple of rehearsals the week before the show, and we all have a couple of months to brush up on things individually. I am very very excited about it, and I believe we still have a lot of fans in Gainesville that will be excited about it too.

    Man, we love to rock.

    So now, to prepare the set list.