The Metal Air of North Still Places

Animals need animals before the winter comes
The metal air swarms across the plains!
My long-necked, freckle-specked,
Heavy-chested, trust-invested sews her breath
Into my chest and hums--
Now what kind of county line
Holds her remains?
Copper and tin is bronze,
The dream felt nothing like this description.
We'll be glowing like those bonds
When I find you in a ditch and
Pontiac is half the way!
Pontiac is metal gray!
Pontiac is half the way to you...

Change of Plans?

I was thinking, stumbling upon this old web/log (thanks zach) today, that perhaps we'll make this part of the new website and keep it for various members of frontier ruckus and the mumbling crumbling tumbling porches to sketch thoughts or complaints or recipes. It's 6:48 am again and again I haven't been to sleep yet. Just wrote extensively about many issues involved with apartheid for the good portion of last night into this morning. I am studying in Ireland this spring. Dublin. Joyce. Beckett. Warm-sex headaches. Anna is probably going too. Frontier Ruckus is working on an ep: "I Am The Water You Are Pumping"-to be released before I/we depart=dark autumn hour/the back-lot world/rosemont/june is our mother's name/the blood/adirondack amish holler. We are recording it in one of the factories of downtown Detroit missing windows you see from I-75 (swallower of Christmas.). An old shipping yard with a freight elevator. Artist lofts. I live alone in East Lansing. Turning twenty-one. Frontier Ruckus is making lots of new friends. Most recently Canada ( www.thecanadianfront.com ) and Chris Bathgate (www.myspace.com/chrisbathgate ). They are inspirations and the kinds of people we would like to follow across the country this summer on a tour. We will tour this summer. Most recent songs are about Dark Window/Menstrual Fluid. I'm going to get Dave or Eli or Zach or Ryan or Anna on here to talk too. I feel metal air swarming in across the plains.

www.frontierruckus.com

www.frontierruckus.com is now established, though still in its latent stage. Visit it to view a moving picture of what the crippled summer looks like in its fuzz of fluids.

for all you enthralled patrons, most business will be addressed there from this panting moment onward!

Way Upstate & the Crippled Summer

To Matthew, by Matthew:
Cast down your celebrities and live for your breathing backyard. In my kingdom, the poorer is the richer and the richer is the poorer. It sounds like an adage combed into the vast and bucolic biblical landscape, it sounds like a parable. The red carpet leads to Hades, whereas the wide-eyed lotto store pebble alley leads to the base of the effulgent laketown watertower, which is: "hallelujah".
Success is humble direction steaming on rails around the bodies of poortown shining water; it is hollering so tacitly. It is passion for one's self, as well as a veritable amplifier to perform for all the other holy and desireless, sweetly obsolete, t.v. for unplugged-furniture folks rolling through the narrow kitchens of illuminated summer.
And for the sorrowful and ignominious starlets and heirs, with pockets leaden and a complexion so lurid, with cars speeding and tongues cutting the insides of their own spoiled mouths, fucking their sloganeers and scolding New York City's gorgeous upper shoulders—east and west—from an echoing, gaping, orifice of a place in burning L.A. ...find the wide-eyed poorman's alley and dumb your mind to celebrities and the gloss streaked toilet paper of People magazine, before that beckoning watertower dumbs its doming streams of light from you.
Because sometimes, for some reason, the prodigal son is born into a way so unconscionable that he never does return, an odious trick indeed.
goodbye status goodbye jealousy goodbye determinism
hello typewriter

JUNE IS OUR MOTHER'S NAME

I wrote a new song today, for the first time in a while and I am swelled by it. It is a tuning I've never used before. I just walked through the area's streets and main road and balanced across toppled telephone poles and grocery store ditches/bowling alley ditches. Anyway, the song is in DADGAD tuning and I made it while sitting on shadows of pure sunlight on the ridge of my greatgreenlawn.
It goes like this:

People barkin'-
They're callin' the good ol'summer down
They're gonna have a filthy roll-around
June!

Birds are speakin'-
They're wonderin' why
We're singing high notes for the air to kiss onto the
Moon.

But you love your tune!
And I love my tune!
And you love my tune!
And I love your tune!
In harmony, they croon
All throughout June!
Together they bloom...
A little something like this...

Warm-sex headaches-
Mine're back again,
They're my only friend,
I'm gonna send an old lakebottom to
You!

Haven't seen you
In years, your fragrance is pouring back
With the mugginess of the black
Midnight way to say
June's my mother's name too!
--------------------------------
My friend is still a walkin' down the old black watertower boulevard away from me. The watertower is way to our backs and is the lighted side. He walks into a stormlike bosom of tree poms. The dark poms of airbushes of featherleaves all panting and stealing air and color from the sky. He walks into that, and like with most of my friends, I know not when or if I'll see him again.

My memory is so sparse and I'm reading some books so I make waste of information more regularly than usual.

Vague social construction/illusory object/complete and utter truth revealed tonight:
Nothing can be unloved.

Jefferson Avenue

Split-level-deerpond-houses!
I will be down by the pond where deer do kneel
I will be the lilly pads cut by the keel

Did you know alternate realities do exist? The carpet-staired basement in the bungalow-green-lawn-grid-rain-night-house exists on the north side of Detroit in Birmingham or Ferndale as the same house's basement exists on the east side of Detroit in Grosse Point. And how the fam'lies love their kingdoms, through the curbs they know to where those curbs lead out to the ends of the kingdom with the blurred frontier, where the curbs get sore to reach the beginnings of another kingdom. Yet, where these two, of countless, kingdoms meet is a kingdom of its own, and the fam'lies of that kingdom see the other kingdoms' hearts as their dark and dimming frontiers. And how these lots of geography and constructs-of-emotion just blend into each other. All the basements connect. And they all hold their trailorpark movie emporiums that are cojoined-twin-crumbled to their dollar store neon and it's so beautifully identical you could blink at one and watershed your way like raintrash through the highway resevoir gulleys to the other by the time the lashes part.
And I live like sweating lawn mower waiting in sidegarage-green-paint-stuffiness that is deemed to every house of every shaved and lapping lawn that crewcuts its parted hairline to kiss the sidewalk's caulking.

But where the grid does grow shaggy and splintered like rain-cloud-summer-skilift-lone-church-shed-collapsin'-drive-in-driving-range-outskirts, the land of the hour-drive cottage, where the last frontier of kingdoms end,

I will be down by the pond where deer do kneel
I will be the lilly pads cut by the keel...

Communication is a killer!
Impaled by a grassblade on the slope of raintint lawn from the Grosse Point mansion stacks-like sticks out of saintclaire mud-and the blades hand me in motion to the perpetual-summer-continuation-curb of the thick air boulevard!

...Jefferson Avenue told me tonight, it said, "My brains are of gravel and I want to feel Gratiot running the length of my innards, and me its. Turn right at Belle Isle, with the looming behind you, and you dead-end, like childhood-restaurant-vague-kingdom-(city)-((ROSEVILLE))-reminder. Turn left to the jungles and you will find everyplace there is, you will find the dusk and the girl you first came with and the skipping of that pink-fleshed, flower-showered shining girl's father's car that rolls you back through the homes of her radical lifetime and safe to your now-shared remote frontier, all in the time it takes the night to fall like stones from my tallest building.

You will find every place, but never know in what kingdom-town you are."
matthew`c`milia

Impact Basement Part II

As I previously warned, the first half of the Frontier Ruckus Impact Basement show has been removed in place of the second half. Listen below...

This is a live-in-the-radio-studio recording at the Impact's "Basement" radio show. The performance took place April 6th.

Also make sure you check out Frontier Ruckus's myspace page for a new song uploaded, that is if you haven't already!

Come Meet Friendly Frontier Ruckus!

My Jungs have wives, in hem.

Fortville, Indiana; where the campsite meets the highway: we'll be there next week, but we'll already've been there, in our heads, for this week.

Except, all we have is the archetypical image of a small town like any other we've passed through on our way to larger ones. Sewing the commemorative quilt before the occasion and painting the landscape before we've seen the land is how we're imagining a place we know nothing about. Combining my town with yours and our friends with all those places we passed.

We'll be there, in Hancock County, next week, April 22nd.
-Zachy

My Lungs Have Knives in Them

Health is such a sticky thing. All the lofty, wafting wispy homes of your made-up mind do ride on it. I have this corner in my mind where the walls are made up of farm fields and dusk colored gravel and tender ravines and first-love teeth and fat doggy-eared Bibles and trash-town castle-churches with fifty-big-screen-tv-screens and rock'n'roll bands.....all these settled-county kinda places. Does this corner fog up when my mindless body is gasping for air with acute respiratory fits that pierce my chest and ruin my world? Body and soul, what divides you!

Kevin (and I) spent a long time mixing 'Epiphanies and Revelations' tonight. It is coming along. It's a drawling country diddy about summer sidewalks—do you remember those green, sweating fringes?

The Lucero show was interesting. Don't know if we were enough-loud-energy for some of the folks, but talked with Ben Nichols briefly at the bar and he seemed like a terrific guy. He remarked that we sounded real pretty and I must admit, seeing him perform was greatly inspiring and raw. Don't really care for the sound qualities of the Temple Club's upstairs.

Cough cough the world is crumbling. Oh asthma. Oh seasonal cough cough. Why, what brings you?

Now I'm sittin' here, a "half-sick", sleepin' through the day glow, walkin' outside once-a-sunshine to see how far along the lilacs are comin' and spittin' in a bucket.

When some vile foreigner (a virus which I know not is even a living spirit, like ma-self!) is trapped in your lungs, you think:
"when you're sick you want to die/when you're healthy you want to live/when you're sick you want t.v. to die, but you watch it/when you're healthy you want t.v. to live, but you leave it to roll around the sun-scortched lots/when you're sick, sex is death/when you're healthy, sex is rolling around the sun-scortched lots"

Shining in their thawing! Shining in their dawning!

I'm so ecstatic with the way band is sounding nowadays. Tonight we played on 88.9 The Impact's program "The Underground". We were sans Davey, who had an exam in Ann Arbor, but we still played like highway souls and barnyard holes. We played, between various banter and interviewing: 'Rosemont', 'Epiphanies and Revelations', 'Adirondack Amish Holler', 'One-Story-Carport-Houses!'. We were severely worried as to where Eli was up until very close to the showtime, but as always, he came raging in with a storm of manic concentration and proud duty. He plays the bass, shift-eye, and textbook.
We were graced with Smalls' entire fam'ly sitting in on the session-I really hoped they enjoyed it after their long drive from a fam'ly trip. Also sitting in with support was Zach's friend Ben Phillips who, likewise, has recently returned from an even longer distance and sabbatical-London, England.
Lately I'm eliciting tremendous warmth from singing 'One-Story-Carport-Houses!' with my friends. I like when we chant together. I like the idea that we can feel something together, even if that idea is only my feeling/illusion. I sincerely hope they can feel something too; and, that being something I can never existentially know for certain(?), it is simultaneously my great fear and before-bed wish.
I feel anxiety and pressure. To constantly remind those I appreciate that I constantly appreciate them. With every new person to know the anxiety is greater. But as the Moment grows wilder into new perspectives, denser, thicker, seen from higher-Dakota becomes the Great Plain and the Great Plain becomes the Western Hemisphere. There is no way to simply interact. With each new construction of each degree of the Moment, life becomes fatter and harder to reconcile... all else that's not me: stranger, and all parts making me: vaguer. With this, mediation between individuals becomes either absolute (every person is one, alone) or completely illusory (every person is one, together)-depending on how far you take it.
The only songs we can sing are traces of something simple that you simply and heavy-heartedly believe actually happened someplace simpler, back with that new pair of eyes in a new world, simply . That Easter corner of my grandparent's lawn did happen! The corduroy wallpaper/the streets in the cities connecting to other streets and all the touching cities did happen! And it was simple. Simple is narrow and narrow gets a bad rap...many long to drift towards open but open is scary and away from the most crystallized instance of yourself, when you actually were one, simple and narrow and smiling like a song. I want to make a life-of-a-living singing simple songs about the times of crying I believe actually happened. So much has happened! and it all seems so simple and appetizing behind me. Backwards gets a bad rap but simplicity is a backwards voyage and though nothing in the Moment's lost, Dakota fades in degrees and soon appears as the Yukon. Pontification is masturbation and both occur rampantly downstairs at the saloon and upstairs in the brothel of the North Town Frontier. Out by the pond, though, around the mounding potter's field, when the sky is purple and the air drops sprightly, people shout, "Yards are overflowing! Lilacs and the knowing...that our bodies...made this season come!...made the child'ren succumb..."

I Shall Become One, I Shall Become Nothing!

Saturday was devoted purely to recording since the whole band was contained to East Lansing for the weekend; and we stirred to life from a long night at 9 am. Mike Vasas, creator of Grammy Hall Records and our first producer of the day, constructed a magnificent one-day studio in the basement of Landon Hall with the use of scrap lumber, a big screen t.v., his bed's comforter and very expensive vintage Neumann microphones. It turned out to be a great space—all carpeted and wood-paneled. We began with Rosemont which worked out incredibly. Zach's singing-saw with reverb filled the room and haunts the track. For the climax, after the soft guitar part, we did two tracks of everybody yowling the words together and it sounds like the ghosts of everybody who's ever lived on Rosemont Street. We did banjo and guitar (Dave and I behind the comforter-made sound booth), drums (mic'ed on the other side of the room), and acoustic bass (direct input) all at once. My vocals, Anna's vocals, melodica, and singing-saw were all done separately. The drums and bass really drive the song, and give it a whole new dimension in rhythm. Can't wait to hear it mixed.
Next we did You, What You Are (working title?) and it turned out raw and intense and very enjoyable. This song never had a crystallized form so we kinda winged that, really only knowing that there are three sections of lyrics with space to roam in between. I did a vocal track with the instruments and then a doubling vocal separately. Anna's harmony punches in at "worried homes have walls..." and comes and goes like a response to the narrator. The bass in this song is bouncy and driving. Thinking Hammond or Wurlitzer solo by Mike at one part. Other solos include Dave's dulcet plucked-banjo part and Zach's absolutely uninhibited saw solo. I'm dying to hear this recording again soon to reassure me of it's merit.
That night we recorded with Kevin Fein at the Comm. Arts Building to finish Epiphanies and Revelations! We added banjo, melodica, harmonica, my vocals, Anna's vocals, and Dave's vocals to the already existing guitar, drums, and bass. It came together so well. Anna's harmony makes the song and is undeniably country twang. Dave got the banjo take down perfectly in one take, same with Zach on melodica, which sounded incredibly warm-toned. I tried to sing with a quaking kinda heart and I think it came out well. The one-verse-pedal-steel track will be recorded in my room and added later. Again, can't wait for the mixing. Epiphanies and Revelations and Adirondack Amish Holler will definitely be a different production than the Rosemont recordings—much cleaner and meticulously arranged, but I see both projects working together dynamically. Afterwards, we went to IHOP and laughed our brains off.
I'm starting to blog like Mike Vasas.

Band will soon be arranging old/new Matt songs into powerful/new/hammered-out-full-ensemble Frontier Ruckus songs: Orion Town, Mount Marcy, One-Story-Carport-Houses, Ogallala, Abigail, Foggy Lilac Windows.

Other songs will remain forever-minimal in instrumentation: Lumberjack Freedom, Dark Autumn Hour, The Great Lake Town, The Back-Lot World.

What You Want You (Won't) STILL Want Once You Have It

A woo-hoo for winning battles of the bands. $1,500 to spend at Elderly Music.
When they said 'Frontier Ruckus' I was swelled with a certain fluid of euphoria, disbelief, and intense appreciation for Dave, Smalls, Zach, Eli, and Anna. I've always wanted to hold one of those over-sized novelty checks. We shouted shortened versions of 'Epiphanies and Revelations', 'Rosemont', and 'Adirondack Amish Holler', all with a lot of heart.


Why does goal-attainment always come with some kind of inherent guilt or subliminal self-doubt? Why when steep dreams are met do they seem awkward afterwards? It's strange dealing with a lot of things. It's hard dealing with the way things build themselves using everything else for construction. "Hell is other people"? So is heaven?

Frontier Ruckus is the only-child who has trouble playing with the outside world even when they're winning. Red-faced and displaced but in love and admired!

Catharsis is a Sun-Bleached Bitch

Songs that could/will be on our full-length album if we ever make it in these dark and latter days:

-Rosemont
-Epiphanies and Revelations
-Abigail
-Foggy Lilac Windows
-Adirondack Amish Holler
-Winter and the Preacher's Daughter
-You, What You Are
-Lumberjack Freedom
-The Great Lake Town
-One-Story-Carport-Houses!
-Dark Autumn Hour
-Ogallala
-Mount Marcy
-The Back-Lot World
-Orion Town

I'm a-missin' many an old dream gone-by.

This just in—Frontier Ruckus sharing the stage with Lucero! at the Temple Club, April 11. This shall be an awesome night to share with, predictably, a packed house.

Furthermore, we are wrapping up the recordings of "Epiphanies and Revelations" and "Adirondack Amish Holler" which will be issued as some form of a single—they will even comprise Sides A & B of a limited vinyl relase. The tracks will also be included on the EP which will commence to be recorded next weekend.

Yes, it's 6:12 AM and I've been awake all night. First, planning out routes and venues with Zachy for the proposed summer tour. Amongst others, we have our eyes set on The Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas; The Conservatory in Oklahoma City; Cicero's in St. Louis; and Modified in Phoenix. We'll have to save Zach's long-wished for joints such as the 40 Watt in Athens and the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco for another trip.

I've been sitting all night and morning reading about Kant, voyeuristically tear-eyeing new photos of an old pretty face who's forgotten me, watching the sky lighten, and half-wishing my mind was a pedal steel guitar mechanism and that alone. Wud'ya rather be beauty and not know it? or be beauty and have a conscious which is naturally forced to doubt it as well as naturally incapable of wholeheartedly negating it?

Everyone I've loved and everything I've done is an artifact out of context. But that's not poetry at all, and the two are one forever! I sing now "All is something...Lost is nothing." Just degrees of separation are perceived. I miss the dumb-eyed tender girl with the slender neck to hold me in bed when my foolish mind wants to wake up from dreaming. Dreaming was much better, there along some feathery dark pool of lake water trapped inland. Oh she was suddenly shy and the whole forest did blink for a moment when we became wet.

*Frontier Ruckus goes on at the International Center this Friday around 10 pm.