Phthursday Musings: Villanelles and Catamounts

When I was in college, there was a general ed requirement to take one “arts” class: art, music theory, something along those lines. As a double major in history and political science who had flirted with majoring in math and computer science, I only wound up taking one such class, and the one I chose was a creative writing class. This was spring semester in 1996.

I feel like I was a little outrageous at the time, and I was trying to find my way by being unnecessarily brash, and some of what I wrote was like that. But I can’t find anything I wrote and I’ve forgotten what it all was… except for one poem. This poem was a villanelle - a nineteen-line fixed verse poem, and I think I wrote it in iambic pentameter. I actually think I wrote this insane thing in iambic pentameter'. I mean… I really tried to make something really good.

Alas, I don’t know where it is. But I remember the line I repeated:

You should not try to regulate my speech

And I remember the name I gave it: “May Ye All Be Leahy”.

Yes, I wrote a 19-line poem in iambic pentameter all about how much I despised the Communications Decency Act.

Per Wikipedia:

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the United States Congress's first legislative attempt to regulate obscene and indecent material on the Internet. In the 1997 landmark case Reno v. ACLU, the United States Supreme Court unanimously overturned most of the statute due to its restrictions on freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The CDA passed as part of the larger Telecommunications Act of 1996, a very important and overall terrible piece of legislation. and it passed overwhelmingly: 414-16 in the House and 91-5 in the Senate. The 5 Nays in the Senate were Russ Feingold, Paul Wellstone, John McCain, Paul Simon, and my inspiration, the most outspoken opponent of the CDA, Patrick Leahy from Vermont.

I go into all this to say, in my roundabout way, that I’ve cared deeply about free speech for 30 years, and I’m paying close attention to what’s happening in America currently, and it’s chilling, and it’s hypocritical, and it’s a whole lot of things.

And I was going to write more here, a whole lot more, but I’ve seen other bloggers say what I’ve wanted to say better than I could. I want to focus on an understated aspect of what’s happening: it’s not just about freedom of speech, it’s also about control of media, and what we’re experiencing right now is the danger of a corporate media in the thrall of an authoritarian regime.

Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t taken off the air because what he said “crossed the line”. He was taken off the air because NexStar is seeking Trump administration approval for a merger. And so too is Disney. And Trump’s FCC has the power to block these corporate mergers, which shouldn’t be happening at all… but they are, because of, you guessed it, the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Seriously, read Matt Stoller’s piece, he says it all much better than I could.

So much of what has gone wrong in America can be tied back to corporate media - an overwhelmingly right-wing corporate media which for a long time has suppressed unpopular viewpoints, even when not pressured to do so by authoritarians.

But Stoller offers a way out, which is incredibly similiar to something I’d already written. Before I read his piece, I had written this, and I’ll hold to it:

There is a long-term way out of all of this: the Democrats have to become populists again, and they have to throw off the shackles of neoliberalism and Clintonism. And I think that’s going to happen. I think the American system, for all of its obvious flaws, offers corrective mechanisms, albeit slow ones. And when it happens, we have to take immediate strides to dismantle the corporate billionaire state, and do so in a way that is a hell of a lot more sensitive to the very real fears that a lot of Americans rightly have about their futures.

I’ll also echo this point that Stoller makes: Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries might be part of a short-term solution, but they’re more so part of a long-term problem, indicated by how overwhelmingly the Telecommunications Act passed in 1996.

But this can all change, and to this point, for those of you in Illinois, we’ve got an interesting primary coming up in 2026 for who will succeed Senator Dick Durbin. Two of my questions for the three leading candidates: Will you vote against Chuck Schumer for majority leader? And will you vote to repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996?

Can you win my vote? Hell, maybe I’ll even write a villanelle for you.

None of the five Senators who voted against the Telecommunications Act are still serving, but there is one sitting Senator who, when in the House, voted against that wretched bill. Would you be surprised to learn that he’s from the same state as Pat Leahy?

I found this fantastic photo from probably the 80s some time, which I assume is Pat Leahy with Bernie Sanders (then Mayor of Burlington) celebrating bringing baseball back to Burlington.

This all makes for a fine pivot to this week’s Phthursday Flag, that of Burlington, Vermont:

I know Burlington well, since my company’s home office is in an adjoining town. In fact, this week marks ten years I’ve been with the company, which probably means something on the order of 20+ trips to the Burlington area.

And yet I have no idea what this flag is, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Even weirder, it was adopted in 2017, a time when I was actually following the local news in Vermont.

I really do not know what to think about this flag.

Allegedly the blue is the sky and the lake, the white is the snow of the mountains and the breakwater (really?), and the green is because Vermont is the Green Mountain state.

But is that what you see? What I see is like… the logo of a paper company or something.

It’s not that I’m opposed to abstract flag design, but there’s something just not quite right here, and my theory is that it’s just entirely the wrong shade of green. It should be more of a forest green, not a dandelion stalk green. Or, probably, it should be exactly the same shade of green as on the logo of the University of Vermont:

That’s a catamount, by the way. As in, mountain lion. Cougar, if you will. Puma, verily.

Apparently Burlington was inspired (or maybe shamed) by a TEDtalk given by Roman Mars in 2015 about bad city flag design. Somehow I’d never seen this TEDtalk even though that was right around the time I started listening to 99% Invisible. (Admittedly I haven’t listened now for about four years… but I’m still into design… except not so much so… well, really, I think you all just need to talk to me more about design. If I can write a villanelle surely I can design a flag, right?)

Anyway, this all gave me occasion to listen to this TEDtalk from Roman Mars, and among other things, now I know what Roman Mars looks like! I kind of wish I’d seen this ten years ago though. Or, well, if there had been a flag design class in college, I probably would have taken that instead, and never written a villanelle at all…

We are on the precipice of Silkworm week, four shows in four nights, something which I might have found extreme when I was an overly brash 19 year old. May my back hold up.

I am especially excited to at long last see the legendary Joel R.L. Phelps. To my great surprise I found that there are actual official videos for songs from Gala, the 2013 album from JRLP + the Downer Trio. (There’s not actually an and a trio… the band is Joel plus Robert Mercer on bass and William Herzog on drums.)

Somewhere along the way a video from a May 2001 Silkworm show at Schubas was unearthed and I have not seen this before:

If you’re around Chicago and you’ve given even an iota of thought to it: Yes, come out and see one of the Silkworm shows. If you need a ticket for one of them, reach out to me. I’d love to see a lot of extra familiar faces around the room.

This past week, so many years so late, we watched the documentary Couldn’t You Wait? The Story of Silkworm. I’ve had it for a decade and was… waiting for something? I guess this is what I was waiting for.

I don’t think I’m ever going to have another experience like this upcoming week again. It’s not exactly that I think I’m getting too old for it but rather… I just can’t imagine being willing and able to make this kind of commitment for any other band.

When I think a long way ahead to what “retirement” might look like, I admit that one of my “best” ideas is to live a block away from a place like Fitzgeralds where I could go see live music from touring artists (and sit while doing so) any night I so pleased. I don’t know what the hell is going to happen to our country, our planet, but I can’t imagine ever being without music as a driving force, and when I’m 80 I still want to be seeing what the 20 year olds are coming up with. I wish I was out doing more of that, if I’m being honest. The guitar-heavy rock sound I gravitate to might not be in ascendence, but please, next generations, take over anyway. It’s all good by me.

Okay, here’s a real stretch of a way to try and tie things together… when I last saw Mint Mile in April (Mint Mile being Tim Midyett’s band, Tim being Tim from Silkworm), it was at a bar in Logan Square: Burlington.

Alas, friends, I’m tired, I’ve got a very busy week coming up, and after all this I’m sure one of you is going to make me write a villanelle about flags and rock bands. Look for “coverage” of Silkworm week here, and damn it, keep on exercising your freedom of speech!