Lever Fancies Björk!

Lip Service by Chris Lever (Last Hours #16)

This is Uncool
Adj. Slang
Not in accord with the standards or mores of a specified group.

This is a Carrie Bradshaw column. Sex and the City still on in the background, a parting hypothesis perturbs: ‘Maybe you’ve got to let go of who you are; to become, who you’re going to be?” Albeit with the aid of a Jimmy Choo, she hit the nail on its head.

I am inherently uncool.

I distrust people who dismiss their past’s validity for the sake of posturing in the present. Every time you deny a part of your past as uncool, a little part of you dies. I endeavour to stay consistent: on a cliff-top plateau, watching the waves of fashion crash down on the souls below. I wear a lot of plain clothes and cashmere jumpers. If it’s cheap, comfortable, and fits; I’ll wear it. If I’m desperate enough, I’d turn my girlfriend’s ‘Donnas’ t-shirt inside out and wear it too, Edd.

Cool people never get that desperate.

Our parents are cool. Almost all have a steady job; and all, at least one child. They have already achieved everything we’re so afraid of doing ourselves. The love and support, my parents gave me when I was growing, afforded me a lot of spare time. While they were preoccupied with raising me, I whiled my days away with uncool obsessions. When most of my peers were collecting football stickers, I was watching Dominick Diamond and Dexter Fletcher on ‘GamesMaster’, transcribing Sir Patrick Moore’s cheats into the ‘Sega News’ zine my friends and I were making at the time. I also became a devoted x-phile, curating my own secret dossier of episode synopses.

In the summer holidays I would spend a lot of that spare time with my Grandad; flocking terrain for Warhammer 40K, and sampling his record collection. One afternoon, upon collecting me after work I treated my mother to the impromptu rendition of ‘Johnny Be Good’ I rehearsed earlier that day. A couple of days later, after one of our frequent jaunts to Woodbridge - to stroll beside the Tide Mill, and complete the activity sheets in the Town museum - I bought a tape of Aswad’s ‘Warriors’ from the bargain bin in Woolworths. Fuelled by sweets and Kia-Ora, I listened to it all afternoon; repeatedly rewinding to write down the lyrics.

After spending a couple of summers home-alone - watching hours of MTV (US, before it became MTV Europe and Ireland) breaking only to eat sandwiches for lunch, an Supernoodles for high-tea - my parents bought me my first CD player. The first album proper I ever bought was ‘Melancholy and The Infinite Sadness’ by The Smashing Pumpkins. I remember how excited I was, at the opportunity to finally cross-reference the lyrics of ‘Bullets With Butterfly Wings’ with the ones I previously transcribed from a version I taped off the radio. Whilst I still regard this anecdote as indicative of relative cool I possessed in the past, when juxtaposed with the two CDs I bought before it, one can instantly observe, how inherently uncool I was. Nonetheless, I am not ashamed to confess: my first compilation was ‘Now 28’ and the first CD I ever owned, will always be MN8’s ‘I’ve Got a Little Something for Ya!’ A family friend my age, was obsessed with Michael Jackson at the time. Her bedroom door wallpapered with his image, which she would cut out of the National Enquirer, and every weekly rag he was featured in.

My parents eventually let me put posters on my walls; but only if they were laminated. The first space worthy of this privilege was reserved for the Spice Girls. Alongside every fourteen-year-old fanatic, I had all their CDs, and would regularly taunt my friend Tom, that Sporty was considerably more attractive than Posh. Unlike Tom, I never bought Smash Hits - which would explain the menagerie of stickers, posters and other wank paraphernalia adorning his walls - but recall the jubilation at beating him to that exclusive Pepsi single ‘Step To Me’; collecting my forty ring-pulls first! If you’re cool, I doubt I’ll be seeing you at their reunion.

My parents let me go to gigs.

The first I ever went, to was Alisha’s Attic, at the Ipswich Corn Exchange. Smash Hits brought this momentous occasion to Tom’s attention, as a plan hastily unfurled in ‘double History’. One of my art teachers was there too, keeping an eye on us from the balcony seats, as we drank lemonade with the cool kids frequenting the floor. Their self-titled album is amazing. In fact, it’s one of the last four I’ve listened to; counting down the cases on my CD player as follows: The Leif Ericsson, the first mix of an acoustic punk record I’m going to release, Acid Mother’s Temple, and…Alisha’a Attic. I remember catching them with a ciggie before their encore, and an inclination towards the alternative forming within me; albeit towards a couple of fag-hag blonde redheads perceived as the edgiest monster Smash Hits could have ever spawned.

Oh, how we push to transcend the limitations of our youth! How we race to be cool! Listening to the ‘Men In Black’ single at home, before taking the bus to drink stolen brown ale in the park with our bros! By the time B*Witched rolled into town - the following year - some of my cooler mates pissed on their limo.

I used to like Limp Bizkit! And Korn! You’ll never hear me deny it. Interviewed by The Evening Star whilst attending an exclusive preview of the ‘Issues’ album I was, and still have the cutting to prove it. We were given party bags and ‘popkorn’! Why would I seek to devalue any of those feelings that strangely made sense at the time? Puberty is embarrassing enough in itself; but to deny past tense in perpetual pursuit of what's presently cool, prevents the realisation of who you have become. Everyone has musical passions perceived as uncool; ‘skeletons’ in our closet-mindedness. I was ridiculed at school once: expressing an interest in a Björk biography, leading, in turn, to the class bully crying out ‘Lever fancies Björk!’, as our teacher entered the room. Needless to say, he had never heard of her, and did little to quell the furore that followed, at my expense. Ten consistent years later, that fancy was finally realised; I thought, as she took to the stage, at Glastonbury 2007.

I don't want to admit it, but when I’m hung-over, only Nora Jones and a sweet cup of tea have the potential to make me feel myself again. I know Jon from Captain Everything shares the sentiment somewhat further. When I think of how much I love Captain Everything! I cannot help but contemplate: is it because they’re cool, or so blatantly uncool? After all, they openly admit there’s nothing better than playing ‘Risk’ – The Classic Game of World Domination. I’m not a fan myself, and abhor playing Monopoly, but if you wannabe my lover, you’ve gotta get ‘Dreamphone’ out once in a while! When it comes to ‘bored’ games, I’ve played them all. I had a childhood, after all. Looking back on it as an adult, I can say with conviction, that ‘I wasn’t in such a hurry to get here’. Never stopping to consider what would tarnish my track-record, I eventually grew, into the person I was destined to be.

Can all the cool, kids of today; honestly say the same?

Chris Lever

End Notes:

Last Hours is relatively uncool too. Whilst researching this column I received a paradigmatic txt from Edd:

“Dude, I still listen to Michael Jackson, thought Captain Planet was cool as a kid and wanted to be a member of East 17.”

Nuff said.

The bespoke illustration for this column was crafted by the lovely Matilda Huang

A Grassroots Movement: Lessig's 'Change Congress'

Despite the huge list of ‘blogs’ pending the completion of my thesis, this one simply cannot wait. In an attempt to record a Virilo-esque history of the moment, I produced this transcript of the video:

Check out the video here

There’s been a lot of talk this political season about the idea of change. What exactly ‘change’ means is, of course, not clear, but what is clear is an agreement about where change comes from:

Barack Obama: “Change does not happen from the top down in America - or anywhere else - it happens from the bottom up.

Hillary Clinton: “It’s going to take a grassroots movement”

A grassroots movement: but as I look around in this political season I want to know where is this grassroots movement [in] the idea of simply electing a president. For a president cannot change Washington alone. He or she needs to be supported by others; others who believe in his or her values. They will make change happen. They are what’s necessary to make this change real.

So what are these values? In my view the most exciting part of the debate around change is the idea of changing how Washington works. Changing the influence of money in Washington. Not an influence that comes through bribes, but an influence that is produced by the economy of influence, that money now has in Washington, which skews public policy in extraordinarily important areas. For example, against the recommendation of the vast majority of nutritionists, the United States Government’s Food Nutrition Board now recommends that your kids get 25% of their calories from sugars, a change that occurred when the sugar industry happened to get just one more vote on that board. Or think of the story told in this fantastic film [http://www.maxedoutmovie.com/], about changes in bankruptcy laws that have occurred in the last eight years, making it easier for corporations to take advantage of bankruptcy, but almost impossible for lower, middle-class individuals to take advantage of bankruptcy, a change supported by major credit card companies pushing that idea through campaign contributions. Or think about the tragic delay of the United Sates taking responsibility for its contribution to global warming because of the millions spent in producing junk science, which complemented the political contributions by oil companies to support the idea that no change to stop global warming was necessary. The list here is endless, but there’s no need for me to repeat it because this is the one thing you know about how Washington works. You know about this corruption in Washington. A corruption that doesn’t come from evil people. Corruption comes from good people working in a bad system.

Now in my view ‘change’ – the change that progressives should be pushing for – is to change that system, to change that ethic, to change the power of money in Washington. Not because this is, in some sense, the most important problem, but because it is the first problem that has to be solved if we’re going to address these more fundamental problems later. Just as an alcoholic might be loosing his family, his job, and his liver, each alone, extraordinarily important, he won’t solve any of those problems until he solves his alcoholism first. We need to recognise that the power of money in Washington is our own alcoholism, that must be solved before these other – more important – problems ever get solved in the correct way.

So how could that ‘change’ happen? In my view this will take a coalition - a bipartisan coalition - of Members of Congress who pledge to three ideas.

1.That they will individually not take any money from lobbyists or PACs
2.That they will vote to ban earmarks in the congressional appropriations process
3.That they will support public financing of campaigns

People who take the pledge to these three ideas become part of the ‘Change Congress’ movement, and over a number of election cycles we can imagine the number of supporters to this ‘Change Congress’ movement growing dramatically. And as the numbers grow, it makes it possible to make real change in how congress works by making that change real in the political process.

So this is the first thing I want to announce in this video today: the launching of this ‘Change Congress’ movement, through the beginning of an exploratory committee that will be housed at this place on the Internet [http:change-congress.org] that will begin to gather together supporters and ideas for how this movement might be implemented.

Now I announced the basic idea for this ‘Change Congress’ movement in a speech I gave, billed as my last ‘Free Culture’ lecture at Stanford, and after that lecture someone came up to me and said “why don’t you do something about it? If it’s so important, why don’t you do something to bring it about?” Now that’s a totally fair question for a person who spends most of his life in the Ivory Tower. If indeed, this is important as I think it is, what can I do? Many others have said there is one thing I can do, they have been pushing me to consider taking the step to enter Congress myself. To run for an open seat that has just appeared in the district that I like in, the California 12th. There is a movement on the Internet to draft me to this position in Congress, a place on Facebook more than 2,000 people have joined to urge me to consider this step. So with lots of fear and uncertainty, the second announcement I making today is that indeed, I am considering this step, to launch a project to become a member of Congress, and by about March 1st I will make that decision, I will decide whether this is the best way to advance this movement to ‘Change Congress’.

But the one thing I want people who support this idea to recognise, is that this will be an extraordinarily difficult race, and not just because the message here is so insanely difficult to communicate to ordinary people in their ordinary lives, but also because the no.1 person running for this position right now – a woman named Jackie Speier – was an extraordinarily good State Senator. For thirty years she has lived in public service, indeed, so powerful has her service been, that a train has been named after her: the Jackie Speier Express. So nothing in this campaign would be a criticism of that extraordinary service, by that extraordinary public servant, but there is an important difference between Jackie Speier and me. This is a difference in the ethic, about how she runs her campaigns, for she takes money from the interests she regulates. As the chair of the Senate Insurance Committee she accepted over $250,000 in contributions from Insurance companies. It’s exactly that kind of behaviour that I think is wrong, and I would push for an ethic – an ethic that I think progressives everywhere should support, that would oppose that kind of influence. So maybe it is right that this campaign get launched by challenging precisely this kind of professional politician: not someone who is evil, not someone who is corrupt in the traditional sense of that word, but instead someone who is good, indeed someone who was great, within that old system of politics.

But change - the change we should be fighting for - is a change in that old system of politics. It is a commitment to this idea of a different ethic of politics. So if I decide to take this plunge – to run for Congress in this cycle - then I would commit:

1.to take this pledge – the ‘Change Congress’ pledge;
2.I would commit to use every effort I’ve got to build this national movement to change Congress, and;
3.I would offer something that not many politicians would offer – a guarantee: that if in two terms, the people in my district believe I have failed in this effort to change Congress then I would resign my position.

So if I run for Congress, those would be my 3 commitments. But I will only be able to run for Congress if you show your support right now. I need to see your support right now to understand that there is enough support for this idea, to make this campaign worth it: for it is very rare to have the chance to live in times, where there’s the opportunity for fundamental change. This is one of those times. We need to fix Washington now, before we can fix anything else that Washington’s involved with.