Blimey

As you probably all know, life can get very busy. Too busy you might say, particularly too busy to polish turds or make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear… but nevertheless, we’re still trying to live the C90 dream.

My Red C90 is a bit poorly these days, so we aren’t going to be able to ride him to the premiere at Modern Art Oxford as originally planned. Instead we thought we’d do the next best thing:

The premiere is coming up very soon in fact, it’s this Thursday. Time has eaten itself, it’s vanished, it’s evaporated, it’s dissolved. So I should have said this ages ago, but if anyone wants a ticket they should probably buy one. There’ll be limited seats on the night and it might be wishful thinking that they’re going to fill up, but you never know. So buy one at this link:

https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/divine-schism-residency-23-april/

The Red Carpet

Another lease of life for our silly film is coming in a couple of weeks. We’ll be showing the whole thing, as intended, in it’s entirety, to an actual audience. They’re going to have to sit on chairs and everything. It’s a pretty terrifying prospect.

The venue will be Modern Art Oxford. A highly reputable and serious establishment… perfect for a highly reputable and serious film. The Andy Warhol/William Morris exhibition has been taken down, and C90 Dreams is going up. Well… not really. It’s just being shown once in the basement to a load of our (hopefully) drunken friends. Our faces are going to do a fair amount of wincing and reddening, lets hope the wind doesn’t change direction…right?

Thought it was probably worth thinking about what we should wear, as film premieres are pretty important things, and the whole world will be watching of course, with a capacity of around 60. So here we are just trying a few things out, seeing what works.

Seaside

We’re showing our C90 film at the museum of modern art in April.
It’ll be fun to have a beer and sheepishly watch it with people in public.

I thought I’d better write something about that but I’m feeling warm and tired and contented because I’m on holiday at the seaside at the moment.

My lad is snoozing at the end of the bed and outside our room I can hear cousins,uncles and aunties playing and chatting.

We’re Down on the south coast in the witterings. It’s very lovely.

We all went to west wittering beach today, a big sandy beach with a row of multi coloured beach huts at the back and old wooden groins jutting out into the sea every 100 meters or so.

It’s exactly like the seaside of memories self made or imagined.

I went clambering through the dunes with my boy Harrison. We hunkered down and sheltered from the wind which was whipping the sand into our faces.

I told him the dunes were a good place to hide, a good place to shelter.

They’re a good place to stop still and do nothing but watch the grass move in the wind and the clouds drift by overhead.

He found an old tent peg and wanted to know how it sounded when hit against different objects.

He’s not quite there yet with the stopping still stuff. He might never be. That’s ok too because we all have our different stopping places, hiding places. We all have our different times for doing or not doing.

Jamie

In defence of messing about

If you are most used to using the Christian calendar… Happy new year!!!

2014 was an excellent year for C90 Dreams, because above all, we finally allowed it to exist in spite of the desire to keep it as our pet project forever and ever without anybody but our close friends knowing about it. So yes, 2014, six years after the original slow and tortured departure for Greece, we finally told a story about a thing we went and did, and it felt good.

There is I believe, a lesson in both the execution of the journey itself, and the torturous six years of angsty amateur filmmaking that followed. It’s something I started thinking about this morning when pondering dreaded ‘New Years resolutions’.

The lesson lies in focus. What do people place their focus on in life?

Now, I can only speak from personal experience, but it seems that too often I focus on results. The desire to achieve something is too great and as soon as an idea is born I immediately ache to look back on my work and go “there, look what I’ve done!” But it just doesn’t work like that. How many times have you sat at a computer, picked up a guitar, taken your camera out, propped up your easel or picked up a pen and paper, only to find that you either start well and lose interest, or worse still you get a weird sense of inertia and just don’t bother starting?

When I worked in a music shop selling guitars, kids would come in and flail about wildly on shitty heavy metal guitars emblazoned with snakes and daggers, or make awful beats on drum machines convinced of their genius. Yes it was annoying, but do you know what was more annoying? Adults coming in, usually middle aged men, and asking the staff: “How long will it take for me to get good at the guitar?” Or “I want to build a home studio, what do I need?”

Their desire for amazing, stupendous results was totally clouding their judgement and they couldn’t see past it. They didn’t want to flail around on a £50 guitar like the kids, that’s just embarrassing. They wanted bloody results! And they were willing to pay for them. They wanted to be on Top of the Pops (insert modern equivalent, oh wait, there isn’t one) by the end of the year, or not bother at all. Sure enough, many of them just didn’t bother. Me saying “it’ll take you aboooooouuuuuut 15 years probably” might not have helped.

So, C90 Dreams. Why is it so beautiful? It’s because it focuses on the process.

I know we’ve said this a million times, but we never actually set out to achieve ANYTHING. The first four or five days were pretty painful and we got bloody grumpy getting lost really slowly. But once we stopped focussing on our sore bums, we felt this immense liberation. We suddenly realised there was no challenge to be completed, we were just bumbling around and that was fine. We were probably learning to be patient too. Eventually we didn’t care whether we actually made it to Greece or not. It then became a genuinely life changing experience, just because we forgot what we were actually trying to do.

Further still, we came back with tons of dodgy footage on little plastic blocks called ’tapes’. We somehow magicked these hours of dirge into a computer, and made a few crappy little videos that served as sort of trailers (I’ll post some, they’re fun). Then we set about actually trying to make a film out of the whole thing. It was regularly agonising, but often just hilarious reliving all the nonsense. Jamie and I would drink beer or wine, have dinner and just faff about with hours and hours of video. Over that time we taught ourselves to edit, deliver voice overs (ish), look for decent shots and most of all craft a bit of a story. Whether or not anyone thinks C90 Dreams is any good, it taught me a lot. I now make a living out of creating video content for people, something that I seriously think I can attribute to shoehorning a story into footage of three grown men being useless, stupid and free. In short, I had no focus on the results. I was in no way expecting to make a career out of it, but it looks like that is what I am doing, and I like it, it’s nice.

This isn’t true of everything in life of course, but there’s a lot to be said for just messing about. It can lead to your most creative moments, take you places you would otherwise never see, give you a new job, cause you to meet someone you’d like to spend the rest of your life with or just make life a little bit better.

Everyone’s New Years resolution should be to mess about more. It’s brilliant.

The Story of Red C90

I’m sure you’ll all agree that since my Honda C90 is red, it is totally linked to Christmas, so I’m allowed to talk about him. His name is ‘Red C90’, and he’s red and white in fact, like a big rusty christmas decoration. Kneel before his indestructible 4 horse power! That’s as powerful as FOUR horses!

The story of his acquisition is weird, and one worth telling I feel. Where to begin…

First we had to get over the theft of Jamie’s first C90 from outside the shop. Then we had to face up to the fact that my first C90 wasn’t up to the task, the old brown one hastily purchased from eBay you may have seen in several clips. So, we had to buy TWO more C90’s, one for me and one for Jamie if we were going to make it. This all happened in the week prior to the 25th of August, our leaving date. I went to a friends house for a barbecue on a Saturday night, got drunk and then had some strong coffee.

I contacted all manner of lunatics on Gumtree that night hoping for a result. Then on the Sunday morning after absolutely no sleep from worry, I boarded several trains into Essex, where two potential buys resided. I’ll hedge my bets I thought, two C90’s in roughly the same area, how can I lose? I was going to ride one of them home back to Oxford that day if it was the last thing I did. Despite the generosity of the first seller (can’t remember his name) who kindly picked me up from the station, he also had to drive me straight back there after I saw his heap of motorcycle shit.

So on I went to South Ockendon. Ever been there? No. Me neither. Well once, obviously.

On the train I realised that the insurance people closed the phones at 4pm on a Sunday. So I went ahead and payed for the insurance on a bike I had never seen or ridden in my life, questioning my sanity the entire time. On arrival it looked fine to me apart from the wonky steering column (it’s still wonky) and I had made my bed anyway by paying for the insurance. So without knowing how much oil was in it, or whether it worked properly at all. I shook Phil’s hand (I think his name was Phil), handed him some cash and blasted out of the end of the road to join the M25. No gloves, no sat nav, no smartphone, no map, I just went for it. Start as you mean to go on.

DSC_0022

After surviving a ghastly journey on the notoriously horrible motorway, I started to panic at the fuel gauge showing below half way so stopped for petrol. First I checked the oil level, which it turns out was incredibly low. Good. I bought a bottle of engine oil which I threw all over the petrol station floor trying to get it in the stupid little hole. I then pumped some petrol in only to find I could only get £1 worth into the tank. I joined an enormous queue of about 20 people in a busy motorway petrol station to hand over a one pound coin. The guy behind the till found it hysterical and said “That’ll be £100 please!” But I couldn’t laugh, I was too busy wondering what the bloody hell I thought I was doing. Once I’d paid I consulted an AtoZ in the station to try and figure out where I was. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, in my panic it looked like hieroglyphics and I went back outside to stand motionless for a moment freaking out. Then I called Jamie and explained roughly where I was, he said he was a bit drunk but was going to guide me back to Oxford.

Jamie became base camp that day. He told me which A roads to take and which road signs to look out for. It took me about 4.5 hours to get home. It was probably one of the strangest days of my life, a slightly drunk Jamie accepting my calls to tell him where I was and ask for further instructions.

Once I was in Aylesbury or somewhere, I started to enjoy myself. I was cold, unsafe, and I had been a total idiot that day but it had paid off. I had tested my new C90 by learning to ride it on the M25, and fumbling my way around the south of England. It was great. The police only followed me for a short while.

The whole ordeal was only a taster of what was to come. Red C90 still sits outside my house now, with a flat tyre I’ve been meaning to change for over a year. I love that bike. I should take him out.

02092008272

Where could I go? What could I do?

 

Liam

The beauty of simplicity

Does anyone remember not having a smart phone? Better still not even having a mobile phone? Or email?

We are forever at the mercy of people asking something of us, contactable in any number of ways, including barrages of information via social media of course. More than we could ever ingest. Worse still we volunteer ourselves up for it. I’ve just spent a significant portion of the day looking for a good deal on a new iPhone because mine’s a bit old. Why I’m doing this I have no idea, but I appear to be inextricably linked to having a smartphone nowadays, as a lot of people are, and mine is simply too slow and annoying. I want to access the universe FASTER, be pestered more regularly and spend more money.

I could just not do that, I could continue to miss calls because I tried to answer and hung up on them accidentally because the phone threw a wobbly, I could continue to try and answer emails and give up because the buttons aren’t doing much, but instead I want a new shiny one that allows me to be forever available and forever distracted.

We have become king procrastinators with little to no attention span. We’ve only got eyes for touch screens these days. I do at least have my partner to reign me in, with her Sony Erricsson phone and it’s missing buttons, snazzy colour screen and battery that lasts a month. She’s still resistant to this smart phone rubbish because, as she says “then I’ll just be like everyone else and will be constantly getting my phone out to look at it, even when I don’t need to”.

It’s this relentless checking that is so debilitating. I think I have genuinely spent entire days before just ‘checking’ things. Not even reading what is on the bloody internet, and there’s a lot on there. I could instead read a book, walk in the wilderness, go skateboarding or ride a C90 to Greece with no smart phone, no iPod, no laptop, no headphones, just the thoughts in my head and the meditative vibrations breaking my bum.

Then reward myself with a tiny beer from a petrol station and some crisps. Lush.

Liam

 

Here's Jamie and I washing some filthy clothes in a sink

Here’s Jamie and I washing some filthy clothes in a sink