I’ve listed a few of ideas I liked below to get you going, and you can find the rest (in printable form!) over here. "The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when panic, particularly in studios, tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach." In 1975, the magnificent Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt designed a method for promoting creativity, a. Delving deep into the history and development of David Bowie's Heroes I found out that during the recording of the album, Brian Eno made use of his set of cards: Oblique Strategies. Presented like a stack of playing cards from which he would pluck a prompt at random, Eno’s strategies are a way of remembering that - even when you’re psychologically flatlining - there are a million ways to think and to work: Created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975.
My mind wants to zigzag again.Īside from reading - so much reading - one thing that helped this week was Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: A set of simple directives the musician and producer conceived in 1975, as a way of breaking through the creative impasse of long stretches stuck in the studio. I’ve sat with my thoughts, and now I’m bored of them. And while my body is enjoying this period of enforced stillness - something that was long overdue for me personally - my mind is already putting up resistance. When I can’t think my way out of creative stalemate, I’ll take a walk, jump on a train, or sometimes even book a flight all in the pursuit of a random conversation or an unexpected landscape that might help my brain to recalibrate entirely.Īdventures like these are slightly thin on the ground right now. In the years since, I’ve often defaulted to spontaneous adventures as a way of breaking through the spells of mental funk. High on our newfound freedom, we jumped on a doubledecker bus without checking the destination and zigzagged across London until the fizz of that morning’s elation had worn off. But for some reason, on that otherwise unremarkable Saturday, it felt different.
We were precocious city kids, so ‘doing what we liked’ wasn’t exactly new to us. I’m not sure where this sudden (and let’s be real, not entirely accurate) realisation came from. On Saturday morning we woke up with the giddying awareness that we could spend the day doing whatever we liked. I was 13 and I had spent Friday night sleeping over at my best friend Ellie’s house. I’ve never forgotten the first time I truly felt it.
0 kommentar(er)
