But when she went to leave she put on a record for him. “I’ d assume so, here ’ s a guy who came up with his own deck of cards and wore eye shadow and shiny jackets. “ My homeboy Brian Eno got hit by a car and split his head open and while he was in the hospital recovering one of his ex-girlfriends came over to see him in the hospital. “ What happened was homeboy got hit by a car. I had to put on something a little louder to compete with the noise, so I put on David Bowie ’s Low (which he collaborated on with Brian Eno), but I kept talking about Music for Airports to my mom and Rae, who were admiring their gingerbread house and sipping their coffee.
A few minutes later we heard his TV in his bedroom blasting Sherlock Holmes. My dad came out of the bathroom and looked at the TV, which was now blue, in A.V. I got up and shut the TV off and put on an album instead. I can listen to music while I work on creative projects, but listening to a TV show is insane. “ Oh my god, ” Mom said, “ That ’s brilliant. “ We ’ ll use Twizzlers for the edge of the roof and it will look like rain gutters. “ I don’t know why, but it gave me an idea, ” Rae said. This one said, “ Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable ”. This is just a way of saying the world is funny bullshit.” I turned over another card. Fortune teller, you’d have to believe in magic. Rae said, “ What does your fancy fortune teller say about it ?” “ I really don ’ t know about gingerbread houses. “ Okay, if we skip the gum drops what else are we supposed to use? ” “ Does a regular house have gum drops on the edge of its roof? ” “ I don ’ t know, a regular house, I guess. I read it aloud, “ What else is this like? ” ” I shuffled the tiny pieces of paper and picked a strategy at random. “ What do you think, Bud, should we use gum drops for the roof trim like the picture shows? ” My mom spread white frosting with a silver butter knife. A red starfish became, “ Change ambiguities to specifics ”. So, I cut with the scissors, and pasted a strategy on the back of a Go Fish card. Some of the Uno Cards had been gnawed on by a seven pound Maltese that runs the house. Uno would have also worked but the cards were sticky because my second cousin spilled a glass of Hawaiian Punch on those cards the summer before, also ruining a white lace tablecloth. Since there are only 52 cards in a standard deck of playing cards and I need 100 over cards, I was using a combination, a deck of Go Fish amended with a few Old Maid cards. I was doing a craft of my own, snipping away with a pair of dull scissors, cutting out the Oblique Strategies and glueing the strategies to the back of a deck of cards I found in my mom ’ s china cabinet. Rae was drinking coffee at the table next to me, and working on a gingerbread house.
My father was watching Sherlock Holmes on the TV at full blast, as if Sherlock Holmes were a rock concert. A spiral ham in the oven for Christmas dinner. On December 23rd, 2018, my mom ’ s house smelled like ham. 15 sheets of Georgia-Pacific standard bright multipurpose 8.5 ” x 11” paper later, I was on my way. “ Try faking it ” my first strategy read.
”Ī google search led me to a WordPress site with a printable PDF of Oblique Strategies.
Ĭhad Mossholder left a one star review: “ LOL! You can print them online for free. But his criticism was inaccurate, the cards were created in 1973, 5 years before Eno produced More Songs About Buildings and Food, and after that, Fear of Music, and after that Remain in Light. ” Three stars, said Greg Maffei, who raised an interesting point about money and how it forces people to make ugly decisions.
The Talking Heads production royalties must be running out. “ It’s pretty cool, kind of expensive for what it is. Or would it? Could I afford not to purchase Oblique Strategies? I consulted the user reviews. I checked my bank account and quickly realized, it would be a financial disaster if I spent $60 on a deck of mystical cards. The Oblique Strategies cards retail for $60. Having no ideas myself anymore, and also wishing to create a masterpiece, I went on Amazon dot com and typed in Oblique Strategies. ” With an open mind, and the guidance of those cards, Eno wrote Another Green World, a masterpiece of the avant-garde. One card says: “ Abandon desire.” Another says: “ Remove the middle extend the edges. The strategies are prompts meant to spark creativity. Something like 100 cards in all, each card with a ‘strategy’ printed on it. Oblique Strategies is a system developed by Eno and the painter, Peter Schmidt. He had no ideas whatsoever, having largely abandoned traditional songwriting, and now coming into bloom as an artist ‘ playing the studio.’ He carried with him a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. In July of 1975, Brian Eno entered Island Studios to record his third album, Another Green World.