Since my own deck was for my own purposes, I decided to add my own artwork. I realize Schmidt and Eno’s decks had purposely been printed on white blanks, probably to remove any outside specific creative visual input as overly distracting. And very quickly, in the minutes before bed in the wee hours of the morning, I started writing out my own until after a few nights I found my own list had grown to 145 phrases. Like many before me, I thought of my own additions. There are even rogue PDFs to print and cut on cardstock, a simulacra acting like the photocopied samizdat Real Book that jazz musicians rely on to learn the standards.
#Oblique strategies for sale full#
Intrigued by Eno’s cards, I read through one of many lists online of the full deck. It’s comforting to be given a recipe, or a snippet of one, that gently steers us on a path of our own making. They also seem to trace a lineage to the instruction pieces of the fluxus artists like Yoko Ono. They remind me of Horse_ebooks, which had been believed to be an algorithmic spam bot but turned out to be handcrafted by a human. They are *open* and provide just enough structure to spark at least a little new thinking. They are simple and just vague enough, the way a fortune cookie’s fortune may appear. When you reach a creative impasse, you are meant to draw a single card from the deck and let its words or meaning guide you to a solution or path forward through the territory of lateral one, the card suggestions border right on the edge of understanding. What would your closest friend do? - What to increase? What to reduce? State the problem in words as clearly as possible. They are plain white with a standard card deck sheen and feel, but rather than a regular playing card they contain a choice phrase. What is Oblique Strategies? With the subtitle *Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas* it is a card deck containing over a hundred prompts for creative inspiration when blocked, especially created for musicians but useable by other creative practitioners. Ironically I no longer have access to this original deck. Of course years later I stumble across articles and interviews citing Oblique Strategies’ influence and now know I overlooked something incredibly special. The same size as a regular card deck, and rather plain-seeming beyond its odd plastic box, the deck did not impress me much. If this hadn’t been the Peter Norton edition, it would have come in a black box with white lettering, and perhaps that would have provided more information, but as it was, I felt a blankness at the time and I put the cards away. What I remember is that I was confused, and I put it away. I do not remember what it said, but I wish I did.
Inside was a deck of cards with words printed on them. I took the cover off a small white plastic box that was strangely shaped, almost like a tiny fat plastic cartoon bone dog toy. Oblique Strategies, “Fourth Again Revised and more Universal Edition”
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