Monday, March 1, 2010

Brian Eno: A Tuesday in 1987

After viewing the BBC interview with Brian Eno, I was struck by his willingness to try something that he may not be good at- what could be called Play. As he states, we are told by our culture that we must pay attention to ourselves and that we must take control. By giving up this need for total control, to surrender, we give ourselves permission to enjoy doing things like singing that we might not be good at. We can hunt for fossils without being paleontologists, we can sing in the choir, we make drawings for pleasure without the thought of producing a show piece. I think this lifting of our own urge to self-criticize frees us up to explore, though I can relate to other posts, which refer to having perfectionist tendencies. I think that the automatons shown in this piece are incredibly evocative, juxtaposed as they are with Eno’s creativity, like making maps of the events of his daily life. Whenever I'm feeling stuck in a rut, I’ll have to try that to remind myself that I'm getting somewhere even if I don't yet know what that "where" is.

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