"...But Is It Art?"

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,
We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart;
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art ?"

That is Kipling.  It's from a poem called the Conundrum of the Workshops. 

I don't know a lot of Kipling.  I know that he wrote probably the best tribute to the heartbreak of losing a dog.  I know also that he wrote the story that became one of my favorite John Huston films, "The Man Who Would Be King."



I was reminded Kipling as I read this essay by Jamy Ian Swiss.  Swiss is a working magician and author of some of the best book reviews I have read on magic, or any other topic.

Swiss makes the case that magic is held in low regard by its audiences because, in large part, it is held in low regard by far too many of its practitioners.  In the interview with Derek DelGuadio that I have previously written about, he notes that in no other art form is a low threshold of skill celebrated.  The self-working tricks that I relied upon as insurance against a hostile audience may have democratized magic, but they have also diluted and diminished it.

What were originally intened as "gateway" effects, designed to give the beginner the sense of accomplishment that would, in theory drive them forward in the study and development of technical ability, became an end it themselves.

Purchasing a magic trick can be an excercise in disappointment especially if the goal of the transaction is to learn the secret.  As has been noted elsewhere, the technology is, by necessity, simple and reliable.  Anyone expecting very complex technologies is bound to be disappointed.  I would wager that if one were made privy to the secret of Copperfield's Statue of Liberty vanish, the initial response would be "Really?"

And for those who are not chased out of magic by their disappointment, the next area of concentration is on technique.  They move beyond the self-working "toys" and concentrate and what has come to be described quite accurately as "knuckle busting."

To travel the halls of a magic convention is to see clusters of magicians showing one another their interpretation of some move or another.  This time-honored process has led to life-long relationships and the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, but, divorced from a lay audience, it becomes at some level like an echo chamber with each new iteration lacking something of the fidelity of the one that came before.

I used to work with a colleague who had a sign in his office that read, in effect,

"That's all very well and good, but what is the audience doing during all of that?"

Swiss maintains that magic sucks because too many practitioners concentrate on fooling the audience and ignore the opportunities that come from having accomplished that.  It's as though after having used the red crayon, the artist felt sufficiently self-impressed to ignore the other 63 colors in the box. 

Imagine the possibilities that arise after you have convinced an audience that their assumptions about the way the world works can be manipulated, or even subverted all together.

There is an often-repeated theory to explain the enduring popularity of Houdini.  It holds that, at the time of his career, America was experiencing a massive influx of immigrants from eastern Europe.  They had escaped oppressive regimes and arrived in a new world where they spoke little, if any, of the language and found themselves forced to work in oppressive conditions for miniscule wages.  Houdini, himself an immigrant, showed them with each new appearance that they too could escape and overcome any challenge.

It's not clear that this was every explicitly a part of his performances, but the implication is there for the taking.  In our own time, David Copperfield demonstrated that, under the right circumstances, and with the right piece of Peter Gabriel's music, he was capable of just about anything.

Magicians talk about magic as an art form and I am not certain they have made a convincing case for it to be considered as such.  What is more certain is that it, like the Crayolas referenced earlier, is a medium to allow for the exchange of ideas and emotions.



It's always a challenge to attribute poetry to Penn & Teller, but this is pretty close. Not only does it contain strong technical magic and their trademark blood, but it is in service of a grander idea.

Don't get me wrong, I'll watch a performer saw a woman in half all day long, but it is an illusion without an effect.  Despite what we see, we know that the performer has not really cut his assistant in two.  In my country, we would call that "murder."  So, it's a trick and we, as audience members, are being fooled.  And, as Swiss points out, only magicians think the audience likes to be fooled:

Quite possibly the single most egregious myth that magicians have perpetrated on themselves (and, I might add, it is solely upon themselves), is that "it is fun to be fooled." Really? I don't think so. Was it fun to buy that new car only to discover it was a lemon? Was it fun to declare fidelity in a marriage vow, only to be cuckolded? Was it fun to vote for your choice for the highest political office in the land, only to learn that he subverted the Constitution that he swore to uphold, or had to flee from office in order to escape Congressional subpoena?

If then magic is a medium--a means, rather than an end in itself--what should magicians be doing with it?

Magic, I would argue, is a medium for telling stories and in that way is most like theatre.  And, when I was studying theatre, one of the most important ideas I learned was about dramatic action.  This idea should strike a chord with performers because it is about transformation.

With each new play we would study, we were obliged to ask the question who is the character that is changed most by the events of the play?  In a play like "Death of a Salesman," it is Willy Loman, but in a classic play like "Antigone" it could be just as successfully argued that it is the character of Creon who is most transformed.

Answering this question of who is acted upon, who is transformed, gives the key to the production.  It informs the direction, the design and the performances.  And without an answer, the production can seem aimless and the performances uninspired.

It is interesting to note that  a little more than 100 years ago, the great British magician John Nevil Maskelyne made his reputation, in part, on presenting his illusions within the context of  short plays.

Does every effect have to be framed within some kind of "Once Upon a Time" context?  No.  But every effect should be considered, routined and sequenced with this in mind.

Sometimes the story a performer tells is about themselves as a magician:  each new effect adding to the legend and creating specific expectations within the audience.  And sometimes the story a performer tells is just about a specific effect...



I would argue that without his patter, "Sam the Bellhop" is unremarkable and difficult to follow. With the patter, Malone bolsters his character as the kind of guy you would want to meet in a bar and share a beer with. He also gives a context for all of the shuffling and dealing which, in turn, emphasize his mastery of the deck.


Eugene Burger does something quite remarkable with an effect known as the "Gypsy Thread."



The magic is very basic, and yet the effect is dramatic in the sense that the audience is transformed, their world perspective is challenged.


While Burger's style is not appropriate for anyone other than Burger, his approach to presentation is one that elevates his material and his art form and is, above all, focused on his audience.


And that's when it becomes art.

Managing Expectations

In our last meeting, I wrote about old theatres and how they created expectations for the audience and, because I had a limited amount of time to devote to writing that day, I teased a follow-on piece on how performers can manage the expectations of their audiences.
Promotion plays a big part in framing the audience's expectations of a performer.

Today, with access to a tidal wave of information, audience members can seek out all kinds of information about magicians including clips of their performances, appearances on TV chat shows and a career's worth of interviews.  (A search on the terms "David Copperfield, magician" yielded 738,000 hits including information on his performances at the MGM resort in Las Vegas and clips of some of his signature effects such as making the Statue of Liberty Disappear.)

A few minutes online and any audience member can have a pretty good sense of what to expect from the performer.

This new world of audience awareness offers both challenges and opportunities to the performer.  the challenge for the performer is to keep innovating:  developing new material and new presentations; the opportunity is to subvert those expectations and show the audience things they did not expect and have not seen before.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Cardini and how his act was largely decimated by a single TV appearance.  He had an act that he developed over the course of a lifetime's work and he made it as perfect as anyone could.  Those 9 minutes were how he made his living and when they were gone, once they had been "burned" by a national TV appearance, there was nothing more.  He did not have a new act.

Before electronic media and central air conditioning ruled our lives, when magicians toured every year, it was possible to see more clearly how performers built and maintained their brand with their audiences.

Successful magicians used to tour a circuit of theatres each year.  Starting in the Fall and ending just as it would get too hot to keep an audience in doors in the late Spring, magicians could be expected to make annual appearances in communities in their territories.  In so-doing they were able to develop what would now be called a fanbase.  And by having a couple of months off the road each year, they could both repair their existing equipment and also develop new material.

Each visit would bring with it the promise of a mix of new material and old favorites.

In late summer, the performer's advance men would hit the road and talk-up the performer and their "new" show.  They would check out the theatres, arrange accommodations and hire bill posters to put up the boss' latest one two and three-sheets.  And, just as the train pulled into town carrying the show, the advance man, or "ad man," would be pulling out and headed for the next tour stop.

Posters played an important role in promoting the performer's brand and also in communicating to an audience that might not have been able to read, or who did not understand English.  And it is for that reason that the posters of this period were dramatic and very representative of the expectation that the performer was hoping to create.

Here is an image of a poster used by Charles Carter.  It is typical of posters used in the first quarter of the 20th century.  It carried the performer's name and a representation of a featured illusion for that particular tour.  In this case, it was an illusion called "Carter Beats the Devil."


http://rlv.zcache.com/carter_the_great_vintage_magician_poster-p228676195453656632qzz0_400.jpg

From about the same period, here is a poster from Howard Thurston:



The ad is almost perfect.  "Thurston," the familiar name, is shown on a horse being hoisted aloft by four guys dressed like ushers.  Even if you can't read, you know right away that this is unusual and your curiosity is piqued.  What happens next?  Why is he wearing those clothes?

And, if as would most likely be the case, these posters were all over your community, it would be almost impossible to escape this image.  Just as it is difficult to escape many television commercials these days.

Satisfying your curiosity would cost maybe twenty-five cents for a seat in "the gods."  And that, as they say, was the name of the game.

You can see many of these same practices in use today.

Here, for example, is a poster created to promote David Blaine's "Frozen in Time" special where he was encased in a block of ice for three days:

http://images.penguinmagic.com/images/products/original/9046a.jpg

And here is a poster for David Copperfield

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44191000/jpg/_44191388_copperfield_afp203.jpg

What is noteworthy about this 2007 poster is that it is entirely about the personality of the performer.  It is an acknowledgement that his brand is more powerful than any individual effect in his repertoire.  The poster invites the audience to surrender their evening to the artist and, in exchange, he will amaze.

It's not unlike how they advertise movies with posters featuring featuring the face of the lead actor, or, from more than a century before, when "Buffalo Bill" Cody toured with his Wild West Show:



This poster dates from about 1900--about half-way through the 30-year run of Cody's 4-hour travelling extravaganza.  For a man whose show was already a household name and whose name was already a household name, what else did he have to say?  His audience had already been trained what to expect from these shows.

* * *

The rules have not really changed when it comes to generating interest in an upcoming show or event. 

Despite the changes in media, all marketing is social.  The goal is to get the potential audience pool curious, expectant and, above all, talking. 

"I can't believe he's going to be frozen in a block of ice."  "You have to see this guy, he actually flies on stage."  "My dad took me to see this guy when I was your age...."  "I wonder if he's still doing...."  "I hear he's doing all new stuff this year...."

These are the kinds of statements that the performer wants his audience making to themselves and, most importantly, to others.  They translate into ticket sales and, once they take their seats, they make the audience more receptive to the performance.  It's more nuanced than this, but a successful campaign is a way of pre-qualifying the audience:  if they are drawn in by the promotion, they will already have met the performer more than half-way.

Old Theatres

When I got to Newark in the late 1980s, they, like a lot of communities in the country, had a couple of abandoned theatres in the heart of its downtown.

The Midland Theatre opened in 1928 as a hybrid move/vaudeville house.  It was the new kid on the block compared to the venerable Auditorium Theatre which was primarily a live theatre that was later retrofitted to increase capacity and to incorporate motion pictures.

Perhaps not as grand as the movie palaces that sprang up in the country's larger cities, these two spaces were nonetheless intended as centers of their community where people of all classes could come together to enjoy the latest melodrama, or see the big name acts in vaudeville.

The use of the word "palaces" is particularly appropriate because they were intended to impress.  They were the architectural equivalent of shock and awe.

Without the experience of actually setting foot in these spaces, it's hard to imagine that there was a time when theatre owners would compete with each other to see how much could be spent to create spacious lobbies, attractive marquees and richly decorated auditoria.  As audiences we have come to accept the maxim that all that is needed to put on a show is "two boards and a passion".  The spaces where we will go to watch a concert, or a movie, or a play have become less and less.

They are smaller, they are uglier and designed not for the experience of the audience but to maximize the profit of their owners.

I love old theatres in the same way that I love old churches:  their scale and grandeur immediately re-frame the experience of their audiences and change their behavior.

You might be the meanest, toughest, cussingest son of a mother on the street, but when you walk into a church, or grand theatre, you reconsider your behavior.  In the same way that when you walk into some stores you can tell without even looking at a price tag that you can't afford to shop there, the architects and designers of these spaces forced you to slow down, quiet down and look up.  It's a shift in power.

* * *

At the time of its opening in the early 1990s I remember reading about the design of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.  The planners put a lot of thought into how they were going to tell the story of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the massacre of Jews and other undesirable populations and the resistance to those efforts.

It was an important part of the planning that Museum visitor come away with a visceral understanding of what it was like to live through those times.

Museum designers paid attention to traffic patterns, the relative volume of spaces, the sounds and sights to which visitors would be exposed and used all of these elements, together with their collection of artifacts, to bring the experience to life.



http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/US_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum_-_Boxcar.jpg/220px-US_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum_-_Boxcar.jpg

 A key moment in the Museum is when visitors come upon a box car--one of many that were used to transport prisoners to concentration camps.  This is one of the few places in the Museum where guest can choose their path.  They can either walk through the car, or walk around it--a recognition that for some, in particular Holocaust survivors, the experience of being in the car would be overwhelming.

* * *

Disney are masters of this kind of audience management.

In their theme parks, they don't wait for you to get on the ride before they start telling you a story.  Whether you are on line for the Haunted Mansion, or Pirates of the Carribbean, the moment you get into line, you are in the world of the story.  Lines snake back and forth from outside to inside and from room to room and as you round each corner, you make new discoveries related to what you are about to see.  The designers are framing your experience and designing your expectations.

After a day of waiting on line for various attractions, the notion of a FastPass alternative--a shortcut to the front of the line--can seem attractive, but I think, to a certain extent, it diminishes the overall experience of the ride.  The Kilamanjaro Safari experience at Disney's Animal Kingdom is a wonderful opportunity to see a variety of exotic animals in something approximating their natural habitat, but there is also a conservation message that permeates the "pre-show" line experience that is diminished if you can just step onto the ride vehicle.  It's kind of like simply pulling a rabbit out of a hat without first going through the step of demonstrating that it was empty.

* * *

Over the years I have been fortunate to have seen a number of the resident shows of Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.  They too believe that their shows begin the moment their audiences arrive.

A particularly good example of this is with "Ka."  The person taking your ticket is costumed in the style of the show.  Audience members are surrounded in textures and colours consistent with the show.

As the audience walks from the lobby to the auditorium, they pass walls covered in what appear to be rough-hewn timbers from a pre-industrial culture.  Once in the auditorium, the aesthetic is all steel and catwalks, towers and bridges--similar in feel to a petroleum refinery.  And, as if to seal that impression, there are occasional bursts of flame that come up out of "the void" that will become the performance space.

The contrast between the pre-industrial and the industrial mirrors the conflict that is at the heart of the story.

That so much of the story involves characters rising and falling--both in stature and in physical space--the audience is set up for that when, as they are taking their seats, performers descend from the ceiling to within inches of their heads before they just as rapidly disappear from whence they came.

All of this atmosphere is in the service of setting the scene and establishing the reality in which the show's characters will operate.  If you make the mistake of arriving late, you not only miss out on this "appetizer" but the experience of the show is less immersive.  You are more a spectator and less of a collaborator in the show.

Another example of this can be found in "Zumanity."  This show was designed to be more "adult" in its orientation and is evocative of cabaret in Weimar Berlin or pre-WW II Shanghai.

From the point where a cast member takes your ticket the lobby space is designed with curved walls, soft colors and peep holes.  The aesthetic is erotic and not pornographic.  The intent is to tease and to stimulate.

The auditorium features, predictably, a thrust stage and looks a lot like it would be an ideal location to stage a production of "Cabaret."  The soft colors of the decor play against the steel truss work and spiral staircases.  The rigid structures contrast with the flowing lines and feminine curves.  This is not a dime store architectural critique, but again framing for the experience of the audience and in support of the show's performers.

To a very real extent, for the magic to happen, it makes the magician's work easier to have a magical environment.

* * *

I was fortunate enough to be allowed to explore the Auditorium just before it was demolished.

This was a decade after it had finally been abandoned for the last time.  After the last revival attempt had failed, after the last community theatre show had closed.  After it had served as a law library and after they had used its lobby to store materials used in the restoration of the Midland across the street.

The building had been built as a tribute to those who had sacrificed during the Civil War, had survived two world wars and even a fire that claimed its original stone facade only to fall victim to the onslaught of electronic media and to community indifference.

But even in the available light you could still experience the majesty of its design and get a sense of its function as a temple of art.

The unflattering daylight that stabbed through the open doors revealed that its fit and finishes had deteriorated over the years.  The auditorium had been repainted in a series of flat colors that were not only not complimentary to the space but also to one another.

But even in its last days I had a sense of what once had been.

I remember noticing the loading dock door in the upstage right corner.  It had been pushed open in order to keep the teams of explorers from injuring themselves and you could see in silhouette that it was a ten-foot door with a portion cut out to a height of maybe twelve or fourteen feet so that taller pieces of scenery could be accommodated.

In the dressing rooms, you could see where various performers had written their names over the years in an effort to establish some form of permanence in the otherwise transitory life of a performer.

From the unfinished floor of the trap room to the tangle of rope and cable that was evident on the pin rail, the backstage spaces were not glamorous but just enough to meet the needs of whatever show was playing.  Narrow passages, steep stairways and utilitarian rooms, these were the workplaces of the performers and technicians that made the magic that would entertain the audiences.

In Mike Caveney's book on Harry Kellar he includes a list of his tours and where they stopped.  In 1898, Kellar played Newark and, as far as I can tell, he would have had to have played The Auditorium--at least I would like to think that he did--and here I was roaming the same spaces.

In the trap room under the stage, I remember seeing the remnants of what must have been an elevator trap--a way for someone to disappear or reappear in the middle of the stage.  It was exciting to think that it might have been used by the likes of Kellar and his contemporaries.

While this has not directly about conjuring I do think it is important to look at all of the ingredients of a performance and the space is certainly a part of that.

Granted, today's performers have little say over when and where they perform and therefore must create their own space where magic can happen.  Not only must they manage the attention of the audience, but also their expectations.

What can the performer do to take control of the power in the relationship between themselves and the audience?

And now that I have provided some context and created some expectation, I will leave the resolution until our next meeting.

Burden of Secrets

http://roniece.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/secrets.jpg

In the current issue of Magic magazine, there is an interview with Derek DelGuadio.

The magazine's publisher, Stan Allen considers this to be a good "get" for the magazine because DelGuadio, unique among his contemporaries, does not fit into the mold of the modern magician.  He does not promote himself, he does not release a lot of material to the marketplace and he is not angling for a showcase in Las Vegas.

After reading the interview, it is clear that what he does do is care a lot about his art.

If I am reading this correctly, it seems that while most who take up magic traffic in secrets and technology, DelGuadio is most concerned about the experience of his audience.  He wants them to be able to experience a world where magic can happen all around them.

If you see magic in everything, it's frustrating when people don't....  I'm not interested in showing people what a magical world would like if it existed.  I'm interested in revealing a magical world, because it does exist (Lovick, Jack.  "The Kid at the Table," Magic, October, 2011, p. 33).

What is refreshing is that he upends the traditional adversarial relationship between performer and audience.  He does not play "catch me if you can" with the spectators.  In fact, he much prefers telling them the truth and allowing them to believe that he is lying.

And, if you think about, there really is a kind of freedom in telling the truth.

Generations of performers have trained the audience to look for the lie, the moment when truth becomes deception and this puts all kinds of pressure on the performer to mask the "tricky" moment so that it is indistinguishable from a normal moment.  

The last time I checked, Penn & Teller were still doing an effect in their Las Vegas show called the "Red Ball".  This is a solo piece for Teller, based on the work of David Abbott, a prominent amateur inventor and chronicler of magic in the first part of the last century.  Like many of their pieces, the floating ball has an elegant poetry about it that Teller has been perfecting through diligent rehearsal.  The premise is simple--a ball floats, rises and falls at his command--but it lacks the "bad boys of magic" imprimatur on which Penn & Teller have made their reputations for almost forty years.  As you will read in the above-linked article, the floating ball did not really become a Penn & Teller effect until the decided to have Penn introduce the piece by telling the audience how it was done--with a thread.  

What is telling is that for the author of the piece, even after having watched Teller rehearse the effect, listen to him discuss every aspect of its performance and the history of similar effects, he still has some doubt as to whether that is the actual secret.  Much like their approach to the Cups and Balls, even arming the audience with the secret, does not protect them from being fooled.

 we’ve been told about the thread. But there is a caveat: I have to take Penn and Teller’s word that there is a string. I have stood next to Teller as he practiced the trick, looking hard from every angle—even the ones that would normally be rude; watched video of him developing “The Red Ball” at a cabin in Utah on his vacation; talked to him for hours about the 100-year history of floating-ball tricks; and attended a lecture he gave to doctors at Lake Las Vegas, during which he discussed every phase of the trick’s development. But I have never actually seen the thread....  When I watched him practice onstage it was just the two of us after the show and no computers were involved. I saw only ball, hoop, bench and Teller. With Teller, you are literally dealing with one of the best illusionists in the world, and so you accept that believing doesn’t necessarily mean seeing.

In the DelGuadio interview, writer Lovick makes the following comment that is I think very important when thinking about magic.

If you show them something impossible, they have two choices.  They either have the reaction:  There is a secret, I don't know it, you're not going to tell me, drop dead.  Or they go with it--on either a suspension of disbelief level or actually accepting it as magic. 

Dariel Fitzkee, author of Magic by Misdirection, an important theoretical work on this most important of magical principles, wrote the following:

In true deception, deception is not skill of the hands. It is skill of the mind. The important thing—I mean the supremely important thing—is not the control of your hands. It is not the control of your apparatus.... It is control of the spectator’s mind.

Penn tells the audience that the trick is done with a thread and then, through the artistry of his performance, Teller spends the rest of the piece disproving the possibility that a thread could be the secret.  In full knowledge that each and every member of the audience has a lifetime's worth of experience of the Law of Gravity, he convinces them that, for a few brief minutes, he has managed to carve out a small lawless part of the world where gravity might not apply.

What was inspiring about the DelGuadio interview was his perspective on the currency of secrets that has for so long defined magic and magicians. 

He states toward the end of the interview that he does not keep secrets because they give the magician his power, but rather that

I keep secrets so they (the audience) don't have to.  I carry a burden of secrets that literally destroys my ability to see the world in a magical way....   

...a secret kept just to be a secret is only good to help boost the ego.  Secrets are supposed to be put to good use.  That's why we value them, for the mystery they are capable of creating....   

...if you put the proper attention on everything else, the secrets will be put into the proper perspective....  People won't even care to ask how you do it, because they won't think your job is about secrets....  I think the magicians who get asked "How did you do that?" are the ones whose tricks have no content.  There is nothing else to examine, think about, respond to.

It's a Character Choice

http://www.21ace.com/

It seems that everywhere I look these days there's another program about comedians interviewing other comedians.

Paul Provenza, co-director of The Aristocrats, a great film about free speech and the dirtiest joke that comedians tell one another, has a show on Showtime.  Aisha Tyler, stand-up, actress and one-time host of Talk Soup on E! has her own podcast where she interviews comedians and other members of the "Nerdverse."  On About.com there is a posting listing the top 10 podcasts of comedians interviewing comedians.

The program getting the most attention from the mainstream media is Marc Maron's WTF.  What began as a guerilla project while he was still working for the now-defunct Air America has evolved into the New York Times of comedians talking to comedians.

At just over 200 shows, Maron has interviewed top names like Robin Williams and Gary Shandling, to comedy giants like Jonathan Winters and current favorites like the "Queen of Mean" Lisa Lampanelli.

Perhaps it is the setting for the interviews, Maron's make-shift garge/studio at the enigmatically named Cat Ranch, but these interviews are compelling because the subjects are not relentlessly pre-interviewed and the questions are not shaped to set-up the guest's A-material.  They talk about the life behind the jokes and, because both parties are "in the business," there is an honesty that you just don't hear.

I bring all this up because I recently listened to Maron's interview with Andrew "Dice" Clay who was the "bad boy" of comedy a little more than a decade ago.

I was never a fan of his comedy and his "new" nursery rhymes, but in the interview he talks about how he created the "Diceman" character.  He looked at the comedians who were successful at the time he was coming up and he made a conscious choice to go in a different direction.  Where most comedians of the time--well, any time, really--draw their material from their insecurities, Clay built his comedy persona on the premise of being the most confident man in the room.  And once he had made that choice--"committed to it" as we used to say in the theatre--his act grew organically from that initial decision.

Condensed into a paragraph, the choices that led to him being the most successful comedian of the decade seem self-evident and facile, even somewhat clinical.  Like any new business venture, he surveyed the market and identified a niche, or character, that was unique.  The revelation is remarkable because it seems so out of synch with the persona he created.

Earlier in the interview, Clay discloses that he began performing as a John Travolta impersonator.  This was at the time of "Welcome Back Kotter" and Travolta's Vinnie Barbarino was the show's stand-out character.  I just have a hard time imagining Barbarino with an MBA and yet that is, in essence how the world got Andrew "Dice" Clay.

It is in separating the actor from his character, the comedian from his persona, that we see the effect of conscious choice.

You come across interviews with actors all the time who talk about how their characters can do things that they themselves could never do.  The example that comes to mind right away is perhaps not the most persuasive, but I remember at the time Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, a big deal was made out of the character's fear of snakes.  Turns out that Harrison Ford is not afraid of snakes and yet there were a number of interviews where he was asked about this.

The other story that comes to mind is from the Dustin Hoffman movie "Marathon Man".  True, or not, it speaks to conscious choices designed to create a specific effect in the minds of the audience.

Sound familiar?

Elsewhere in this blog I have written about choosing material that is appropriate for the performer.  It is perhaps more accurate to say that the material should be appropriate for the performer's onstage persona.

Where does that persona come from?

Without the advantage of a screenwriter to create the character, the magician has to piece together his own.  

Who are the magicians that inspire?

In the 1950s, one of the biggest names in magic was Channing Pollock.  He created a night club act that has inspired magicians for generations.  His suave presentation of his signature dove routine defined what magicians were.



Johnny Thompson was one of those inspired by the Pollock act.  He recognized that he could not compete with Pollock and so he took his act in a different direction.



Lance Burton's onstage persona was more polished than Thompson and he was able to create an award-winning act that was evocative of Pollock and yet totally his own.



Watching these videos provides another insight into Robert-Houdin's maxim about the magician being an actor playing the part of the magician. Not only does the performer have to be savvy enough to understand what the public is buying, but they must also be sufficiently self-aware to know how to find that character within themselves.

I can only draw on my limited experience doing stand-up and the rankest of amateur levels.  

When I would participate in open-mic nights it was the same crowd of wanna-bees that would swarm from one club to another in order to get as much stage time as possible.  Because the faces were the same from one week to the next, we had an opportunity to watch performers evolve their comedy personae:  there was the dumb-joke guy--I wear condoms on my ears so I won't get the hearing aids; the guy who was inspired by Richard Pryor--this is my impression of James Brown taking a dump;  and several who would jockey for the title of the most outrageous.  They seemed to pride themselves on coming up with material that would not be suitable to share around the workplace watercooler.

I was inspired by the thinking comics and so I tried to come up with material that was topical.  Against a backdrop of fart jokes and drug humor, I tried observational humor and from the headlines type stuff.  Needless to say, by trying to swim upstream, I was not doing myself any favors.  I was not making myself accessible to the audience.

One night, I remember trying a joke about Maxwell House coffee and I knew it wasn't working.  For some reason, I thought I would overdrive the punchline with some profanity and not only did it not help the joke, I was immediately uncomfortable for having done it and I never did it again.  

I was uncomfortable because using that kind of language, while it was common for the environment of the club, was not authentic to who I was.  I did not have it in me to act the part of a profane comedian.  To refine my persona, I needed to keep looking for authentic parts of me that I could amplify for the stage.

The role of the magician is a character like Romeo or Indiana Jones.  To play that part, the performer, the "actor" doesn't have to have had the same experiences as the character, but they do have to be able to find analogs in his own experience that enable them to bring a "truthiness" to the performance.

The choice of character continues to evolve over time right along with the magic.  Continuous refinement is inevitable in the performance arts and as the character becomes "truthier" then it becomes clear when the magic fits and when it doesn't.

As a magician, I never really found my character.  I would be drawn to material that I was convinced I could get away with and never paid much attention to how the right character choices could have made my lack of any discernible skill less apparent.

By way of illustration, I refer you to the work of Rene Levand.  Sen. Levand is from Argentina who specializes in close-up magic.  At the age of 9, he lost his hand in a car accident and was forced to develop his own approach to magic.  In his signature effect, "It Can't Be Done Any Slower" you see a marriage of material and perfomer where the strengths of each support the other.



Perhaps the best example of the synergy between character and material is found in the performances of Lennart Green. In this 2005 performance at the TED conference, Mr. Green disguises world-class technical skill behind the persona of an absent-minded professorial type. As a result, his material is always surprising to himself and to the audience.

O, for a Muse of Fire

http://www.criterion.com/films/908-f-for-fake

In "F for Fake" illusionist, and part-time filmmaker, Orson Welles creates what he descried as a film essay on creativity, deceit, misdirection and storytelling.

Built primarily from unused footage shot for a documentary on art forger Elmyr de Hory, the film features Clifford Irving who was, at the time he was being photographed, in the middle of perpetrating a forgery of his own, the "autobiography" of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.

In asides shot in the editing bay--arguably as he was putting the film together--Welles appears almost giddy to have "stumbled" across this mirrors upon mirrors scenario.  To their stories he adds his own experience as a faker when he convinced the nation that it was under attack by Martians.

And it is against this backdrop of deception that Welles makes the startling vow right to the camera that, even though the film is about deception and features decievers, he will, for the next hour, tell only the absolute truth.

Despite this seeming like a paradox that Captain Kirk would use to overcome the logic of one of the menacing Star Trek computers,



the audience is lulled into trusting an admittedly untrustworthy guide.

This is the contract that magicians make with their audiences at every performance:  pay close attention and I will convince you that everything you know about your world is no longer true.  Regardless of the premise of a particular effect, this is the meta trick and it relies less on technique or technology than on the performer.

There is an often-told tale about Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin in which he is dispatched to north Africa to help put down a rebellion using his magic.  His mission was to demonstrate to the Marabout tribesmen that French magic was stronger than theirs.  They were unimpressed with parlor tricks, but he gradually upped the stakes to a point where he was able to convince them that he could actually drain the strength from the body of their strongest warrior.

When this story is told--and there are a number of different versions out there--it is often seen through a western cultural bias:  how stupid those tribesmen were to be fooled by such a simple principle.  That the trick is still being sold suggests that it continues to fool a variety of audiences.



The more important point, it seems to me, is that the effect was presented in a broader context of a whole performance. I don't know anything about Marabout culture, but I am pretty confident that if you picked out the strongest person in the room and then humiliated them with a trick like this, without first contextualizing it as part of a whole series of demonstrations of your power as a magician, that audience member would probably look for an opportunity to demonstrate his strength on you.

By sequencing his material, Robert-Houdin was establishing his character as a powerful wizard.  Beginning with simple coin tricks and ending with the bullet catch and the "Light and Heavy Chest," the audience was presented with a portraint of the performer as wizard.  It's no surprise then that he would define a magician as an actor playing the part of a magician.

This is another of those Kirk-worthy paradoxes:  magic, an art form that is predicated on deceit and trickery, is also dependent upon a measure of "truthiness."  The ability of the audience to trust, or believe that they can trust, the performer even as he misrepresents and misdirects is critical to the success of the tricks.  This is one of the reasons that the performer's choice of material must align with their on-stage persona, or character.  One would not, for example, believe that a performer like The Amazing Johnathan...



would ever be able to present a trick like "Walking through the Great Wall of China."



Copperfield's choice of material supports, and is supported by, his onstage character.

This brings me back to Welles and "F for Fake."

The film is a master class in these ideas. The authority of the performer is established, the premise of the effect is laid out, the audience is artfully and entertainingly misled, the trick is revealed and then the performer disappears in a puff of smoke. And all of this is done despite a context that would tend to promote an heightened atmosphere of mistrust and skepticism.

How is he able to get away with such an audacious trick?  He preys on the imagination of the audience.  He provides enough of a glimpse behind the curtain to get the audience rationalizing forgery.  Elmyr asks how he can be a criminal if so many museums buy his pictures and declare them "authentic."  Clifford Irving makes claims to have met with the world's most famous recluse, believing that he will not appear in public to refute the claims.  We watch Elmyr draw a few simple lines in the style of Modigliani and think that on our worst day, we could do as much.  Slowly, but surely, we are on the side of the forgers, the fakers.  A powerful combination of empathy, greed, imagination and trust is established.  The audience, much like the "all-knowing" art curators, is a co-conspirator in the fakery.

Shakespeare, another great faker, uses a similar portfolio of techniques to engage the audience and get them to ignore the confines of a primitive performance space in order to tell the too-big story of Henry V. 

In yet another paradox, I will leave you with my favorite reading of this most theatrical of monologues that comes to us from a film version of the play.

That's Entertainment

http://www.quasi-modo.net/Fannie_Mills.html

I studied theatre production in school.  I wasn't going to be an actor or a designer, I wanted to make things, I wanted to help create the illusions.  In addition to courses in drafting and various craft techniques, I took a number of courses in theatre history.

Before I go any farther, let me just say that I think it is important for practitioners in any medium to learn about its history and the various movements and counter-movements that wash across it like waves hitting the beach.  (I say this right up front in case there are any teachers in the audience.) 

The courses I took were taught with great solemnity and paid due diligence to Shakespeare and Moliere, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Arthur Miller & Rodgers and Hammerstein.  We read plays and wrote papers and discussed theory and came away with the sense that the theatre was something to be experienced from the other side of a velvet rope.  Like a painting in a gallery, or one of those performance art piece where the artist crawls across broken glass and then sells boxes of shards for tens of thousands of dollars.

What is missing from this curriculum is any sense of the popular theatre.  Sure, there were audiences who would pay for the opportunity to sit in a darkened room and have actors scream at them for eight hours, but while that was happening, there was a bigger audience in another theatre watching melodramas like "The Pursuit of Happiness" or "After Dark."  In the days before movies and television, this was where the audiences went to get their fix of moral tales featuring heroes and villains and happy endings.

http://meeky-meeky.blogspot.com/

I had the good fortune to work for a time with a man who was much better read in the literature and history of the theatre than I could ever hope to be and his position was that while theatre artists were writing to the history books, the audiences were supporting a very different kind of entertainment.  For every Henry Irving there were performers like le Petomane.

As we would prepare for productions of "serious" plays where some important action such as the death of one of the lead characters would happen offstage, Van would tell me about turn of the 20th Century shows that featured elaborate chases on horseback, fires and falling trees crashing into buildings. 

I guess it has always been true that while audiences will judge a production of Hamlet on the strength of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, blowing stuff up will always draw a crowd.  The real magic of the theatre is that it is an environment where both the serious and the popular can co-exist.

I have just started reading a book by the great Spanish magician Juan Tamiriz in which he writes about the responsibility of the performer to create a spectacular environment where magic can happen.  It's not about tricks and secrets and fooling and figuring out, but about an altered reality where amazing things can happen.  On the street, when you put an object in your hand and wrap your fingers around it, you expect it to be there when you open your hand, but for the period of time that you are with the magician that might not always be the case.

It's a simple statement that, like a good magic trick, disguises some very complex ideas.

The performer must not only master his technique, but he also must master the attention and focus of the audience.

Under the broad category of "misdirection" magicians are able to control where the audience looks and when.  And I think most people--magicians, or not--would agree that if you can get the audience to "look in the right place at the wrong time" then a lot of the otherwise impossible becomes more likely. 

To understand how a master can control the focus of his audience, I offer a few minutes with Slydini




I watch this and I am amazed that it works. I am also impressed by the understanding of human psychology necessary in order to attempt something like this.

Reading explanations of magic tricks is a lot like reading a cookbook:  they list the required equipment, lay out the steps and, many times, include the dialogue, or patter, to recite as you perform the effect.  What you rarely see is an explanation of why the trick works.

With the same need for certainty that informs my choice of which magic trick to buy, I have tried to understand more about how misdirection works.  I joined an online forum hosted by Genii, The Conjurors' Monthly and tried to find out how magicians talk to one another about misdirection and audience management.  (As no secrets are revealed, I will include a link to the thread here.)

My operating premise was that since this is such a fundamental part of how magic works then there had to be some sort of articulated understanding that was passed from one generation of performers to the next.  Turns out, however, that if I understand my correspondents accurately, misdirection more like comedic timing:  something that can only be learned in performance.

There was a time when I was reading a number of different books on comedy and comedians and trying to understand how they created their material.  Time and again I would read that they "wrote" their material onstage.  This was unfathomable to me because it suggested that they went up there with nothing and just started talking hoping to get the audience to laugh. 

In reality, there are many more steps involved including a significant amount of preparation.  A comic outlines topics and arranges them in a specific order.  Quite often you will see comics come onstage with a bottle of water and a notepad which contains their "set list."  What you don't see is the tape recorder that is capturing the performance.  The performer will then study that tape and listen for the audience response--where they laughed and where the sound of crickets was deafening.  This study will then inform the next performance and the whole process repeats.

Perhaps because I see magic as barricaded behind a wall of secrets and technical skills that, more often than not, seem impenetrable, find it harder to see the craftsmanship of the performer.

The recipe that one finds time and again in the literature of magic is study, practice and practice again.  It's never clear how a would-be conjurer knows they are ready to perform in front of an audience.  In my case, I made that decision way too soon.  And what you almost never see is that the process of continuous revision and improvement of one's abilities and material never stops.

Seen in this light, the role of the audience in creating the Tamiriz "magical atmosphere" comes into sharper focus.  The audience, and all of the audiences that have come before, becomes the uncredited co-author of the magician's performance.

This discussion of the ability of the performer to control or manage the audience implies a level of manipulation that is oppressive.  Perhaps, it would be more useful to think of it as a caring relationship.  Through his skill, the performer is protecting the audience's experience so that they will be able to enter a space where the impossible becomes possible.

The Wisdom of Solomon

I took up the challenge of blogging about conjuring, in part, because I was challeged by a friend to write about something that I had a passion for.  Over the course of almost 25 years, he has listened to me whine about doing work that is unrewarding, working for people that I don't respect and generally about my avoiding taking responsibility for my own life.  In that time he has advised, bullied and challenged me to get off the bench and get in the game.  For most of that time, I have been able to resist him, but, when he challenged me to write about magic, I really didn't have a good reason to not do it.

Magic is easy to write about because I find it endlessly fascinating.

I worked for a number of years in live entertainment production and, during that time, I came to appreciate the dialogue between performer and audience.  In most performance forms, the audience comes to the show expecting to be entertained and more than ready to accept the given circumstances of the production.  Audiences at school pagaents are just as enthusiastic as those who attend a Broadway musical.  It's not a matter of art or skill or production values, but an implied contract between the performers and the audience:  each invests their time and attention and imagination to share an idea.

I should stop here, before this begins to sound like the intro to a show tune. 

Let me illustrate my point in another way.  Years ago, I was getting ready to direct a play about a comedian and, in order to do the show justice, I set out to learn a thing or two about stand-up comedy.  I took a class that promised to teach me the "secrets of comedy" and that by the time it was over I would have 5 minutes of audience-tested original comedy.  Our "final" was held at an open mic night in downtown Sacramento. 

I have written elsewhere about the experience, but the important take-away for this piece is that, on that night, I had a practical lesson about audiences.  Suffice it to say, my material, while original, was not really comedy, but the audience was cordial and polite and found opportunities to laugh even when I had no idea I had written a joke. 

At one point in my "set" I managed to lose my place.  In the language of the theatre, I "went up" and, for what had to be about the longest 30 seconds of my life, I stammered and I floundered around trying to remember the next "joke."  What was truly remarkable was that the audience made up primarily of other comics, who were waiting for their own chances to try out new material, stayed with me and waited until I found my way out.  I'm not saying I "killed" or even that I was any good at all, but the audience wanted me to be successful.  They had come expecting to laugh and they found the funny.

In general terms, the same is true for a play, or a dance recital, or a concert.

When it comes to magic however there might be some who come expecting to be amazed, but there is also a healthy percentage of skeptics in every audience.  The contract between the magician and their audience is different than between the actor and their audience.  The magician promises to lie to the audience, to accomplish by trickery, that which is impossible and, furthermore, he challenges the audience to discover his secrets.

Talk about a hostile work environment.

Perhaps it was because my first experiences doing magic were in front of my family and relatives followed by working children's birthday parties, but this notion of a confrontational dynamic between audience and performer made sense to me.  I recall thinking that, presuming I could get them to sit still long enough and pay attention, if I could fool my cousins then I could fool anyone.

Turned out to be not so easy, but it was a compelling idea.

I stopped performing and turned by attention to working in the theatre.  I thought there were many analogs between the work I was doing in production and that done by the designers of illusions.  By controlling what they saw and heard, we were cueing the audience to accept a version of reality where, within the context of the performance, anything was possible.  It was a kind of an illusion and, at any rate, even if it wasn't, it was enough to get me out of bed every morning and into work.

Another aspect that has sustained my interest in magic has been the technology itself.

I was a big fan of the George Peppard show "Banacek."  The character was an insurance investigator who got called into recover items which had been stolen under seemingly impossible circumstances.  These were really locked room mysteries where the only explanation for the robberies seemed to be some sort of sorcery, but before he walked off into the sunset with the hot girl of the week, he would reveal the far-too-elaborate explanation.  In one case, the crime involved the theft of a flat car from a moving train and, in another, a horse apparently disappeared while running a race:  puzzles that seemed to defy logical explanation.

To highlight the complexity of the problem, Banacek would always have a rival investigator who would act as the audience proxy and either develop a completely improbable explanation, or else talk about how the item seemed to just disappear like magic.

When the correct solution was revealed it invariably was some iteration of Occam's Razor: the simplest answer was usually the correct one.

Now there may be some who take issue with this characterization of Banacek, but like most shows, some episodes were stronger than others.  The solutions of the stolen flat car episode and the stolen prototype jet engine episode strain the definition of simple, but the thefts are based on assumptions that turn out not to be accurate.

The same is true about most magic tricks:  systems with too many moving parts tend to be more unreliable.  For a performer doing multiple shows a day and touring six days out of seven an effect that works on a straightforward method is a better and more profitable choice.

I can remember reading a description for a trick called the Zig Zag Deck.



The idea of the effect captured my imagination and, like Banacek's rivals, I came up with a number of overly complicated possible solutions.  Eventually, I had to order it just to find out how it worked.  Turns out, it works just exactly how it has to in order to do what you see in the video.  Through the skill of the performer--and in my case the writer of the catalog description--the audience is led to a number of false assumptions that suggest very complicated mechanical solutions and none of them are accurate.

Big or small, illusion or packet trick, this is how magic works. 

In 1919, Houdini made an elephant disappear on the stage of New York's Hippodrome.  When asked about the trick, Houdini is reported to have said that it was so simple even the elephant doesn't know how it's done.

To this day, I am impressed everytime I learn the secret of a new trick by how simple the technology behind it is.  For those who are skeptical audience members obsessed with figuring out how a trick is done, I can't imagine how they would feel if they knew they were being fooled by a piece of black thread or a simple magnet.

At our most recent lunch, I was describing to Barry a current topic in magic circles concerning the psychology that makes magic work.  In the last couple of years there has been some work published by psychologists about why tricks work, but there seems to be comparatively little in the magical literature about it.

At one point in my monologue on trying to figure out how what has to be a pretty sophisticated understanding of how audiences can be lead to accept what ever a magician wants, is passed down through the craft from one generation to the next, I recognized that I was sounding a little obsessional.  Barry, in his usual Solomonic fashion, immediately and accurately described what it was that I was doing hanging around magic all these years.

He simply said, "You're Salieri," and I knew immediately the moment in "Amadeus" to which he was referring.  It is a scene it which court composer Salieri understands the elegance of Mozart's compositions and also recognizes that he will never be able to write anything comparable.

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

In 1992, I spent some time in the hospital--couple of them, actually. 

I don't much care for hospitals because they always seem to me to be hospital-focused rather than patient-focused.  I found it paradoxical that they would, on the one hand, encourage me to get some rest and then, just as I would be drifting off, the new shift would come in, turn on the lights and wake me up for some test, or measurement, or whatever.

At one point, I was sharing a room with a man who had worked his whole life in the coal mines in West Virgina.  He was proud of his work and, it seemed, equally proud of the illnesses and injuries he had collected because of it.  I am not certain I remember the whole list, but it seems to me that he was diabetic and had some sort of lung disease and heart trouble.

What I do remember was how happy he was.  He was thrilled to be in the hospital because he could get oxygen which, for some reason I didn't understand, was unavailable to him at home.  Everytime the staff would bring in a piece of monitoring equipment, he would proudly say that he had one of those at home but that he couldn't get the oxygen.  It was almost like he was declaring his afilliation with the doctors by virtue of his familiarity with their technology.  Like if I bought a golf club endorsed by Tiger Woods and went around telling people that my game was as good as his because we used the same stuff.  (Of course, lately the quality of our games is getting closer, and I don't even play.)

By comparison, I found being in the hospital to be very stressful.  Not only was it difficult to sleep, but, as a shy person, I found the constant probing and poking and touching and pricking to be very threatening.  I know they put on my chart that I didn't handle stress well which has always seemed to me to be a tacit admission that they were doing all these things to me on purpose.

The favorite part of my day was when I could watch an hour of Bob Ross on the local PBS afilliate.

From MTV.com

Bob Ross, the "Happy Painter," would spend a half-hour showing you how to paint landscapes, or seascapes, using a handful of colors, brushes and a pallet knife.  He was like McGuyver in that he could make something out of virtually nothing.

Whatever talents I might have do not, in any way, include drawing or painting, but it was nonetheless fascinating to watch him manipulate the tools of his trade and produce something that was recognizable as a representation of a place.

In addition to his undeniable craftsmanshhip, his pleasant chatter and relentlessly positive mantra that there were "no mistakes, only happy accidents," the mellow timbre of his voice would send me blissfully off to sleep providing a peaceful island in the middle of an otherwise stressful day.

Whether it is in painting, motorcycle fabrication or cake baking, I am fascinated by craft.    To my wife's increasing frustration, I will watch hours of "American Chopper" with the same fascination that I watch "Cake Boss" or "Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives." 

It is the same fascination that keeps me engaged by magic.  At this point in my life, I am as likely to perform magic as I am to decorate a cake or paint a motorcycle, but I appreciate the singular vision that drives people to master the skills needed in each of these areas.

One of the best books on magic that I have read in a long time was The Magician and the Cardsharp by Karl Johnson.  The book profiles the lives of Allen Kennedy (the "cardsharp") and Dai Vernon (the "magician") and their obsession with mastering their respective crafts.

Vernon, "The Professor," devoted his life to becoming the expert at the card table that he read about as a young boy.  He is said to have read the influential "The Expert at the Card Table" by the mysterious S.W. Erdnase which documented many of the skills used by card cheats to gain an edge and spent the rest of his life perfecting the techniques that were described therein. 

The white whale in card mechanics is to get the cards you need into play at the right time.  Holding out an ace and slipping it in at the right time can be for nought if another player cuts the cards and your ace winds up in the middle of the deck. 

Kennedy too was a nascent card expert and kicked around gambling houses all over the country.  He is reputed to have succeeded where others did not and figured out how to deal cards from the center of the deck in a way that looked perfectly normal.



The throughline of the story is Vernon's search for Kennedy and the opportunity to learn his technique.

At some level, it's inspiring to know that secrets have just as strong a hold over magicians as they do over civilians. Every student's master is just student to somebody else.

When I began to follow magic, I was constantly frustrated by descriptions of magic tricks that contained the phrase, "by the usual method" because it assumed knowledge that was not available to me.  It was as though in pursuit of trying to learn how to pull a rabbit out of a hat, it assumed that you knew how to make a rabbit and, if you did not, the author had no desire to waste their time trying to bring you up to speed.

In the beginning, when I was still thinking I was going to be a performer, it was all about acquiring material.  To do a show, you needed tricks so each trick was a unity unto itself.  Like colors in the crayon box:  there was a color for "flesh" and another for "sky" and there was a trick with cards and a seperate trick with silks and another different one for sponge balls. 

It is only over time that you begin to appreciate that the actual sky is not uniform in color and that the techniques used to vanish a coin, a card, or a sponge ball have more in common than not. 

The center deal story would be far less interesting if it had been just about an arcane technique.  What is compelling is the knowledge that Vernon used his collection of these techniques to inform his work as a magcian and, more importantly, to influence generations of those who have taken up the craft since.

I think finally that this is what Bob Ross meant when he talked of "happy accidents." 

At the time I took this bromide to be an excuse for beginners to hide behind when their paintings turned out nothing like they were seeing on TV.  Now, I am inclined to think that he was referring to the learning that comes when you pick a wrong color, or accidentally spill some thinner across the canvas.  Perhaps this will be what it takes to discover that you have more of an affinity for abstract art.

I continue to collect secrets because, like other art forms, they are an insight into the mindset of their creators.  The choices reflect their education and their experience and the hard-earned wisdom of performance and they also contain the footprints of their influences.  Trick by trick, magician by magician, I am slowly filling in my canvas one happy accident at a time.