Saturday, August 27, 2011

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.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

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.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Brick and Mortar

It didn't happen very often, but Agnes would take my brother and me out to lunch.

We would get the bus from school and ride down to the corner of Sherbrooke and Claremont and meet her for lunch at Murray's.

Not a diner in the Eat at Joe's sense, Murray's was a family restaurant where the waitresses wore uniforms and the milkshakes came in  a tall glass and with a metal container direct from the blender.

The Claremont location was in an area of Westmount that had a lot of apartments and bordered on a residential community.  It was a neighborhood place where the waitresses knew your name and very quickly learned your order.

These lunches were a great treat.  Normally, we would have to walk home, which took about twenty minutes, eat for twenty and then walk back to school.  When we would meet Agnes for lunch, we would have a whole half-hour for lunch and, most times, enough time left over to visit the Trainatorium.

As the name suggests, this was a hobby shop specializing in model trains, but they also carried a variety of other items including what used to be innocently described as novelties.


These were simpler times, when you could readily find a retail establishment that sold simulated dog poop and the ironically named joy buzzersTrainatorium carried a small selection of these treasures that continue to delight young boys and middle-aged men. 

While my brother studied the model kits, I went straight for the novelties to search through the handful of magic tricks that were displayed in the same section.  Interspersed with the black soap and the whoopee cushions would be the items like the ball vase, the three shell game and coin to nest of boxes.

I had been to the library and read through the general interest books on magic.  They were a very helpful introduction to the mechanics of the art, but for those effects that required special props, you were left to your own devices to make your own devices.  My brother was the artistic one in the family.  My attempts at such projects always ended up disappointing.  These little packages were my earliest apparatus and represented my first steps to becoming more like Magic Tom.

From the Trainatorium, I expanded my search to other toy and hobby shops.  Every time we went anywhere, I would seek out the toy stores and search through their Games section to try and find more equipment.  It was a source of constant frustration that the selection was always limited and the offerings were startlingly similar from one store to the next.  I was always hopeful that I would find something new and frequently disappointed when I did not.  Some of the earliest entries in my rule book of life's lessons were generated by my falling victim to a familiar product being repackaged and renamed.

In addition to my stalking of toy shops, I also was reading my share of comic books.  I didn't get wrapped up in the expanding mythology of the characters as I did by the ads that appeared in the back of these publications.  There were ads for Charles Atlas and for opportunities to sell greeting cards, but there were also ads from companies like Honor House.

Honor House carried everything: from gags and spy radios, to serious tools like X-ray Specs.  They also carried a selection of magic tricks.  I have very clear memories of taping coins to a piece of cardboard and sending away for some of the exotic treasures contained in these ads.

Never once did it occur to me that this was not serious equipment for the budding magician.  After all, it was in these same pages that you would see ads for submarines and space flight simulators.

I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was around this time, maybe a little later, that I became aware of magazines like Genii and Tops.  And from the ads in those magazines I learned about mysterious places like Tannen's and Flosso-Hornmann.  These and places like them were the storied meeting places of the performers who were profiled in these magazines.  It was here that magicians would meet and show one another their tricks and get and give advice.  From time to time, the magazines--the "trades"--would profile up and coming talents and these rising stars would tell of visits made to their local magic shops where they would watch and learn from the old-timers.

I needed to find a serious magic shop.

Montreal, at that time, was home to Morrissey's Magic on Rue Decelles, just east of Decarie.  The address is and was an apartment building, with their shop in the first apartment to your left on the first floor.

The showroom had a window, but that was the only part of any of the walls that was not covered by shelving and stuffed with stuff.  Lots and lots of packages containing lots of secrets.  It was kind of like that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark:  so much stuff that you couldn't ever hope to take it all in in a single visit, or even a lifetime of visits.

And, best of all, no fake vomit or plastic dog poop anywhere.  This was a store for professionals.  I won't say I ever made it into the inner circle, but visiting Morrissey's let you know where the inner circle was.

Not only did they sell the professional equipment, but they also manufactured a line of their own.  Herb Morrissey manufactured and sold cups for the Cups & Balls, Dove Pans, Zombie Balls and Coin Pails.  Their stuff was so far beyond the plastic "toys" that I had started out with that just to hold it in your hands was to be in a different league.  This was the stuff the pros used.

I remember when I was able to purchase a Chop Cup from them.  This was going to be a turning point for me.  I was going to, once and for all, put down the toys and dedicate myself to mastering the sleights required to make the trick work.  Having a professional rig meant that it was time to get professional about magic.

But better than any single prop that I ever purchased there, or in any other magic shop, was the sense of possibility that Herb and Richard gave to even a hopeless beginner like myself. 

From the very first visit, they treated me with respect.  They assumed that I was serious about magic and, as a result, I became serious about it.  They treated me like I was an insider and not an outsider.  They pitched their talk just above my head so that I had a sense of how much more there was to learn, but not so far that I would get discouraged and give up.

They asked me what kind of a performer I was.

What a loaded question.

If I identified a specific area, they knew what sorts of merchandise to steer me towards.  If I did not, I would be marked as a tourist and I would be shown the Svengali decks and the ball vases.

They could demonstrate anything in the store and, based on how you responded, they would show you other similar effects.  If price was an obstacle, then they could direct you to a similar effect that was perhaps a little less expensive. 

The were terrific salesmen.  They could inspire and intrigue, flatter and challenge.  They empowered diuffers like me to think that we would be headlining at le Caf Conc--one of the last supper clubs in North America--in no time at all.

I do not have a lot of fond memories of being a teenager.  It felt like I experienced just about everyone of the topic areas covered in the ABC Afterschool Specials.  There were not too many places where I felt valued and respected.  Morrisey's was one of those places.  I remember after having having a tooth pulled--pre-trial punishment prior to being sentenced to a term of braces--I was offered the opportunity to have a "treat."  I chose a trip to Morrissey's.  I believe that was the day that I came home with an appearing cane:  seemed a fair exchange for a disappearing tooth.

Like the cane, eventually other interests "sprang up" to occupy my time and my committment to magic was redirected.  And while I was "misdirected," Morrissey's closed up and moved to Toronto.  And like the braces I wore, the application of technology has caused the important role that the so-called "brick and mortar" magic shops played in nurturing new magicians has been all-but erased. 

Today, just as in the Honor House days, magic is primarily a mail order business.  Instead of taping quarters to cardboard, we type credit card numbers into a computer and, sooner or later, new magic appears at your door.  It's all very efficient and makes good business sense, but like buying a suit off the rack, you never can be sure whether what you bought is a good fit.

For an old variety art, magic has made a real effort to stay relevant.  All you need is a web connection and you can see performances by the greats of today and many of those from days gone by.  You can comparison shop for particular effects in shops all over the world.  Performers, both living and dead, have fan pages and are present on Facebook. 

The price paid for all of this relevance is the loss of magic as a social medium. 

First and foremost, magic exists as live theatre.  It's a thousand and one stories about small miracles such as making a rabbit appear out of a hat, or being able to pluck coins out of the air.  In print, or online, these stories can seem silly, or unbelievable.  On stage, they become truly miraculous. 

If you have ever had the experience of watching a much-hearalded scary movie on television, you have a sense of what I am talking about.  It's so much easier to scare people in the dark then it is in the comfort of their own living room and easier still if there is a crowd.  Fear, like laughter and wonder, is contagious.

And just as magic need an audience, magicians need to engage with and be engaged by other magicians.  And hope-to-be magicians need to work for and be corrected by the more experienced.  Encouraged whenever possible and discouraged when necessary.  That's how you build the next generation of performers and sustain the art:  brick-by-brick, one magician at a time.