Heroes

Image copyright, Penguin Magic

When I was much, much younger, I wanted to be a magician.

As I have noted elsewhere, I came of age in the era of Mark Wilson and Doug Henning, or Reveen The Impossiblist, Kreskin, The Amazing and Bill Bixby as The Magician.

There are revered icons:  heroes in age of chaos.

To be a teenager is inherently chaotic, a time of natural transformation, but it also happened to be a time of national and international change.  In Canada, the Quiet Revolution, came to an explosive end, in America, a presidency came to an end and, internationally, old world orders seemed to be cancelled, or re-written with alarming frequency.  It was a good time to be a map maker as countries seemed to be changing their names on a regular basis and a bad time to buy a big car.

For a kid with no particular social skills, a more than healthy interest in dessert and a love how things worked, magic was an irresistible draw.  Unlike any other aspect of life, magic was full of surprises that were always pleasant and mysteries that were intriguing to unravel.   I could imagine a dove being produced from a handkerchief, because I had actually seen it happen, but I could never imagine any one of a seemingly endless series of Jennifers ever liking me, because that never happened.

One of the few friends I did have, Joe Lawson, lived in magical house at the end of my street and he shared my interest in magic.  What's more, he actually had some serious magic props including a bell that even though it was isolated under a glass, would mysteriously ring in answer to questions from the audience:  one ring for "yes", two rings for "no."

While still in elementary school, I read up on Houdini and how his fate was inextricably linked with my home town of Montreal.  I soaked up information about how all of the greats from the "Golden Age" of magic had played the cavernous theatres along St. Catherine Street.  And I was thrilled to learn that the legend of modern magic, Dai Vernon, had grown up in Ottawa--not that far away.

Magic seemed to be all around me.

I was also fascinated by language and the power of words.

I still remember the practical lesson on misplaced modifiers that was dispensed in elementary school:  "Wanted a piano by a woman with fat legs."

I knew from listening to The Goons on the radio and watching Monty Python on TV that words could make people laugh.  I knew from personal experience that words could also make people cry.  And, thanks to some gifted teachers, I knew that words could also inform and inspire.

Good writing, like good magic, can change the way you look at your world and, as Shakespeare put it, alert you to the possibilities of "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

Paradoxically, I was never a great reader.  To this day, I love to collect books that I have every intention of reading, but somehow never get around to.  They continue to accumulate in my "office" right next to the magic props and never-ending decks of cards that I keep meaning to study and perfect.

I did actually perform magic, for a time.  I did several birthday parties and an annual appearance at Christmas dinner, but I never progressed outside the friends and family circuit.  My passion for magic was tempered by my zero-tolerance policy for rejection.  There were and are enough things in my life that make me cry without my actively seeking more.

Perhaps it was an early exposure to "Harriet the Spy" that made me think of myself as a secret writer.  "Writer" because I enjoy the meditative practice of moving pen over paper--handwriting samples notwithstanding; "secret" because I would never show my stuff to anyone--see above.

For as long as I've had pen and paper, I have tried to model the styles of those writers that have made an impression on me.  I have notebooks and hard drives with poems inspired by Ferlinghetti, fiction by Chandler, plays by Mamet and comedy by everyone from Spike Milligan to Woody Allen.

But just like with my magic, I lack the discipline to pick a direction and stick with it.  I write, but I have no voice, no authentic vision.

It was maybe a decade ago that I discovered that one of the longest-running magic conventions in the country had been taking place about a half-hour from where I live. 

I discovered the fact quite by accident, and it must have come at just the right time because it re-ignited something within me.  In addition to first visiting their dealers room and purchasing some books on magic history--a gateway drug--I re-started my subscription to "Genii:  The Conjurors Magazine" a publication I hadn't read in perhaps forty years.

And it was in the pages of this magazine that I was introduced to the writing of Jamy Ian Swiss.

I had only known of him as a magician because of his work on a special for PBS and an incredible "Card Under Glass" performance.

His description of himself as an "honest liar" resonated with me, in part, because it echoed a sequence in one of my favorite films, "F for Fake" the last completed film by another magician-writer, Orson Welles.

In the pages of Genii, Swiss reviewed magic books the same way he performed his magic:  with a mastery of subject and a distinctive voice.  The subject of the book under review was almost secondary in that it provided a context for Swiss to frame his comments on the state of the art.  The reviews were always thoughtful considerations of the work at hand, but they were also editorials and advocacy pieces.  

I know this description makes him sound didactic, but that was not his effect on me.  His words fueled my curiosity and made me want to look for the works he was writing about, but also to re-examine books I had already bought but only thumbed through.

Up to this point, magic books had, almost without exception, disappointed me because everyone I had opened had contained what seemed to me like incomplete explanations, or were written in such a way that they kept me an arm's length from their subject.  Like this joke from Steve Martin, you had to know what was being talked about before you could know what was being talked about.  In his reviews, Swiss would routinely provide references to secondary sources that helped to fill in any gaps in the reader's knowledgebase.
 

Reading Swiss was transformational in that he took me from being a magic tourist to being more of a student.  I have many more magic books in my library.  I have gone from being a visitor at the Magi-Fest to a regular attendee.  

I also attend lectures produced at a Columbus-based venue for Penguin Magic where I have seen some of the best working professionals perform and discuss their work.

And it is thanks to Swiss that I now see all of this in a new way.  I see magic less as an expression of technical mastery and more of an artistic statement, a performance art where craft, character, artist and vision are all represented in the same person.  When I was a kid and torturing my audiences with bad magic, I used to think that if someone was silly enough to explain how to do a magic trick, I could learn that trick and become a magician.  After being exposed to Swiss and his work, I now understand that a book about magic, like any other book about art, is not a cookbook full of recipes but an insight into process.

Five years ago, Genii Magazine held a conference of their own in Orlando to mark their seventy-fifth year of publication.  The line-up of speakers and performers was impressive not the least of which was Jamy Ian Swiss.  At the time, it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and one that fell squarely into the "oh well" category of this that it would be nice to do, but which could not be justified.  To my surprise, my wife surprised me with a pair of conference registrations and off we went.  

It was incredible to be under the same roof as not only Swiss but Eugene Burger, Jim Steinmeyer, Max Maven, Uri Geller, Juan Tamariz, Guy Hollingworth and a host of others whose work I knew, in part, because of Swiss.

I was grateful to my wife for insisting that we go and I was grateful to Swiss for helping me to see magic and my interest in a new way, an integrated way that brought together my interests in a way that had previously been invisible to me.

Swiss was to lecture on mentalism in one of the late-night sessions and I was looking forward to that because, in part, I wanted to thank him for his contribution to my new perspective.

I was never able to do that, to make that simple personal connection, because I am a shy person with limited social skills, and because at every potential opportunity it seemed as though Swiss was angry.  As I recall, I think it might have had something to do with the presence and/or reception of Uri Geller, although it might also have had to do with the end of his time as resident book reviewer for the magazine:  whatever the reason, he never seemed approachable.

About a year ago, our paths crossed once again when Swiss came to Columbus to present a lecture for Penguin Magic's online service.

I had to go.

All I wanted to do was watch him work and get a booster shot of his perspective sorely lacking since his departure from Genii.

As luck would have it, I was recruited from the sparse studio audience to participate in one of his effects.  He was presenting an effect wherein the spectator's thought-of card disappears from the deck and appears as the only card inside a supposedly empty card box.

There I sat, next to one of my favorite writers, as he did a magic trick for me that left me on common ground with the man in the first who learns that his card is now under the Swiss' cocktail glass.

There were no words.  

It was an object lesson in design, mastery and performance.

It was a master class. 

Again, I wanted to say "thank you," but here again, it seemed inappropriate.  All I could do was shake his hand and retire to my seat.

It's not enough, but I'll take it.

P is for Part 3

The advent of Internet videos has unleashed a torrent of magic and powered many a hand-wringing column, blog post and conversation.  It has also created a slew of performers who can display their relative skills to the world with concern for audience response.

Approbation has been conflated with page views.

Real performance is a bi-directional process in real time, a conversation really between the magician and his audience.  And, like any conversation, it is made up of an unending series of adjustments and refinements in response to verbal and non-verbal cues passing back and forth over the footlights.

There is no virtual simulation for this, no matter how good your Internet connection.

To upgrade your skills as a performer, you have to perform in front of a living audience.

Preparing for those performance opportunities means doing what other performance artists have always done:  prepare, practice and rehearse.

I can recall my own early days in magic and how each time I would get a new trick, I would renew my commitment to being a better performer only to tear open the package, pour over the instructions and quickly become bored with the props.  And, like most game day prayers, my commitment to practicing would similarly evaporate.

It was only when challenged to "do a trick" that I would go back to my props and quickly try to put together a program based on my sketchy memory of the instructions I had read.  It's no surprise then that I never accomplished my goals in magic.

I bring all of this up by way of introduction to the lecture of Eugene Burger at the Genii 75th Anniversary Bash in Orlando.

By reputation, Burger is one of magic's revered philosopher kings.  He is as comfortable discussing theory and history as he is performing his torture-themed take on the Card Warp.

What is less clear until you see him in person is the mischievous twinkle in his eye.  He clearly enjoys confounding his audiences.  In my notebook I wrote "The Friar Tuck of Magic."

The premise of his lecture was "how can we make our shows better?"  Not how can we be better magicians, or how can we master a particular aspect of presentation, but how can we make our shows better.  How do magicians make better theatre?

In answer to his question, Mr. Burger went on to define what he felt were the four pillars of a good show.

Pillar I:  Practice
Burger is an advocate of regular and conscious practice.

While I can't pretend to speak for all, it seems that, for many, practice is too much like dieting:  they know they need to do it, but something more interesting always seems to get in the way.

It is for this reason that so many effects are sold as being "easy" and requiring little to no skill.

While I am certain it happens all the time, I am pretty sure Burger would maintain it was a mistake to confuse the skill requirement with the mandate to practice.  It may not take a lot of skill to operate a Svengali Deck, but it does take practice.

One of the key reasons for practicing is to empower the performer to not have to think about the procedure of the effect.  In Burger's words, "thinking kills magic."

Until the procedure of a given effect can be performed without thinking, in other words, until you can name the 16th letter of the alphabet without using your fingers or singing "The Alphabet Song" then you don't know the trick and need more practice.

Burger went on to say that practice should also be conscious.  This is to say that in practice the moves should be second nature to the performer but they should never be automatic.  The performer needs to pay attention to their practice so as not to learn bad habits.  The last thing one wants is to invest hours and hours perfecting a piece of "sneaky business" only to have it not be right for a particular effect.

Pillar II:  Rehearsal
Burger differentiated practice from rehearsal by saying that while practice can and should be done alone and in front of a mirror, rehearsal should be done in front of a camera and, as in the theatre, attempt to replicate as closely as possible actual show conditions.  And, Burger was careful to caution, it would serve the performer well to not always assume that the rehearsal audience is nice, or even interested in his magic.

The camera can be a useful tool for identifying procedural and presentational shortcomings but, like the Internet video performances of so many young magicians, it can blind the performer to angle issues that can crop up in the real world.  To receive maximum benefit from these rehearsals, the performer should move the camera to less-than-ideal angles.

Pillar III:  Scripting
Like practicing, magicians have heard about scripting their effects, but it too often falls off the preparation checklist.

Too many performers, especially beginners who specialize presenting other people's magic, believe that by repeating the presentation of the person who demonstrated the effect to them they will be "real magicians."  Worse, there are far too many who believe, mistakenly, that they have superior improvisational skills and they simply make up their presentation as they go along.

Burger's position is that a magic trick is a "picture without a frame" and it is through the scripting process that the performer provides a context for the effect.

It should be noted here that the script for a given effect has to also be consistent with the performer's onstage character.  This comes back to the magician as actor playing the part of a magician notion of Robert-Houdin.

Presuming I could master the Card Warp effect, it would no more make sense for me to repeat Burger's script than it would for David Copperfield to perform the endurance stunts of David Blaine.  Scripting is how the performer makes a particular effect part of their particular show.

And, from a purely technical perspective, the structure of a script provides the performer with a way of avoiding cluttering up the audience's experience of an effect with unnecessary verbiage--what Burger calls "verbal lint."  Improvisation can add energy to a performance, but the uncertainty can lead the performer--especially an inexperienced performer--to a dead end the only way out of which is more words and more audience confusion.

Pillar IV:  Critique
By investing in the first three pillars--practice, rehearsal and scripting--the performer should be more than ready to accept the feedback of a constructive critique.  Soliciting the comments of trusted fellow magicians and civilians, the performer can continue to adjust and correct aspects of their show so that they can be ready for an audience.

ByThe processes that Burger described are not static.  Much like then final performance, the process is bi-directional with each refinement impacting practice, scripting and rehearsal.  Each critique, like each, performance, informs the scripting, rehearsal and so on. 

Burger's Pillars are foundational to the creation of strong, individual performance and essential to beginning a real conversation with the audience.

"...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.