Television is as responsible as anything for my interest in magic. Not only was there Marshall Brodien and his TV Magic, but in Montreal we had "Magic Tom."
Magic Tom Auburn was THE local magician. He hosted a local kids show that was our equivalent to Bozo. He also seemed to be the go-to performer for live events around town. And why not? At the point when I was introduced to him, he presented himself as everyone's idea of the uncle who could do cool stuff. He was friendly and respectful, great with kids and he could do magic. What was not to like?
It was with this image in my head that I thought I too could perform for kids. He made it look so easy that I thought it was easy. It was not until I had retired from the stage that I came to understand that it was only because of absolute mastery of his material that he could appear so effortless.
Here are some videos where you can get a sense of what I'm talking about.
So, not only was I hearing that "magic is easy once you know the secret" but I was seeing it every week in the person of Magic Tom.
At about the same time that I first saw the ads for TV Magic Cards, I remember seeing a similar style ad for the Wonder Mouse. I don't know who was selling it, or even if it was called Wonder Mouse at the time, but I have a memory of seeing this advertised and being completely fascinated by this magical plastic mouse. There was no abracadabra, no magic wands, just an inanimate plastic mouse that appeared to be able to do impossible things. It looked like real magic.
Well, here, take a look for yourself:
This isn't the actual ad, but it gives you some idea of what I saw.
As I was preparing this piece, I was surprised to see that the mouse is still being sold. There is a more modern variation called the "Squirmel," but the mouse is still going strong.
This surprised me because when I finally got my hands on one, I remember being so completely disappointed in the "secret." The little "motor" that made the mouse do his wonderful tricks didn't make me think so much of Magic Tom as it did Rocky's famous line to Bullwinkle: "those tricks never work."
As I have noted elsewhere, I was pretty focused on getting caught and so a trick's "technology" had to pretty bulletproof. The part that I didn't get about performing is that elaborate technology comes with its own set of problems. The more the moving parts the more parts there are to break. In its own way, the Wonder Mouse is pretty bulletproof, but for a different reason. It's simplicity means that the performer doesn't have to think about it and can instead focus on his presentation.
What continues to impress me about magicians is that they willing enter into a performance with a hostile audience. The promise of trickery means that the audience is alert for possible clues that will enable them to discover the method. Nontheless, the magician distracts, misdirects and charms the audience so that he or she can pull the wool over their eyes. That's a kind of bravery that I can respect, but otherwise can't get close to.
Magic is storytelling, not technique. Every set of instructions I have ever read begins with the effect of the trick. That is the primary consideration: what does the audience see? The path to accomplishing that effect can take many routes and the actual work of the trick can happen at any point before the end. Some tricks are done before the performer has even begun and others can have a variety of outcomes depending on what happens along that path.
When I was still doing kids shows, I would go to the magic shops--Morrissey's in Ville St. Laurent, or Cramer's on Bleury--and look for the items that I saw Magic Tom use. I remember getting a piece of used equipment from Cramer's that became the close of my show. It was something I had seen Magic Tom use, a glass of sugar that turned into a glass full of candy. That was something a professional used. I used it, so I was on my way to becoming a professional.
It has taken me some four decades to recognize something that should have been painfully obvious: magic is not about the equipment and the technique. These are the details, the accents in the story told by the performer. It's not what happens when the simple metal tube covers the glass, but all about what happens to the spectators when the tube is removed. When they are transformed from cynics and secret-seekers into those who believe in wonder, that's when the magic happens.
Showing posts with label Marshall Brodien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marshall Brodien. Show all posts
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Time Tunnel
In my work, I try to write about issues relating to mental health. As part of that work, I curate our agency blog.
It was there that I posted this piece about magic, memory and Marshall Brodien. It may not be original to this blog, but it is in keeping with it.
It was there that I posted this piece about magic, memory and Marshall Brodien. It may not be original to this blog, but it is in keeping with it.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
DeLand's Cards Have Superiority
I like Honda cars.
I was an early convert. We had been a Ford family with the exception of a brief fling with a Renault when my brother and I were young children. My dad was not one to experiment. When he found something he liked, he teneded to stay with it and so we went through a series of Ford station wagons. And when we experienced our first oil shock, he bought a Pinto wagon for my mother. Always wagons and always with the genuine immitation wood paneling on the side panels.
I don't remember what accounted for the abboration that was the Honda. I just know that with the arrival of that hatchback, the parade of woodies was broken.
What impressed me about the Honda was that when I drove it every button seemed to be placed where you would intuitively look for it. Not only did the car handle well and have some gitty-up in its get-along, but it appeared to have been designed by drivers. They appeared to have thought of everything.
I share that little piece of my motoring past because I appreciate the difference it makes when product developers consider a comprehensive solution to a problem rather than a small subset. It's the difference between retrofitting an air conditioner into a classic car and designing a car from the ground up to include air conditioning. In a retrofit, both the car and the add-on system have to be bent to meet the needs of the other.
I have perhaps exhausted the level of my authority to write about cars, but I wanted to make a point about good design. You can see this on Antiques Roadshow all the time when someone gets caught with a reproduction. What distinguishes the fakes is the approximation of detail, the vague impressions where the original would have had patiently carved detail.
It doesn't matter what the product is, the difference between good design and great design is in the details. You know when a product does what you want it to do and when it doesn't. You know when it fits your process--whatever that might be--and when you have to adapt your process to fit the product.
As mentioned elsewhere, I began my passion for magic by resorting to the shortcuts provided by self-working tricks. I succumbed to come-ons like those of Marshall Brodien who intoned in his classic TV pitch that "magic was easy once you know the secret."
The cards were so smart that they did all the work for you.
If that were only true.
Over the years, I have purchased many decks of TV Magic Cards--some on purpose and some because I didn't understand that it was the same product sold under a different name. Almost all of them come with an intricately folded sheet of instructions containing a variety of tricks with which one can "amaze" one's friends. The decks--properly called Svengali decks--are ideal for television because they are easy to work and they look like real magic. In real life, however, they cannot be examined by the spectator and so the performer must always be mindful of the enquiring hands. It is ironic that these decks are sold to young magicians and yet should not be used to entertain young audiences unless by an experienced performer.
Earlier this year, I purchased a DVD by magician Oz Pearlman all about the deck and even though I was familiar with the secret and had these decks all over my house, I was stunned to see him demonstrate how you could successfully riffle shuffle the cards. It's a simple thing to do--once you know the secret--but it is very convincing in putting over that these are "perfectly ordinary cards."
My big fear as a performer was, and is, getting caught by the audience. The last thing I want is to be doing my "miracles" with the "perfectly ordinary" cards and have someone pick a card they shouldn't, or see something up my sleeve. What I saw in the Pearlman DVD that I had not seen before was some of the subtleties that would keep the audience focused on the performer and not their props, on the story and not the procedures. Whereas my style as a performer is pretty defensive, I saw that it was possible to "play offense" not by beating your audience, but by keeping them psychologically off-balance. That little bit of information--even though it came about forty years too late--was worth knowing and worth the price of the DVD and yet another Svengali deck.
All of this is mere prologue to a discussion of DeLand's Automatic Cards.
The first thing you notice about these cards is how carefully they were designed. It seems certain that the intent was to design a utility pack of cards that would suit the needs of the working performer. Special features are built into the manufacturing of the cards that enable the performer to tell the location of any card at any moment, to locate a selected card blindfolded, to immediately identify a selected card, and much more. The performer can have the spectator cut the cards into two piles and tell immediately how many cards are in each half.
It's like the Swiss Army knife of trick decks.
I don't know enough about the history of the deck--although there is shortly to be published a new book about DeLand and his many contributions to magic--but I know in my own life I have seen it more typically in toy stores than magic shops. It's sold to "civilians" and not to magicians and, perhaps for that reason, for many years not much attention was paid to the details. Like the weathervane, it was intended to convey the impression of magic without having the underlying utility.
I bought my first DeLand deck many years ago and, as soon as I skimmed the directions, recognized that I couldn't use it. Not because it wasn't useful, but because of the precision of its design, I would be afraid of messing it up. I didn't even want to shuffle it.
I never performed a trick with it, but I have never forgotten it. Like the Honda, I was impressed by the thoughtful design. And like the Svengali deck, I don't think I understood its many subtleties until many, many years later. (I bet you were thinking I couldn't tie this all together....)
About a year ago, I learned that the rights to the DeLand deck had been purchased from the S.S. Adams company--sellers of black soap, whoopee cushions and many inexpensive magic tricks--by Magic Makers, Inc in South Dakota and that they are now producing a high quality edition of the deck on the same stock used for the ubiquitous Bicycle decks made by the United States Playing Card Company.
I also learned only recently that DeLand ended his days in a mental health facility in Pennsylvania. It's not relevant for any other reason that I am currently working for a mental health advocacy organization.
Needless to say, I bought a deck. Still afraid to shuffle it, but still think it's a great idea and a beautiful design.
I was an early convert. We had been a Ford family with the exception of a brief fling with a Renault when my brother and I were young children. My dad was not one to experiment. When he found something he liked, he teneded to stay with it and so we went through a series of Ford station wagons. And when we experienced our first oil shock, he bought a Pinto wagon for my mother. Always wagons and always with the genuine immitation wood paneling on the side panels.
I don't remember what accounted for the abboration that was the Honda. I just know that with the arrival of that hatchback, the parade of woodies was broken.
What impressed me about the Honda was that when I drove it every button seemed to be placed where you would intuitively look for it. Not only did the car handle well and have some gitty-up in its get-along, but it appeared to have been designed by drivers. They appeared to have thought of everything.
I share that little piece of my motoring past because I appreciate the difference it makes when product developers consider a comprehensive solution to a problem rather than a small subset. It's the difference between retrofitting an air conditioner into a classic car and designing a car from the ground up to include air conditioning. In a retrofit, both the car and the add-on system have to be bent to meet the needs of the other.
I have perhaps exhausted the level of my authority to write about cars, but I wanted to make a point about good design. You can see this on Antiques Roadshow all the time when someone gets caught with a reproduction. What distinguishes the fakes is the approximation of detail, the vague impressions where the original would have had patiently carved detail.
It doesn't matter what the product is, the difference between good design and great design is in the details. You know when a product does what you want it to do and when it doesn't. You know when it fits your process--whatever that might be--and when you have to adapt your process to fit the product.
As mentioned elsewhere, I began my passion for magic by resorting to the shortcuts provided by self-working tricks. I succumbed to come-ons like those of Marshall Brodien who intoned in his classic TV pitch that "magic was easy once you know the secret."
The cards were so smart that they did all the work for you.
If that were only true.
Over the years, I have purchased many decks of TV Magic Cards--some on purpose and some because I didn't understand that it was the same product sold under a different name. Almost all of them come with an intricately folded sheet of instructions containing a variety of tricks with which one can "amaze" one's friends. The decks--properly called Svengali decks--are ideal for television because they are easy to work and they look like real magic. In real life, however, they cannot be examined by the spectator and so the performer must always be mindful of the enquiring hands. It is ironic that these decks are sold to young magicians and yet should not be used to entertain young audiences unless by an experienced performer.
Earlier this year, I purchased a DVD by magician Oz Pearlman all about the deck and even though I was familiar with the secret and had these decks all over my house, I was stunned to see him demonstrate how you could successfully riffle shuffle the cards. It's a simple thing to do--once you know the secret--but it is very convincing in putting over that these are "perfectly ordinary cards."
My big fear as a performer was, and is, getting caught by the audience. The last thing I want is to be doing my "miracles" with the "perfectly ordinary" cards and have someone pick a card they shouldn't, or see something up my sleeve. What I saw in the Pearlman DVD that I had not seen before was some of the subtleties that would keep the audience focused on the performer and not their props, on the story and not the procedures. Whereas my style as a performer is pretty defensive, I saw that it was possible to "play offense" not by beating your audience, but by keeping them psychologically off-balance. That little bit of information--even though it came about forty years too late--was worth knowing and worth the price of the DVD and yet another Svengali deck.
 |
| From shop.zauberparadies.com. |
The first thing you notice about these cards is how carefully they were designed. It seems certain that the intent was to design a utility pack of cards that would suit the needs of the working performer. Special features are built into the manufacturing of the cards that enable the performer to tell the location of any card at any moment, to locate a selected card blindfolded, to immediately identify a selected card, and much more. The performer can have the spectator cut the cards into two piles and tell immediately how many cards are in each half.
It's like the Swiss Army knife of trick decks.
I don't know enough about the history of the deck--although there is shortly to be published a new book about DeLand and his many contributions to magic--but I know in my own life I have seen it more typically in toy stores than magic shops. It's sold to "civilians" and not to magicians and, perhaps for that reason, for many years not much attention was paid to the details. Like the weathervane, it was intended to convey the impression of magic without having the underlying utility.
I bought my first DeLand deck many years ago and, as soon as I skimmed the directions, recognized that I couldn't use it. Not because it wasn't useful, but because of the precision of its design, I would be afraid of messing it up. I didn't even want to shuffle it.
I never performed a trick with it, but I have never forgotten it. Like the Honda, I was impressed by the thoughtful design. And like the Svengali deck, I don't think I understood its many subtleties until many, many years later. (I bet you were thinking I couldn't tie this all together....)
About a year ago, I learned that the rights to the DeLand deck had been purchased from the S.S. Adams company--sellers of black soap, whoopee cushions and many inexpensive magic tricks--by Magic Makers, Inc in South Dakota and that they are now producing a high quality edition of the deck on the same stock used for the ubiquitous Bicycle decks made by the United States Playing Card Company.
I also learned only recently that DeLand ended his days in a mental health facility in Pennsylvania. It's not relevant for any other reason that I am currently working for a mental health advocacy organization.
Needless to say, I bought a deck. Still afraid to shuffle it, but still think it's a great idea and a beautiful design.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Is It So Wrong?
I used to do tricks.
No, not like that.
I used to pester my parents, and anyone else I could force to sit still long enough, to watch me murder an idea that some very talented people had worked on and brought to market.
I pretended to do card tricks and tricks with coins. I had canes that disappeared and one that came back. I had a floating ball and a storybook about a magician who could make a rabbit appear from his hat depending on how I held it.
But I wasn't a magician. I was the person that magicians love to hate. They love people like me because we buy their tricks, but they also hate us because we can never do their stuff justice. We rush through the instructions in order to figure out how the trick works and then we try and "perform" our latest miracle to a less than enthusiastic audience.
Like so many of my peers who discovered magic when "normal" boys were discovering girls, I would go to the magic shop and fall in love with whatever the demonstrator showed me and think that when I showed it to my family that I was every bit as good.
So deluded was I in my pretense of being a magician that I did birthday party shows for children in my neighborhood for the princely sum of $5.00.
Today, at the other end of the telescope, I think I owe those parents their money back, with interest.
I had no business getting in front of an audience. Any audience.
The father of modern magic, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin said that "a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician." When I first read that, I took it as equivalent to the kind of koan uttered by Master Po on the Kung Fu TV series. A magician is an actor? The two were nothing alike. I knew from being in plays in elementary school that actors have to learn lines and pretend to be someone they're not. Magicians know things that others don't. They know secrets and that makes them eminently cool. It also didn't hurt that while I was deepest into magic during these years that there was a TV show about a magician who travelled the country in a private plane and a white Corvette helping the helpless and righting wrongs with his powers.
Magic could be cool; much cooler than being in drama club.
In one of my many courses in a master class of life's ironies, it would turn out that I would spent almost 20 years working in and around the theatre.
I did what I could to integrate my interest in magic with my surroundings by gravitating to the world of stagecraft. Instead of being the jet-setting, wrong-righting Anthony Blake, I became the person who stood in the shadows and handed Mr. Blake his equipment.
I consoled myself by saying that I was in the business of creating the illusion of the world of the play. (That I can write a sentence like that will let you know just how much of a theatre geek I was.)
"A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician."
Why would you get an actor to play the part of a magician when you could just get a magician?
Like most beginners, I got into magic with equipment that did the tricks for you. Instead of investing the time in learning the difficult manipulations that, in combination, can create the most devastating of effects, I invested my money in tricks that did themselves. I bought hook, line and sinker into Marshall Brodien's mantra that "magic is easy once you know the secret."
I can remember being so pleased to have my first deck of his TV Magic Cards
. They promised to impress with the greatest of ease. When I got them, I was impressed with the secret, but also afraid that the secret was so obvious that I would get caught if I tried to perform with them. All it would have taken is for one of my patient family member to reach over and snatch the deck from me and I would be discovered to be a fake.
As this fear was imbedding itself in my consciousness, I was also reading about the history of magic. I recall reading about the fakirs of India and their reputation for supernatural powers. While we can quickly see from an Internet search that the name of fakir covers a variety of ascetics in South Asia and the Middle East, at the time, my young mind connected my fear of being caught as a "fake" with the formal term "fakir", or as I read it at the time "FAKER." I want to amaze in the same way that the demonstrater in the magic shop had amazed me, not be a faker.
This drove a kind of magic arms race where I kept looking for effects that would be bulletproof. They would work everytime and be invulnerable to my "handsy" relatives.
A reasonable person might conclude that, given some time and experience, I would be able to overcome my fears and acquire the technical skill needed to keep my critics at bay. Perhaps, if I had been more disciplined/driven in my study, I would have done just that, but I rushed into doing birthday parties and to performing magic at family gatherings.
Comedians have a term to describe a challenging audience, one where they were not able to meet the crowd where they were and when the jokes aren't working. They call those shows "tough rooms." Working for my two primary audiences was a relentless onslaught of such rooms. Both crowds, my extended family and parties with 6 year-olds, had a stake in demonstrating that they knew as much as, or more than, I did. Through my combination of fear and lack of experience, I virtually surrendered control of my show before the first trick. Audiences for magic and audiences for other blood sports are looking for the slightest sign of weakness and, once spotted, will be relentless in exploiting it.
Unlike the birthday party audience, my relatives saw the magic trick as not an end in themselves--they were not waiting for me to produce candy at the end of the show--they saw my performance as an opportunity to engage in their favorite after dinner game which was to see who could make the funniest critical remark. That they seemed to really enjoy that aspect of my show made me very conflicted about performing for them. On the one hand they could be brutal in their criticism, but on the other they really did seem to be having a good time, so I was entertaining, if inartful with my magic. A reasonable person would escape that experience once and never go back, I, on the other hand, suffering from a kind of magical Stockholm Syndrome, went back time and time again.
I did find the strength to stop dong kids' parties. I was forced to admit that my interests in magic were not those needed to be a successful kids performer. Like many would-be magicians, I was fascinated by card tricks and, you know, kids really aren't. I was intrigued by the technology of magic and kids want a good story. Without the story, it's just another adult trying to fool them with what are, in essence, some pretty cheesy props.
And it was at this precise point, that I began to understand what Robert-Houdin meant.
No, not like that.
I used to pester my parents, and anyone else I could force to sit still long enough, to watch me murder an idea that some very talented people had worked on and brought to market.
I pretended to do card tricks and tricks with coins. I had canes that disappeared and one that came back. I had a floating ball and a storybook about a magician who could make a rabbit appear from his hat depending on how I held it.
But I wasn't a magician. I was the person that magicians love to hate. They love people like me because we buy their tricks, but they also hate us because we can never do their stuff justice. We rush through the instructions in order to figure out how the trick works and then we try and "perform" our latest miracle to a less than enthusiastic audience.
Like so many of my peers who discovered magic when "normal" boys were discovering girls, I would go to the magic shop and fall in love with whatever the demonstrator showed me and think that when I showed it to my family that I was every bit as good.
So deluded was I in my pretense of being a magician that I did birthday party shows for children in my neighborhood for the princely sum of $5.00.
Today, at the other end of the telescope, I think I owe those parents their money back, with interest.
I had no business getting in front of an audience. Any audience.
The father of modern magic, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin said that "a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician." When I first read that, I took it as equivalent to the kind of koan uttered by Master Po on the Kung Fu TV series. A magician is an actor? The two were nothing alike. I knew from being in plays in elementary school that actors have to learn lines and pretend to be someone they're not. Magicians know things that others don't. They know secrets and that makes them eminently cool. It also didn't hurt that while I was deepest into magic during these years that there was a TV show about a magician who travelled the country in a private plane and a white Corvette helping the helpless and righting wrongs with his powers.
Magic could be cool; much cooler than being in drama club.
In one of my many courses in a master class of life's ironies, it would turn out that I would spent almost 20 years working in and around the theatre.
I did what I could to integrate my interest in magic with my surroundings by gravitating to the world of stagecraft. Instead of being the jet-setting, wrong-righting Anthony Blake, I became the person who stood in the shadows and handed Mr. Blake his equipment.
I consoled myself by saying that I was in the business of creating the illusion of the world of the play. (That I can write a sentence like that will let you know just how much of a theatre geek I was.)
"A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician."
Why would you get an actor to play the part of a magician when you could just get a magician?
Like most beginners, I got into magic with equipment that did the tricks for you. Instead of investing the time in learning the difficult manipulations that, in combination, can create the most devastating of effects, I invested my money in tricks that did themselves. I bought hook, line and sinker into Marshall Brodien's mantra that "magic is easy once you know the secret."
I can remember being so pleased to have my first deck of his TV Magic Cards
. They promised to impress with the greatest of ease. When I got them, I was impressed with the secret, but also afraid that the secret was so obvious that I would get caught if I tried to perform with them. All it would have taken is for one of my patient family member to reach over and snatch the deck from me and I would be discovered to be a fake.As this fear was imbedding itself in my consciousness, I was also reading about the history of magic. I recall reading about the fakirs of India and their reputation for supernatural powers. While we can quickly see from an Internet search that the name of fakir covers a variety of ascetics in South Asia and the Middle East, at the time, my young mind connected my fear of being caught as a "fake" with the formal term "fakir", or as I read it at the time "FAKER." I want to amaze in the same way that the demonstrater in the magic shop had amazed me, not be a faker.
This drove a kind of magic arms race where I kept looking for effects that would be bulletproof. They would work everytime and be invulnerable to my "handsy" relatives.
A reasonable person might conclude that, given some time and experience, I would be able to overcome my fears and acquire the technical skill needed to keep my critics at bay. Perhaps, if I had been more disciplined/driven in my study, I would have done just that, but I rushed into doing birthday parties and to performing magic at family gatherings.
Comedians have a term to describe a challenging audience, one where they were not able to meet the crowd where they were and when the jokes aren't working. They call those shows "tough rooms." Working for my two primary audiences was a relentless onslaught of such rooms. Both crowds, my extended family and parties with 6 year-olds, had a stake in demonstrating that they knew as much as, or more than, I did. Through my combination of fear and lack of experience, I virtually surrendered control of my show before the first trick. Audiences for magic and audiences for other blood sports are looking for the slightest sign of weakness and, once spotted, will be relentless in exploiting it.
Unlike the birthday party audience, my relatives saw the magic trick as not an end in themselves--they were not waiting for me to produce candy at the end of the show--they saw my performance as an opportunity to engage in their favorite after dinner game which was to see who could make the funniest critical remark. That they seemed to really enjoy that aspect of my show made me very conflicted about performing for them. On the one hand they could be brutal in their criticism, but on the other they really did seem to be having a good time, so I was entertaining, if inartful with my magic. A reasonable person would escape that experience once and never go back, I, on the other hand, suffering from a kind of magical Stockholm Syndrome, went back time and time again.
I did find the strength to stop dong kids' parties. I was forced to admit that my interests in magic were not those needed to be a successful kids performer. Like many would-be magicians, I was fascinated by card tricks and, you know, kids really aren't. I was intrigued by the technology of magic and kids want a good story. Without the story, it's just another adult trying to fool them with what are, in essence, some pretty cheesy props.
And it was at this precise point, that I began to understand what Robert-Houdin meant.
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