Month: March 2018

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The Vengabus is coming
or About 400 pages

Back in the late 90s I was very fond of a song I heard on the radio called Nth Degree. I bought the single and after a while humming it wasn’t enough and I wanted to learn the lyrics. That’s when I realised what a bloody awful song it was and promptly never listened to it again.

The problem, you understand, is that the song was about the band, which sadly was named Morningwood.

This is the point when I tell you that this post has a Spotify playlist associated with it, so you can listen along. I will warn you though, some of the music is terrible.

Continue reading “The Vengabus is coming
or About 400 pages”

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If You Don’t Ask…
or I Also Made This

There’s a little story I wanted to add into the last post which I didn’t mention for the sake of brevity (basically it was getting too long).

When I met Eugene Burger (A very big deal in magic and sadly no longer with us) at a special one day workshop he showed us a trick using a prop called a Glorpy. The standard Glorpy is quite brightly coloured so Euegene had modified his to make it black, and realised that since he was lecturing the trick, he would like to sell black Glorpies for his students.

He reached out to Bill Madden and Bernie Trueblood, the people behind the original Glorpy to ask if he could sell his black version. It’s worth noting that since it’s creation in 1963, the Glorpy has been re-released by various magic publishers and there have even been a number of published sources describing how to make your own. In response to the request however, Eugene was told “You’re the first person to ask.”

So as an aside, when I decided I wanted to use Nedroid’s “I Made This” comic in that post I reached out over twitter to ask if I could include it, knowing full well that half the bloggers on the internet had already posted it on their own spaces with various levels of accreditation and I so desperately wanted him to say I was the first to ask, but alas, he just said yes.

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I Made This
or Parasites on the Shoulders of Giants

The following are three stories of things which I have not personally witnessed but which were recounted to me anecdotally in various forms. I can’t guarantee their veracity.

1. At Blackpool magic convention several years ago Dirk Losander saw someone selling a second hand floating table similar to one of his own designs. To prove a point he bought the table in question and smashed it to pieces in front of the seller, admonishing him for trading in knockoffs. It was however later revealed that the table in question was an original which predated Dirk’s entry into the floating table marketplace. For anyone new to magic, Dirk Losander is considered kind of a big deal on the international magic circuit so this was a surprising development.

2. The same thing happened one year where someone bought a copy of a trick named Red from Craig Petty, and tore it up in front of him. For anyone new to magic, Craig Petty was kind of a medium sized deal in the British magic circuit, having presented a review show with World Magic Shop on which he had made his views on copycat magic releases very clear¹, so the fact that Red was functionally identical to a trick called New Wave Prediction by magician Bob King.

3. I am an admin on a facebook group for magicians and as such I saw a similar event play out in real time this very week. A magic shop owner called James Anthony posted a special offer to the forum consisting of a special card deck for a trick named ILC², which is the signature effect of another one of the admins, Lawrence Turner. James claimed to not realise that this was what the ILC deck was, but he has worked alongside Lawrence as this trick was performed and couldn’t possibly have not known.

Intellectual property is complicated.

Continue reading “I Made This
or Parasites on the Shoulders of Giants”

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Rabbit Rabbit
or Prestomatosis

I was mid way through writing a long post about magic, intellectual property, cryptomnesia, and theft, when a little piece of information was brought to my attention that I simply had to share.

In Australia, where the introduction of rabbits caused an ecological disaster that famously had to be controlled by the intentional introduction of a disease called myxomatosis into the wild¹, it is illegal to own a pet rabbit in all but two circumstances:

  1. In a controlled laboratory environment for testing
  2. As part of a magic show

This suggests the possibility that someone in Australia might have become a magician simply because they wanted a rabbit².

Frankly there are worse reasons.

Continue reading “Rabbit Rabbit
or Prestomatosis”

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Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
or Men of Principles

Did you know Jeff McBride was in an episode of Star Trek? They actually wrote the whole episode of Deep Space Nine with him in mind as the character Joran Belar. Penn and Teller, conversely, were in an episode of Babylon 5, as Rebo and Zooty, a pair of intergalactic entertainers, one of whom doesn’t speak.

What’s fascinating to me is that Deep Space Nine is a knockoff of Babylon 5.

J. Michael Straczynski took the idea of a space opera set in a stationary location near a warp gate with themes of intergalactic war, the recent end of the Centauris’ oppresive regime over the Narns, and alien religion which selects the station’s captain as it’s chosen one, to Paramount and they said “Eh, not our bag”…. and then made Deep Space Nine, where a space station near a wormhole is the central key location in an intergalactic war, featuring the Cardassians whom until recently were oppressing the Bajorans, whose religious prophets select the captain as their next… you know, no, I’m sure Paramount totally came up with that on their own.

Anyway Babylon 5 was better, but Deep Space Nine got the drop on them because while JMS was still looking for a production company, Paramount were ramping up and selecting a cast.

Equilibrium, guest starring Jeff McBride was first aired on October 17th 1994, whereas Day of the Dead didn’t air until March 11th 1998, more than 3 solid years later. Some people might say that Babylon 5 stole the idea of guest starring a famous magical act from Deep Space Nine, but frankly I think they deserved a little payback.

Also, Babylon 5 was far superior in every way and Jeff McBride has to live with that.

Hey, did you see Jeff McBride on Penn and Teller Fool us?

Continue reading “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
or Men of Principles”

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Wabi Sabi Let’s Get Grabby
or Inappropriate appropriation

Cultural appropriation in magic is something that hasn’t really been addressed much and perhaps ought to. I’m actually guilty of it myself too a tiny degree in one of my routines. A lot of people don’t really know what cultural appropriation is though and it’s both a big topic to get into and something I can only really give a tiny insight into, given that as a white woman with roots into the ancient history of Yorkshire, the only thing that has ever appropriated my culture is The Last of The Summer Wine¹.

But today I want to blunder through a topic which magic has a terribly history with. That topic is Orientalism.

Content warning on this post for examples of some stuff that’s kinda racist.

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or Inappropriate appropriation”

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Philately Will Get You Nowhere
or Ethical conjuration under capitalism

I mentioned that people waste money at Blackpool. Lets drill into that a little.

Much to my shame I am on Facebook and I’m a member of quite a few Facebook groups for magicians. Three for actual physical clubs I’m a member of, about six attempting to set themselves up as online equivalents to magic clubs, countless which have virtually no posts ever and one which by far I get more notifications on than any other.

That particular squeaky wheel is Second Hand Magic, and right now it’s pretty much on fire. It always is in the late February to mid-March period.

What’s special about this time? It’s just after Blackpool of course!

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or Ethical conjuration under capitalism”

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The Unbelievable Truth
or Magic teaches us how to lie without guilt

I was watching an interview with Penn and Teller in which they talked about one of my favourite routines of theirs, Polyester in Excelsis Deo more commonly known as The Magic of Polyester and which I always thought was called Man of the (Synthetic) Cloth.

I guess if anything this is because magic tricks don’t actually need names unless you’re going to publish it and want people to be able to find it easily to buy it. Penn and Teller don’t publish their work so this never comes up I guess. I’ll probably talk about the publishing mindset at some point in the future. But this isn’t about that.

Continue reading “The Unbelievable Truth
or Magic teaches us how to lie without guilt”