Month: June 2021

In my post about Troublewit I kind of wrote a cheque that I didn’t fully cash.

I said that by recognising and codifying the things you hate about a routine you can methodically attempt to fix those things and produce some brilliant shining original masterwork which has none of the identified problems.

I then listed out the problems of Troublewit and noted that it was unsalvageable garbage (which, don’t get me wrong, it totally is) because fixing those problems would take it so far from it’s origins that it completely morphs into an unrelated allied art or, worse still, gospel magic.

What happened to be benefits of hatred? Did I lie to you?

No. No I did not. I did however decide to split what I wrote in two because it got too damn long. This is the second half of that article, in which Stacy Saves the Linking Rings.

Continue reading “Thinking Rings
or The Benefits of Hate”

You heard it here first, Rick Lax is the evil magician.

@broderick busted this wide open last month & i clicked on this vid, thought "i bet the evil magician is doing this," and sure enough a bit of linkedin and fb snooping confirmed it https://t.co/VJyvAGq9G0

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) June 2, 2021

I guess Alistair Crowley lost his crown.

There’s a term used by magicians to refer to other types of performance which blend well with magic. Things like juggling, ventriloquism, quick change, balloon modelling and shadowgraphy. That term is Allied Arts

Often the allied arts will be included in a gala show at larger magic conventions and they are usually the most popular part. This may be because they are a novel diversion in a sea of magic that all starts to look the same after a while. It may also be because the things defined as allied arts are usually, but not always, overt displays of skill.

A colleague of mine once said that the difference between juggling and magic is that you can see the juggler’s hands. To put it a little more directly: jugglers can make something difficult look easy, magicians can make something easy look impossible¹.

But there’s one magic trick that has its method as clearly visible as juggling or balloon modelling, and yet refuses to be demoted to an allied art, because there’s no overt skill, very little actual skill, and only magicians seem to like it.

But not me.

I cannot fucking stand Troublewit.

Continue reading “Troublewit’s end
or Feel the Hate”