For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, there are two kinds of computer hackers.
White hat hackers are tourists, explorers, defenders of digital space. Yes they will use their knowledge of technology to gain access to places they shouldn’t be but they won’t take anything or damage anything and often will tell the organisations after the fact what vulnerabilities they exploited to gain access, so that the systems administrators can improve their security.
Black hat hackers are using similar skills and access to steal confidential data, sabotage the systems they infiltrate and exploit unknown vulnerabilities entire for personal gain.
You know, goodies and baddies.
And I decided a while ago that since magic is just theatre… Why aren’t there more magic baddies?
Walter White, Patrick Bateman, Tyler Durden, Rick Sanchez, The Joker, all basically complete pieces of shit. Awful awful people.
But audiences love them.
A distinction needs to be made here that the villain protagonist model doesn’t apply to characters like Dr House and Deadpool, who are instead antiheroes; characters who do good things but in unpleasant and sometimes morally questionable ways. The term ‘grey hat’ is often applied to hackers who fit into this archetype and there are already quite a few magicians who might fit this classification, people like Phil Cass, whose cut and restored necktie routine is legendarily mean to the audience member. A spectators tie gets cut off in the first few minutes of the show and he doesnt restore it till the very end.
But it is restored.
Grey hat magicians will always have things work out and the spectators have a fun experience in hindsight, but during the routine they’ll mock spectators, make fun of people, even appear to put volunteers in peril, but it will always end well for everyone involved.
I had a real hard time trying to find magicians who will intentionally fuck with the audience in a way that cannot be undone.
Morgan Strebler has been known to bend a spectator’s key, rendering it useless… but he always asks for a key they don’t use anymore, and the guy is a metal bender, it’s pretty clear what he’s going to do.
Paul Zenon did a wonderful version of bill in walnut in egg in lemon for his TV special where the central impossible location contains not the bill itself but instead a note saying that the £10 could be found in the cash register. Indeed it is, and he walks away from the bartender he performed it for, revealing only to the television audience that the method for this essentially steals £10 from the bar every time this is performed. Evil? Maybe. But that evil exists in a meta way, his magician character is likeable and upbeat, decidedly white hat¹.
Some magic messes with people’s heads. The best example of this type I’ve seen is a beautiful confabulation² in a show called The Witch of the Woods, where a magician asks someone to focus on their favourite memory, then tells them that the memory they recall isn’t real, it read implanted but the magician, and to prove it the magician opens an envelope where the memory is described in full, written before he could have known it. He tells them their favourite memory is fake.
This is the level of evil I’m aiming for, but I’m not a mentalist. I’m a magician. I would like my magic to happen physically and visibly.
I’m about to describe 2 tricks, one of which I attempted to create a performable version of, and the other of which I did not. But don’t get me wrong here – I came up with a method for both.
Permanent Linking Rings
I have, over the years, attempted to create a lasting result from a routine as abstract as the linking rings. The starting point I use when I’m inventing a routine or an effect is to visualise the most impossible version of it and slowly work backwards until I reach something achievable. In this case my starting point was “Imagine the linking finger rings but where you could walk away and leave two spectators’ own rings irrevocably connected.
Obviously that’s impossible (prove me wrong future magicians) but from there I worked backwards to “Is there anything you could permanently link a borrowed ring to, such that you would have to destroy it to release the ring?”
At the time there were a number of Ring Flight³ effects being sold and I thought about the fact that they all relied on keyrings with easy to open rings, either sprung or screwed together. But 90% of the keyrings I’ve owned were split ring type, which are a fucking nightmare to get keys on and off of. If you could make a device for loading a key on to one of those rings, you could give the keyring away with the ring attached and leave the complex matter of getting it off to the spectator. Since split rings tend to be made of steel and rings are made of softer metals like gold and silver, they might even damage their priceless jewellery trying to get it off.
Evil
But is it as evil as…
Hole in the Head
Around the same time there was a huge interest in moving hole effects. Nothing in Transit had just come out and it was around the time that I took an interest in The Pothole Trick and that entire gaggle of similar effects I mentioned in my last post.
One of the effects was Holely and the sequel, Beyond Holely, the trailer for which had a beautiful moment where a hole punched in a card is removed from that card and placed on a water bottle, at which point water starts to spout from the hole.
Upon seeing this my first thought was “What if you could place a hole on a person… and kill them?”
I will not be sharing the method for this trick. But I did come up with one.
The fact is, being an evil magician in the moment is hard because you have to do mean, antagonistic, and downright nasty things to your audience and that tends not to lead to repeat bookings or long lasting friendships. If you can’t perform for paying customers or your circle of friends, all you have left is strangers on the street, and they might kick the shit out of you.
So what’s the point?
In my last post I ended with a little teaser for a trick I had been working on. When I wrote that, I had not yet performed it. I have now performed it and my next post will contain a video and retrospective, but in the interim I wanted to approach it from the opposite side.
Moonshot Magic takes a one in a million chance of something outside of your control affecting the audience in a way which might connect to your trick long after the performance.
Black Hat Magic turns the concept of entertainment on it’s head and looks at ways to produce negative effects, that damage people psychologically (easy), fiscally (harder), and physically (nightmare mode).
If you could combine these two concepts it takes a bitter flavour and turns it into a subtle aftertaste, the presence of which though unpleasant will only intrigue an audience more in the long run, rather than turn them off in the moment.
Thinking about The Pothole Trick, imagine how preposterous it would be if someone actually tried to complain about that. “The magician did a trick where a hole in a card moved in front of my house and then a real pothole appeared in front of my actual house, the bastard!”
Frankly, that would make people want to see your magic even more.
If we take this to its natural conclusion, what kind of legendary status could you achieve, if you put out a magical hit on a spectator’s worst enemy?
Well… that’s what my next post is about.
SEE YOU,
SPACE COWBOY
¹ Okay so he did do that trick where someone’s keys appeared in a tin of beans which he dumped out into their hands in the middle of the street and walked away, and the time he convinced a spectator to throw what was essentially a brick through a car window, but that was more of a sight gag, the car was probably planted by the producers. Maybe he’s grey hat.
² Okay, hear me out here, this is the only accurate use of the confabulation method I have ever seen. Confabulation literally means a gap in a person’s memory filled with fabricated information. There have actually been studies into how easy it is to make someone remember details of an event that never happened, simply by asking them to remember it. If you don’t mind your sense of reality being shaken to the core, you can read about it here.
But confabulation as a magic trick, revealing that you have previously written down information made up on the spot by spectators, has nothing to do with memories. In fact, it typically doesn’t mention memory at all and instead references a dream or (bizarrely) a purchase, where one of the pieces of information is the cost of the highly specific item.
Anyway the point is, congratulations Lewis Le Val, you did good.
³ Many of these were marketed as Ring Flite effects, which you might expect to be simply the American spelling of flight but is in fact defined in the dictionary as “to scold, wrangle or jeer”. I don’t understand it either.