Month: June 2025

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The Work is not The Work
or The Curse of Technology has Doomed us All

I went to a lecture recently which simultaneously blew my mind and made me very sad.

The lecture was by Magical Katrina, who you may know as the sexy magician from the Chappel Roan Red Wine Supernova music video.

But the lecture wasn’t about music videos or lesbianism analogies. It was about… search engine optimisation and automated ephemera generation.

But before I explain what those are I need to back up a little to tell you about my local magic club.

Continue reading “The Work is not The Work
or The Curse of Technology has Doomed us All”

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Lady Spade
or She Lives In His Throat

I try to keep my feelers out on the world of the arts¹.

I follow a fair number of comedians, illustrators, poets, writers, and musicians on social media to keep myself up to date with whats going on at the leading edge of the creative world. I’m also in a group called Queer Creatives who meet online every fortnight to learn about aspects of queer media and the arts².

I’m mentioning all those facts upfront as an explainer for how I came across this story of a performance which initially I thought would be great inspiration for a magic act and in hindsight may have simply been a magic act.

The person who posted this gave me persmission to talk about this on the condition that I didn’t link back to them or reveal their identity³.

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or She Lives In His Throat”

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Crowd Control
or The act that writes itself every night

Years ago I went on a course run by Wayne Goodman on how to work a restaurant residency, and the latter half of this was actually working a restaurant, and trying to put us in the kind of situations that may arise. For example he would tell us to work a table which, unbeknownst to us, he had visited a few minutes prior and told them to refuse a performance.

I never had to face this particular fate as the table he told to reject me was so keen to see me perform that they ignored him and eagerly asked me to continue.

One challenge he set however was to approach a table and not perform a single trick until he gave us a signal. In short, we had to use the time to build rapport. We all just used the opportunity to make small talk, explain that we are magicians, just sweat it out until we could finally do the one thing which we thought gave us value as human beings.

But it needn’t have been that way.

Continue reading “Crowd Control
or The act that writes itself every night”