When I first started learning magic I joined an online forum for magicians (no, not that one ). This was back in the days before Facebook swallowed the entire conversational volume of the internet simply by its membership ubiquity. As I understand it still exists so I could go back in theory but I no longer really want to because back then I gathered a reputation of arrogance. I knew nothing. Nothing. I was an idiot who probably only really understood one trick to any serious degree¹, but I spoke with great authority in many matters of opinion, and used my one year of study to argue with professionals who had many decades of experience.
And now not only do I understand why I did this, but I have earned the fate of having to encounter it from the other side.
It’s a phenomenon commonly called Dunning-Kruger after the scientists who study it. People who are novices in a subject feel like they have learned so much that surely they can’t be far off from knowing everything. In short, they don’t know what they don’t know².
Back then I thought I was inventing new tricks every day. But the vast majority of the tricks I invented were either natural developments of basic ideas which had been in print for a very long time or they were insane. Ridiculous pointless ideas which I perceived as being magically cool or interesting but which were unperformable, either becasuse of an overcomplicated method, an impossible to follow plot or… Well… I had this notion in my head after reading Gift Magic that it would be cool to do a ring flight that would leave a spectators ring on a real actuall split ring keyring. Came up with a mechanical way of putting a borrowed ring onto a keyring without damaging it, using only one hand… But it was pointed out to me that this would leave the spectator to remove it themselves, and they would probably damage it in the process and then blame me³.
I still come up with insane ideas, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it’s an intellectual exercise to come up with a method for a moving hole effect where the hole lands on a person’s jugular vein and kills them, but I’m now humble enough to not try to publish or perform it.
After a while on that forum I used ( no not that one ) the Magicians Of Facebook group got mentioned, I jumped ship and got involved in the first couple of conventions they organised. Met some people, made some friends, never looked back. I say got invovled with because as well as attending the convention, I entered the competition and offered a trick I’d come up with to be published in the book they were selling to support the event. I have zero doubt in my mind that the worst effect in the whole book is mine⁴.
The interesting thing about Facebook groups for magicians (of which I have joined approximately five) is that whereas a forum splits down into topics, and individual discussions become their own searchable linkable reply threads on facebook everything is a post with a bunch of comments. Its hard to find out if someone has already asked a question because the site is meant to be more like a conversation, and the information is essentially ephemeral. As such people frequently ask questions or discuss topics which have cone up before, and the same people make the same comments with the same opinions. It’s rare for anything interesting to happen.
The other thing about magic facebook groups is that they fall broadly into 3 categories: The serious ones, the sales ones, and the silly ones.
Sales ones exist primarily for the buying and selling second hand magic tricks, and will not be further discussed here.
What divides the serious and silly groups is entirely based on one factor: when a newbie posts a stupid, badly conceived or presented trick, how does everyone react? If it’s mostly people saying it’s crap and telling them to get better before they post these things (some of which may be constructive advice but is, none the less, devastating to read) then it is a serious group. If instead they get nothing but gushing praise and encouragement to post more, its a silly group; a human zoo of sorts. A digital peanut gallery where beginners are encouraged to stay ignorant to their failings and post their most off the wall ideas for the entertainment of the other magicians in the group.
Allow me a tangent.
I’m a subscriber to The Jerx, and I mention this now only because the subscribers monthly newsletter recently drew my attention to the Magic Alon Society. The mention basically explained that it was free to join, had regular livestreamed lectures from big name magicians and recordings of all the past lectures were available to members. Some of these lectures are basically no different to the kind of lecturers you’d pay £30 to download from Penguin Live or Alakazam Academy⁵. You also get to join the Discord. Discord is pretty weird because its basically a chat service, so even more ephemeral than Facebook, where all conversations are smashed together into a small number of broad topics. Yet somehow, Discord gets used as a replacement not only for forums, but sometimes as a knowledge base and a replacement for any kind of documentation for many open source projects.
Magicians however are guaranteed to only use Discord in one of three ways, and its hard to sell things on Discord.
Now I can’t say for certain that Magic Alon is a silly group. Some people might say that it’s narcissistic to name a club after yourself (Alon is literally the name of the guy who runs it) but frankly I think it sets expectations way better than trying to centre your club as something important. Magicians of Facebook sounds like the only magic group on facebook, but its not. Far from it. The International Brotherhood of Magicians is a title suggesting it’s the only magic club in the world… But they don’t even have regular meetings in the UK, just an annual convention smaller than the one arranged by the Blackpool Magicians Club. So the fact that one fairly young guy’s club named after himself has managed to score lectures from several big names in magic and made them available to members totally free of charge is quite the achievement… But the Discord makes it feel like it could topple into being a silly group at any moment. But that’s not why I left the Discord.
I like to give advice when I’m in a group setting so being surrounded by newbies is quite fun. Not only do they often need help but they’re almost guaranteed to be at a stage where I will know something they don’t which might be useful to them. After a couple of interactions of this sort someone asked if anyone did rubber band magic. I do a lot of rubber band magic so of course I spoke up, and they asked if I could post some videos of it. I said I’d have to ask someone to help record it and set it as a task in the back of my mind. Before I could make good on this project however I got a friend request from him. I accepted it thay night and the next day, apropos of nothing he fucking phoned me.
Back up a little, in case you didn’t know this Discord made it big primarily because as well as being an internet chat service, it also allowed multi participant voice calling. This allowed it to grow in the gaming space as a way for people playing massively multiplayer online roleplaying games⁶ to talk in realtime. This capability means that if you accept a friend request in order to receive direct messages from another user, they can also just press a button to make all your connected devices start ringing like they want you to pick up the goddamn phone.
To do this without first sending a text asking for permission is, in my mind, a massive breakdown in polite netiquette (internet etiquette). Worse still when I refused the call and said I needed a minute to get ready to take a call, I went to the loo in preparation where my phone started buzzing again, this time asking for a video call. Declined again, this time explaining I need to get infront of a computer with a webcam, and ten minutes later we began the call, with me already on the backfoot having done my usual RSD⁷ thing of apologising despite them having been the pushy impolite one.
I was under the impression that he wanted to talk shop regarding rubber band magic… but he mostly seemed to want to show off that he’d figured out the method of something he’d seen on Penn and Teller’s Fool Us. I asked what other things he knew and he mentioned Staircase, a linking band trick, and a trick he’d invented which was a bit like Hanson Chien’s Touch. I talked about similar tricks and where he could move onto next but he seemed to only be interested in asking me if his invented trick was original, because he was already planning to release it. I’m the first person to admit it felt like there was a bit of a language barrier because while his English was a hell of a lot better than my Polish, he seemed to be showing me tricks very flatly with no narrative or premise. I assumed this was because he was just demonstrating not performing so I asked if he would be interested in performing something. He did a mutli phase ambitious card and it was also quite a flat “this then this then this” type performance. The sleights were immaculate but there was no energy.
I tried to mention this lack of energy as politely as possible, suggesting that maybe he would be more comfortable performing it in polish so I could see him unburdened by translation, but he insisted it was the same in English broke off into some diatribe about the core of his magic being his voice and some other stuff about the head and the hands, and it was only after the call ended that I got the impression that he was quoting 5 points in magic to me but hadn’t really understood how to apply the principles. He just knew them. This is in no way unexpected because he had, by his own admission, been doing magic a sum total of one year.
I had to ask 3 times if I could end the call because I had other things to do, and each time he would draw me back into conversation with a ‘last question’, the answer to which he clearly had no interest in but instead he wanted to spring back into a topic we’d already covered. Being polite is a curse sometimes.
After the call ended I immediately disconnected from him on discord. I didn’t want the possiblity of him video calling me out of the blue again. That’s reserved for my good friends. After a quick thought I also decided to leave the magic Alon society, figuring there was probably a high chance that it was full of other people like him, and I would be too polite to tell them to go fuck themselves – no matter how much they deserved it.
Then, as an after thought I decided to look up the episode of Fool Us with the tricks he’d shown… and wouldn’t you believe, as well as the trick my bothersome acquaintance said he’d figured out, the same magician performed staircase and a linking band. The three main effects he’d shown to me. That’s when the pieces fell into place in my head. He’d been doing magic for a year, seen a rubberband guy on Penn and Teller, learned the three tricks he’d seen there, and then immediately decided he was a rubber band guy and was going to publish the first thing he’d come up with.
He also mentioned that when he performed he would just walk up to people on the street and ask to show them some magic and I was catapulted back in time to when I was a new magician, on a forum full of other new magicians ( yes, that one )⁸. Back then the new hotness was Dynamo, hot on the heels of David Blaine and Criss Angel, who were occupying the shadow cast by Paul Zenon.
Back then street magic was the big thing and everyone thought that was how you ‘made it’. These days the big thing is magic tricks presented almost as pranks where the audience is in on it and if you know how they’re done you immediately know that fact because often the spectators can see something which gives the trick away, since angles are being calculated for the camera, not the live audience. Getting a million followers on insta of tiktok is how you ‘make it’ now. More importantly however, because Dynamo and Blaine in particular appeared to perform without any special props or apparatus⁹, the things they did felt in reach of the folks with very little money starting out on the journey to learn magic. This meant that the way to practice with an audience was to go out on the streets and accost strangers with your new gimmicked coins, which were advertised as “As seen on TV’s Dynamo: Magician impossible!”
Now that the only game in town for magic on TV is Penn and Teller’s Fool us, the playing field has changed. There’s a new generation of magicians who seem to have decided that there are 3 main factors in becoming a magician:
- inventing new tricks…
- …which fool other magicians…
- …and selling them.
Notice how performance is not mentioned there. An adjunct to this is developing the ability to figure out other magician’s tricks, because solving a puzzle puts you one stp closer to coming up with your own.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love to sus a method as much as the next person, but that’s not the point. Penn and Teller have stated explicitly in interviews that the adversarial format of Fool Us was purely just a way of sneaking a solid magic show on TV under the guise of a gameshow which the networks would be more comfortable with. Whether a trick fools them or not is largely immaterial. The contestants see a boost in their careers whether they fool the hosts or not, and the one magicians they wanted to work with over and over, pulled into their brain trust, and started a double act with Penn is Piff The Magic Dragon (John Vanderput) who didn’t even fool them.
The explicit goal of Fool Us was to get the public excited about magic again, and I feel like it succeeded in that goal, but all magic shows have a secondary purpose, which is to inspire the next generation of magicians. In my childhood the notion was that if you learned the magic, and could perform for an audience, maybe one day you could get a guest spot on The Paul Daniels Show or Stuff The White Rabbit. But now the narrative of TV is that absolute nobodies can make it by submitting themselves to public humiliation on a talent show, and if you want to make it in magic specifically, you have to Fool Penn and Teller.
I keep referring back to this but when I went on a tour of magic shops back in 2015, the owner of Magick Enterprises in Sheffield¹⁰ told us the tale of how he started out making his own svengali decks and selling through demonstration at the local market, and between that and owning his own brick and mortar shop he had been hired to recreate a historical human sacrifice on a funeral pyre, in illusion form. He said to me “There’s a lot of interesting things happening in magic away from walking around tables doing card tricks.” He was sort of dimissive of the fact that while magic could be used to do all these great things, a vast majority of his customers just wanted the hot new trick as seen on TV to perform at their restaurant residencies and wedding gigs.
I guess now they want the hot new trick as seen on TV to simply show to other magicians. After all, it’s a magician fooler. The snake is eating its own tail, and I fear that craft of magic is flattening out, a mere shadow of what it once was. While the performers on Fool Us are developing in character and style, making their own props and costumes, innovating on classic ideas and whole new plots, all the next generation of magicians sees is “These methods which fool Penn and Teller are the ones worth learning.”
I fucking despair sometimes.
¹ I still maintain that 90% of magicians do the Slydini count wrong when performing the professor’s nightmare. Fucking fight me.
² I once had a conversation with a young relative while driving him somewhere, in which I asked what he had been doing in school. He said he was learning science, and being a bit of science fan myself I asked if he was learning a lot. I was thinking he might mention something he’d been struggling with to see if I could help, or that he would mention a favorite topic such that I might blow his mind with some college level addtional facts. But what he actually said was “I think I’ve learned almost all of it.” What he meant was he’d learned almost all of that year’s student textbook topics, but in his mind, that book contained all of science. Because if there was anything else… Why wouldn’t the book be longer?
³ Which is something I should have understood before beginning the work on this endeavour, because I initially got into magic by reading Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror, which explicitly mentions that when gigging close-up Derren avoided effects which involve spectators’ property. He cites a card to spectator’s wallet routine where he got blamed for some cash which was later allegedly discovered to be missing from said wallet. I say allegedly because you only have to watch a few ‘Karen’ videos online to see that some people will accuse strangers of various wrongdoings just to make themselves the main character. I even saw one where a white woman just straight up claims that a black man stole something from her because she decided she wanted it thought most people would believe her word over his if police got invovled. Absolute insanity on actual streets.
⁴ I do however maintain that it is the most original.
⁵ Or for the savvy shopper, an Alakazam At The Table lecture is only £9, but that fact doesn’t really help the argument I’m making here so it has been exiled to the footnotes.
⁶ Sometimes its nice to write the long hand form of MMORPGs. As a treat.
⁷ RSD is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I have only recently learned about this but if you find yourself constantly apologising because you feel you have to be extra nice to prevent people from not hating you, you probably have it.
⁸ I love rule of three jokes. For those playing along these were, in order, The Magic Cafe, Magic Bunny, and Talk Magic.
⁹ Okay so this will probably ruffle some feathers but all the magic tricks in these shows used quite a lot of gimmicks, many of them extremely bespoke single use props. The kinds of things you would only use if you had a budget in the high thousands to perform once and put it on TV. Things like making a live fish appear in a watercooler was beyond the credulence of the average viewer but the phone in the bottle… people asked magicians if we could put their phone in a bottle for years. Because Dynamo appeared to be in a regular location and just absent mindedly grab a bottle from a table, which would obviously have to be broken to get the phone out, people assumed this was a trick that could be done entirely with borrowed objects and would judge a magician’s skill by how well they could replicate this. Of course, this too used an extrmely well crafted bespoke single use prop, immediately destroyed forever after the trick, but as Teller often says, the best diguise for a method is that people would never imagine you went to such ridiculous lengths for a simple magic trick. That appearance of it just being a guy on the street grabbing trash and borrowing people’s belongings, combined with the unpolished urban aesthetic of street magic, really sold the idea that they probably couldn’t afford expensive props even if they wanted to.
¹⁰ Sadly now closed. I do feel sad about this fact, but unlike many magic shop closures, which are usually based on failing finances, as far as I can tell, this one closed because the owner was 82, running it all by himself, and wanted to focus more on publishing. You can still buy loads of great books on the website. I recommend the Bizarre section.