The joke goes:
Minimalism is a scam invented by big small to sell more less.
This post is only tangentially related to magic and was inspired by a thought I had while writing the last part of the previous post after watching an advert for a miniature watercolour painting kit. The thought applies to magic but is actually about hobbies in general. Actually, let me show you the advert first
I get the appeal.
Many years ago, in the distance past of 2005, long before my interest in magic had extended to actually learning any tricks, my hobby was crochet. I had a painfully long commute and the sudoku in the free paper at the train station only filled about 10 minutes². So one day, I went to the market in my lunch break and bought a ball of wool and a crochet hook and started making some single crochet hyperbolic surfaces, like the ones I had seen on the internet. Crochet was perfect because all you needed was one hook, shorter than a knitting needle and half as numerous, and a ball of wool. There was only ever a single loop open at once so it crammed down small into my handbag. Perfect train hobby.
In spite of this however I wanted more. I wanted to knit. I’d seen the smooth lightweight consistent fabric and decorative cable work made by my knitting friends and I wanted to get into that. But it was just too bulky. Eventually I had an idea. I had read about some people who did micro knitting using bodkins instead of knitting needles, mostly as a display of skill, but to me it presented a solution. If you could knit with crazy thin needles you could probably knit with a pair of open safety pins. And when you reached the end of a row you could close the pin to hold it together inside a handbag or even a pocket. A teeny tiny miniature hobby³.
This image is from a reference article I found about a micro knitter called Althea Crome.
That’s why I understand the appeal of the miniature watercolour kit. Paints contained, water inside the little brush pen. Everything fits in a pocket. A teeny tiny hobby you can carry with you and squeeze into those precious free moments no matter where you happen to be.
Also I have another pastime which is making small games using a fantasy console⁴ called Pico-8. I write these on my laptop and post them on my website. Many of them can be played on your phone’s web browser. Just before Christmas I saw a post on mastodon from someone who had managed to get Pico8 itself running on their android phone and my head exploded with the possibility of actually developing games on my phone… And then something dawned on me.
Why are people trying to make hobbies convenient? The happiest people I know have entire rooms of their house set aside for their hobbies. I know a plane spotter who takes week long holidays abroad and spends the vast majority of their time at the airport. I am one of many magicians whose magic collection demands its own space in the house. There are people with entire workshops set up for wood turning or machining. Maybe this is correlation rather than causation and it is not the big hobbies that make people happy. Rather the same material circumstances that make a person happy also happen to afford them a greater hobby scope, but I know of multiple cases where this isn’t true. Struggling gig workers that set aside a large chunk of their rental flat to be a sewing or music room.
This all leads to a phrase that I’m a little tired of hearing in magic:
Packs small, plays big.
In a lecture from Morgan and West there was a damning rebuttal to the entire concept of “packs small plays big”. They said anything which packs small will play medium at best. They actually made a point that they mostly played mod size venues but they used the biggest props they could in order that the magic was clearly visible all the way at the back.
Piff The Magic Dragon, in his book, mentioned that when supporting the band Mumford and Sons, he got to see some venues which are mentioned in tales of famous magicians playing to packed audiences, holding everyone in a spellbinding silence with a simple cigarette vanish. Seeing the band perform in these venues however, he comments that from the back the lead singer looks about the size of a tic-tac.
The idea of an Every Day Carry or EDC plays into this notion that the best magic tricks are unintrusive, built into your life seamlessly. A trick wallet or keyring which is always on you.
Craig Petty famously used to bang on about his keyring containing a 45 minute show because of the number of gimmicked keys and keyrings on it. When he did the Wizard Product Review with David Penn he would become giddy with excitement every time a new keyring based magic trick appeared on the program.
Now I am fundamentally on the side of minimalism to a degree. There are a million and one people out there telling you to fill your life with more plastic garbage, and indeed fill other people’s lives too. It is Christmas after all⁵.
But the people peddling EDC and “packs small plays big” aren’t trying to stop you from filling your life with crap. They’ve just found buzzwords to make their crap more appealing, just like the miniature painting kits and pocket looms. Just like skin creams sell you on youth by making you ashamed to look old, miniature crafting kits sell you on compatmentalisation because they want you to feel shame for setting aside time and space in your life for enjoyment. It’s just a more insidious form of hustle culture.
There’s a background thrum in our culture which tells us that we need to be productive and striving and that taking the time or space for something we enjoy is a cringe worthy indulgence and an abandonment of our duty as members of society. They want you to toil your life away. They want you to shrink every aspect of your character that doesnt fit the machine.
They want you to be small.
Buy a goddamn easel.
¹ This isn’t an affiliate link or anything, but I figured I’m about to bad mouth their entire ethos and main product so the least I can do is link to them.
² Easy ones were 2-5 minutes, medium ones were 10-15, hard ones I couldn’t solve so basically just gave up on after about 20 minutes if I bothered trying at all. My fault commute was 3 hours each way on the train. Daily. Yes I spent 6 hours a day on a train and the rest of the time working eating or sleeping. Most of my paycheck paid for the train tickets. It was a very dark time for me.
³ I never actually did this, mostly because it turns out if you can’t already knit, learning to do so at a scale other knitters consider to be a flex is an absolutely insane course of action.
⁴ A fantasy console is an interesting way of saying it runs a self contained software environment which acts like an emulator for a retro console which never existed in hardware. It has its own graphics and audio interfaces and a complete addressable memory map but it’s all made up for the emulator itself, not based on a physical implementation
⁵ I wrote this line the day after boxing day so I can’t even say it was Christmas at the time of writing. I’m still full of the Grinch spirit however. Yes, the Grinch spirit. The Grinch didn’t hate Christmas, he hated the manifestation of Christmas as a festival of excess. His heart grew 5 sizes because of the realisation that Christmas wasn’t something you bought in a store. Educate yourself.