While I was writing my previous post I had a brief conversation with friend of the blog Gwen Coney, about aesthetic (one of my favourite topics).
She said:
Yeah there seems to be a thing that some magicians like to do where they will theme or perform a trick a certain way because they like the aesthetic but they don’t really examine deeper on why they’re going for that particular look or whether it fits with how they perform
See also: why everyone who tries to perform a Tobias Dostal trick looks like utter shit
I should clarify just in case that what she means by that last part is not that Tobias Dostal’s tricks look bad, it’s that other people look bad performing them because they rely upon a kind of audience headspace which other performers don’t take the time to cultivate. You cant perform liquidfy with the same flippant attitude as an ambitious card routine.
One second while I plumb the depths of my psyche for an appropriate tangential allegory…
Coronation Street is a British soap opera on ITV which has been running since 1960. At time of writing it has aired 11,746 epidodes, clocking in at nearly 6000 hours of television (they switched from 30 minute to full hour episodes in 2022). It is regular tales of simple Northern folk, having arguments and affairs. They run corner shops and pubs. Then after 36 mostly uneventful years, Vera Duckworth saw the ghost of Ivy Tilsley on the stairs in the Rover’s Return. This was a monumentally unpopular plotline that was squashed in 2 episodes and universally derided by critics¹.
Contrast and compare with Dark Shadows, an American soap opera on ABC with more of a gothic romance feel to it. It started as a regular family drama but over the course of the first year it introduced increasingly supernatural elements to the plot, which culminated in a full embrace of the genre by introducing a vampire who became a character, and would be later joined by ghosts, werewolves, and even science fictio elements like parallel universes and time travel. It didnt last as long as Coronation Street, with its original run airing from 1966 to 1971, but in those 5 years it was on 5 days a week and was the most popular show on the network. Two movies were spun off during its run, and it even got a remake miniseries in 1991 and a big budget Tim Burton movie in 2012².
The difference between these two shows is that Dark Shadows slowly introduced viewers to the kinds of things people could expect to see and it set the expectations for the world. This was a spooky place where spooky things happen and vampires are spooky so it fit perfectly. Coronation Steet on the other hand is a show where Vera Duckworth pulls a prank on her husband Jack, making him think she’s cooked one of his pet pigeons, and they all laugh about it in the pub while Ken and Dierdre Barlow get divorced because she had an affair with Mike Baldwin. She ends up working in a corner shop called the Kabin. It’s dull as fuck and it has been going on for 66 years. If you lived there you would want to die and the thought that even then after the sweet release of death they might bring you back as a ghost is more horrifying than any of the Vampires or Zombies on Dark Shadows.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, so if you do three card tricks showing your skill at sleight of hand and misdirection then melt your fucking pen cap into liquid on the table it’s going to have a bit of tonal whiplash³.
Kind of like Oz Perlman presenting himself as an expert in body language and psychology, using not magic tricks but real scientific skills to fathom the inner workings of your mind… and then he makes a soup can full of lego appear in a rolled up paper tube⁴.
All of this was on my mind when I wrote inmy last post…
Normally the worst part of a lecture is having to sell things afterwards to people who mostly only buy things to find out how they work, when you’ve already told them.
… Because actually I don’t think that is the worst part of a lecture. The worst part of a lecture the same as the worst part of selling magic in any format. It’s knowing that other people are going to be out there working your material, possibly to a bigger audience than you’ve ever had, and maybe even not doing it as well as you.
It’s the main reason I’ve never released any of the tricks I’ve come up with. Deep down there’s a part of me that still kind of hopes that maybe some day I’ll make it and hit the big time and they will become my signature effects that I’m known for, like Fielding West’s dove act or David Copperfield’s Bermuda Triangle.
Tobias Dostal’s effects employ one of three methods I know of to prevent this dilution of a personal signature effect from happening.
The Chris Rawling
The effect uses an unprofessional prop. This prop may be very professional in its quality or construction, but it is designed to look like a cheap card game from a supermarket, a post-it note pad or a their house keys. Any magician who is paid handomely to perform at someone’s special event is going to raise quite a few eyebrows at the point that they announce that they don’t have any professional magicians props on them, and instead perform with some random bits and bobs in their pockets. Chris Rawling explained in a lecture I recently recently that he has found a niche that makes these props make perfect sense. By offering a parlour show in people’s house parties, he has time to seed these props around the room before hand and apparently perform using his client’s own property. Sean Farquhar has a similar ruse when performing Torn 2 Pieces for celebrities where he surreptitiously drops a framed photograph of his client on a shelf to retrieve later in performance.
If you perform in a very specific setting, making tricks that don’t really make sense outside of that setting will keep them in your repertoire.
The Tobias Dostal
The effect simply does not fit with a standard magic routine. The nature of the effect is so viscerally elemental that it breaks the established reality of a standard magic performance. Unless the performer is going to solely specialise on this kind of effect and character it simply will not work. This is also true of effects like Sick⁵, Saw⁵, or that time Penn and Teller did a cut and restored snake on Saturday Night Live.
The Kieron Johnson
I did mention Kieron in an earlier footnote³ regarding other effects with an alchemical, elemental feel to them. This is not the Kieron Johnson unperformability technique, nor is the fact that Kieron also does one of the world’s best regurgitation acts, an act which cannot even really be taught. No, Kieron’s special sauce relates to the preparation inherent in his tricks. There was a point in Kierons Career where his main routine involved turning a flame into an icecube, pouring hot tea from a hot coke can, and producing freshly cooked eggs and toast. It’s spectacular but it is also the reason he spends the entire day preparing for an eveng gig and turns up with three duffel bags full of thermos flasks. I’m not saying other magicians are just lazy, god knows I’ve banged that drum enough. But if your options are that or have a bag with your entire show ready to go at a moments notice, it’s difficult to convince yourself of the virtues of the path less trodden.
When I lecture my material I do so with the hope that people will appreciate my methods and be inspired to create their own routines based on them. I would like them to not use my exact routines as such I have used a combination of the above techniques to make my work unperformable. Notably:
- they rely on a premise most people can’t even pronounce
- They make the performer appear foolish⁶
- They are annoying and fiddly to reset
- They require you to go all in on belief in the supernatural⁷
- The props are single use, annoying to make. and difficult to transport
- The point of the trick is giving away something you had to make by hand to a spectator
The irony is, I recently turned 44, my heart condition is worse than ever, and I just got put on diabetes medication. I am not going to “make it”. Since the pandemic, I barely leave the house other than going to the park with my wife to walk the dog. My signature effects are about as recogniseable to the average person as my actual signature, and my actual signature is an unreadable scribble.
But if you don’t have a little hope you might as well crawl in a hole.
¹ In spite of this reaction, while researching this I read that they’re planning to do it again. The ghost of Diedre Barlow is coming to a future episode of Coronation Steet.
² This film was kind of a spectacular failure, which I mostly think was down to the presence of Johnny Depp. Little bit over exposed at the time if you ask me, plus he might have abused his wife and DARVOed her in court. Not cool. Allegedly.
³ I don’t like to be negative all the time so if you’re looking for something visually alchemical to perform alongside Tobias Dostal’s Liquid Spectrum, allow me to recommend Kieron Johnson’s To The Max ice production or his fork bending routine from the Chaotic DVD.
⁴ I must confess I wasnt even aware of Oz Perlman until I noticed that there was a mentalist in the footage of the evacuation of the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner, but I have been obsessing over the recent interest in his methods. I was going to write a post about it but I worry I might get cancelled with my hot take of “If you’re going to insist your magic tricks are real and make people think you can do impossible things just to sell more copies of your book, you’re no better than Jesus.”
⁵ Sick is an effect where you cut open your arm to retrieve a coin pushed into your eye. Saw is an effect where you saw into your neck with a cord, often to retrieve a polo stuck in your throat. Both of these creations are inventions of Sean Fields, who I hope has since had the therapy he clearly needed when he came up with them.
⁶ This is great because kids acts want to look silly but don’t typically use complex methodological sleights, and performers who put the time in to learn complex methods typically want to appear skillful.
⁷ For example, the Toothfairy.