I have to squeeze out some bile, and unfortunately that means it’s going to splatter all over you, my wonderful audience. Please forgive me, it is so hateful, so cathartic, to encounter something which is so diametrically opposed to your own internal calculus that it seethes from your every pore like steam escaping a boiler on the cusp of exploding.
I am of course talking about Alakazam’s regular YouTube segment, The Act.
At the time of writing, Alakazam has made 37 episodes of this show, and every single one follows the same format.
They roll 3 dice with criteria for making an act. This part is a good idea. I recommend this as a creative exercise. However rather than having themes to incorporate the dice have type of act (closeup, stage, mentalism, etc), Budget (the amount of money you have available to spend on the tricks) and restrictions (such as no card tricks, all self working, etc).
Rolling these three dice, the shopkeepers of Alakazam then put together an “Act” consisting of 3 tricks off the shelves in store which together fit these criteria.
Finally Peter Nardis jaw hinges open a full 180 degrees, emanating a cloud of locusts and a loud foghorn sound while the words “CONSUME MORE PRODUCT” flash on screen in dark red letters¹.
For example on the 30th episode they have to make an “impromptu” act with “no mentalism” for “£75”.
From this they end up with:
- Liquid Forks
- Extreme Burn
- Loops
- Thumbtip
Now I don’t want to say metalbending is a kind of mentalism. That’s low hanging fruit and I don’t want to get into the weeds of that particular argument. Yet.
I also don’t want to get too deep into what counts as impromptu. To my mind genuinely impromptu magic could be done on the spot with the things you have around you. Learning a magic trick you can do with any piece of string or paper, rubber bands or sugar packets is the best way to be impromptu, but I will concede that if you have a small innocuous gimmick such as a thumbtip or a loop, the effects done with them have the appearance of being inpromptu.
Cutlery bending is a great improptu trick in the right setting though I’m not entirely sure why they suggest you buy a pack of easily bendable forks rather than Banacheck’s Psychokonetic Silverware or the original Liquid Metal by Morgan Strebler. Okay, to be clear I do know why they did this, it’s because the forks get used up in the process of learning the routine so you have to buy more and also take a supply with you just in case the forks at the venue are too meaty for your delicate fingerbones. This is also the reason they recommend loops, because they can break and you have to keep buying more.
What really confuses me is the world in which Extreme Burn is an impromptu trick. For the uninitiated, the original handling of this trick was turning a stack of $1 bills into a stack of $100 bills, meaning yiu had to literally carry $505 dollars with you in order to perform it. Yea you could feasibly get away with $20s but this sort of undersells the power of the effect. In the UK the value proposition is oddly skewed, partly because our smallest bills are £5, and our largest are £50s, so the 100x multiplier inherent in the original is reduced by an order of magnitude. Whats more, unlike American currency these bills are not the same size, meaning what you actually have to do is cut some pieces of paper to the same size of your final bills and then turn them into money. Often people will use magazine clippings or recieptsand while this increases the wow factor it does seem a little less impromptu to carry a stack of paper which happens to have the exact same dimensions as a stack of banknotes.
Far more important than any of this however is the fact that theres a £75 budget and Extreme Burn sells for £30. Yes the cost of all the notes you load into it pushes it way over your budget, but don’t worry about that. The budget is about how much money Alakazam gets from you.
Now in many ways these items do sort of play well together, you can use the loop to get some spooky telekinesis on the fork before you bend it or get a note from the extreme burn to stand up or levitate, but I can’t think how these things could fit together.
All Fingers and Thumbs
The presennce of the thumbtip is what really fucking kills me on this list however because if I had a budget of £75 and wanted to be able to do three pieces of impromtu magic, here’s what I’d spend the money on:
- 101 Tricks With a Thumbtip
- A Thumbtip
When I bought 101 Tricks with a thumbtip it was £5 and came with a thumbtip. Most places don’t stock the book anymore but can find it for around £10, and a host of other books with similar names and near identical content. If you prefer videos to books you’ll learn just as much from Thumbtipedia, World’s Greatest Magic: Thumbtips, Paul Harris Presents Hand Picked Astonishments: Thumbtips, or Secret Seminars of Magic (Thumbtips) by Patrick Page.
Expanding it out Lybrary has 3 books by Martin Gardener on impromtu effects called After The Dessert, Over The Coffee Cups and Match-ic, for imprompto effects using various borrowed objects or things available in particular settings.
This really is my main beef with the episode really, is there’s no real recognition of the fact that the kind of impromptu magic you can perform really relies on planning ahead for the kinds of borrowed props you think will be available in the settings you’re likely to frequent.
But of course the dice don’t take that into account. The dice mostly tell you how much to spend and which section of the shop the products come from.
Don’t get me wrong I like Alakazam as a shop, I often buy things from them online and even like to visit in person when I get a chance, given that its one of an ever diminishing number of magic shops with physical locations where you can do so. I also get that they like to big up the products, that’s commerce. Like on one show they got the £200+ option and they used it as an opportunity to big up the Anverdi Mental Die and the Nightshade coin set.
It’s the framing of the concept that I don’t like.
My Terrifying Origin Story
When I was a kid I didn’t know there was a magic shop near me. Many magicians have an origin story which involves going to a magic shop where an old man showed them a miracle and then sold them a plastic thumb, and the realisation that these two things were actually one and the same opened their eyes to the truth of reality.
But I didn’t know there was a magic shop near me, so my introduction to magic came in the form of a small mobile kiosk in the mall which sold juggling supplies, puzzles and a smattering of magic tricks. The tricks were kind of split into two tiers, with your typical kids tricks like a coin size drawer box, colour changing die box, and plastic finger chopper on the bottom shelf, whereas the top shelf had coin gimmicks like a cigarette through coin, coin in bottle and coin unique². These top shelf items were at least 5 times more expensive and after failing to save up for one of them several times, always defeated by the temptation of buying a cheaper trick earlier in the hope that I wouldn’t be disappointed this time.
I guess that was a me problem but it was a very different experience to the common tales of magicians who learned magic from a shopkeeper keen on producing a lifelong lover if magic (and therefore customer).
I very quickly crystallised the idea in my head that this was how magic worked. Without someone showing me the way these things could be presented, I very quickly decided that if you could only afford cheap plastic crap, that was what you got. If you could afford better tricks, you could perform better tricks. If you had hundreds you could get stage props, thousands and you could do grand illusions, and if you were super rich you could vanish the statue of liberty. I no longer felt respect for magic because it just was like the kid with the better computer than you, they didn’t do anything to get it, they just had richer parents.
That’s when I gave up on magic forever³.
You Shall Not Pass
There’s a story which I’ve heard multiple versions of several times from magicians who learned magic from their local magic shop as children. It’s the story of going to a shop, seeing someone perform a trick, and then being told that they cannot buy that trick. Not because they cannot afford it but because they are not ready for it. They are instead shown another trick, such as a svengali routine or a vanishing handkerchief and the shopkeeper says “I won’t sell you anything else until you can come back here and perform that trick to me.”
I’m normally against gatekeeping, but I think that being eased into a creative, expressive art is an important part of developing a life long passion for it. Otherwise it turns into the “All the gear, no idea” stereotype of hobbyists who buy increasingly expensive tools without mastering the craft and eventually give up. But it’s difficult to run a shop with thousands of online customers and slowly trickle out what is essentially a magic course to them.
Alienated Workers⁴
Issy Simpson appeared in the 11th series of Britains Got Talent and, although she was eliminated before the final, there was still a big row over whether the show was rigged because the official magic consultant for BGT, Russ Stevens, is Issy Simpson’s grandfather.
What never raised any eyebrows however was that her performance was essentially sitting on a stool and reading a script while expensive props operated by backstage crew did all the work. This was also true of the act she went on to do at the Blackpool Magic Convention, meaning when it went wrong in one performance it wasnt even her fault. I’ve seen her use expensive motorised props several times and each time she was doing very little.
And when you look up Issy Simpson on Google now, how is she described?
Issy Simpson: Youtuber
Look up her YouTube channel and she hasn’t posted a video in 3 years. Her bio there describes her as a 10 year old magician and actor, which is nuts because shes 16 years old and her only notable achievement is that she is the author of a book of 100 instant pot recipes.
I feel like I’m getting off topic. The point is, having access to super expensive props and effects may be flashy in the moment but I think it actually damages young magicians. Ricky Jay had a rich father and and an interest in magic, and he was also propelled to TV fame at an early age, but you know where the money went? Magic lessons from Tony Slydini.
Online magic shops can offer help to customers, Alakazam themselves have a chat feature on the shop for people who need guidance⁵. But that is an optional side quest to visitors of online shops. You can get in touch and ask about the products, but speaking to a shopkeeper is no longer a necessary step in the purchasing process.
I remember finding Ian Rowland’s website as a teenager, because of my interest in the impossible objects he made, and there was a section on the site for his magical writing. But to get to it, you had to know a piece of magic trivia. Without this arcane knowledge, you couldn’t even find out what kind of forbidden teaching was on offer.
If you go to Ian Rowland’s website now, he has a books section on the main menu taking you to a page which tells you all his books are available on Amazon.
This frictionless consumer culture has boiled magic down to “I have £200 and would like to do a magic.”
In two posts last year I spoke about how the desire to teach magic en-masse over YouTube robs us of our community and turns it very much into a top-down relationship of producers and consumers.
What is missing from this analysis however is how online shopping for magic tricks is arguably doing the exact same thing.
More Things in Heaven and Earth
If I had to guess why Alakazam produce this dice based simulacrum of shopping experience, it’s to push the concept that they are knowledgeable sellers, and that if you were to walk into the store with £75, a hatred of mentalism and a wish to appear unprepared, they will sell you the best products to match your needs. But by defining the problem in the way they have, they have not only restricted themsleves to 216 options but also defined tiny boxes for their knowledge. According to this, there are only 6 kinds of magic act, and only 6 types of magic which one may want to avoid. What of mood, theme, atmosphere, narrative?
Imagine instead if they used a huge bag of story dice and had to produce a routine based on what comes up when they grab 3 at random and roll them. The creative challenge of interpreting and incorporating the symbols into a magic act?
Hell, with modern online tools they could ask people to submit ideas they are working on or challanges they face, and put them on a big spinnner to pick one out and produce a cohesive routine which can meet those requirements?
There’s all kinds of other ways they could recommend tricks in a challenge like thematic way without it being a process so simolistic that it could basically be done by using filters on their website search function, and make people actually think about what they want their magic to look like, to feel like. Not just where they perform and how much money they have in their pocket.
¹ This part of the broadcast can only be seen with the use of the special glasses I keep in my safe.
² As I understand it coin unique with a £1 and 1p is less widely known than the more generalised name for the scotch and soda gimmick, which uses an American half dollar and an old English penny. The kiosk, as I recall, only sold coin gimmicks made in local circulating currency.
³ Until 20 years later when I read Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror and it changed my life, but thats a different story.
⁴ This is an amazing pun, and you probably didn’t even notice it. The concept of alienation in labour is a central pillar of Marxist analysis of capitalism, but also tricks which play well commerically in a professional setting are often called workers. So I’m applying the concept of people having no stake or interest in their labour with the idea of people having no stake in the content of the magic they perform. Its very clever and so am I, shut up.
⁵ Funny story, I asked a friend of mine who worked at Alakazam if he could ask about a prop I’d seen in one of their videos, and he said just phone up and ask in store. I went to the website to get the phone number and saw the chatbox so decided to ask there. The response I got was my friend admonishing me for avoiding a social interaction and telling me to just phone like he’d told me to. The irony is that when I did eventually phone, the guy on the other end couldn’t answer any of my questions because that video used a prop they didn’t sell and he’d never seen the similar prop they actually sold.