Category: Magic

Posted on

Out Of Order
or Anarchy All Along

This post is kind of being rushed out to capture a mood from the most recent episode of the Disney Plus show Agatha All Along. This post contains spoilers about one episode’s minor plot point. It also contains minor spoilers for Back to the Future, The Time Travellers Wife, Shuffle and the ending of Derren Brown’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

It also uncorks some deep feelings about showbiz which have nothing to do with any of that but we’ll get there later.

For those who don’t know, Agatha All Along is a TV spinoff from Wandavision, which itself is a TV spinoff from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, focusing on the characters of Wanda and Vision, both of whom were kind of side characters in other people’s movies. It’s a fringe on a fringe on a fringe and it’s only available on one highly specific streaming platform. It’s okay if you’ve never watched it, honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of it. To top it all this entire artile spins off from a single episode, which is about a tertiary character in the main cast. Despite being about something brand spanking new, it may be even more niche than the usual references I drop to forgotten Sci-Fi channel miniseries and feature length independant experimental animations.

The show is about a bunch of witches who set out on a quest to blah blah, magic powers, dark pact, yawn. You’ve watched TV before. This particular episode however activated a very specific part of my brain. The part of my brain that loves time fuckery.

Continue reading “Out Of Order
or Anarchy All Along”

Posted on

The Lost Wonder Room
or It’s an object, one of many

I rather enjoyed the section of my last post in which I listed out moments from film and television which could be ripe for magical effects, and I’ve mentioned one TV show before.

What’s fabulous about The Lost Room as an inspiration for magic is that the core premise is that ordinary looking objects are imbued with strange properties, not the people who wield them, so it sidesteps the whole ego problem of wanting to seem special.

But also the people who end up owning objects from the titular lost room are all weird little freaks, which if you recall is what I want more magicians to lean into.

Continue reading “The Lost Wonder Room
or It’s an object, one of many”

Posted on

I Think I Understand You But I Don’t
or It’s Such a Beautiful Day

I recently went to see a one night only touring single showing of my favourite film: Don Hertzfeldt’s it’s Such a Beautiful Day, preceded by a new short musical film from the same animator. My wife came with me and she utterly fucking hated it. Interestingly, she also kind of hated Derek Delgaudios In and Of itself, to my mind one of the greatest magic shows ever concieved.

I also gave my older sibling¹ a copy of the blu-ray of It’s Such a Beautiful Day several years ago as a christmas gift and on boxing day they watched it with their partners and my parents every single one of them hated it.

“It’s depressing,” they say, “It doesn’t make sense,” they exclaim, “What the hell did I just watch?”

So here’s my question: how does one invoke such reactions to a magic show?
Continue reading “I Think I Understand You But I Don’t
or It’s Such a Beautiful Day”

Posted on

Would You Like Fries with That
or STEM the Flow

I studied engineering in university. Software and Electronic to be exact.

This is not an uncommon story. Dai Vernon studied mechanical engineering, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin built automata, and Robert Harbin is the most well known of a long line of illusion designers working from mechanical know how. Even Jesus started out in carpentry¹.

And isn’t that kind of weird?

In any other performance art, the technical side is relegated to backstage. Set builders, lighting technicians, audio engineers. The actors, musicians, and dancers on stage very rarely entered the arts because they loved the working of curtain pulley systems, valve amplifier schematics or shoe construction.

The obvious reason for this is that magic most commonly instills in its audience a desire to know how it works, and wanting to know how things work is also a strong drive in engineering and science education.

But this has further implications, linking my previous post to the world of STEM education, elitism in academia, and Gamergate. Yes, Gamergate.

Buckle the fuck in. It’s going to get bumpy.

Continue reading “Would You Like Fries with That or STEM the Flow”

Posted on

How We Got Here
or Entry Points and Exit Wounds

This is going to pull together a number of threads, so forgive me if it takes a while to make any kind of definitive statement.

In my last post I mentioned the concept of magician’s ego, the fact that when presenting what appears to be a strange or coincidental occurrence, the natural urge is to fabricate some narrative in which there is zero doubt that the magician is the root cause, even if the power of the effect is in the appearance that the magician does nothing.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Continue reading “How We Got Here
or Entry Points and Exit Wounds”

Posted on

F.E.G.
or If Tricks Could Kill

Back in October 2023 I posted a two part intro to what would have been my next post, a video about a trick I had been working on. However upon performing this trick in a magic competition it did not have the impact I had hoped for, a fact that was mostly down to my volunteer selection.

He didn’t get into it, so it didn’t land. I have since performed it again in a different competition and while it went much better, I’m now of the opinion that this kind of magic is kind of wasted on an audience of magicians.

Continue reading “F.E.G.
or If Tricks Could Kill”

Posted on

Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works

Sometimes I read something and wonder if I’m having a brain heammorrage.

It’s like the words in their particular order make so little sense that either I have forgotten how to read or the author of the words is insane, and I am surprisingly not egotistical enough to assume the latter every single time.

Thats the sense I had today when I was told that Dan and Dave, one of many famous sibling groupings known colloquially as the Buck Brothers, were putting all their work in the public domain, a statement backed by a post on their Instagram.

Continue reading “Ledger Domain
or Dan and Dave don’t know how copyright works”

Posted on

Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it

Fay Presto is a scuba diver.

This may come as a surprise to many readers (should they exist) as it’s common knowledge that Fay Presto is a magician, but whereas most magicians work some shitty 9 to 5 to earn the money to buy magic tricks which they perform on the weekends, Fay Presto performs magic around the world to earn money for her scuba diving trips.

She told me once about the odd economics of scuba gear, that almost every piece of scuba equipment from tanks to masks to wetsuits is far cheaper on the internet, but no experienced scuba diver would ever buy things that way. Not because the online products are lower quality or difficult to judge sizes and compatibility or anything like that, but because the one thing you can’t do online is fill up your air tanks.

On a suba diving holiday everyone’s airtanks get re-filled a few times a day, and the only place to do that is at a physical scuba gear suppliers.

However, here’s the rub: there is no money in filling air tanks. If people don’t buy their scuba gear from the physical scuba store where thry dive, the scuba store goes bust, no one can fill up their air tanks, and scuba just kinda… Ends.

Continue reading “Vanishing Vanishing Inc
or Use it or Lose it”

Posted on

[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches

This entry is tangentially related to David Regal’s new tarot deck. But not entirely. Perhaps not even legitimately. I currently have a question pending on the Vanishing Inc. website which may prove that my fears are unfounded. This time.

Indeed the last time I was super concerned about a technological innovation it was NFTs and despite my fears only one magician ever released an NFT project to my knowledge, and it was so hilariously bad that he sold none of them and pivoted to passive income training course scams.

But with the launch of Phill Smiths Fusion Mosaic Phenomenon and Marc Kerstein’s Subliminal the dawn of the AI generated magic product has truly begun.

Continue reading “[Uncredited]
or The Singularity Approaches”

Posted on

I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner

SIn my previous post I talked about The Magic Circle’s rules regarding exposure and teaching magic on public platforms, and I did it on the basis of controlling access to information to only people directly seeking it. And I ended with “Maybe you could even start a Discord”.

Today I want to drill down into that a little more, in terms of one of the things I think is lacking when you teach magic on a public stage like a youtube channel or even a website:

Community

Now you can get your hammer and sickle out.

Continue reading “I, Sickle
or Nobody puts baby in the corner”