( But you can watch too )
After a few highly theoretical posts I thought I’d get back to some more hands on conjouriffic creativity, while also devising utterly pointless things.
You know, classic Stacy.
This post is about telephone cords as they existed 20 years ago, a modern fashion trend, and how if those two things had lined up closer there would be an absolute miracle at our fingertips.
I went to Taskmaster Live and had a wonderful time, even though I came absolute bottom of the scoreboard with one single point.
This post isn’t really about magic, but it’s sort of relevant and I wanted to share it. It’s about motivation and surviving in bleak times.
It’s also about eating as much melon as you can in 2 minutes. Your time starts now.
A couple of days ago I saw a lecture by Jon Allen. It was pretty good, lots of solid thinking, strong methods, entertaining effects, and everything he said made perfect sense… But when he explained his reasons for doing things the way he did, I continually found myself disagreeing with him.
Normally when I disagree with someone I can put my reasons into words but it wasn’t until much later that I realised what was going on in my head, and when I had this epiphany it suddenly made a lot of other things slot into place in my head, such as why I have so many props I never use.
Jon Allen is too professional.
Continue reading “Shabbycadabra
or Let’s See Jon Allen’s Card”
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.
This post sat in my drafts for a year, because I needed to work through some thoughts, which I did in these three posts.
A number of people have brought the following recent article to my attention:
Magicians Less Prone To Mental Disorders Than Other Artists
Given that the Magic Circle has a whole mental health programme to look after its members mental health I can’t help but feel that suggesting magic is a ticket to good mental health might be papering over some actual problems, but that’s not what this is really about.
Because everyone knows to be an artist you have to be nuts, right? You have to be so tortured by the delusional visions visiting you at night that the only respite is to capture them on canvas or in writing. The music of the damned plays in your head until you can share it with other people to alleviate the burden of being alone with forbidden knowledge.
Right? That’s what we all know about being creative, its a curse.
Right?
Continue reading “Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here”
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.
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”
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”
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
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”