( But you can watch too )
So this is the part where I call back to several other posts simultaneously into a crescendo like those parts of a musical where it turns out you can interleave all three of the main leitmotifs into one epic finale song.
This isn’t my last post¹, it just happens that I have now laid enough groundwork to start getting a little more meta.
This post also contains 3 trick reviews, which seems to be what magicians like²
In my post about Troublewit I kind of wrote a cheque that I didn’t fully cash.
I said that by recognising and codifying the things you hate about a routine you can methodically attempt to fix those things and produce some brilliant shining original masterwork which has none of the identified problems.
I then listed out the problems of Troublewit and noted that it was unsalvageable garbage (which, don’t get me wrong, it totally is) because fixing those problems would take it so far from it’s origins that it completely morphs into an unrelated allied art or, worse still, gospel magic.
What happened to be benefits of hatred? Did I lie to you?
No. No I did not. I did however decide to split what I wrote in two because it got too damn long. This is the second half of that article, in which Stacy Saves the Linking Rings.
You heard it here first, Rick Lax is the evil magician.
@broderick busted this wide open last month & i clicked on this vid, thought "i bet the evil magician is doing this," and sure enough a bit of linkedin and fb snooping confirmed it https://t.co/VJyvAGq9G0
— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) June 2, 2021
I guess Alistair Crowley lost his crown.
There’s a term used by magicians to refer to other types of performance which blend well with magic. Things like juggling, ventriloquism, quick change, balloon modelling and shadowgraphy. That term is Allied Arts
Often the allied arts will be included in a gala show at larger magic conventions and they are usually the most popular part. This may be because they are a novel diversion in a sea of magic that all starts to look the same after a while. It may also be because the things defined as allied arts are usually, but not always, overt displays of skill.
A colleague of mine once said that the difference between juggling and magic is that you can see the juggler’s hands. To put it a little more directly: jugglers can make something difficult look easy, magicians can make something easy look impossible¹.
But there’s one magic trick that has its method as clearly visible as juggling or balloon modelling, and yet refuses to be demoted to an allied art, because there’s no overt skill, very little actual skill, and only magicians seem to like it.
But not me.
I cannot fucking stand Troublewit.
At the second this goes live I will just have finished giving a sort of impromptu lecture on the Alakazam discord theatre. I did this as a favour to the store, which is nice, and my friend Wayne who does a lot of promo work for them.
I couldn’t possibly have done it to raise my own profile to ahead of my upcoming book release later this year (hopefully).
If rather than coming here from that lecture you’re one of my regular readers (whom frankly I didn’t realise I had) consider this a little free lesson in how I perform off the clock.
The subject of the lecture is my Purse Strings routine and in the off chance that someone enjoyed it but needed to jog their memory about some part of it, I present this article as a companion piece.
Continue reading “Purse Strings
or Magic on a Shoestring Budget”
I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine recently over messenger and my inability to stay on topic basically fucked it up for her. Probably sounded like nonsense. I say recently… When I wrote this paragraph and some of what’s below it was still 2019 and it felt like the world would soon be my oyster, forgetting that oysters are one of the main vectors for hepatitis and sure enough we would descend into a plague.
So anyway I’m going to have a crack at explaining it now.
This is how to turn problematic nervous energy into useful performing energy, and cast a few fireballs while you’re at it. It’s worth noting that while this works for me, it won’t necessarily work for anyone else. There is always the possibility that I’m just fucked up and accidentally found a glitch in my own emotional hardware.
But hey, maybe you can break your brain too!
Continue reading “Nervous Energy
or Casting Basic Fireballs”
It’s been a while since I posted here. You may have thought I was dead, a few times I thought I wasn’t far off, but I made it through in the end.
I’ve been through some personal changes, we’ve all been through a global coronavirus epidemic, and for a while keeping a magic blog seemed a little pointless in the grand scheme of things.
But now I’m vaccinated¹ and things are beginning to tend towards normality I’ve once again learned an important lesson: pointless bullshit is the only thing that makes life worth living.
Continue reading “Returning from Hiatus
or Did I leave the oven on?”
I just wanted to add a few extra points about my previous statements about the circle. Bits and pieces that didn’t fit the flow of the points I was making but do have a little relevance.
Quirky side avenues like the few people who really do want to abolish the exposure rule, some examples of what happens if you break the rule, what joining the circle is like, and reasons you might want to.
After all, I’m a member of the magic circle, surely it can’t be all that bad?
Continue reading “On the Inside of a Circle
or Bits and Pieces”
There’s a lovely little story in Eugene Burger’s book Magic And Meaning about an aboriginal¹ custom of going out hunting evil spirits once a year, each time taking the young boys who have come of age and are ready to face the monsters themselves. The boys must take a brave stand against the unseen creatures roaring in the distance as the group splits up, and only those brave enough to face the beast will learn that the roaring is produced by a strip of carved wood swung around on a piece of cord² by one of the elders, and there are in fact no monsters. The instruments are then burned in a great fire, leaving ash to show the creature was defeated without the lack of a corpse giving the game away³.
This could be considered the earliest form of magic, similar to the magic of Father Christmas, The Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy⁴. A magic for everyone, a secret kept by the elders but which is eventually known by all.
But of course, when we normally talk about magic, we talk about the performance of apparent miracles by secret methods known by very few. Indeed, revealing these secrets to the world at large would destroy an entire performing art, industry, and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of magicians.
Or at least, that’s the theory.
The Magic Circle is a club for magicians located in London, near Euston Train Station. For decades the club was considered, in the UK at least, to have a special place in the world of magic. If you were a magician the first question anyone would ask is whether you were in The Magic Circle. To a degree it also had international prestige, which they use to declare themselves an international club, even though the majority of their members are located within 50 miles of the London headquarters.
A massive change occurred in the club in the 90s, when due to a huge public campaign run by and on behalf of female magicians, the club accepted women for the first time. Yeah, in the progressive wonderland of 1991 they allowed female members. Conversely the International Brotherhood of Magicians has always been open to female members, since it was founded in 1922.
The actual shift in the club though was an after effect of the campaign to open The Magic Circle to women rather than the impact of the rule change itself.