Tag: Showbiz

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Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here

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”

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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”

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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”

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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”

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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.

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or Entry Points and Exit Wounds”

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[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.

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or The Singularity Approaches”

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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”

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Ban Hammer
or Throwing the baby out with the bath water

I was planning for my next big post to be a video of my latest routine with a further video explaining its origins, similar to the post I made for the tooth fairy act but watching back the performance, I just wasn’t happy with it yet.

Needs longer to cook.

However it got me thinking about video content and specifically about magic youtubers and such, which all led to with this video my friend and long time reader sent me.

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or Throwing the baby out with the bath water”

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Black Hat Magic
or How to lose friends and alienate people

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, there are two kinds of computer hackers.

White hat hackers are tourists, explorers, defenders of digital space. Yes they will use their knowledge of technology to gain access to places they shouldn’t be but they won’t take anything or damage anything and often will tell the organisations after the fact what vulnerabilities they exploited to gain access, so that the systems administrators can improve their security.

Black hat hackers are using similar skills and access to steal confidential data, sabotage the systems they infiltrate and exploit unknown vulnerabilities entire for personal gain.

You know, goodies and baddies.

And I decided a while ago that since magic is just theatre… Why aren’t there more magic baddies?

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or How to lose friends and alienate people”

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The World’s Greatest*** Card Trick
or I can teach you, but I’d have to charge

Normally I don’t try to keep up with current affairs because I like to sit on a topic and let it stew in my brain until it ferments and froths over, generating a stink I can’t contain and have to smear on the internet for everyone to see.

But this… this just… I can’t even.

Right now you can buy the World’s Greatest Card Trick for £435.

Before you go any further, I want you to think: Sky’s the limit, what would be the world’s greatest card trick? The greatest. The absolute best.

Continue reading “The World’s Greatest*** Card Trick
or I can teach you, but I’d have to charge”