magic is about honesty
everything here is true
except for the bits I made up
One thing almost everyone is genuinely terrible at is thinking about large numbers. Any time you can take huge numbers and make some more comfortable comparison, it's a huge help. Here someone put together a history of the known universe (13.8 billion years is the current best estimate) and condensed it down into ten minutes so you can get a sense of the relative timescales.
Don't hold your breath looking for humans. We don't show up until the very last frame.
It's a strange feeling to stop and consider that you lie for a living.
Magic is make believe, but there's something that separates it from other forms of pretend, like watching a movie or a play. In a movie, you can get swept away in emotion and feel that you're watching the real-time reactions of real people (who just happen to be reading from a script all the way through.) But in magic, emotion isn't enough; I need to bring my audience on intellectually. They need to know what they're seeing and know that it can't happen. The lie is more real.
Seeing a behind the scenes look watching your favourite Stark Trek alien getting into makeup doesn't detract from your enjoyment of Star Trek. But watching a magic show set up and seeing where all of the bits and pieces secretly went would seriously undermine your experience.
If I were trying to be absolutely intellectually honest, and admit that lying is wrong, it's not easy to defend my particular brand of lying.
One person who thought about this a lot is the famed magician and skeptic (and Canadian) James Randi. He was recently interviewed on the podcast of Penn Jillette (who has also thought deeply about this). They chat about this and other things for the better part of an hour. Gave me an intellectually satisfying warm fuzzy feeling:
Or so The Onion claims. I've been reading the article almost but not quite entirely sure it's satire. Such is the problem with politics these days.
“Right away there was the issue of accountability. In the aftermath of Trump’s surprise victory, we realized the American people deserved better from their magicians. It didn’t matter if you were working birthday parties or headlining the MGM Grand. You had to take a real honest look at what you did and accept that whether you were making a playing card disappear, pushing a cigarette through a quarter, or levitating over the Grand Canyon, your actions would be judged in the context of an entirely new political climate.
With Trump peddling fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, we could no longer remain silent: We had an obligation, both as illusionists and Americans, not to allow such hateful behavior to become normalized.”
One pieces that I found rather interesting:
“Though much of what we as Americans hold sacred has come under threat this past year, there has been at least one positive development: Many magicians no longer saw their female assistants in half, having come to realize that there are now consequences for such behavior in the workplace.”
Magicians have a history of being not so nice to women (and often our audiences in general), something I've tried very hard to not emulate for my entire career.
I post this only because it contains magic tricks... as someone who was forced to learn the math behind the Laffer Curve in university.
Found a fabulous bit of ad copy from the nineteenth century conjurer Ingleby that I'm thinking of stealing:
“…in consequence of his superior excellence in the Art of Deception he has had conferred upon him the title of ‘Emperor of all Conjurers’ by a numerous Assemblage of Gentlemen Amateurs, particularly through the Amazing Trick of Cutting the Fowl’s head off and Restoring it to Life and Animation! For no man knows the real way but himself. He is now, therefore, ad the Head of his Profession, and all Competitors remind him only of the following Fables: The Ass in the LIon’s Skin and The Ox and the Frog.”
Put that on a poster in some Comic Sans and my 2018 will be rockin'.
Special thanks to Sidney Clarke and his Annals of Conjuring.
When you star in a show called Magic & Martini, YouTube puts some strange things in your suggested feed. Heading into a very busy time of year, so it may be a while before I muster up the energy to try this one. But looks very interesting. If you manage to make one, leave your thoughts in the comments.
