One of the downsides of being a well-respected news organization is the requirement that articles have some hook to current events. Fortunately, Inside Magic has never been confused with a well-respected news organization and, therefore, these rules do not apply. This is not the primary reason we are not well-respected or even considered a news organization, but it is a benefit.
Consequently, if The New York Times desired to publish an article gushing about the outstanding writing skills and style of Charles Dickens, it would need to find some way to associate the effusive tribute to the news of the day. Even then, The Times would feel obliged to find parallels to some event or person familiar to both readers of Dickens and today's newspapers. It could not just be a gush piece 1 or homage to the incredibly relevant author for today's modern society.
But as we noted, we have no reputation to squander and we are not convinced we would worry about squandering even if we did. Irregardless and nonetheless 2 we wanted to talk about Ian Rowland and how much we like his work today. We worried for hours how to work it into the current news from magic or non-magic sources. Yes, there was the big news that Folger's Instant Coffee intends to bring back its "Magic Morning Mud" contest awarding $1,000.00 to the worst cup of coffee available to commuters. That really had little or nothing to do with magic in its proper sense. It just used the word "magic" and that was good enough to trigger a Google News Alert.
Unfortunately, we don't know if Mr. Rowland even drinks coffee and we worried about stretching too far to make a story relevant.
Mr. Rowland is an Inside Magic Favorite from way back. His brain is a fertile medium for the weed-like growth of leafy, green magic. 3
We have purchased his writings with the drive of a man (although with a slightly effeminate laugh) possessed. His Real Work on Cold Reading is one of the most comprehensive and accessible books on this very arcane subject. We have stolen his spoon bending routine without shame to great success before US audiences. Plus, his writing style is gooder than almost anyone we know. He is pithy, funny and substantive. We shoot for any one of the three and often miss or clip one our own essential arteries.
Today, Mr. Rowland is offering two very unique and free items for visitors. The first is an instant download about persuasion entitled Mind Twists. It asks, "How can you persuade anyone to do anything? How can you be happy? And what very strange thing did I do in 1997?" The download is free in the most basic sense of the word. You are not required to give up your email address, join a mailing list, post a badge on your site, or even foreswear some habit others claim could harm you and your offspring. You simply go to the page and download the PDF.
A second freebie does come with a string attached but it is a nice string or at least not a string that one would mind. 4
Mr. Rowland will give you access to a stunning group of effects in exchange for proof that you have helped a charity.
4. Put your full 'normal' name (e.g. John Smith) at the top of the email, whatever else you write.
5. Tell me in a few words about your chosen charity and what they do. Don't cut and paste from official blurb. Don't tell me how much you donated.
Mr. Rowland promises he will not put you on a mailing list or give your details to anyone else. Like all good things, the offer ends soon. You need to get your submission to him by March 31, 2012.
We thought about this for a very long time but cannot figure his angle unless it is just his way of encouraging charity. If it was our offer, you know we'd have some way of making it pay but not so for Mr. Rowland. His interest is sincere and his goals noble.
True, we don't have a timely hook for this story but then again, relevance and professionalism are merely words here at Inside Magic. What Mr. Rowland offers is substance and good tidings – and that has to be sufficient for ample news coverage, right?
Ironically, Gush Piece is also the name of our hard-boiled detective with an eye for the ladies, a finger for the trigger and salivary glands for a spit take. Gush Piece is not related or connected in any manner to the iconic Belgian comic strip of the same name featuring the beloved character Gush Piece (“Le Garçon Avec la Bouche Très Mouillé” – “The Boy with the Very Wet Mouth”). ↩
Please see our law review article, “Useless and Pedantic, a New Lawyer Guide to Language and Artificial Profundity”, Cosmopolitan Styling Academy Quarterly, June 1999. The original article was 25,000 words but the editor slashed it to 250 words before adding an irrelevant, although very helpful, paragraph about the need to avoid “generic acetone” as a nail polish remover. ↩
See, “Up an Analogy without a Clue: Modern Statistical Study of Poor Analogies and the Devastation Wrought Upon Innocent Sentences,” Timothy Quinlan, Car Wash Attendant Journal, Winter 2009. ↩
Speaking of which, look for our premier episode on Mystic Hollow, Michigan Comcast Community Access Channel 81, “The Magic and Deviant Behavior Hour.” Our first show will feature a psychologist from the University of Michigan, a Gaucho (an Argentinian Cowboy), an alpaca and a magician working together as a team to place an effective classified ad to meet the group members’ divergent needs. ↩
The Guardian newspaper of London recently ran a piece on the popularity of magic, magicians and the traditional magic show. In asking whether magic was again becoming “fashionable,” the anonymous writer referenced “the old journalistic adage, “Two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend.”
“Penn and Teller, who sprang to fame in the 1980s by appearing to reveal the secrets behind tricks, thereby breaking the magical code of omerta, are the old guard in this pairing. Fool Usis, at heart, no different from the Paul Daniels magic shows of decades past, merely spiced with the addition of some X Factor dynamics.”
They may have been the “Bad Boys of Magic” but Fool Us is not a challenge to the proud history of an art form that continues to entertain because and in spite of remarkable developments in science. ”Penn & Teller are historians of magic and their respect for those who are operating within such traditions is palpable, even when they are not fooled by the acts.”
Magician and actor Paul Nathan has a great hook for his play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. If you seem him anywhere (literally anywhere) you are free to stop him and challenge him to perform one of the card tricks his character does in the play, Devil in the Deck.
If he succeeds, you get to see a neat effect in a very impromptu situation. If he fails, you get a cool $1,000.00.
There are a couple of conditions for the challenge but they are not unreasonable. First, the deck must be ungimmicked, standard size, and in reasonable condition. If the deck is still in its unopened condition, he will use the deck without hesitation. If it is well-loved and sticky with various folds and tears, he reserves the right to pass on the challenge.
The only exception to the challenge is CardToon for obvious reasons.
Finally, in handing your deck to Mr. Nathan, you acknowledge you may not get it back. So, if you purchased some of those Jerry’s Nugget decks being offered by Lee Asher, you might want to keep them in your back pocket and hand over a less expensive one.
The play sounds pretty cool as well. According to one source, “Devil” is an elegant blend of stories, music, and enthralling close-up magic. The card tricks alone are worth the ticket price.”
The show begins its limited run on August 5th and will go until August 29th.
Mr. Nathan is familiar to fans of Star Trek Voyager and has been seen on HBO and MTV.
First, they were described as “the Bad Boys of Magic” because they allegedly exposed our most sacred secrets; except they didn’t.
Penn & Teller were iconoclastic rebels ready to stick it to The Man with outrageous and non-traditional performance pieces; except that is not accurate either. After all, while they were allegedly engaging in the clasting of icons, they were performing nightly in a posh theater named for them in Las Vegas.
Next, there was hue and cry when they refused to update their act, abandon the trite magic stage show, to accost people on the street and perform endurance stunts. They eschewed standing on the top of a pole on a pole for a week, being frozen, nearly drowning, subjected to static electricity shocks, or being suspended by gossamer threads tied to meat hooks sunk into the fatty tissue between their shoulder blades.{{1}}
Where is this going and whence did it come?
This morning, The Guardian (UK) published a savage review of Penn & Teller’s new show for ITV1, “Penn & Teller: Fool Us!”
It begins with an attack on Penn’s size and proceeds down the low road from there. The review describes the show’s premise as “Magicians do tricks for [Penn & Teller]; they have to say how they’re done. If they can’t work it out, the contestant goes to Las Vegas, which is just about the last place on earth where “magician” is a job title.”
Hence the “Whatever!” as our introduction to this article.
But the reviewer is really cheesed-off because Penn & Teller behave like real magicians – not the “Bad Boys of Magic.” “When they do unlock the mystery, they don’t share it. Instead, they make opaque remarks, to convey to the performer that the games up, without telling the audience how anything’s done.”
He gives one of the “opaque” remarks as “as far as the rope tie, this was used extensively in spirit cabinets.”
We think that is a perfect way of hiding secrets but communicating with a fellow magician.
Nay says the reviewer, “It doesn’t so much impart information as make a noise with some words. When they can’t work out how the trick was done, they look vexed and thwarted, which is sort of against the spirit of feel good mentoring that this is meant to encapsulate. And yet, of course the shady atmosphere is to protect our innocence, otherwise we wouldn’t be amazed.”
That is where this rant started before winding its way from Berlin to Chicago to London and back to Mystic Hollow, Michigan.
[[1]]The parallels to Louis Sullivan (“Form Forever Follows Function”) and Mies van der Rohe (“Form is Function”) are obvious. The latter architect’s embrace of the former’s approach did not mimic or grossly distort the Chicago School’s essence. The German immigrant understood the purpose (or “function”) of the Chicago School was to build a “tall building”). (See Louis Sullivan’s real article in Lippincott’s Magazine, Volume 57 (1896) pp. 403-9, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” He continued in the tradition but in an era where modern building materials were readily available.
Louis Sullivan’s Carson, Pierre, Scott and Company building resonates with Mies Van Der Rohe’s posthumously completed IBM Plaza in Chicago and his Toronto-Dominion Centre.
Teller performs silently but nonetheless performs.(See our fake article in Architectural Research Quarterly, 15, pp. 22-39; “Bauhaus or Bologna: The ‘New School’ Phenomenon in Architecture, Magic and Economics – How Followers Miss the Point of their Inspiration”). [[1]]
Reading is one of our favorite things to do. We read constantly. Our job (the real one where we make gobs of cash easily converted into gobs worth of magic tricks and books) is all about reading and during our breaks, we read.
We used our advance skills to learn about the goings on over in the United Kingdom. You may be able to read this faster, it is tough for us to sound out words in a British accent and virtually impossible to focus on not moving our lips as we work through each word plus try to derive meaning. Duncan Trillo’s MagicWeek.co.uk web site is on our weekly must read list. This weekend we learned the British Magical Society awarded the David Berglass Award to Inside Magic Favorite Derren Brown.
The presentation took place during Annual Awards Dinner of the BMS in Coldfield, Birmingham.
Derren Brown is currently touring with a new show “Svengali” and was therefore well-equipped to document the presentation by his own private film crew.
We will have to do some more reading to learn more about his new show, Svengali. It sounds fascinating and is just the type of thing young magicians in this country need to see.
The Svengali Deck has fallen on tough times in the States. Perhaps its ubiquity from the TV Magic Card campaign scorched the earth but if Derren Brown can do an entire two hour evening show with nothing more than a Svengali Deck, that’s proof that the old trick still has some life yet.
We imagine with his big budget, he can use a different deck for each show and decrease the chances of being found out by audience members who see the show more than once.
One of the downsides of being a well-respected news organization is the requirement that articles have some hook to current events. Fortunately, Inside Magic has never been confused with a well-respected news organization and, therefore, these rules do not apply. This is not the primary reason we are not well-respected or even considered a news organization, but it is a benefit.
Whatever!
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