Mystery Man

Dying Art

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:00:46 -0600

I am the only person in my town who is legally allowed to smoke in a public place. It’s true. A city wide smoking ban was put in place some years ago, but an exemption was written in for me so that I could continue to perform magic, publicly, with cigarettes.

Before smoking was seen as the scourge of all humanity,
a favorite demonstration of mine was to borrow a $100 bill, have someone write their name on it and then fold it up. Someone would get out their cigarettes and light one. They would touch the burning end to the bill, and the bill would vanish in a flash of flame. I would take a puff from their cigarette, announce that it tasted funny, and have the paper torn away. There, rolled up inside the cigarette was the signed bill. A miracle. And one I hardly ever get to do anymore.

Or, back in the day, I would sometimes open a stage show with this: I’d make my entrance, give some opening remarks, then slowly put both of my hands in my trouser pockets. I’d pause for a second, smile, then shuffle my feet to turn my body around 360 degrees. When I faced front again I was smoking a lit cigarette. There would be a few puffs to prove it was real, a few smoke rings blown for show, and then I’d take the lit cigarette in my fist, blow a puff of smoke at my hand and the cigarette would vanish completely. This really bothered people, because the thing that vanished was burning. Think about that.

Now it bothers people for a completely different reason. Smoking is taboo. Not only that, but smoking is actually illegal in most public places, and there is almost no venue left to see the art of cigarette manipulation. I suspect I stand alone on this, but I think this is a tragedy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy that no one is allowed to smoke on an airplane, and that I can enjoy a nice dinner and wine without clouds of blue smoke wafting over my plate. (Though I would like to go on record saying that if we are going to allow perfume on planes I’d just as soon have people smoking too.)

It’s funny now when I think back to my early training as a pre-teen magician, how many of the books I bought--written specifically for young magicians--contained a section on sleight of hand with cigarettes. My parents didn’t even blink when I asked them to get me a carton of unfiltered cigarettes at the age of 9 or 10. There is no way that would happen today, books teaching sleight of hand rarely mention cigarettes anymore, and virtually no young magicians study this wonderful and historically significant branch of conjuring. In fact, I predict that within 50 years cigarette magic will be nothing but a memory--a wisp of smoke taken by the winds of changing social norms.

Is this really such a great loss? You decide. Try to get over your knee jerk revulsion at seeing someone light up, and take a look at a few examples culled from YouTube:

Penn and Teller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qQX-jayixQ

Richard Cardini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ0cnTjgcAE

Tony Slydini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcS_FutAvU&feature=related

Cyril Takayama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_nGL9thTHU

José Frakson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5W8kFFra1Q

And the king of all smoking magicians, Tom Mullica
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd5P2p0xjGg&feature=related

A Talk at Magic Con

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:54:22 -0600

On March 20, 2010 I was a presenter at Magic Con--a gathering of magicians from all over the world in San Diego, California. One of my three presentations was about character in performance. It is a plea for magicians everywhere to understand that “the trick is not the thing” and that like all live performance magic shows are about storytelling, about communication and about connecting with an audience. Here is the text of my short talk:

“I heard an interesting story about Trevor Nunn. For those that may not know, Trevor Nunn is head of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, a theater director, and probably knows more about Shakespeare than anyone alive. So Trevor Nunn is at a party with a bunch of theater people, and there is a young director there who is pontificating about his upcoming staging of Othello. He’s going on and on about character and themes, how Othello is a man clinging to chivalry in an age when chivalry is dead etc. etc. etc. After a while Trevor Nunn holds up his hand, and everyone stops to listen. He says, “Othello is Shakespeare’s play about jealousy. If you make every scene about jealousy in one form or another, the play will work on stage.”

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think there is an important idea here for the construction of magic shows. The idea of distilling something down to its essence, and focusing on that. I want to return to this idea in a moment.

I live in Aspen where we boast one of the largest Fourth of July fireworks displays in the country. Some years ago I was enjoying the fireworks when I was struck by the notion that most magic shows have the same structure as a fireworks display. Boom. (Wow.) Boom. (Wow.) Boom, boom, boom. BOOM. (Ahhhh…wow.) Boom rat-a-tat-tat, boom, boom, boom...BOOM. “Wow, that was great. Let’s get something to eat.”

One of the reasons for this is that we tend to study magic in terms of “tricks”--individual units of performance. We learn a new trick, maybe write a script for it or give it some loose context, and then we drop this isolated thing into our repertoire. Thus, we end up with a “show” that is a random collection of tricks we like. The tricks might be great, the performance might be entertaining, and the “show” such as it is may work just fine. However, it doesn’t tell a story, doesn’t take the audience anywhere really, and it’s structured exactly like a fireworks display. Boom. For my next trick...boom. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but because it’s the easiest way to “be a magician,” it’s what we see most of the time and we become conditioned to think this is “the way.” I believe other approaches to show structure can lead to more interesting theatrical experiences. I’ve written and talked a lot about the importance of transitions, about how tying the end of one piece to the beginning of the next is a crucial part of presenting a coherent and professional show. But today I want to take that a step further, and explore the idea of consciously making your show, as a whole, be about something specific.

This is supposed to be a talk about character, and it is. I don’t think you can make decisions about character without also deciding what your character is trying to communicate. The two things are inseparable, so the question of character is tied to the question of theme, or the character’s intent. Knowing the “who” and the “why” means being able to answer two questions very clearly: 1. What is my character? And 2. What is my show about? Or to say it differently, Who am I in performance? And Why am I performing? Answering these questions will go a long way to giving you an original point of view, and a reason for an audience to watch.

I’ll tell you an interesting story about this: I was leading workshop sessions on these ideas last year at Luke Jermay’s Mentalism Workshop. Each student would get up into the hot seat at the front of the room and stay there until they could verbalize a clear and succinct answer to these two questions. What is your character? What is your show about? And it was really difficult for them, and started to look like group therapy. They would talk about why they do magic, what they want an audience to think, what tricks they like and why, etc etc--always talking around the questions without being about to answer them directly. Then, after a painful public soul searching they would have a breakthrough--or many of them did anyway--and see clearly for the first time who they were on stage, and what they were trying to say in performance. Well after the first couple of students struggled with the exercise, I thought a concrete example might be helpful. There were a number of name professionals in the room--Max Maven, Michael Weber, Mac King--so I went around the room and asked these men to answer the questions: What is your character? What is your show about? And each of them could answer the questions instantly, directly, and succinctly. It was a powerful and revelatory moment.

This then is the work I want to encourage all of you to do. To put aside tricks, to stop thinking about the individual “units” of your show for a while and instead focus your efforts on answering these two questions about your show as a whole. What is my character? What is my show about? And to understand that you don’t just answer these questions once and call it good--you revisit them constantly, revising your answers as you grow and change and develop.

Once you understand who you are as a performer, and what you are trying to communicate with your show, you’ll find you can no longer just drop random tricks into the middle of things or use patter written by someone else. This is a good thing. The answers to these two questions will dictate what effects you choose, how they link together, what kind of script they need, and your show will become exponentially more effective because it’s no longer structured like a fireworks display. It cannot be random snatches of effects you like and stock jokes that work cobbled together to fill the time. This patchwork approach that is 95% or more of what we see in magic today simply will not work if you get serious about character and theme. Your show will start to have meaning, and content, and intent, and it will take us somewhere because whether or not it has a standard narrative structure, you are now telling a story. And stories are how we communicate ideas in performance.

Which brings us back to Trevor Nunn. If you know who your character is, and what your show is about, you can see how Nunn’s formula for Othello can be applied to your own work. Othello, said Nunn, is about jealousy, so you make every scene about jealousy in one form or another. In the same way you can work to make each individual effect you choose speak to some aspect of your theme, from your character’s unique POV, and you’ll find that your magic is stronger, and your show, as a whole, begins to resonate and to connect with the audience at a deeper level. Because it has become a real show, a performance, and not just a demonstration of tricks.

Thank you. “

TEDMED talk at TED.com

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:45:16 -0700

Last fall I gave five short presentations at the TEDMED conference in San Diego. <www.tedmed.com> The idea was simple: to do short pieces of pure entertainment that would break up the heavier content of the sessions. The only caveat was that my presentations had to be framed in context--they had to match in some way the themes and content of the sessions they were in.

At a conference like TEDMED, this is no easy task, because the context is the most mind blowing and wide ranging information imaginable in the fields of medicine, health, and general well being. Some personal highlights include Dean Kamen speaking about robotics and the design of functional prosthetics controlled by thinking; Aubrey De Grey explaining with a straight face that aging is treatable and why we are the last generation that will have to die; Anthony Atala demonstrating how his lab grows human tissue and can “print” healthy transplantable organs using a modified ink jet printer; and Nobel laureate Kary Mullis revealing that he may have discovered a way to cure every known virus in the human body. Those are just four of over fifty presentations representing a bewildering range of research and ideas pointing to a future that is not far away and very hard to fathom. It seemed at times like pure science fiction, yet it is rooted in hard science, serious research, and innovative thinking by some of the best and brightest in the fields of biology, medicine, genetics and information design.

My job was to create interstitial texture pieces that were mostly for fun, but had to have some content that relates to the session they appear in. I did five different talks over three days:

1. When Fake is Real -- The placebo effect and how belief can change your perception of things.
2. The Value of Old Ideas -- Where I presented a very old method of communicating that looks as modern and impossible as anything technology can offer.
3. Memory Lapse -- Taking complete control of a random person (both physically and mentally) and just by talking caused her to forget something she was trying hard to remember.
4. The Magician’s History of Body Modification and Prosthetics: 1584 - Present -- A slide show detailing how conjurors have used the human body to delight, deceive and horrify over the past 400 years.
5. Germ Studies and Behavioral Patterns in Public Bathrooms -- A game show like affair where I explained how social norms affect choices made in public restrooms, and how studying germ quantities lead to understanding of obscure human behavior.

How did it go? Pretty well, I’d say. People laughed and clapped at all the right places, I was seated at all the best tables for dinner conversation, and I’ve been invited back to speak again next year.

You can see the first of these talks, “When Fake is Real” at the TED website. <www.ted.com> Please note that it is bloody, and not for anyone squeamish about needles.

Summer Summary

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:24:05 -0700

(Seems I’ve allowed my blog page to go stale. My humble apology will be coupled with a valiant effort to catch you up all at once with what’s been going on while I’ve been gone. I will therefore present a clipped weblog version of “What I Did Last Summer.” I hope to write about most of these events in detail here soon, but I think lumping a few highlights together will prove to be the expedient way to get back on track.)

After the ski season closed in Aspen for Monday Magic at the Hotel Jerome, I signed on to be a facilitator and instructor for the Bezos Scholars Program. In short, we take a group of 12 high school students and 12 educators from their schools, bring them here for the Aspen Ideas Festival and equip them to change the world. Seriously, that is part of the stated goal of this amazing program. I’ll tell you more about my role, some incredible young people, and the Bezos Family Foundation in future posts. Suffice to say it was--and continues to be--one of the most satisfying experiences in my career.

In addition to the regular gigs, I did a lot more speaking and lecturing this year than I have in the past. Not by design, exactly, but my talk at the EG Conference last year got posted by ForaTV. [Link] I assume it’s because of this that suddenly people wanted me to give talks instead of straight performances. I much prefer to step out and do my show, but I know that staying completely in my comfort zone means I am not growing. So I said yes to a series of high profile talks this year and poured myself into writing custom scripts and designing slide shows--neglecting nearly everything else, including this blog.

The biggest audience was at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Chicago. Somewhere between 7000 and 8000 people attended the special Dialogues program where Apollo Robbins and I shared the stage for two hours of “Magic and the Mind.” We each performed and presented ideas about some aspect of conjuring and brain science. I chose to address issues of memory, how memories are coded, stored and retrieved, and how a skilled magician can subvert the process--leading to misremembering, forgetting details, and even the planting of false memories.

This got me some nice press notices and a comically large picture in USA Today. A lot of good ink. (A digression: I was flying home the day the USA Today article hit, and the lady in the seat next to me was reading a copy. I was sitting there debating if I should direct her to my picture, or if that was a weird thing to do. I mean, how often can you point a total stranger to a giant photo of you in the paper they are reading? Still, what am I trying to prove here and what’s the point? Just as I’m weighing how much of a geek this would make me, she looks at me, back at the paper and says, “Who’s the mindreader now.?”) I’ll post some clips from my talk soon.

Nearly everyone I ask knows about the TED conference. Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED has created several spin-off conferences, including TEDMED which he now produces with Marc Hodosh. <www.tedmed.com> Same format, same concept as TED, but focused on medicine, health, well-being and in fact any idea big or small related to the medical field. I was asked to put together five short presentations for TEDMED, each customized to fit into the context of that session.

The photo at the top of this post is from my talk about the placebo effect, and the idea that something fake can become “real” if presented properly. Yes, it’s gory looking, but remember that the whole point was to show something fake that was indistinguishable from reality.

What else should I tell you? I attended a couple of magician’s conventions where I see lots of great friends, stay up way too late, and share ideas and secret methods with my fellow conjurors. At MagicLive in Las Vegas last August I again gave five short talks in five sessions. (What is it with that format and me? Twice in three months.) I got a good mix of fan letters and hate mail about my presentation on digital piracy, which indicates it was the most effective talk.

In early November I spent two days in Los Angeles at the Conference on Magic History. Too many highlights for this already long entry, so I’ll have to share some of those experiences and pictures in a future post as well. The art of magic has an incredibly rich and well documented history, and the people who put on this conference never fail to astonish with recreations, scholarly lectures, live performance and just about the best gathering of diverse and serious minds in magic.

Oh, there is so much more to talk about, but this has already gone on longer than anyone has time to read, I’ll wager. In an effort to bring you up to date quickly I’ve left out nearly all the juicy details. Meaning I have lots of fodder for future entries already. There are even more cool projects and performances coming up in 2010--so if you’ll poke your head in once in a while I’ll make sure I’m better about regular posts.

Cultural Trendsetter?

Wed, 4 Feb 2009 22:32:59 -0700

I have always been a cinemaphile. I love movies, love the language of film, and truly believe that movies are magic. Movies both great and small become part of the cultural lexicon, and have the power to change people’s opinions, their way of thinking, and in certain rare cases their very lives. Among my closest friends movies both past and present are constantly discussed, analyzed, criticized and praised. We quote favorite lines, argue over quality and relevance, and spend countless hours watching and re-watching movies we love and revile.

Whenever I’m asked about my favorite movie, I am at a loss for honest answers. How does one choose a favorite among so many films, in so many genres, that have left their fingerprints on your psyche? My favorite movie? Depends on the day, my mood, who exactly is asking, and why. I can list dozens of movies that might be considered “my favorite” at any given moment--from Amadeus to Zelig.

I was recently flattered when asked to write a short feature piece for a film website, part of a series where “cultural trendsetters” from outside the film industry briefly discuss five films that have affected them personally. In my case they were interested in how a professional magician looks at film, from whatever point of view I thought would be interesting. While not quite as broad a question as “What’s your favorite movie,” there were just too many possible approaches to the challenge, and I struggled with the seemingly simple assignment for days.

Do I discuss films with obvious “magic” in them, like Nolan’s The Prestige, or films with less obvious, but no less palpable magic in them, like Cassevetes’ The Tempest? Maybe I should discuss the evolution of special effects, as even experienced filmmakers seem unaware that the special effect is the direct descendent of stage magic, and the evolution of the two arts are intricately intertwined. After all, George Méliés, who is credited as one of the earliest and most important pioneers of special effects in film began his career as a stage magician, lived above the famous Egyptian Hall in London (a theater that featured magic acts), and most of his earliest film effects were recreations of magician’s tricks of his era.

I finally decided to take a different approach entirely, and to examine films that have similar architecture to great magic tricks. I chose five films that use deception and misdirection to tell their stories, films that contain a surprising plot twist or revelation at the end--something completely unexpected yet somehow so perfect as to seem inevitable in retrospect.

I had a blast thinking about these films, how similar the design of individual shots and construction of sequences is to my work of presenting theatrical illusions, and how the filmmakers become magicians in the telling of these stories.

You can read my piece at the Film in Focus website by clicking the link below:

[Eric Mead discusses five mysterious films.]