Ye Olde Magick Blogge

It’s a thankless job saying what needs to be said.

In university, I was affiliated with the student-run paper, and early on I somehow got roped into doing editorial cartoons. I was never very good at the art side of it, although I could fake it well enough (as can be seen in the old Ye Olde Magick Blogge sketch at the top left), but the real pleasure came from the jokes within the cartoon themselves. It was in doing that job that I realized one of the really important things about the freedom of the press, and that’s about the importance of the watchdog. One of the most dehumanizing things that we have to do in life is to grant unto others power over ourselves, and yet we’re born into a world where such systems are forced onto us. The only thing that makes this subordination palatable is the fact that we have the right to hold those people accountable, and even mock them mercilessly if we see fit.

Still, it’s not something that makes you popular, and the better you are at it, the less popular you’re going to be. At least, when I was in university, I was making fun of politicians, whom pretty much everybody despises anyway, so pretty much any ire I drew was from them.

How does this relate to magic?

When we perform for people, it’s often the only time they get to see a magician in their lives, and with the inevitable positive response (unless you’re freaking terrible) it’s easy to let one’s standards drop. Worse still, if you attain any kind of success, and you share that with others, any flaws that you might have get totally glossed over. People might even go so far as to embrace them. And it doesn’t matter if your technique sucks, or your patter is otherwise lousy, or if you put down others, or if you’ve borrowed a few too many things in your career… You’ve been successful! You deserve the pedestal everybody’s placed you upon! And if people start to support, admire and even emulate us… well, that’s just things unfolding the way they ought to, isn’t it?

And we wonder why magic isn’t doing as well as it could be.

Enter Roland Henning and his Weekly Magic Failure blog. Every week since April of last year Roland’s been spotlighting figures in magic and giving them the tough treatment. He’s not held back — he’s just as likely to go after darlings of the Magic Cafe and FISM winners as he is the easy targets such as online exposers or fraudulent producers. While he does try to be fair — he’s retracted a few WMF awards, and also poked a lot of fun at himself — for the most part he’s risked making himself a pariah amongst the elite in the magic community.

And, as a somewhat new development, he’s taking up a comic strip.

I don’t care who you are, that’s some funny shit right there.

It’s also worth pointing out that he’s way more than just some empty pontificating armchair quarterback.

He’s also put up a ton of other performance videos over at Magic Video Depot. His material is fresh, clever, difficult at times, and he can do it in more than one language. And perhaps that’s where part of the motivation comes in — as somebody who’s been a performer for a long time and who takes his magic very seriously, his priorities are a bit different from those who are trying to become celebrities amongst other magicians.

And we need this. At least, I need it. I need to be reminded that magicians are collectively a bunch of twits at times, because I don’t want to be a twit. I need to know that with this resurrection of the Olde Blogge that there’s a chance I might end up on that last if I fail at keeping up to my own set of values. I need to know that if, heaven forbid, the stars align for me as a performer and I actually gain some notoriety, that I don’t start mailing it in.

So, here’s to you, Roland. You’re confrontational, brutal, contrarian, opinionated, sometimes not very nice about it, and arguably one of the bigger jerks in the magic community today.

Please, don’t ever stop.