Ye Olde Magick Blogge

What we’re gonna do right here is go back. Way back.

I’ve been finding myself really curious about how the old school guys did it. There are a lot of blabberheads out there on the Magic Cafe and the Genii Forum proudly proclaiming their heritage (just my opinion) or else dropping name and name, thereby making themselves come across as experts by association.

So, instead of putting up with that nonsense, I want to take a look at primary sources to get an idea of what it really means to be old school, to see what sort of things they valued, and to try to figure out which of those values have carried forward.

We unfortunately don’t have much in the way of video recordings, but the ones we do have offer some interesting insight. Take a look at Al Flosso, Cardini, the second half of the Fred Kaps video, and Ricky Jay channeling Max Malini.

 
Al Flosso’s Miser’s Dream

 
Cardini’s Hotel Lobby Act

 
Fred Kaps’s Salt Pour

 
Ricky Jay’s Multiple Selection trick

In all four of these videos, there’s one thing that stands out… Overkill. Al Flosso just can’t stop finding coins on the kid. Cardini produces card fan after card fan after card fan. Fred Kaps is standing in a pile of salt. Ricky Jay (again, bringing us a bit of Malini) combines a dozen pick-a-card tricks into one. The endless parade of effect can either lead to an impression of absolute mastery (such as what Ricky Jay portrays) or else a feeling of the magic almost overwhelming the performance. That first concept seems to have survived into the present, but that second one, the idea of almost being plagued to death by the magic, seems to give the implied magical cause a lift of its own, casting the magician as somebody who’s almost trying to tame it.

Of course, it’s easy to fall into the logical fallacy of assuming these videos represent everything from the era, but at the same time, these are really striking performances, and I think this sort of thing goes a long way towards establishing credibility in the magic and the magician. The magic itself takes on an unmistakable presence, and that presence in turn surrounds the magician and creates an atmosphere around him, the impression that wherever he is, magic happens. It’s easy to go a bit too far with this, as Derren Brown and Teller talk about when referring to the magician as a whimsical god-figure who snaps his fingers and gets what he wants. That said, if we’re going to give our all to an effect, it makes a ton of sense exploring the effect to the point of dramatizing its limits.

Do we see much of this these days? Hard to say. As said before, the idea of conveying total mastery is there, but not so much the idea of the magic being something completely out of the performer’s control. Tommy Wonder was pretty good at this, although the scope of it was tamed down to something more appropriate for the close-up or parlour level. Other individual performances stand out, such as John Carney performing Cards Up The Sleeve, David Roth doing the Free and Unlimited Coinage of Silver, or David Williamson doing 51 Cards to Pocket, but again, there’s not quite the old school level of overkill there. Not saying that these examples aren’t disqualified as old school (especially since Erdnase is arguably as old school as it gets), but compare the effect of 51 Cards to Pocket to something like the Egyptian Pocket as described in the Royal Road to Card Magic… A spectator, aiding the magician, has four cards selected by four spectators, which are returned to the deck, which is shuffled, before the spectator puts them in his pocket. He, not the magician, then proceeds to reach into the pocket to pull out the cards. He succeeds the first three times, but the fourth, the magic gets a little out of hand, and all over a sudden he and the magician pull out “an avalanche of cards” from the various pockets on the spectator’s person.

What an incredible image that is. Imagine plucking the equivalent of two full decks of cards (or more…?) from a spectator in bunches. That’s over a hundred cards, a hundred individual items, off the spectator’s body! It’s like comparing stealing a guy’s watch (a great effect) with Paul Potassy emptying their pockets over and over again, or comparing a chop cup routine to Gazzo producing a Watermelon from his hat. It’s like going beyond mastery, since repeating an individual effect over and over again runs the risk of trivializing the effect. Something like a continuous production of items, on the other hand, begs the question, “When will it end?” A while ago I tried to propose the idea of the Yin/Yang model in magic, which Yin is the effect, Yang is conviction in the effect, and both being in a sort of symbiotic continuum in which both contribute to the overall strength of the effect. These sorts of productions seem to be a full embracing of Yin, but if you consider it, it also makes an interesting case for Yang. Rather than taking the approach of eliminating all non-magical explanations for the effect, he’s creating conviction in the effect by virtue of the fact that he can’t stop the effect from happening over and over again.

The modern era, though, has brought with it a greater focus on practicality, and perhaps on brevity as well. Everybody’s got attention deficit disorder, and brevity, once merely the soul of wit, has practically become one of the seven cardinal virtues. Be honest, how easy was it to set aside the time necessary to give full appreciation to the effects above? I won’t pretend it was easy for me. And when I think about what it is that magic has lost in many prominent modern magicians not fully embracing the effect the way Cardini et al did, I’m just as disappointed in myself.

Perhaps there is something to be gained in dialing it down. The emphasis on clarity can allow the magician to put more power into each iteration of the effect, including lifting it beyond the visceral and into the metaphorical. Consider Jeff McBride’s version of the Miser’s Dream.

 
Jeff McBride’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice

McBride’s talked at great length about where it is he wanted to go with the Miser’s Dream plot, about making it a sort of mini Campbellian Hero’s Journey for the kid, who is symbolically brought into a larger world through the guidance of a magic mentor. Personal taste aside, would it be possible to fulfill this artistic goal this amidst all the confusion and overkill of Al Flosso’s approach? Probably not. Are there people out there who would prefer Jeff McBride’s version over Flosso’s? Probably. The sad thing to me, though, is that these days it feels like magic is going towards a sort of homogenization, and that as magicians lean towards routine constructions that are economical in nature out of practicality, we risk losing a great deal. Gone are the days of magicians handing out dozens of rings for inspection in the audience and linking them all together. After all, who needs all that fuss when three rings, or even just two, suffice?

Maybe magic needs it…?