May 14, 2008
Crank up the volume for this tryptich:
Harold Lloyd Vs. Groove Armada
Buster Keaton Vs. Air
Charlie Chaplin Vs. James Unk
May 2, 2008
When I was younger, my mother had a lover. He was kind to me, and taught me the meaning of many things. He just didn’t stick around very long. He did give me an appreciation for chess, and he never let me win. He made me work at it.
He took working class jobs and kept a low profile. He’d served in Vietnam and wasn’t very happy about it. He would disappear for weeks without telling us anything. He taught us to wake him up in the morning only by tugging his toe. Toes, are for friends; anything else is hostile.
He believed corporations had adopted an adversarial position towards humanity. Even though they had “neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn.”
He taught me the definition of manhood and integrity, by doing what must be done.
You see, he was a construction worker during this period, and he found some concrete blocks that were unfit to be used in a foundation. He informed the foreman, who tried to brush it under the table. He waited a few days, and then the foreman told him to add the blocks back into the stack to be used in the foundation. So he waited till everyone was on lunch-break, and gathered the faulty blocks together.
He then took a sledgehammer to them.
He lost that job. He was poor for weeks. No one ever thanked him, he went entirely unrewarded.
That’s integrity.
Not some slides and a presentation, not a buzzword in corporate culture, not hollow words.
, originally uploaded by DaveSinclair.
April 3, 2008
Today I learned a great phrase in magic: ‘Liason Tricks’.
When you want to go from performing magic with cards, to performing with silks, or coins; a liason trick. It would typically be something like showing the box of cards empty and then producing the silks you will be using in your next effect from it. Perhaps instead you might lay your cards on the table one by one, and hope when you lifted them up, there will be coins beneath them.
Sometimes weird just happens.
Usually, though, you rely on weird people like us to make it happen for you.
Today the magic is inside, it is studious, and private. I’ll share again in the future, but for now, I don’t feel inclined to reveal my skills. I’m trying to find a good liason trick in my library, and I don’t really want to be disturbed.
Come back later, when I’m done reading.
March 28, 2008
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A magician.”
“You can’t do both.”
This week I have been mostly teaching my boss how to spell Machiavelli…
Pretty precocious for a 32 year old aren’t I?
In such trying times, I remember all the fantastic things in my life. I do this using mnemonics to summon up whole six month periods, and replay them in my mind.
My current favourite is ‘the raccoons in the chandeliers’. Let me explain.
Once upon a time I had never heard of magic. I walked into a mall with my mother and she took me to a tiny corner stall made of wood and brass. It was the first magic shop I had ever been in. The man behind the counter was tall, funny, and mid-western. He sold me a rocky-the-raccoon, which is a kind of puppet that can be animated.
He was a master of this routine, and very funny. You could find it on youtube if you looked. I bought one other thing from that magic shop, and I am still learning how to use it properly 20 or so years later.
In the intervening period, I grew a little older. Then I realised I still wanted to be a magician and quit it cold turkey. There’s no time like the present they say…
I practiced and got better, which is how I ended up attending one of these thrilling performances. I was with someone (I won’t say who), and misbehaving (I won’t say how). Those who need to know already do, and the rest of you are just snooping busybodies.
Shortly there-after I returned to the town of my alma-mater, Antioch. I wanted a walk down memory lane while the college was closed. Once there I called up a famous magician I had always wanted to meet.
Dave Williamson. Look him up. I had to.
I had an introduction from my kindly mentor, and nervously inquired after Mr. Williamson. He was good enough to meet me in the local coffee-shop and spend his valuable time sharing history and technique. We passed a pleasant hour or so and it suddenly dawned on me that he must be the one who had sold me Rocky. I asked him about it, and he confirmed he had built that very same stall with his bare hands.
He said to me:
“I emphasize what isn’t important, and de-emphasize what is important. Kinda like what you do, huh?”
Truer words may have never been spoken…
March 12, 2008
“..make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant.”
March 10, 2008
Charles Stratton transcends. He became so famous you don’t even know his name, but you will recognise it when you hear it. Two people inspired him to do it: PT Barnum, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson. He looked up to Phineas literally, but he looked up to Sir Jeffrey as if from earth to those unreachable stars; across eternity.
“Sir Jeffrey was born in England in 1619.”
At eighteen inches tall he was thirty years of age.
His exploits were legendary:
He was baked cold into a pie by the Duke of Buckingham to jump out and surprise Queen Henrietta. He served as Captain of the Horse Charle’s the First’s court. He was captured by Dutch privateers on a journey to France, but was released.
He fought a turkey and almost died before being saved from its claws. He nearly drowned in a wash basin, but was rescued by someone over eight feet tall. Presumably to give us such a strange scene to imagine. He once challenged a full sized man to a duel, and demanded to be taken seriously. The villain arrived with water pistols. Infuriated, our eighteen inch hero challenged him again and demanded again to be taken seriously. They fought with pistols on horseback, Sir Jeffrey killing him outright.
Imprisoned for murder, he was pardoned by the Queen of England and become her most valiant defender. He was captured by Turks, and sold into slavery. He was ransomed, and returned to England. Suddenly he grew to three feet nine inches.
He lived happily on a pension until he was implicated in a Popish plot, and jailed where he died at 63. Most of all, he served as an inspiration to this mysterious Charles Sutton.
Charles was to become Tom Thumb, or in his full title: General Tom Thumb. He was of course named after the earlier character from literature and folklore, but he walked the earth as you or I. His adventures are even more beguiling, but I know you will pursue them on your own…
February 29, 2008
“In the summer of 1824, two retired business men, Lozier and John DeVoe, having nothing better to do, announced to friends that they had been hired to saw off Manhattan Island and turn it around.
The preposterous project might have been laughed out of existence had not Lozier, speaking with the authority of considerable wealth, convinced laborers, contractors, tradesman that he had the support of Mayor Stephen Allen. According to Lozier, he and the Mayor had agreed that Manhattan Island was beginning to sag on the Battery or southern end, because of the weight of new business buildings. The situation was dangerous. They decided to saw off the Island at Knightsbridge, or northern end, the float it down past Ellis Island, turn it around, bring it back, and moor it in a more sensible position.
DeVoe appeared with an impressive ledger and began signing on workmen and awarding contracts. During the next eight weeks the pixy pair located a quantity of mammoth saws one hundred feet long with teeth three feet deep, hired three hundred laborers to do the sawing, then found two dozen oars two hundred and fifty feet long, and hired two thousand men to row the Island across the bay. Giant anchors were available to keep the Island firm in the event of a storm. When the carpentry was to begin on the appointed date, nearly a thousand persons, with tools, assembled at Bowery and Spring streets-almost everyone was present except Lozier and DeVoe, who had left town. it would be a long while before they would return or the laughter subside. Manhattan Island remained sagging but intact.”
I have had business cards printed. It took ages to settle on a tagline, but I opted for:
magician raconteur showman
with a nice little quote by Oscar Wilde on the back. It was the last word that was subject to such indecision (isn’t it always). I took my inspiration (and the above quotation) from The Fabulous Showman: the life and times of P. T. Barnum. We need more show-people, don’t we?
A couple posts ago, I commented about my day job (although it is now deleted). I have decided not to do that again. I might start another blog on software security, and matters that concern the corporate world, but I’d like this one to remain the labour of love that it is. It should continue to be filled with history, magic, delights discovered deep in text, and other strange events or hoaxes.
Perhaps I’ll even dream up a hoax for this site, see if you can spot it in the future…
February 17, 2008
I left the flat at the time the note said. Immediately out of the front door I found a chalk arrow, and started following them across the city. Who knew where they’d lead besides the one who drew them.
It turns out, they led to Walden. Or at least an hour long performance based on Walden.
It was one of the sweetest, kindest acts. The kind of sweetness that lingers longer.
Since I found the play early, I had to spend some time waiting. I popped into the bar next door and ordered two letters. G and T. The woman at the bar has never met me, but flirted like we were old and wicked friends.
“Lime or lemon, or are you going tae go wild and have both?”
I nodded in affirmation, she smiled in desperation; the lager dragons drowning her out against their football songs. She gave me change, and I thought about how lucky I was. I left and went to see the play I didn’t pay to see.
“Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
January 13, 2008
n.
A situation in a chess game in which a player is forced to make an undesirable or disadvantageous move.
I am forced into just such a position at work. The details are unimportant. The basic effect is that it’s my move. I don’t want to move, all the options look bad from here.
Being here on the farm as I am, I sense the counsel of the amish, the peace of hard work. There’s not much politics tolerated when you’re stacking hay bales. You muck in, or you get out.
I like to “disagree without being disagreeable”. I am sometimes alone in this, and yet I persevere.
When I am in just such a dark moment, an evening of insomnia, when ‘the whatifs have crawled inside my ear’ I conjure up some cinema to put the creases back into my attire. After all, my “tie is crooked”.
One of those quirky strips of silver nitrate and celluloid with snappy dialogue. One of the greats, one of the light-hearted lovelies, one of the gems.
Constance Bennet in ‘Topper’, Dorothy Malone in ‘The Big Sleep’, Jane Fonda in Sunday in New York, or Rebecca Pidgeon in The Spanish Prisoner (and yes, I hope Rebecca reads this and knows she was that good). Ladies with loose tongues, whip-cracking come-backs, and the faces to get away with using them. Where a flash of flesh isn’t half as pretty as a turn of phrase, and the flesh isn’t so weak either.
Don’t mistake me, I like the real world and real people as much…but we all need to solve the crime and right the world, we all need to triumph over conniving con-men, we all need someone to rescue us, a guardian angel with a naughty streak. Someone to tousle our hair, and quench our thirst for that perfect glass of bubbles.
“That’s your situation, and the box it came in.”
“If I were you, I would kiss me.”
January 10, 2008
My grandmother spoke these words today at a book-group, and I couldn’t help thinking a little too deeply about it. How many people does it take to make a circle?
It’s like a sort of Zen koan to me…
Which probably saved me from saying too much. I do so dearly love to talk, and though it is so often about myself, you must forgive me for I know no-one else as well. It is not so much that I like the sound of my own voice, but rather than I like it better than anyone else’s.
Seriously, it can be so serious here.
With the primaries all agape, and the pundits wittering on about candidates and their experience, all that old ‘red emma’ wisdom comes flooding back.
“There’s just no government like no government.”
People ask me who I vote for back in Britain and I make things up. I tell them I voted for a dog that did card tricks and a pig that tells the time…
…and I’ll vote the same in my American postal ballot this November. We all laugh like I’m kidding and I have safely dodged the questions.
On a more humorous note the American people are concerned about the health care system. Both red and blue parties alike (Is that why they call it a primary? Will yellow be the next party?). It is strange, and I have waited years for such a discussion. I say humorous above because there is no system! You go to company and agree to pay them so that they will pay another company when you get ill. This is known as ‘the best healthcare system in the world’.
Don’t misunderstand me. It is possible to get world class healthcare in America….but where is the ’system’?
Does a number of competing companies equal a system?
I want to point out a few important points on this subject:
In Britain where we do have socialised medicine, you can still go private.
You should judge a society by how well it treats its most vulnerable people.
America is widely mocked in the rest of the industrialised world for not providing a system of healthcare for its people.
Some things should just not be profited upon. People’s lives is one of those things.
If socialism is so inefficient and so un-American, why does the American military pay for food, shelter, education, clothing, and healthcare of its troops?
That of course is a slightly larger American koan…
I’m going to make a circle with one of the great Americans, Thoreau. Oh you haven’t read his stuff? Despite having the best education system in the world? Well, you’ll just have to take my word for it then…
“I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty.”
I need only enough people to make a circle, and not one more…
January 1, 2008
“There were games that everyone played; and when there was music everyone sang.”
I have snow in my beard and self-reliance in my heart. Emerson and Twain seem as right as rain when you’re in an Ohio blizzard. To tell it; and tell it well….no help from the others.
“
“Peter Rugg!” said I; “and who is Peter Rugg?”
“That” said the stranger, “is more than anyone can tell exactly.”
“
The snow has come. It makes me like the word ‘ilk’. It is more than a metaphor you know…
A cold blanket of silence. A pause.
A moment to question why.
These ‘whys’ are mine, and I won’t share them here, that is not the point of this narrative. The point of this is meditative, and returns to one of my previous subjects. The art of deception. In short, why lie? Can deception equal art? Aesthetics often retreats to intent for justification, and if we illusionists follow that same reasoning…well…let’s wait a paragraph or two…
I knock about my grandparents house and hunt down books. Not so very different from what I do at home, but different enough that I have the time to do it properly. I have time to wander in these leaves and leave other thoughts to fall. I find funny little things, odd pieces, and words I fly away with.
So here are the excerpts you crave, unless it’s your first time here. Believe me, you’ll know if you fit in soon enough…and for the rest of you, just a little something I dug up, something that exhibits the intent, and perhaps justifies what we usually ignore:
”An authentic liar knows what he is lying about, knows that his listeners-unless they are tenderfeet, greenhorns-know also, and hence makes no pretense of fooling either himself or them. At his best he is as grave as a historian of the Roman Empire; yet what he is after is neither credulity nor the establishment of truth. He does not take himself too seriously, but he does regard himself as an artist and yearns for recognition of his art. He may lie with satiric intent; he may lie merely to make the time pass pleasantly; he may lie in order to take the wind out of some egotistic fellow of his own tribe or take in some greener; again, without any purpose at all and directed only by his ebulliant and companion-loving nature, he may “stretch the blanket” merely because, like the redoubtable Tom Ochiltree, he had “rather lie on credit than tell the truth for cash.” His generous nature revolts at the monotonoy of everyday facts and overflows with the desire to make his company joyful.”
That captures the spirit doesn’t it? The heart of what we do? I kept wandering through this book after finding that, it contains tall-tales, and ghost stories and american folklore. There’s even an essay by Mark Twain on how to tell a story that I know you’ll like. That is; if you ever hunt it down yourself. Some pleasures just can not be found online.
…and so I found a section in it called ‘Proverbs of a People’.
It contains the light and mirth of generations. Cold wisdom and hard lessons. I’ll read it all, and drink tea and watch the snowfall. I’m just another knot in the cord, and the presence of all these books is proof enough of that. What would those who came before tell me?
“Can you unscramble eggs?”
“Everyone talks about the weather but no ones does anything about it.”
“Every card in the deck and both of the seven-eleven bones are with you.”
Tonight I’ll read O’Henry, if only because there’s a variation of a card trick and a candy bar named after the author. Now that’s a compliment…
December 12, 2007
the omnipotence of an unjust fate and the transitory nature of beauty and happiness
Posted by lucksmith under books1 Comment
I am unashamedly reading Cavafy.
…and so, I do not wish to say…
…anything.
November 22, 2007
I have embarked on a personal journey, one fraught with peril, but one with rewarding moments of insight into my own character. I grew up with out a father, and I have never known if I wanted to find him. I remain, like Smullyan’s Gödel, Forever Undecided.
“Like most men who grew up without a father I collect father-figures.”
I have a scarecrow father; a patch-work dad stitched together from films and books, mother’s lovers, and family friends. It includes a dizzying array of professions, and professes to be a bewildering gender-confused, multi-racial, class-less, uncouth, highly educated, myriad of nationalities, sometimes younger than myself.
What did you expect?
Fatherlessness is complexity and comfort in the mystery.
I have snippets of my grandfather, Oscar Wilde, Garrison Keillor, Samuel Beckett, Robert Houdin, Emma Goldman, Jeremy Carter, Lawrence Fishburne, Gordon Bruce, Dustin Hoffman, Roy Walton, David Mamet, Stevie Wonder, Mark Twain, Charlie 2na, Dorothy Parker, Howard Zinn, Italo Calvino, Hardy and Littlewood, Whoopi Goldberg, Brian Blessed, Umberto Eco, Bernardo Bertolucci, Herman Hesse, John Irving, Nina Simone, my mother, and of course the moments I took care of myself.
Imagine. Every time I buy a pocket knife, which is something I imagine a father should do for a son, I am accompanied by an invisible person. It is made of scraps of paper, bits of old film stock, sound-bites, sweaters, socks, pipes, euphemisms, aphorisms, speeches and drunken memories. It must be difficult to exist like that, and I am attempting to let him go.
“His will never became my law.”
This is a quote from Nietzsche. I can’t remember where it is from, but it touched me one day. It reminded me I was free to build my own opinions of the world and come to my own conclusions because I had no towering masculinity on the hill behind me. There was no castle (not even Kafka’s) in the wilderness of my youth. No idealogical limits, nothing undiscussable. That produces a certain kind of person, someone of my kind.
And so the quest.
I am watching all the films of fatherlessness I can find. Last night the selection was Central Station, about a Brazilian boy on a quest to find his father. His sidekick is an old ex-teacher, a little world-weary, and a little lost. She finds her way again by accompanying him on his journey, and he finds…well, I guess I better leave it at that.
There are others too, and that comforts me.
them again, originally uploaded by lardus.
November 15, 2007
Don’t be afraid to be touched by the moment, and don’t be afraid of touching it either.
Our own hands give us a sense of touch. Yet it takes our mind to comprehend all the meanings of the word available in English. I will not explore the completist attempts of the OED here, but a brief overview should suffice.
Hands reach out to our minds with sensations so diverse we cannot hold them all or count them on our fingers (no, not even in binary). There are temperatures and textures, pain and proprioception, viscosity and velocity. We understand pressure, and intuit stretching, and comprehend constriction. More interestingly we use our sense of touch as a metaphor for other things: my options were constricted, the pressure of the situation was mounting; I had over-stretched the metaphor.
Someone once said to me they love water because ‘it touches me all over at once. What else does that’?
Honey; I thought. Although it is more difficult to wash off.
Wouldn’t that be just like me?
“Between skin and skin there is only light.”
That’s why touch is so important. It shuts my mind up. The voice of reason is muffled by hands caressing. Touch is the most common cause of any frisson I experience, and I experience a bountiful plenty.
For example, I have recently discovered I like textures more than colour patterns in my dress shirts. It is good to enjoy such splendidly little things.
I sometimes hold my hands in my lap ‘the wrong way’ because I like the way it feels. I guess I am secretly left-handed (which is actually true in a sense). I seem to be left handed with cards, though I am not in the average white day.
I confess I like toying with cards because of the sensations of cards falling off my thumbs or transforming from a solid deck into a ribbon spread of cards across a table cloth (textured of course) is more interesting than half the conversations I endure. I admit I do not suffer fools gladly. Ask my boss.
If in a more formal environment you will probably find me rubbing the table cloth with my hands palm down. Or twisting a wine glass between my finger tips (why don’t they ever keep it full?). It is in these moments that I think lucidly, when a sudden ceasing of the draft on my skin, or a pregnant silence, gives me an instant of nothingness before exhaling…
, originally uploaded by the sapient pig.
…and I like people who touch; linking arms with friends while walking, a pat on the back after a good joke, hugs lingering slightly. I distrust people who flinch when you touch them, although I too, flinch when a stranger’s leg touches mine under the table. As if somehow they might not have noticed as quickly as I, as if I can save us both from embarrasment by being the first to react.
Touch someone or something, as soon as you can after reading this….and I do mean that in all of the 33 ways defined above…because that is what makes touching these lettered keys such a pleasure…knowing that I might just have touched you…for a moment…
October 28, 2007
“…and then the mysteries began…”
Posted by lucksmith under books, credits, friends, magic history, referencesNo Comments
Brown paper packages and a customs manifest. Christmas on Saturday morning.All the packages contain significant books:
Magic of the World, John Mulholland, 1965 no dustjacket
Breslaw’s Last Legacy (Reprint of 1811), LE number 172 of 560
The Expositor, or many mysteries unraveled (Reprint of 1805) LE number 415 of 1000
but one package in particular contained four booklets. Softback, two pamphlets, two softcover bindings. The smell of dry paper.
These four things bear boring titles:
The Paul Fleming Book Reviews Volumes I & II
How’s Your Library?
Cues for Collectors
Essentially, bookporn doesn’t need to be judged by its cover.
‘How’s your library?’ for example contains a number of pages illustrating what famous magicians’ bookplates look like. Thus if you are to find one in a secondhand bookshop, that has a bookplate, you may be resonably confident of recognising it.
Cues for Collectors contains such enticing chapters as:
* ‘Odd and Unusual Books’
* Mythical Magic Books
* The Cheaters
* The Scarce and Rare
* Thomas Johnson’s Dainty Conceits
Here is an excerpt of Mythical Magic Books for your delectation:
“William Fennor, a pamphleteer, poet and entertainer, published in 1617 a book titled The Counter’s Commonwealth. Actually the book was completed in October 1616. It took the form of a dialogue between the author and another inmate of a counter (i.e., a debtor’s prison - Fennor was actually in one when he wrote the book). In chapter 2 he says “Why sir,” said I “there is a book called Greene’s Ghost Haunts Coney Catchers, another called Legerdemain, and The Black Dog of Newgate(etc.).” The only seventeenth century conjuring book known to have been published prior to this time was Sa. Rid’s The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, London 1612 and 1614.”
Essentially, two of these books can be identified if allowances are made for mistakes in titles (hauning instead of haunts), and predate Fennor’s book. The third however has not turned up in over 400 years. A ghost among rare books.
Some of the mysteries encountered are fresher and ephemeral:
A sixties era photograph containing 26 men was tucked into one of the booklets. They are smiling, some standing, some seated. A cursive hand on the back reads:
“To Steve Chaiko
The last meeting of the New Haven Magic Society
P&F Studio 1968
Russ Dowden”
Why would a magic society have a last meeting? What would bring them to smile into to the camera before vanishing forever?
The yellow springs themselves, originally uploaded by Benimoto.
October 13, 2007
Love, however fleeting; is worth it.
Mystery is energy.
A tale twice told, will live to be twice as old.
Things tend towards existence.
Manifest dreams into reality with words and time.
Memories can be cruel both in what remains and what fades: craft the now dilligently.
One piece of strange in the head is worth two in the hand.
You are a war of ideas, be ashamed of being an innocent bystander in this.
Consider otherness, and alleviate it.
Give people something for nothing, they’ll pay your bills with it.
September 28, 2007
9♦ - The Scorn/Curse of Scotland
Q♠ - The bedpost Queen/Tracy/The only Queen holding cards
6♠ - Tracy’s card
4♣ - The devil’s bedposts
9♣ - The Curse of Wales is my Triumph
A♠ - The bullet card
J♦ - The laughing boy
3♦ - Hannah’s card
K ♥ - Shaving (The only King without a moustache)
3♣ - Edinburgh-Hull Express
K♦ - The King of the blind (The one-eyed King)
Q♥ - The Whyte queen
3♥ - Barroom mind-reading
4♥ - Us
And a number of other cards waiting for you to attach a memory to them….
Riddles from easy to hard…
Who are the suicide Kings?
Who are the one eyed-Jacks?
Have you ever noticed all the Jacks are blonde?
How did Jokers get their name?
Why is the deck called a soldiers diary or prayer book?
Why are there not the same number of even and odd cards in the deck?
What are the odds of dealing a bridge hand from a shuffled deck and finding every hand contains only one suit in ascending order?
Has this ever happened in the life of the known universe?
Why can the stained glass windows/paint cards change colour? (My straight tip to the studious magician visitors)
September 23, 2007
C’est un livre idéal pour une jeune fille.
Posted by lucksmith under First-Nations, Native-American, art, magic history[2] Comments
“American conjurers were at their best in the open air under the night sky. When tom-toms beat and campfires cast flickering shadows, their strange feats were as awe inspiring to fellow tribesmen as the occasional flashes of lightning that streaked across the sky.”
According to Milbourne Christopher the earliest known European reference to native American or First Nations magic appears in the chronicles of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. These record Cortez’s gold hungry expeditions in Honduras, 1524.
Escapology seems to be a strongly represented form of magic in these communites, the ability to escape often expounded as proof of the assistance of spirits. Jonathon Carver studied the Cree in Canada from 1766 to 1768. He records witnessing an extraordinary escape too ordinary to merit mention here.
“American magicians of that same era used sleight of hand to change the colour of balls or cards. How much more effective to conjure with feathers and snow!”
The Role of Conjuring in Saulteux Society by Dr. A. Irving Hallowell discusses the construction and use of conjuring lodges. Often a medicine man would be tied and bound by a challenger and left alone in the lodge. These lodges would then begin to shake violently, and moans or wails could be heard emanating within. The medicine man would then appear untied at the door, or be found in inside still tightly bound. Occasionally they would be found to have vanished entirely, or perhaps have been replaced by a bushel of corn or box of rifles.
I regret that I do not thus far count among my coorespondances either a Native American magician or historian. I suspect there are books and studies written by tribe members themselves, and I await someone more knowledgable than myself to make me aware of them.
Until then we must settle for a theatrical ending of this post, where I lose my head, and provide you with a description of a decapitation. This is but one star in a vast constellation of decapitations throughout the history of mysteries, but it is fitting in that it takes place under the open sky.
“The ceremony was staged at night by the light of a campfire. The conjurers of the Kwakiutl tribe on Vancouver Island placed their victim face-down flat on the ground. When the executioner raised his knife for the cutting stroke, assistants scurried forward to kneel and shield the horrible sight from sensitive eyes. Down flashed the blade. The men moved aside; the head was several inches from the body. It was lifted by the swordsman and held high to be seen by all who dared to look. After the head was put on the ground close to the neck, the assistants converged again and joined the chant that would make the victim whole.”
September 19, 2007
The words come slow and they take effort. Everything I have ever read, anything that inspired me, has abandoned me in front of this blank page. Expression walks more heavily laden tonight.
Jokes are laboured, love is wilting. At least in this fiction of a moment of contemplation, these things appear to be so. I have every reason to be inspired, but not enough time to transform the inspiration. I am merely aspirational. I am fat with time, I try to savour it, but it runs down my face, and stains my body. Wrinkles, grey hair, stretch marks.
I am not living on even terms with time. Emerson would scold me, and produce a metaphor from nature. He would probably succeed in transforming my soul into a placid, frosty panorama.
I meant to write about synchronicity, secret bookish pleasures, and about decadence. I couldn’t synthesize them here. These things need no synthesis in my heart. They are not fissiparous elements of my life, they only don their armour and seize their weapons on this page. They divide from their brethren as soon as the arena presents itself.
My hands are sore from practice, but my mind is tender without reason. Forgive me, as I must forgive myself.
twelve apostles 8, originally uploaded by the sapient pig.
August 27, 2007
I saw an old acquaintance through the crowd last night. It was dark, and the room was noisy, but there was no mistaking the figure smiling back.
We shook hands and hugged, and a speakeasy is a great place to renew friendships. To get in I had to speak to Bernie on the door. Nice guy, great suit. When we found him outside, he was being harassed by a young blonde thing. She was offering him sexual favours to get into the joint. I wish I was making this up. He turned to me and said “I’d accept sexual favours off this guy, I’m just afraid he’d be too good.”
He was adept at giving the brush-off, but she wasn’t adept at getting it. If you ever get this treatment, never stay and try to ‘fix it’. It’ll never work. When people blow you off, leave quietly.
Luckily, on this occasion, I had the honour of playing the rescuer in his tedious conversation. “Round the back, up the ramp, knock loud, the password is ‘Here’s to you mister Roosevelt’”
Once inside, I ordered a cup of tea. Oh fear not dear reader, I am still on the sauce…the Bosco theatre punch is served in a teacup, but is far from tee-total. It is wicked stuff, for decadent people.
There he was. Frodo, one of a handful of memorable performers I’ve seen in the last few years. He had a broad smile on his chops, and a cup of tea already in hand. We sat outside, and the ladies joined us. We drank and smoked and laughed. I had the venerable pleasure of performing a little something for him with a deck of cards. He being the knowledgable chap he is probably knew the reference, but was polite enough to call it very good. On top of being my favourite posture-master, he is the son of a magician, and a magician in his own right. We shared some very specific references on the major arcana of shuffling cards. It’s the details I have respect for…
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
I think not.
Or at least, that’s what I try to do when drinking punch from tea-cups…
August 22, 2007
Words, he suggested, are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.”
August 15, 2007
I’m overflowing. Spilling. Splashing. Dripping.
My cup runneth over.
It is important to remember how I got here; hard graft. And to remember why…
I wanted to become a magician, because I wanted to see more magic. I wanted to be good enough to sit at the table. Perhaps, with cards anyway, I am. More importantly though, I am exposed to such beautiful performances. My magic is good enough to get me through the door, a seat at the table, a close up view.
Your art is the same. Whatever it may be.
Start slowly. Be bad.
That is where most people fail. They hate to be bad and expect that they can be good instantly. They sell expensive guitars years later with the thought ‘I just wasn’t very good’.
Forgive yourself. Keep being bad every week.
Meet others, and talk about what is meaningful in your art or theirs. Share, and try to be the worst artist in the room. By this I mean: little fish big pond is better.
You’ll get better. Don’t stop. Show less people maybe, but never stop.
Consider the rejection a magician gets. The disappointment on a child’s face when they see how you hid the coin is timelessly brutal. Your own criticism is permanently echoing in your mind.
Just don’t stop. Don’t stop until you have a seat at the table.
Find the others. One day they will bring you a cup.
Persevere.
A friend in art will fill your cup.
Brimming meniscus, shining glass.
Until it runs over, until it is overflowing.
August 12, 2007
Humans; non & post. Thanks for reading this, if you did.
You may have noticed the interval since I last tapped the keys. I am otherwise engaged. I am entangled, I am involved. I try not to ignore you kind reader, but it is circus Hogmanay, vaudeville shuttle launch, freakshow Purim, burlesque Divali, musichall moonlanding, cabaret carnivale!
For those of you not lucky enough to be with me here, this month, it is ‘The Festival’. Edinburgh seethes with people chasing culture, hunting horror, seeking showmanship and story. I indulge deeply in a rare art at this time of year…
Namely, living like a god in the Festival.
Though we are not at the third way mark I have already seen zombie boys kissing, fallen in love with a button, born witness to Columbine, been mocked by Boswell for my course of study at our shared alma mater, seen a band perform in a box, listened to a backwards song, fallen out of love with a button because a zipper came along, mocked a mime side by side with a balloon animal maker, discussed how a man makes love to a mermaid, sang along to Graham Parsons songs with ‘the Crips’, dumped the zipper to get back with the button, sworn at children in languages they don’t understand, realised I fancy both buttons and zippers and that I shouldn’t have to choose, and of course tried to entertain jaded people with a nothing but a humble deck of cards.
“You can’t offend me, I have two cocks.”
This guy. He said this to us as he opened his show. It was less than a full house. His performance showed the mettle of a real performer. He would play to the crowd if it were only scarecrows. He would entertain them with zeal and fervour no diminished by the ticket sales. I respect that.
There are many shows that deserve your time, but this week, see this one…before such an art becomes rarer. Do it for art, do it for self-emancipation, do it for Johnny Eck, do it for Mathew Buchinger, do it for Vonetta, do it for yourself.
To kindness and to courage; to solidarity!
originally uploaded by DaveSinclair.
July 21, 2007
When the drawing closed of a perfect circle is accomplished, many people will insist they have been cheated. Why should they pay for something that is completed in an instant? How can you charge so much for the ephemeral experience? Surely something so easy cannot be worth earthly remuneration?
More importantly, why do we need someone who can draw a perfect circle, and why do we dismiss them so readily when they show that encirclings can be effortless?
The genisis of these thoughts is here.
The word juggler, used to refer equally to magicians, equilibrists, and posture masters. The constellation of ‘allied arts’ fell under this one name. Today we tolerate specialisation, and accept that someone may be highly trained in one art, and uninformed on another. Each star is given its own name, and the map of their relationships sinks away. The night that suspends them begins to seem meaningless.
That is why we need someone to draw us perfect circles.
To show us that we could draw too, if only we had spent our time instead of our money.
“Classique = Moderne”
Kris Kremo
July 12, 2007
“Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal.”
Posted by lucksmith under circus, magic[2] Comments
Magicians lie less often than you might think. We tend to let you think for yourself, it works better that way. When and if we do lie, it is with our hands, and bodies, and less often our mouths.
…and we have artisitic crisis too. Do we lie here, or here? Which one casts light on a truth of humanity? Does the first make us laugh, will the second inspire awe and wonder?
“Tell the truth but tell it slant.”
I spent some time in Melbourne with the history of Australian circus. Family lines and oral tradition dating back 170 years. People who show you what a life devoted to something is capable of.
Many of these people live out their autumn years in obscurity. They don’t want fame, a rare quality in these trying times. They know what they accomplished and that is enough. They leapt from galloping horses, they danced with tigers, they performed dental trapeze.
They traveled, and know the best roadside cafes. Their children played in the open air, and they later married into other families. Hard, smiling faces. Calloused, strong hands.
I’m sure I saw Fanny Espinosa leaving the exhibition with a delighted smile on her face. I recognised you, even if no one else did…and I wouldn’t have it any other way…
July 8, 2007
If you were Lee Miller.
If I were Goethe.
If we met over beer in Melbourne…
I would say:
‘Photography makes architecture of the moment.’
You would be indestructible, still, and probably say nothing.
July 2, 2007
There is this romantic notion of a magician taking secrets to the grave. The reality is that every magician takes knowledge with them when they go. They have learned details and perfected the timing of lines, that no one else can share.
For those of you who do not know, the death of a magician involves a breaking of the wand ceremony. I have only just arrived in Australia, sleep deprived, bewildered, and learned of the death of a friend. It does not come unexpected, it has been a long time coming. The breaking of the wand in this case may be only symbolic, but no less genuine. We card guys tend to be less formal…
We did our best to capture as much of his knowledge as he had time to share, before he went. He left so much behind, and I will not learn all of it.
The people chatting next to me couldn’t possibly understand this moment; despite being a family of sorts. He told me to stop performing magic when I wasn’t having fun. There is probably only one way to express myself tonight:
“Jacks are wild.”
I will also console myself with the knowledge I did not just put flowers on a grave, but took the opportunity to see the man himself when I did.
June 27, 2007
“In New York, as in China, (Ching Ling Foo) offered a challenge to rival wizards. If anyone could duplicate his bowl production, it was announced, Ching would pay $1000 for the pleasure of seeing it. William Ellsworth Robinson, “The Man of Mystery,” a New Yorker who had been with Kellar, Hermann and other masters, accepted the offer, but learned it was just a publicity stunt.
Furious Robinson built a complete act along the lines of Ching Ling Foo’s production and took it to Paris, where he masqueraded as a genuine Chinese. Later in London, as Chung Ling Soo, he was a sensation.
Ching Ling Foo went on from the United States to play continental theaters, then returned to China. In January, 1905 Ching was performing at the Empire Theatre in London while Chung conjured at the Hippodrome. Ching challenged Chung to a battle of magic. Chung arrived for the test, but Ching didn’t. Ching said that unless Chung would prove he was a real Chinese, he wouldn’t meet him. There the matter ended.”
June 23, 2007
My anarchic archivist has astounded me again.
Posted by lucksmith under archiving, security[2] Comments
reCAPTCHA. How can one thing so elegantly combine my interest in security and archiving/digitising?
Here’s how:
You know that little thing you have to do to use websites. That prints wobbly words, and then makes you type them in. To make sure you are not a bot?
Imagine for one moment that every time you did that, part of an old text was digitised. Imagine that WHILE performing a computer security task you were altruisticly helping a computer dissambiguate some information, so that other people in the future could read a text online that they previously had no access to.
Now read this.
June 22, 2007
“I’m a drunken-hearted man.”
I had an ear infection for a month and a half. That meant no music. It drove me a little crazy.
Now there’s a whole audio-verse awaiting my exploration. All my old songs sound new. I’m an explorer in my tinny virtual collection of hip-hop, punk, blues, jazz, and trip-hop. A friend who introduces me to obscure indy-pop, softens the tones. He introduces levity, and haunting a-melodic expanses.
I can now again get lost while coding at work. The mind can drift and work still gets done.
Tonight I will run with the crowd. I will enjoy the friends I have slowly found over the years. Tonight I remember why I am so intense, and why I put so much effort in.
Life exhales what life you breathe into it.
June 19, 2007
Self-emancipation and the art of astonishment
Posted by lucksmith under art, magic, self-emancipationNo Comments
Today is not my birthday, as by some mystery I just happen to have been born on Juneteenth. Most of you won’t even know what Juneteenth is, or why I might choose to let my birthday play second fiddle to a sense of history. So here is your chance to find out.
Might I also point out, that the celebrations of this day are slightly early. There still exists across this planet not just prejudice, but genuine slavery still to be abolished. We needn’t look only at history and feel smug that we people of the enlightened future are superior.
People can’t even phone each other back, let alone achieve worldwide emancipation.
Self-emancipation is the most repeated phrase in the communist manifesto. If you haven’t read it, you’ll have to take my word for it. Oh, and by the way, Engels inspiration was the slums of Manchester. England. A first world nation.
Paul Harris wrote the ‘Art of Astonishment’. He is a magician who took the magic world by storm in the 70s and now works quietly behind the scenes. When his house burned down, he packed everything into a car and lived life light of heart. Magic can do that. That is ultimately its life-changing power. The ability to whip up a living with nothing but a coin or a pebble or some paper and a pen. That samurai level of preparedness. The zen of studying only to throw away the secrets and ‘make it up as you go along’.
He recently gave away $30,000 to a relative stranger. He did it as an act of self-astonishment. That’s also an act of self-emancipation.
, originally uploaded by DaveSinclair.
June 15, 2007
The dishes are done. The guests are gone. Sleep.
The table is clear, and the sun stretches pale across the stains of last night’s meal. A cup of black coffee, and the smell of shaving cream constitute some form of a morning. The reality of it is reflected in my cup.
My alma mater is closing.
Leafy lanes, and time to think. Small town, direct democracy, lifelong learning. We shook the world. You know we did, and we know who we are.
We became film-makers and writers, alcoholics and visionaries, peace-keepers and translators, lawyers and youth-workers, criminals and strippers, scientists and politicians. We felt the lightness of leaving, the trimmed sails of the last co-op. We left no matter who was left behind. We left little material goods in our wake, but great tides of intensity.
Still do.
We had a tradition of breaking tradition.
The bootcamp for the revolution was never a place anyway….it was a culture.
A Hundred Stretches Hence
1859
From The Vocabulum: or Rogues Lexicon, by G. W. MATSELL, New York.
I
Oh! where will be the culls of the bing
A hundred stretches hence?
The bene morts who sweetly sing,
A hundred stretches hence?
The autum-cacklers, autum-coves,
The jolly blade who wildly roves;
And where the buffer, bruiser, blowen,
And all the cops, and beaks so knowin,
A hundred stretches hence?
II
And where the swag so bleakly pinched
A hundred stretches hence?
The thimbles, slangs, and danglers filched,
A hundred stretches hence?
The chips, the fawneys, chatty-feeders,
The bugs, the boungs, and well-filled readers;
And where the fence, and snoozing ken,
With all the prigs and lushing men,
A hundred stretches hence?
III
Played out they lay, it will be said
A hundred stretches hence;
With shovels they were put to bed
A hundred stretches since!
Some rubbed to wit had napped a winder,
And some were scragged and took a blinder,
Planted the swag and lost to sight,
We’ll bid them one and all good-night,
A hundred stretches hence.
June 6, 2007
One coin remains
Two different sides
Illusion and disorder
-Patrick O’Donnell
June 4, 2007
“Have a glass of champagne, it perks you up.”
“Do go outside and enjoy the garden before the rain comes, won’t you?”
I stepped forth from the crowded hallway and was dazzled by the green and grey brightness of a garden. Not just any garden, but the stately home of the Earl and Countess of Haddington; Mellerstain house.They were holding an exhibition to which I and The Companion had been invited.
The garden stretched forth onto a lawn. The lawn rolled outwards towards a lake, distant and tranquil. Demulcent.
We walked down towards that lake, over the first crest of hill, only to discover a second. This previously obscured rise seemed about two thirds of the way until we arrived at it. Then it appeared we had only traversed half of the walk. The lake lie almost as far away as when we crested the first hill.
How can 2/3 = 1/2?
Illusion. Forced perspective.
Some of you may know I once worked for the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC making props. A story or two can be told about those days, and perhaps in person you might hear them. While so employed, I learned about forced perspective, from a good friend and mentor in that venerable trade: a properties artisan. Clearly, the gardener had been trained in such techniques as well.
This garden had hedges that angled sharply inward at the brow of the hill, and continued until the bow of the valley where they traveled straight on again. They gave one the sensation of distance, a vertiginous panorama, a behind the looking glass moment.
As the horizon was never reachable; I turned back for more champagne.
June 2, 2007
Hands aren’t beautiful on their own. It is in motion that they hold their attraction for me.
My mother, my grandfather, and my grandmother’s hands all splay vividly in my mind. I can see the earth, and the rough hands that work it. I can see them washing in the white china basin before dinner, scrubbing clods of soil from their calluses before chopping fresh vegetables from the garden.
Hands held danger and life-threatening gestures on my way to school as a child. They were used to trace symbols, symbols that would twist and change to describe whole gang histories in the neighbourhoods I grew up in. Interpreting a symbol wrongly would get you a beating, dealt squarely from the same hands.
I recall an early date in those same years where I ended up in a cinema with two girls from the soccer team that practiced next to mine. Both their hands crept across their laps to hold mine, through the film. We played that early teen game of squeeze and response. I got the timings wrong by trying to handle both at once. They figured out what was going on and made me choose between them.
I remember my own bloody and battered hands defending me in later years. I remember cutting myself repeatedly at the knife store I used to work at. It became such a daily accident when demoing kitchen knives I hardly noticed. I revere the hands of a friend who defended us all, removing UXO. In fact, the apendages of any engaged in labours for the safety of future hands.
It is not in their appearance or stillness they move me. It is in motion, it is in manipulation, it is in grasping the moment. Touched by their dexterity, my focus lies shallowly in their palms. They must cup quietly, to keep it.
May 31, 2007
It arrived in the post today. Sharp and flat. My 3-year reader’s ticket to the National Library of Scotland.
The last time I was there I read a century old book on cheating at gambling. It’s better written than most novels. I had a traumatic hangover, but the books and the quiet soothed. I learned a lot, about a lot of things. Things other people don’t want you to learn about. Things I may never whisper to another soul. Not even when my shuffling talks.
“Alliteration is the curse of modern literature.”
And you, do you know why you’re here? Wandering the akashic record with me?
To escape the sequacious and seek your own gems. To read the list of people who last checked this book out and recognise their names. Realising how far they traveled, and the other archives you have crossed paths in, or might have. Knowing you are part of the real world wide web, while the other remains only virtual.
Books never throw a 404 error. They don’t return 0 results.
They wait patiently. Silently.
They blossom with new lessons and words like tatterdemalion. They need only the fertile soil of your mind. The water of your imagination.
“The garden of forking paths”
A fusion of garden and library.
We could meet there you and I, we could smile as we reach for the same book. Even if there’s one hundred years between us. It’s for you I wrote this, and it’s for me you read it. Even if we’ve never met. Even if we never meet.
May 28, 2007
People with skills don’t always reveal them.
“An artist is one with the skill to provide more and the will to refrain.” A lesson I had forgotten.
It takes time. And so I spend time…
…and I try to spend it well.
Time is ice in the hand. You have to be a real, cool, customer.
Sometimes you have a streak of rotten luck. You give away your skills for free. You give them to people who you think deserve your time. Then you never hear from them again. They pass their time, and their judgements, idly.
Its my fault, really. I confuse people’s enthusiasm for a free performance with real, lasting, friendship. I make friends fast. Too fast for some, I suppose. Yet sometimes, I even make fast friends.
I wouldn’t be anyone else, and how could I be. Indeed, how could anyone be anyone else? I’ll waste time with thousands of people, just to find those with skills.
Just to find the others.
Other times, you find you are at home in a place you’ve never been. Your family is sitting round the dinner table, but you’ve never met half of them before. The dinner table is a crate of beer, or a pub table. Dinner is on the house. You know everyone’s street-name, and their real names too. They know they’re in good company, and you sense you’re with ‘good people’. ‘Joe hep’ is nowhere to be found.
That’s when skills get revealed, lasting memories are made, epic moments of beauty and laughter illuminate your life. I had one of those moments this weekend. Though I was little tipsy when it happened, I was there when the ‘curse of wales’ was under the glass. I was there, and it wasn’t in my deck in the morning.
“The art is in concealing art.”
May 20, 2007
“Let us have a toast to drinking champagne without reason”
Posted by lucksmith under art, friends, magic history1 Comment
I started the day participating in the great oral tradition of magic. I found out Cy (Cyril) Endfield was one of us. Rather, I know his work as a card-guy. I never realised he was the same guy who brought you ZULU. We card guys are everywhere.
Suddenly, I was in an exhibition at the Edinburgh printmakers workshop. The one upstairs was called Zoo and featured various prints by diverse artists showing animals. Frogs, owls, cats, rabbits. An invisible hand reached out of one frame and choked me up. It was a striking image, partly because it was the only human face amongst a room full of animals. Partly because it was wood block between photogravure and lithograph. Mostly because of the title: “The understanding that death is final.”
It sat there simple, and iconoclastic. Nestled between the photogravure of silver fish on a fishmarket stall, and a lithograph of a monkey eating a butterfly. Silently screaming.
“Be well, do good work, keep in touch.”
The day progressed, and in good company. Walking, beer, sunny pub. Dinner at a friends, wonder at mathematical principles, knitted graffiti, depth of knowledge of science fiction and music. Sharon looking through old photos of family. Passionate people…and champagne without reason. Or perhaps just ‘the understanding’.
May 15, 2007
I never saw Fred Kaps perform live. Dissapointing but true. That’s the kinda thing that guys like me think. Just in case you ever wondered what guys like me think, let me tell you straight:
I would rather spend sixty glorious seconds with a legend, than a month swilling gin.
And I like gin.
This brings me rapidly to my point. Do you know someone who could be a legend? At least in their own craft, or their own quiet way? Someone studious, diligent, passionate, and devoted?
Then why are you reading this nonsense?
Go and find them and ask them to show you something beautiful. Something mathematical, comedic, scientific, historic, tragic, visual, cinematic, gastronomic, cerebral, ephemeral, eternal, or visceral. Anything that breaks the tedium, and stretches the synapses. Anything, anything at all.
Yesterday I asked a friend whose avocation is vinyl to make a compilation of music for other friends. He’s my genius of the everyday, at least for today. For him, and for you, dear reader, I post fifty one seconds built from a life time of practise. Fifty one seconds of Fred Kaps.
May 13, 2007
I have returned, once again, to the comfort of reading. Mostly poetry and magic. They aren’t so seperate as you might think.
Johann Nepomuk Hofsinzer called cards the poetry of magic, as Ricky Jay so poignantly reminds us in his broadway show. He then goes onto demonstrate this so thoroughly, you are left with no doubt of its veracity.
My magic books are stacked up, waiting, frowning at me. About 6 books have been given me this year alone. I can distinctly recall who gave me each book, and where, and when.
One landed in my hands at a convention. It is OOP and I have wanted a copy for years. Suddenly it was thrust into my hands, while the author was sitting beside me. A planned event by the gift giver; and one I was able to capitalise on immediately by having the author sign it.
Another was given to me last weekend in Portsmouth. Again something I have been interested in for a year or so and semi-rare. The giver demonstrated a number of techniques from the book the night before, while we drank and laughed and shuffled. In the morning while suffering the wrath-of-grapes, it was placed unceremoniously into my lap.
A kindness without reason. A moment unlikely to be forgotten.
Poetry, on the other hand, I buy for myself. I choose it alone and unaided; I read a cheap paper back copy, and then I give it away. I give it to someone who I think needs or deserves it at that time.
I love flipping through those slim volumes on the train, or on a flight.
Little poignant sentence fragments entwining themselves into my heart and veins.
A travel ticket for a bookmark, and a soul at rest.
Jorge Luis Borges, Langston Hughes, William Blake, e e cummings, Rilke, Emerson, Frost, Twain, Pablo Naruda, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams, Phillip Larkin, and notebooks borrowed from friends not-yet-famous. All these and more…
“Every morn and every night”
I like to think that there is a direct link in the poetry I give away, and the magic books given to me. A sort of bookma.
“Every night and every morn”
If you can dig, you find the poetry of the deceivers, the thieves, the children of night and morn. Canting songs.
Here is a favourite, and one that is easier to understand than the slang drunk others I adore.
“The Nutty Blowen
1841
By BON GAULTIER in Taits Edinburgh Magazine.
I
She wore a rouge like roses, the night when first we met,
Her lovely mug was smiling o’er mugs of heavy wet;
Her red lips had the fullness, her voice the husky tone,
That told her drink was of a kind where water is unknown.
I saw her but a moment, yet methinks I see her now,
With the bloom of borrowed flowers upon her cheek and brow.
II
A pair of iron darbies, when next we met, she wore,
The expression of her features was more thoughtful than before;
And, standing by her side, was he who strove with might and main
To soothe her leaving that dear land she ne’er might see again.
I saw her but a moment, yet methinks I see her now,
As she dropped the judge a curtsey, and he made her a bow.
III
And once again I see that brow no idle rouge is there,
The dubsman’s ruthless hand has cropped her once luxurious hair;
She teases hemp in solitude, and there is no one near,
To press her hand within his own, and call for ginger-beer.
I saw her but a moment, yet methinks I see her now,
With the card and heckle in her hand, a-teasing of that tow.”
May 9, 2007
I saw someone graceful and brave this weekend. He dealt out three rows of seven cards and still fooled a roomful of jaded magicians. His friends were a testament to his character, and I was glad to be with them. I wouldn’t have been anywhere else on earth.
As I was in England, I couldn’t help thinking…
“We few. We merry few.”
I, in turn, took my turn. I was not as good as the rest, or as well rested. I made some schoolboy errors, and I felt the awkwardness I haven’t known since childhood.
“The dye is cast The dice are rolled I feel like shit you look like gold.”
I made new friends, and swore with old ones. I drank, and I laughed, and I was in awe of their skills. Their camraderie is odd, but it is never boring. Many people say they don’t want a boring life, but they do not seek these pieces of strange.
On the plane I found a torn piece of newspaper was tucked into my copy of The Expert at the Card Table. It held a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don’t know where it came from and I probably never will, but then, I’m not afraid of not knowing…
“To know even one life breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have suceeded.”
My friend, you have succeeded. Many, many, times over.
May 3, 2007
I recently watched Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket on the advice of a light-fingered friend.
Writing as a magician, he got the character right. He captured the balance between practicing alone in your room, and getting out into the world. The fear of your first attempts in public, the despair of being caught, the transcendance of thinking on your feet, and turning disaster to triumph.
Some of the choreography is breathtaking, and Bresson indulges us with flurries of activity. The payoff of slow pacing and claustrophobic scenes, is multiple thieves working in rhythmn. They dance through the crowds lifting items in unison, and passing them between each other with all the grace of tandem contact jugglers.
It is shot in black and white, it is minimalist, and it is luminous. As the narrator informs us…’this is not a thriller’…indeed not. It is a love story.
It reminded me of the first time I saw Bob Arno, and so I treat you to what may very well be your first look at a master pickpocket. Get a cup of joe, make sure no one will distrub you for 7 minutes, or grab someone to watch and laugh together…
May 2, 2007
A friend runs the Edinburgh Horror Film Festival. I actually don’t see her that often, but I am glad to know that she exists. She is passionate and hard working, and she built this thing from scratch. I respect that.
I have increasingly looked forward the last couple years to the all-nighter, where they sometimes have to pry my embedded fingernails from the seats at dawn. Twelve hours in a cinema hearing your friends’ reactions to the thud of an axe buried in the skull of a religous zealot. Bliss.
This year was no exception, and her commentaries before the films begin (usually berating some idiotic character for opening a door or going into the woods alone at night) always give me a chuckle. This year between the creepy and the spooky, was this short:
My favourite feature length film this year was The Abandoned.
May 1, 2007
Very little on this blog is original material. I am deeply indebted to those who have preceded me, and many of the things you read here were unearthed or preserved by their research or diligence. I would be delighted to discuss credits and references for anything you may read on this site. I like to preserve some mystery, and so I do not post the references explicitly, although quotes do appear when I am using someone else’s words. If you are interested in sources of any of these stories, please post a comment, or e-mail me to discuss their provenance.
April 29, 2007
At eight I knew what I wanted to be for the rest of my life; a polyhistor. My mother said that ‘polyhistor’ was a pretentious word for an eight year-old, but I told her to stop being calumniatory.
Despite such early set-backs, it is a continued pursuit to this day.
At the risk of over indulging a metaphor…
There are only ever spaces between the books, gaps to be filled. No shelf is ever large enough, and you often must give some books away to make space for the newly acquired. A sage friend recently offered to fill the gaps in my collection of a certain subject, no light task. It is such a never-ending quest, like enumerating the decimal expansion of real numbers. Luckily my mother put a stop to that when I was 9.37851 years old.
The gaps in my mathematical knowledge were recently evidenced when friend revealed to me using base i. I had never considered using complex numbers in a base system, and I still haven’t. My hangover put a stop to that. Imagine the pain of I and i, the day after too many cocktails, especially with reggae playing softly in the cafe behind us. The cosmic irony was inescapable.
Holes in the film archive of my heart exist too. I will probably be chasing those for decades. Another ever renewing avocation, devouring of time. I find though, that films slot nicely between the books in the library of my mind. In the weightlessness of this analogy, they make great book-ends. My internal editor is putting a stop to this paragraph right now…
To me, being a ploymath or polyhistor, means giving in to endless fascination. Becoming pursuant of luster in the libraries, indulging in card catalogue adventures. It is not really something you can be, something one can only continually reaspire towards.
This is something my mother, my internal editors, and my hangovers, have never put a stop to…
April 20, 2007
Tryptich for Nova
Posted by lucksmith under Magician, circus, freak show, magic history[3] Comments
In which we learn of death defying coin magic for famous engineers, a bilingual woman who resists fire, and a man who mocks the noose, though only one will fail to survive.
On the 3rd of April 1843, Isambard Kingdom Brunel reached into his mouth to produce the half-sovereign he had vanished into his ear. He was known more widely for his bridges than his conjuring, but the latter was done justice in his capable hands. Except on this occasion.
His gag reflex caused him to swallow. The coin could not be produced, and the trick was ruined. This was the least of his worries, as he began to choke, sputter and cough. The coughing was a good sign, air at least could get through, as the disc spun in his esophagus.
Within days the Queen’s own surgeon Sir Benjamin Brodie, had been assigned to make this his main task. The cough grew worse, and the coin appeared to have slid further into Brunel’s lungs. This saga continued six weeks, the public became obsessed, and new surgical instruments were invented to remove the coin. They, and the tracheotomies that followed; failed. The saviour was to be an application of physics.
Centrifugal force.
Brunel was strapped to an apparatus, and spun on an axis at his hips. Such paroxsyms of choking ensued, the treatment was stopped. The papers took notice, headlines were printed, the nation could talk of nothing else. Brodie waited, and waited, and decided to try again.
This time the coin dropped effortlessly from his mouth, as if produced by magic. So enraptured was the country, that a man who was dispatched to the Atheneum ran through the club declaring ‘It’s out! It’s out!’. No one even needed to ask to what he referred.
The British people could breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, earlier on the same soil.
Signora Josephine Girardelli, was commonly refered to as the female salamander in 1814 because she was impervious to heat and flame.
“She will, without the least symptoms of pain, put boiling melted lead in her mouth, and emit the same with an imprint of her teeth thereon; red-hot irons will be passed over various parts of her body; she will walk over a bar of red-hot iron with her naked feet; will wash her hands in aquafortis; put boiling oil in her mouth!”
Though Italian by birth, she always claimed to be German. Curiouser, and curiouser.
Afterwards, and above another country…
For four hundred years or more people have defied death by hanging as a performance art. The Great Peters featured a stellar version of this stunt, before disaster struck. He succesfully performed an exhibition where he lept without harness from a hot-air balloon, a hangman’s noose around his neck. He had taught himself from a young age to turn in the air, taking the brunt of the force on the back of his neck.
Of course, this rope was specially prepared, as well. The mysteries of its construction are too tedious for reproduction here. Let it suffice to say the same mystery has now been degraded to an extreme sport.
On one succesful occasion he endured a freefall of 75 feet, and while the rope stretched under his weight, he slowed in his descent, and was able to alight gracefully on the earth after his plunge from heaven.
This drop was marked by approbation, but another in 1943 was to result in horror. By a quirk of irony, the rope broke and the danger of the noose was transformed into the star-crossed plummet of hi