In my last post I was lamenting the disappearance of one of the great performances of ventriloquism from the internet. While a piece of my heart vanished with that video, it inspired the search for others, and a chance to dip into the history of ventriloquism. This transforms the old into the new, in the endless cycle of entertainments.

Ventriloquists used to perform without the dummy. They used to hold conversations with ‘off-stage’ characters or members of the audience. They would sometimes sing, or do birdsongs. In a sense they were performers of mimicry, rather than people who could ‘throw their voice’. In my mind, vents are magicians too, and I share freely with them when I meet them. Their illusion is auditory, but they are illusionists none the less. Of course there are differences, and I cannot do what they do, but I do not consider them so differently than magicians, or magiciennes as the case may be.

One of my favourite stories of ventriloquism comes from the eighteenth century. I must confess I have just hunted through my bookshelf to give you an exact quotation, but failed my quest. My enthusiasm to find the reference would appear to be equally matched by my lack of time for this writing this post. Unfortunately this seems to be an increasing trend.

So with apologies, we shall work from memory.

A vent was performing on a cruise ship, and performing in the older style I mention above, by holding dialogues with invisible characters or mimicking noises and people. During the performance he was consistently disturbed and interrupted by the buzzing of a fly. Attempting to espy the nuisance, his eyes wandered a great deal during the performance to the mirth of the audience. Of course they would’ve attributed this to part of the act, and to his skill in as a performer.

Close to the conclusion of the act, his gaze fell upon a member of the audience, who looked bored and seemed not to be paying attention. Slowly though a sly grimace swept across the spectators face, and the performing ventriloquist recognized another great polyphonist of the day. He suddenly realised he had been dueling with an illusory fly, produced by an equally skilled practitioner of the art!

After the show they laughed heartily, and the ensuing two week cruise to New York found these mischievous gentleman producing all sorts of auditory illusions and pranks on an unsuspecting captive crew and audience. This culminated in a ridiculous hullabaloo when the arrived at Ellis Island and disembarked to be processed by customs. Upon approaching the customs desk they giggled like schoolboys while the posh woman in front of them was accused of smuggling pigs into the country within her great baggage cases. The sounds of an entire barn-yard were clearly heard emanating from her baggage until the customs official demanded to inspect it and found it contained a rather mundane selection of evening wear and ladies toiletries.

The lady and the customs official were not amused, but the vents must have laughed all the way to to Broadway.

Witness then just how versatile ventriloquism can be, and share my joy at finding at least another performance that makes me smile. Even if you sometimes find them creepy, which I know many people do…trust me this is worth watching…

Nina Conti in Montreal…

I recently went back to some old posts, only to find that a video I had linked to was gone. It obviously time to clean up the links on this site. It gives me something to write about though, and forces me to examine one of my closely held beliefs: the best things in life are fleeting, ephemeral things. Exceptional performances don’t live forever, even on the internet. The impermanence of things, the lie of immortality.

A video I had linked to of Arthur Worsley, has been removed. Sure 22 seconds of that same video is played out, but the full piece has disappeared, like a memory degrading. It loses something when it is edited like that, and becomes just  a fragment. Charlie Brown screaming at Arthur had a silent genius that just isn’t exhibited by watching him blurt a single sentence.

Still, it sums up my point, and gives me the opportunity to articulate it. Things on this site will come and go, some of my posts will only be up for a few hours, and others might last months. I like it like that.

We glimpsed him as he vanished, and will always be glad to see him, it’s worth all the sadness that comes when they go.

You can only get a broken heart one way.

To be a magician, is to be broken hearted. To be a magician means being in love with impossible situations. A magician must endlessly chase impossible beauty, and yet endure the broken heart of it.

I thought I’d stop by Tom’s place, and I was sure glad I did.

Last weekend, I spent time with Sharon down in London at the Magic Circle Collectors day. We met up with our friend Will Houstoun, a fine magician and magical historian.  It’s always fun to session with him, and he delivered a great lecture on his new book.

Richard Evans delivered a fantastic lecture on Isaac Fawkes, adding to our primary source on the legend by a factor of 20! He has found nearly 1000 articles in newspapers of the time. Many of these are placed by Fawkes himslef as advertisements, but luckily for us they detail his routes, his routines, and the cost of his show. This means a route book could be created! I really like Richard and hope to meet him again. Unfortunately, his research is not up on the web, and you’ll need to track him down yourself.

Richard Stokes delivered the most controversial lecture, and is obviously worn down by reactions to his research. I thought he made his points clearly and everything he states is verifiable. The truth will out. Unfortunately, as Brits we have a lot tied up into the legend of ‘The War Magician’. I mean, we couldn’t have France’s legends of Houdin and the bedoiuns, and not have our own war magician could we?

So some of you may have guessed I was joking in my last post, fulfilling a long promised hoax.

I may be more infrequent in blogging here as other issues are increasing, but I am here to stay.

In honour of 5000 visits, this blog will cease to exist.

However, I thought I’d share with you one last video with you faithful readers before I go…

They cheat in ways you cannot conceive of. They’ve devoted their lives to it.

Haven’t you always wondered why they become deceivers…

Witness here the inception of deception. The birth of a trickster. The turn card.

400 years ago he might have been a coney catcher, or gull groper. Perhaps he would have been light fingered, or fleet of foot. A faker of injuries, maybe, or the infuriating bait in a blind alley mugging.

You wouldn’t have had the chance to witness the introduction of a deceptionist to cozenage then but here in this strange digital realm, you do.

Let this serve as a warning to would be gamblers, and would be cheaters. If you keep rounding my table, I’ll put a thumb down your back. That’s all the warning you’ll get.

There are generations upon generations behind the cons, and pulling back the curtain for a peek is a dangerous game. You might start to believe you know the game, you might get wise, find the office, have been around the block a few times. In your heart though you must admit that any one of us can be taken for a sucker.

This upstart is only 15. Imagine how invisible he’ll be at the table in 15 more.

He won’t be the loud-mouth, he won’t have an ego.  He’ll have no need to show off his skills. That’s a weakness some of us don’t indulge in…

We’ll tell him about our history:

The Bleeding Heart in DC, The Amphibians in Las Vegas, The Akula club in NY. Yellow Kid Weil, Titanic Thompson, Victor Lustig, Arthur Furgusun, George C. Parker. He’ll whisper things to other deceptionists that make them brighten their eyes or turn their hearts to ice.

He’ll never need to cheat.

He’ll know ‘the right way to do wrong’.

He’ll entertain.

You can sheer a sheep many times, but you can skin him only once.

Toast of the Town Episode #17.19 (1964). That was the inflection point. It was the rise of rock and all electric and the fall of variety and music hall. That show has so many stories running through it, I’ll have trouble giving you all of them.

I’ll try though, I’ll try.

First let’s hear it first hand. Let Charlie and Mitzi tell you. They’re a priceless act themselves.

Act one, starting at 6:30 min.

Now you know the story, you’ll want to see Frank on that epic show.

You haven’t forgotten that magician though have you. I recognized his voice instantly from TAL. Take a guess before you look up the line-up.

Now that leaves us two of the other great acts to find. Unfortunately, I can’t find all of them, but then maybe this post will help you bring them to me.

Let’s look at that guy doing card tricks…

Not just any guy. A legend.

Who else would do a card trick and screw it up so perfectly? Planned mistakes, and comedic accidents. Rumor has it he was a magician of the old school…not just on stage, but he would hang out with the amateurs afterwards. There’s definitely not many of those left.

Which finally brings us back around to the title of the post and a woman who could entertain people with an empty paper bag. She was that good.

See for yourself…a little taste of Tessie.

Now the Beatles are stuck in my head. To be fair, they were pretty good too.

I understand more.

I’m coming to terms with my anger, my expectations are lower. I know some people cared for me, and handled the situation, and supported me where they could.

Support is definitely crucial to the conversion process. More of it is needed for change agents of the future. I know there’s not enough money for anything these days, and so support can’t be written into the budget, but we as human beings can know that it is an essential part of the conversion process.

It is after all hard to have a therapeutic conversation on the topic with an outsider. You can’t share the frustration, for fear of creating panic.

That support will just have to remain part of two-way trust. One day, when we look back on it, these things will be funny. We will know we made the world a safer place, every single day. I don’t care if no-one else knows.

I think I know enough now to help support others through the conversion process. At least for the next few years, I need to be inspiring others to gain the skills and understand the problem too. Even if I became the most technically exceptional activist on the subject, I couldn’t achieve half as much as I could by inspiring others and walking them through the conversion process.

Of course, I’d like to gain more technical knowledge too, so I’ll have to split my time. Knowing the right proportions will require greater understanding.

“You let him use his strength, and you use your understanding.”

“It’s alright. There’s no one here but the fighters. “

-Mike in Redbelt

In My Craft or Sullen Art

And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

-Dylan Thomas

There’s stuff you wish you saw live. Things that just come alive from the description. You hear about these things in the green room, and hope one day you’ll meet them or see their act on film.

One of the heartrending things about performance history is knowing just how many things were never filmed. Isaac Fawkes at the Bartholomew fair, Bartolomeo Bosco doing the one cup routine, Hofzinser in the parlour.

Then there’s the things you never heard about before, that just wander into your life. This group was mentioned once by a friend in the Spiegel Garden, and I promptly forgot about them. Then suddenly at last weekend’s talk they were on screen and glorious. Bursting forth in my consciousness like a spinning chrysanthemum blossoming on high speed film.

If you’re in a rush while reading this, don’t bother watching the video.

However, if I could persuade you to  put all thoughts and worries from your mind, get a glass of whisky or a cup of tea, take a couple deep breaths and sit still for a moment…then you have a real treat in store.

Tomorrow, or sometime soon I have to do something I hate. I will sit down and watch one of my own ‘performances’ that has been taped. Firstly, I hate being taped,  as I am a firm believer in the purest of the pure: performances that live only in your memory. Secondly, I am highly critical of myself, and re-living performances is a bit painful.

The thing I have to remember is: if they had felt the same way I never would have seen them. That’s even more tragic than sitting down with a good friend to face your mistakes.

Thomas Parker: Our suffering is special.
The pain we feel is worse than anyone else.
But the sunrise we see is more beautiful than anyone else.
The Parkers is…like the moon.
There’s one side forever dark. Invisible. As it should be.
But remember, the dark moon draws the tides also.
Our time has come.
Bruno Parker: That’s the most wonderful thing you’ve said in years.
Thomas Parker: That’s the only thing I said in years.
-Funny Bones

Blackpool. Interior. Day.

Our narrator sits with his girl in a room called the Ice House. This room is nestled in the Winter Gardens, and is an escape from the madness outside. The temperature speaks more of steam than ice, but the mood is nostalgic, and the atmosphere calm.

In a larger room next door literally thousands of magicians jostle each other for room to buy the latest gimmick, or the shiniest toy. Here however, is the real treasure. A lecture titled ‘100 years of musichall’, by Duggie Chapman.

We are probably the youngest couple in the room, but not at heart. The people here know the songs, and sing along. He talks us through things, and introduces us to a variety of variety acts. He points out a nuance here, or a detail there, never tipping the punchline…just enhancing your enjoyment of the film you are about to watch.

For instance, the letter M is the hardest letter for a ventriloquist, and plosive words like ‘bottle of beer’ are exceptionally difficult.

There’s this line in ‘The Dreamers’ that sums this experience up for me. It’s when Matt meets Isabelle and Theo at the Battle of the Cinémathèque.

Isabelle: Theo and I never watch television. We’re purists.

Experiences like this make me want to be more of a purist too.

Good advice comes in bad wrappings.

A corporate trainer said something fantastic to me this week:

“Nervousness is vanity.”

It says a lot don’t it?

He was an ex-tory councilor which will explain why he knew so much about con-games.

Honestly, he did.

He wanted us to play against him in the game NIM. He said he invented it and was a world champion. I can’t criticise him for stretching the truth, I’m hardly on the moral high ground in that dept. He did give me one of those great backhanded compliments though:

“You don’t look like a con-man.”

Good chap none-the-less. I mean, he failed the con, since no one took up the challenge. He’s got the noodle, but you gotta have a shinier hook to get the lettuce.

On a different note: Do you have any idea how many videos there are on you tube of falling leaves?

“Like a blind man sensing the beauty of a snow flake, one touch and it’s gone.”

I spent last weekend with 120 fine magicians. I saw the mentor entrance the room with stories. I watched a kid grow, while he fooled me and I fooled him.

I saw this chain of inspiration across time and I knew, it is your students who make you a legend. As the mentor says:

“If I told you how it was done, I wouldn’t be giving you anything, I’d be taking something away.”

The sun is thin, and the sky is pale.

I have been trying to post to this blog for a while, but I haven’t found a subject. I have to confess blogging is a strange medium, as I have very little interaction with you readers.

To be honest, I don’t know why you read this.

No, I’m not depressed and fishing for compliments…I am asking you the reader what you get from this blog.

I realise some of you come here to find out what I’m up to, and that’s ok but ultimately not my aim. I appreciate the friends I have, but this blog is less about me and diarising and more about why we perform.

I know some stop by because I post bits of history and digital equivalents of ephemera, I hope to see more of you. I know some people come for a cup of tea and to see some novelty or other.

I know some magicians read it, but it’s not about how we do tricks. There are plenty of other sites for you to learn from. I am specifically keeping this site explanation free. I am open to coorespondance on this subject, but this blog isn’t the place.

I’d say this blog is about ‘things writ in water’: conversations, moments of quietus, temporary and fleeting wonderment. It’s also about reading and searching and inspiration. It’s an opportunity for me to try my hand at writing sometimes, another hobby I’m slowly learning about.

Finally, this blog is about respect. We have too little space in our societies for ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘appreciation societies’. We prefer our experts to be people that do.

Well I want to challenge that.

Over the last year I have come to know forgetful cineastes, business card collectors, ushers come theatre-historians, hacker historians, joke archivists, bibliomaniacs, lion comiques, pub songbirds, tipsy translators, martial arts movie afficionados, graffiti spotters, oenophiles, and the new kings of non-fiction.

All these volunteer experts have contributed to my life, and kept the boredom at bay.

Let’s face it, life just isn’t as good on TV.

So thank you for reading over the past year, and if you don’t mind…drop me a comment telling me what you think this blog is all about. In the meantime, here’s the kind of holiday ‘bit of business’ I like to think you’ve come to expect.

One of the best performances I have seen this year, was by a magician affectionately known as ‘the warpsmith’. Tom Stone showed class and charisma when his routine didn’t go as planned. A glass accidentally shattered on stage, and Tom was fun while filling time. He chattered along aimlessly, cleaning glass from his performing surface, as casually as you or I might offer our lovers a cup of tea. Then he began performing again.

I was left wondering what I might have missed.

He was kind and knowledege-able in person too. Offstage, down-to-earth, back-room. He shared a few secrets and explained to me the pantheon of Swedish magicians. I expressed my love for Roy Walton’s material, and he being a ’showman of merit’, didn’t buy any mealy mouthed bullshit. He wanted to see an effect performed. I realised nothing of Roy’s is in my active repertoire, something I have rectified now. Fear not, I dug something out of memory, and performed it for Tom the next day.

I had the pleasure of fooling Tom (Tom-foolery being my strong point), which he gleefully admitted. I offered to share the method, and had the pleasure of having him turn me down gracefully, a sign of a magician with deep self-knowledge.

The highlight of all the highlife that night was being entertained by him.

So I’m rubbish. I didn’t tell you all the antics I got up to in last week of the festival. I was too busy carousing around the carousels.

I think the highlight of the festival was finally bringing Frodo and the Mentor together. I mean Otis Lee Crenshaw was brilliant, Circus Oz rocked, I enjoyed a few more sideshows,  Michael Franti and Spearhead helped me stay human, and tePooka are fast becoming friends, but a late evening’s conversation was most memorable when the hangovers lifted.

They talked mostly of one performer, George Carl, who I had never heard of. They both knew where he was from, and what his act was like. I was left out of the conversation for a fair few minutes, a small price to pay. I like listening to knowledgeable people enthuse, and Frodo ended up recommending a film: Funny Bones. Not to the tastes of many I suspect, but certainly to mine.

In fact George Carl has a small role in it, and a critical line that I hopes stays with me for a very long time. I won’t quote it here, at least not in this post so as not to spoil the scene. Some clowns escape the make-up…

…and to top it all off he was from Ohio.

66a Church Rd.

He comes onstage and opens suitcases filled with light. He speaks, we laugh, he opens up. It’s like having an verbose and funny friend who is down on their luck, and lamenting a loss. He shows up, you offer him tea and sympathy, and of course he returns the favour by protesting too much with false bravado that ‘it isn’t so bad’.

If I told you what this play is about you’d think ‘how good could that story really be’. This is proof that it’s the showman and the method of the story, and not the story itself that should concern you. Daniel Kitson is a cat chasing a yarn, one that leads us through every nook and cranny of his beloved flat. On the way through you catch glimpses of his life, his humour, and his home.

The next day, the Mentor gave a talk. He brought three books on magic:

Hocus Pocus

Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

and another which will remain nameless.

Not only was the talk brilliant, he brought the books to life for people who had never heard of them. I don’t mean just the story of those books, I mean the story of those particular books. He flipped their pages and showed us the words written in them by some previous reader. The comments of some magician centuries past, on how he thought the trick of severing a horse’s head was ‘Nonsense’. He recalled how they had found him, enticed him, and ultimately provided some way of paying to acquire them on his limited means. Bibliomania of the most delicious kind.

Afterwards, I found myself briefly holding a suitcase with more than my yearly salary’s worth of books in it.

Then the drinking began.

When I woke up, I recalled that I had agreed to participate in a Scavenger hunt all over the city. 100 items, 12 hours, 42 teams, three comrades and one prize of £2,000. We didn’t win, but we were close. I personally solved clues on museum rooftops, found references to frogs in old books, joined an aerobics class, put a butterfly in a matchbox, got a document from 1936, and a postcard of the Forth Rail Bridge predating 1950. My team were brilliant, and I look forward to ‘arging’ with them again.

The exhibition of what we all gathered is on this Saturday at 2:00. Come along, I’ll tell you the story of finding weird stuff….

mr e, originally uploaded by piglicker.

Monday night:

I met Denis Behr, a magician from Munich. He was in town and I thought I’d get a copy of his book, and avoid paying the shipping. We’ve never met before, but it’s common to just phone or write other magicans and meet up in their city. We only spent a few hours together, but it was a good laugh.

I got the chance to show him around the Festival theatre and tell him a bit about The Great Lafeyette (and strangely forgot to tell him he was born in Munich), and Arthur Lloyd two of the most amazing performers who ever lived. That I live in this very city and can recount their story to visiting magicians or showmen is a recuring pleasure.

We popped over to the Marquee de Sideshow and we were able to grab a quick bite to eat and see Shep Huntly. Paul Zenon opened things up for the show and did a classic of magic with a lemon freshness. I said last week I was looking forward to seeing him compere, and he didn’t disappoint. I even had the bemusing experience of watching Frodo sprook for himself in the third person. Having all these guys within spitting distance is a rare treat.

First of all, it’s the credit crunch and we need more £3-5 pounds shows in Edinburgh.

Second you get to see some classic sideshow stuff, like blockhead and lifting car batteries with sensitive portions of the anatomy. I’ve seen the fomer many times and the latter in other forms, but it sure beats reruns of Cracker.

Third, it’s great to see some short and sweet shows this year. The shows they put on are 15-30 minutes long and running all the time.

So if you have an hour to kill between shows, the Marquee de Sideshow doesn’t just talk a good game, they deliver a show up close and personal. Check the nails yourself; I did. You may wish they were a little farther away to be honest, since in their own words they will do “what other people couldn’t, shouldn’t or wouldn’t”.

Saturday I went to see a magic show unworth mention, and a supper club worthy of the Honourable Minchin.

I went with the ginger, anonymouseth, and the greek/south-african.  We didn’t clap out of politeness or laugh when it wasn’t funny, and sometimes that was necessary. Let ‘em earn it.

Take the two comedians from America who shall remain nameless. Perhaps my humour has changed a lot since I moved to Scotland, but I just didn’t think it was funny. Making fun of Johnny Depp could’ve been light amusement, but it rapidly became self indulgent. You see, people in the US are trained to think you’re funny if you’re gay and from New Yawk, but here you actually have to expose a piece of your soul. You can’t rely solely on your stereotype to get you by at ‘the festival’. Stay awhile, get to know us, try a little interaction next time.

Ok, I grant you this line was good: “You want suspense? Get an AIDS test like the rest of us.” Sadly that was as close as we got to knowing the comedian though. He just ranted at us about how bad JD was. Like a drunk queen who had too much JD. The whole act was kinda like losing an erection waiting for someone to put on all their latex.

By contrast Tim Minchin interacted with the audience, made us feel special, and even commented on the strained quality of our laughter. Surely making fun of how an audience laughs breaks some sort of comedy commandment…

Thou shalt not call attention to British people having too much fun or they wilt stop laughing and deport thee to a colony.

…or something like that. That’s one commandment he broke, and we loved him for it.

He mocked the crowd for having no residual laughter. We’d chuckle and go rapidly silent. Like a kind of cold compliment between uneasy friends. It made me think of tough audiences past and present. The toughest was quite possibly the people of Glasgow Musichall in it’s golden era.

Remember when they sold rotten cabbage at the door on the way in to a music hall? When the shipbuilders  used to through rivets and nails at bad performers? They even had a special balcony where the local lads would piss on performers who pissed them off.

Wasn’t that great?

I wouldn’t have thrown anything at Tim Minchin, even then. He’d only turn his pain into a song and make me laugh again…..The bastard.

As if that’s not enough talent to hate him for; every woman whose affections I count meaningful fancies him rotten. I have more than one reason to throw something at him if he ever stops making me laugh…

…and that’s no idle threat from someone who loves the history of musichall…

Some nights my soul sounds like a black hole…

I want to put my boots on, smoke, drink, cuss, and fight. The roughneck in me wakes up, and I often lose pieces of clothing in the aftermath. Wednesday wasn’t as bad as usual but I’m glad ‘the greek’ took me to see the Drive-By Truckers. She, the band, and the beer might just have saved me from my own darkening mood. The rain that night certainly agreed with my mood. Something about corporate bosses makes my heart as black as lung cancer.

Those freer moments keep me keeping on though…

Like the first time my friend made me listen to Johnny Cash on a roadtrip, or getting drunk on whisky on one of Princeton’s porches in a storm. Janis Joplin and redneck scarification. My first trip to West Virginia arriving at dawn to biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Skinning deer and skipping town when the coming out is done. Driving from Ohio to DC on my learner’s permit at 15. Standing toe-to-toe with my mom’s ex-husband while I helped her pack her things to move out. Those little personal rebellions…

Seeing DBT brought back a lot of memories from my younger days. They let me blow off some steam and yell out a little.

They’re as much fun as bourbon and bloody knuckles. When they roll through your town, I reckon you should welcome these folks.

Sometimes you may think I’m a man of contradictions that might never resolve; like rednecks and socialism.

About the latter, all y’all’d be wrong.

And probably the former too…

The saxophone was weeping, the keyboard was winking through the weariness, and the guitar was whispering weltschmertz. The drums itched out the urgency of young love, in my favourite venue: the Spiegel tent.

Scott Hamilton and the Sermon Organ Trio might not appeal to all of you, but a good friend, a strong beer, and free steak afterwards convinced me that comraderie still exists. That was a sunday spent, and the next day at work just bearable because of it.

The pasteboards were represented as well, and gloriously so. Guy Hollingworth performed his Expert at The Card Table. While I disagree on some of the academic conclusions of ‘The Man Who Was Erdnase’, turning it into a show was indeed worthwhile. It is a story worth telling, even if the facts need a little colouring outside the lines.

Let’s face it, most people don’t have the stomach for the subtlety of ‘probably true, but not fully proven’.

I digress.

The show was an inspiration. I have read through Guy’s books with laugh-out-loud pleasurable moments. I know (or at least have read) some of the methods in his show. It was a pleasure to watch, and even more so to see it working. A symphony for fingers and a dance with misdirection. It may be the best show with cards I have ever seen live. It is without a doubt my recommendation for the magic show to see this year.

Faithful readers know how I feel about Captain Frodo. He is a gentleman and a scholar, and I am delighted he’s returned to our rainy city. He has returned with La Clique, and rumours have it that a smaller tent means a bigger show.

Take the Marquee De Sideshow for example….

Paul Zenon’s usual lounge wizadry? That would be plenty.

He has exceeded the expectations by working a smaller stage and sharing it with other extraordinary people. While I love his magic, I have always felt he had a knack for being a compere incomparable. He strikes me as a man with convictions and perfect diction. I think Jim Rose has a serious run for his money, and he’s not on home turf….and that’s as exciting as Barnum and Bailey’s early rivalries.

To come: Jim Rose, Circus Oz, Ali Cook, La Clique, The Marquee De Sideshow, The Mentor’s book-talk.

Empty your pockets, kick off your shoes. Stay awhile, brush the day off,  shoot the breeze.

Tell me what’s what and who’s who, what they did and why they do.

The time has rolled round and we find ourselves here again.

Beer and cheer, theatre and thespians, alliteration and acrobatics. The festival is back, and I need a new hat.

I started off last Friday being challenged to produce a pie from nowhere. It’s getting hard to live up to the myth…but I succeeded again, by sheer, dumb, luck. Her face was priceless, her voice shrill.

“What the fuck? How can I just ask for a pie, and you just make one appear?”

“It’s a shuffling pie, I thought everyone had one…”

“Hey if she gets the pie, can I have a Maserati?”

“No.”

Saturday it was hangovers and cooking Gumbo for the crowd, who willingly devoured it. They brought beer of course, and dice games kicked off. It’s tradition for us locals to have a pre-festival party before all you Gaffers and Donahs roll in.

Which brings me to my next point of order…I will once again document my festival and try to summon all of you I love who live too far away. If you haven’t come here yet, then you haven’t come enough. Those of you who come again; please do.

Sunday held another hangover, but a gentle one and time for some much needed practice. One has to keep their chops sharp with so many sharps in town.

Monday night’s reward for the days grind: Tom Waits.

A glittering light and a voice doomed to tell the stories of the woeful. He hasn’t played Edinburgh in 21 years…so I wasn’t going to miss him. The comrades and companions were sound and the show delivered by a real showman.

There were a few too many bourbons afterward, and work the next day was hindered. Luckily the work I do isn’t as hard as magic. People don’t ask you to do anything cleverer than they can think of in corporations, and I’m blessed with a boss too busy to think.

It was all worth it, and still is. So for those of you who missed it…

I opened a book festival with bespoke magic. It was a local affair, with the best kind of people. Bookish and quiet yes, but saucy and suave too. The Edinburgh Book festival has nothing on this vivid upstart, who have injected the fermentation induced frivolity back into literature.  I performed on cue, on time, and under budget.

They needed me to print all their programme flyers free of cost magically, and I am pleased to say I obliged. It couldn’t have been accomplished if their designer and the festival directors were not so collaborative and creative. They were, and it was.

There were many other people there I enjoyed the company of, the mentor, the booksellers, the whirlwind. The ladies, and their respective men. Some other performers were present too, people I had never met before, wandering about and blending in. Interestingly I was introduced to my narrator, who I have to say was very pleasant. It is not every day one gets to meet their narrator, so as you can imagine, even I was speechless.

We were accused of being “dadaesque” by parts of the varied crowd, which I can only take as a compliment. A lovely lady appeared grinning at me afterwards and told me she had loved my trick. I poured myself into the to the pub with the others, and while some very strange dialogues began there, it was a pleasant enough evening.

I even performed a coin trick.

For those of you indulging this year, the event in the Blue Blazer would be my pick of the programme. I suspect the victorian fair will be great fun as well. I have it on authority there will be some street musicians who just happen to show up at the time.

It’s coming.

1. Drink cocktails in the street
2. Compete in a contest
3. See the sunrise without sleeping
4. Perform magic free-of-charge for a friend
5. Sing drunkenly
6. Learn a bawdy joke
7. Arrive thoroughly overdressed for an occasion
8. Have something signed by a magician
9. Triple book socially for an evening
10. Get caught in the rain
11. Do something embarrasing enough to lose a friend over
12. Manage to keep that friend anyway
13. Make a new friend
14. Rescue someone from something
15. Ruin a piece of clothing
16. Wake up somewhere surprising
17. Buy someone dinner
18. Have dinner bought for me
19. Learn a new poem by heart
20. Learn a new dance
21. Flirt with a stranger
22. Pick a pocket for entertainment purposes
23. Stooge for someone
24. Get the dad joke in first on someone
25. Learn to make a ballon animal
26. Perform a coin trick
27. Mentalise Tommy
28. Acquire free tickets to something worth seeing
29. Get a compliment from a stranger
30. Hear a song I love performed live
31. Get mistaken for someone’s father when the dad joke comes round
32. Explain the promiscuity of orchids to someone over champagne
33. Avoid being filmed-Failed
34. Invent a toast on the spot
35. Be quoted in something
36. Fall asleep during a performance
37. Heckle
38. Enthuse
39. Teach someone who doesn’t deserve it a magic trick
40. Mock a mime
41. Buy a book
42. Give something valuable away for sentimental reasons
43. Perform a flower trick
44. Meet someone extraordinary
45. Smile at strangers
46. Tell my mentors how much they mean to me
47. Forget something that pains me
48. Be entranced by fire
49. Renew correspondances
50. Play a practical joke on someone
51. Find out why you weren’t here….
52. Figure out why it had to be 52…

As of today I have been 33 times round the sun. Juneteenth, again.

I feel quite numb really, as if it doesn’t matter, as if I should have better things to write about. I do have plenty of things I could write about but they all make me so angry. I have made my complaints to my betters and now it is time to be quiet for a while.

I’m reading fiction again though, and it is quite a change. Lanark, by Alasdair Gray. That’s where the quote of the title comes from, and it is such a suitably odd book capable of keeping my interest. I read it on the bus journey to work, with a bus ticket for a book mark and the crash that comes from arriving. The day itself is conquered with cigarettes and plenty of experience ‘passing time’ gets me through.

People try to make small talk with me and I don’t care. I have become silent, and I find most other people distasteful. There are a few though, who keep me laughing. There’s the ghost, who likes to break things as much as I do, and knows we’ll always have bugs to chase. There’s the shoe who perseveres through the horrors of corporate life by the application of indy-pop. My hip-hop brethren across the desk, and the Belgian. Double L the geeky enthusiast, who still believes in the goodness of people. If you look around hard enough there are still people with souls in offices.

One of them I barely know even feeds the birds bread at lunch-time. Suffice to say that revived me from the dead one day while I was having a smoke. The knowledge that a person with real beating heart sits a few desks away was like the windows of an attic thrown wide.

I’m up earlier than I wanted to be today (it is a day off), but then again it provides plenty of time for reading.

I’ll pop into the little magic shop and look for the street performers through the day. Tonight I’ll celebrate with friends I have neglected, friends who hate to see me down. I owe them the shining vibrant companionship they show me, and I owe it in spades.

PS to 99 distractions and burning like water, I am waiting on letters, which is why I am tired.

…watch and learn from the others.

Dialogues have happened this week. They felt a little like this one.

In short: patronising. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, my peers told me about the history of this individual. I now know just how right they were. It took me a while, and I got what I needed from the time I spent in this environment.

Some people think computer security is a fad. It is not something that resources should be applied to. You comply and you use PR, but that is all. You talk a good game, but you haven’t got heart.

Of course, these are the same kind of people who thought breakdancing was a fad too. Time has told us that our youthful determination and pride was not misplaced. It is our world now, and they can only stand on the sidelines pretending to look cool by paying admission.

B-Boys and B-Girls were raised to be different. Hell, most of us raised ourselves.

Latch-key kids who now hold the keys to the kingdom.

The best revenge is living better, and the price of admission is the currency of self-worth.

…doing things you don’t understand.

“Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can “become” or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.”

-This quote moved me while brushing up on my post-humanism. It comes from wikipedia. So since it’s copyleft, do I quote and reference it, or not bother at all?

Crank up the volume for this tryptich:

Harold Lloyd Vs. Groove Armada

Buster Keaton Vs. Air

Charlie Chaplin Vs. James Unk

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.

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.

“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…

“..make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant.”

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 in 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…

“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…

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.”

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.”

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…

“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…

I am unashamedly reading Cavafy.

…and so, I do not wish to say…

…anything.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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)

“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.”

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.