Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520270479
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520270473
- Pub. Date:
- 09/14/2011
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520270479
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520270473
- Pub. Date:
- 09/14/2011
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520270473 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2011 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Sales rank: | 678,591 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Trade of the Tricks
Inside the Magician's Craft
By Graham M. Jones
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27047-3
CHAPTER 1
An Apprenticeship in Cunning
In French, it's called le trac. Every magician gets it, but it always remains an intensely personal experience. French close-up superstar David Stone describes its symptoms as "an elevated heart-rate, a dry mouth, nervous shaking ... clammy palms ... weak knees, stomach cramps, cold-sweats, shortness of breath (even hyperventilation), stuttering, blurry vision ... maybe even hives on your face.... It can also bring on ... irritability, difficulty concentrating, and memory loss. When it's a frequent occurrence, you may begin to suffer from nagging fatigue, a lack of motivation ... a lack of muscle coordination ... depression, phobias, and anxiety disorders." I've seen its debilitating effects on seasoned professionals and first-time performers alike. Sometimes le trac pounces like a crouching predator just minutes before a performance. Or it may slowly creep up over the course of weeks. "The moment I book a gig," a magician in his late fifties told me, "I get it so bad that I immediately begin wishing they'd call back and cancel. The more experience I have, the worse it gets. The more I know what can go wrong."
Stage-fright surged upon me suddenly, like a tidal swell of adrenaline. I paced the wings of the large theater that would shortly fill with over a hundred spectators eager to be amazed. It was May 2005, and I was preparing for a performance at the Les Halles community center in the heart of Paris, where I had been taking a magic class since the fall. While the class began with seven students, besides me there were only three left: Denis, a soft-spoken Franco-Vietnamese marketing specialist at a telecommunications firm; Antoine, a junior high student who had shot up several inches since the beginning of the year; and Jean-Jacques, an affable, middle-aged employee of the national rail system. Having never practiced in the theater, we anxiously went over the music and lights with the techie. Backstage, Denis and I worked with Antoine on his technique for producing a bottle of Scotch from thin air, adjusting for what magicians call "angles"—spectator sight lines. We executed small rituals of protection and transformation, arraying our props in neat little piles behind the curtain, changing into our stage attire, awkwardly applying makeup, testing our gimmicks, and exchanging reassurances.
In front of our friends, families, and colleagues, we were about to exhibit skills we had spent a year mastering. Would our artistry impress? Would our illusions astonish? With the expectant gaze of "real" spectators fixed upon us, would we be able to successfully embody those qualities synonymous with magicianship—mystery, dexterity, craftiness, and cunning? The sense of risk was both terrifying and exhilarating. We looked within ourselves, and we waited for the audience to arrive.
PROFILES IN CUNNING
There are many ways to describe how magicians are made. One would be to trace the acquisition of embodied skills, the meticulous "techniques of the body" that allow innocent-looking gestures to dissemble covert manipulations. While magicians strive to make their body language naturalistic, their every move is codified according to tradition, methodically adapted to suit individual needs, rehearsed thousands of times (often in front of a mirror or video camera), and fine-tuned over the course of a career. But while many spectators believe that hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye dexterity accounts for the magicians' deceptive abilities, in fact, an enormous amount of mental strategizing underlies every illusion. As illusionist Pierre Brahma explains, "We deceive through speech, gesture, the most imperceptible mimicry, silence.... We deceive through what we do and what we do not do. Behind every good magic trick there lies hidden (and must always remain hidden) a veritable science that applies understanding of the mainsprings of the human mind and heart, and of psychological ploys that can, at times, reach a level of astonishing subtlety." A trick, he continues, "is based on manual dexterity of course, but also on a mastery, a perfect grasp, on the reactions and the reasoning of spectators who believe themselves free, but whose mind and senses are always secretly under our control."
This chapter approaches apprenticeship in terms of not magicians' acquisition of embodied skills like sleights, but rather the cunning intelligence that inhabits their limbs and digits. How do magicians assimilate artifice, learning the crafty style of thinking essential to their art? After introducing some of the settings where they pursue projects of enskillment, I explore how cunning develops in tandem with a refined intersubjective awareness that enables magicians imaginatively to see the world through the eyes of the spectators who co-construct illusion.
A skilled practitioner of the trade of the tricks must be able to outwit and outmaneuver spectators alert to impending deceptions, and to perceive opportunities for surprise in the interstices of everyday life. British conjurer Bob Read, in Paris for a gig, told me over a morning pint, "I don't ever walk into a room without being aware of the possibilities for holding up my end of the situation. Once you get into that state of mind, you want to know the shape of the glasses, the shape of the lights, what people are wearing, the place where that guy put down his newspaper." Read paused to take a sip. I heard the loud concussion of his teeth against the glass, and he doubled over in pain. I leapt to my feet. Laughing, he opened his hand to reveal, not a tooth, but the coin he had snapped against the side of the glass to create the auditory illusion of a painful accident. As Read demonstrated, sufficient cunning makes the possibilities for trickery endless.
Becoming a magician transforms the way one sees the world. Everyday material objects—rubber bands, paper clips, sandwich bags, and even breath-freshening strips—disclose properties that could make them amenable to use in tricks. Indeed, magicians often come to rely on properties of commercial goods to which most consumers attach no significance: for instance, one of my friends despaired that hair curlers no longer contain the metal springs he once extracted to construct a prized gimmick. When Lucky Strikes introduced a new kind of cigarette box featuring a large front chamber and smaller second chamber, I joined a group of magicians who spent nearly an hour discussing how to repurpose it for a magic effect. Practicing magic also suggests new ways of thinking about everyday social situations as potential occasions for performance. "Say you tell your girlfriend, 'Watch me produce a hamburger.... Presto!' She might be impressed," magician Sébastien Mossière once told me. "But if you bide your time, waiting for her to say, 'I'm hungry,' and then produce a hamburger, you can accomplish a miracle."
Gaëtan Bloom, one of France's most inventive magicians, spoke with me at length about the nature of magician's intelligence. I met him between shows at a café across the street from the Crazy Horse cabaret, where he has been a regular performer for de cades. With his wire-rim glasses, a white scarf around his neck, and a newspaper in his lap, Bloom looked more like a scholar than a magician. But just minutes before, I had seen him onstage, sandwiched between two striptease acts ("the beast among the beauties," as he put it). Speaking a mishmash of a half-dozen languages (a little something for everyone in the international crowd), he performed an outrageous cut-and-restored rope trick with his microphone cord—apparently getting electrocuted in the pro cess (see Figure 8). Bloom brought a video camera to the café and showed me some footage of a new trick he had recently shot in his home workshop. On the small screen, I watched him saunter up to a banquet table sagging with food. He picked up a heaping bowl of spaghetti and poured it instantly down his throat, followed by an enormous salad, a platter of fries, a plate of meatballs, a basket of fruit, and so forth until, within a matter of seconds, the "human vacuum cleaner" as he called it had apparently ingurgitated enough to sate an entire rugby squad.
Bloom told me that there is a simple, but fundamental, difference between the way magicians and laymen think. "A layman will come up to you and say, 'I've always wanted to know how you guys do that trick where the magician gets tied up in a sack, locked inside a trunk, and then instantly changes places with his assistant.' Then you ask if he's ever thought about it. 'No, not really.' That's the difference. A magician would say to himself, 'Well, you could start by cutting a hole in the sack, and putting a trapdoor in the box.... But there must be something more cunning still!'" The word Bloom used—malin—can mean cunning, clever, crafty, or tricky. It's an irresistible urge to find something more cunning still that has made him one of the most prolific innovators, French or otherwise, in contemporary magic ("I can't resist inventing; it's a sickness, a disease"), but cunning intelligence is something all magicians share. Not surprisingly, many have backgrounds in fields related to science and technology, where similar kinds of intellectual work and manual tinkering are also valued.
Malin is the French adjective that best evokes the peculiar quality of a magician's intelligence, and magicians use it all the time to praise each other and their inventions. They also express unqualified admiration for deceptive performances and performers with words like astucieux (shrewd), vicieux (devious), and vicelard (shady). While they clearly enjoy the moral ambivalence language such as this connotes, these tricksters nevertheless operate within a culturally condoned sphere of essentially benign deception, fooling audiences who expect (and preferably pay) to be deceived. But they also link magical cunning with more practical kinds of intelligence like street smarts. Illusionist Laurent Langloys recounted that once, after performing in a Pigalle cabaret, he was held up by several thugs. "Just let me show you something first," he told them, making a coin appear out of thin air and then vanish. After several minutes of magic, the would-be muggers expressed their thanks and escorted him to his car. "They called me Monsieur and everything."
Expert performers in a variety of domains consider cunning an essential element of style and skill—from capoeira and improvisational music to computer hacking. Associated the world over with trickster figures and artisans, it also can be a culturally prized quality of persons more generally. Known as metis, it was "at the heart of the [ancient] Greek mental world," emphasized in "large sectors of their social and spiritual life," and embodied in culture heroes like Odysseus, "the man of twists and turns." Historian Robert Darnton similarly identifies cunning as a "master theme of French culture in general, at its most sophisticated as well as its most popular." Darnton calls the particularly French kind of wily intelligence Cartesian cunning, the knack for outwitting powerful adversaries and flamboyantly dispatching intellectual challenges. Indeed, contemporary Frenchmen widely perceive themselves in precisely these terms; in a recent book, a prominent historian of philosophy documents the prevalent belief in France that "Cartesian" intelligence somehow defi nes the national character.
If French magicians partake of an ideal of Cartesian cunning, they ironically deplore it in their audiences. For them, it is a truism that French spectators are "too Cartesian" to enjoy the pleasures of being deceived. They often complained to me that the French are "ashamed to not understand something." I heard—not without mild pique—a number of French magicians praise Americans as "big children" who "just want to be entertained" and who are "always willing to play along." "In the United States," one magician told me, "people don't have a problem accepting things they don't understand. It's like, 'Oh what ever, no big deal.'" The ste reo typical go-with-the-flow American stood as a kind of idealized Other for the hyperrational Frenchman who always wants to understand the "trick" behind the magic effect or, worse still, who pretends to understand in order to "save face." (One French magician told me that, by contrast, Italian spectators are too credulous: "if you show them a card trick, they'll ask you to heal their sick child.")
Given the widespread belief that French audiences are especially resistant to being deceived, it is all the more important that French magicians hone their craftiness. In this chapter, I describe the world of activity in which they cultivate cunning and give their wily imaginations free rein. In particular, I focus on magic clubs as sites of informal apprenticeship and magic classes as sites for formal instruction, taking my own experience as a novice alongside other novices to exemplify the process of acquiring a magician's cunning more generally. In doing this, I focus closely on language to show how magicians' ability to deceive relates to the expert ways they describe, analyze, and prepare for performance through talk. In particular, I show that the ability to evoke the viewpoint of hypothetical or generic spectators is a verbal skill central to their staging of deception.
JOINING THE TRIBE
In Paris, magic as a social activity is primarily organized into clubs, whose regular meetings set the rhythm of life in the magic subculture. While some shun the club scene altogether, most magicians attend meetings, if not regularly, at least selectively. The social boundaries of the magic community are nearly coterminous with the orbit of magic clubs, which therefore became the principal sites of my field research. The membership of the two biggest magic clubs in Paris largely overlaps. The Cercle Magique de Paris (CMP) is the local branch of the national magic federation (the FFAP); during my research, it held biweekly meetings in the large theater of a community center on the outskirts of the city, and workshops in the FFAP's one-room national headquarters downtown. The Cercle Français de l'Illusion (CFI), which also has several affiliated branches in the provinces, met monthly in a conference room inside an international student dormitory. While both clubs attract members young and old, regulars are overwhelmingly adults, a large percentage of whom are elderly retirees. These regulars are also overwhelmingly amateurs, though professionals drop in from time to time.
As a default, club meetings of the CMP and CFI primarily comprise performances of tricks or routines by club members, usually followed by an explanation. Some people spend a month or more preparing a routine just for their club, using the opportunity to perform as an impetus for their training and creativity. Others only come to watch, never performing. Both clubs occasionally hire professionals to lecture at meetings. Afterward, the lecturers sell gimmicks, books, videos, and lecture notes—often turning a tidy profit.
As supportive as magicians generally are of one another, the standards for behavior at magic meetings sometimes made the former junior high school teacher in me cringe. A portion of the audience entirely ignores what's happening onstage, engrossed in manipulating cards or coins. Back-row kibitzers maintain a whispered commentary on the performances. Inevitably members of the audience hurl taunts (lancer des vannes, they say) at the performers and at each other. The steady stream of sometimes lewd raillery can constitute a performance in its own right. For instance, one evening at the CFI, the magician onstage asked the audience to volunteer a number for a mathematical effect. "67," the man next to me offered. "Is that your age?" another shouted. "No, it's the size of my penis," the first responded. "The length?" asked a third. "No, the diameter." Meanwhile, the performer onstage simply waited for things to settle down. Another evening at the CMP, a magician demonstrated a trick for children, making a lollipop mysteriously stand on end in his outstretched palm. "I just got a text message from your wife," a wisenheimer shouted from the back of the auditorium. "She'd like you to employ that technique with another object."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trade of the Tricks by Graham M. Jones. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations, ix,Preface and Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction: Men of a Thousand Hands, 1,
1. An Apprenticeship in Cunning, 34,
2. The Social Life of Secret Knowledge, 77,
3. Potency and Performance, 118,
4. Business as Un-Usual, 160,
5. Conjuring Culture, 199,
Notes, 245,
Bibliography, 263,
Index, 283,
What People are Saying About This
"This book is a celebration and a revelation. Highly recommended."—Genii Magazine
"By following some of the world's leading magicians and fully participating in the scene as a kind of sorcerer's apprentice, [Jones] shines a light on [the] community."—The Independent
"Look beyond the birthday parties and 10-gallon top hats and magicians have a long history going for them."—Maxim
"Studded with humor, insights, revelations about deceptions being created and destroyed."—Magicana
"There is a lot to appreciate in this book. . . . The shrewd magician will read it."—Genii Magazine