Famulus newsletter: March 2012

President Craig Fennessey called the meeting to order with 28 members and several guests, Clem Kinnicutt and "Sammy, The Magician": both were accompanied by their wives. Craig went on to report that Jack Kodell was recuperating from a recent health setback at a local rehab facility. The plans for our annual Flea Market and Auction on March 10th were going well with the 30 available tables going fast. Bob Swadling and Bob Moreland were scheduled to do lectures and the former will also do a Workshop.

Dan Stapleton did a brief book review of The Life and Times of Augustus Rapp and So You Want To Be An Illusionist by David Seebach. He endorsed them both.

Orlando SAM Chapter President, Craig Schwarz, presented Charlie Pfrogner with a fifty (50) year membership pin commemorating is service with them. Charlie is also very active in IBM 170. A brief film, from the 70's, was shown of member Valerie Swadling performing her FISM award winning magic act. Bev Bergeron came on to demonstrate and teach Bob Hummer's Three (3) Item Prediction.

Phil Schwartz presented Magic History Moment No. 37. His subject this month was Frederick Eugene Powell, a master magician who entered our world in 1856 and performed throughout his long life into the 30's. Educated at Pennsylvania Military College in Engineering he gave up a teaching career to pursue Magic. He teamed with several of the top magicians of the day to perform on stage some very unforgettable illusions. He was a contemporary and friend to Houdini. Powell's most noteworthy illusions included 'Noah's Ark' and 'Cremation': his tricks included the burned and restored rope and coin ladder. Powell died at the age of 82 in 1938.

This month we had 11 performers demonstrating their art to an appreciative audience. Chuck Smith did a Keno Prediction effect followed by George Bernard showing a Chain Penetrating Spike. Charlie Pfrogner was back, after an illness, performing a Card Transpo that was very entertaining. Dan Stapleton performed Psycho-Psycometry with Valentines Day cards that were sent to him from audience participants. Newcomer, Sammy, The Magician, entertained with Shots in the Deck, a novel playing card illusion. Bob Swadling took the stage next and demonstrated his card handling techniques. Craig Fennessey did a Cut, Mixed, and Matched Jumbo Card Routine. J. C. Hiatt followed with a perplexing selected card routine. Next, Ed McGowan brought out his Cups and Balls and expertly performed the Vernon Routine to the delight of the membership. Ravelli closed the evening performances with a shredded paper routine to restored paper and ended with the oral consumption of razor blades and then producing them, from his mouth, on a thread, as the curtain went down.

I still get upset over magic on TV boasting that there is “no trick photography and it is just as you would see it if you were here!” That statement is only true if you stood in one exact spot, with blinders on each side of your eyes! That is not a practical or realistic or truthful claim.

I think, in some videos, the cameras (angles) are as important as the illusion. And it could be, that some viewer could be placed at a spot that would reveal something, but they are hired to still look dumbfounded. It is all designed to throw us off completely. One magician wrote me back once in one of my previous tirades to say, ” Yes, his trick was Interesting. But not practical.”

The beginning of this kind of “magic” was:

1) Copperfield with his stooges on the Lear Jet and Statue of Liberty Vanish as well as his fake dummy being hung from a chopper on the Grand Canyon levitation.

2) David Blaine, in his first special, when he edited in a few shots of his feet while he was doing “chin-ups” during the Balducci heel-rise sketch.

After that it was pretty much over for any creditability for TV “Magic”. The Golden Rule of Milbourne Christopher, Mark Wilson and Doug Henning had been trashed: Never use the camera in any way that would violate what an audience would see if they were there in person.

Even Jim Steinmeyer stooped to use a “position vital” method on Lance Burton’s Elephant Vanish. Anyone there would have seen the mirror method unless they were positioned with blinders on and looking only where the camera was aimed.

I am not sure that “practical” has anything to do with TV fakery. Whatever looks like a miracle on TV, regardless of how it is done, has accomplished its purpose. TV itself is a trick, an illusion. It is just a flat screen with moving pictures. Copperfield was able to adapt total TV trickery to an entertaining sketch on live stage with the “Escape from Alcatraz”. Of course the fake shots of him flying a helicopter and vanishing things by dropping them out of frame were not used in his stage version. His actual vanish from the cardboard box on the table was done differently for TV.

I have never actually performed John Cornelius’ “Fickle Nickel” but Henning opened one of his specials with it. I guess it could work in some situations as a live performance piece but, for me, I consider it impractical due to the complexity of the thread and getting into and out of it. It is great for TV. Can I forgive Henning for breaking his own rule? Probably.

About the same time, on Copperfield’s #3 special, David was doing a miracle in his opening by making a medallion appear in his bare hands. The methodology was similar to Fickle Nickel but apparently Copperfield had someone sitting below him manipulating the medallion on a magnetic stick and keeping it constantly behind his hands, so as not to be seen. Is that magic? It is TV magic using the characteristics of the camera and, as such, it is camera trickery. When you drop a coin out of frame, it is the TV equal to “lapping” or sleeving but if you were there you would see it. That is TV trickery.

I am not trying to be a purist. I am trying to arrive at some ethical definitions. I get people who come up to me and ask, “Is that Criss Angel guy for real? I saw him float a woman on the sidewalk in the middle of the town with people all around him. That must be real!” I almost always say, “Yep he is real alright!” Often it is followed by them saying, “Do it! Float me right here!” I respond, “Just like Criss Angel, I would need 50 grand worth of video gear, an editing suite, 12 assistants and all the special gimmicks.” I wink… They then get the idea; not the method or secret but the idea that TV magic is a bit different than live magic.

************

Career management and timing are so important to anyone wanting to work in show business. You can have all the talent in the world but if it is not managed and brought to bear at the right time and places, you will get nowhere. It is so easy to get side-tracked and lost in the boiling cauldron of show business. The opportunity to stay in the top tier and in the public’s eye and making money is very limited and tenuous. You can rattle off the names: Brett Daniels, Rick Thomas et.al. All who have decent acts and should find it easy to stay busy. I am not sure that they do.

There was a window from 1975 until 2000, that we now call, “The Second Golden Age of Magic” where a competent stage act (willing to travel and put up with a little hardship) could stay fairly busy. Just like the First Golden Age was ended by talking pictures and the Great Depression, the second was crushed by the Internet and the Great Recession. The Great Recession began in 2000 with the Dot Com bubble burst and was deepened in 2001 with 9-11 and then smothered over by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve with massive injections of paper money which led to the Real Estate Bubble and financial shenanigans and the Global 2008 free-fall.

In many ways, this epoch in magic is worse than the 1930s Depression for variety arts. America is no longer rural with a large market of “tall grass” venues. Mac Birch and later Lee Grabel and Ken Griffin and many others just went into the remote countryside where the population only had radio and they booked “first money” gigs for community organizations such as The Lions, Rotary Optimists and even school fund-raising.

Such a market no longer exists and is only viable in some parts of Canada, Australia and New Zealand... John Kaplan still does it in Canada and sells his method but I do not think that it works well in many places here in the lower 48 other than in the minds of those deluded by visions of grandeur. What cracks me up is that there are many magicians who have failed at taking out a successful touring show but they will sell you the secret to doing it for a few hundred dollars.

As the rural areas got strung with phone wires, the late 40s to mid 80s saw the heyday of the “phone promotion”. This was the main source of activity for my illusion show. A rural club or charity was booked and a crew of phone callers moved into town for a month and sold tickets through phone calls in a “day room” to local businesses and its “night room” to homes and local families. The last gasp of dying breath on this was in the late 80s. My long time agents, John Bevis and Ken Parker all faced the truth: Wal-Mart killed small town businesses and phone answering machines, cell phones and legal restrictions killed cold-calls to homes. I recall in the pre-internet age (1989)when Ken showed me his note-card file with calling records of a town ( called a “tap file” in phone room lingo) and only one third of some small town businesses were left after the rise of the big boxes such as Wal-Mart. Compounding this was the collapse of most Fraternal Organizations. Today you can look at the declining memberships of the Elks, Moose, Masons, Boy Scouts and see how our ideas of “community” have shifted from face-to-face interaction to social media!

My point is that these venues and performing opportunities for a lightly capitalized illusion, self-promoted and independent touring show no longer exist.

I have heard that the big money shows such as Ringling now use E-mail lists and their name-recognition along with splashy video clips in their E-Mail to sell tickets on-line to their smaller tier of traveling attractions (Mickey’s Magic Show etc). Whereas, radio, TV, newspapers and print media posters were the primary and expensive and inefficient method of advertising, now E-mail is free. But you have to have the list and the name recognition and the money.

It is easy to see oneself as a victim and blame others or get into mental depression and self-pity. The fact is that show business is a very limited business and is often at the mercy of conditions beyond the control of all parties. Will Rock, was a great showman and he tried it for a few years , in the late 30s, with Thurston’s brother’s show and then threw in the towel and spent his remaining years working for a dry-cleaners. Raymond Sugden was said to be a great performer. He signed a 10 year contract with Howard Thurston and performed under the name of Tampa - England's Court Magician. The timing was wrong. Talkies were in, vaudeville was on the way out, and the Great Depression had arrived.

The cultural mindset of America has been greatly influenced by the mythological Calvinist-Puritan work ethic: “the cream rises to the top” and “hard work and talent always are rewarded”. This is overlaid with the myth found in the Horatio Alger “Rags to Riches” stories which were so popular in the late 1800s. “Anyone can get rich, famous and successful is you work hard enough. This is America!” When both of these myths are severely challenged by existential reality, social rage and anger result along with political unrest.

Culturally, Americans try to find who publicly denies the holy myths which were supposed to work for them. The search for the “guilty” is both public and noisy. On one side, a cacophony of screams into the radio microphone: “It’s the illegal immigrants. It’s the unions. It’s all those lazy and stupid people who want something for nothing. It’s…” Fill in the blanks with racial slurs and what I don’t have to tell you. On the other side: “It’s the rich. It’s Wall Street. It’s the Far Right. Its the Bankers. It’s the …”

In a country without a common ethnicity and religion, we are only bound together by economics and an ill defined and individual and flexible idea of liberty and freedom. That is not much to hang unity upon.

In the last few years, I have come to appreciate an old bumper sticker that I saw on an old rusted-out car years ago in Orlando. It said, “Since I gave up hope, I feel so much better!”

Recently I have beaten my head against the wall until it is bloody and I am just flat tired. Younger, brighter and fresher minds may find an easier way to make money in magic. I am old and worn out. I have been selling myself for far too long. Churchill once defined insanity as “Doing the identical thing over and over again and each time expecting a different result”. I am at the point where I know that I am not insane and I simply don’t have a clue as to what else to do and I no longer want to do the same thing over and over again. I will continue to perform and mentor, write, discuss, create on the cheap, do shows if they drop in my lap, sub-teach and do radio. It could be worse…

There comes a time to stop believing in myths and face reality. Arthur Miller put these words in the mouth of Charlie as a eulogy for the ill-fated Willy Loman, a man who never could face reality, in Death of a Salesman “A salesman is got to dream, boy. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. . .” I don’t think that formula works anymore.

Famulus newsletter

The ring website

Followers

Blog Archive

Contributors

Ring 170 - The Bev Bergeron Ring (I.B.M.)'s Fan Box

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

2012-03 Famulus newsletter

2012-03 From the Editor

2012-03 Ring Report

Monday, March 12, 2012

2012-03 Annual Flea Market/Auction

2012-03 Dennis' Deliberations