2008-07 Dennis' Deliberations

Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem - Horace, Odes, book II, poem III-

With gasoline approaching the price of whiskey, it is ironic that we already are pouring 10% cheap whiskey into our gas tanks! It is called “ethanol”.
I just filled up my little gas sipper, a Hyundai Tucson, and the bill was sixty bucks. The total impact hasn’t hit us yet but fuel costs are bound to upset the typical traveling magic business. For the performer that works a wide area and does “hundred milers”, the fuel costs will be cutting heavily into the profits. Raising your rates is called, “inflation” and everything fuel related will be rising if companies want to stay in business. All of this assumes that the consumer, the buyer, will still want to pay the higher costs or even have the money to spend. Any downturn in spending in our consumer driven economy will result in job losses and a decline of business and a Recession/Depression. A Recession is when your neighbor is out of work, a Depression is when you are out of work.

One illusion performer told me from a truck stop in Colorado that he had just put $800 worth of diesel in his tanks. I commented, “Wow, 800 bucks for a fill-up!” His response was, “Fill up? Heck, I just put in what my card would allow me to buy! It was only about two thirds of a fuel load!”

In the live-show business remember that all those folks that filled the seats in the shows have to also use fuel to get to the show place. Are they going to want to spend the gas money to go see your show? Are they even going to be in the mood to want to see your show? In 1974 following the October ‘73 Yom Kipper War with Israel, the foreign oil producers decided to punish the United States for aiding Israel so they cut off oil shipments. By early 1974 long lines appeared at gas pumps and slowly the gasoline supplies dried up and American motor traffic came to a grinding halt for a few weeks. I played my magic show in Eastern North Carolina and had to travel from Charlotte, in the central part of the state. The trip would require a fill up and I was unsure if I could get the gas to get back home so I borrowed some Jerry cans (named after the Germans who developed and used them in World War Two) from the TV mobile unit for Jefferson Productions where I worked. I arranged for all three to be filled outside of the typical gas line by the owner of a gas station, whose son-in-law was a friend and worked with me.

We carried the cans, with my props, in my utility trailer and they enabled me to make it back home. I felt like a 1942 Doolittle Raider squeezing out every ounce of fuel from spare gas cans as they tried to make it across the China Sea after their Tokyo bombing Raid. Most of them crashed their B-25s after running out of fuel. I made it home but I was sucking fumes as they say in the aviation business.

During that gas crisis in 1974, when fuel was unavailable, Magic Legend Ron Urban generated a unique idea. I saw his advertising materials. He was planning to take out his illusion show using Amtrak! He planned to play towns along the route. It was a brilliant strategy and may have worked in the days of Keller and the early years of Thurston. The major problem would have been that the people with the tickets lived mostly in Suburbia and also needed gas to get to see his show. The other fact was that the country went into a Recession and entertainment dollars for live shows evaporated. Before trucks, Thurston used horse and wagons to get his props from the train station to the theater. In most towns that was a short distance. It was only a little before World War One that trucks came into general use in most places. We still honor the horse and wagon days with the union named, “The Teamsters”. When I moved to Orlando in 1975 there was a small office near the Train Station. It was called, “Orlando Cartage” and their job was to “break bulk” on railcars and take care of the small freight packages on the rail platform and deliver it to you. They were a part of the old Railway Express Agency (REA) that most old timers like me will recall in the years before UPS and FedEx. Abbotts used to advertise all their illusions as F.O.B. through R.E.A. (Freight on Board – means “shipping charges collect on receipt”)

My gut feeling is that we are headed into a Stagflation Recession. This is where inflation continues to drive up prices of manufactured goods and services. But just as prices are rising, people are being laid off and unemployment rises as the economy spirals downward in stagnation. The $1,160 stimulus check that Cindy and I got went directly to pay for long over due dental work. Maybe I should have bought Bear Sterns stock? I wonder how many of the remaining checks will end up in gas tanks for people driving to work? I don’t think many of the stimulus checks will be used for tickets to see the latest magic road show.

The real sadness is that all those dollar values that Baby-Boomers socked away in 401Ks and IRAs for their retirement are now plunging in real value! Was the whole IRA scheme a plot by Big Money on Wall Street (ERISA 1974!) to con you out of your retirement savings? At least Social Security is indexed to Inflation and adjusted upward. I don’t trust Wall Street anymore than I trust Government. In fact, I trust Wall Street even less because I can’t vote them out! Recently, since the 1980s, Wall Street has been buying the government they want so they can do what they want. I should say, they have been paying government to stay away from them.

You need to hope that your IRA has beaten the underlying rate of inflation by at least 7 to 10 percent. If it has, please contact me. I want to be your agent! You need to be recognized as the leading financial and stock market genius. You need to replace, “Baldy the Screaming Manic” in the evenings on CNBC or any of the Fox Noise Network Financial idiots. You are better than Warren Buffett! Your collection of quality collectable magic props probably had appreciated more than your “buy and hold” IRA! In fact, I guarantee you that they have!

There is a glimmer of hope and that comes from this old guy remembering history! Just about the time of the original 70s gas crunch, a new breeze blew through magic. The Magician with Bill Bixby appeared on NBC primetime and Doug Henning opened on Broadway. Realize that all the while the original Broadway “Magic Show” was playing at The Cort Theater; the country was in a horrible inflation and flat economy. Doug’s bell-bottoms and rainbow shirts were the last gasp of the fun time Disco era that New York audiences demanded. Also David Copperfield first appeared on the TV magic scene in the late 70s with the help of Freddy Silverman and Joe Cates.

I am optimistic that people will crave escape and entertainment during hard times just as they did in the 1930s when Hollywood boomed. The key is to figure out just what they will want. Will it be a new round of mega-illusionists who move National Monuments? Will it be the Sadomasochism of a Criss Angel or the Evil-Knievel street-magic mysticism of David Blaine? Or will it be some yet to be seen superstar?

I am laying my bets on a totally new style of magic. It will be intimate but with the help of eye-cams visible in the largest theater/stadium. It will be a kind of mentalism, motivation, hypnotism, close-up, good feeling shamanism. No cards, no coins, no typical props. You will be mystified but not fooled (think about that statement!) This new magic will be immune from You-Tube exposure and anyone trying to discredit it will be greeted by most fans with distain because the presenter will be loveable and not challenging anyone’s intellect. The “tricks” will be object lessons. Fans of this new magician will have good things happen to them: they will lose weight, stop smoking, work their way out of debt and make friendships and restore relationships and experience new fun in their lives. It may be a tool to restore imagination. Not many modern people have much of that anymore.

In someway, Jeff McBride seems headed in that direction-perhaps. I supposed it is not coincidence that Eugene Burger is an academic theologian. At this point, I am not into enjoying McBride but something intrigues me about his approach. LeGrand David has another “exposure immune” form of magical entertainment. Almost everyone who goes to the show loves it and marvels and no one would put up a You-Tube site exposing anything they do. LeGrand David is an experience and not just a magic show. It is, however, an experience from the past that “artsy” Boston enjoys and would not succeed anywhere else. I use it only as an example of magic that is immune from You Tube revelations because it comes with no challenge to find its secret. The secret is the production itself.


This new “magic” will be a support and adjunct to religion yet not compete or oppose it. Prior to the 1860s there was no understanding of a separation between “magic” and “religion” and that is why people feared magicians. With the rise of modernity and the scientific view of cause an effect, most people dismissed the “supernatural on demand” and enjoyed magic and illusions as an amusement without superstition. The future for human civilization may not have such a simple dualistic view of the universe.

The coming years will see a return to a more unified view of science and mystery, the spiritual and the physical. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has yet to actually penetrate into the minds of the general public. Eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and eigenspaces may end up in everyone’s understanding of what they experience as finite human beings.

Magic is on the edge of a big change. We will never solve the energy crisis by the old values of drill, refine and burn. Magic won’t make it into the 21st century with only cards, silks, die boxes, change bags and boxes to dissect ladies. Those will probably exist forever in the routines of hobbyist performers, but they will not be in the routines of the next magic superstar. –neither will: The Zig Zag, The Origami Box, Modern Art and every familiar illusion; the principles are eternal, the look, presentation and style are not.

The future superstar will be the smart magician who can see what people want in magic entertainment in the future and fill that need!

Dennis Phillips