2013-08 Dennis' Deliberations

“haud ignota loquor”  Virgil‘s Aeneid, 2.91. 

Female illusionist, Ariann Black had a disastrous performance on America’s Got Talent. She and her assistants accidently exposed Jim Steinmeyer’s “Interlude” Illusion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SFOU2p8Gq4   Black has been attempting to mystify people with magic for the last twenty years.  She’s been mostly unsuccessful at imbedding herself into the  top tier in the Vegas magic scene .Her own show on the strip seemed to fail, she reinventing her show on the strip, which seemed to fail again, she was another magician’s opening act, and then a part in Splash… And now at age 45, I think that you can see the pattern.  I believe that she does have talent but has not been able to translate it and her good looks into the shinning career she seems to want.  It could be that the times and Vegas conditions are just not right.  For all the talent that the late Peter Reveen had, he just never quite succeeded as an illusionist. Both he and Black had their best chance at being top acts in the 80s.

This latest disaster with Ariann Black and The Interlude may have pulled the final curtain  on her attempt at being a star Vegas Illusionist. As sarcastic and snotty as Howard Stern and the rest of the AGT panel, they seemed baffled at trying to understand what she was trying to do.  That means her act was not bad. It was not even good enough to be just “bad”.

Much of the problem is the Illusion she was trying to present, Jim Steinmeyer’s Interlude. 

No one has greater respect for Jim Steinmeyer than I do. He is the single most prolific creator of illusions in the last quarter of the 20^th century and he continues to create. But like most thinkers and inventors, not everything he creates is great. One great illusion he created was the Origami Box, another is Modern Art. It virtually made Harbin’s Zig-Zag obsolete.

A clever but not spectacular Steinmeyer illusion is “Interlude”.  It is where a magician steps into an upright frame and is covered in the middle and a woman crawls through his body.  It is another one of Steinmeyer’s feeble puzzles like about 50% of what he creates. I am not a big fan of his “Osmosis”. It is too much box and too little plot. “Op Art” leaves me flat also. “Incubus” is a waste of materials.  But Steinmeyer has enough ingenious creations that he deserves every honor he gets.

P.T. Selbit (P.T. Tibbles) , the genius of the early part of the century, also had a ratio of failures.  I think that like Selbit, many magicians performed his lesser illusions out of respect rather than merit. Both Virgil and Levant abandoned Selbit’s “Mighty Cheese”.  It was a novel idea with a giant two-foot high cheese wheel (cylinder) which could not be turned over by a group of spectators.  The secret was a large internal gyroscope which was spun to high speeds by an external electric motor or bicycle method.  Like all gyroscopes, it resisted any forced movement through its vertical plane of rotation. For all you math geeks, like me, its used Precession. It is is a change in the orientation of the rotational axis of a rotating body. It can be defined as a change in direction of the rotation axis in which the second Euler angle (nutation) is constant. In physics, there are two types of precession: torque-free and torque-induced. Enough of that!  A gyroscope can be mysterious and I am sure it was more so at the beginning of the 20^th century and Selbit’s audiences.  But a puzzle is not a magic trick.

“Interlude” is just not that great of a magic trick. The only way the Interlude sort of works is with a virile male in the box and a gorgeous female passing through such as Charlotte Pendragon and Joanne Spina. Siegfried and Roy added a surprise ending by backing it up to a Million Dollar Mystery mirror tube and producing a black panther out of Roy’s middle.

The illusion always seems to take on  a sexual metaphor. (Not to get too Freudian, here)   It has a tinge of masochism-domination as the guy gets penetrated by the female, For some this must be a male and female fantasy. I will just leave this line of commentary at that point.

“Interlude” works as a throw-away for a big box show when used this way.  Copperfield helped his performance with the remote controlled rotator. The Pendragons were all beef and skin. The boxes were irrelevant except as shock and awe.

One other performance I saw with it had merit. It may have been Hirakowa ( The guy in Honolulu with the hotel dinner show) http://www.magicofpolynesia.com/

I seem to recall that his Interlude split in two down the middle! .  It was themed in bamboo with vines and at the end were tiki torches that he held on to as he was sacrificed by an island  shaman to have a slender Hawaiian Goddess pass through his heart.  It clam-shelled open  to let him in and then closed. The plot dominated the trick, as it probably should with this illusion.

But for me and most others to do this effect would come off as kinky… Ah,  the pain of growing old ( and knowing it)  Apparently  Ariann is clueless about her age. She has increasingly become garish in her looks and was spooky on the AGT clip…harsh and old. She is not aging as well as Heather Locklear, who is also getting ragged.  Ariann, like Melinda, was very attractive in her youth and still appealing but now in a different way.   Like Melinda, she needs to take a different career path and business model.  What she is doing is not working.

Dennis