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Science tricks to impress/distract your family

at 8:44 am • •

This morning, NPR brought on Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, of the depressingly small House Civility Caucus, to offer advice on how to defuse the now-traditional Thanksgiving political spat. As you might suspect, given the Civility Caucus' record of success, this was not the world's most helpful interview.

Probably the best bit of advice Congresswoman Capito had was to offer up a distraction when things get too tense. "It may be the perfect time to bring in dessert, she says, or to announce that someone should take the family dog out for a walk."

I've got a better suggestion. Every year, Richard Wiseman releases a set of easy-to-do and highly impressive science stunts that you can perform using things you probably already have around the house.

My suggestion: Combine Capito's awkward segue with Wiseman's awesome tricks. Not only will you actually get your family focused on a new topic, they might even be delighted enough that they decide to ignore the fact that you just passive-aggressived them out of a heated debate. Happy holidays!

Teller working on stage production of The Exorcist

at 8:02 am • •

Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) is working on a stage adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Teller's got an eclectic, less-well-known scholarly/serious bent, having contributed to peer-reviewed work on the neuroscience of magic as well as directing an acclaimed performance of Macbeth. From the early notes, it sounds like this adaptation will play off Teller's advocacy for atheism.

Unlike William Friedkin’s film of The Exorcist (which isn’t anywhere near the best film of all time, just for the record), this play will “focus on the psychological aspects and questions of faith.” At least, that’s according to Ken Novice, the MD of New York’s Geffen Playhouse, where the play will premiere in July 2012. I can see that the film is at least supposed to focus on those same things, and when it works, it’s because it does...

Re the above quotation, Chelsea writes, "I'm the communications coordinator at the Geffen Playhouse, and while I appreciate your recent post on our upcoming production of The Exorcist, there are a few factual errors. First, the Geffen Playhouse is in Los Angeles. Second, Teller is helping out with some of the special effects for the play, but he is not one of the producers nor is he 'bringing the play to the stage.' The Geffen Playhouse is producing the show, John Doyle is directing the show and John Pielmeier is writing the show."

(via The Mary Sue)

Inquisitor's Apprentice: tenement sorcerers versus the robber barons in an alternate Gilded Age New York

at 6:05 am • •

Chris Moriarty's The Inquisitor's Apprentice is the first volume in a fantastic new historical young adult series that takes place in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York where magic is the key to power and the infamous robber-barons of the age have cornered the market on enchantment and use their power to deprive hardworking poor immigrants of their self-reliance. Sasha Kessler is the 13-year-old hero of the tale, a tenement-dwelling kid who lives with his hardworking parents, his anarchist-wiccan actor uncle, his sister, and his Kabbalist rabbi grandfather. On the other side of their one-room flat live a married couple who sew shirtwaists with every hour they can wring from their days, saving to bring their family over from the pogroms in the old country.

Sasha's life is upended one day when he finds that he can see magic, and has the misfortune to demonstrate this ability in front of a crowd at a furtive magic Jewish bakery, in full sight of an Inquistor, one of the special police officers charged with regulating magic in New York. In short order, Sasha is inducted into the ranks of the Inquisitors, assigned to apprentice to the enigmatic and notorious Inspector Wolf, along with his co-apprentice, a girl from the famous society family, the Astrals (a pun on the Astors).

So begins Sasha's tale, which takes him on the trail of a dybbuk that tried to assassinate Thomas Edison while the inventor was visiting JP Morgaunt, the robber baron who has taken control of New York's magical world. This trail leads through the fraught racial relations in New York, to kung-fu lessons with the Immortals who run Chinatown, to Coney Island and Harry Houdini, and a slew of characters and settings that are marvellously remade as loci of magic and mystery.

Moriarty's plotting is just fantastic, and the story itself manages to tackle difficult issues of race and class and politics without ever slowing down. Period ink illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer complete the package, giving the whole thing a deceptively lightweight, pulpy feel. It's a great magic trick, a piece of misdirection that makes a book that's full of weighty material zip along like a quick adventure tale. This is one of those incredibly promising first volumes that makes you hope that the writer's got plenty more where it came from.

The Inquisitor's Apprentice

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Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour: exploring magic's roots in China, India and Egypt

at 5:47 am • •

We just watched Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour, their 2003 documentary on traditional magic in China, India and Egypt, and really enjoyed it. Penn and Teller resolve to track down performers who are still doing the street magic that inspired western magicians in years gone by -- the Indian Rope Trick, the Egyptian Gali Gali men with their cups and balls, and Chinese classics like the mask trick and the glass bowls trick.

Each segment is very self-contained, and full of the brash Penn humor and Harpo Marx Teller mischief that they're known for. There's a bit of general history and cultural overview in each nation, but the emphasis is always on magic and its odd history in each nation -- Mao's purge of street magicians, the hieroglyphs that (may) depict an ancient cup-and-balls routine, the colonial soldier who faked evidence of the Indian rope trick.

But where the video shines is in the intimate views of the lives of the magicians and their families in the countries that P&T visit -- a village filled with traditional magicians in China, a slum known for magicians in Calcutta, the descendant of Luxor Gali-Gali, an Egyptian magician who played the Ed Sullivan show and attained fame in Vegas.

The documentary left me with a sense of the overall oddity of devoting your life to magic, and the strange ways that magicians all over the world, and all through time, are bound together by this craft of trickery and illusion. Teller has a moment where he addresses the camera at some length on the nature of the linking rings and the cultural differences in the way that it's transformed that is one of the most interesting bits of video I've ever seen.

Oh, and the Crosby and Hope-style title animation and themesong are a hoot.

Mat Ricardo at Edinburgh Fringe

at 2:21 am • •

Funny juggler/conjuror Mat Ricardo sez, "Remember last year when I staged a one-man show at the Edinburgh festival, asking if - after 25 years of touring, performing and slowly going mad - I should continue doing my job as a juggler and comedian? Remember how I discussed it with the audience and got their advice during each show? Well - the results are in - the show was a massive success and I got the best reviews of my career (Graham Linehan came, and called it 'Charming, funny and startling;). the feedback was literally unanimous that I should keep doing it. Hooray! The show transferred to a short London run earlier this year, which sold out, and I've been booked to perform it at a larger venue for the duration of the Edinburgh fringe, starting next Wednesday. The lesson here is simple - if you make something, then make it personal and meaningful. When you do a job that you love for a long time, as I have, it's easy to forget why you loved it in the first place. It's easy for it to become just a job, and that's what had happened to me - but writing and performing 'Three Balls and a New Suit' helped me remember, and now I love doing it as much as I ever have. Win!"

Teller explains the psychology of illusions

at 7:02 pm • •

HappySmurfday sez, "Without the assistance of Penn Jillette, Teller explains some of the psychology behind illusions."

Teller Speaks! (Thanks, HappySmurfday!)

Great aunt Kathleen was an automaton

at 10:42 am • •


How to Be a Retronaut reader Jimmy Anderson sent in photos and an account of his great aunt Kathleen, who toured the world hidden in the belly of an "automaton" exhibited by a showman called Professor Popjie. In the guise of the automaton, Jimmy's great aunt performed all manner of stunts (shaving a volunteer with a straight razor, flying a twin-prop plane), and eventually turned down a marriage proposal from the good professor.

Radiana, 1925 « HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT

Card flourishes and mystical poetry

at 10:49 pm • •

Here's YouTube user Scottmfreda doing delightful card-flourishes while reciting mystical poetry. He's a talented card mechanic and a pretty good poet! According to PeaceLove, he's also a fine painter and guitar and sitar player.

doing flourishes and magic to my its all in the mind poem (Thanks, PeaceLove!)

 

Derren Brown's Confessions of a Conjuror: funny memoir is also a meditation on attention, theatrics and psychology

at 1:13 am • •

Mentalist/magician Derren Brown's new memoir, Confessions of a Conjuror, is a very odd sort of book. Technically, it's a kind of autobiography, but what it really is is a kind of meandering shaggy dog story that presents narrative in the same way that a great conjuror presents a trick.

Brown begins by recounting a night from the start of his career, when he was performing close-up table magic at a restaurant in Bristol. He recounts in eidetic detail his nervous thought processes as he begins his work for the night, conjuring up the scene with language. And then, just as you think he's about to tell you about the trick he performs, he veers off into a meandering story about the effect that the smell of pink industrial soap and blue ink has on him, taking him back to his unhappy school days. This seems to just be a kind of stalling trick, but when Brown returns to the present day, you find that the anaecdote has a purpose, that it explains the way he approaches the performance he is about to give.

The description of the performance inches forward, and then, again, Brown wanders off the road to explore the hedges, more stories about his boyhood, about his personal habits, about the things he hates about himself, about his little compulsions, about his work habits. And so the story inches along, pushing forward just a nudge on the trick in the restaurant, then going for a long stroll around memory lane, and these asides take over the book, and they develop their own asides, in the form of sprawling, multi-page footnotes, and so forth, but each time you pop up one layer through the narrative, you discover that you've been informed of something vital to understanding the layer above it.

Brown is explaining how misdirection, attention, social dynamics, and dexterity combine to make a baffling effect out of a set of finger gymnastics. He's trying to unpick the thing that makes magic work -- and to explain why audiences and conjurors put up with one another, and even seek each other out. Along the way, he is, by turns, funny, gross, embarrassing, informative, thought-provoking, and even infuriating. It's not so much a story as a performance on paper, and it's told with great showman's instincts. What's more, even the most seemingly self-indulgent material (a detailed explanation of Brown's career in nose-picking, for example) pays off eventually.

It's a lovely kind of magic trick in book form -- the kind of thing that shows you exactly how it's done, but manages to amaze, anyway. Brown is one of my favorite magic performers, ranking with Penn and Teller in my view, and the experience of reading Confessions is, improbably and wonderfully, much like going to a Brown stage show.

There's an unabridged audio edition coming out on Oct 28 as well -- read by Brown, which should be a treat, as he has a great stage voice, and I can imagine he'd be great narrating this material.

Confessions of a Conjuror

Simon Drake's House of Magic: great magic cabaret in London

at 6:52 am • •


Last weekend, my lovely wife surprised me with a birthday trip to Simon Drake's House of Magic in south London -- a fantastic night out of magic cabaret in a house chock full of funny, spooky tchotchkes and whatnot. There's slightly rude haunted cellar tours with a vampy vampiress, cold readings, magic pinball, truly outstanding close-up card/coin magic during dinner, and a fantastic stage magic show (I got to be the audience volunteer and got my hand sawed off). Between the pre-show warmups, the opening act (a surprise performance by the screamingly funny Dr Adam "London Underground" Kay) and the main event, we didn't get out until 1230 in the morning, and were delighted by the entire evening.

Simon Drake's House of Magic

Penn Jillette on artistic satisfaction and magic

at 10:34 pm • •

Here's a fun and revealing interview with Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller), talking about the artistic satisfaction he gets from doing the kind of magic he does, and the working relationship he has with his longtime business and performance partner, Teller. Penn and Teller are in London for their first show here in more than a decade (I've got tickets to see them tonight -- an early birthday pressie from my wife!).
He couldn't care less what they think. "I have always hated magic," he says. "I have always hated the basic undercurrent of magic which Jerry Seinfeld put best when he said: 'All magic is "Here's a quarter, now it's gone. You're a jerk. Now it's back. You're an idiot. Show's over".' I never wanted to grow up to be a magician. It was never my goal." He would rather have been a rock star, he says, but the business seemed already saturated with extraordinarily talented people. "So my thinking was, and I will say this outright, music is full of people I absolutely love. I don't have a chance. They are all better than me. Magic has, ooh, nobody in it that I like." He rocks back in his chair, cackling. "This is the field for me!"

Everything about Penn and Teller seems to defy conventional wisdom. Here are two men who value the world of ideas: Penn counts Bob Dylan, Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins among his friends; when in New York, Teller has tea with Sondheim. And yet they have taken up residence in perhaps the most mindless town in the United States. They are creatively restless: in addition to their show, their current projects include producing a film about "the secret technology that was probably behind Vermeer's work", directing an off-Broadway play (Teller), and writing a book about atheism (Penn). But they have signed up to a deal that compels them to perform a show in the same hotel, at the same time, night after night.

Penn and Teller interview (via Kottke)

BigThink videos: Penn Jillette and Dan Ariely

at 1:21 pm • •

A couple of great videos from BigThink. First, Penn Jillette on how reading the great religious texts will make you into an atheist, the future of magic, and how he and Teller work together.

Next, behavioral economist Dan Ariely covers a lot of material from his new book, The Upside of Irrationality, including the irrational math of online dating sites; the Ikea Effect (overvaluing things we make); and the irrationality of many businesses.

(Thanks, Colin!)

Mat Ricardo one-man show in London and Edinburgh

at 5:47 am • •

Mat Ricardo sez, "For the last 23 years I've been touring the world as a comedy variety performer, but the industry I love is all but dead in my native UK, so I'm at a bit of a career crossroads. So - I'm doing my first (and perhaps last) one man show at this years Edinburgh Festival, to try to determine what I do with the rest of my life. Do I continue as a performer, or do I find a job that will satisfy me artistically while letting me see my wife and friends more than once a month? I'll let my audience help me decide. MAT RICARDO: THREE BALLS AND A GOOD SUIT is the show. I'm doing two nights of previews at the Deptford Albany London, and then I'm at the Edinburgh festival."

The Boneshaker: magic, latter-day Bradburian novel for young adults

at 10:05 am • •

Kate Milford's debut YA novel The Boneshaker (not to be confused with Cherie Priest's excellent, award-nominated novel of the same name) is a fine, darkly magical story set in turn-of-the-20th-century Missouri, in a small and haunted town called Arcane. It's the story of thirteen year old Natalie Minks, the daughter of a gifted mechanic, and what happens when a mysterious carnival comes to town. Doctor Jake Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Magic Show isn't right. There's something spooky about how the snake-oil peddlar can make the automata in Natalie's Pa's shop work, and the pitchmen who perform phrenology and amber therapy are sinister in the extreme (and then there's the acrobatic jester in motley who scampers over the carny on the guy-wires, wearing a darkly hilarious clay mask from which malevolent eyes peer).

Boneshaker is filled the the rich Bradbury stuff, that haunting and deliciously spooky stuff that lives in the shadows and ride through the land on creaking wagons with dusty brocade curtains. The mystery of the carny quickly turns grim and urgent, as Natalie realizes that the whole town is in danger, including her ailing mother, and discovers that only she can save the town. But first, she has to solve the riddle of the carny, of the abandoned nearby ghost-town at the crossroads, of the ancient Civil War vet who beat the devil with his guitar there before she was born, of the mysterious town benefactor who seems to know everything but only talks in circles.

Oh, and she has to learn to ride the bizarre boneshaker bike she talked her father into rescuing off a scrapheap and rebuilding with her.

Filled with heart-racing suspense and delicious mystery, Boneshaker is a book a kid (or a grownup) could fall in love with, the kind of thing that might fill a summer's worth of bedtime stories, or a stolen afternoon reading in the park.

The Boneshaker

Magic trick reverso: putting the tablecloth back on the table!

at 1:58 am • •

Magician Mat Ricardo writes in regarding this morning's post showing a motorcycle (seemingly) pulling the tablecloth out from beneath a very long table's-worth of place settings: "Here's what I do - for 20 years-ish I've been finishing nmy cabaret act by putting the tablecloth back on the table, underneath all the stuff. Took me years to invent, and I'm the only person in the world performing this trick. Maybe I need to get out more, but what can I say - it's a living!"

You can see the gag around 2:15 in the video, but it's well worth watching the whole thing. I was gutted to learn that I missed Mat last weekend when I took the kid down to Covent Garden in London to see the performers, but I'm looking forward to catching his act next time we head down.

Mat Ricardo showreel (Thanks, Mat!)

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