The Sweet Smell of Magic
/[Note: This post didn’t publish when it was scheduled to, for some reason. To give this post it’s due, I’ll wait another 24 hours to publish the final post of the week on Saturday morning.]
For a time, in New York City, I lived in a small studio apartment.
One time, my friend came to visit me and when he came inside, he noticed an aroma and said, “What are you cooking?” Big inhale. “Beef stew?”
Now, what actually happened was that a few minutes before he had come over, I had shit up my bathroom something fierce and the smell had permeated the small apartment.
Because he was walking into an apartment (and not directly into the bathroom) the smell was out of context. So he mistook the smell of my hot diarrhea for the wafting aroma of a hearty beef stew.
After I informed him what he was really inhaling, he started gagging and spit-up in the kitchen sink.
Why am I telling you this? To make your mouth water? To get your dicks hard?
No. I’m poisoning your mind with this story because it’s something I think of often.
I think of it when I’m having a discussion with someone like this:
Them: Yeah, it’s cool. They can feel your heartbeat through a pencil.
Me: Ah, interesting. My issue with tricks like this is that it’s just so easy to find on google with the most obvious search. If they google heartbeat pencil magic, they’re going to find a link directly where to buy it. Not that they’re going to buy it. But still. Just finding it like that is going to make it feel less special.
Them: Yeah, but, I mean… what can you do? As long as they’re entertained and enjoy the trick, I don’t worry about what they do after.
To me, this attitude feels like, “Hey, as long as they enjoyed the smell of the beef stew for a moment, I don’t care if they realize it’s shit later.”
This feels like giving up.
And it feels like a misunderstanding of what the performance of magic should be.
I think it’s a mistake to think of a magic trick as being something with a traditional story structure.
This is not how a magic trick works.
What we think of as the “climax” of a magic trick isn’t where the trick ends, it’s where it begins.
Think of a magic trick like a campfire. When building a fire, you clear out a little space; you go and gather tinder, kindling, and some larger pieces of firewood; you pile up the tinder; you build up the kindling; you light the tinder; you blow on it; you add the firewood; and now you have a fire. And that fire can burn for a long time, if you’ve set things up correctly.
But the preparation leading up to the fire is not the fire. And the preparation leading up to the magic is not the magic.
If you have a trick that falls apart after a little thought by the spectator, or the most basic google search, it’s like having a fire that fades right after you light it. Why bother?
If your goal is just to get to the finish line without getting caught, you can’t then be bothered that nobody really cares too much about what you just showed them, and that it’s soon forgotten.
But if you're showing someone a trick to give them some sort of feeling, then you’re going to want to take the extra steps to try and make that feeling durable. To try to remove “Easy Answers” so they can’t just logic their way out of the feeling. And to search for more obscure effects, or find ways to camouflage popular ones, so they can’t just search it online and say to themselves, “Ah, that was nothing special. It’s just something he bought online.”
Otherwise, you’re really just serving them this…
[See Also: A Story With No End}