The Internet is a Horrible Horrible Place

shanecobalt:

A lot of people complain (myself included at times) that younger magicians don’t get books, or read, or study the good stuff. But the truth is, recently A LOT of the good stuff has gone out of print!

The Vernon Chronicles, Inner Card Trilogy, Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic, are all more difficult…

I actually find that the opposite is true.  I’ve found a lot of rare Marlo manuscripts that are actually readily available.  You just have to know where to look…

One of the problems I had for a while is that I assumed I could find everything on the internet, but then somebody reminded me that for years before everything was online, there had to be other ways to get books.

This is not to say that they’re cheap, but difficult-to-find books happen to congregate in places other than chat rooms and message boards.

Just some storyboards…

Greetings magician and movie friends of the internet:

Funding for my short film has proved successful (yaaay)!  I just want to extend a more personal thank you to those of you who follow this series of inane pseudo-essays (the term “blog” seems like a bit of a stretch) who backed the project.  It really means the world to me and I truly could not have done it without you.

Dammit, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry…

I know nobody has any reason to give money to some asshole on the internet, but this asshole is super appreciative and so I promise everyone that I won’t spend the entire budget on beer and hookers.

But in all seriousness, I’m slated to fly back to NOLA very soon with my assistant and shoot these scenes, so expect some passionate exhortations about the triumphs and woes of filming on a tiny budget and how only Ed Marlo could have prepared me for doing it.

So thank you all again.

If anyone wants any more info about the film, you can still check out the Kickstarter page.

Let the record reflect that this video originated some time ago with neitherblindnorsilly.

thebottompalm:

MOST EXCELLENT

fuckyeahactionpalm:

In honor of Krenzel.

Not even a retarded person.

In honor of Krenzel.

Not even a retarded person.

Strange… how did this video get here?

Dear everybody who may or may not read this.  The time has finally arrived…

…for me to ask for money.

I’m currently working on a short film that I wrote that’s part 1 of a 3-parter and I’ve started a Kickstarter page for it:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1004742272/part-1-the-card-game

It’s super low-budget and so far the funds for it have come out of my own pocket, but I am not finished and to finish, I’m going to need some cash.

I figure that since it’s about a poker game, there may at least be some loose connection to the shit I write about here and therefore possibly some loose interest.

So check out the page and if you’re interested in seeing the finished film, consider donating whatever you can.  I’ll love you forever.

Let the record reflect that despite not being mentioned in the previous post, he’s still better than all of you combined.

I keep coming back to Robert Bresson.  That French motherfucker (my apologies to any French readers*) haunts my motherfucking dreams like a fromage-loving Jansenist Freddy Kruger.  I mean, have you ever watched his movies?  Shit yeah, that’s the good stuff.  If religion ever did anything good, it was in the art world.  If I could be deluded and make shit as good as Bresson’s films, I’d conk myself out with a hammer and hope to white Jesus that some Catholics found me and indoctrinated me.  Then oh baby…

But seeing as I’m about as god-fearing as the Darwin bumper sticker on my gay lover’s ass**, I’ll just watch Bresson’s films and appreciate them for their unflinching artistry.

Bresson was a dude who knew what he fucking wanted.  He only made 13 feature-length films over his lifespan, but they are perhaps the most influential films, stylistically, in the entire history of the medium.  He managed to create such an outstanding oeuvre through painstaking attention to detail.

See, Bresson’s formal training was as a painter.  Thusly, he created his films as if they were paintings.  Think of a painter like Paul Cézanne.  That’s who the fuck Bresson was.  The Cézanne of the film world.  

In his paintings, Cézanne demonstrates such careful attention to color, composition, shape, etc. as to be as in command of the painting as if it were an extension of his own body.  They are certainly stylized—not meant to be photorealistic—but they approach a level of craft unlike anything of their time period.  

But this seems natural for a painter.  One would never look at a painting and see a big white spot that the painter “just forgot about.”  Everything is composed for a reason.  Every brushstroke has a purpose—it was put there by a conscious person.

And film should be no different.  Whereas some filmmakers might be more lax with what they show, Bresson makes no arbitrary decisions. Everything has double or triple meaning. Everything.  The way that guy just put down that glass? Yes. The number of steps that donkey just took? Hell yes.  The fucking sound levels of the footsteps of that homeless guy? I shit you not.

There’s something strangely utilitarian about the way his work is constructed. Here’s a little pseudo-history lesson: The art world went through a revolution in the mid-1800’s. Before the introduction of photography, if I wanted to take your picture—that is, take a snapshot of you as you were—I would have to paint your portrait.  The camera changes that.  Now, all of a sudden, where once artists would spend their entire lives perfecting the tools of the craft—composition, lighting perspective—we now see the advent of expressionism, impressionism, the burgeoning of abstract art; and so painting transitions from being this utilitarian craft, to a purely aesthetic medium, that while beautiful, serves no functional purpose.

Ah, but now painting can focus on evoking something.  The brushstrokes mean something.  This isn’t to say that it never meant anything—human expression did exist before the 1800’s (I think).  But we’ve reached a point where painters can focus purely on expression if it so suits them.

The thing is, the other art forms reach this point also, not all in the same overt game-changing way (and in my opinion, this is where everything started to go downhill, but I’ll get to that later).  

With Bresson, we’re getting something that is so finely crafted—so precise—that it seems like it was made by an industrial designer, not a filmmaker.  Looking at the history of art (in which I am by no means an expert), a lot of what appears to be historical art is really all just utilitarian art: chairs, goblets, architecture, fertility statues, maps, etc.  The only time we really seem to get art for art’s sake is in churches: poetry, ceilings, music (and even then it’s as a tribute to some invisible asshole so he won’t fuck you in the ass with his flaming dick).

So then, I mean, it kind of begs the question to me: is “fine” art really now just a religion?  Like, looking at what’s passed off as “good” art I see no functional purpose, a very fundamentally-lacking degree of craftsmanship.  It’s basically just pooped (shitted? shit? shitted? shat?) out to appease the human gods.  

And really, the artist’s job has mainly migrated to pointing to things.  Nobody really makes anything. Without getting into a philosophical discussion (I fucking hate those) about how nothing is really created in a geological sense, art just seems to be taking things that other people make and sticking them on a wall.

But this isn’t a hissy-fit about the art world (or at least it didn’t start that way).  What I’m really quite interested in is how we use craft-based media to, in effect, ask questions.

So in the case of card tricks (because I had to eventually), how does the physical act of the craft (or whatever we want to call it) create what magicians ideally want going through the audience’s mind?  I mean, does it at all?

Examining the Bressonian model, we see formal concepts such as duration, montage, sound design, or the way lines are delivered being used in a strict sense to create the psychological space that the audience experiences when they watch the film.

One rarely sees magicians discussing this.  They certainly hypothesize, wildly and generally, but there is little in the way of narrowing in on the actual formal tools.  Certainly we have sleight of hand but as I’m sure I’ve said before (I won’t actually check—that would involve going back and reading what I’ve written), sleight of hand is a blunt object meant for shoving the metal spike that is the allegedly magical effect into somebody’s brain.  The sleight is not the effect.  The sleight is never the effect.  If the sleight is the effect, then going to the movies is staring at a camera for two hours.

We have something much more potent at our disposal and that is subtlety.  Subtlety trumps sleights any day of the fucking week, however we run into the problem that while we can identify the mechanical aspects of sleights that are at work, subtlety is much more… elusive.

I don’t know, how about an example.  Without being too specific, I was sessioning with SR recently and we were discussing an effect based on Hamman’s Final Aces in which the second phase is basically a total bluff.  Now, I trust SR. He knows what’s going on. He does the effect nightly at restaurants.  I’ve seen him do it to spectators.  And always I think they’re going to call him on the bluff (essentially, he implies that the aces assemble a second time without ever actually showing them) and they never do.  

So I ask him to explain what’s going on and the thing is, he explains what’s hypothetically happening in the spectator’s head, but it never gets down to the brass tacks of what causes what. No, that’s not entirely true.

One thing his discusses is something called “mental spin” which was theorized by Jon Racherbaumer and it more or less says if 1 = 2, then logically anything follows.  So if a spectator sees a ball disappear from underneath a cup (or flagon or whatever), and he really sees it, then he’ll buy it if I say it went to my pocket.  Because what other choice does he have? He didn’t actually see it go to my pocket, but the conviction from seeing it vanish from the trough (or whatever) is enough to carry over.  I’m probably doing a bad job of explaining it. Deal with it hippie.

So then it’s this mental spin from seeing the aces vanish that causes the spectator to accept that they’ve assembled in the leader packet.  Or that’s the basic idea.

So SR says that, more or less, but to me it raises a bunch of other questions as to if the aces vanishing isn’t actually the end result of the effect (or trick or whatever the fuck you want), then to what degree do we ever actually have to clarify what the effect is?

I mean, it gets to this idea of Hamman’s (of which SR is a devout student) about ambiguity.  Which I think I might’ve also touched on at some point (maybe I was high?).  But simply that by not clarifying the effect and leaving it ambiguous, we leave it to the audience’s interpretation and therefore the impact is dependent on this ambiguity being interpreted in the most ideal way.

Double Deal Card to Pocket (one of my very favorite Hamman Effects) relies on this ambiguity and in the best possible situation, the audience forgets that I just put the fucking deck of cards in my pocket and somehow the selection is magically transported to my pocket.  But I have no real control in the matter.

I guess on some base level, all effects are ambiguous and we can never really predict how they’ll be interpreted.  I suppose it gets back to that thing that every magician who made it through grade school likes to write. Something along the lines of:  the effect happens in the mind of the spectator.  Thats very good.  That means they’ve talked to someone who knew a guy who saw something written on a forum by a guy who was the cousin of somebody who once read Hillard. 

The effect happens in the mind of the spectator.  I deserve a fucking cookie.

P.S.  If anyone finds any typos, just let me know and as a reward I’ll mail you a brand new, never opened go fuck yourself.  Free of charge.

*And just to be clear to any French readers: I’m sorry you were born French.  I know it wasn’t your decision.

**And just to be clear to the ladies (yeah right), I’m not gay. That remark was entirely for illustrative purposes. Please call me.

thebottompalm:

Breakfast of Champions

Can we please be best friends?