Magic is Dead, by Ian Frisch -- Book Review
Magic
is Dead (2019) By Ian Frisch. New York: William Morrow/Dey St.
I decided to review this book because I can feel the passion
with which it was written. This is a
book about deception and illusion that is disarmingly candid. This
book is not only a history of magic and the story of it as a contemporary
craft, it is a significant literary work of great skill and sensitivity. Frisch considers himself a journalist, one who
describes and reports on people and events going on in the world, but this book
is also a deeply personal memoir, an autobiographical rendition of his own
development through being drawn into the world of magic. Chapter 15 is one of the most moving and
insightful descriptions of a father-son relationship I have ever read.
Frisch had a lower
middle class, blue-collar background with a few twists. His mother was a card sharp and a pool
hustler. Marriage to Frisch's father
stabilized her. But she didn't forget
her roots and taught Ian to play cards and to cheat at poker from a young
age.
After my father died,
everything changed. He was the rock who
kept our family grounded. . . . But
after he was gone, she was lost. So,
with the pressure of being a single mother mounting, she went back to something
on which she knew she could rely:
poker. Deception at the card
table became her primary coping mechanism.
It was the closest thing she had to an escape. . . . But over the years, poker became a way
for my mother and me to bond. . . .
Poker became our time together -- just a mother and son becoming a couple of
liars for the weekend. (p. 12-13)
As his mother put it:
The biggest draw for me with
this game was that I could go out there and be blatantly deceptive, which is
very unlike me. But with poker, the entire
premise is to sit down and lie to other people.
It's almost liberating. There's
just something about it that speaks to me.
And I'm good at it. (p. 138)
Deception at the poker table was a gateway to the deception
of the magician.
The one thing that I have come
to realize, as I've gotten to know everyone better, is that everyone carries a
little bit of deception around with them their entire lives. (p. 245)
Magic's existence is contingent
upon someone willing to be deceived.
Moreover, magic is exceptional because a performer isn't merely trying
to create a fantasy for a spectator (like movies or novels, which are also
illusions of truth), but striving to alter their sense of objective reality. (p. 61)
A completely unique thing
happens, however, when deception is
applied within
the context of performance.
A new goal forms:
astonishment. (p. 56)
Frisch was struggling to make it as a freelance
journalist. He met a magician named
Chris Ramsay on Instagram and thought of writing a story about Ramsay and the
magicians around him. Through Ramsay,
Frisch became friends with a circle of magicians who welcomed him and with whom
he felt an immediate kinship.
I felt like I was falling in
with people who were like me -- a family of misfits, that we understood each
other. Being drawn to deception says
something about your outlook on the world.
(p. 55)
His background in cards and poker playing gave him a
foundation, an in with the group, but he was accepted as a friend and companion
long before he found acceptance as a magician.
Daniel Madison and Laura London were forming a group they
called "The52," after the 52 cards in a deck. It was a project to assemble 52 of the most
capable and innovative young magicians who shared their outlook on magic and its
nature as a performance art form. It was
a secret society. Every member was
required to have a tattoo emblazoned on his or her middle finger corresponding
to a card in the deck. Ramsay was the
four of spades, Madison was the 9 of clubs, Laura London was the King of
Diamonds. Eventually Frisch became the two
of clubs.
The52 quickly became known as
the new generation, the ones beginning to shake things up in the world of
magic. They took the antiquated image of
a magician and flipped it on its head.
They vowed to no longer associate with the stereotypes of top hats and
scarves, rabbits, and doves -- lame crutches that can dumb down magic from an
art form to a joke. To them, magic was
something to be revered, and magicians could embody a modern mystique. ' Every single person in the52 has something
special about them,' Laura told me, adding that some members are not
necessarily magicians, but have contributed to the industry in other ways. They have inducted photographers, artists, a
professional forger, hypnotists, and reformed card cheats. 'Everyone we choose to become a member is an
artist in their own way,' she told me, 'and they each have a specific role in
the group.' (p. 36-37)
Frisch provides a lot of biographical detail about many of
the magicians the came to know. Chapter
9 is a very interesting survey of the history of magic going back to the stone
age. The first magicians were probably
people who wanted their peers to think that they had supernatural powers. This was a distinct advantage in a society
that did not have great stratification in wealth. From ancient times the ability to perform
magic was associated with a special relationship to the spirit realm and the
ability to invoke its powers. Morton
Smith in his book, Jesus the Magician,
argued that Jesus was part charlatan and magician who was able to fool some
people into thinking he was the Son of God -- whatever that might mean.1 The52 are a secular manifestation of a modern
take on magic divested of its "spiritual" hokum. They consider themselves skilled artisans and
entertainers whose object is amazement and alteration in perception.
They were an outlier on the
artistic spectrum; instead of clay or paint or dance, they worked in the medium
on the human mind, knowing full well that they could reach in, twist some
hidden knob, and alter a person's conception of reality.
(p. 55)
'I see a lot of parallels
between magic and hacking', Doug told me.
'It's the same mind-set. You are
looking for loopholes, for ways to push people's ideas of perception.' (p. 264)
Throughout the book there are numerous retellings of magic
tricks. I'll repeat one, just to give
you a taste.
"which one of you is going
to show me a magic trick?" Madison
slowly sipped his drink.
"I don't even have a deck
of cards on me, " Madison told him.
After a pause and another swig of whiskey, he said, "But how about
you name a card." Jeff rubbed his
chin, as if deep in thought.
"The Jack of Hearts,"
he said, adjusting his glasses.
Two jokers sat atop a stack of
napkins on the bar (from someone else's deck, removed from a fresh pack) and
Madison reached out to grab them, putting down his drink in the process. "I guess we'll just have to use
these," he said picking them up.
"Jack of Hearts, right?"
Jeff nodded. Madison pinched the Jokers between his thumb
and forefinger. He swayed the two cards
gently from left to right, as if fanning a Polaroid, and held them for a
moment, arm outstretched. He separated
the cards and revealed, between the jokers, a Jack of Hearts.
"Like you said,"
Madison started, handing him the three cards, "the Jack of Hearts."
Jeff stood there, frozen in
place, speechless. (p. 212)
Much of the last half of the book recounts how magic works
in the age of television and the internet.
Some members of the52 are able self promoters making skilled use of the
resources of the internet and modern means of communication.
A magician who wants to make
it, especially in the present, needs to not only be
talented but also gifted in
self-promotion, performance, video and photography production, trick invention
and innovation, and personal branding.
(p. 108)
This was true going all the way back to Harry Houdini in the
early 1900s, who was the consummate self promoter. Chapter 10 is devoted to describing this
intermingling of social media, magic, and self promotion, which no one has
exploited better than Chris Ramsay.
There is also an interesting section on cardistry, which is the art of
handling cards in artful ways to create dazzling effects. It bears a relationship to the practice of
magic, but they are not the same thing, and many expert cardists are not
magicians.
Chapter 11 is an interesting survey of the long history of
card cheating, especially in poker, and the various ways of marking cards. In fact, in the past many cards have been
marked by the manufacturers. Frisch
tells us that by the 1860s 25 percent of all cards used in America were marked
by the manufacturers. (p. 122) He quotes a passage from another work that
outlines how to mark common cards for cheating or magic.
For modifying well-known cards,
like Bicycles, a magician could, for example, implement the Farmarx
System. 'The areas to be clocked out are
the four daisy patterns, two at each end of the back. There are eight petals
and a center dot in each daisy. These
nine spots are filled in to represent the values and suits of the cards. The daisy on the left signals the values,
while the daisy on the right signals the suits.' The Farmarx System used shape to discern
value -- petals left unblocked in the shape of an A represent an Ace, for
example -- but loads of other image based languages can be used for a common
brand like Bicycles. All you need is the
right color ink to illicitly modify a deck that anyone could have lying around
their house. Harry River suggests using
Pelikan Drawing Ink, No. 3, Vermillion for red Bicycles, and No. 10 Prussian
Blue for blue Bikes, applied with a 00000 sable or camel artist's brush (p.
124)2
Anyone who plays poker for substantial sums of money would
do well to educate themselves in the many ways of card cheating. Even casinos are sometimes cheated out of
large sums of money by skilled cheaters.
Frisch relates a mystery from the history of card cheating
that I would like to comment on. He
describes a book that appeared in 1902 called The Expert at the Card Table, by S.W. Erdnase. Frisch calls this book "the most
thorough and well-regarded text on playing card sleight of hand."
(p.127) It remains highly regarded today
despite the fact that its prose is dense and difficult to read. The mystery concerns its author, S. W.
Erdnase. No one knows exactly who he
is. There is a theory that he was a card
cheat, murderer, fugitive, and con man named Milton Franklin Andrews, but it is
unconfirmed. I would like to add my vote
that Andrews is Erdnase. If you spell
S.W. Erdnase backwards, you see the name Andrews spelled out very clearly. It's a telling indication in my opinion.
When Frisch was ten years old his father kept him out of
school one day in order to take him to meet his hero, Shaquille O'Neal. They waited outside his hotel in the cold
where he would emerge to go play against the Boston Celtics. His father pushed him through the crowd and
in front of Shaq and asked him to sign his son's jersey, which O'Neal did. They framed the jersey and the two tickets to
the Celtics game. This framed memento
became one of the most profound connections Frisch possessed to his father, who
died a few years later when Frisch was thirteen. Twenty years later Frisch interviewed Shaq
for a magazine article about how O'Neal had evolved as a person since his
basketball playing days. It touched off
some deep personal reflection on his own life and that of his father and the
role Shaquille O'Neal played in their relationship.
To this day, my greatest fear
in life is to never be able to truly
understand his identity as a man [his father] -- to fully grasp how much he
sacrificed, how much he cared, how hard he tried -- and how much we may share
as adults. That I, perhaps, will
understand we were both just two men who at their core, were trying nothing
more than to grasp the hard truth that sometimes finding purpose in life --
truly finding yourself -- is one thing you may never come to accomplish, that
time is not a thing with which you can make a deal. (p. 183)
I thought about the
conversation with Shaq and how, despite being one of the best athletes of all
time, and a by-product of his father's influence, he was still searching for a
true version of himself. Maybe that's
why he dipped back into music, I thought to myself. And maybe that's why my mother went back to
poker. But for me, I had, at that point
-- before I found the magic thing -- likewise been on a quest to find my
place. People spend their entire lives
searching for the radical event, the epiphany, that finally reveals the truest
version of themselves. (p. 184-85)
The shared idealization of a hero between father and son is
a powerful bond, of which Frisch's experience is an excellent
illustration. The converse is where a
father and son are not able to share
an idealized figure, and this indicates a divergence of values and direction in
life, and perhaps lasting estrangement.
Having the hero sign the jersey, or an autograph book, or taking a
photograph together, creates a lasting connection between the admirer and the
idealized hero.
I remember an incident from many years ago when I worked as
an usher at Orchestra Hall in Chicago.
Vladimir Horowitz was performing a sold out piano recital and at the end
of the concert I was posted to an elevator where Horowitz would descend to a
garage where a car was waiting. My job
was to keep people from congregating around this elevator door that Horowitz
would be taking. There was a man there
with a camera who wanted to get a picture of Horowitz. At first I was going to make him leave the
area, but it seemed very important to him to get this picture, and I relented
and the two of us stood there together waiting for Horowitz. It was a long wait and we started to
talk. Taking pictures of celebrities was
a hobby of his and he recounted some of the many celebrities he had
collected. I began to realize that this
man had nothing of his own, and that he lived and became somebody -- briefly --
by merging with these idealized, accomplished people whom he imagined to be
better than himself. He was nervous that
Horowitz might not permit him to shoot a picture, but I assured him that he
would most likely indulge him. He
insisted, that no, this picture would be very difficult to get and Horowitz was
unlikely to allow it. I asked him if he
would like me to do it. I was quite sure
that Horowitz would allow me to take the picture, but it was something he had
to do himself.
At long last Horowitz and a small entourage came through the
door from the hallway. The elevator door
opened and Horowitz stepped inside and turned toward us. The man stepped up with his camera and spoke to
Horowitz. "Mr. Horowitz, Mrs. So
and so, who is the president of the symphony board is a good friend of mine and
she would be very pleased if you would let me take a picture. " Horowitz looked at him and made a grimace,
then shook his head no, raised his hand in front of his face to wave him off,
and the elevator door closed and he was gone.
It was over in an instant and the man did not get his picture that he
had waited close to an hour for. I
couldn't believe what I had just seen.
The elevator was gone and it was just him and me. He looked at me and I said, "you blew
it, you idiot! Why did you give him that
song and dance about Mrs. So and so being the president of the symphony
board? All you had to do was show him
the camera, say, 'Mr. Horowitz, would you mind?' And he would have stood there and let you do
it. It would have only taken a second.
" The man insisted that his way was
right, that the only way you could get a superstar celebrity to condescend to
allow a picture was to invoke a higher power that they would consider an
peer. I disagreed strongly, but the outcome
was already determined: he didn't get
the picture.
The point is that the idealized figure reflects the
aspirations, values, self esteem, and social position of the supplicant who
wishes the brief merger. It is akin to
the Bible story in Mark about the woman with the hemorrhage who believed that
if she touched Jesus' garment, she would be healed. She did so, and Jesus noticed that "a
virtue had gone out of him," but he told her that her faith had healed
her. (Mark 5:25-34) The Bible story
captures the psychology of the souvenir seeker in relation to a celebrity. The person believes that by just touching the
garment, just achieving the most minimal contact, acquiring a signature, or a
photograph, will have a beneficial, healing effect upon them. And they are right. The man at the elevator invoked a false god
to help him and he failed as a result. Faith
is what succeeds. Believing in yourself
and believing that your contact with the revered figure will help you, actually
does. Frisch's story of Shaquille O'Neal
and his father is an example of a success that had a lasting impact on his life,
and there are many others that might be told.
The final third of the book deals with the various roads to
success for contemporary magicians through the lives of some of his friends among
the52, especially Chris Ramsay, Doug MacKenzie, Daniel Madison, Laura London,
and Xavior Spade. Each has a unique,
interesting story and their modern take on the practice and business of magic
is cast against a long history of the methods of magicians from the past. I do not wish to recap the highlights of the
biographies of these magicians or the many ways they are promoting their
careers on the internet. I do recommend
reading it for anyone who is interested in magic, or self promotion on social
media. The book is an excellent survey
of the history and nature of magic from its origins through its most modern
practitioners. It is very well written
and deeply personal.
1. Smith, Morton
(1978,1998) Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? Berkeley, CA:
Seastone Press.
2. Quoting Charles,
Kirk (2005) Hidden in Plain Sight: A Manual
for Marked Cards. Publisher
unavailable.