Magic is dead, p.18
Magic Is Dead, page 18
That November, my roommate Tom briefly dated a girl named Lauren. I had met her a few times in passing and, when Tom mentioned to her that I was learning magic and hanging out with magicians, she asked if I would show her something. I had been tinkering with a routine and I thought, Well, I guess I have to perform it sooner or later.
We sat down at the dining room table in our Brooklyn loft and I told Lauren to pick a card—not in the traditional way where you grabbed one randomly, but as I thumbed through the deck in her direction, showing her the faces of the cards. I turned my head away, closed my eyes, pointed the cards toward her, and started riffling the deck, flashing each card’s face as we ran through the stack. “Tell me when to stop,” I told her.
“Stop!” Lauren called out about halfway through.
“You happy with your choice?”
“Yup!” she said, excitedly.
“Okay, great,” I said. I handed her the deck. “Now shuffle for me.” She mixed up the cards and handed the deck back. I turned the cards faceup and spread them out onto the table, so each card was slightly visible, tucked underneath the one that preceded it.
“Now, magic is something that relies almost exclusively on the spectator,” I told her. “It’s kind of hard to do a magic trick without someone on which to perform it, right?” She nodded. “And, to me, the best magic tricks try to involve the spectator as much as possible. You’ve already shuffled the cards, but you’re going to need to do a lot more in order for me to find your card. So,” I continued, “let me see your hand.” She held it out, palm down, and I gently grasped her wrist. “Let’s see if I can get a read here—if I can find your card. It’s not something you are aware of, but people give off subconscious clues all the time.” I slowly began to move her hand over the outstretched cards.
“Um,” I said, letting go of her hand, “I couldn’t get an exact location, but I think your card is somewhere in this area.” I separated a selection of cards, just under half the deck, and discarded the rest. “Now,” I said, turning the cards facedown and spreading them out on the table, “we’re really going to find your card. But, like I said before, I need you to help me find it. So, I want you to pick one end to start from—we’re going to start from the edges and work our way inward to find your card.”
“That one,” she said, pointing to the far end.
“Okay, great. But we obviously need a way to count down, so we can find your card. We’re going to need a set of numbers to help guide us—but it has to be something completely specific to you. It has to be something that only pertains to you and no one else. So, what could that be?” A calculated pause. “How about your birthday?”
“Okay, yeah, my birthday,” she said. “August fifth.”
“Perfect. So, August is the eighth month,” I said, putting my finger on the card farthest to the left, the end she chose beforehand. “One, two, three,” I counted, removing eight cards in total. “And the fifth day,” I continued, removing, one at a time, five cards from the opposite end.
When I was done counting, only one card remained.
“And we have one card left,” I said. “We’ve gotten this far all because of you—nothing else.” A dramatic pause, letting the possibility of this being her card sink in. “So, for the first time, what was your card?”
A smile spread across her face. “The eight of hearts,” she said.
I turned over the card. “As you said, the eight of hearts.”
“Oh my God,” she gasped, her mouth hanging open. “That was amazing.”
The trick worked, sure. It served the basic purpose of fooling the spectator, but in the grander, more nuanced context of magic as an art form, it had some fundamental flaws. First was justification. A magician’s behavior and an illusion’s structure have to seem normal; for a trick to land well, like acting natural during sleight of hand, a magician’s performative arrangement cannot raise suspicion. Their movements must be justified. Magicians spend hours debating over this foundational principle. Why do you pick up the card like that? What’s the point of saying that to the spectator? Why do you need to do all of that when you could just do this?
In his book Tricks of the Mind, legendary British magician Derren Brown dissects a simple coin illusion based on the justification principle. The scene is set as such: A magician sits across the table from her spectator. She takes a coin out of her pocket, places it on the table, and says she will make the coin disappear. In one fell swoop, she slides the coin back toward the edge of the table, picks it up, and encloses it in her fist. She slowly opens her fingers to reveal the coin is gone. The method is simple (you can do this trick at home; seriously, try it): when she slides the coin toward the edge of the table, it falls into her lap before she “picks it up.” But the method isn’t the issue here; it’s why the magician had to put the coin on the table after taking it out of her pocket. If it’s already in your hand after taking it out of your pocket, why put it down only to pick it back up again? There’s no justification in that behavior; the movement is dictated by the trick’s method.
Brown’s fix is so simple as to be overlooked but gives an element of profundity not seen in the first version. When you initially sit down (this could be, say, before an hourlong dinner), take a few coins out of your pocket and put them on the table. When you’re ready to do the trick, the coins are already in position, ready to go. The move is justified, and the effect is better because picking up a coin that’s already on the table is much more natural—more believable, more real—than taking a coin out of your pocket, placing it on the table, and picking it up again. If something seems like a trick, surely it will turn out to be one. But if something seems innocuous and turns out to be an entertaining piece of deception, that’s where the magic moment is found. That’s astonishment.
Max Malini, a stout Polish sleight-of-hand artist from New York City, operated with a sense that magic only existed as a moment—something that just was, with no explanation of why. He wanted his magic to blend seamlessly into everyday situations—bending, but not breaking, the objective reality so many people were quick to accept as fact.
Malini performed for some of the wealthiest people in New York City during the 1920s and was known for his bold and aggressive style. He would scurry up to a famous politician or businessman, bite off one of his jacket buttons, spit it back into place, and walk away without saying a word. In one of his finest and most famous moments, he sat down for dinner at a restaurant with a group of friends. They ate a large meal that lasted several hours, and not once did Malini leave the table. At the end of dinner, he asked to borrow a hat from one of the women in his party. He spun a coin on the table, covered it with the hat, and asked her to call for heads or tails. When he lifted the hat, the coin had toppled and showed what she called. He did it a second time and again the coin fell on the side of her choice. The third time that he lifted the hat, however, the coin was gone, and in its place sat a large block of ice. This reveal stood as a private moment between Malini and his guests, something designed specifically for them, an effect that required intense planning for it to seem impossible. This was a key facet of Malini’s brand of magic.*
Legend has it that he did this trick only a handful of times during his life, and only a few other magicians were privy to the method. Ricky Jay, the magician and magic historian who studied under Dai Vernon, was one of those people. While filming a BBC documentary in 1995, the director pressured Jay to do the ice-block trick on camera. Jay refused. He engaged in a heated argument with the BBC staff and stormed off set. He had another interview lined up that same day with Guardian reporter Suzie Mackenzie. Jay met up with Mackenzie and while they drove more than an hour to a restaurant for lunch on the other side of Los Angeles, he told her the story of Malini and how these types of tricks—and the feeling of astonishment and wonder they create—cannot be forced. The most magical of moments come out of nowhere; they seemed entirely justified, and that’s how they made such a memorable impact.
Jay and Mackenzie continued to drive, the summer heat baking her rental car. The restaurant was packed when they arrived, and they had to wait twenty minutes for a table. Jay continued to talk about the trick after they sat down, detailing how Malini used the hat and the coin as a lead-up to the twist ending. He held the restaurant’s menu in front of him as he spoke, blocking the reporter’s line of sight. He lifted the menu from the table. In the space between them sat a large block of ice.
Mackenzie began to cry.
“I deceived you,” Jay responded while she sobbed. “It’s what I do for a living.” Mackenzie later recalled the event: “It’s a moment I’ll never have again. I’ll never forget it. It was a kind of supreme piece of artistry that I witnessed, that was done for me. He had produced this extraordinary effect for me. It was in that moment that I realized this is what we all wait for, in a sense.”
My trick already had a fracture in these regions of its foundation. Where was the justification in showing the cards faceup, other than for me to know where her chosen card was within the deck? Where is the magic in that? I can see all the cards! Moreover, the trick, in its most basic form, was a run-of-the-mill, I-will-find-your-card trick. Although I used information specific to Lauren (her birthday), the narrative I created was nothing more than a convoluted, roundabout way to find a chosen card. There was no twist ending like with Malini’s ice-block trick. It was a decent try and the concept was coming into focus, I’ll give myself that, but I would need to keep going if it was going to be worthy of being released into the magic community—if, sometime down the line, a big retailer like Ellusionist would agree to feature the product.
In magic, inventing and releasing your own effect is a rite of passage. If I was going to hit that standard, I needed to keep refining the effect. But, more than anything, I wanted to prove to myself that I could accomplish something completely outside the purview of my normal life. If my journey through magic was to be a defining moment of my adulthood, I needed to prove to myself that I was actually dedicated to the progression of the craft, not just someone who learns the latest trick and performs it—and that my contribution to the world of magic could influence others, as well. I was watching the torch being passed down to the new generation in real time—I wanted to have a grip on its handle.
After performing for Lauren, I reached out to Ramsay. He had invented so much great magic and had impeccable taste regarding what makes an effect remarkable. I trusted him more than anyone. “I have a decent idea for a card trick—using information freely chosen by the spectator, which in the end helps them find their card—but it seems so rudimentary right now,” I told him over the phone. “It just doesn’t feel magical.”
“How a trick unfolds is the key to a memorable experience,” he said. “Remember, you’re taking them on a journey, you’re telling them a story, you’re sharing a piece of yourself with them.”
“But how do you turn that into a trick?”
“Let me put it this way: What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to take away from their time with you?” he asked. “If you have an idea, and you need a method on how to do it, you’ll find a way. But don’t stop here. Think bigger.”
17
By Any Means Necessary
Madison was gone—disappeared, hiding, I didn’t know.
All I knew was that he had been ignoring my phone calls, text messages, and DMs. And then he deleted all of his Instagram posts; before that, he hadn’t posted anything in weeks. When I saw that he wiped his profile, I knew something was wrong. I called him, and it went straight to voice mail. I sent more texts that sat unanswered. I knew he and Laura were ready to add the next wave of members into the52. What the hell was going on?
It was common knowledge that Madison had a precarious mental state, that his moods swung between hot and cold, outspoken and reclusive. In early adulthood, Madison began experiencing symptoms of low latent inhibition, a neurological disorder categorized by an intense awareness of one’s surroundings, especially as it relates to specific sensory stimuli. It’s a type of hypervigilance. “Anything can spark off a bad feeling,” Madison told me. “Everything is shouting at you. You can hear the fucking tap dripping in the bathroom, you can hear your neighbor’s door closing, the traffic outside your house, everything.” He also avoided crowds. “I had to be aware of everything about the environment around me,” he said. “I had to look at every single face in a crowd.” This type of hyperawareness can become all-consuming and in some cases evolves into full-blown psychosis. It can make you crazy. A monster in your head.
The irony is that the more you try to correct an episode, the worse it becomes. “The shitty thing about it is, you think, I’ll close my eyes and it will help, but it doesn’t, because now you’re listening more, and you can hear everything,” Madison explained. “A quiet room is like hell because you are aware of the silence, but you can still hear those little things. It’s almost like your mind is saying, Where’s the noise? Let’s find the noise. Let’s focus on the noise. All right, there’s a tap dripping. Let’s focus on that.” In his early twenties, Madison was prescribed antianxiety medication, which he hated. It didn’t fully stop the symptoms, just flattened his personality. One thing did help, though: magic.
Madison never really enjoyed magic’s social side. He grew to dislike performing for people or hanging out with other magicians. But he practiced religiously, usually alone in his home office or living room. A deck of cards allowed him some semblance of control over his mind. Digging into sleight of hand was one of the only things that made him calm. “If I am focusing on a trick, that’s good. All the attention is here, on this one thing, so I can constantly focus on it. Playing with cards became meditative for me. It made me calm up here,” he told me, pointing to his temple.
Most of Madison’s magical innovations were just a consequence of his need for obsessive practice. “People who suffer from depression or anything else, it’s the way you deal with it that matters—to try your hardest to find your own solution.” To Madison, magic was a way to escape his own head.*
Madison continued to self-medicate with sleight of hand, but the episodes persisted. By the time he turned thirty, in 2010, he had begun to accept that he would always live with this bug in his brain—constantly burying, digging, and scraping for something it would never find. But then, one year, he received an unexpected gift for Christmas: a bottle of whiskey. Before this, Madison had never been a big drinker, and never really went for liquor. “After a couple of shots, everything toned down and I felt like a human again,” he told me. “Fucking hell! I found a solution!” It was the best he felt in nearly a decade. He traded his over-the-counter pills for booze. The soothing effect, however, came with a consequence: when the alcohol wore off, his mind started racing again. After a while, he told his doctor that if he drank all the time, he felt in control of his condition. The doctor replied that if he kept drinking, he’d eventually kill himself. “Without alcohol, the way my mind works, I’d probably kill myself anyways,” Madison told me. “I’d rather not live with it every day.”
As the years went on, Madison buried himself in playing cards and liquor, trying to keep his internal demons at bay. This was when he created his public persona, the character that became a barrier between the public and Daniel Madison the real man. It’s ironic that he fed so much of his energy, both personal and professional, into this alter ego, which seemed to embody the most fragile aspects of his real-life personality: tortured, hard drinking, searching for a cure, desperately trying to find a way out. Unbeknownst to anyone except his closest friends, the alter ego was actually a lens into the deepest reaches of Madison’s true self. Despite his efforts, however, he sometimes couldn’t fully control what went on inside his head. That’s when he withdrew completely. When the demon came back, when the bug started to dig and scrap again—dancing, dancing, saying that it would never die—that’s when Madison disappeared.
I saw Madison a couple of weeks after my Buffalo trip. He and Ramsay came to Manhattan to film some projects for Ellusionist. They both love chess, playing each other regularly online, and so they decided to develop a chess-themed deck of cards and an accompanying trick.
The cards, called Knights, were stamped with miniature gold pieces and the face cards were those of famous chess players, including Bobby Fischer. They developed an effect called Chess Guess, which mimicked the start of a typical game. To see who gets first move, one of the players holds a pawn of each color in a closed fist. If their opponent guesses where the white pawn is located, they get to go first. The trick was that the magician could guess, with 100 percent accuracy, the location of the white pawn. To create the marketing video, we kicked around the chess hangouts in Union Square and Washington Square Park, and filmed Ramsay fooling hustlers over and over again. The grinders shook in their chairs, slammed their fists down on their dirty boards. They loved it.*
Madison seemed normal, if a little quiet, during that trip. I could tell he wasn’t sleeping well—sunken eyes, slouched shoulders, his voice garbled and groggy—and he barely ate. But he did what he had to do to get the project filmed. When his Uber came to take him to the airport, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Let’s talk soon.” I called him a week later and I could tell he had gotten worse. His voice swam in a dejected, almost angry tone, and his thoughts ranged between cynicism and hopelessness.
“What the fuck is all of this for?” Madison said. “I don’t know, Ian. I’m just so sick of magic. What am I getting from it, anyways? I’m not a magician—I hate magicians.” He reflected on his accomplishments and seemed to become disgusted at how he chose to devote his time. “It’s not satisfying, really, getting to the top, to where I am now. I’ve achieved everything that the industry has to offer. I don’t know. Maybe I’m in the wrong game.”
