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When Your Father Is a Magician, What Do You Believe?
- toss1 1y ago>>"The real wonder is in the human mind that constructs reality from fragments, that can be fooled by a flourish, but that can also be illuminated by experiment. " Beautiful.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoSeems a little pretentious.
- VoodooJuJu 1y ago[dead]
- markus_zhang 1y agoAgreed, sounds Lovecraftian.
- hamonrye34 1y agoTalmudic test of Abrahamic faith. Bit of Jungian parapsychology: tell the physician to forget everything he knows prior to undergoing psychoanalysis.
- tzm 1y ago> I became my father’s assistant, carrying props, rehearsing patter, acting as the straight man. But I was also his skeptic. If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how. When he succeeded, I applauded; when I found the secret, I felt the satisfaction of uncovering a law of nature. I find this beautiful > My father taught me to vanish before I learned to appear. Science taught me to appear without vanishing — to stand by evidence, to let truth emerge even when it contradicted the spectacle. Poetic
- vunderba 1y agoFrom the article: > If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how. Tangential but that's one of the reasons I actually migrated away from sleight of hand towards juggling. IMHO it's far less stressful when your performance doesn't require fooling the audience.
- jt2190 1y agoThere was a very good article about magic [1] where the magicians describe tricks that are too good to perform because people will get angry. Apparently the audience is much more receptive when they believe they can figure out how the trick was achieved. [1] The New Yorker. “The Real Work: Modern magic and the meaning of life.” by Adam Gopnik July 28, 2008
- MonkeyClub 1y ago> [1] The New Yorker. “The Real Work: Modern magic and the meaning of life.” by Adam Gopnik July 28, 2008 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/17/magic-the-real-work?currentPage=all https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/17/magic-the-real... a.k.a. https://archive.is/kBpwF https://archive.is/kBpwF
- js8 1y agoI dabbled in magic, and what I found beatiful about it is, as an audience, you're amazed once (because magician never does same trick twice). But as a performer, you're actually amazed three times! First time as an audience, when someone shows you a performance of a trick. The second time you're amazed, when they show you the method, and you think - how could have I been fooled by this stupid detail? And the third time you're amazed, when you actually learn it, you perform it, of course imperfectly, and it still fools the other people.
- petermcneeley 1y agoMy father took magic very seriously and went way beyond simple slight of hand that this article suggests. He could make coins disappear without a trace. Our mother was often astonished when she found all the money in the house and bank had vanished. One day he wanted to show us a disappearance trick with a cigarettes carton. He didn't have one so he went to the corner to pick one up. He hasn't been seen since. A true magician never reveals his trick.
- markus_zhang 1y agoSounds like a Johnny Cash song.
- petermcneeley 1y agoProbably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1Ple-qYuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1Ple-qYuU
- dhosek 1y agoIt was the prolog to a 70s sitcom as I recall, about the dad going to the corner for cigarettes and only coming back years later. I can’t remember what the show was now though.
- smelendez 1y agoThe dad who went out for cigarettes is a big trope in American culture. The joke only really works if you know that. See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentNeverCameBackFromTheStore https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentNeverCameB...
- busyant 1y agoAlso Springsteen (at least the opening lines): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boJhWtw-6Gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boJhWtw-6Gg
- n1b0m 1y agoWas your dad D. B. Cooper?
- js8 1y agoWell, obviously, you don't believe what you see. :-)
- viggity 1y agoMy dad is a tax attorney/cpa, but is also a magician. My birthday parties were dope. It certainly wasn't a full time job, but he made enough money from corporate parties doing walk around magic to fund his habit, and magic is expensive (most videos teaching the trick are ~$100 or more). He has a magic library that if I had to guess is worth 6 figures. I've tried getting into the craft many times, and if I had to boil down the essence of nearly every trick (especially for slight of hand, not necessarily stage magic)... Imagine the stupidest, dumbest, simplest explanation of the trick that you write off as "well certainly they're not doing _that_", and that is what is happening. The real art is that doing that simple thing is hard AF, they have to practice it a thousand times to make it look convincing. I never really got into it because it required too much dedication. And if anything, that makes it more special than something more cerebral.
- monkeyelite 1y agoThis is an topic where internet and camera phones have ruined it.
- stephenpontes 1y agoI grew up loving magic. I watched David Copperfield on a grainy old tv, and vividly remember rewatching taped performances of "The World's Greatest Magic" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Greatest_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Greatest_Magic) trying to figure out how the big illusions were done. I was part of a magic club and loved peeking behind the curtain. It fascinated me how as you learned those building blocks of simple sleight of hand, you could compound and build on those components to pull off more and more impressive tricks. A double lift, palming, french drop, etc...all pulled together to a cohesive "trick". I feel like a lot of what entertained me about magic also pulled me towards web development. Sites and interactions online seem like magic until you realize they also break down into simple problems, simple components that build upon one another to deliver the trick. That interest in figuring out how things work just never went away I guess!