Magic Is Dead, page 10
By 2010, magic was once again far removed from serious performance art. Criss Angel’s pervasive character had embedded itself into the psyche of the typical American entertainment consumer and merged with magic’s already-established clichés. Blaine was still making captivating specials, but with a multiyear lag between shows, his take on the craft seemed like something exclusive to him—something he solely owned—rather than a widespread mentality being adopted by young magicians. Magic was in a cumbersome if not altogether highly complex transition period and, with young magicians vying for a fast track to stardom on the silver screen, magic started sprouting up on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, and the show quickly became a hot-button issue in the community.
It’s widely agreed that the main problem with integrating magic into shows like AGT is that it confines the art form’s performative flair within the context of competition. This, to many magicians, is the antithesis of magic’s purpose. Moreover, routines are determined based on the wants and needs of the shows’ producers and the network that pays them. The criteria by which the magicians are judged, too, is constructed based on parameters set by the television industry, not other magicians. This in turn influences how people at home come to evaluate magic. In a way, these are the same problems magic encountered in the past—the dumbing down of a much larger artistic vision for television’s tried-and-true model.
Young magicians hoping for a breakout moment have likewise lost the ability to curate their presence if they go the route of an AGT-type competition show. Eric Jones, part of our friendship circle, performed on AGT in 2017. When Eric—who is black—showed up wearing a blazer and slacks, the producers told him to change. They gave him new, stylish streetwear clothes to wear while he performed, including Y-3 shoes, Off White jeans, and Kanye West shirts.* “The producers liked me because I gave the show variety. I am not sure if that’s because I had the anti-showmanship presentation, or if it had something to do with my race,” Eric told me. “It was never overt, but they did use words like ‘hipster,’ ‘urban,’ and ‘swag,’ and those were words that were also given to Tyra Banks to use in her script when dealing with me.”
The producers also forced an intrusive backstory onto Eric, where his estranged son was the driving emotional force behind his appearance on the show. “I fought hard against them integrating my son because I didn’t want him used as a prop,” Eric told me. “I wanted to focus on the positive things about my life.” The producer who crafted this docu-style vignette dug into Eric’s relationship with his son, as well as the death of his father. “He starts down one path, finds a sensitive core, and then prods it to make you emotional—to try and make you cry,” Eric said.
Eric eventually conceded to the producers’ incessant demands to have his son fly out to their filming studio in Los Angeles, mainly because he knew it was unlikely he would advance to the final round, and he wanted to create a moment his son could remember. Still, the entire experience left a sour taste in Eric’s mouth. “The producers see us more as actors on their show, even though we see ourselves as artists,” he said.
For AGT, a magician puts their entire image—and their career—in the hands of producers who see their talent as expendable fodder for a television audience, easily manipulated for ratings and online clicks. Moreover, magic’s ethics come into question when the craft is put into the hands of television producers.* Like with Criss Angel stooging spectators for Mindfreak, it’s an open secret that some segments on AGT are dramatized for added effect.
Demian Aditya, Indonesia’s most famous magician (also a member of our friendship circle, and someone who eventually became a member of the52), fell into this conundrum where, for a buried-alive stunt on the show, the producers botched his secret escape tunnel. Demian was supposed to appear behind the judges, with the audience across the way. But the audience was set up behind the judges, a last-minute decision by the producers, and the tunnel, unbeknownst to Demian until he walked on set, was diverted to another location. Demian was forced to employ a bit of misdirection—and toe an ethical line in the process—to distract the audience.
His wife (a professional actress who knows how all his tricks are done) was folded into the story line at the final hour. “The only option was for my wife to be the misdirection for me to get out,” Demian told me. During the stunt, she ran to the site of the burial and screamed, “Get him out! Get him out!” She fell to the ground and howled, the camera zooming in on her tear-soaked face. When Demian emerged unscathed, she ran over and embraced him, the audience fooled into thinking her actions were genuine.*
Despite Demian’s heart-thumping routines, his time on the show was short-lived. An apparatus for his next stunt—a tower that suspended him, handcuffed in a coffin, over a flaming bed of spikes—malfunctioned. When the coffin was supposed to fall onto the spikes, it got stuck halfway down, a consequence of AGT producers refusing to pay for Demian’s personal builder, replacing him for a contractor of their choice, who, testing the device without Demian present, bent a piece of the delicately engineered rigging.*
He still went through with the reveal, shuffling up behind the judge’s table—a humiliated look plastered across his face—as they scowled at the mishap. The judges didn’t say anything when he emerged, just smashed that loud honking button, red X after red X beaming from their panel, and killed his dream of winning the show. “It’s frustrating when a lot of people thought it was my fault,” he told me. “The people at AGT think they know about magic, but, eh, not really.” He packed his bags and went home.
Far too many people think the magic they’ve seen on television is all that the craft can offer. “Many people have not felt real, live astonishment,” Chris Ramsay told me during one of our many conversations. “Part of the art form is to make them feel.”
10
The Rules of the Game
For a long time, magic was confined to a stage. Then it found its place in private parties and spontaneous, close-up situations. Then it was stuck on television. But with the dawn of the internet age, the rules of the game have changed, and social media has emerged as the most important catalyst for magic’s current progression.
Social media is in many ways a tool to live vicariously through people whose lives are seemingly better than your own. You follow a fashion blogger because you want to dress like her, you stalk the fitness vlogger because you wish your dedication to the weight room was as forthright as his, and you gawk and awe at the mother on Pinterest because of her perfectly curated domestic life. The same is true for magicians. Ramsay has always said that his take on social media isn’t to strictly disseminate the performance of magic, but to show people what type of life can be attained by being a magician—jet-setting, traveling to the biggest cities in the world, mingling with celebrities, lecturing to the masses, and cashing six-figure checks as a successful new-media entrepreneur.
Truly, a successful magician has never been solely defined by his or her technical ability. 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. And in many ways, this has always been true. Just look at Houdini’s or Blaine’s rise to fame: Houdini performed his most dangerous stunts in public places and whipped a city into a frenzy before the stunt by giving newspapers early access into how the event would go down; Blaine also utilized public spaces for his performances and marketed himself kind of like the antimagician—no frills, just raw astonishment. But the internet has made these aspects of a magician’s career even more crucial. Because, the truth is, anyone eager for magic is only one click away from someone bigger and better—someone who best fits their own archetype of what kind of magician they want to see perform, or they themselves want to become.
In present-day magic, you not only have to harness the technical prowess that people can aspire to, but you also have to encompass lifestyle and aspiration, where success and influence is charted through Instagram followers and YouTube views. In any art form, people have been equally fascinated not only with the skill of a practitioner but also the lifestyle embodied by the artist. For me, great writers come to mind: Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway. People loved these authors not just for their books, but for the way in which they lived their lives while they created these memorable bodies of work. The two become inextricably linked. On a completely customizable platform like Instagram, a person can become anyone they want without the threat of their brand being diminished or strangled by outside forces—an almost mandatory concession for a magician contracted into a big-time television deal with a billion-dollar media corporation.
The person who has emerged as one of magic’s most heralded ambassadors to the outside world—the go-to archetype of a twenty-first-century magician—and the master of utilizing social media for the benefit of his career is also the person who first introduced me to this fascinating world: Chris Ramsay.
In 2012, at age twenty-eight, Ramsay decided to release his first piece of exclusive material. The project, Praxis, was a simple but effective card control and peek hybrid, where the performer could move a card from one spot in the deck to another while simultaneously catching a glimpse of its identity. He wanted to release it through Ellusionist (though this was long before he worked for them full-time). But without a reputation in the industry, Ramsay had to find another way to catch the eye of magic’s largest and most powerful retailer. “I didn’t look at the content people were creating, but at the creators themselves,” Ramsay told me. He saw a crucial flaw. There was a major gap between what the magic community thought was cool or acceptable for a magician’s brand and what everyday people thought was cool or acceptable when they imagined a public figure. He knew he wasn’t the most astounding in terms of skill, but he had a more evolved cultural taste level than most magicians. He was plugged into millennial culture—he followed fashion trends, had a penchant for tattoos, dedicated himself to the latest hip-hop releases, understood the nuances of social media and digital marketing—and, so, instead of waiting around for the industry to discover him, he took matters into his own hands.
He hired a cameraman and filmed the entire Praxis project himself, complete with an intriguing and well-produced trailer: Ramsay, his face not yet covered in his now-signature beard, wandering around an abandoned building in Montreal, a deck of cards in his hands. The video cuts back and forth to artistic b-roll shots and close-ups of the sleight itself. More than anything, however, it lathered Ramsay in a layer of swagger rarely seen (at least back then) in the magic industry. Because the industry had be so insular, the approach to filming projects revolved around the trick—the product being sold—rather than the magician performing it. But with Ramsay’s video, that point of view began to shift; it was as much about him as it was about the sleight. Ellusionist loved everything about Praxis and offered him a contract to release it on their website. Ramsay was ecstatic.
With his first release secured, Ramsay immediately put more effort into building his brand on social media. He knew he needed to create hype. By 2013, Instagram had emerged as the core social media platform for magicians. Magic is an inherently visual enterprise, and Instagram’s simple, photo- and video-centric interface was a breeding ground for the community. It shifted the entire subculture. It became their beating heart. “As in the best social media, the artifacts are not the innovation on Instagram,” Virginia Heffernan puts forward in her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. “Instagram images have become units of speech, building blocks in a visual vocabulary that functions like a colonial patois, where old-school darkroom photography is the native tongue and digitalization is the imperial language.” This broader simile of visual media’s confluence with digital communication is directly mirrored in magic’s breakneck evolution at the time: out with the old, in with the new—and hurry up.
Another by-product of Instagram’s influence on magic is cardistry, a card-handling offshoot categorized by flourishes, riffles, and complicated shuffles—balancing intricate shapes of cards with the fingertips, flipping cards into the air and having them fall seamlessly back into the stack. Cardists can handle a deck with incredibly graceful ease; it’s as if the cards are dancing in their hands. They are hypnotizing feats of dexterity that take years of dedication and creativity to master. Wired wrote a feature on cardistry in 2015 and called it “the elegant, mesmerizing subculture of card juggling.”
The practice of flourishing cards has been around for decades, but its modern inclination has become so popular that cardistry-only meet-ups have blossomed into annual events, the flagship of which is hosted by Dan and Dave Buck, the godfathers of the movement. They were the first, in their 2007 DVD Trilogy, to offer tutorials on complicated flourishes. “We never thought it would get as big as it’s gotten,” Dan told me. “When we first started, we could count the people doing it on our hands.” More than 350 kids from all over the world traveled to California for CardistryCon 2017; tickets sold out in less than one minute.
The movement has blossomed into its own subculture, now only tangentially related to the magic community. “A lot of guys from cardistry are only interested in cardistry. They don’t care about magic. And I think that’s really cool,” Dan Buck told Vanity Fair in 2015. “It’s fun to integrate the two, which is what [my brother] Dave and I are known for. But we want cardistry to be a separate art form because it could stand on its own.” Cardistry’s popularity has likewise been compounded by the nature of content on Instagram and YouTube; as soon as people were able to post videos of themselves doing cardistry, more and more people started adopting the pastime and it continued to grow.
Although many magicians themselves practice cardistry, a lot of newcomers to the activity didn’t practice magic previously. It’s a fast-growing community centered around a love for playing cards, an offshoot dedicated strictly to sophisticated handling and a pursuit of style. Cardistry doesn’t seem to have a specific performative purpose but exists rather to see what is possible with two hands and a deck of cards. “It does seem quite pointless from time to time to just be super skillful at one thing that you can’t really use, other than just to show people or do videos,” Oliver Sogard, founder of the cardistry-focused playing card company dealersgrip, told me. “But because cardistry is such a small community, the internet plays a very big role in the subculture. Without Instagram, without the internet in general, the cardistry community would have a tough time surviving. We need the technology to communicate with each other and show each other our stuff—which, in the end, has influenced the artistic mentality behind it.” Charles Bukowski once said, “Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.” This seems to be the core ethos of the cardistry movement.
Previously, the online magic community had lived in private forums and Facebook groups, which were heavily regulated by moderators and guarded from the public—online extensions of the exclusive backroom meet-ups of yesteryear. But with a blank, hyperpublic canvas like Instagram, magicians had the chance to build constraint-free personal brands that anyone could access and be influenced by. It was the perfect opportunity for magic to snuggle up alongside the widespread sociological revolution the platform produced. Any magician now had the ability to truly be an individual—to try new tricks, to innovate, to truly connect with others in their community. Finally: total freedom.
Ramsay was one of the first magicians, alongside Daniel Madison, to take advantage of this sea change in digital consumption and curate his social media presence, using it as a tool to build his reputation in the industry. He added an element of lifestyle to magic: themed, well-lit still-life photographs of playing cards, and tasteful shots of himself in cool clothes—slouching irreverently on a street corner in a bomber jacket, gazing at the camera while adjusting his wide-brimmed Goorin Bros. hat, or, clad in a chunky gray cardigan, flourishing a deck of cards in a snowy field. (Ramsay’s style has since evolved into a more high-end streetwear, hypebeast-esque aesthetic: A Bathing Ape jacket, Supreme cap and hoodie, adidas by Pharrell Williams NMD sneakers, etc.)
It was this take on self-branding that first caught my eye when I stumbled across Ramsay in the summer of 2015. I was surprised—befuddled even—that a magician seemed so tapped into the cool-kid self-marketing tactics of social media influencers. Weren’t magicians supposed to be nerds? I was pretty straight-up when Ramsay and I met, telling him that he didn’t fit the part. “Yeah, dude. That’s the whole point,” was his telling response.
The new generation’s ability to not look like magicians in any traditional or stereotypical sense had become their greatest asset, and Instagram allowed that viewpoint to rapidly disseminate. “Magicians used to have this unattainable factor about them,” Ramsay told me. “But with Instagram, that veil was lifted. Magic became a culture people could access and be a part of, and allowed Daniel Madison, me, and others to put out our vision of what we thought a magician could be.”
This approach—understanding that magicians can be cool; that they aren’t inherently geeky or cheesy—laid the groundwork for magic’s branding evolution. Just as Robert-Houdin changed the perception of a magician from an otherworldly wizard to the everyday gentleman, young magicians in the twenty-first century were taking current trends and fusing them with an age-old art form for which they had immense love and respect. Guys like Ramsay were now able to replace outdated clichés with a more acceptable notion of who is, and who gets to be, a magician. That was one of the things that intrigued me most about magic once I knew where to look: it now resembled a truly modern subculture. The guys I had fallen in with could be anyone mingling in the crowd at a hip-hop concert, or shooting hoops on the basketball court, or taking down a few whiskeys at the bar on a Friday night. For an art form drowning in stereotypes, that seemed like a massive development—perhaps even its biggest change yet.
