After I returned to New York, it occurred to me that being a magician is a bit like working for the CIA, in that you’re not supposed to tell anyone what it is that you do. Here I was eagerly stockpiling secrets and tricks that I could use to amaze people, but if I were to breathe a word about the secrets themselves to anyone outside a close-knit network of hidden assemblies and solemn compacts, I’d be ostracized, condemned as a traitor for breaking the magician’s code.
And yet, there’s something about this rule that seems at odds with the modern world. We live in an age of openness and oversharing, Wikipedia and Google, Facebook, YouTube, and the talk show tell-all. The lines separating public and private domains have long since evaporated. The curative power of baring your soul has meanwhile become the cornerstone of modern psychoanalysis, the legacy of Freud and Jung. The notion that letting it all out leads to resolution and prevents secrets from going postal on your psyche has been embraced by mainstream psychologists and New Age belief systems alike. Secrecy, we’re told, is the enemy of inner peace. Talk it out. Join a group. Free your mind. (Still, nearly half of all patients lie to their therapists.) But does any of this have its roots in empirical research?
As it turns out, science has a lot to tell us about secrecy. For one, as University of Texas at Austin psychologist James Pennebaker has observed, secrecy is hard work. Holding on to a secret in an interview sets off the same physiological cues that ping a polygraph—accelerated heart rate, increased sweating—which suggests that, as with other forms of deception, deliberately concealing information is stressful. Experimenters have also found that after keeping something secret, people tend to show signs of physical exhaustion, and that hiding a secret word hinders a person’s ability to name the color in which it’s printed. Secrecy is taxing, in other words; it takes psychic effort. Like any mental challenge, it’s an active process. Secrecy is a performance.
Conversely, unburdening yourself of a secret turns out to be something of a de-stressor. People with skeleton-free closets get sick less often and are more content on average than those who keep things bottled up, a finding that, in general, holds up even after controlling for factors such as past traumas and levels of social support. One study reported that gay men who hide their sexual orientation have an unusually high incidence of cancer and infectious diseases, and when researchers at UCLA tracked a cohort of HIV-positive gay men over a nine-year period, they found that the disease progressed more slowly among men who were open about their sexuality compared with those who were in the closet. Even just writing about a secret trauma on a scrap of paper and burning it has been found to reap some physical and psychological rewards.
Imaging studies hint at the neural correlates of catharsis. Immediately after a person divulges a secret grief, EEG readings record increased firing rates between the neurons of the right and left cerebral hemispheres. Translation: the mind is suppler, like the body after yoga. Confession isn’t just good for the soul. It’s good for your brain as well.
In romantic relationships, secrecy is an aphrodisiac, enhancing desire much in the way that parental prohibitions lend enchantment to a forbidden love—the so-called Romeo and Juliet effect. In one experiment, Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner found that pairs of strangers sitting at a crowded table who brushed ankles in secret became more attracted to one another than those who brushed ankles openly or not at all. (A cautious type, Wegner had his secret footsiers leave the lab through separate doors—you know, just in case.)
The magnetic nature of secrecy has been invoked to explain the astonishingly high levels of infidelity among married couples. Why does cheating occur in more than a third of all marriages? Perhaps the covert nature of an extramarital affair, the plotting and intrigue, artificially enhances arousal, sustaining a dalliance that might wither in the harsh light of day. Secrecy has aftereffects, too. People are more likely to think about an old flame if the relationship was secret at the time. (When it comes to cheating, whether in the bedroom or at the card table, it’s never just about sex or money.)
Keeping a magic trick secret clearly isn’t the same thing as hiding a childhood trauma or an extramarital affair. Nonetheless, the double-edged nature of secrecy goes a long way toward explaining what makes magic, and the people who practice it, so unusual.
Many professions have trade secrets, but in most, secrecy is not the defining characteristic of that profession. Few crafts so fiercely demarcate the line between the artist and the audience as magic does. Musicians don’t worry about people learning their songs, or their techniques. Writers don’t worry that readers will question the omniscient point of view. (Indeed, many of them have sought to undermine it in much of postmodern fiction.) The film industry knows its viewers can be trusted not to read—or, for the most part, write—movie spoilers. And nobody complains about behind-the-scenes footage ruining films. Magic stands alone in demanding blanket ignorance from its audience. This is different from the willing suspension of disbelief that one brings to fiction. Magic is inseparable from deception.
In magic, secret knowledge endows you with control over people’s perceptions of reality and, in turn, power over their thoughts. It can also be a tool for controlling how people perceive you. Through secrecy, you can fashion a new identity, one that is more interesting than your own. Secrecy allows you to become a different person. But the reliance on secrets comes at a cost, because it tends to set up an adversarial relationship between the magician and the audience. Performing magic puts you in the awkward position of having to deceive the very people whose approval you seek to win. “The secret puts a barrier between men,” wrote sociologist Georg Simmel, “but, at the same time, it creates the tempting challenge to break through it, by gossip or confession—and this challenge accompanies its psychology like a constant overtone.” Magicians court the spotlight while living in constant fear of exposure. They regard magic tricks as being like quantum states—destroyed by the very act of examining them up close. Magicians trumpet the secrecy of their art, almost daring the viewer to lift the veil, and yet they are furious when someone actually does.
I learned this the hard way, after publishing an article on the Magic Olympics in Harper’s magazine. It was a gearhead piece, written in the style of a sports commentary, with play-by-play action—rather like some of the descriptions I’ve provided in this book—and a few exposures along the way. If you truly want to understand magic, I reasoned, it helps to familiarize yourself with some of the methods behind it. Can you fully appreciate a baseball game, for instance, if you don’t know the difference between a curveball and a slider? Or what it means to hit a homer with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth?
When Frank Zappa disbanded The Mothers, he said it was because he got tired of fans clapping for the wrong reasons. I often think about this at magic shows, where you can sometimes tell the magicians from the laypeople based solely on when they clap. Laypeople applaud the effects, while magicians clap during the seemingly uneventful moments, when the secret moves occur. To the untrained eye, it’s as if the magicians are clapping at nothing.
The elegant Spanish conjuror and member of the Madrid School Rafael Benatar, a true magician’s magician, has taken this idea to its logical extreme with a card routine in which nothing magical happens. In fact, it’s made up of a series of demanding sleights that perfectly cancel each other out—he’ll do, for instance, a double lift (to show the second card from the top as though it were the top card) followed by a second deal (to deal down the second card while pretending to deal off the top). The second deal thus nullifies the double lift. Magicians go wild every time he performs it.
Magic has come a long way from rabbits in hats and ladies in halves. Yet most people have no clue how much skill and creativity and hard work goes into it, because magic is all about art concealing art. (As François de La Rochefoucauld said, “It is a great ability to be able to conceal one’s ability.”) As a result, magic exists in a kind of vacuum. My goal in writing the Harper’s article was to pump some life into this vacuum, and I figured magicians on the whole would be pleased.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
As soon as the piece came out, Harper’s was bombarded with complaints from angry magicians frothing about the code of secrecy and the oath I’d signed when I joined the Society of American Magicians. (It’s true: I had signed an oath.) I was skewered in the magic press, flamed in online magic forums and e-zines and blogs. “He’s just another nitwit who’ll be shortly forgotten,” sneered the editor of Genii magazine. “We’ll all still be here.” The magic quarterly Antinomy ran a hit piece about me in which the author, a magician from Michigan, implied that I was a drug addict. (Totally not true—I can quit anytime.) And this was only the beginning.
Things came to a head at a Friday night SAM workshop manned by the usual quota of dusty diehards and salty old sourdoughs. As soon as I walked in, eye daggers were thrown my way and tense murmurs eddied around the room. Ken Schwabe, former president of the local parent assembly and current chairman of the lecture committee, pulled aside the leader of the workshop, a gray-haired man named George, and the two of them shuffled to the back of the room. I could see them peering over at me from time to time as they whispered in each other’s ears. George approached me a few minutes later. “Are you writing this up for publication?” he asked. I shook my head. Another compeer protested my presence. Grudgingly, they let it pass. But the fat was in the flames.
Then came the letter.
It was the end of October, in the middle of National Magic Week, the week of Houdini’s death. (It used to be National Magic Day, but I guess they decided one day wasn’t enough.) It arrived by certified mail and was printed on heavy, important-looking stock. Initially I thought they might be offering me an award, recognizing me for my service to the magical arts. But when I read the letter, standing by a wall of P.O. boxes, my heart sank.
Dear Mr. Stone,
I have received several complaints from members of the Society of American Magicians concerning the article which you wrote and was subsequently published in the July 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine.
In this article you blatantly exposed the secret, not only of your own act, but the acts of several other magicians as well. By doing so, you have acted in opposition to the SAM’s Code of Ethics and Oath and are subject to disciplinary action under our By-Laws, Article XI, Section I.
We hereby ask for your resignation from the Society of American Magicians or we will begin disciplinary action seeking your expulsion from the Society.
We request your reply no later than November 15th 2008, or we will begin official action.
Marc DeSouza
Chairman—Ethics Committee
The Society of American Magicians
I could feel the blood draining from my face as I finished the letter. At that moment you could have knocked me over with a feather, or a very light magic wand. I stood there in shock, trembling, my heart filled with panic. I felt as if I’d been punched in the face. Were they serious? Was this some kind of joke? Was I really being expelled?
The fact that it took place during National Magic Week was especially harsh, like being dumped on Valentine’s Day. I’d always known secrecy was important to magicians, but I had no idea just how serious the issue was until now.
I’ve made a huge mistake.
As the days passed and I recovered my presence of mind, the sting of rejection gradually subsided, and in its place indignation welled up like a volcano. I’d been a loyal, dues-paying member for over three years. I regularly attended meetings and ceremonies and was an active participant at lectures and workshops. I dutifully carried my laminated SAM membership card in my wallet next to my driver’s license and student ID. Many fellow SAM members were friends of mine, people I hung out with on a regular basis. Imagine my horror, then, at finding out that these very same individuals now wanted me excommunicated. How dare they!
I decided I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. But first, I needed to know my rights. I combed through every syllable of the SAM’s lengthy constitution and bylaws in search of some loophole or legal hook on which to mount a defense. This took a while. Once I’d familiarized myself with the nuances of magic law, I contacted a lawyer, who helped me formalize my intent by drafting the following letter, dated November 13, 2008.
Dear Mr. DeSouza:
Pursuant to your letter of October 24, 2008, please note that I respectfully decline to tender my resignation to the Society of American Magicians. The facts as they stand do not warrant my expulsion.
Please note further that pursuant to Article XI, Section 4 of the General Bylaws of the Society of American Magicians, I hereby request a formal hearing to provide me an opportunity to rebut the charges levied against me, at which hearing, pursuant to Article XI, Section 4c(6), I am privileged to be present.
I further reserve all rights which may be afforded to me by said bylaws, and note in closing my disappointment that the board has decided upon this course of action.
Please reply with a hearing date by December 24, 2008. If I do not hear from you, I shall consider this matter closed.
Very truly yours,
Alexander R. Stone
Parent Assembly Number 1
My fingers trembled and my heart pounded out the Law & Order theme song—Dun Dun. Da-da-da-da-DUUUUM—as I gave the letter to the postal worker, who stamped it certified and handed me a confirmation slip. There was no turning back now. I’d crossed the Maginot Line.
This was war.
I WASN’T THE FIRST PERSON to have run afoul of the Exposure Police, and I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was in good company. In the twilight of his career, the Vaudeville-era great David Devant was exiled from London’s Magic Circle, a club he’d cofounded, after he published Our Magic, a mainstream book about his own material, now considered to be a landmark text. (Today, the highest honor in British magic is the David Devant award.) The Magic Circle—whose motto is Indocilis Privata Loqui (literally, “Not Prone to Divulge Secrets”)—is notoriously doctrinaire. Even Prince Charles was required to pass an initiation exam before he became a member. In 2003 the Magic Circle expelled a crop of affiliates involved with a BBC special called The Secrets of Magic. Among those forced to resign was Magic Olympian Etienne Pradier, who took third place at the 2003 Games in The Hague.
No one is immune. When a museum in Appleton, Wisconsin, opened a show that included an interactive exhibit on the Metamorphosis, a famous illusion in which Houdini would magically switch places with his assistant after being locked inside a trunk, the curator was inundated with angry protests, and Sidney Radner, the magician and retired rug salesman who had leased the museum his collection of Houdini artifacts, eventually withdrew his patronage. The exhibit closed, and the collection was sold off at auction.
The mother of all exposures was perpetrated by the notorious Masked Magician, who first appeared on Fox in the late nineties with a prime-time series called Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, a show that has now run for over a decade. The first installment drew a record-breaking twenty-four million viewers—beating out the World Series as the highest-rated event in the network’s history. It spawned imitations in Asia and Latin America and live arena shows across the country.
Magicians reacted as though it were the End of Days. They filed lawsuits, held vigils, penned high-toned remonstrances in newspapers and magazines, quoted Edmund Burke on evil. A coalition formed, frantically urging viewers to tune out, talk to their kids, and boycott the show’s corporate sponsors (Taco Bell, Circuit City, Pizza Hut, Miracle-Gro, Disney Video, Motel 6, Church’s Chicken, McDonald’s, Home Depot, and Jack in the Box).
One magician likened the fight against exposure to the civil rights movement and compared the SAM’s inaction to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. A member of the board of directors at the Magic Castle in Hollywood drew an analogy between the Masked Magician special and the iceberg that took down the Titanic. “This time, the situation is serious,” wrote a respected columnist in Genii magazine, echoing the consensus. “It’s like destroying Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny,” fumed Jonathan Pendragon of the acclaimed Pendragon duo. “These people are trying to kill us,” brayed another.
The Masked Magician, whose real name is Val Valentino, received death threats and was blackballed from the magic community. Demands for his scalp reverberated throughout the blogosphere. He was eternally banned from the Magic Castle by diktat of the board of trustees. And in September 2010, Criss Angel—who, incidentally, has exposed a few tricks on his prime-time special—booted Valentino from a premiere party at the Luxor in Vegas for the sixth season of Angel’s show, Mindfreak. Quoth Angel: “Get that piece of shit out of here.”
Time and again, when it comes to the question of exposure, reactionary voices have dominated the discourse. But is all this hand-wringing justified? Does exposure truly pose an existential threat to magic? Are secrets really the sole source of the magician’s power?
WHEN YOU PURCHASE A TRICK, you’re typically paying for the secret. With the exception of large-scale illusions, the props are incidental. What you’re buying is a piece of intellectual property. But magic secrets are an unusual form of intellectual property, one that isn’t protected by conventional legal safeguards. You can’t copyright a magic trick, and patenting the method behind an effect automatically makes it part of the public record. John Nevil Maskelyne learned this the hard way when, in 1875, he patented his celebrated Psycho, a robot that played cards and did math. Soon after, a journalist dug up the patent and published the method in Macmillan’s Magazine. Maskelyne, his secret now on newsstands everywhere, was outraged. Similarly, in 1933, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company exposed Horace Goldin’s Sawing a Woman in Half in an ad for Camel cigarettes. The ad was part of an aggressive marketing campaign—with full-color promotions in more than a thousand newspapers—that tipped the methods behind thirty-nine classic tricks. What, if anything, this had to do with cigarettes was never explained. “It’s fun to be fooled,” ran the slogan; “it’s more fun to know.” Goldin took R. J. Reynolds to court, charging them with unfair competition, but the judge tossed the suit, citing a patent Goldin had filed in 1923. A number of similar cases have failed after it was revealed that the plaintiff’s trick was already in print. Not surprisingly, very few effects are patented.
Magicians occupy a phantom zone in intellectual property law, one they share with fashion designers and chefs. (You can’t copyright shoes,* for example, or recipes.) But that doesn’t stop them from invoking their own unofficial laws. In the absence of legal protection, the world of magic is governed by a set of professional norms, as with the medieval guilds.
In addition to enforcing the secrecy rule, the magic community routinely sanctions those who pirate other people’s work. In a world without the protection of trademarks, attribution becomes paramount. Proper credit is the coin of the realm. This is why, in print and at magic lectures and on DVDs, tricks are meticulously footnoted. Every move has a history behind it and a surname attached to it: Vernon lift, Hofzinser cull, Tenkai palm, Bobo switch, Ramsay subtlety, L’Homme Masqué load, Ascanio spread, Charlier cut, Elmsley count, Green angle separation, Tamariz perpendicular control. The history and bloodline of moves are in turn vigorously claimed and fiercely debated. (It was this kind of debate that led to the fistfight between Wes James and Doug Edwards.)
Magic is a science of ideas, and some of the most respected magicians never perform. Much like physicists, who generally fall into one of two categories—theorists and experimentalists—magicians are usually either inventors or performers. There are those who do both, but by and large the big names—Angel, Copperfield, Blaine—farm out their R&D. The inventors never become household names, but they are highly esteemed within the guild. Few laypeople have heard of Jim Steinmeyer, for instance, the genius behind many of David Copperfield’s most celebrated illusions, or Paul Harris, the man who taught David Blaine much of what he knows. But among magicians these guys are gods.
Anyone found in breach of the plagiarism rule faces punishment by a brand of collective action. A few years back, a company in England called Illusions Plus started copying another magician’s material. Legally there was nothing the injured party could do. But the guild banded together and came to his aid. Magic journals stopped printing the company’s ads, and working pros boycotted its products. Soon enough, Illusions Plus went the way of Lehman Brothers.
A code of ethics, enshrined in the statutes of the societies, undergirds the discipline. All the major magical orders require neophytes to swear an oath of secrecy and agree to the code. If this sounds a bit like the Masons, it’s no coincidence. There’s a long-standing connection between magic and the old fraternal orders. No fewer than nineteen of the past presidents of the IBM and the SAM were Masons, and every year the Masons hold secret closed-door meetings, known as the Invisible Lodge, at the national SAM and IBM conventions. I know this because I’ve tried to infiltrate the Invisible Lodge on several occasions, and each time I was rebuffed by a white-haired man wearing the emblem of the Scottish Rite (a double-headed eagle).
The party line, magic’s central dogma, is that any form of exposure—even of one’s own material—undermines the art. Exposure is seen as a form of vandalism. It deadens the mystery and tarnishes the brand, shrinking all the grandeur in magic to the scale of an intellectual puzzle. Spectators lose interest, and magicians lose their jobs. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of knowledge is a death sentence.
In reality, the facts are more complicated. During the golden age of stage magic, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, magicians routinely exposed one another’s tricks as they jockeyed for top billing. A big name like Maskelyne would debut an illusion only to have his rivals publish a pamphlet on the method the following month. As a result, magicians were constantly inventing new tricks to stay ahead of the curve. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the golden age of stage magic was also the golden age of exposures, because exposure drives innovation. Much in the way that market-oriented competition among businesses fosters economic growth by forcing companies to evolve, exposure compels magicians to modernize their acts and invent new material. Secrecy, meanwhile, is a license to be lazy. Like monopolies in the marketplace, it breeds stagnation.
There are more books on magic than there are about any other branch of entertainment—be it movies, theater, or dance—and yet, in a way, every magic book constitutes an act of treason, antithetical to the secrecy pledge. (Not surprisingly, many of the books in the magic canon were initially condemned as breaches of faith.) If exposure is so harmful, why isn’t magic dead? And by publishing your material, don’t you renounce all claims to secrecy?
Magicians sell their secrets. They put out lecture notes and DVDs. They open magic stores. They sell their products online, often on the same websites where they advertise their shows. And yet these same magicians are outraged when their secrets are leaked in a forum not intended solely for members of the guild. To me this is a bit like locking the windows on a house with no door. If I’d published my article in Magic magazine or Genii, no one would have batted an eye. The scandal came about because I wrote the article for Harper’s, a mainstream magazine for laypeople.
Not long ago, a friend of mine was over at my apartment, and she noticed an issue of Genii sitting on my coffee table. Leafing through it, she asked, “Can anyone subscribe? What’s to stop people from learning the secrets?” It was an understandable reaction. The way many magicians talk, you’d think they carried their secrets around in briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. Magic journals may not be on newsstands, but they’re available by mail or online, and in theory, anyone can subscribe. In practice, though, it’s a self-selecting audience. Only magic geeks subscribe to magic magazines. I myself subscribe to five—six, if you count the one in Spanish.
In truth, attempts to demystify magic only tend to heighten people’s curiosity. Practically every classic trick has been exposed at one time or another. For better or for worse, magicians still saw women in half, even though Goldin’s method has been public for some time. Anyone can learn how most levitations work, but try finding a Vegas magic show that doesn’t feature some type of floating effect. I’ve been asked countless times if I know how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, the biggest illusion in history, even though the secret is a mouse click away. Charles Hoffman’s “Think-a-Drink,” which was first exposed more than fifty years ago, is now the signature trick of New York society conjuror Steve Cohen, who banks $1 million a year doing private gigs and a weekly show at the Waldorf-Astoria.
There’s an unwritten rule in magic that you’re never supposed to repeat an effect for the same audience. But in practice people can be deceived again and again by the same effect, even after it’s been exposed. In the early eighties, when a rogue prestidigitator went on British television and exposed a simple thumb tip vanish to prime-time audiences, magicians everywhere began tilting at the nearest windmill. But the next day, veteran TV entertainer Paul Daniels went on the same show and did the same vanish with a minor variation in handling, and it fooled everyone. (Paul Daniels is such a legend in the UK that if you address a letter to “Paul Daniels the Magician, England,” it will reach him.)
Clever magicians have always known how to dodge exposure, or even use it to their advantage. The innovative duo Penn and Teller will often reveal the secret to a trick and then fry the audience with the same effect done a different way. At one show, they taught the audience three different card sleights during the first act—you could just hear the old guard gasping in horror—and then had virtuoso close-up magician Jamy Ian Swiss mill about the crowd at intermission performing card tricks using only those three sleights. Not one person caught on.
Penn and Teller also do a version of the cups and balls using clear cups—and it still fools you. Not only that, but Teller has found that even after watching this effect, people are still fooled by the classic opaque version. This illustrates a general principle: magic tricks can fool you even after you know the secret, because they exploit perceptual mechanisms that are etched into our brains. Clearly there’s more to magic than not knowing.
The ancien régime wigged out when Penn and Teller hit the scene in the early 1980s. “Penn and Teller take the mystery out of magic,” seethed David Berglas, president of the Magic Circle. “We’d rather keep our secrets and not have them exposed.” But to the young duo, playing to an audience’s intelligence—while still fooling them—was a way of elevating the art. After my article appeared, I spoke to Teller about my scrape with the SAM. “If magicians are pissed at you you’re doing something right,” he said. “It means you’re on the side of the public.” He told me that magicians gave him hell when he and Penn first started out, and concluded, “It’s a tempest in a teapot.” The brilliant New York City magician Simon Lovell, who has a long-running Saturday night show in SoHo, sang a similar, if bluer, tune. “Oh, fuck them,” he said, when I told him I was being kicked out of the SAM. “Their average age is dead.”
In the aftermath of the Masked Magician, the reports of the death of magic turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Attendance at the Magic Castle remained as high as ever. Criss Angel managed to score a ten-year, $100 million contract at the Luxor, even though several of his tricks had been leaked. David Copperfield maintained his perch atop the Vegas hierarchy, despite being outed on at least three illusions. In my own neck of the woods, demand for local magicians had only gone up. “I got more work after that,” Asi Wind, a brilliant New York performer, told me. Like most members of the younger generation, he was unfazed. “You think you can explain my magic in a thirty-minute show?” Then he laughed.
When Breaking the Magician’s Code first aired, there were no prime-time magic shows. Today there are several. One of them, Masters of Illusion, airs back-to-back with Breaking the Magician’s Code, something that has left many magicians scratching their heads. Wouldn’t the two shows mutually annihilate each other, like matter and antimatter? Isn’t the network shooting itself in the foot? The fact that they coexist strongly suggests that they share an audience. Clearly, in the eyes of most viewers, the two shows complement each other.
The main problem with the militant antiexposure stance is that it sells magic short. It portrays magic as a stagnant enterprise with a handful of secrets that might easily be exhausted. In reality, the field of magic is rapidly evolving. Each week, there are new moves, new palms, new sleights. Even people who devote all their time to magic can’t keep up. Methods have become so advanced that one needs years of experience and an extensive back catalog of technical know-how just to hang. Perhaps there was a time when you could learn all there was to know about magic, but that day passed at least a century ago. Eventually you realize that there’s no danger of overfishing the sea of tricks; there are enough secrets to last a million years. We’ll run out of melodies before we run out of magic. Even if you could somehow learn everything today, tomorrow you’d be out of date. And if magicians are constantly fooling one another with new ideas, what hope does the layperson have?
Take the Ambitious Card, for instance, the famous trick that fooled Houdini. It’s one of magic’s oldest and most popular effects. The classic method has been written about and exposed countless times. And yet experts still fool each other with it, in part because every magician makes it his own. (Shawn Farquhar, the Canadian I followed at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm, would go on to win the Grand Prix in close-up at the 2009 World Championships in Beijing with his trademark Ambitious Card routine.) Like any great trick, the Ambitious Card provides an almost limitless canvas on which magicians can vaunt their creativity. The same goes for the linking rings, the cups and balls, the Metamorphosis—all the classics.
Masked Magician hysteria also fails to give the audience enough credit. It infantilizes the spectators by implying that they can’t be trusted not to step on their own fun, arrogating to the performer the power to decide what’s in an audience’s best interest. The “loose lips sink tricks” credo suggests that there is only one way to enjoy magic: through the eyes of Peter Pan. But why does everyone have to see magic the same way?
Once again Penn and Teller cut to the chase, this time with a routine in which the audience members get to decide for themselves whether to learn the secret or keep the trick a mystery. (Those who don’t want to know the secret are given blindfolds.) By inviting the audience to exercise agency over their own experience, this routine challenges the accepted notion that magic can only be enjoyed from behind a veil of ignorance.
When I hear Jeremiahs like Berglas fulminating against exposure in a way that suggests to magicians and laypeople alike that magic stopped evolving a hundred years ago, I think of Max Planck, who was told by a college professor that he should leave physics because all the important discoveries had already been made. “Physics is finished,” Planck’s professor scoffed. “It’s a dead end street.” Good thing Planck didn’t listen, because twenty years later he helped discover quantum mechanics, the greatest revolution in physics since Newton.
Physics is dead. Long live physics.
Magic is a science as well as an art, and in science, knowledge serves only to deepen the mystery. Each new find opens vistas on an uncharted territory at the edge of human understanding. Nestled within each answer lies another riddle in an endless web of unknowns. “The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part . . . what is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.” This from physicist Richard Feynman, and it seems to me that it applies as much to magic as it does to physics.
Magic is dead. Long live magic.
I HALF EXPECTED THE NEXT letter to arrive by homing pigeon or Hedwig the Owl. I waited for it with bated breath, on pins and needles and even a few steak knives. In the meantime, I began readying my defense. I’d decided I was going to make it a test case, a referendum on secrecy. I’d probably lose, but who knew? Maybe I’d manage to sway some liberal activist judge toward my rejectionist view of the magician’s code. I had visions of the Scopes trial. I fantasized about retaining Alan Dershowitz to represent me. I was preparing an amicus brief even though I had no idea what an amicus brief was. I had selected a philosopher friend as my co-counsel, along with a human rights lawyer from D.C. whom I’d met at a Halloween party. (I was Anton Chigurh, the killer in No Country for Old Men, and she was Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.) Court drawings would show my legal team—which I’d determined would include at least one clown—badgering the “ethics chairman” and those immaterial witnesses who’d lodged complaints against me wilting under the cross.
But it never happened.
December 24 came and went without incident. No letter. No owls. Nothing. The Society had backed away from the case. I’d called their bluff, stared them down with my legalese-laden letter, seizing victory before the first crack of the gavel. Case dismissed.
Well . . . sort of. My membership at the local assembly had lapsed, and Tom Klem, the head of our local order, was refusing to let me pay my dues. I’d paid them late in the past, so this was the board’s way of ousting me on a technicality, ex parte and without a hearing. But my membership in the National Assembly remained valid, which was far more important.
Still, I felt uneasy. Even though I’d been granted a reprieve (more or less), the whole ordeal had cast a pall over my year of magical thinking. Not helping matters much was the fact that Richard M. Dooley, former president of the National Assembly, was denying any knowledge of having signed my Magic Olympics entry form. (He not only signed it, but also mailed it for me.) Maybe he forgot or was too ashamed at having rubber-stamped a loser—not to mention a traitor. After the Olympics, a new president had taken office. Had Dooley been cashiered because of me? I was told this was not the case, but I had my doubts.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SAM debacle, I made myself scarce at Rustico II on Saturdays. I knew Wes’s stance on exposure. “I never give away principles,” he had told me once, when I broached the issue. And his feelings toward Penn and Teller were far from affectionate. “I have problems with some of the ethics of the stuff they do,” he said plainly. I decided it was best to lie low until the dust settled. But I could only duck Wes for so long. He was my teacher, after all. Eventually I had to face him.
I went to Rustico II expecting the worse. This was a man, after all, who’d cold-cocked a guy over a one-hundred-year-old trick involving an egg. Here I’d broken magic’s cardinal rule—I’d given away secrets! I literally feared for my safety.
But Wes, as always, was full of surprises. He welcomed me at the table without any hesitation, offering me a seat next to him as if nothing had happened. I was shocked. Of all the people who’d read my article, he was the last person from whom I’d expected a show of mercy.
Moved by his kindness, I all but broke down. I told him I felt awful about the incident and regretted the article—all of which was true. He put his arm on my shoulder and measured out a smile. “I know,” he said, softly, with a flicker of approval. “I know.” He’d just come back from a cigarette break, and I could smell freshly smoked Pall Mall menthols on his breath. Minty death. “But it’s good to hear you say it.” After that, all was forgiven.
We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about an Italian coin expert named Giacomo Bertini, who was in town for the elite FFFF convention and was giving a lecture and teaching a workshop at the SAM later that week. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Wes wheezed. “He’s got the best classic palm I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t look like anything. It really doesn’t.” As with everything, Wes knew the score. He had a copy of an underground DVD containing some of Bertini’s top-secret material, which had been put out by a close-up worker in Chicago. Bertini had now become somewhat of a star on the international coin circuit.
Afterward, I contacted Ken Schwabe about making arrangements to see Bertini. “This is unofficial,” Ken said, very hush-hush. “I’m not speaking to you now as chairman of the lecture committee, because the workshop is not actually affiliated with the SAM.” The upshot was that I could attend the workshop, because that was Ken’s pet project, but if I showed up at the SAM lecture, I’d be greeted with torches and pitchforks.
The workshop was held at an undisclosed location. Only after being screened by Bertini and paying the fee was I given the address. Apparently they were worried about party crashers, something I honestly wouldn’t have expected at a six-hour Saturday afternoon coin workshop given in Italian.
I met Ken in person to give him the cash. He counted it twice, discreet as a drug dealer, and told me in cloak-and-dagger tones that it was nonrefundable. I was to await further notice. That night he e-mailed me the coordinates of the secret location, which of course turned out to be the same place we always met.
The workshop was well worth the price of admission. Bertini was a brilliant thinker, and his technique was mathematically exact. Around hour five, I started wondering what the motivations were for devoting so much time and effort to something so esoteric. By now I’d spent enough of my life sessioning with magic fiends to know that the Bertinis of the world weren’t in it for money or fame. Listening to Bertini go on at length about the proper handling of the classic palm—the angle of the coin, the attitude of the fingers, all laid out with millimetric precision—I realized that his was a life devoted to the rendering of an aesthetic vision. I imagined that, for him, the coins were like abstract symbols in a mathematical equation, representations of an ideal reality, one of infinite dimensions. “This right here is as powerful as the Statue of Liberty,” a wise magician once said to me as he raised a half dollar in the air and held it up to the light. “Size doesn’t matter.”
As I left the workshop that night still cradling these thoughts, I ran into a WASPy man in his mid-forties with floppy gray hair and blue eyes whom we’ll call John. My article had not pleased him. “You made a lot of enemies,” he told me bitterly. “Much bigger than you might know.” He was speaking very fast and almost in a whisper. “You’re just a loose cannon, and it’s really dangerous.” He paused, and his voice got even quieter. “The signal you’re sending out is that you don’t give a fuck.”
We walked outside and he quickly worked himself into a rage. Standing in the middle of the street, he read me the riot act, and I stood there and took it. The thing that had angered him the most—even more than the exposure—was the fact that in my byline I’d identified myself as a professional rather than as an amateur. This, to him, was inexcusable. “Don’t ever pass yourself off as a pro ever again,” he hissed at me. “It’s rude and wrong and you lied.”
Several minutes later, after he’d vented most of his anger, we began to have a more measured discussion. Even though he’d bawled me out in the middle of Ninety-sixth Street, I appreciated his candor, and it was clear to me that it came from a place of genuine passion. Also, I’d seen his chops and he was clearly very skilled. (He’d trained with the great Slydini.) We shared a cross-town bus—he also lived on the Upper West Side—and talked about the ethics of magic.
It was John’s view that if magicians wanted to keep their material secret, they shouldn’t publish it at all, not even in professional journals. I admired the consistency of his position, even though it was a little radical. “I’m a secretive SOB,” he said, shrugging. “I couldn’t be more old guard. I grew up in a place where it was one old man telling one young man a big secret. I’m a relic. But I get it that there really is this active conflict now. This whole information thing. We don’t understand the full ramifications of a fully searchable database.”
He apologized for yelling at me, and I apologized for playing fast and loose with the honor code, and by the time the bus emerged from Central Park we were like old friends. “Love the craft,” he urged me as we stepped off the bus and prepared to go our separate ways. “That’s the main thing. We all wanna be somebody else. But the job of the artist is to be who you are.”
This sort of fealty to the craft for its own sake was something I may not have given enough credit when I published my article. Then again, what discourse does beauty have with secrecy? Magic is so much more than a collection of techniques. And art requires honesty as well as imagination. So, while I regretted having offended the people who’d devoted their lives to magic, as time went by I also felt a renewed commitment to rethink the traditions many of them espoused.
With this in mind, I decided to start my own magic society. Columbia had a club for just about everything—chess, video games, anime, motorsports, model UN, Latin dance, Klezmer music—but nothing for magicians. This struck me as an egregious oversight on behalf of the student activities office—one I aimed to redress.
In forming my on-campus magic society, I reached out to clubs I thought might have a similar target demographic, including the Columbia science fiction club, the kung fu society, and the women’s water polo team. I decided at the outset that ours would be a magic society cast from a different mold. There would be no oaths and no rituals. Anyone could join. The only requirement was an interest in magic and a willingness to learn.
Two people showed up to the inaugural meeting of the Columbia Magic Society, a female undergraduate from China named Yintiang who spoke very little English, and an enthusiastic French MBA student named Jean who wanted to learn magic so he could meet women. On the first day, I taught them the rudiments of my Ambitious Card routine. They both seemed thrilled.
It started out small but grew quickly. At the second meeting, there were twice as many people. Over the next several months, our numbers doubled again. Soon we had our own little community of aspiring magicians.
I realized that, going forward, many magicians would see me as an apostate, just as John had. But if anything, being blackballed from my local society only strengthened my resolve, fanning the flames of my obsession and drawing me ever deeper into this bizarre world.
* Though some have tried. In April 2011, French footwear designer Christian Louboutin sued rival Yves Saint Laurent for issuing a red-soled shoe, claiming that red soles were his trademark. A federal court dismissed the case. “Awarding one participant in the designer shoe market a monopoly on the color red,” wrote the judge, “would impermissibly hinder competition among other participants.”