Rant

Its 1:20am, I'm up in less than 6 hours and I can't sleep, so I thought I'd write another blog post. This time I want to rant about about magicians in general and how the vast majority seem to be no good. Now before I get into this, I don't want to take the high and mighty approach and act like I'm better than them all but so many times I see a video of a magician doing something and it just looks terrible. Like I mean completely unnatural, robotic, flashing etc. I've already wrote a bit about using mirrors and naturalness so I won't go too far into it, but it made me think, why are we like this? Why are so many performances from magicians just plain shit?

I think a great deal of this is due to magicians being all nice to each other. How often have we seen someone do an effect that maybe isn't the greatest or could do with some work or even is completely terrible and the response from other magicians watching is "nice" or "cool" or some other hip phrase. We need to be more honest in our critique of other performances. When I ask for feedback I want someone to tell me what looks shit so I can then work on improving it. Otherwise we go along in a pipe dream thinking everything is fine.

Another reason I think is magicians like justifying stuff. Again how often have you heard folk say "lay folk won't even notice it" or "you only see it cause you know what to look for". Bullshit. If a magician can see it, there's a really high fucking chance that a layperson will spot it at some point. Obviously unnatural movements seem to be justified too. So many actions that I see magicians do are ridiculous yet are so over done. Take this pass for example. Two hands start separate, one hand comes over to square an already square deck while the pass is executed. Why the fuck would you square a deck that's already square. It is a ridiculous scenario.

Ultimately I think it comes down to lack of practice, or at least lack of efficient practice. That combined with getting advice from magicians that you actually respect and actually know what they're talking about is the best way to not be shit. Go out, record your tricks, email that magician that you really respect, watch the video and analyse it and be brutally honest, take that magicians advice on board and ultimately magic as a whole will be better for it.