[QUOTE=Bob Loblaw]
Bob, I sincerely apologize, grovel even. I hit the edit button instead of reply, and completely hosed your post. I don’t think there is anyway I can recover it. I’ll find out. I am tremendously sorry.
You’re out of the Alliance, sir.
Actually, P&T have made a great living telling the secrets of their tricks. The thing is, exposing secrets has not only become an act, but their act. It would be gauche at best for someone else to follow suit.
Last year I was dabbling in a little magic. I learned one very hard lesson. Really little kids are not impressed with tricks. For one thing, they haven’t learned to be so easily deceived. They take things at face value rather than accepting distractions. It’s like getting a cat to look at a TV by pointing at it. For another thing, they already live in a magical world. You made a handkerchief appear out of nowhere? Big deal, check out the dragon living under my bed.
I’m not remotely interested in being a stage magician, so I guess the answer is, “I wouldn’t.” If I want to learn how the internal combustion engine works, I’m not going to try to build one from scratch, I’m going to look to the people who have already done it, and see what they did. I guess what it boils down to is, I’m not impressed that you can trick me. It’s not like it puts you in rarified company, you know? You’ve got to do something a whole lot more special than that to get my attention.
There’s also something in me that reacts instinctively against both secrecy and tradition. It’s really an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. Whenever I hear about the whole “brotherhood of magicians closely guarding the ancient secrets of stage magic,” I feel like someone just plucked one of my nostril hairs. That’s just me, though, not anything you should really concern yourself about.
(Hey, looks like I picked a good time to quote the whole post in my response! TYM totally owes me one for this!)
Fuckin’ A, I do!
And now, my scintillating reply:
Huh. I just assumed magicians went through a lot of ladies.
Honestly, I’m not sure it was worth all that trouble and freaking out. 
Maybe ‘u’ ought to know that revealing a trick will get you thrown out of the Magic Circle.
Maybe ‘u’ ought to have done a little research before Pitting him.
Maybe ‘u’ ought to command a basic knowledge of English too. We aspire to better than mobile-speak and leet-speak here.
I think Miller pretty much summed up my thoughts here. I’m curious, but not that curious. Coupled with the constant, never-ending “Ooh, I can’t tell you” performance, the performance-outside-the-performance, the magician-never-tells mindset- I guess it just seems tired to me.
I mean, if you told me how ___ happens, would it really blow the show that much? I, for one, would be able to appreciate the mechanics and the performance even more (and if the tricks are as simple as you say, the mechanics and the performance really are the heart of magic), because I wouldn’t be distracted looking for the wire or the hole or the trap door or whatever. And sure, I might tell others how it worked, others who might enjoy just watching the show and not analyzing, but the same goes for every TV show or movie that others haven’t seen.
I guess the thing is, if I post a thread here titled, “How did they make the bus fly in Speed,” or “What happened in the last ten minutes of Serenity,” I’ll get an answer in five minutes. But if I ask about a trick, everyone who knows purses their lips. What makes magic tricks so damn special that their secerts, of all the arts, are the ones guarded so strongly?
And yes, I know these points have already been covered
Lord knows this happens pretty seldom, but I’m with Miller as well.
Would that that was the direst of results! Ever wonder what happens to those dancing badgers after they eat the toxic mushrooms? Well…
No problem, I thin we all understand that. Not to worry.
But, if you’d like some help addressing the post(s), I am able to help; just let me know.
I do speak smartguystyle…uh, I mean smartguysmile.
I also know karate, judo, jui-jitsu, macrame, and five other Japanese words.
Okay, let me try it this way. We don’t do your basic thinking for your here at SBMD, and we don’t do your homework. When I wanted to know how to do something as a kid, I’d ask my dad, and much of the time he would tell me to go look it up in the dictionary or encyclopedia, that’s why we had them and I needed to get used to using these resources.
Same with your brain. If I told you how this and other tricks worked, you’d want to know how three card monty works. Look, don’t play three card monty, it’s a scam, there are a number of ways to work it. There is only one way to do the damn window trick. It is really obvious and simple. Having explained the theatrics around it (the distractions), if you can’t figure it out, well, then you haven’t tried, or, Koko, is that you? If you can’t be bothered to think even this much, well then you don’t know how to think, do you?
And it isn’t really that we have a very powerful “guild”, we don’t. I don’t know any other amatuer or in my case, former amatuer magicians, and only knew one other kid 25 years ago who did this stuff. It’s that if I have to explain in detail to you that 2 + 2 = 4, it means you are irritating me with questions because you are too lazy to think through something rather elementary.
Well, it’s a trick. You see a window without an opening. He covers part of the window with paper and then crawls through the paper and then the window appears whole. I can assure you that he does not mingle his atoms with the glass and phase shift thought it. He climbs though an opening in the glass. The opening is not visible before he puts the paper up, or after. But trust me, it does exist when he puts the paper up and crawls through it. Watch it again and figure out where the hole is and deduce how me makes it come and go seemingly at will.
The producers of the show aren’t necessarily looking for you to watch the show - they want the X dozen other people for every one of you who do like watching the show and don’t like thinking about it. “Can you believe he did that? Wow!” If you (you being no one in particular) tell the audience how the tricks are done, they’re not interested anymore and there’s no show.
It’s the same sort of suspension of disbelief that makes every other form of entertainment fun. Sure, there are thousands of people who want to see how Mad Max really internalizes the problems of civilization having to deal with criminals within the constraints of the society they’re protecting and there are thousands who like knowing that the truck that smashes Toecutter at the end has a fake front and shield painted on because the truck owner didn’t want the grill ruined. but there are millions who want to watch Max get his revenge. For them all the other stuff gets in the way - suddenly it’s not a guy taking matters into his own hands, it’s just a script and a director and some actors.
I watch Criss Angel a lot on A&E. I think the show is fascinating and he cracks me up. I wish I could find somebody to explain all his tricks, for one simple reason. I’m not amazed or impressed with anything he does. I say, “Ahh, it’s a camera trick. That guy is probably in on it.”
But damnit, I don’t want it to be a camera trick! I’d love to know the actual mechanics and procedures of his illusions. I want to know he could perform the same thing in front of me, and I want to know how. I don’t get pulled in my by illusions anymore. I can’t just relax and enjoy the show. I promise, revealing how it’s done won’t “ruin it” for me. If anything, it’ll make me actually sit up and pay attention.
Penn and Teller tell how their tricks are done, and there was a series on Fox a couple years back that show how all the stuff is done, including the more sophisticated stuff. The window thing is straighforward.
Very rarely are camera tricks used in professional stuff, maybe about 1 in 10 tricks. It may have been done with camera tricks aiding the slight of hand in this instance, but this sort of trick doesn’t need camera assistance if done skillfully.
Question is not whether magician should reveal scrt. If dont want reveal, just keep mouth shut.
If post “I know but Im not tell” then you are ass.
I have two words of advice for you. Remedial English.
Me fail english. That’s unpossible.
2 word for you:
Shut the fuck up
(Thank Bob!!)
OK, great quote from Midnight Run. Now, seriously, about your writing. Are you in the process of learning English? Don’t you think you could benefit from putting a little more effort into your grammar, spelling and syntax? You might want to polish these things up a bit before venturing into the Pit. Although it has been entertaining so far.