After 50 years, The Magic Circle finally inducts Penn and Teller
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I really relate to this because despite being at least ostensibly “gifted” my entire academic career, almost all of my professional success has been because I have been willing to climb steep learning curves at the expense of hours of my life and extreme frustration.
In short, I can relate because I too practice a type of “up close” magic which few people can even appreciate.
It amounts to holding a coin in a classic palm position (dead center of the palm), then spending several months strengthening the palm muscles and developing a callus, until you can propel the coin a foot or so without noticeably moving your hand.
Random video demonstrating:
Edit: but look, it's a good one. A little bit of reality mixed in so it looks cool
You can, and should, remove it to not give their graph more data about you.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFXV6o7cro&lc=UgyhehHF9YBGF...
(-:
For M. Kimlat's own commentary and someone else's particularly insightful comment:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49CSV2w0i0g&lc=UgxqIy_Vgt37q...
For the time spent on prep for the second appearance:
Amateur magician here (but a magician member of the Magic Castle, so I know a few things). Manual dexterity is certainly a useful skill, but it's just a tiny part of the art of magic. You can be a consummate sleight-of-hand artist and still be a mediocre magician, and conversely, some of the best magicians don't use particularly difficult sleights. The best example of that I know of is Dani Da Ortiz's routine on Penn and Teller Fool Us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_KcQt0z-eE
Now, Dani is in fact a master at sleight-of-hand, and so one would think that you are watching a masterclass in sleights, but no. There are a few sleights, but they are not particularly difficult, beginner-level. I could do them, and I'm not particularly skilled. The trick is based almost entirely on timing and misdirection and psychological subtleties.
The degree of psychological subtlety in top-level magic continually blows my mind. The best magicians make it look like magic even when you know how the trick is done. Dani's trick is a consummate example. The performance looks like chaos, but in fact every detail is meticulously crafted and serves a purpose. It's almost like watching a dance.
Agree with this. I remember being the 'skeptic kid' at a birthday party long ago. The magician involved me in a trick everyone could figure out but it was done with charm and I was completely delighted.
When teaching this whole routine, Dani spends much more time on the psychological background and nudges that are used, rather than the physical card manipulation techniques.
BTW, if you are a Castle member, Carl Hein is currently doing a routine in the Library Bar that is IMHO in the same league Dani's Fool Us routine. We took some friends of ours to the Castle a week ago and Karl absolutely melted their brains. They're still talking about it. :-)
(And if you're not a Castle member but are in the LA area, contact me privately and I can set you up with a guest pass.)
> Scores of authors use the phrase “steep learning curve” or “sharp learning curve” in reference to a skill that is difficult to master. . . . Nevertheless, from the standpoint of learning theory, these and other authors have it backward, because a steep learning curve, i.e., a curve with a large positive slope, is associated with a skill that is acquired easily and rapidly (Hopper et al., 2007).
Source: Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....)
Based on common usage of the term learning curve, I had thought of it much like a power curve where the y-axis is the amount of cumulative effort you have to put in to reach a particular point on the x-axis, which measures mastery. Sounds like the official definition is effort on the x-axis and the total amount you've learned on the y-axis, which would indeed invert the meaning from how I've understood it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z7InE1zXAY4&pp=ygUfcmlja3kgamF...
He took on a young "partner" (mentored a student, but without admitting it), and presumably taught him much in his last years. Hopefully nearly all.
The foundations of card magic are certainly out there, and for me knowing how the fundamental slights work make it that much more magical to see it performed at such a level. No different than having played a sport makes spectating that much more interesting and appreciable.
I've seen other famous magicians live and up close you can catch move or notice things but he was pure skill.
fwiw, learning curve theory relates how much learning you get through time or episodes of experience. a lot of learning from a small amount of experience (easy to learn) means you will slide quickly down that steep learning curve. a shallow learning curve implies that it takes a great deal of experience to learn.
(I rarely perform his tricks... they're brilliant, but they're so perfectly suited for his style that I can't even come close to pulling them off without seeming like a confused idiot. But I love watching him explain what goes into each trick. This specific trick is available on Vanishing.)
Now, that specific Fool Us performance has moves most magicians cannot pull off, but still, a large percentage of the act involves his standard slew of tricks to put a lot of randomness where it doesn't matter, while there is no randomness near the cards that matter.
I wonder if it will hold up the next time I watch. I keep notes for my daughters to read some day and wrote about this tonight (it’s been too long since I wrote them), I hope this video will still be around when they are ready to read the notes so they can experience it too.
And the magician cannot lie, since he/she has to convincingly explain how the trick works to the producers, beforehand.
Really wish he'd been on Fool Us!
Do you understand the difference between rationally knowing something is an act and the experience of actually seeing an actor out of an acting context?
I love how genuinely enthusiastic and encouraging of lesser known magicians they are. Always willing to celebrate their strengths instead of mocking them for their failures.
And they are excellent magicians, too.
My respect for Penn also went up after he realized his hardcore libertarian position was untenable. It was nice seeing him grow out of it.
I did the same a few years ago and it was one of the few series that kept me hooked, trying to figure out how the contestants try to fool Penn and Teller. I'll need to revisit for some newer episodes that I may have missed..
A bit off topic but no one else brought up Penn's great acting as Hal the system admin in Hackers (1995), a classic movie that everyone should be familiar with (and if not, worth checking out!).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2OYNMO_mNw (first 20-30sec)
So it means “to act against” / “to escape from” the rules.
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/penn-and-teller-teach-th...
And what's remarkable to me is how nice they are to the other magicians, how willing to help and celebrate them, never heckle them. These are genuinely cool guys.
I never got their act, so I never really watched them, but my relatives thought they were great.
Anyway, I did like and enjoy their performance in Babylon 5.
edit: meant for dylan604 :)
Penn and teller had a TV show, so it could mean they caught an episode or two and weren’t into it (which, same).
I've always respected them a great amount for that. I'm glad that The Magic Circle finally came around.
It's one thing to reveal standards like the cups and ball, but another entirely different to spoil a recent trick a living magician is still making money off. I don't think they do the latter.
The balls and cups with transparent cups is still amazing, by the way.
The other thing to note is that Penn and Teller are getting old. Penn is 70 and Teller is almost 80! Don't expect anything in their act which requires physicality anymore.
I think they've also seen that American Wrestling seems to be doing fine even if the entire fakeness is out in the open.