Both Joshes claim to be Nr. 1 - especially since they learend in another thread what Nr.2 stands for in the UK . . .

I sense trouble

I have opened a magic workshop that I hope can point young magicians in the right direction. I also believe that one should be well informed and educated to become a success in magic.I can remember when I was starting out as a young magician and without the information and direction you can waste lots of time and money.

There are "secrets" that no longer are secrets due to an overexposure and publication. The DL is certainly one example. So teaching them is ot really a big issue.

It would be desireable to have a class of closely guarded secrets that will not be published and only passed between a very few selected persons.

That works pretty well till folks "session" and the classification of the data gets lost in the shuffle and rush for some wannabee to publish.

Then again, if you look at the dreadful advice going on about double lifts, double turnovers and how to use them effectively... the magic community seems to have something worse than self aggrandizing exposers and producers looking to make a buck off them... it has truly misguided folks who can't distinguish their internal feelings from the perceptions of others <- like their audiences which are not usually composed of imbeciles.

shhh that's a secret too.

It gets more interesting when some try to decide for others if they have a "need to know".

Want to know about the darker side of this... look at Expert Card Technique. Some wannabee reporter went and recorded what he saw others do for the sake of preserving a snapshot of card magic at the time. Of course he did not have the permission of those whose magic he recorded and wrote up filling in his own explanations.

Then we get to our dear Professor Hoffmann... who would attend the performances of others and take notes. Then he wrote books for the laity describing what he saw and how it worked.

Why do you think the Hofzinser routines stayed pretty quiet for over a hundred years. The closest we have in performance today is Ricky Jay doing a version of Hofzinser's Power of Belief using the patter from the "erdnase" text. Hofzinser by the way was far more congruent to his audiences and used topical humor.

Was that news to you? Why? Surely our history is not a secret?

No real news Jonathan . . . and the current trend of people bringing out their DVDs, e-books, books and lecture notes will increase the speed of exposure.

Remember the discussion we had some time before . . . what is exposure?

For a lot of people in this forum exposure means disclosing a trick for free. It is okay to sell a DVD, but not to give it away for free.

For me, any kind of publishing means exposure.

Andy

My guess is that some in our craft have gotten so vain that they forget to keep secrets safe. Also some may have gotten so greedy that they are willing to trade their future in magic for a few dollars from initial sales of product.

At some point the vain will start to wonder why all their books and videos are being downloaded for free and perhaps also notice that the inventors are not including them in discussions of new works. I won't even dignify the dumpster divers and grave robbers with a discussion of how their works violate the spirit of those whom they pretend to honor.

For the rest of us, I guess we can enjoy books written by Gilderoy Lockhart as a distraction from our studies of scholarly works.

Publish or perish . . . a bad guideline for magicians.

15 minutes superstar . . . even worse.

Who is the most vain, those who keep the secret or those who sell it? Isn't in both cases they are trying to figure how to either make more money or to boost their ego, or both?

Just for fuel to the fire,
Brett

Brett,

In context of other people's works which they want kept as secret... I gave my word to the inventor (or their delegate) that I would use the invention and also preserve its secrecy. If I want to give that work to someone else I need to first obtain permission. To be fair, most of the time it's simpler to refer the person seeking some knowlege to the inventor directly.

Vanity might be feeling ego involved with one's work or knowledge of others work.

Envy might be closer to what you are describing.

Keep the fires burning, looks like a long cold winter on the way,

J

Brett, good fuel for the fire.

Personally, I share my stuff "ONLY" when I have something to gain in return... Call it "exclusive bartering material."

Saving something for yourself, doesn't make it an ego thing. No where does it say you have to share anything.

You can save what you want and share what you want. But about the only way a magician having a trick and keeping it secret is to never perform it, or at least never perform it around anyone who has any chance of figuring it out or duplicating it in some way.

Great conversation.

Brett

Actually, just not around trick addicted wannabees who in turn are so vain that they need to show stuff or worse... publish.

Lots of secrets out there. Several over thirty years old and still very quiet.

Until recently even the dry mounting tissue approach to card making was kept quiet.

Does this mean you have an issue keeping confidences?

Brett, good enough; however, I'm not a magician, nor do I really associate myself with any. While I do have 1 or 2 magician friends who I consider brothers, I don't really care to hang around any.

My stuff really has no business being around in the magic community, but I do, for some strange reason, enjoy this section of the forum.

Just so that you understand exactly where I am coming from before you read my comment, let me tell you about myself: I personally am sort of a "newbie" to magic and am trying to learn as many awesome illusions as possible. In fact, I've spent massive amounts of money buying everything really good that I could find. I am NOT a pro and have no intentions of ever being one. I just do Street Magic as a hobby for my own enjoyment.

Personally, I welcome the availability of magic information and am very hungry for everything I can get. Since I am not a pro and don't have a lot of money to spend, I can't really afford as much as I would like. I really don't believe that "average Joe" would ever do the reseach and/or spend the money to find out anything past a few beginner tricks. So, in my humble opinion, no one but other magicians would ever really know any good magic secrets even if someone was selling them online.

I believe that what it really boils down to is that the best magicians don't want the other ones knowing anything because their income depends on it. I, on the other hand, have personally helped several other magicians develop new tricks without any compensation for myself. I have a very good ability of being able to invent gadgets which can do things everyone else thinks can't be done. In fact, I already helped a guy perfect a new trick in this forum within the last couple days and I just joined this forum at the end of last week. I have no reason not to help someone.

Right now, I'm working on the "walk on water" trick that Criss Angel did on his show and it will be very cheap to build due to my own inventiveness and lack of money. Whether or not it would be ethical to sell this would be debateable, but it is doable. Would it be ethical for me to sell this info? Would it be ethical to give this information away for free to a few select people? What about walking down the wall of a building? I can recreate that illusion too. Many people can levitate, but there are dozens of ways to do it and each one of these methods is currently being sold except for Criss Angel levitating down 6-8 floors in the Luxor Lobby, which I can also reproduce dirt cheap.

Should I sell any of this information to anyone?
Exactly where is this ethical line?
Exactly where is the legal line?

Also, what about "Theory 11"? Is that ethical? Or is it just marketing hype?

Thanks,
Don Itjen

I understand what might lead you to believe this. What does concern creative folks in this craft is the taking of material without permission. What hurts more is not just the taking, as desperate and misguided people sometimes do such unproductive things, but that they can then sell these works to others in our market. To see ones work taken and then sold in the market is not a pleasant thing. We have had folks die without publishing and even instruct their families to destroy their props and notebooks because they did not want to see their work abused. Most recently Del Ray passed on without publishing. Before him we lost Fred Kaps and before him Karl Germain. We were most honored that Tommy Wonder decided to publish some of his magic.

On the other side of this is the openness I have seen among the very knowledgeable and creative magicians in an environment where just a love for the craft and enough self respect to keep what one is shown quiet was enough to get moving down the fast track into the state of the art in conjuring.

If you spend some time around performers it becomes pretty obvious that what works well for one person may not work so well for another. That process of finding your character and style takes lots of work and if you can offer feedback about what you liked when shown a trick you might also find that the performer is open to helping you with tricks you are working on. Seems a simple enough trade... you don't show around material that is not yours and you don't perform a trick you learn till you find something uniquely personal to make that trick work for you. In a quite exchange of information along this path you can learn at your own pace and find support as you develop works that will serve you.

I'm not going to discuss the market where some are misguided into buying works which won't serve them and learning routines second and third hand from performers who aren't even aware that somebody copied a part of their act and is selling it.

Instead I recommend folks look around and ask about what might work where they want to perform and find some trustworthy peers who can give them feedback and help them develop their own magic.

There's a magician in my area who dose 8 shows a year at the local libray for children, he designed this show to teach magic or expose it depending on your point of view. I got really upset about this after all I do a decent amount of birthday parties to kids in the same age bracket, Know every once in a while some kid will say "You did it by such and such" Then I say "did you see it" They say "Well no" Then I say "There are many ways to do the trick" the kids seam to think for example well he couldn't of used a TT because I didn't see it.

This kind of changed my opion on exposer abit, That magician acually by exposing his tricks acually help my business buy creating more demand for my show, the kids are more observant because they want to catch the magician.

What does everyone think ?

Scott

What would you think if the exposer did a better job and folks in your audience knew what to look for and maybe even the props by name?

Just because a person knows what a Thumb Tip is, and a couple of tricks with one, dosen't mean they can spot on being used by a well practiced magician. What it seems to be doing with the kids is creating an instrest in magic. There are thousands of tricks out there exposer forces a magician to be well prepared and practiced and not to relie on the tricks that everyone is doing. The magician that runs these shows unless he takes a bunch of them under his wing and trains them to be magician, there by creating more competion for me he's really not doing any harm, as far as I can tell.

Scott

Magic is not a way to seem clever. It is a gift we give - short plays where the impossible happens.

The "how to" of magic is very dark knowledge and without the clear direction toward entertainment the mechanics of guile is exactly what fuels a cynical and paranoid world view.

Kindly do not confuse education with "robbing the cradle". IMHO innocence is precious and the experience of destroying that innocence in others is an ugly pleasure.

Its a rare child that belive's in magic annymore parents have told children for the most part expessally since Harry Potter That there's no such thing as magic, That its tricks, just tricks. Kids might play along, but they know that its a trick, and if there not sure there parents will reasure that its just a trick. The only thing they don't know is exactly how its done.

If a child has the instrest to find out how tricks are done they will find out weather its the libray, internet, older sibling or going to a teaching magic show or there parents will find it out for them to prove its not real magic. Even if a child gets exosed to the "HOW" of magic tricks, It Does not take way the enjoyment of a good performer.

I personally think that we as magicians shouldn't get so caught up in exposeres, and try to turn it to our advange. Weather we like it or not exposer is going to happen I think we have to adapt and acept it.

Scott