How to Reject Authority at a Border Patrol Checkpoint

Here's a weirdly compelling video of a guy declining to answer a Border Patrol agent's questions at a checkpoint 50 miles north of the Mexican border. He repeatedly asks, "Am I being detained?" and "Am I free to go?" -- questions the poor agent fights like hell to avoid answering.

Comments on the site skew pretty heavily against the motorist, who people seem to think is being rude. His manner is certainly brusque, but I nevertheless find it thrilling to watch someone bravely assert their civil liberties in the face of armed authority. I can sympathize with the B.P. agent, who's just trying to do her job. Too bad that pesky Bill of Rights sometimes gets in the way.

Clay Shirkey on Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirkey is the very smart new media scholar who posited that kids growing up today immersed in ever-more advanced technology are undergoing genuine neurological changes similar to those accompanying language acquisition in small children. (Check my previous post here.) Recently, he described a social paradigm shift no less cataclysmic. In a speech given at the Web 2.0 Conference on Wednesday, Shirkey discussed the sudden democratization of the tools of cultural production, which have turned millions of formerly passive consumers into content producers. Shirkey goes on to answer the all-important follow-up question: Where do they find the time?

It turns out Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year. Worldwide, people watch about a trillion hours per year. These are astounding numbers; by comparison, Shirkey estimates that the entire Wikipedia project worldwide represents about 100 million total hours of human thought.

If people worldwide, suddenly awash in a sea of choices, reduce their total television viewing by a mere one percent (1%), the "cognitive surplus" freed up would be equivalent to 100 Wikipedia-scale projects. Per year.*

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first.... Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

Read the whole speech here.

* Shirkey mistakenly claims 1% of a trillion would yield 10,000 Wikipedia projects but I think he's off by a factor of 100.

Wow! Tay Zondy is sharp!

Tay Zondy's a strange dude. His YouTube smash hit Chocolate Rain was just voted most popular music video of 2007 despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact he comes across as a humorless oddball with a marginal, though startlingly deep, voice. The song's catchy in that maddening commercial jingle way; once it infects you it doesn't let go easily (which may be why Chocolate Rain has inspired hundreds of parody responses, beginning with this hilarious remix).

Check out this interview with Zondy (nee Adam Nyerere Bahner), in which the 25-year-old doctoral student holds forth on selling out, Richard Wright, social justice, and media bias. He's a prickly interview subject, perhaps because he's way too smart not to sense the media narratives unfolding around him. My respect for Zondy just took a huge leap.

Tip of the old hat to Salon's Farhad Manjoo for the link.

Obama's Masterstroke

Yesterday, Obama gave what I think is the single most important political speech of my lifetime. Obama assumed he was addressing mature adults, and he wrote and delivered the speech with a bluntness and honesty I've never seen in another American presidential candidate, ever. Obama addressed the full spectrum of race and its legacy in America. He called on all Americans, including the media, to leave the past behind and embrace a new vision of a united America.

If this isn't political courage, I don't know what is.

Watch the full speech here.

Obama/Clooney 08

Aha! The perfect running mate! George Clooney is already an internationally famous and beloved American. I'm sure the rest of the world is quite aware of his progressive activism on behalf of the poor and weak. He makes movies about it, for heaven's sake.

What better American Ambassador could there be, all around the world, than Vice President Clooney? An unmarried serial monogamist from Hollywood with a solid record of international political activism!

We already know they like each other!

Dibs on the TeeShirts!

And Larry Lessig for Minister of Culture! Ensuring the free flow of information to all Americans, and working to promote such values in the rest of the world as well! Maybe Hillary for Health and Human Services? Gavin Newsom to head the newly-created Department of Peace?

Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

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Hats off, by the way, to the beautiful Tootsie Farklepants for her Obama/Clooney 08 post, in which she posited an Obama/Clooney 08 ticket way back on April 27, 2006, almost two full years ago. I was unaware of any other prior use of the term until after I wrote this post, when I googled "obama/clooney" and found her.

It's possible she got the idea from TMOTTB, commenter number four on this article:

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/
2006/04/clooney_obama_for_potus.html

Coincidentally (!), TMOTTB left the comment on the very same day, August 27, 2006...

NYC in Words

Alex Gopher's short animated film The Child envisions a Manhattan constructed entirely of words. The nominal plot follows a young couple rushing to the hospital to deliver their baby. I don't know if Gopher's trying to illuminate an obscure neurological condition or simply creating a compelling textual road trip, but the result is trippy and moving.

An Idea for Hillary and Obama

I think Obama will be our next President, or else our next Vice President. You heard it here first. (Unless someone else has said it before me.)

I have an idea both he and Hillary can use to generate even more momentum, more cash, all while setting a moral example for all other candidates and for the nation.

Hillary was on Letterman tonight, and they were talking about the enormous amount of money she and all her colleagues were spending on their campaigns. Letterman said, "To think some of that money could have gone to feed poor people."

There's the idea. I think both Hillary and Obama should become an example, a Christian example, if you like, by pledging to donate 10% of their total donations to help feed the poor and homeless. How much do you want to bet that their total take goes up by more than 10%? Hell, that might even inspire me to donate to one or both of them.

Maybe it should be 30%? Just how generous and giving are the American people, anyway?

Whichever candidate would have the courage to do something so obviously wonderful -- that's the one who deserves your vote.

Disaster on Lego World

My son has just completed his first short film, about a UFO attack on Lego World. Contains horrible violence and bloodied, dismembered Lego dudes.

Dennis Kucinich at the Democratic Debate

The warmongers at GE/NBC specifically changed their rules to exclude the anti-war Kucinich from last night's debate, after initially inviting him. Luckily, American patriot Amy Goodman of Democracy Now decided to rerun major chunks of the debate with Kucinich in studio, essentially giving him the seat at the table he was denied by the corporate controlled media. So here's the debate as it should have been:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Richard Dreyfuss@Macworld

I mentioned a few days ago seeing Richard Dreyfuss, the actor from Jaws and The Goodbye Girl, hanging around at Macworld. Well, I had a Close Encounter of the Star Kind and I snapped a surreptitious pic for you, Dear Reader.



I wasn't going to add this coda but what the hell. You see, when I saw Richard Dreyfuss, all I could think of was a little anecdote in uber-producer Julia Phillips' memoir, You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Phillips and Erica Jong* were hanging out with Dreyfuss:

“Whaddyou mean, angry fucking?” Erica says, egging him on. She and I exchange an I’ll-never-fuck-this-one look. Oh, please. Dreyfuss is a little shorter than me, and has taken to calling me “boss” as in, “Hi, boss,” then pecking me, sonlike, chastely on the cheek.

Dreyfuss pulls himself up to his full height, which is not much, and puffs out his chest. He dryhumps the air, his arms around an invisible whore, and as he screams, “I hate you I hate you I hate you…” one hand smacks his phantom lover about the head and shoulders. We crack up, but in my mind he has moved from a maybe to a never.

So that's what I thought of when I saw Richard Dreyfuss.


* So worth a click, just for the audio. At the moment, it's Jong reading her own poem Smoke on Vanessa Daou's trippy electro-jazz album Zipless: Songs From the Poems of Erica Jong.

Macworld & EFF

I got to feel ridiculously hip yesterday, what with wandering Macworld and then schmoozing at EFF's 17th birthday party at the 111 Minna Gallery a few blocks down the road. The highlight of Macworld for me, besides playing with the new Macbook Air, was getting a chance to play an early version of Spore, genius Sims creator Will Wright's much delayed new wonder in which players get to create an entire universe, from single-celled organisms to highly customizable animals and creatures to galactic physics.

Check Wright's inspiring TED talk for a closer look.

In the picture, a guy is designing a creature, elongating and shaping the spine. You decide on the length, width, and placement of legs, eyes, mouth, and every other design element of the creature. Then, when he comes alive he moves according to your design and, presumably, some basic rules of anatomy and physiology. Tres cool.

Spore is the game my son and I and -- a great many other people -- have been most eagerly anticipating for several years. Wright's the kind of guy who won't release a game until it's really, truly ready, and I'm willing to believe Spore has required some seriously heavy-duty coding to bring to fruition. Previous release estimate put the date around March, but all I could get out of the EA reps was that the game would be released "sometime this year."

After following their heroic work for well over a decade, I finally joined the EFF at Macworld. Joining supports the leading voice for civil liberties in cyberspace and netted me a cool Hugh D'Andrade-designed tee shirt, too.


I ran into my buddy Bob around the iPod Touch display and we ended up going to dinner at Osha, a very nice Thai place right in the neighborhood. We watched a very cute redhead in a short skirt and white stockings getting a big takeout order. After dinner, we walked over to 111 Minna and discovered the cute redhead is an EFFer. I knew there was something special about her!

At the EFF party, I met Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, copyfight hero, and all-around nice guy. I've been a fan for years, and I complimented von Lohmann on his excellent interview in Steal This Film II, the fantastic free documentary all about the historic threat to free and open information exchange on the Internet.

I also had a nice long chat with Charles Choi, founder of Caachi.com a new indie film distribution site. With Caachi, filmmakers set their own prices for DRM-free downloads. Artists retain all rights to their work, along with 75 cents of every dollar their films take in. I wonder what percentage goes to the artists with Apple's newly-announced video download service?

In the corner, a couple of guys held court for a while with XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child project. Impressions without actually playing with one: Very cool, stylish design, and pretty powerful for what it is. The guy doing the demo claims it's very easy to learn to use, especially for someone who has never before used anything else.

Then I met EFF's incoming webmaster Chris and his delightful girlfriend Hilary (one "l," thank you very much) and told them about the seminal role EFF has played over the last 17 years. I advised Chris to make sure the site steers everyone to the Join EFF page as clearly and conveniently as possible.

I even got to introduce Chris and Hilary to Fred von Lohmann, who wished Chris well in organizing a decade and a half's worth of documents into some coherent form!

Liveblogging from Macworld

I don't have much to say at the moment. I just think it's cool to be posting from the Blogger's Lounge at MacWorld, sponsored by Office 2008. I've already bumped into a couple of friends, one of whom will accompany me to the EFF 17th birthday party later.

Saw lots of cool Mac-related stuff and got to play with the new Macbook Air. Crazy. Also saw Richard Dreyfuss hanging outside the John Lennon Bus. Pics and impressions to follow.

3 Graphic Designers + 4 Days = D-Day Invasion

This astonishing clip demonstrates that the days in which you needed the GNP of a small country to make an effects-heavy blockbuster are coming to an end. The clip supports my contention from a few days ago that the balance of power has shifted quite dramatically in the film industry.

In my previous post, I mentioned that big time film and television artists will start creating their own media companies, owning every step in the production process and eliminating the parasitic middlemen called studios. Apparently, this process is already underway. Artists and writers are teaming up with geeks to create their own production partnerships, entirely independent from the studios.

The time is ripe for a bottom-up reinvention of the film and television industry. Both technology and society have evolved exponentially since the last writers' stike, way back in 1988. The current writers' strike is the biggest mistake the AMPTP has ever made, and the blowback could prove fatal.

The Daily Show is Back -- Thank God

Jon Stewart went on a tear for his first show back in the midst of the Writers' Strike. Stewart, along with Stephen Colbert, is the best friend the writers could ever hope for, clarifying the issues and slicing the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and the corporations it represents. Both Stewart and Colbert featured experts on labor and unions. If nothing else, this strike is educating Americans about the value of unions in allowing workers to stand up to large corporations to assert what are beginning to seem like fundamental rights.

Stewart: I don't believe that the AMPTP understands the struggle that it's in, and I don't think they understand the blowback that's going to happen.
Link (click on the Writers' Strike segment)

Very soon, film and television artists will simply cut free from their corporate masters and run their own shows, much the way musicians are doing right now. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin did this in 1919 when they formed United Artists, and others have periodically tried the same tactic, often successfully. But the fundamental paradigm of big media has remained constant. Production and distribution have been so expensive that only large corporations have been able to afford them.

That era is coming to a close. Digital media democratizes every step of the process, from production to distribution. The days of scarcity, of a small number of giant corporations controlling the means of production, are over. How appalling that artists and creators largely don't own or control their own work! How'd we ever get into this situation?

The future of media is the Internet, and everyone knows it. The media giants are fighting to hold onto their digital distribution cash while simultaneously claiming they're not making any money on the Internet ($1 billion lawsuits against YouTube notwithstanding).

This strike is a big story. A very, very big story. This is the first Internet-era strike, the first time artists have been able to take their case to the public through all the new media channels, the ones not controlled by their adversaries. Hell, the Golden Globes had to be cancelled, because the producers couldn't get any actors to cross the picket lines and show up.

A line has been drawn in the sand. The AMPTP is fighting a losing battle. Watch out for the blowback.

President Bush's grandfather plotted a fascist takeover of America

Here's a rather creepy BBC radio report on how a number of powerful businessmen, including Prescott Bush, plotted a fascist coup and takeover of America. Amazing, isn't it, that such a major story has remained hidden from the American people?

I wonder how far the apple falls from the tree...

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The guy who blew the whistle on them in 1934, incidentally, was General Smedley Butler, the author of the famous 1935 treatise War is a Racket.

How Big is the Global One-Mind Machine?

I've swooned for Wired "Senior Maverick" Kevin Kelly in the past, when he wrote his eloquent paean to the Web's first decade, We Are the Web. Kelly's latest mind-blower is Dimensions of the One Machine, which outlines the contours of our current cyberspace and posits the future rate of growth. Among the startling specs:

There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Today the Machine has as 5 orders more transistors than you have neurons in your head. And the Machine, unlike your brain, is doubling in power every couple of years at the minimum.

I was recently blown away when I realized my $40 4 gigabyte thumb drive, about a third the size of a pencil, contains storage equal to 3 thousand of those old hard plastic 3 1/4" floppy discs we all used until a few years ago. You can now buy a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) hard drive for around $400. To discuss the One Machine, Kelly talks in exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) and zetabytes (1000 exabytes):

One of the problems we have discussing this Machine is that its dimensions so far exceeds the ordinary units we are accustomed to, so we don't have a way to reckon its scale. For instance, the total international bandwidth of the global machine is approximately 7 teratbytes per second. We used to talk about one Library-of Congress-worth of information (10 terabytes), but that volume seems absolutely puny now. In ten years terabytes will fit on your iPod. Keeping that metric for the moment, one Library-of Congress-worth of information is zipped around on the Machine every second. These are very deep cycles of processing. What will we use to measure traffic in another 15 years?

We could start by saying the Machine currently has 1 HB (Human Brain) equivalent . That measure might hold up for a decade or so, but after it gets to 100 HB, or 10,000 HB, it begins to feel like using inches to measure galactic space.

Shivers...

Letter to a Senator or Congressman (or Congresswoman)

This is in response to an excellent email from Democrats.com, reprinted in italics at the end of this post.


Dear Senator or Congressman,

As I write this, our President is in the midst of an extraordinary power grab. He is attempting to turn America into a dictatorship, in which secret prisons and torture are accepted and commonplace, and rampant extraordinary corruption the norm. You know this and I know this--in fact, the whole world knows it.

What I don't know is why you are aiding and abetting this crime.

But I do know this. The American people are a sleeping giant and you are beginning to arouse the beast. America will not stop until the President and Vice President have been impeached and tried in an International Court for war crimes and treason. Along with the President and Vice President, the court will also focus its attention onto their willing executioners. And you, Senator or Congressman, will be called to account and will likely be charged with being an accessory to torture, treason, and other war crimes.

I believe that you contain within you more power for good than evil. But some sort of allegiance to the dark side is making you betray your country and instead support the dangerous occupants of the White House. I urge you to cast off the dark and follow the light. Protect the American people. Protect the Constitution, and protect America and everything great for which it stands.

Now is the time for you to show your strongest mettle, Senator. History will remember you for what you do from this day forward. Let there be Light.

PeaceLove


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Email from Democrats.com

No Waterboarding. No Dictatorship. No Mukasey.

In an impassioned floor speech opposing the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked: "Will we join that gloomy historical line leading from the Inquisition, through the prisons of tyrant regimes, through gulags and dark cells, and through Saddam Hussein's torture chambers? Will that be the path we choose?"

Mukasey refuses to say that waterboarding is torture because Dick Cheney won't let him - otherwise he would have to prosecute Cheney and Bush as war criminals . Mukasey also believes the President can ignore FISA and the Constitution and wiretap American citizens without a warrant, which makes the President a Dictator.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Mukasey next Tuesday. All 9 Republicans will support him, so all 10 Democrats must oppose him. Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy, and Sheldon Whitehouse already do, but the others are undecided (Ben Cardin, Russ Feingold, Herb Kohl, and Pat Leahy) or leaning towards Mukasey (Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer).

Tell your Senators to oppose Mukasey:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/122

Call the undecided Senators and report their responses:
http://www.democrats.com/mukasey-judiciary-whip

Chuck Schumer is the key vote and he chairs the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee - so if you give them money call 202-224-2447 to say you will not contribute if Mukasey is confirmed.

____________________

No Wiretaps

Democrats.com has led the fight against Bush's warrantless wiretapping since it was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005. We believe it must end immediately, we believe Cheney and Bush should be impeached for it, and we believe everyone involved should be punished through prosecution and lawsuits.

Senators Jay Rockefeller and Harry Reid do not agree with us. They are working overtime on a bill to expand Bush's wiretap power and give full immunity for all past crimes. But Senator Chris Dodd is outraged and promises to filibuster the Rockefeller bill. Dodd gave a tremendous speech on Friday and spoke for all of us.

Dodd needs 40 Senators to support his filibuster, so please write your Senators:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/114

Apple Death Watch: Ten Years Later

Fake Steve Jobs has a post up reminding everyone of the above Wired cover story from June, 1997. I remember reading it at the time with a tremendous sense of loss; although I was not the passionate Apple fan I am today, I still knew in my gut that something important would be lost if Apple went under. The "101 Ways to Save Apple" are mostly completely off-base, except for #50: Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development.

The last decade has been one mind-boggling breakthrough after another, thanks largely to Jobs' uncompromising vision. Of course, now there's another problem to deal with...


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TOTH to FSJ, Photo: Bernd Hammer, Lair & Garden.

UPDATED: Capitol Police Attack, Injure Anti-War Minister

When anti-war Iraq veteran Reverend Lennox Yearwood, President of the Hip Hop Caucus, tried to enter the Petraeus hearings wearing an "I Love the People of Iraq" button he was refused entry. When he questioned why others behind him in line were being allowed in while he was not, police threatened to arrest him and ultimately jumped him and tore some of the ligaments in his leg.

Luckily, someone had a video camera and captured the whole incident. And now BoingBoing has posted it, too. This should be interesting to watch how the story unfolds.

UPDATE: Reverend Yearwood YouTube's his side of the story here, and addresses the ANSWER Coalition here.

Jérémie ICE

I love finding any fresh approaches to YouTube-type magic This guy, Jérémie ICE has some fun stuff!
Karate Cord

Smoking D'Lite

Fun/cool backwards action

Last but not least, his Cyril parody is pretty funny.

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Hat tip to my buddy Martin for the links.

Hidden Gem: Company Man

I love finding maligned film gems, those pictures that open to disastrous reviews, get dumped by the studio, and slowly build their small, passionate cult following through word-of-mouth by ardent devotees. Once in a while, a single passionate critic can sway me to check something out. Blade Runner was one such film. It was pretty universally panned when it came out. But I happened to be lucky enough to read a review by the excellent Joel E. Siegel (as distinct from the Joel Siegel who reviewed films on Good Morning America) in the Washington, DC City Paper. Siegel's original 1982 review isn't online, alas, but it basically said, Ignore those other critics; this film is amazing.

On the strength of that one review, I saw Blade Runner when it came out and was blown away. Blade Runner was lucky. It somehow survived its original dumping and is now widely considered the best cyberpunk film ever made.

Other films aren't as lucky. John Boorman's 1990 Where the Heart Is is another favorite I saw on the strenth of a single review (John Powers in the L.A. Weekly?). It's another one of those horribly reviewed films that turns out to be astonishing, a very beautiful farce about creation and destruction, love and magic. The only excuse I can think of for its generally terrible reviews is that it's too European for mainstream American critics--even though it takes place in New York and stars Dabney Coleman, Uma Thurman, Suzy Amis, and Joanna Cassidy.

Here's a really longshot film for you to put on your Netflix queue: Company Man. I first read about the film back in 2002 in Esquire Magazine. Film critic Tom Carson, defending a film almost universally deplored, called Company Man "the funniest cold war farce I've ever seen." Carson had been a State Department brat during the time period and he thought the film captured, in it's own wacky way, the real feel of that world.

I'm a State Department brat myself, though from a somewhat later period. Carson sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, and I loved his passion in defending the film: "About midway through, I was marveling that a movie this sharp and entertaining could have gotten such dismissive, peeved critical notices." Carson's review really sold me on the film and I've wanted to see it ever since.

Well I just caught Company Man on IFC (Independent Film Channel), and I thought it was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Carson wasn't kidding; I checked the external reviews off the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), and the general consensus is scathing. People hated this movie, and in some cases thought Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Dennis Leary, Allan Cummings, and a host of other big name actors gave career-worst performances. Virtually everyone, excepting Carson, found the whole production completely flat and cheap.

Metacritic, which assignes a meta-rating to films based on an overview of a large number of critics nationwide gave Company Man an 18. Out of 100. Next to the 18, which has a red background, is the color key: Extreme dislike or disgust. That's only two points up from Showgirls (16) and two points down from Corky Romano (20).

They're all wrong. They had no idea what they were seeing. The film's a scream.

Through the Miracle of the Internet (and it is a Miracle), I found the original review I had read over five years ago:

In From the Cold

Company Man reminded me of Dick, another one of those films funny to those who remember thirty- to forty-year-old history with something akin to fondness. And another political farce (this one about Watergate) you may want to check out.

Flesh

French photographer, graphic artist and filmmaker Edouard Salier has created quite a splash with Flesh (2005), a ten-minute meditation on the merger of erotica and violence. Reaction on the blogosphere has been decidedly mixed. Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing recently called it "9/11-themed CGI terror-rotica," but added, "I don't know that I'm a fan of it, or not." Count me a fan. Flesh is a stunning, visionary work, even in its heavily degraded YouTube version. The Strikeback Films website has some much crisper clips; this must look amazing on the big screen.

YouTube link (NSFW, and you may need to log in and promise you're over 18 to view it.)

I sympathize with reviewers who find Flesh merely pornographic and empty, but to my eyes it's neither. Unclear it may be, but the horror and decadence on display certainly seems to express uncomfortable truths about fundamentalism, Islamofascism, and American hedgemony. I recommend the explanatory commentary on the website's About section for more details.


Just in case you were unclear about Salier's intentions, here's his earlier (2004) 4-minute short Empire. It's a decidedly more low-key work, but no less uncomfortable for it. The degraded YouTube clip is again a bit hard to read; that's military hardware moving across the screen.

The Lesson (2007)

For G. My heartbreak.

Magic and Metadiscourse

A ventriloquist lost his job when a local nightclub went out of business, so to make ends meet he began working as a "spirit medium." He had a talking skull on the table and people would come to him to talk to their dead relatives. The ventriloquist could secretly move the skull's mouth and make it seem as though the skull itself was talking.

One day, a very wealthy society matron came to talk to her dead husband. The woman was so impressed with the contact from beyond that she said to the "medium:"

"Young man, you have an extraordinary gift. If I pay you a thousand dollars can I come back next week to talk to my husband for a few hours?"

The ventriloquist "medium" responded, "Lady, for a thousand bucks you can even talk to him while I drink a glass of water!"


When Good Magicians Go Bad

Here are a couple of stories about two of my good friends in magic, each making a critical mistake.

1) A very talented kid I know was frying some laypeople with his rubber band magic. He did a beautiful version of Crazy Man's Handcuffs, a classic effect in which one rubber band seems to simply melt through another. My friend knows how to sell this type of thing. He brought the attention in close, created a very tight frame around the action, and slowed down the moment of the magic. When that band melted through, the spectators gasped.

Hold that moment. The effect is over but the ramifications are still building in the spectators' minds. Then...

...my friend started talking about the trick. "I usually do that as a 3-phase routine, but I've started eliminating the last part..."

2) Another friend, a talented magician with the look, dress, and demeanor of a wizard, performed Anniversary Waltz for about 60 people. In Anniversary Waltz, a couple each select a card and sign the face. After some magical incantations, the two cards fuse together into a single, double-faced card each side of which is one of the signed, selected cards. Symbolically, the fused card represents the fusion of the two people, their link and their bond.

Picture the scene. My friend, looking like a cross between a magician and a high priest, is standing between the two spectators like a minister officiating at a wedding. He has fused the cards, and he gives it to them as a memento. Beautiful framing, magical moment.

Then he says, "You'll definitely want to hold on to that card, because when you leave here everyone in the audience will want to pounce on it and examine it from top to bottom to see that it is, indeed, a single card."


What Happened?

I've caught good magicians doing this type of thing before, but I have only recently learned the name for it: metadiscourse. In writing, metadiscourse is essentially writing about the act of writing itself. More specifically, we use metadiscourse when we refer to the act of writing whatever it is we're writing at the time. In Technical Writing, metadiscourse is generally a no no; you're not supposed to say, "This guide covers" or "Later, I will discuss..." because those are of no interest to your reader, who only cares about the information, not the form of the information or the process in which it was written.

I've struggled to define the term accurately for you and the best I can come up with is this; this whole sentence is metadiscourse. Of course, metadiscouse can be wonderful. Blogs, for instance, thrive on metadiscourse, since they are often channels for bloggers to work through their own thinking on various issues in a public way. In the future, I might have more to say about the role of metadiscourse in our modern wired society (think Twitter). But that's enough metadiscourse for now.


Magic and Metadiscourse

In the examples above, the magicians killed the moment by talking about the tricks after they happened. The young fellow took an impressive effect, a rubber band passing through another, and turned it in the eyes of the audience into a routine, a studied series of moves and sections. The wizard took a beautiful effect about a sacred union and turned it back into a puzzle. Metadiscourse doth slay the mystery.

Metadiscourse can play an important role in magic. When David Blaine talks about how Houdini inspired him, or when Criss Angel channels David Blaine to talk about how Houdini inspired him--that's metadiscourse. Much of the metadiscourse in magic can be banal, like stories about "the first trick my Grandpa showed me when I was a boy," or the perennial "I learned this trick in the Orient many years ago...." It can also be deep; Ricky Jay is a master of metadiscourse, and his entire 52 Assistants show is as much a tribute to the history and practice of card magic as it is about the magic itself.

For the most part, however, too much metadiscourse is death to magic. To create a sense of jaw-dropping astonishment, you almost by definition have to take your spectator outside the province of magical technique and history and put them in a pure, unfiltered now. David Blaine is smart enough to put all his metadiscourse, his setup, up front. You'll never see Blaine create a miracle and then talk afterward about the process. Blaine is comfortable enough with the visceral notion of wonder that he allows his spectators to remain in the state for as long as possible.

But many magicians are uncomfortable with actual wonder, and their own power to create it. So they reflexively move to kill the moment of wonder by cracking wise, or talking about the trick. Rather than allowing the spectator to simply be in the experience, they feel the need to fill the "void" with mindless chatter.

I've become very sensitive to the issue of metadiscourse, especially as it applies to magicians who appreciate and strive to create deep wonder. In the examples above, I was able to call my friends' attention to the phenomenon and point out how much stronger their material would be if they eliminated all post-effect metadiscourse. Being gentlemen of taste and discrimination, and excellent magicians both, they understood and will certainly be more conscious about not stepping on their own effects in the future.


"Technical Metadiscourse" in Magic

I've always loved the joke that opens this post, but I think it's particularly funny for magicians, for whom there's a lot of truth in the ventriloquist's retort. Magicians are often so in love with their technique they create extra proof of innocence where none is required. For instance, another very talented magician friend (I'm extremely lucky to have such an amazing community of magicians around me) sent me an email about an idea he saw posted on the Magic Cafe. The idea is a "subtlety" added to Bob Sheets' Hang 'Em High, a rope through body effect I've been doing for years.

In this new "improved" version, before you pull the rope through your body you attach a sticker with the name of your two spectators to the center of the rope. Then, when the rope passes through you the audience sees the sticker still on the rope. In other words, you have just "proved" something that didn't need proving, that the rope that passed through your body is the same rope you started with.

I've coined a term for such types of technical solutions to what are often non-existent problems: technical metadiscourse. Technical metadiscourse comes about when magicians create extra presentational points to cover what they see as a weakness or potential hole in their secret methodology. Such tools can be important in magic. Having a spectator sign a card is an example of useful, overt technical metadiscourse. The signature is openly intended to preclude an obvious method (duplicate cards) from entering the spectator's mind and ruining the effect.

On the other hand, magicians often have no feel for when such "over-proving" is necessary or even prudent. The common magical aphorism covering this situation is Don't run when you're not being chased. At one of our local magic contests, yet another talented magician won by causing a borrowed bill to vanish and reappear under impossible conditions in a selected lemon. Many of the other "magicians" were surprised the trick played so well. Someone asked one of the spectators, "Did he have you sign the bill?"

Spectator (puzzled): "The bill was inside the lemon!"

Skeptic: "But, did he tear off one corner so you could identify the bill later?"

Spectator (patiently, as to a child): "But that was my bill, and it was in the fucking lemon!"

Examine your magic for unnecessary metadiscourse, both technical and verbal. Eliminate if possible. Be fierce with yourself.


Why Magicians Use Inappropriate Metadiscourse

I have several theories about why magicians often feel the need to add metadiscourse both during and after an effect.

My first theory states that magicians often add technical metadiscourse as a way to assuage their guilt. Here's a classic example every beginner is taught to avoid, "This is an ordinary deck of cards." Saying such a thing only arouses suspicion; why wouldn't it be an ordinary deck? Even though magicians very rarely make such a silly mistake, they often create similar situations. For instance, I can't tell you how many times I've seen magicians performing coin and card effects spasmodically "proving" that their hands contain only cards. Or magicians doing the Silk from Empty Hand trick pointing their hands, fingers towards the audience, for waaay to long just to "prove" that their hands are really, really empty.

Sometimes, we just do it because we can. Even when we shouldn't.

Another pet peeve, which I see all the time during performances of Professor's Nightmare (in which three unequal lengths ropes become all the same length): "Now I have one...two...three lengths of rope, all the same length." Those familiar with Professor's Nightmare will know the count I'm referring to. Unless you're working a nursery school, you don't need to explain that three ropes are counted one...two...three. And you don't need to tell people what they can already see, that the ropes are now the same length.

I don't object to the technique, by the way, just the pointless counting. When I used to do Professor's Nightmare table-hopping, I would always do the display count as a convincer, but I would say, "Once again, here's the short rope, here's the middle-length rope, and...Oh, wait, that's the short one, this is the medium-length one...and I guess this is the long one." In other words, I use the display as a setup for a gag. The gag not only gives me a reason to do the count, it also reinforces that they are all identical in a fun way and it gives me a rhythm to move through the count and cover any dirty work I might wish to accomplish.

The whole display is technical metadiscourse, designed to point away from the method. Done right, it's very convincing; done badly, it makes you look guilty. Don't feel guilty fooling people. Your job is to create wonder, and you have the tacit permission of your audience to lie or cheat however you like (as long as no one gets hurt) to create the illusion of impossibility.



Magicians are Friendly

My other theory about why we magicians often add needless metadiscourse is that we all want to be friendly and communitarian. Fooling someone, creating deep astonishment, inevitably creates a wall between us and the audience, between us who "know" and those who have no idea what just happened. We want to soften the blow, to comfort the audience that it's all in fun, that it's all a trick, that it's all "entertainment."

So we say, "That's something new I've been practicing." Or, "That's a cool Paul Harris routine." These are metadiscourse; they mean a lot to a magicians but only serve to puncture the wonder bubble for your spectators.

Please don't make this mistake. Keep your magic occult, hidden, secret. I don't mean you should take full credit for every trick you do, but when people ask "Where did you learn all this stuff?" they don't really want to hear, "I got a book from the library, then hung out at the magic club meeting at the local church...." They don't want to hear, "Well, the original idea was in Frank Garcia's Million Dollar Card Secrets, but then Racherbaumer did some work with it...."

Here's an idea: Script your answers to common questions.
Q. "Where do you learn this stuff?"
A. "I'm part of a small group of magicians who meet and work together to bend space and time and create miracles."

That's a gag answer, in a way, but it's also relatively true without being mundane. When people ask that question, here's what they secretly hope you'll say (and mean):

"Gypsies stole me as a child and I was trained in the dark arts."
"I was kidnapped by men in black and my power grew in a secret underground laboratory in the Rocky Mountains."
"After the lightening struck my skull, I began to see and understand things others could not."

I'm not suggesting you use these lines (although feel free to, especially if they're true). I'm only saying people want mystery and romance, not prosaic explanations. When you demystify the art you're not doing anyone a favor. Not your audience or yourself.

Hans Rosling at TED

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of some of the most brilliant people in the world. Geniuses from one field after another get up and speak for twenty or so minutes about whatever they want, and the TED people have graciously put up many of the talks online. If you have time to kill and a mind to blow, you could do worse than to spend a few hours watching one astounding presentation after another.

I first saw Hans Rosling's 2006 talk about six months ago and it literally brought tears to my eyes. Rosling is a Swedish professor of public health on a mission to make the world's data, especially UN public health data, widely available and accessible. Here he creates highly visual animated data maps to show that the world is getting better, the gap between rich and poor is shrinking, and life expectancy is rising almost everywhere. This is a stunning, rousing talk and is apparently now considered legendary among TED aficionados. Check it out here.

Now, his 2007 follow-up talk is also online. All together now: Hans Rosling Rulez!