Dear Friends:
Jeff is off in France as I write this, teaching a 5-day workshop with Juan Tamariz, and Gaeton Bloom. We have a piece of fantastic news, before I introduce you to our guest writer for the month:
Jeff McBride will receive the prestigious Merlin Award for Most Innovative Magic Show 2010 on October 21, at a special ceremony during Jeff McBride’s Wonderground at The Olive on E. Sunset Road in Las Vegas. At the same event, Eugene Burger will be receiving the Merlin Award for Close-Up Magician of The Year 2010.
The Merlin Award to magic is what the Oscar is to the movies. It is the most prestigious award given in the world of magic. Since 1968, the Merlin Award has been presented by the International Magicians Society as a recognition award. The International Magicians Society is listed in the Guinness World Records as the World’s Largest Magic Organization with over 37,000 members worldwide.
Some of the world’s greatest magicians have received the Merlin Award, including Harry Blackstone, Doug Henning, Channing Pollock, David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, Penn & Teller, Criss Angel, Sylvan, Tabary, Paul Daniels, Peter Marvey, Jeff McBride, Max Maven, Luis de Matos, Brett Daniels, Juliana Chen, Shimada, Mahka Tendo, Sorcar, etc. Many show producers have also been honored with the Merlin Award, including Kenneth Feld, Elena Palchevski, and Alberto Sperduto. For the complete list, go towww.IMSmagic.com and click on “Merlin Award Recipients.”
We have a very full schedule in October, with several corporate shows, the class in Street Magic coming up, the Master Class for Mentalists with Ross Johnson (still a space or two available…hurry!), and, of course Magic & Meaning.
Our guest writer this month is one of our favorite performers and good friends, who has been coming to Magic & Meaning for many years. George Parker is a true wizard, performing over 300 shows a year for many years now, helping various organizations all over the world find new and better ways to operate. He is an amazing magician, and even more amazing thinker. I know you will enjoy what he has to say about the subject of Serendipity!  Ladies and gentlemen – George Parker:
Do you like chocolate chip cookies? I like the taste, but I like the bite even more. However, if Ruth Wakefield had been in control of her shopping, chocolate chip cookies would not have been invented. She intended to make chocolate drop cookies but didn’t have the right kind of chocolate. Instead, she broke up a candy bar and put the chunks in the mix. Silly putty was a byproduct of the search for an alternative for rubber in WW2. The inkjet printer was discovered by a Canon engineer who accidentally put his soldering iron on his pen and noticed that ink was shooting out.
These are cases of serendipity: an invention by accident. I have always loved the experience of happy and surprising discoveries. I’m a big believer in accidents and coincidences; they are a big part of my creative process. The word ‘serendipity’ was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. He formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip. The main characters were ‘always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. The secrets of how to trigger these discoveries is in the definition. You can’t force serendipity, but you can invite it by:
aiming to find something (the quest)
allowing accidents to happen
keeping an open, alert mind (sagacity).
The last thing is particularly important because we’re always going somewhere, even if we’re not aware of it. Even the most uptight, anal-retentive person can’t avoid accidents. But our senses will only perceive what our mind allows them to perceive. So a one-track mind will notice very little of what’s going on and will look at the world in the same way every day.
To open your mind you need to get off track on a regular basis. That turns out to be difficult for most people because we tend to resist experiences that are out of our comfort zone. A sober-minded person often resists spirituality. A very spiritual person resists sober-mindedness. Republicans resist Democrats and the other way around. Creative people tend to resist pragmatism and pragmatic people resist exploring more options. But our mind becomes lazy if we hang on to our own beliefs too long. Explore in all directions: switch your daily routine regularly. If you take a break, don’t just rest, but do something opposite from the thing you’re taking a break from. If you’re a physical person, do thought experiments. If you’re a thinker, surrender to dance, bioenergetics or sex. Switch religions every month! You’ll discover that beliefs are just beliefs and you can play with them to evoke new ideas.
The playful mind will be open to accidents and notice unusual opportunities. At first, it will feel strange because we learned to control everything in our lives and suppress uncomfortable feelings. But soon you will start to love this strange feeling of being open to chance. Then you will stack one invention on the other just like Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics. He was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA in the fifties. And LSD itself was a case of serendipity, according to Albert Hofmann, who conducted the pharmaceutical research LSD was a byproduct of.
I’m not promoting the use of drugs of course. If you can’t handle alcohol, coffee, or whatever drug you can be addicted to, stay away from it. Because addiction is a sign of a one-track mind. And this type of person has little chance of running into serendipities.
That’s all for this week. We’ll be back in just a couple of weeks with more news, and maybe even some photos of Jeff’s recent travels.
Best to all!
Sincerely,
Tobias Beckwith