Stone’s gee-whiz enthusiasm occasionally leads him astray. He seems genuinely baffled when he gets tossed out of a bar for refusing to put away his card tricks, and he’s similarly nonplussed when a girlfriend asks for a reprieve from his endless sleight-of-hand drills. “It’s annoying,” she says, “and I asked you to stop.”
This particular skill — knowing when to rein it in — is one that Stone seems unable to master. A few years ago, he achieved a measure of infamy in the magic community when he published a magazine article that exposed the secrets of fellow performers. He sets aside a lengthy chapter in “Fooling Houdini” to mount a defense of his actions, which he characterizes as a celebration of magic rather than an assault. “Most people have no clue how much skill and creativity and hard work goes into it, because magic is all about art concealing art,” he writes. “As a result, magic exists in a kind of vacuum.” His goal, he insists, was to “pump some life into this vacuum.”
(Harper) - ‘Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind’ by Alex Stone
Few of his critics will be won over by this logic, and it is worth mentioning — as Stone himself does earlier in the book — that he swore an oath of secrecy when he joined the Society of American Magicians.
I should confess that I signed this same oath when I was a teenage magician churning out balloon poodles in Cleveland. Personally, I don’t believe that an occasional tip of the gaff does any lasting harm, and Stone is correct when he points out that most of magic’s secrets are just “a mouse click away.” In days of yore I was often asked for the secret of a particular “Four Aces” routine, and I would provide the title and Dewey decimal number of the library book from which I learned it. So far as I know, no one ever looked it up.
But in the end, Stone calls his own bluff. After fulminating at length on the manner in which “exposure compels magicians to modernize their acts” and taking some pot shots at the “ancien régime,” he abruptly breaks off the charge and seeks absolution from one of his mentors: “I told him I felt awful about the incident and regretted the article.” And with a snap of his fingers, the soapbox vanishes.
Stone’s personal travails are far less interesting than his scientific insights, but the digressions of this type are thankfully brief. He’s at his best in a lab coat and goggles, looking at magic from a physicist’s point of view. “Like physics,” he tells us, “magic is all about nerds playing god with the universe.”
Daniel Stashower
, the author of “The Beautiful Cigar Girl,” has been a member of the Society of American Magicians for 33 years.
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