The Allure of the Dark Side
By Shane

I was going to write an article this month dealing with pocket management and the necessity of never referring to a silk as a "silk". However, I received an email from a reader, unfortunately anonymously, that stirred some thoughts I felt I wanted to put to paper (upload to server, attach electrons to copper... pick your computer-like analogy, I'm easy). This reader complimented me on some of my more bizarre routines and asked a simple question, quite tongue-in-cheek: "What made you decide to sell your soul?"

The answer was compelling: a girl named Pamela, on the beach at midnight back in '82.

Okay, so that probably wasn't what the reader was talking about. He asks a good question though, and one that made me think for quite some time.

Why did I give up the wisecracking, joke-making, smart-aleck persona and opt for something a bit, well, different? The answer is really nowhere near as interesting as the tale involving the aforementioned long-legged brunette beauty.

I was on a quest and never knew it.

The first time I heard of bizarre magick was upon my return to magic after a twenty-year absence (referred to by myself as The Null Years). I had read about something called bizarre magick online somewhere and made a trip to Showplace to ask the wizened and more in-tune folks there what in the world bizarre magick was. As luck would have it, that's when I first met Kep, and he and Drew -- a practitioner of such things -- gave me my intro to magic-with-a-K.

They began by explaining, in the simplest of uni- and bi-syllabic vocabularies, that bizarre magick was a return to the roots of magic, where magic really began. Sounded interesting, I'll admit, and the passion Kep and Drew exhibited when discussing this thing was contagious. Then they decided that the easiest way for me to see what bizarre magick was would be a demonstration by a pro. In went the tape, on came the TV, and Eugene Burger was suddenly doing the old Gypsy Thread thing.

Now, an interjection. The Gypsy Thread routine has never interested me. I know, I know. It's a great routine -- I truly appreciate it as a classic of magic. But, as is the case with so many classics, virtually all the presentation you'll ever see is very matter-of-fact, otherwise known as "Say-and-Do". You know what I'm talking about: "I have a thread (show thread), I break the thread (break thread), and the thread is restored (show thread again)." This just never did anything for me. It never hooked me.

But Eugene, may the gods of magick forever smile on him, wasn't showing a thread. He was showing the universe. He didn't break the thread, he was unraveling the very fabric of the universe. And he didn't restore the thread, Indian gods reestablished our existence. Man, oh, man, oh man, was I hooked. Solidly. I was entranced. This was Something Special.

At that time, as Steve Simbeck over at Showplace would say, I went over to the Dark Side.

But, when supping with the Devil, one must be sure to use a long spoon. So I went slowly into this good night.

Simply enough, I bought every book I could find on the subject of bizarre magick. Most were rotten and stank of some foul ichor brought forth from the denizens of a Lovecraft story. A few where wonderfully insightful. In between the muddy mires and the grassy plains, I started finding my way through this new territory. And I was loving it, every single slow step of the journey felt wondrous to me.

Along this time, I stumbled onto Kenton Knepper. Kenton, I can say with true self-knowledge, is a great man and nothing short of a genius. Also, he is a remarkably kind man, and generous with what little time he has free. Now, I have to admit, at this time I figured him for either a kook or a con-man (my apologies, Kenton, but I have to be honest with myself and my Gentle Reader -- remember that I still had scales on my eyes at this point). After all, I was reading some incredible things that he claimed to be able to teach, things not even a dealer (sorry, Steve, but you know you're not in this class) would pretend to claim the consumer could achieve. However, being the adventurous beast I am, I puts my money down and I tooks my chances and I bought some of Kenton's material.

I got it, I read it, and I was moved. Tremendously. My eyes opened wide, in surprise and wonder. I began thinking seriously for the first time about such things as cold readings, psychological effects of words, and the like. And I felt myself going a bit farther into Dark Side. Or, as others have called it, the grown-up form of magic.

Mentalism.

Now, I'm not an idiot. I know that mentalism is about as far from bizarre magick as you can get (with the exception of doing a Cups and Balls routine with whoopee cushions as a final load). But there's much common ground there. If bizarre magick is, in fact, a return to the roots of magic, to that lost-in-time epoch of magic as a means of survival, then mentalism had to play a part. If bizarre magick relies on story and presentation to create a new reality, formed in the spectator's mind by the performer, then mentalism and its techniques, which builds itself strictly on presentation, had to be a piece of magick.

Hello, Andy Leviss. Andy lives on both sides of the street, being both a magician and a mentalist. Andy was also gracious enough to listen to some of my plight, put up with some of my questions as I now delved into mentalism. As I buried myself over and over into Corinda and Annemann and Banachek and Waters, I began seeing that, after all was said and done, I was right. There is a solid connection between mentalism and bizarre magick.

I also found out that, if I had purchased my books a bit more discriminately, I would have found out that everyone else already knew this. But just because you journey along a well-travelled road doesn't make the journey any less fulfilling, and fulfilled I was.

But not completely. I still had a major problem with bizarre magick, as much as it appealed to me:

I look terrible in black robes and refuse to call myself Yog-Saggoth.

Virtually everything I read about bizarre magick was written by someone who sounds normal and quite sane but who performs as a poor-man's Anton S. LeVay. That's not me. That will never be me. And if that's what is required, bizarre magick will never work. For me.

Enter the final pieces of the puzzle: Paul Harris and Bob Neale. A wisecracking performer I first learned from as a youngster and an incredibly powerful storyteller I had run across by accident. The books, those final pieces, were "The Art of Astonishment" volumes and "Life, Death, and Other Card Tricks". In those works, I found that one important thing I was looking for.

And my journey was over and, in typical Zen-fashion, my journey ended where I began.

My favorite Zen story of all time:

Two monks, one a younger initiate and one an older teacher, were traveling together. Several times during their journey, the older priest would pull a mirror from his pack and look into it. After a few times of this, the zealous initiate could no longer stand it and took the old priest to task. "We are taught that vanity is a ruin, yet you take every opportunity to stare at yourself in that mirror! Why is it, as wise as you are believed to be, that you show such vanity for yourself?" The older priest explained very simply, so the initiate could understand. "When I look into the mirror, young man, I see both the cause and the solution to all of my problems."

I like to think that, about that time, he struck the youngster soundly with some Matrix-like kung-fu moves, then walked off laughing at the chump. But that's why I'll never be a Zen master.

A typical Shane-digression? Nope. Not at all. You see, Paul gave me my first exposure to The Moment of Astonishment, the true goal of magic. Bob showed me that I could get it by morbidity or by hilarity. Both showed me an emotional appeal to this sense of wonder in an audience was The Goal.

And I didn't have to look like an extra from "Tombs of the Blind Undead" to achieve that goal at all.

As the story said, though, I was both the source of the problem I was having and the solution. I knew, having been taught by some great men when I was young, that I had to go for the audience's emotions. I needed a way to get to it, and a way that was fascinating to me. As I was told, to inspire an emotion, I have to feel that emotion. Bizarre magick fascinated me. What I had learned along the way to this little self-discovery gave me the tools to be more than some guy with a deck of cards getting laughs while talking about cops and robbers.

My longtime love with Lovecraft and Bloch and Barker and King and Poe was allowed to come to the fore. My hobby of cineteratology (horror movies to most folks) gave me plenty of material. Paul and Bob gave me the go-ahead to create wonder and reach emotions other than through the funny bone or some quick moment of suspense. And, on the shoulders of Burger and Raven and Andruzzi, I went for it.

And a bizarrist was born. Or maybe "storyteller" is closer to the facts of the matter.

So, to the question of what made me decide to sell my soul, the answer is easy enough: I wanted to allow my own fascinations to fascinate other people, to make them see more than just "tricks", to feel something more than just "puzzlement". For me, bizarre magick and mentalism, where the perfect tools to allow that. I can, using the philosophies there, discuss with equal entertainment and emotional appeal the summoning of demons, the power of Voodoo, the mysteries revealed in a Celtic Cross of a Tarot deck, how my uncle got ripped-off by some carnies faster than he could shout "Hey, Rube!" and my own terribly unlucky experiences playing three-card monte.

The Dark Side beckoned, and it delivered on its promise for me. It gave me the courage to be a bit more free as a performer. And there lies the true profit from that daemonic transaction. All in all, I got more than I bargained for.

Now if I can just get that smell of brimstone out of my carpet.

Shane