High School Houdinis
by Jimmy Magahern
Originally published by the Scottsdale Times, December 3, 2006
Thanks to YouTube and other Internet sites, schoolyard nerds who can make their shoelaces tie themselves are now the latest high school celebrities. Magic tricks are hotter than ever in today’s high school cafeterias.
Bobby Hasbun can make a dove disappear into thin air, find a spectator’s card in a randomly shuffled deck and repair a cut piece of rope with just a wave of his hand.
But Hasbun’s dad thinks the greatest trick in the arsenal of his 16-year-old son, a bespectacled, curly-haired, slightly doughy sophomore at St. Mary’s High School, is how he can make cute girls magically appear at his doorstep.
“They already come around, saying, ‘Hey, can you show me a trick?’,” says Rick Hasbun, flashing an envious smile at his embarrassed son as the two share an after-school meal at the Central Avenue McDonald’s.
“When I was in high school, I didn’t know how to do anything special,” dad continues, sounding for a moment like a stand-up comic on the WB’s Blue Collar TV. “I couldn’t get any girls to come close to me. But I don’t think he knows what an advantage he’s got. When Bobby’s doing magic, it’s like they’re drawn to him.”
Bobby just looks down at his burger and slowly shakes his head, smiling. “Well, sure, it helps me meet them,” he says, trailing off. But apparently, Bobby’s being modest: his MySpace page is full of shout-outs from attractive female friends, some with nicknames like Magic Chick and with a penchant for Harry Potter movies and Mindfreak DVDs.
Hasbun has unlocked a secret effect imprinted on today’s teens by months of watching all those Criss Angel and David Blaine video clips on YouTube: Tricks get chicks.
Viral video sites such as YouTube.com and Yahoo! Video have become the perfect medium for short performances of street magic.
All over the Internet, both star and amateur magicians can be seen levitating on elevators, swallowing quarters and transporting cards. The quick visual punch of the surprise effect turns out to fit the new entertainment medium perfectly: short clips involving magic regularly draw millions of views on YouTube, and some ambitious tricksters, like the self-proclaimed “PhoneCam Magician,” Marco Tempest, have already morphed themselves into mini-celebrities with their own iTunes video podcasts.
Less noticed, however, has been the popularity-boosting effect this new hunger for magic bites has had on the peculiar high school nerd who can make his juice straw disappear. Suddenly, the kid who can perform any of these tricks live in the lunchroom has been bestowed the best mad skills since Napoleon Dynamite.
Hasbun admits he’s been getting noticed more since he began performing card tricks for his friends around St. Mary’s campus. “I’ll be doing a trick for my friends, and suddenly people will stop to watch,” he says. He’s also learned how to draw smiles from classmates without resorting to class clown buffoonery or resulting trips to the principal’s office.
“I did a card trick in Spanish class today that everyone really liked,” he says. “Shhh,” he adds, with a wink. “The teacher’s not supposed to know about it!”
There are other edges to being an adolescent master of misdirection and sleight of hand, Hasbun reveals.
Like all honorable heroes with extraordinary powers, however, Hasbun resists using his magical abilities for personal gain — even if that means passing on the occasional OC-worthy girlfriend.
“Magic can be good for meeting girls,” he admits. “But I wouldn’t want to use it just for that. I wouldn’t want to think someone likes me just for my magic.”
Competitive Magic
Across town at a Scottsdale Starbucks, another 16-year-old, Caleb Siegler, fans and shuffles a deck of cards while three attractive older girls at the next table smile and stare, seemingly enthralled by his dexterity.
Like Hasbun, Siegler doesn’t exactly look the part of the big man on campus. With long bangs and hipster black-rimmed glasses, the Saguaro High sophomore projects a misplaced-in-time image straight off a Chad & Jeremy album cover.
But Siegler, unlike Hasbun, is still somewhat shy about approaching strangers — a skill essential to making it as a street magician. Siegler speaks admiringly of David Blaine, the 33-year-old Brooklyn busker credited with introducing the street magic genre through his series of ABC specials in the late 1990s. Blaine rose above the pack of other anonymous street corner hustlers by being absolutely fearless with passers-by.
“I do magic for my family and friends,” Siegler says. “But it’s really hard to, like, go over to that table over there and say, ‘Wanna see a trick?’ ’Cause if they say, ‘No,’ you feel like an idiot.
“David Blaine pulls it off, though” he quickly adds, as if reciting upon a well-worn pep-talk to himself. “I’ll keep working on it.”
With nearly every teen armed with picture-snapping cell phones and videocams, and the Internet freely available as a distribution outlet, Siegler says it’s easier than ever for a clever magician to make an overnight name for himself. Like many budding magicians, he is also into film and photography, and admits he spends downtime in math class dreaming up that one killer trick he can film and upload to achieve instant fame.
Problem is, with so many would-be wizards clogging the Internet tubes, it’s also tougher than ever to produce an illusion the world hasn’t already seen. Worse still, today’s illusions are often debunked and exposed in record time, rendering the amazing lame before its creator can capitalize on its popularity.
“It’s really hard to make up new tricks because there’s so many out there,” Siegler says. Hasbun agrees: “I’m constantly coming up with new ideas, and then constantly finding out that they’ve been done.”
Certainly the ones who do make it to YouTube first with an original trick are reaping rewards previously unavailable to the upstart magician. Jay Noblezada, a San Diego street performer who three years ago joined the Internet-based distributor Penguin Magic as a creative consultant, recently scored one of the best-selling magic DVDs of the year when he unveiled the secrets of his “Self-Tying Shoelace,” a clever illusion that makes it appear the magician can re-tie undone shoelaces with the flick of a foot.
Siegler says the field of magic now has its own weekly Top Ten, with a batch of new effects introduced each month that every magician quickly rushes to master.
“On Ellusionist,” says Siegler, referring to another top Web site for practicing magicians, “they have a new trick [for sale on DVD] every two months. And usually, everyone wants to order that one trick for that month.”
Fortunately for Siegler, he’s one of the few guys pulling tricks in the Saguaro cafeteria, so if he debuts the trick of the month, “there’s not too many people who can upstage me.”
Like a lot of kids his age, Siegler is also limited with how much he can spend on the materials or instructional videos needed to unlock the latest illusions. How-to DVDs of some of the hottest tricks, like Criss Angel’s levitation effect, can fetch as much as $99 to $200 — priced high, the pros say, mainly to keep the secret out of reach to all but the most serious magicians, though bootleg versions often wind up available on the Internet in short order.
For that reason, both Siegler and Hasbun say, most young magicians prefer spending their allowance on card decks and the occasional trick coin. “Most of the stuff I do is just simple sleight-of-hand,” says Siegler. “I’m not a big fan of tricks where you have to buy stuff — gimmicks, they call ‘em.”
Still, he has been considering spending the $19.95 for Noblezada’s nifty shoelace trick — unique in that it’s the spectator who typically breaks the ice by telling the magician, “your shoe’s untied,” perfect for bashful conjurers like himself.
“I’ve heard good things about the self-tying shoelace,” he says. “I might buy that.”
Shock Value
At Scottsdale’s Presto Magic Studio — one of the last remaining brick-and-mortar magic shops in the Valley, and the one most pros consider the best, veteran magician Barry Schor tidies up the colorful array of cups, scarves, coins and cards on his store counter, getting ready for the usual after-school clique of young magicians angling for the latest hot effect.
“Most kids go through a magic phase at some point,” Schor says. “But it’s usually when they’re between seven and twelve, when there’s that degree of wonderment about the world — and also still the wish that maybe it is real, you know?
“But recently, what I’m seeing an influx of is the teenage group. And I think that’s largely due to Criss Angel.”
While Schor has some personal misgivings about Angel — “I’m not a big fan of the man,” he grimaces — he admits that the gothic-looking, long-haired illusionist, currently riding an unprecedented wave of popularity due to his hit A&E; Network series Mindfreak, has done wonders in making magic hot with a whole new demographic.
“He’s darker, and I think that tends to attract that age group,” Schor says. “His stuff feeds that circus geek mentality — which we all have, to some degree. It’s all about taking an old classic and twisting it, to look like you have some supernatural powers.”
Indeed, Angel’s form of magic, in which he often performs stomach-churning feats like making a quarter travel under his skin and pulling apart a woman whose top half then scampers away on its arms in horror — has pushed the art to new extremes even fellow magicians can’t imagine topping.
For mild-mannered card sharks like Siegler and Hasbun, that means simple stand-bys like the old “Which cup is the ball under?” illusion no longer cut it in an audience of their peers.
“Things like the cup and balls — that might have been cool 200 years ago, but it seems pretty lame now,” says Hasbun. “People my age want to see more extreme things, or just cool things, you know what I mean?”
Hasbun says he’s done his own extreme variation on the basic cup-and-balls premise, where he covers a butcher knife under one of three paper bags and asks the spectator which one he should smash with his hand — a trick dependent on a risky mix of skill and luck. He says he’s seen people attempt another current variation using a nail and three Styrofoam cups — its creator calls it the “Russian Roulette” trick — and wind up with the nail literally through their hands.
“That’s one I don’t perform much,” he says, “mainly for that reason.”
Siegler agrees that the push to top dark masters like Angel has made his hobby a much more dangerous pursuit.
“Shock value is so important now,” he says. “Like, say you do the Russian Roulette thing with an egg under a cup instead of a nail that you can impale your hand on. Well, that’s not gonna be considered as risky, or as hard-hitting. And that’s what people want.”
Magic High
Fortunately, today’s high school Houdinis may not have to risk life and limb to become the magic world’s next superstar. If history is any indicator, whoever snatches the crown from Angel may in fact be his polar opposite.
“I’ve got this theory that magic always moves in cycles,” says Brad Zinn, a 49-year-old Phoenix-born magician who today runs his own booking agency for fellow magicians and entertainers.
“You have a magician who represents the thesis, the way things are. Someone comes along and becomes the antithesis to that. And the metamorphosis between the two becomes the synthesis.”
To illustrate his scholarly concept, Zinn points to 18th century French pioneer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, who epitomized the early image of the magician as the sophisticate in tail-coats and top hat. Next came Harry Houdini, who took his stage name from Robert-Houdin but performed rougher, more working-class feats involving handcuffs, chains and straitjackets.
Harry Blackstone, Jr. synthesized their styles, followed again by a parade of opposites: colorful hippie Doug Henning, to suave David Copperfield, to down-and-dirty Blaine to extreme showman Angel, who Zinn believes represents a synthesis of Copperfield and Blaine.
“Who will be the antithesis to Criss Angel?” Zinn asks. “No one knows. But somebody will come along with the right formula to supplant him and become the next big thing.”
Zinn’s theory may bode well for good Catholic boys like Hasbun and Siegler, who on the surface exhibit none of Angel’s rock ‘n roll madman persona.
Siegler says he’s currently working up the gumption to audition for his school’s annual talent show, and Hasbun has been busy running his own party bookings.
“I’ve probably done 40 or 50 shows,” he says. “Mostly birthday parties for young kids. But I’ve done some corporate gigs, too. Depending on how long the performance is, I make between $50 to $100 per show.”
Hasbun’s proud dad reaches into his wallet to produce one of the business cards he’s had printed for his son — then quickly turns it over before passing it on.
“I want to make sure it doesn’t have any girl’s phone number on it,” he says, giving Bobby one last ribbing.
“Well, it was in your wallet,” the younger Hasbun points out.
“Yeah,” replies dad, with a grin. “But how do I know you didn’t just put it there?”
