Joshua Jay, episode 205
When my wife and I were dating, we used to go back to my small apartment in Hollywood and watch Penn and Teller’s Fool Us on my laptop. We’ve since been to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles a few times and we’re pretty serious magic fans. So, I knew who Joshua Jay was before the Miami Book Fair put him in touch with me for this podcast. Was I nervous to interview him? Yea, a little bit.
Joshua’s book, How Magicians Think, is fun, entertaining insightful and surprising. It’s one of my favorite reads of this year. It demystifies the quotidian aspects of being a performing magician which, perhaps magically, deepened my appreciation for the art form.
The art form of magic? Is magic art?
The answer, ‘yes’, seems so self-evident to me that it shouldn’t require an explanation but through reading Joshua’s book I realized that this is a privileged viewpoint. Many people have had the experience of seeing a not-so-great magician perform and concluding that magic, the entire discipline, is terrible.
How do you correct such a huge PR problem in an artform that depends on secrecy? How do you demystify magic without making it less magical? Seems impossible but Joshua Jay has figured it out.
We talk about that and some fascinating parallels between magic and music in our discussion about David Byrne’s How Music Works; a book I know well and the one that inspired Joshua to write How Magicians Think.
