The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks

Someone sent me this:

WOMAN’S DIARY
Saturday 31st May 2008
Saw him in the evening and he was acting really strangely.
I’d been shopping in the afternoon with the girls and was a bit late meeting him, thought it might be that.
The bar was really crowded and loud, so I suggested we go somewhere quieter to talk. He was still very subdued and distracted so I suggested we went somewhere nice to eat.
All through dinner he just didn’t seem himself - he hardly laughed and didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me or to what I was saying. I just knew that something was wrong.
He dropped me back home and I wondered if he was going to come in. He hesitated but followed. I asked him what was wrong, but he just half shook his head and turned the television on. After about ten (!) minutes of silence I said that I was going upstairs to bed, I put my arms around him and told him that I loved him deeply. He just gave a sigh and a sad sort of smile. He didn’t follow me up immediately but came up later and, to my surprise, we made love - but he still seemed distant and a bit cold.
I cried myself to sleep - I think he’s planning to leave me - maybe he’s found someone else.

Man’s Diary
Saturday 31st May 2008
Cowboys lost.
Gutted.
Got a root though.

(For non-Aussies: The Cowboys are the local football team. A “root” means sexual intercourse)

Mentalism is a category of magic.  As the name implies, it does not involve manipulation or sleight of hand but the performer instead presents the illusion of some mental feat such as mind-reading, ESP, precognition, mind control, psychokinesis or hypnosis. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentalism)

An effect I have recently acquired, called Postmentalism, is as follows: I tell a person I can predict  the outcome of an impending event, such as a football game.  To prove this, I write my prediction on a piece of paper, without showing it to anyone put it in an envelope, address it to the person, put a stamp on it, and hand it to him or her. I accompany the person to any mailbox in town and watch as he or she posts the letter.

When, in the course of the post, the letter is delivered at this person’s address and opened the prediction is found to be true.

This description is accurate.  The concept overcomes any objections that could be raised if the performer, or, for that matter, another person was entrusted to post the letter.  It would immediately be suspected that they had the opportunity to replace or change what is written in the original note (which only the performer has seen).

Although I have not attempted Postmentalism yet, after careful study of Mr Stockman’s instructions, I am reasonably confident I can perform it.

The limitations of Postmentalism as magic are that it is not performed before an audience; the outcome is delayed; and only one person actually experiences it. However, it promises to be effective and I look forward to trying it soon.

While Mr Stockman devised his method independently, he acknowledges Kenton Knepper (a living legend in mentalism circles) had published a similar effect in 1998 and again in 2005.

I purchased Postmentalism from Penguin Magic (http://www.penguinmagic.com).

David Letterman’s Late Show on the American CBS network had a segment called “Ape or Artist”.  A painting would be shown and Dave would be asked if it was painted by an ape or a human artist.

One may question how relevant or instructive this exercise is.  But it certainly raises the old question of “what is art?”   I put this to Oscar, a two year old male Whippet.  As he looked up at me it was clear that he was thinking along similar lines to Leo Tolstoy:  when one individual expresses strong feelings in word, music, dance, song, painting, sculpture or whatever and “infects” the listener, reader or viewer with those feelings then it is art.

Perhaps Oscar was adopting a simplistic approach but I could see what he meant.  I wondered what he thought about Tolstoy’s view that lacking the capacity to receive those feelings meant one was (how could I put this delicately?) more savage than a wild beast?

Oscar looked at me in a pointedly tolerant sort of way, as if to say he thought that I was being inevitably human centric.  And that is why I started with the “Ape or Artist” line.  It was clearly Oscar’s position that a speciesism unnecessarily complicated the discussion.  Would I, for example, characterise a superior being from an advanced alien race as a “savage beast” simply because such a being could not comprehend the visual language of Picasso?  If not, then why should a camel’s lack of appreciation of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles” relegate said camel to the ranks of savage beasts? No doubt the camel would have many human companions?

I got pretty pissed off at this point and told Oscar to go outside.

From the time we bought a new NEC front-loading washing machine last year it caused trouble.   It often refused to spin dry, leaving a soaking pile of clothes in the machine at the end of the cycle;  at the end of a cycle it would emit a mysterious series of “beeps” and the LED would show some alien code such as “LRE” or somesuch.  After kicking, punching, swearing and glaring at the machine failed,  I read the instruction book.  I learned nothing useful.  I called the service person who pronounced the machine healthy

Then, two weeks ago, it really broke down.  It wouldn’t pump water at all.  It would go through a wash cycle then make growling noises, beep and stop.  When I opened the door a wall of water gushed out and flooded the laundry. From then on it just sulked.  I called the same serviceperson.  He came, checked the machine and, with great insight, said it needed a new pump.

Two weeks later, the same person replaced the pump.  After he departed I cleaned up the mess left and looked at the old pump.  It rattled when I shook it. I opened it up.  Inside was a small, blackened disc. Cleaning the disk up a bit revealed a Swedish 10 Kronor coin.  Stamped on one side, around a kingly looking head, is “Carl XVI Gustaf Sveriges Konung For Sverige I Tiden”.  The other side has three crowns and is marked “10 Kronor”.

I am dismayed.  There are three possibilities: First, because it is the same size as the Australian $2 coin (and is worth about A$1.75), the 10 Kronor was taken as change by a household member, left in a pocket of clothes washed in the machine, the coin came out and was swirled somehow into the pump; Second, the pump may have been made in Sweden and the coin was dropped into the washing-machine-pump assembly line by a worker.  Third, a Swede sneaked into my house, disassembled the washing machine and inserted the coin in the pump as an act of sabotage.

So, what is the most likely of these scenarios. The first one, involving the coin being accidentally washed in the machine, is improbable because the washing drum is a one piece affair containing only very small rinse-holes - far too small to admit the coin.  I don’t know about statistics, but if you washed predominantly Aussie coins in a washing machine wouldn’t it be more likely for one of them to screw up the pump, rather than a Swedish one?

The second possibility, that the coin was caught up in the assembly of the pump is credible: Sweden makes a lot of washing machines; NEC could have badge-engineered their machines from an Electrolux donor; and Ingvar Kamprad himself may have dropped the coin in while visiting the assembly line, rather than pay it to the notoriously high-taxing Swedish Government.  On second thoughts, this is unlikely since I understand Mr Kamprad supervises Ikea from a base in Switzerland.

The third possibility, of a Swedish “Rainbow Warrior” type raid on my washing machine, I shall leave aside for the moment as it is simply too appalling to consider.

No, I believe it is down to Oskar or Maria the washing-machine-assembly worker.  The coin in the pump was a silent protest against the high taxing nanny government of Swede or the boss at Electrolux, or both. Or they want to teach us Australians a lesson for buying a Japanese-badged product.

This theory explains why the damn machine didn’t work from the start. Also, it now works better than ever. I mentally apologise to the fine, Japanese workers of NEC.  The Swedes are to blame.  Just ask the  Brandenburgers of 1618 -1648.

If “news” is a report of an event ( this is roughly how it is defined in dictionaries) then newspapers do not contain news.  I say this for a number of reasons.

First, any time I have ever been involved in an “event” and then read a newspaper’s report of it, there was always at least one  important error in the reporting.  For example, in the days when I was a prosecutor there were often reporters physically present in court when cases were heard.  I say “physically present” because their subsequent reporting indicated that what passed as their minds was clearly somewhere else.  If I read the paper later I had trouble recognising the cases in which I had been involved.  Names were changed (to protect the guilty?), people who were convicted were evidently acquitted, the sentences handed down had apparently been changed by the good graces of the reporter and the number and details of the offences committed had strangely altered.

Also, newspaper articles are sometimes accompanied by photos which prove the report wrong.  For example, I recently saw a report of a traffic accident in the local paper.  According to the article, a Triumph motorcycle was hit by a motor vehicle. The accompanying photo was of a wrecked Yamaha Virago motorcycle.  Now, some people may think this is nitpicking (OK, I suppose it is).  But, if the author of the article makes this kind of obvious mistake then how can the reader trust anything that is written?

My second (and last) point is that newspapers are more concerned with venting opinions about what other people say and do.  Yeah, I admit this is nothing new as television and the internet have rapidly made newspapers, as sources of news, redundant.  If you read what passes for political commentary in Australia you can choose between articles written by journalists who agree with you and those who don’t.   I mostly choose the first option.  If I feel the need to wash my breakfast down with lashings of apoplexy, then I read those journalists whom I know to be my politically opposites.

So newspapers aren’t!