Word: magicianly
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Rick Wakeman. Not counting the revolving crystal sphere which shed light upon the audience, Yes's only form of physical embellishment was a mysterious figure clad in a magician's cape and surrounded by such an entourage of keyboards that he would have been practically obfuscated if not for his gleaming locks which actually rivaled the crystal ball in brilliance. Rick Wakeman has since left Yes and his career as a solo artist is blossoming. Saturday night he will perform a musical version of Jules Verne's science fictionclassic, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Neither man power...
...Thank you for explaining the "Levitation of the Lady" trick in your recent article on the boom in magic. When I was a little girl, my father took me to see Blackstone the Magician, who performed the trick, hoops and all. I've always wondered...
...with the star but with ourselves. In an epoch of uncertainty, people need a fraud they can believe in. Magic, with its cheerful promise of mountebankery, offers a kind of low comic relief. An audience that is fooled invariably laughs, delighted that its attention has been misdirected. To Magician-Historian Robert Lund, it is "a rebellion against science." To James Randi, it is "a sign that our society is still healthy. When people stop being enthralled by a magician who can make a lady vanish, it will mean that the world has lost its most precious possession: its sense...
...circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building stone, and an absent-minded magician performs a couple of genuine miracles, transforming wine into water and raising a man from the dead. The show under the big top is even more spectacular. It offers a unicorn that pops balloons with its horn, a sphinx that asks riddles, a Walpurgisnacht revel attended by witches and presided over by Satan...
...these offerings impress the Abaloneans? Not on your tintype. Their expectations run more to trained-seal acts and Bobo the Dog-faced Boy, and their minds are thus unconditioned to accept such wonders. True members of the American booboisie, they heckle Dr. Lao and his magician during the performance and walk silently out into the hard Arizona sunlight when it is over. One suspects that Sinclair Lewis' Main Streeters might have done much the same thing...