Before I go on: There is a difference between teaching magic and just explaining it. The first approach is okay sometimes but the second one is not OK at all. There also is a difference between written instructions and video instructions. Written instructions take way more effort in order to be understood, video instructions take almost no effort to be understood. You can watch a video almost brain dead and still get the general idea of how the magic trick works, but with text this is not that easy. And finally, there is a difference between uploading your instructional video to YouTube or your instructional text to a blog. If you want to just know the trick the amount of work to read a longer text will stop most from doing that. Those who still do that work deserve the information. With video it is different. And if that video is on YouTube with everyone watching it with no effort at all in nice 3 minutes pieces I would no longer call that magic teaching... I would call it major spoiling.
And now to our weeks magic failure: Malik Haddadi
"...an Award winning entertainer with over 20 years or experience performing comedy magic, balloon sculpture, and juggling for family audinces." (The typo is not mine, it is straight from his website)
So he is not even a magician. He is a entertainer who takes magic stuff in order to entertain and not to "magish", to quote the always awesome Frank Garcia.
Malik Haddadi has appeared in many, many Expert Village videos.
And he doesn't even do it well. This is just the performance video. The explanation is there too. 20 years of experience in performing all of this have not taught Mr. Haddadi the lesson how to deal with magic spoiling! I am disappointed.
And there are tons of them:
Is this still magic teaching? I think not, this is spoiling. If those video would be harder to get... well... I might be convinced that it is true teaching (although bad one) but it is easy to get.
Some of the videos have almost half a million hits. Just saying.
Sheesh - why don't people, at least, edit this crap?
ReplyDeletei/m
I love how he says at the end "That wasnt a good example."
ReplyDeleteI totally agree and it always makes me sad when I see this stuff on youtube. They same with people who show a trick or a sleight on YouTube so badly that everybody sees the secret.
ReplyDeleteOne little correction "magish" is not from Garcia but from Al Goshman.
Tom
It's crap!
ReplyDeleteOne of the worst magician i've ever seen.
"20 years"?! 20 years and he has no idea about presentation, timing and gesture.
Come On!
It's time to add a new category in "report abuse"...
Wow, this is a nasty little blog.
ReplyDeleteI performed a magic show at my dad's 80th birthday party and everyone was amazed. I could not have done it without Haddidi's really helpful advice and tips.
I guess you'd frown on that.
So he's an entertainer not a magician. Well more news for you I guess - magicians ARE entertainers. Lets face it there are not a lot of other career paths for magicians. Conman? Miracle worker? Card mechanic?
Too easy to watch this stuff on Youtube? Well its not like Penn and Teller already spoiled this trick on national TV in the US and Europe (oh wait, they did - and it's all over Youtube).
Worst of all - his web site contains a typo!
In my opinion your post is a fail - you needed to fulfil your weekly 'WMF' and couldn't find a worthy target - so this guy had to be the fall guy on your sad little blog.
Great stuff, Malik, please make more tutorials.