Hey gang,

Last week I mentioned that my pal Steve Spill had just released his new book Holy Smoke and its a must have for your magic library.

For those of you still undecided I have permission to post the following review written by Nathan Coe Marsh over at Genii magazine - Enjoy.

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Holy Smoke: Ways To Work In Mysterious Ways If You’re Not God - Steve Spill

Steve Spill’s Holy Smoke is a remarkable book that manages to mix practical insight into developing a stronger act, writing original material, and building a sustainable career with a self-aware look into the soul of a stand-up magician. By turns bitingly funny, candid, insightful, profane, and poignant (the book closes on a memory of a last meal with a now departed colleague that hit me in the solar plexus.) It also teaches a ton of strong, funny stand-up magic with an original voice.

The majority of the book is split between two sections: “Reflections,” a set of practical and thoughtful essays, and “Deceptions,” descriptions of 12 pieces of stand-up magic written by Spill (fifteen are taught in total including the pieces taught in the “Sermons” chapter on custom corporate presentations).

The central metaphor of the book first comes up in a significant way with an observation of Teller’s: “The God-like plot of -- I wish for something and get it -- in terms of theater, is dull and boring and without humanity.” Spill expands on this “Some, like a guy I’ll call Nick Brainiac, embellish this feeling [of acting like God] with an unspoken, yet nonetheless heard, testiness and attitude: ‘Of course I can tear and restore a newspaper, cut to the aces, and separate two silver rings. I’m !@#$***g God! Now clap like baboons you idiots!’”

Spill argues, compellingly, that this alienating dynamic is why human connection, and the expression of a clear personality onstage, are particularly important to magic. “One needs to make themself the bubbles in the champagne, the yeast in the dough, the force that drives the sap in springtime, the tingle in the testicles.”

Having laid out what’s at stake in putting more of yourself into your magic, Spill gives us some practical steps to do just that. There are strong suggestions here that will benefit performers of all experience levels. This is one of the things Spill does remarkably well. It is one thing to tell students to “be yourself” or “create a show that feels like a unified whole.” It is another, far more valuable thing, to be able to teach specific strategies that readers can implement in their work to do those things. Spill gives actionable advice and it is clear that he practices what he preaches.
The discussion of the importance of personality and plot leads to one of the better explanations of the danger of using other performers’ presentations: “you run the risk of using a script that just looks and sounds wrong, mismatched, the way you can tell when someone [is] walking someone else’s dog.”

While most of the essays in the “Reflections” section contain advice gathered around a specific subject -- crafting a unified show, conveying your personality in your material, managing career burnout -- there is a lovely catch-all section called “Gospel” which contains an assortment of specific, practical insights about a wide range of issues for performers: how to keep creative momentum going, develop your own point-of-view, open a show, use a “mind script,” etc. etc. etc. There is a great deal of enormously valuable information here in easily digestible form.

I have seen one, just one, great magic show that didn’t have connective tissue between the material: Penn & Teller perform a piece, there is a blackout when it ends, the lights come back up and they begin the next piece. Every other first rate magic show I have seen builds and sustains momentum by moving fluidly between pieces and by using devices like running gags, callbacks, and themes developed across the material to create the feeling of a unified whole rather than a collection of parts. Many a crappy show, however, has started and stopped and lost energy in the moments between pieces. Our goal is to immerse the audience in our world, and to do that they need to remain connected to us. The easiest place to lose that connection is to have moments when nothing is happening. Spill’s chapter “Unitarian” describes a series of practical tools for creating connective tissue for a show and delivering an act that feels like a unified whole (and I very much want to see Barfo the Clown, the act described in the course of teaching several of these strategies.)

The chapter that hit me hardest is “Resurrection” which deals with something I have never heard another performer talk about, have never talked about to anyone else, and had never named or reflected upon to myself. It has, however, been a persistent force in different ways throughout my career: burnout. Being a professional magician, especially in the early years of a career, feels like building a plane while you are flying it. You are developing the product -- your material and your act -- while also figuring out how to both market and sell it. That means that there are endless tasks you could be doing every day.

My first 10-15 years as a performer were spent, somewhat paradoxically, both drained by the work I was doing while also feeling a persistent sense of vague guilt that I could and should be doing more. I was always on the wheel and felt a little twinge of shame when I would relax. When I worked hard on the show (in retrospect, the most important and beneficial work I did over the long term) it felt like play, like an indulgence that was taking away from the “grown-up,” important, Work of finding and converting leads. When I threw myself hard into growing the business, on the other hand, it felt like I had given up art to give myself a sales job. I did not recognize it as such, but I was burned out.

Following the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, I stopped prospecting for new corporate event work and chose to fill my performing schedule with a mix of long-term residencies, cruise ships, and touring the various magic theaters and nightclubs that have sprouted up. It has been a lovely three years of a full calendar without feeling like I have a sales job, but I have certainly left a pile of money on the table. I did not realize it until reading Holy Smoke, but that career shift was forced by burnout.

“Resurrection” tackles that head on with practical strategies for being highly productive without getting drained. It sounds trivial, and in my twenties I would have scoffed at seeing a chapter about it in a magic book, but the ability to be immensely productive while also letting off enough pressure to not have it all blow up on you is one critical key to having a long-term, sustainable career as a performer.

Speaking of critical career skills for a performing magician, being able to customize your material to communicate a corporate client’s message is an especially lucrative one. In “Sermons,” Spill gives a fantastic overview of this side of the work -- including a perceptive meditation on the sense of artistic compromise that often comes along with these assignments and a look at some of the ways these gigs came to him over the years -- that moves into sharing three different, fully realized, custom corporate pieces from his career.

His routine for Coppola Winery has an Annemann-esque feel. A small, folded piece of paper is isolated inside a bowl. Behind the bowl are the five bottles from the winery that were awarded “Gold Outstanding” at the previous year’s International Wine and Spirit Competition. A guest names which bottle interests him most and Spill gives a gorgeously written overview of that wine and what makes it special as he sets it aside (“The oak is present but subtle with a character of toasted bread and grilled almond.”) Another guest nominates a different bottle, and gets a beautiful script about that product as it is set aside, and so it continues until there is one bottle remaining. The final bottle’s praises are sung and then the message in the bowl is revealed to have predicted this outcome. The method is direct and versatile, but the presentational framework is the real star here. This approach of progressive elimination to allow you to talk about each product (or, one could make it more abstract and create a prop to represent each benefit so you could talk about each as its symbolic object is set aside) during a prediction effect is a lovely template that I could see many other working performers adapting for corporate presentations.

Next is a lovely presentation of the Sands of the Desert created for Daiken Global to memorably communicate the benefits of an air filtration system. This is an object lesson in connecting an effect -- or a compelling visual in an effect like the moment the clear water becomes black -- with the benefits of your client’s product or service.

A different, but likewise compelling, example of this is Spill’s script for Keith Clark’s Silks Supreme Act adapted to memorably sell ExxonMobil’s line of polymer nonwoven fabrics in the hospitality suite of a textile show.

The chance to read through these kinds of pieces is a rare and valuable one. This is the kind of material that pros tend not to document for other performers. They are the children of a prosaic creativity, we are proud of our cleverness in making these assignments work but they are not art and always feel like a compromise. Combine that with the fact that these kinds of templates can be reused in some of our most lucrative bookings and you rarely see this stuff taught, and when it is published it is rarely from a performer whose writing is as strong and imaginative as Spill’s.

Those enormous gifts as a writer are on particular display in “Shrinkflation” and “Ghosts,” pieces in the “Deceptions” section that are both original presentations for two routines of the late, great Tommy Wonder. “Shrinkflation” juxtaposes the striking visual of Wonder’s “Diminishing Cards” with a hilarious and timely monologue about manufacturers’ creativity in finding ways to give us less and less for the same amount of money. The direct and uncompromising visual of Wonder’s method dovetails gorgeously with Spill’s script. Method affects effect, as Racherbaumer perfectly put it.

“Ghosts,” meanwhile, takes a novel approach to the presentation of Wonder’s “Ring, Watch, and Wallet.” Here the impossible happenings are the work of meddlesome spirits. It is a funny, humanizing approach that is a refreshing break from the now hackneyed “Hold Up” premise. This presentational gift is likewise showcased with “Classic Cat,” which is the only presentation I am aware of for the Rice Bowls in which the effect makes sense and is relatable (here as a demonstration of innovative Cat Litter that is self-refilling).

Spill’s creativity, however, is not limited to innovative presentational premises; there are immensely clever, original methods described here that make for strong magic. In “Grapes I Ate Anyway” Spill has adapted a rarely used principle in a fascinating way to allow four grapes to completely vanish from his bare hands (worth emphasizing: no pop-up moves in sight and this bears no resemblance in method or presentation to the “Balls In The Net” -- Spill has created an original piece that fits in a pocket and plays massive).

I have been intrigued with “Smashed And Restored” since I first saw it performed on one of my favorite magic videos: “Ten Years of Steve Spill.” Spill wraps a champagne bottle in a handkerchief and then smashes it with a hammer. When he whips away the cloth (silently, mind you) the bottle is restored. The method, in particular the way he has designed it so that you hear the pieces when you are supposed to and do not when you’re not, is brilliant and has me thinking of other applications.

One of Spill’s presentational gifts over the years has been adding compelling visuals to mentalism routines. This is a huge contribution. Visual variety is one critical tool for keeping an audience engaged. A show that is all envelopes and papers can easily feel like we are watching the same thing over and over (particularly given, as Max Maven pointed out in Prism, how much more limited mentalism effects are in variety than conjuring effects). Spill’s inclination toward mentalism with memorable visuals is most famously on display in “The Mindreading Goose,” which is a thing of genius. We see this gift at work here in “E-Meter,” a hilarious parody of Scientology’s device for “auditing” in which the machine divines a guest’s fear, climaxing with two different hilarious and visual revelations.

In the opening essay, “Dogma,” Spill talks about the difference between influence and imitation. He compares the army of dove manipulators who mindlessly imitated Channing Pollock, and are almost all forgotten to history, with the way Johnny Thompson was deeply influenced by Pollock but filtered that influence through his own personality and skills (along with Pam’s) to develop an act that was their own: Tomsoni & Company. It would be a shame to see folks using the material published here in a mindless paint-by-numbers imitation (though Spill explicitly gives you permission to). There are, however, rich possibilities here for being influenced and clear examples of making magic that is relatable, personality-driven, and more human. For those willing to do that work you will find fabulous seeds to nurture and examples to study.

Highest Recommendation and Pick of the Month Nathan / Nathan Coe Marsh


Holy Smoke • Steve Spill • Hardbound • 190 pages • $125 • Available Exclusively from SteveSpill.com/book/holy-smoke/

Copyright © 2024 Genii Magazine, Edition 8/1/2024 - (used with permission)

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