Today I bemoan the passing of the age when every magician can be trusted to keep the secrets of magic.
In the Philippines, like in many places around the globe, the mysterious world of magic is an open city. Just about anybody can enter it, unchallenged. Magic secrets can be had cheaply, sometimes even for free. The practice of exposing magic tricks is even more rampant in the virtual world of the Internet than in stalls at some malls.
Thus we see a fad going in the opposite direction of secrecy.
Gone are the days when keeping magic secrets inviolable is a badge of honor. Today, being a tattletale is cool. snitches, whether masked or nude, have followers who adore them at their footstools. Indeed, keeping secrets is approaching anachronism in this modern world.
YouTube has made keeping secrets difficult. It has charmed 12-year-old kids into thinking it’s the medium to quick popularity.
The Masked Magician has made keeping magic secrets unimportant. Instead, he made exposing them lucrative.
Yes, the snitches are singing magic secrets louder than the canaries inside their body loads.
That leaves the real performers, like you and I, mopping the mess they leave behind. We continue to love and to nurture the art by zealously keeping its secrets.
We ought to get a medal for our zealotry.
Stay magical,
Leodini
Leodini's Inner Magic 
Exposure has evolved with the times. Scot’s _Discoverie of Witchcraft_ was published in 1584. Professor Hoffman’s _Modern Magic_, regarded today as a classic magic book, was first serialized in a popular magazines for boys named Every Boy’s Paper in 1876. Marshall Brodien brought exposure into the electronic age with his commercials for “TV Magic Cards.” Patrick Page was expelled from the British Ring of the IBM in 1976 for writing his Big Book of Magic_ that exposed closely guarded secrets including the Russ Walsk Appearing Cane and split fan productions.
I think most of the people who view youtube “exposures” are magicians or magician-wannabes and probably most of the people viewing those exposures are magicians.. The lay public has better things to do with their time than search youtube for the secret of the multiplying billiard balls.
It was a bit of a shock, though, to find Tommy Wonder’s video lecture on Zombie on youtube:
But again, I don’t think anyone in the lay public would bother to look for that video.
(Note: Henry Hay makes an interesting point in _The Amateur Magician’s Handbook_ where he wrote: “when the methods of a Cardini or a Nate Leipzig are explained, they seem more like magic than the tricks themselves. The sleight-of-hand man is the only performer who can never be made ridiculous, and may even grow in stature, by exposure.”)
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Hi Sonny, Atty. Cyril Regalado of Iloilo posted a comment on this subject on my Facebook account. I’m posting a copy of his comment below:
“There will always be exposures; like Camel cigarettes magic Ads in the 1930’s. here is the interesting history of the ads from Magicpedia’s Timeline of magic exposures page:
From January to August [1933] the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company featured magic tricks as part of their Camel Cigarette advertisements. With the catch phrase “It’s Fun To Be Fooled.. It’s More Fun To Know”, the ads appeared in over 1,200 newspapers and magazines. The series of 38 effects were illustrated in comic-book style. The bylines indicated they had obtained the information from such sources as Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions by Albert Hopkins, Tricks and Illusions by Will Goldston, Modern Magic and Later Magic by Professor Hoffmann, and Illustrated Magic by Ottokar Fischer. Julien J. Proskauer and John Mulholland tried unsuccessfully to get a bill passed into law to make it illegal to expose magic to the public. In 1938, Horace Goldin file[d] a $50,000.00 suit against The Reynolds Tobacco Co. as damages for exposing the “Sawing a Lady In Half” illusion. He lost the suit when it was decided that the Reynolds Co. had obtained their knowledge fairly and honestly from Walter B. Gibson’s The Book of Secrets. In The Dragon magazine, Harry Usher suggested that the person responsible for the exposures may be the disgruntled mind readers gaining revenge against magicians who had revealed some of their methods a few years earlier. In 1963, Bob Lund supplied a letter (circa 1932) to Trick Talk in which Max Holden described his collaboration on the ads.”
He also sent a comprehensive list of magic exposures throughout the years: http://geniimagazine.com/magicpedia/Timeline_of_magic_exposures
Stay magical,
Leodini
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Grrrr., after so many years of performing, I cannot help still and always disliking those wisecracks mentioning (or even telling me proudly after the show,) “I KNOW how this or that was done. If I get dragged into a response, I will usually reply, that I also got behind a secret another artist has performed playing the piano. I told this piano player that I very easily discovered, how HE made the music. MY EXPLANATION is he simply pressed down black or white keys of the piano, which is a very easy thing to do using ten fingers he has got
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Ha, ha, that’s a nice reply, Ted.
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