…until the squeezer grabs your scrag…
It came out in 1996. I don’t know when I saw it first, Ricky Jay And His 52 Assistants, but it must have been around then, when I was somewhere between 14 and 16, and I loved it. If you haven’t seen it, go to Youtube and watch it. You’ll see why I was so entranced: Jay is utterly captivating and charming, hammy and showy in the best possible way. Over the years I would see him again and again in movies and TV shows: I loved his taciturnity; I loved his slow, calming voice; his dedication to an art and a time that was rapidly vanishing.
As a rule I don’t like magic. But I think that’s because the only magic you ever really see is ridiculous trash like Sigfried And Roy and David Copperfield: those guys with the flowy blouses and the Aqua-Netted hair, washed and fogged by the dry ice machines. The thing about those guys and their tricks–“illusions, Michael”–is that you never in any way actually believe that they’re actually turning a woman into a tiger or making the Statue of Liberty vanish: these are things that are so spectacular you realize that, obviously, they’re tricks, and even if you wonder how the trick was done, you don’t wonder too hard, any more than you wonder how special effects are done in movies: you imagine teams of technicians working out complex logistics, but you don’t think about it being MAGIC.
Sleight-of-hand is another thing entirely. It’s up-close, and it’s intimate, right in front of your face. To watch someone pull every ace from a deck you shuffled or to take the watch from your wrist while looking you in the eye is truly an amazing thing, where you genuinely wonder How Did He Do That.
There comes a moment in the PBS American Masters episode about Jay when a reporter from The Guardian recalls having lunch with him, when, from out of nowhere, he dropped his menu to reveal a giant block of ice: she describes the trick as being so shocking she burst into tears.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot ever since, and I put myself in her place, and try to imagine what my reaction would be, and after thinking it over I find that her reaction is the most perfect and understandable one. No serious person believes in genuine magic, and the trick is obviously a trick…but to see something like that with your own eyes, something that your rational brain cannot explain…it makes complete sense to me, to be so rattled by something so otherworldly. So magical.
There are less and less of these guys around, and I miss them all.
When you’re talking about Kant and trust, it made me think of one of the ways I tell people about the con game. I say, “You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you can’t be conned, because if you were, you would be living in a world with no trust. That’s the price you pay for trust, is being conned.”
I really don’t think there’s anyone out there in the world who would disagree with me when I say that Smokey And The Bandit is quite possibly the best movie of all time–at the very least the best Burt Reynolds/Jackie Gleason truck driving movie–but I will admit that there is at least one huge plot point that nearly ruins the film for me. And I mean one huge plot point besides the fact that anyone would go to such outrageous lengths to get a truckload of hot Coors delivered to their big outdoor party.
That point is this: Big and Little Enos want the Bandit to drive from Texarkana to Atlanta with 400 cases of Coors: he has 28 hours to make it to the Southern Classic without getting caught. Which–spoiler alert–he does, and ably, with the utmost skill and derring-do. A good time is had by all. But this is where my issues with what is an otherwise perfect film come into play. When you see Bandit and Snowman in Texarkana loading up the truck that is to haul the Coors, you see that the entire trailer is filled with pallets, from front to back. Yeah, you’re thinking, of course it is–they’ve got 400 cases of Coors! That’s a shitload of beer!
And you’re not wrong. That is a shitload of beer. But you see, I’ve been working in a warehouse now for nearly two years, and I can tell you that while 400 cases of beer is certainly a lot, it is not a lot to load onto the back of a tractor trailer. You could pretty easily get a hundred cases of beer onto a single pallet. And a trailer as loaded as the one you see in the movie would hold somewhere around 20 to 24 pallets, depending on how they’re loaded on the truck and the exact size of the trailer, meaning that instead of 400 cases, you might be looking at as many as 2400, if not more. This newfound professional expertise really takes me out of the viewing experience, is all I’m saying, which is probably how Stephen Hawking feels when he watches some dumb time travel movie.
Reblogging this, obviously due to the passing of Burt Reynolds. This post, weirdly enough, is far and away the most popular thing I’ve ever posted on tumblr, with something like a thousand reblogs. It’s weird. Ah well.
Adding another reblog to the reblog count, of which the only befuddling thing is how it’s so low.
Sometimes, on a Sunday night, this is the only thing you need.