The Magic of Things...

There is something beautiful about not knowing how something works. Computers, TV's, cell phones, all these devices do amazing things that we really can't comprehend. We don't know what's inside the phone, or the TV that makes it work, we just know that it works. If it breaks we have no idea how to fix it, it's just a magical image, an unseen voice that we interact with. This naiveness is beautiful though, not sheer ignorance. When we interact with these things and really think about them, we are amazed and wondrous about how they work, how we got from a wheel a thousand years ago, to this magic box that can show you anything you've ever wanted to see. As a child, it wouldn't be ridiculous to imagine little men running around, holding up little colored squares to create an image, or maybe there is a man behind the screen that quickly animates images to respond to the channel of your choice. Maybe the internet is really just a network of hard working elves that are loaded with phone books and catalogs ready to answer your every question, ready to dig up your hearts desired image.

As a kid, I was always amazed by movies and tv shows. It was my dream to be on TV and be an actor, I had no idea what that really entailed, I just knew that I wanted to be on TV in these perfectly formated shows. When we watch Friends, we see a story, a sequence of event that occurs over 22 minutes that make us laugh, cry, and relate to the characters. So this perfect portrayal of a story is created, and for us it's a real event that occurred in this sequence. The rooms are real spaces, in real buildings, that look exactly as we think they should. This is what made me want to be an actor so much. I wanted to play different people and be in all these different spaces. After 4 years of acting school, 4 years of improv, making appearances on 2 national television shows, this majestic idea of acting has vanished, my desire to learn the subject has dissipated. Once I understood how the actual production worked and how shows were put together, the mystery, the grand image of the story was lost. Now, when I see tv shows and movies, I think about the set, and how the actors are really staring at a bunch of crew men holding microphones and camera equipment. How many takes it took for the actor to get a scene right, what order they even shot the scenes in. I can still be engulfed by a great movie, but the wonderment is gone.

Now I am studying architecture. When I would look at really amazing buildings, like Falling Water, or the Guggenheim in Bilbao, I was so mystified as to how it worked. How can a mammoth block of concrete hover over a river? It didn't even matter, it was so beautiful. Now that I'm a year away from being an architect, the experience, the mystery of how the building works is lost. When you know how it works, it's no longer an image, or a space, it becomes a device. The building, outside of the detailed context, becomes part of a setting, as though it has been there forever. When you understand how it works, it's just an object in space, and the experience, though it may still be interesting and amazing, has lost that connection and wonderment once experienced by the viewer.

Nobody understands this phenomena better than the magician, for once a trick is revealed the magic is lost. You see, we interpret magic as a mystifying event, that can't possibly be real, but because we know nothing of how it works, becomes fascinating. For a moment, we think maybe it is real, and this guy really has powers that nobody else may possess. But, once we know how the trick works, the wonderment is gone. You can't see this trick again with the same fascinating experience. It becomes an act, it is now simply a trick.

Magic is real. Magic is not the trick, it is the experience, the wonderment. Magic is thinking Santa flys around with reindeer dropping presents down chimneys once a year. Santa himself is not the magic, the sleigh and reindeer are not the magic. The experience and belief in Santa is the magic. Magic exists, and to tell your children that magic isn't real, would be a crime against their imaginations.


Love. Love is magic. The 2 arn't interchangeable, that's to say love is magic but magic is not love. When you first meet someone, and start dating, there is something magical. You don't understand how this person could be so perfect. As time goes by, you learn that they aren't perfect, and the set of traits you experienced at first was simply just the image, not the detail. Finding out all their quirks and all the things that will grow to drive you nuts is the detail. Often, once that initial curiosity begins to ware, so does the relationship, and soon things will come to a crashing halt. The trick, that makes this magic last forever, is the magic itself.

There is something beautiful about not knowing how something works. This naiveness is beautiful though, not sheer ignorance. Sometimes, you just don't have to understand.

day later- I don't even know what this means, I was just sitting in the Rivera room at the DIA just writing away. I had a thought, an experience that I wanted to capture, so I just wrote, and whether or not I even touched on the experience I set out to capture, this is simply the train of thought that was catalyzed by the experience.