I have been pondering something recently about magic and that is are we lost without good magic mentors? I was lucky and had a magic mentor who taught me the basics of magic technique, performing, doing shows, doing the business and much much more. Tony Eng had taught me since I was about 11 years old. And during that time it seemed to me that most, if not all, magicians looked up to Dai Vernon as the ultimate mentor. People would make magic pilgrimages to go and just meet the man. It seemed he was the one person who solidified the magic community. Unfortunately I never got the opportunity to meet him. I have noticed after Dai Vernon passed away in 1992, there has not been a single magician that has captivated and kept the magician community focused on one main professor of magic. There are of course many great magicians that people look up to and follow such as Jaun Tamariz, Michael Ammar and many more, but there is no one person that we all look up to. I am not sure if this is a good thing or not. I am still trying to think more about this. When Dai Vernon was alive one could say he was the mentor for all magicians. On the other hand now having not just one main figure we look upon we have many more to choose from with different schools of thought. Here in Japan most Japanese arts or certain schools of arts have a grandmaster, and then his students. When the grandmaster gets too old he passes on the torch to a worthy student to become the new grandmaster. This seems to keep the group solid and focused and organized. However sometimes when a new grandmaster is chosen things can fragment of other don’t agree on the new grandmaster. This is what I see with magic today. I see a fragmentation and people choose different people to look up to as a mentor, which is good. Brings different variety in technique and performance. Then there are those like me who had a mentor close by to teach and guide. There are of course many people who never had a magic mentor close by to teach and guide them. I also feel the magic community is somewhat fragmented as well today.

Today there are a lot of great magicians and a lot of material available to anyone who wants to learn magic. There are great people to follow and to mentor from. But sometimes I feel that the magic community has lost some of it’s solidarity from the Dai Vernon days. For me it seems he was the glue that kept our community together and  focused. Also many people just getting into magic just buy DVD’s and learn the tricks and don’t really have anyone to guide them on how to craft a magic performance so we get people just doing tricks and emulating David Blaine which could be the one person that is the mentor for this younger generation in the past 10 or so years. And hence is why I feel sometimes we are lost without one central magic mentor figure such as Dai Vernon. Even from this blog posting you can see it makes me feel even more lost explaining it. Anyways what do you feel about this?

Aaron