Magic

Well, well, well, if it isn’t you and me seanced once again ‘round the glowing screen. 

And I see you brought your … (?) … newt!?

How gross and how perfect! You must have known that Episode 8 of HTFHTS is all about that sorcery! 

That’s right, it’s the MAGIC episode!

Listen into the radio show with this hyperlink I commissioned from a very special wizard.

Alternatively, here’s the archive:

For a whole two hours, we’ll ride high atop our brooms, lie spread eagle across our flying carpets, and jinx bottomless empty mind shit into full-ass incantations!

Hold up. TWO hours!? 

It’s no illusion, babes. 

How’s That Feel How’s That Sound is now a two hour program, airing the first Sunday of each and every month. You got that? 

Well alakazam!

It’s time to celebrate a whole new era, where everything once deemed impossible is actually, totally maybe possible! 

We’ll cast spells (Molly Nilsson, Esperanza Spalding, Yves Jarvis) mix all kinds of potions (Thiago Nassif, Ural Thomas and the Pain, Animistic Beliefs), dance with witches (Rodrigo Cuevas, David Michael Moore, La Perla), and puzzle through all measures of illusion (Resavoir, A. Billi Free & The Lasso, Daniel Ögren & Anna Ahnlund).

Some will rightfully ask, “Is it really magic!? Could it really be!?

I guess it depends on what it is. 

Obviously, this  brings me back to the Magic Eye craze of the 90s. 

As a kid, I remember standing cross-eyed inches away from my beach town’s storefronts, slowly backing away from each and every window as I tried to make sense of the colorful, kaleidoscopic posters hanging next to t-shirts proudly endorsing stuff like breasts and alcohol.

(It’s a shark, duh.) (It’s a shark, duh.) (It’s a shark, duh.) (It’s a shark, duh.) (It’s a shark, duh.)

I felt a special kind of power being able to spot the hidden images when many of my friends crossed their eyes and could not. Was it magic, though?

I think a lot of what we label as “magic” is really just perceiving the unexpected. Unexpected, like when millions of rainbow sprinkles turn into a shark. Unexpected, like feeling a really fucking good feeling. 

It’s something I’ve been paying particularly close attention to these days while watching reality television. 

Nothing about the television itself is particularly unexpected. Actually, every last second of it is completely expected, and that’s what makes it a great and safe opiate for the times. 

Nevertheless, every last bachelor and catfish seems to be shocked dumb when the thing that is the whole, entire premise of a series happens to them, and it’s reflected very clearly in their speech.

Speaking from the heart and to a room full of candle lanterns, love-driven singles will constantly remark how their date with so and so was completely unexpected and “literal magic.” 

Look, I get it! 

When something truly feels good, it can seem really out of this world, illusory.

I personally tend to experience this “good” feeling with an equal-but-opposite “bad” one. I get this nauseating and unrelenting thought that whatever good it is I’m feeling is fleeting, a dark magic that only struck through complete misfire and that will never be felt again. 

Why? I don’t know why! 

But here again, I arrive at the same conclusion I do in nearly every episode:  Thoughts are thots are thoughts are thots!

What’s truly real in a moment is what’s sensed and expressed through the corporal body; the mind just might make it a little bit spicier! And having the finesse to be able to constantly navigate and code-switch between what we perceive in our bodies and what we add in our minds is what makes us so powerful, maybe even magical. 

Magic is supernatural, and magic is super natural. It’s an act of power clashing, a reconciliation of the muscle memory, bravery (Fran Lobo), and nerve it takes to conjure up good feelings (rainbow sprinkles) on endlessly bad days (sharks). It’s the ability to really trust in good days without conjuring up all the memories of bad ones.

Because a real bruja does stop to consider every other time the laws of gravity have applied to her before straddling a broomstick. If she did, she’d never get anywhere.

Once you’re able to channel this bruja mindset, you’re that much closer to making music out of thin air, to bridging nothing with the infinite. 

(Eat your heart out, Harry whatever, because here’s Clara!)

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