John Wesley Harding knows when he gets an email, phone message or a piece of postal junk addressing him as “John,” it’s coming from someone who’s never met him. He’s known to friends as “Wes,” since his real name (the one he uses in his second career as an award-winning author) is Wesley Stace. Harding’s 15th album, Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, depicts an artist well aware of what he does best: marvelously witty lyrics delivered in an emotion-wracked singing voice. Harding will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
John Wesley Harding: Derren Brown is a genius. Who is he? Well, he’s a mesmerist and a magician. That doesn’t sound very promising, I know, but he is extremely good at his job. I recommend his probably downloadable, definitely purchasable shows: 2008’s The System (in which he predicts a woman’s winners a day before each horse race, so she wins six races running—and then tells her how he does it, just after she’s put all her money on the horse) and 2005’s Messiah (in which, traveling under a variety of aliases in the U.S., where he is less well-known, he attempts to win the endorsement of various leading figures who claim to have psychic or mystical powers in one way or another—alien abduction, contacting the dead, dream-reading, old-school Christian conversion, etc.—leaving the “experts” in the awkward position of having to either proclaim him as gifted as they are or admit that he’s doing precisely the same magical tricks). Apparently, an American version of his TV show, Mind Control With Derren Brown, was shown on the Sci-Fi Channel, but please, please, do not muddle him with Criss Angel Mindfreak. Brown’s 2007 book, Tricks Of The Mind, is very informative (about neuro-linguistic programming and how to develop a very good memory, among other things) and charmingly written; his live show is stellar. But the best thing about Derren Brown is that, despite being purely a great magician and a wonderful showman, he is using his magical techniques to a good purpose, to explain humanity to itself. None of these programs are purely stunts; they all have valid, important points to make about why we believe what we believe and how easily we fall prey to superstition, because something works “for us.” It is Brown’s mission to show us the bigger picture. And he does this in an extraordinarily entertaining way. Next time I’m asked that interview old-favorite, “Who would be your favorite dinner guest?” I should remember to say Derren Brown. There’s no competition, really. YouTube video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg
One reply on “From The Desk Of John Wesley Harding: Derren Brown”
Hmm…this ‘System’ business could come in handy – thanks for the tip! Always fun to have something actually of interest from the world of pop culture to spread back to the horse racing masses (indeed, to all several dozen of them).