Past exploits include relieving actress Jennifer Garner of her engagement ring and basketball Hall-of-Famer Charles Barkleyof a thick bankroll. In 2001, he virtually picked former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail clean, netting badges, a watch, Carter’s itinerary, and the keys to his motorcade. (Robbins wisely steered clear of their guns.)
How does he does he do it? Practice, practice, practice… and remaining hyper vigilant as to the things commanding each individual victims’s attention, in order to momentarily redirect it at the most convenient moment.
Clearly, he’s a put lot of thought into the emotional and cognitive components. In a TED talk on the art of misdirection, above, he cites psychologist Michael Posner’s “Trinity Model” of attentional networks. He has deepened his understanding through the study of aikido, criminal history, and the psychology of persuasion. He understands that getting his victims to tap into their memories is the best way to temporarily disarm their external alarm bells. His easygoing, seemingly spontaneous banter is but one of the ways he gains marks’ trust, even as he penetrates their spheres with a predatory grace.
Watch his hands, and you won’t see much, even after he explains several tricks of his trade, such as securing an already depocketed wallet with his index finger to reassure a jacket-patting victim that it’s right where it belongs. (Half a second later, it’s dropping below the hem of that jacket into Robbins’ waiting hand.) Those paws are fast!
I do wonder how he would fare on the street. His act depends on a fair amount of chummy touching, a physical intimacy that could quickly cause your average straphanger to cry foul. I guess in such an instance, he’d limit the take to one precious item, a cell phone, say, and leave the wallet and watch to a non-theoretical “whiz mob” or street pickpocket team.
Though he himself has always been scrupulous about returning the items he liberates, Robbins does not withhold professional respect for his criminal brothers’ moves. One real-life whiz mobber so impressed him during a television interview that he drove over four hours to pick the perp’s brains in a minimum security prison, a confab New Yorker reporter Adam Green described in colorful detail as part of a lengthy profile on Robbins and his craft.
One small detail does seem to have escaped Robbins’ attention in the second demonstration video below, in which reporter Green willingly steps into the role of vic’. Perhaps Robbins doesn’t care, though his mark certainly should. The situation is less QED than XYZPDQ.
While you’re taking notice, don’t forget to remain alert to what a potential pickpocket is wearing. Such attention to detail may serve you down at the station, if not onstage.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. The sleeping bag-like insulating properties of her ankle-length faux leopard coat make her very popular with the pickpockets of New York. Follow her @AyunHalliday
In the picture above, you can see the original Winnie the Pooh bear, joined by his friends Tigger, Kanga, Eeyore, and Piglet. They all now live at The New York Public Library, where kids and adults can see them on display. It should be noted that Roo isn’t in the picture because he was lost a long time ago. Meanwhile you won’t find Owl or Rabbit, because they weren’t originally based on stuffed animals.
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Now comes the Syllabus Explorer, a new website created by the Open Syllabus Project at Columbia University. Impressively, the Syllabus Explorer has gathered 1,ooo,ooo+ syllabi published on university websites, then extracted and aggregated the data found in those documents, all for one reason: to determine the mostly frequently-taught books in university classrooms.
Writing in The New York Times, Joe Karaganis and David McClure, two directors at the Open Syllabus Project, explained that the Syllabus Explorer “is mostly a tool for counting how often texts [have been] assigned over the past decade.” Using frequency as a proxy for influence, the Project assigns an overall ‘Teaching Score’ to each text, providing another metric for gauging the impact of certain books.
According toKaraganis and McClure, the “traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato’s Republic at No. 2, The Communist Manifesto at No. 3, and Frankenstein at No. 5, followed by Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Oedipus and Hamlet.” What’s No. 1? The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. (Find them all in our collection of Free eBooks.)
As for the most frequently-taught novels written during the past 50 years, they add:
Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” ranks first, at No. 43, followed by William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” Ms. Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street,” Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”
It’s worth noting that, despite its name, the Syllabi Explorer doesn’t currently give you access to actual syllabi for reasons having to do with privacy and copyright. You only get access to the statistical aggregation of data extracted from the syllabi. That’s where things stand right now.
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The Gong Show-worthy performance left host Johnny Carson—and presumably the majority of home viewers—speechless.
Was it comedy or a fading, mentally unbalanced novelty act’s attempt to rekindle the passion of a fickle spotlight?
Maybe just a particularly unbridled foray into new artistic territory… Like his elaborately formal manners, Tiny Tim’s usual repertoire harkened to an earlier period. (“No one knew more about old music than Tiny Tim,” Bob Dylan once remarked.)
His oddly demure comportment is in short supply here as he veers from his customary falsetto to a more manly lower register, stripping off jacket and braces to showcase a portly, middle aged mid-section. Musicianship also seems a bit wanting, though to be fair, that’s rarely the criteria by which we measure the success of an act that ends with writhing on the floor.
Whatever his intentions, Tiny Tim’s place in the annals of WTF performance history would be secured on this turn alone.
I wonder: do the fan bases of modern comedy and modern jazz overlap at all? At first, it’s hard to imagine two artistic worlds farther apart, with the comedians seeming like unserious goofballs who consider nothing sacred and the jazz players seeming like serious artists who regard their musical tradition as sacred indeed. But look closer and the difference doesn’t seem as stark as all that: comedy and jazz, both performative pursuits, demand from those who want to succeed in them an almost obsessive commitment to improving their craft. And the best practitioners of both, despite acknowledging the importance of learning and building upon the work of their antecedents, have to know when to break from tradition and experiment.
So perhaps H. Jon Benjamin’s new album Well, I ShouldHave…, which brings comedy and jazz together but not in the way any of us would have expected,comes as something of an inevitability. Benjamin, a comedian best known for doing voices on such animated shows as Archer, Bob’s Burgers, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist and Home Movies, has put out not a record of sketches or stand-up material, but of actual jazz music, with him sitting at the piano. The comedic element? The album has a subtitle: … Learned to Play the Piano.
“I don’t play piano at all,” Benjamin deadpans in the trailer for Well, I Should Have…at the top of the post. “And I’m not a huge fan of jazz. I never was. And that’s why I thought it would be funny to make a jazz album.” To compensate for his total lack of skill or experience at his instrument, Benjamin brought three genuine jazz professionals into the studio to fill out the quartet: Scott Kreitzer on saxophone, David Finck on bass, and Jonathan Peretz on drums, all of whom do their best to build legitimate compositions around Benjamin’s near-random poking and slapping of the ivories. Here we see — or rather hear — revealed something else in common between comedians and jazz musicians: both need to improvise.
In the end, you could listen to this as either a conceptual comedy album, a conceptual jazz album, or both. You can hear selections from it (though, given the videos’ geo-restriction, that depends on which country you’re in) in the playlist just above. For most of us, showing up to a recording session completely ignorant of the instrument we have to play constitutes the stuff of nightmares, but Benjamin uses it as an opportunity to play a role he calls “Jazz Daredevil.” Does this count as real comedy? It certainly gets me laughing. I’ll leave the other obvious question to the serious jazz aficionados, who seem to enjoy only one thing almost as much as listening to jazz: arguing over what counts as jazz. If Benjamin has a particular joke to make with all this, it may be on them.
We knew David Bowie could pretty much do it all—glam rock, jazz, funk, Philly soul, cabaret, pop, drum and bass, folk, avant-garde, you name it. In front of the camera, he could stretch himself into the beautiful but wounded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the scary-sexy-cool Goblin King of Labyrinth, the mystical genius Tesla in The Prestige. Nothing he attempted seemed beyond his grasp, including, as you can hear above, off-the-cuff, mostly spot-on impressions of friends and fellow singers like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen.
The audio clip you hear comes from outtakes producer Mark Saunders happened to capture on tape during the 1985 sessions for the Absolute Beginners film soundtrack (“a better soundtrack than it was a movie!” Saunders remarks).
While recording a lead vocal, Saunders writes, Bowie “broke into the impersonations and I realized that these might get erased at some point, so I quickly put a cassette in and hit ‘record.’” You can read his full recollections at The Talkhouse in a short essay he wrote to accompany the audio—introduced by Zach Staggers of indie band the So So Glos, who writes:
Bowie goes through a handful of sung impressions, including but not limited to, Bruce Springsteen, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Loud Reed and Anthony Newly, who was such a big influence on the iconic singer that the impersonation almost sounds like Bowie mimicking himself. Between takes you can hear Bowie having fun and going back and forth with the engineers. Jokes.
Bowie also does what sounds like Bob Dylan (or Tom Petty, or Marc Bolan as some have speculated?) in the second take and a passable Neil Young in the last. His Springsteen, Reed, and Pop are excellent (Bowie called the Iggy impression “difficult, he’s somewhere between all of them.”) He closes the impromptu performance with “That’s it, night night.”
Bowie did indeed have jokes, though anyone who followed him over the decades knows of his comedic talents, whether playing straight man to Ricky Gervais’ obnoxious superfan or displaying impeccable timing in his deadpan delivery of “Bowie Secrets” from Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 2002.
Despite the kiss-off he gives Gervais in their comedy bit, those who knew and worked with Bowie all testify that he never took himself too seriously or, as Saunders remembers, threw his weight around by “using a big rock star ‘Hey, I’m David Bowie and I want it done my way.” He may have seemed to many like an alien or a god, but he was apparently in person a pretty humble, and very funny, guy.
Though it’s sometimes regarded as a pretentious-sounding term for genre writers who don’t want to associate with genre, I’ve always liked the phrase “speculative fiction.” J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman… A touch of surrealist humor, a highly philosophical bent, and a somewhat tragic sensibility can be found among them all, and also in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, who does not shy away from the genre labels of science fiction and fantasy, but who approaches these categories in the way of, say, Virginia Woolf in her Orlando: as feminist thought experiments and fables about human ecological failings and inter-cultural potential.
That’s not to say that Le Guin’s writing is driven by political agendas, but that she has a very clear, uncompromising vision, which she has realized over the course of over five decades in novels, short stories, and children’s fiction. LeGuin’s writing takes us away from the familiar to worlds we recognize as alternatives to our own.
Like those in ancient epics, her characters undertake journeys to realms unknown, where they learn as much or more about themselves as about the alien inhabitants. And though we experience in her stories the thrill of discovery and danger common to fantasy and sci-fi, we also enter a world of ideas about who we are as human beings, and how we might be different. For Le Guin, fiction is a vessel that can carry us out of ourselves and return us home changed.
Le Guin stated last year that she no longer has the “vigor and stamina” for writing novels, and having given up teaching as well, said she missed “being in touch with serious prentice writers.” Thus, she decided to start an online writing workshop at the site Book View Café, describing it as “a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation.” In keeping with the metaphor of sea voyaging, she called her workshop “Navigating the Ocean of Story” and declared that she would not take reader questions about publishing or finding an agent: “We won’t be talking about how to sell a ship, but how to sail one.” Reader questions poured in, and Le Guin did her best to answer as many as she could, posting advice every other Monday for all of the summer and much of the fall of 2015.
The first question she received was a doozy—“How do you make something good?”—and her lengthy answer sets the tone for all of her counsel to follow. She is witty and honest, and surprisingly helpful, even when confronted with such a vague, seemingly unanswerable query. The dozens of questions she selected in the following weeks tend to deal with much more manageable issues of style and technique, and in each instance, Le Guin offers the querent a clear set of coordinates to help them navigate the waters of their own fictional journeys. Below are just a few choice excerpts from the many hundreds of words Le Guin generously donated to her reading community.
The problem of exposition:
In answers to two readers’ questions about providing sufficient backstory, Le Guin refers to an old New Yorker feature called “The Department of Fuller Explanation, where they put truly and grand examples of unnecessary explaining.” Most of us, Le Guin writes, “tend to live in the Department of Fuller Explanation” when writing; “We are telling ourselves backstory and other information, which the reader won’t actually need to know when reading it.”
To avoid the “Expository Lump or the Infodump,” as she calls it, Le Guin advises the writer to “decide—or find out when revising—whether the information is actually necessary. If not, don’t bother. If so, figure out how to work it in as a functional, forward-moving element of the story… giving information indirectly, by hint and suggestion.”
The problem of description:
When it comes to describing characters’ appearances, Le Guin suggests getting specific:
It’s not just facial features—a way of moving, a voice quality, can ’embody’ a character. Specific features or mannerisms (even absurdly specific ones!) can help fix a minor character in the reader’s mind when they turn up again…. To work on this skill, you might try describing people you see on the bus or in the coffee shop: just do a sentence about them in your head, trying to catch their looks in a few words.
The problem of setting:
Le Guin answers a reader who confesses to trouble with “world building” by pointing out the central importance of setting:
Event requires location. Where we are affects who we are, what we say and and do, how and why we say and do it. It matters, doesn’t it, whether we’re in Miami or Mumbai — even more whether we’re on Earth or in Made-Up Place? So, I don’t know if it would work to try and build up a world– “all those details” – and tack it onto what you’ve written. If inventing a world isn’t your thing, OK. Stick close to this world, or use readymade, conventional sf and fantasy props and scenery. They’re there for all of us to use.
The problem of dialogue:
Le Guin offers some very practical advice on how to make speech sound convincing and genuine:
All I can recommend is to read/speak your dialogue aloud. Not whispering, not muttering, OUT LOUD. (Virginia Woolf used to try out her dialogue in the bathtub, which greatly entertained the cook downstairs.) This will help show you what’s fakey, hokey, bookish — it just won’t read right out loud. Fix it till it does. Speaking it may help you to vary the speech mannerisms to suit the character. And probably will cause you to cut a lot. Good! Many contemporary novels are so dialogue-heavy they seem all quotation marks — disembodied voices yaddering on in a void.
Getting started:
Many readers wrote to ask Le Guin about their difficulty in getting a story started at all. She replied with the caveat that “no answer to this question is going to fit every writer.” While some writers work from “a rough sketch, notes as to where the story is headed and how it might get there, with more extended notes about the world it takes place in,” for others, “a complete outline is absolutely necessary before starting to write.” Whatever the method:
A story is, after all, and before everything else, dynamic: it starts Here, because it’s going There. Its life principle is the same as a river: to keep moving. Fast or slow, straight or erratic, headlong or meandering, but going, till it gets There. The ideas it expresses, the research it embodies, the timeless inspirations it may offer, are all subordinate to and part of that onward movement. The end itself may not be very important; it is the journey that counts. I don’t know much about “flow” states, but I know that the onward flow of a story is what carries a writer from the start to the end of it, along with the whole boatload of characters and ideas and knowledge and meaning — and carries the reader in the same boat.
There are dozens more questions from readers, and dozens more insightful, funny, and very helpful answers from Le Guin. Whether you are a writer of science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, or none of the above, much of her advice will apply to any kind of fiction writing you do—or will give you unique insights into the techniques and trials of the fiction writer. Read all of the questions and Le Guin’s answers in her “Navigating the Ocean of Story” posts at Book View Café.
Sometimes I’ll meet someone who mentions having written a book, and who then adds, “… well, an academic book, anyway,” as if that didn’t really count. True, academic books don’t tend to debut at the heights of the bestseller lists amid all the eating, praying, and loving, but sometimes lightning strikes; sometimes the subject of the author’s research happens to align with what the public believes they need to know. Other times, academic books succeed at a slower burn, and it takes readers generations to come around to the insights contained in them — a less favorable royalty situation for the long-dead writer, but at least they can take some satisfaction in the possibility.
History has shown, in any case, that academic books can become influential. “After a list of the top 20 academic books was pulled together by expert academic booksellers, librarians and publishers to mark the inaugural Academic Book Week,” writes The Guardian’s Alison Flood, “the public was asked to vote on what they believed to be the most influential.” The shortlist of these most important academic books of all time runs as follows (and you can read many of them free by following the links from our meta list of Free eBooks):
The top spot went to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which Flood quotes the University of Glasgow’s Andrew Prescott as calling “the supreme demonstration of why academic books matter,” one that “changed the way we think about everything – not only the natural world, but religion, history and society. Every researcher, no matter whether they are writing books, creating digital products or producing artworks, aspires to produce something as significant in the history of thought as Origin of Species.”
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason placed a still impressive fifth, given its status, in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton, as “one of the most difficult works of philosophy ever written,” — but one which aims to “show the limits of human reasoning, and at the same time to justify the use of our intellectual powers within those limits. The resulting vision, of self-conscious beings enfolded within a one-sided boundary, but always pressing against it, hungry for the inaccessible beyond, has haunted me, as it has haunted many others since Kant first expressed it.”
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