I Just Read About That…

I couldn’t find the right cover–this is the right year, wrong issue.

SOUNDTRACK: FOSTER THE PEOPLE-“Houdini” (2011).

My friend Anna was way ahead of the curve on these guys.  She liked them before “Pimped Up Kicks” went huge.  So I listened to the album and liked it but never would have guessed it would have been such a hit!

This song reminds me of a bunch of other bands, and I actually have no idea what the song is about (his vocals are really hard to understand).  But it’s catchy and has a great melody.

And it has a great video.   Whereas I used to look for cool new videos, I really don’t watch videos anymore, unless someone tells me about one.  I felt like bands didn’t make great concept videos anymore.  Well, this one is very cool, indeed.  I just can’t decide if the hidden people are actually how they did it or if it was a lot more high-tech than that.

[READ: July 5, 2012] “The Bonds He Did Not Break”

Everyone knows Houdini, but I didn’t know much about him.  This JSTOR article gives a really good profile of the man.

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary.  After immigrating to the U.S. with his family, his name was changed to Erich Weiss (and for some reason, his birthday was changed from March 24 to April 6) and they settled in Wisconsin.  Wisconsin seems to have been home to many circuses, or at least the circuses always made a point of stopping there, so young Erich was always around fantastic people.  He even joined a circus as a contortionists (and called himself The Prince of the Air) when he was young.

At the age of 12 he left home look for work in the circus.  After a few months, when he heard that his family had moved to New York, he rejoined them there.  He started doing magic as “Eric the Great” and then, with Jacob Hyman, began performing as the Brothers Houdini–named after French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdini.  By 1891 the Brothers Houdini were a success.  They even performed the 1893 Worlds’ Fair.  The Brothers parted ways when Erich met Bess, his soon-to-be wife (he was 20 she was 18).  Erich was now calling himself Harry.

After they were married, they performed together but had a hard time making money.  Houdini performed as “Card” and “Professor Mura” and with Bess as “The Rahners, America’s Greatest Comedy Act.”  They eventually returned to Wisconsin in 1897, where Houdini began to specialize in escape artist.  He was successful and received glowing reviews in the papers when he escaped from prison handcuffs in matters of minutes.  And yet he remained on the sideshow circuit.  What he craved was Vaudeville–family entertainment that banned smoking drinking and carousing.

He achieved this success in 1899 when vaudeville tycoon Martin Beck saw him and elevated him to the more lucrative circuit–stages across the US and Europe (where he was billed as “The Elusive American”).  He was wildly successful for ten years–even spawning many imitators.  The imitators just made him work harder, crafting tricks that looked more dangerous (even if they really weren’t).  He introduced milk jugs, straightjackets and underwater escapes.

He returned triumphant to Milwaukee in 1916 with some great stage patter about his “hometown” saying, “I do not believe that anyone has done more to exploit the name of Milwaukee in all parts of the world than I have”.  He even had the famous milk jug trick–normally filled with 22 buckets of water–filled with 22 buckets of Schlitz.  Later in 1916 he performed his famous straightjacket routine (normally done in a cabinet) out in the open–people likes seeing him fight his way out.  He was hoisted nearly to the top of the Milwaukee Journal building by a crane.  He hung upside down and in five minutes was out of the straitjacket.

In 1919 he pursued a movie career and appeared in five movies in three years.  In this time his name was added  to Funk and Wagnall’s Dictionary as a synonym for escape.  He ventured to Madison Wisconsin and performed the outdoor straightjacket escape in front of nearly half the capital city’s population.

By 1925 he retired from public performance and devoted himself to making people aware of psychic fraud and the “cult” of Spiritualism–the belief that a medium could communicate with the spirit world. Famous followers of Spiritualism were Harriet Beecher Stowe, Arthur Conan Doyle  and Horace Greely as well as senators and psychologists.  The belief surged during WWI in the hopes of speaking to dead soldiers.  He claimed that all Spiritualists and mediums were frauds.  But some felt he was fraudulent too.  Indeed, many of his original ideas came up through what the mediums themselves had practiced–handcuffs and seances.  Although he never claimed to be supernatural, he let the audience believe he was.

He died on October 31, 1926 from a possible burst appendix brought on by a punch to the stomach–although he died several days after the punch, not on stage that night.  He never went to doctors, so the exact cause is unknown.

I had literally no idea that Houdini was connected to Wisconsin.  I also didn’t know very much about him or his tricks.  This was a fun article–just long enough to be detailed and informative (without having to read a whole biography!).  And the pictures are great, too!

You can read the whole thing here.