I’m a latecomer to magic—whatever we think “magic” is.

Then again it’s been a primary focus of my life since childhood. Do I contradict myself?

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The first “spell” (for lack of a better word?) that I consciously cast was in my mid-30s, around 2013, when my partner Z & I lived in Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The inspiration for the spell came primarily from speculative physics, as interpreted (for example) by Rudy Rucker in his excellent book The Lifebox, The Seashell, and The Soul.

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Our life was a little bit stuck. We liked our little rental house, money situation was so-so (as is perpetually the case for the vast majority of actors & musicians). What you might call our “careers” were treading water at best.

(Are we doing any better now? Yes and no! “Success” is relative. And orthogonal. It’s been over a decade & there have been unbelievable ups & downs & we’re in a good place & I wouldn’t pretend to guess to what extent any of that’s attributable to the spell I’m about to discuss.)

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The thing about Los Angeles, and maybe particularly our little Echo Park nook, is…

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If you’re going much of anywhere, you’re probably going to drive there. And it’s going to take you at least fifteen minutes to get there & maybe more like an hour or 90 minutes, even if it’s just down the street in Silverlake.

HOWEVER.

There are at least sixteen ways to get from any given Point A, to any given Point B, ranging from “left on Sunset & straight on til morning!” to “mapquest took me over the steepest hill I have ever seen in my entire life.” (Remember mapquest? do I date myself?)

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Being us, we knew a LOT of ways to get from anywhere to anywhere. Still, we tended to settle on a “best route” & then stick to it… varying mainly with traffic or weather. Occasionally with mood, or with which one of us was driving.

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The “spell” was this:

What if we consciously vary our route, even when there’s no obvious reason to do so? Sure we know the “best” way to get from here to Los Feliz… But let’s go a DIFFERENT way.

Every time.

Every day.

With the intention of shaking up our larger path through space-time.

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This spell was more science than magic in some sense. & in other senses it was total woo.

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I was aware that when we repeat activities or ideas or statements, we develop neural pathways—physical patterns in our brain that correspond to repeated behaviors & ideas, etc. That these patterns can be useful habits, or long-standing traumas that keep us rigidly set in our ways.

& I was aware of the idea that “as above, so below”; the macrocosm reflects the microcosm & vice versa. Of being the change you want to see.

& I was aware of the “butterfly effect”, the idea that small actions can have larger unforeseen results.

& I was aware of the idea that “it’s all in your head; you just have no idea how big your head is!” (Lon Milo DuQuette said that, I think? Not sure if I was reading him back then or stumbled on the idea some other way, via Robert Anton Wilson maybe.)

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So I put it all together & figured we’d treat reality (the macrocosm) like an extension of our internal world (the microcosm) & change up our neural pathways a bit—changing by extension the way we moved through larger reality.
We started taking different routes everywhere, with the stated conscious intention that this would butterfly out in some unpredictable way—we were desperate enough for a change that it almost didn’t matter what KIND of change. We were happily courting chaos.

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(What I mean by “chaos” is a little bit complicated. Gonna leave it lie for now. Read ye some Rucker.)

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It should come as no great surprise that within a month or so, things were shaking up. Within a year or two we had wrapped up our various activities in Los Angeles & moved our lives back to the Pacific Northwest (where we gleefully remain among the murk & mist).

In fact there was a point where we had to make our routes more consistent again, to dial back the rate & degree of change!

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I’d like to make the point again that this was essentially a physics-based act of magic—or “spell” if that seems appropriate. No gods were consulted, no spirits were summoned (not consciously on our part, anyway). Nothing was sacrificed (that I am aware of), except perhaps the assumption that such things are impossible. We did not speak incantations by candlelight or etch runes into clay or draw them on the side of our car. No cards were consulted.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, and these days we do variations on all of them. But it’s remarkable to think back in wonder. And to wonder, again, if “magic” is really the right word for what we did—which still strikes me more as “applied physics”—or if “applied physics” is maybe a better definition than “magic” for a lot of what gets filed under that label?

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There IS a musical connection to this “spell”.

I’m not going to go deep on it right now, but here’s the food for the thinking:

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It has been said that when you change “the music” you change “the culture”.
(Conversely, it has been one of the greatest weapons of capitalism to co-opt all entertainment in service of ideology without appearing obviously to have done so. But I digress. Or do I.)

That idea has to do with The Music writ large, as in: “what kind of music do we, as a culture, make.” And the corollary: “can we stop people from making the art they want to make, from expressing themselves as they see fit, if we think it will interfere with our authoritarian intentions?”

In 1970s South Korea, Shin Joong-hyun was imprisoned & tortured & his music banned, for refusing to write a song in praise of a dictator. China has repressed various musical styles at various times, depending on who is in power & what they wish to achieve.

In America, of course, we had the PMRC, the “Parents’ Music Resource Center,” attempting to require labels on albums they deemed “obscene” and inappropriate for their children. Prince’s “Darling Nikki” (1984) set them off, as I understand it. Frank Zappa fought them toe-to-toe in Washington DC in 1985 & prevailed against their effort to ruin artists’ already-precarious livelihoods through censorship & to preserve some demented puritanical vision of “The American Way”—though some labels have gone ahead & placed warnings on their releases anyway.

(Keep in mind the PMRC included Tipper Gore, wife of Al who would have tried his best to save the world if he hadn’t been screwed over by the Supreme Court in the 2000 election. Repuglicans don’t have a monopoly on heteronormative oppression, as we know, as we know.)

Famously, Kurt Cobain agreed to tone down the cover art for In Utero (1933) so that it could be sold in Wal-Mart. Some folks saw this as a cop out, while Kurt asserted that he wanted every broken middle America kid to be able to get the music they needed to help keep them alive & sane; that this access was more important than preserving every detail of his vision & thus being shut out of various markets. (Remember: In the days before the internet, you ONLY heard the album if you went to a store & bought a physical copy, or knew someone who did. In the backwoods, if the store didn’t have it, you were shit outta luck.)

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Well—

This has been a delightful & unexpected tangent!

All I really meant to say about music is that improvisation exists—music that is spontaneous & fresh, different every time, courting novelty & change with every breath.

& that if one wants to court change in one’s life, or perhaps in the world, improv (or at least a fresh set list from show to show! or a new arrangement of an old song once in a while), combined with the will to create change, might be a way to work towards that end.

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(Magic and improvisation both being, as much as anything, about finding & following routes between apparently unrelated spaces.)

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More on which at some later date!