Actually, I don’t think mentalism sucks at all. I happen to love mentalism with the same degree of feeling I do close-up magic. Mentalism appeals to a higher order of entertainment, to be sure, and it’s in that stratosphere that sometimes bad things happen. Like magic, some presentations of mentalism reek. Generally speaking, that’s not mentalism’s — or magic’s — fault. That’s the performer’s fault.

The principles underlying mentalism are closer to the mechanisms that make magic magical; the gray matter between our ears that expects a certain thing to occur along that familiar “cause and effect” road and, when it doesn’t, it’s like falling out of a tall tree, but without that sudden deceleration that can become so problematic for most of us.

Those underlying principles are most often tied directly to the names “Annemann” and “Corinda” and rightly so because so much of what we can call classic mentalism finds the seeds of its birth in those names.

Richard Osterlind has a new set of DVDs coming out very, very soon now that deals precisely and brilliantly with this very subject. This DVD set, called “Easy to Master Mental Miracles” — which you can order now here — along with copies of Annemann and Corinda make up a college course in the fundamentals of phenominal mentalism. (The graduate course is called “actually performing this stuff for real people” — and not everyone choses to attend classes.)

There’s nothing wrong with mentalism, per se. The problem is found in some of its practitioners.

Some people simply are not cut out for magic and mentalism. I’m not being ugly about this, it’s just so. Their personality — that is the anti-social, condescending method of human interaction that brings so many of these social misfits into our art form to begin with — is simply at bitter odds with what normal people would call “entertainment.”

So, when one of these poor fellows finds himself in the midst of diminishing or non-existent audiences, who do they entertain? Why, fellow practitioners, of course. (There’s an indelicately worded phrase for that, which I’ll get to later.)

If there’s one thing that can make a poor performer even worse, it’s unfounded, unearned praise — which is generally presented by one ill-equipped performer to another. (Normal people would call this behavior “lying through your teeth” or “the blind leading the blind.”)

Given the choice between constructive criticism and destructive praise, give me the criticism any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I can’t fix what others convince me isn’t broken.

As a follow up to my post yesterday about Jamy Ian Swiss’s book, “Shattering Illusions,” I thought that since I’m already late to the party getting my copy, it’d be okay to dwell on the book a little more.

The second chapter is called, “Mentalism Grows Up.” And, while it’s not my intention to quote my way through the book — something I could easily do, since the whole thing is quotable — here’s a great section from chapter two:

In Mentalism & Its Presentation by Bob Nelson & Syd Bergson (1959), Nelson insists that the mentalist must “convince his audience that he is ACTUALLY reading minds and predicting future outcomes,” and repeats such claims throughout his work. “The object of the mentalist is not to just entertain…but to so [sic] entrance his spectators into believing that he is actually doing true MENTAL MIRACLES” (All emphasis per original.)

The problem with this approach, however, is that while a certain percentage of the potential audience will be attracted to the delusion of special abilities, much of the audience — those with functioning bullshit detectors—will recognize the practitioners as the pathetic losers they are and run in the opposite direction. Little wonder that mentalism was rarely perceived as sophisticated, grown-up entertainment outside the hands of a very few. Mentalism at magic conventions seemed to make bad card tricks look good. How many times can you watch some pudgy myopic nimrod puff out his chest and prattle on for twenty minutes on the basis of two words read off a center tear, as if anyone but himself (and his Psychic Entertainer buddies) cares?

So. I guess a good question to ask is, who are you really fooling?