Can you tell I’ve just discovered Instagram?

I’m quitting Tumblr for Screen Free week! I’ve written about it in my livejournal here: http://larkspurlazuli.livejournal.com/87141.html

See you in a week!

New Derren Brown TV Special at Derren’s blog.

I was shocked to learn the location of this new special; Texas, my home. Derren tells us that he has trained a member of the public and passed him off as a faith healer, illustrating the tricks faith healers use to perpetrate their fraud. He writes very frankly about the realities of the business on his blog. 

After all these years of seeing Derren Brown around London and various sites in the UK, he’s finally come to my own home… but for a somewhat unflattering reason, unfortunately. Texas is really not as backward a place as most Britons seem to believe, and I hope the show does not reinforce negative stereotypes. But I trust that the subject material, at least, will be sensitively treated. I’m thankful that Derren had the courage to confront the ugly ‘big business’ of faith healers (in the same category as televangelists who preach prosperity gospel), and the evil of committing fraud in God’s name.

I was a bit dismayed today to sign onto twitter to see that Derren has decided not to use twitter during the current tour. He handled the reasoning very tastefully but honestly in reporting that there are a few ‘needy souls’ who tweet a great deal during the tour and it ‘casts a dark cloud over the whole thing’. It’s disappointing that Derren feels the need to leave twitter for this reason, or rather, that some fans have behaved in this way, and there’s always the chance that he won’t come back. But, of course, if it makes his life more pleasant, I am all for it. He’ll still be writing in his blog, and …maybe this means he will be reading his blog comments more often (I know that he does read blog comments occasionally but isn’t thought to read them regularly)?

However, I was thrilled to see that Derren had gotten a hold of the petition to create a wax model of Derren and had tweeted a link. Last time I saw the list it had ~130 names. Now it has ten times that.

I’ve spent some time reminiscing on the state of the Derren Brown fandom as I remember it over the last four years. When I first became a fan of Derren Brown in late 2006, I was thrilled to find access to most of Derren’s tv material through (the relatively young) youtube, and someplace to talk about it, at derrenbrownfanforum.com. It was one of a handful of times that the interactivity of the internet was to change my life in a really big way. Although new material was being released regularly (Derren’s book Tricks of the Mind, The Something Wicked This Way Comes stage show, the Trick or Treat series), the official Derren Brown website did not appear to have been updated since 2005. As far as I could see, it remained static until 2008. Derren also had a small set of webpages and videos on the Channel Four website to promote his television work (I don’t believe these were updated much, but someone may correct me). For the first two years since I became a fan, Derren had no strong web presence and no fan interaction outside the stage door signings (although I believe he did answer questions through internet forums a few times). Any new material released or ‘updates’ for fans were either television or official interviews. When I came on board to the fandom, even the official fan forum had been recently shut down. Any Derren facebook or myspace pages were fakes, not official.

The fall of 2008 marked a turning point. It was the beginning of a radical re-branding of Derren Brown and new marketing strategy: social media. The original website, dark and exploratory, was replaced by the simple, clean blog format. An official Derren Brown facebook page was started. I was shocked when Derren himself started writing, the first time I’d seen his thoughts in print outside his published books. Moreover, Derren put his personal views and experiences into his blog entries, so for the first time, fans could see the ‘real’ Derren (filtered, of course, as any celebrity must be), not the stage character, but just a guy who writes about going to the zoo and his excellent eggs benedict.

I think it’s telling that the comments on the first blog post include “Is this real?”

Derren adopted twitter too, which became an even more direct way for fans to see his stream of consciousness. Perhaps more groundbreaking, Derren interacts with fans by reading his mentions on twitter (!) and replying.

Since its inception, Derren has written fairly regularly in his blog, at least a few times per month. During his stage show tours, the entries were much more frequent, a couple of times every week, while he documented the happenings of the tour. Being the dedicated Derren fan that I am, and one that is also particularly charmed by his writing, I’ve been slowly but surely reading through his entries from beginning to end. I’m currently at May 2009, which was during the first Enigma tour. When I have time, my habit has been to make my way through one or two blog posts over breakfast and scan the comments for each one.

It’s massively enjoyable to relive Derren’s progress around the country. One of my favorite reasons to read any kind of personal writing (blog or correspondence) is how an articulate, thoughtful person can record the simple beauty of their everyday experience to be appreciated by others. Derren, in particular, is skilled at communicating this to his readers, and I’m sure many would agree he has ‘a way with words’.

I regularly browse the blog comments to see if fans’ reactions to his writings match mine. There’s currently no centralized fan-forum around for DB fans (my old favorite was derrenbrownfanforum.com, but it’s very quiet now), so many fans gather at the blog to interact in the comments. They’re often filled with the humor and original thinking of some regular fans/commenters whom I’ve come to appreciate.  I don’t believe Derren himself often reads comments, but his administrators Phillis and Abeo do, and will usually answer questions directed to them.

Anyway, I started writing about this because I wanted to share something that I’d found in the blog’s back entries that I think other fans would appreciate. I’ve moved it into a separate tumblr post:

A fan’s letter to Derren and his response.

In the back entries of Derren’s blog that I have been reading, a fan had reproduced a fan’s letter to Derren and Derren’s reply. Because the letter was stuck in the very old blog entries, which I doubt many people read, I reproduced it here so that newer fans can enjoy this tidbit.

From the fan that posted the letters:

“Further proof of DB’s sweet nature. A few years ago Derren answered some mail for a magic site. The following is a letter a 10-year old wrote him and his response (I thought it was so sweet I sent it to some folks and still had it in my “sent” folder)…”

To Derren Brown,

My name is Stephen XXXXXXXX, and I come from Liverpool, England.

I am 10 years old. I saw your show in the empire, it was the best thing I have ever seen in my life. When I am older I want to be a magician, but I am interested in hypnosis and mind manipulating, have you got any advice you could give to me please?

Thanks.

Magically Yours,

Ste.

DerrenBrown

V.I.P.

——————————————————————————–

Hi Stephen, thanks ever so much for writing. And thanks for coming to the show. I’m guessing you sneaked in, as no under 12′s were supposed to be there. In fact I saw you, I’m sure – because I remember thinking, ‘I must report that tiny boy to the police after the show’.

I’m pleased you liked it so much: I love performing the show. They’re beautiful theatres and it’s very cool coming out on stage and seeing you all sat there.

As for hypnotising -it’s very difficult to hypnotise someone if you’re quite a bit younger than them, as they don’t take it very seriously. You could try a) just hypnotising very young children or kittens, or b)drawing a fake beard on with permanent marker first: that might make you look older. It worked for me in the first couple of TV shows. Or c) do what I did: learn magic first, and get really good at it, and then see if it leads you into the mind-reading sort of thing that I do. It took me ten years to really learn it properly, and I’m ninety-three now.

You spell better than any other person on this forum, so you’re obviously bright enough to be very good at magic. And bright enough to know that you can do much more clever magic that you make up yourself instead of just what everyone else does, which is normally silly. I also imagine you’re very creative and good at painting or writing or fixing stuff or making people laugh… all sorts of skills you’ll find you can bring to the magic you do.

If you send an email to my assistant (his name is Coops) and tell him your address, I’ll find and send you a magic book suitable for an intelligent and creative ten-year old to get you started. I’ll even sign it from me and David Blaine. That’s how I got started: I got a book and tried all the stuff in it. It built from there.

Best of luck with it. I’ll tell Coops to expect an email from you. And I’ll alert the police again.

Yours,

Derren.

I’m hitting the books. This semester has been a very intense one for me so far. It’s my last year of grad school, and as much as I love tumblr, any minute spent here is a minute I should be getting work done, at least for now. I’m just looking forward to graduating and resuming a normal life again (although I’m not sure if my life has ever been normal in that sense)! I’ll be back in December.

Just received my copy of Confessions of a Conjuror!  Eeeeee! I’m excited because I’ve had the impression he talks about his period of doing close up magic in Bristol (the word Conjuror is in the title, after all), a period which I find mysterious, very easy to romanticize, and I would love to learn more about. I’ve put the book on my bookshelf stacked underneath a number of other books so it’s pretty to look at but very hard to get to. I’ll have to postpone reading until the end of the semester, probably. That’s, c’mon, six weeks away, probably. I can do it.

The joy of opening the book and seeing a whole new batch of Derren’s words does bring me back to the first days of my fandom, November 2006. I discovered Derren around August/September 2006 and initially disliked him. Although his showmanship and manner were so smooth, I found him more than a bit creepy and unethical - because I bought his surface explanations of his psychological skills.  Eventually I picked up a copy of Pure Effect around October. The humor, wit and philosophy in this book turned me around, and I began to suspect that not all of Derren’s effect explanations were true. I ordered a copy of the brand new Tricks of the Mind, along with Trick of the Mind Seasons 1 and 2, and after an interminable wait for its delivery, I spent many enjoyable evenings with Derren at my dinner table. It was one of the first physical objects associated with DB that I had ever laid my hands on - it was almost miraculous to see an amazing performer who had only been ‘someone on youtube’ become that much more real to me. Although I never found Tricks of the Mind as substantive as Pure Effect, it did get me picking up a deck of cards and wishing I had someone, anyone, on which to try just a few of the things mentioned in Tricks of the Mind. At the time, I had just started a Ph.D program in a different state, so I didn’t have any friends (probably one reason my love for DB flourished quickly).

Things have changed a great deal in the last four years, and I’m incredibly lucky to have been able to share Derren’s work with at least 8 different people I can think of (all of whom had never heard of him before), several of which became fans. One became a devoted fan with whom I had the unexpected opportunity to travel to Europe this spring, where we had the unparalleled pleasure of watching Enigma in Southampton and meeting the lovely man himself after (but that is a story for another time).

So I can consider this the four year anniversary of my introduction to Derren Brown and into the fandom. It’s been a serendipitous and at some points solitary journey but one that’s solitary no longer. It’s changed me in some subtle ways and given me so much more than just an evening’s entertainment. Thank you, Derren, for your legacy, and may you have many fruitful years ahead.