I was a pretty serious magician in my adolscence--more than a hundred magic shows, visits to national magician conventions, newspaper coverage, etc.  I even published a magic magazine when I was in middle school (it lasted a total of three issues). 

   My hero back then was Harry Houdini (1874-1926).  I read every book and article I could get my hands.  This was in the days before Internet and cable television, but I still managed to see the Tony Curtis biopic a half dozen times, and I even got to view numerous film clips, such as this and this, including the clumsy matinee serials that Houdini starred in:  "The Grim Game" (1919) and "Man from Beyond" (1921), among others.  The latter featured a memorable but hoaky Niagra Falls rescue sequence.  Like Buster Keaton, he did all of his own stuntwork:  that was the whole point, of course.  As E.L Doctorow celebrated in his novel Ragtime, Houdini was one of the first twentieth-century celebrities, a man who instinctively understood the new world of mass media and promotion that was just dawning. 

   My own Houdini phase took place in the 1970s.  Much new has been discovered since then, including the fact that Erich Weiss (his real name) was born not in Appleton, Wisconsin, as he always claimed, but rather in Budapest, Hungary, before his family emigrated.   Last week, while wasting time on YouTube, I stumbled across another new wrinkle in Houdini studies:  recordings of the great man's voice.  

   Houdini always promised that, if it were possible, he would come back to contact us after his death.  This was always interpreted as a continuation of his lifelong interest in spiritualism, but perhaps he had something more mundance in mind.  In contrast to Walter Benjamin's ideas, in these recordings the technology of mechanical reproduction takes on an aura--that of the dead celebrity.