Great article about Rich Bloch and his Dickens Parlour Theatre and his career as an arbitrator.

Magicians take advantage of this to manipulate their spectators attentional spotlight. They know, for example, that the eyes give off important social cues, and that people have a natural impulse to pay attention to the objects that others are attending to. They exploit this joint attention by using their eye movements to divert the audiences attention away from the method – the secret action behind the trick – and towards the magical effect.
via Sleights of hand, sleights of mind | Mo Costandi | Neurophilosophy blog | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Magic is becoming a business by magicians for magicians, it’s as if musicians were doing music for musicians, I think its not healthy for the art. Lots of people are creating extraordinary things but not targeted to a lay audience.

Magical Sleight are going to be releasing some downloads from Bebel, go and watch this short interview to hear his thoughts on sharing magic with other magicians, and what it was like to work magic on the streets.

London Magician Noel Qualter has written a step-by-step guide to becoming a famous magician, go and read it, some very wise advice for anyone just starting out.

Dave Forrest of Full 52 is ramping up his Youtube Channel into something he calls Full 52 TV. Go and subscribe to the channel if you don’t already. He runs regular competitions with some amazing give-aways as well as teaching free tricks. It was a real pleasure to spend some time with Dave and Andi Gladwin at the recent Southport IBM Convention. During the convention Dave filmed this recent Episode, you can watch Part 1 and Part 2 where Andi will teach you a great handling of Chicago Opener, you get a chance to win his Master Pushoff DVD, and you might even catch me lurking in the background, and at one point I was even behind the camera, filming John Archer’s hilarious antics, it was all I could do to keep the camera straight from laughing, so thanks for trusting me with that Dave, and please go and subscribe to the channel, tell him The Magician blog sent you!

On the 30th October Jay Sankey will be releasing The Gimmicks Lab project. I am a sucker for a new Sankey release, and can’t wait to see what Jay has planned. You can read a little of his philosophy and thinking behind this on his blog post. But the real reason to link to this was to get you to watch this video, Beginning with the Ordinary. Something I have been thinking a lot about lately. How you can use ordinary everyday objects to segue into the magic, rather than doing what is obviously a staged performance. Obviously there is a time and place for both, but if like me you do a lot of your performing in casual situations for friends, then this is something you really need to consider.

Magic Agora’s essential objective is the education of magicians as artists and professionals in the Art of Magic; it carries out a work of investigation and development of the training technology most appropriate for magicians, it puts them together in a common methodology and, as a result, periodically plans training actions destined to offer a good-quality education to the magicians.

Basically an online Hogwarts, this looks really cool, get an overview of how it all works. It looks like they are still preparing the lessons, but this is definitely one to keep an eye on.

The Swedish version of The Magicians, thanks to Noel Qualter for the link. You might not be able to understand it, but at least you don’t have to put up with Lenny Henry!

The Magic Pub is a new magic forum, where performers help performers. Seems a bit less flooded than The Green Place, and more focused on performance of magic, might be a nice quiet alternative to the existing forums.

Lee Asher is Interviewed on The Magic Broadcast, find out how to tune into the Live Stream.