But more importantly, they forgot. For that eight or so minutes they forgot about the heartache, they forgot about the disappointment, and they pretty much forgot about everything. And when it comes down to it, isn’t that the point of entertainment? via Why Steve Loves Magic « Magick Words.
Bristol Magician Rob James has started a new blog, go read his first post on getting fake enquiries, what baffles me is why people would do this in the first place, go and learn a new card trick instead of bothering professionals!
Two old scrapbooks that contain magazine and newspaper clippings collected by a amateur magician from 1900 to the 1930′s. Covering all aspects of magic from the beginning of last century, from small close up tricks to the greatest Magicians of the time revealing their secrets. These articles have been scanned in from the scrapbooks and provide a fascinating insight into magic from that era, you can see what is coming up in each volume in the volume 1 and volume 2 index.
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.
Noted by Gary Jones Costas was very kind to send me a review copy of Gary’s new release Noted. You can see the demo in the link above. This was originally published in Gary’s lecture notes as Starter for 10. The original used a simple basic gimmick, but Magic Tao have taken the idea and greatly improved it. The basic idea behind the trick is that you walk up to a table holding a note-pad and ask if you can take their order, you then change the note-pad into a deck of cards and you can start your magic.
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.
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.
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.
If you are into Memdeck work as I am, you might be interested to know you can get the out-of-print Martin Joyal book as an ebook from Hermetic Press for $20. If you haven’t learnt a stack you might consider this, as you can learn the rules, and it should take you, as the name suggests, around 6 hours. Although you will have non of the advantages of using a stack with in-built features, so it might be worth reading round first.
Woody Aragon has just published his new book, A Book in English, this is the accompanying blog, to showcase some videos and anecdotes. I have the book and haven’t yet made it past the tools/sleights section, that isn’t the books fault, it’s just that I can’t stop playing with some of the original sleights in this first part. The Separagon move is superb, I couldn’t stop smiling as I was working through it.
It’s very common to have customers ask how they can make there magic better. While there is no carved in stone formula, there are some practical steps you can take to improve your magic. Five ways to improve your magic from Paul Richards of Elmwood Magic, courtesy of our friends over at The Magic Session. While there check the rest of the site, watch some of the On Demand Content, and head over to their new facebook page to see the new version of the site.
Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio launch the Journal of Secrets with a manifesto that is well worth reading, and then reading again, then printing out and sticking in your magic den! Inspired by Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth it should be required reading for any magician, young or old, amateur or professional! Can’t wait to see where they take this site, and for the launch of The Ontology Project.
It’s about thinking carefully, seeing past the tricks and seeing what the performer is trying to achieve, magic is and always will be more than just tricks. The tricks are the bones of it, but it’s everything else which makes it watchable. We are not here as magicians to make you believe we are really performing the impossible, we are here to entertain. An article from Chris Cox about a review of his recent Edinburgh Festival show, and the problem with people reviewing magic.
Ohio State University Centre for the Study and Teaching of Writing interviews magician and author Joshua Jay. Fascinating, particularly the part where Josh shares some thoughts on the development of his own show, and giving the spectators a peek behind the curtain into the process of magic, a presentational concept I am becoming more enamoured with. Also check out the trick at the end, this might be a sneak peek at The Prism Deck coming out soon through Vanishing Inc.