Saturday, July 23, 2011

Passing



Sleight of hand artists use a number of benchmarks to measure their skill level in comparison to their peers.  These benchmarks are moves that become the building blocks upon which much of their repertoire is built.

One such move is the Palm.  This is where the performer conceals a coin, card, or other small object in their hand while it continues to appear empty.

Another foundational move is the Force.  This is a series of actions and equivocations designed to make certain the spectator takes the card that the performer intends.

The high water mark for card workers is the Pass.

This move can take a variety of forms, but the end result is that after a spectator returns their chosen card to the middle of the deck, the performer secretly cuts the cards at that point delivering the chosen card to the top, or bottom, of the deck.  Once the card is delivered to the desired position, the performer can do all manner of additional covert operations before revealing its identity to the audience.

Cutting the cards is a simple enough action:  taking a stack off the top and putting it under the remaining cards.  Doing it covertly can produce some very complex choreography which must appear both innocent and perfectly natural.

The Pass is such a badge of honor that its complexity in service of innocence becomes the measure of its value.  Taking a group of cards off the top, laying them to one side and then stacking all remaining cards on top of the first pile is a low-complexity, low-skill move and something that magicians make civilians do all the time.  Being able to have a selected card returned to a fanned spread and, in the process of closing the fan, cutting the cards so the selection is now on top is more complex and more valued.  This perhaps explains why there are so many variations.  While some may have been devised to suit the needs of specific plots, most would seem to be developed as personal statements and expressions of skill. In my own case, learning the Pass has become important to me and my mildly arthritic fingers precisely because it is a calling card to magic's next level.

I have no aspirations to being a performer, but being able to do a Pass means that you have put the time in and are ready to put down the crutches of trick cards and self-working effects and make your own magic.  As I have written elsewhere, if pressed to present a trick, I default to my self-working, gimmicked roots, but it seems undeniably attractive to try and get a visa to the land of the "real work."

I have a video in my collection by the great Tony Giorgio who has been an actor and authority on advantage play in games of chance.  He has had a semi-regular column in Genii (The Conjuror's Magazine) wherein he writes about the demimonde of sharpsters and mechanics and where, if at all, their world overlaps with magicians.

In this video,
The Ultimate Work, Giorgio demonstrates various moves used by gamblers to overcome the house advantage in card games.  These are not fancy flourishes, but rather moves that are designed to appear perfectly in keeping with normal card table activities.  He maintains that it is at the card table, with money on the line, that moves, any moves, are subject to the greatest scrutiny.  These are conditions described as "under fire" and are the crucible in which real cardmen are forged.

The video was shot with Giorgio in his early eighties and not nearly as smooth as he must have been in his prime, but what is undeniable is his technique and his philosophy.  At one point he talks about techniques for holding out cards until they can be used to maximum advantage, i.e. to make a pair into three of a kind, or to finish out a flush.

For anyone who has ever seen a western with gambling cheats, they have seen a holdout machine.  These are most typically shown as having a series of inter-locked scissors-style arms that can extend and retract in the gambler's sleeve delivering the needed cards when needed. Giorgio demonstrates his ability to accomplish the same effect without the hardware.  And, for the most part, that's a club you can't get into if you're still doing the 21 Card Trick

But wanting to learn the Pass is only the starting point.  You must also decide which one.  There's the Classic Pass, the Bluff Pass, the Half Pass, the Spread Pass, the Dribble Pass, the Nowhere Pass, the Invisible Pass and untold others each with personal variations and subtleties.

It's reasonable to assume that it will not be sufficient to just master one of these.  As I say, to be invisible, the Pass has to pass unnoticed at a time when your spectator is "burning your hands" with their eyes.

And some effects may require multiple uses of the Pass and it is a truism in magic that you should never do the same move the same way for the same audience.  More than once for repetition is the most reliable route to discovery.

You can easily see how study of this one move might become all-consuming.

But mastery of this, or any other skill, is the price of admission to the subsequent levels of challenge and acceptance in any arena.  People don't take you seriously if you stay on the bunny hill, or shallow end, or the putting green.



The above video is of master manipulator Cardini who is said to have practiced his sleight of hand magic in the trenches of World War I where it was so cold that he had to learn his moves with gloves on. After the war, he developed a pitch-perfect ten minute vaudeville act that was his bread and butter for decades.

The video comes from a 1957 appearance where he did his entire act. The television audience in those days was much more homogeneous and so a performer could reach tens of millions of homes in a single evening. In this one performance, Cardini reached more people than he had in all his years on the stage. Despite the masterful technique and the elegance of his presentation, perhaps his greatest trick performed that night was the transformation of his act from "featured" to "formerly featured." The next day, his act wasn't fresh any more. Everyone had seen it.

That's a show business story: a performer spends his entire career perfecting ten minutes and, overnight, he has to start over again if he wants to keep working. Now, I'm certain there's more to this than I have outlined, but it's a story that magicians repeat to one another as a cautionary tale.

Learning a move like the Pass is to use the same bowling shoes as the greats like Cardini. It is to connect to the giants of the art and get a visceral sense of what it takes to be a master.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

"How Magic Works" by Teller

This 2007 video turned up on boingboing.net over the weekend.  It is from a presentation given by the shorter half of Penn & Teller and begins to explain--with illustrations--how magicians use our brains against us.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Lessons Learned

I remember going to the Laurentien Hotel in Montreal to attend a magic lecture by Al Goshman.


Just up the street from Windsor Station, the Laurentien was a post-war streamlined, silver-tone hotel designed for travellers. It's lobby was decorated in varnished wood and plaster and most of the lighting was indirect.


It was one of those hotels with a mezzanine level--the floor in between the ground floor and the second floor that was not the first floor--that contained a number of store fronts including a barber shop. I remember thinking he had to be a pretty good barber if he could stay in business so far off the street.


Goshman was in Montreal as a guest of Morrissey's Magic Shop. Four or five times a year, Herb would bring performers into town to talk magic, demonstrate their techniques and gin up a little business.


Al Goshman was renowned for his sponge balls.  This is not a comment on any particular physical attribute, but rather the foam rubber spheres with which he made his magic.  In his hands, the balls would add, subtract, multiply and divide faster than the eye could follow.


I remember watching him us a purse frame--literally the metal frame from an old fashioned coin purse.  He would appear to show his hands empty and then, using the purse frame, he would produce a large quantity of those maddening red balls from inside the frame.


This was magic that had been honed to a razor's edge over many years and was precisely the type of thing that I could never get away with.





What was fascinating and also so frustrating about the magic lecture was that its format is that of a conversation among insiders.  The lecturer will show you his tricks, but then he explains how they are done.  The frustration comes from not having the luxury of following along with the props in your hand.  It's almost impossible to take it all in.  Like the high-speed disclaimers that run at the end of ads promoting contests, it's all there, but it's too much to process.  By the time you get home and find a set of props, "your individual results may vary."


To watch a professional magician give a lecture wherein he discloses his secrets--literally giving away the tools of his trade--is to understand something about mastery.


Like any other performance art, magic may be practiced in the rehearsal room, but it is perfected in front of an audience.  Each move--covert or not--is adjusted until the whole is greater, i.e. more magical, than the sum of its parts.  Every word , every pause, becomes part of a script designed to put the audience at ease and make them easier to fool.


By the time lecturers of Goshman's calibre get to the classroom, they have wrung all of the juice out of those routines, made the discoveries and are ready to move on to new material.


Now, it should be noted that the lecture I am referencing happened more than 30 years ago, long before YouTube and professional lecturers who are amateur performers.  The economics of magic were very different:  you could still find show rooms in larger cities that booked variety acts.


At the time I was learning about magic there were very few schools.  The primary pedagogical medium was the written word and only the very lucky would have the opportunity to study side-by-side with a working professional.  Having a performer with a recognizable name come through town was impressive.  That he was going to tip his material to local magicians was irresistible.


These lectures drew men and boys of all ages, all of whom were doing their best to seem collegial rather than confounded.  Among themselves they would talk like insiders about the art, but in the presence of a celebrity presenter, they would appear live over-anxious fanboys at a comic book convention.  You can always tell the super fans:  they are the ones with the biggest grins.


My memory may be failing me, but I believe it was at this lecture that I purchased a non-sponge ball trick of Goshman's:  the rising cards. 


This is one of the classics of magic.  The performer invites the spectator to select a card which is noted, or perhaps signed, and then returned to the deck.  The deck is placed in a glass and the performer, concentrating all of his energy on the pasteboards, is able to command the card to rise from the pack.


What's not to love about a trick like that?  The plot is simple and direct and it looks like real magic.  And it has stood the test of time for almost four hundred years.


I thought so much of this trick that I tried to make it the new closer for my birthday party shows.


I thought I was being terribly clever.  I would get the birthday honoree to select a card and then, when the magic happened, the card would rise out of the deck with their name on it.


I did that trick exactly once and I learned a very important lesson:  children do not care about card tricks.  And, perhaps more importantly, however magical the rising cards might appear, they do not hold a candle to the magic candy glass.


I offer all of this by way of prologue for some observations on what has got to have been the ultimate magician lecture:  the historic presentation of the rising cards by Dr. Samuel Hooker.


Dr. Samuel Cox Hooker
Hooker was a chemist by trade and a magician by avocation.  He was an active member of several magician's fraternities. 


In 1914 he invited a small number of his breatheren to his home and demonstrated a series of effects which he justifiably called "impossibilities."  Each of these rising card effects was presented under conditions that appeared to preclude any of the traditional methods.


A centerpiece of the demonstration was that the spectators could shuffle the cards and then the pack would be placed under a bell jar and another spectator would name any card at random at which point the named card would rise from the deck.


Hooker gave a second demonstration of his "impossibilities" in 1918.  He died in 1935 without ever revealing his methods.


Hooker's rationale for withholding his technique is a reflection of his profession as a scientist.  He felt that the research of those looking for possible solutions would do more to advance the art of magic than anything else.  The education of a scientist, a magician, or any other artist has more to do with trial and error than it does with following the instructions worked out by somebody else.


It's almost 100 years later and magicians are still fascinated by Dr. Hooker's effects.  Through a remarkable set of circumstance, the apparatus used to create them has survived and twice in the last 20 years Dr. Hooker's cards have taken flight at meetings of the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History and each time they have been demonstrated the effects have ignited much praise and more speculation.


I am reminded of the line from "The Usual Suspects" where Kevin Spacey's character talks about the "spook story" that is Keyser Soze.


Dr. Hooker's greatest trick is not the rising cards, but starting a creative reaction that is still bubbling away and, in so doing, is still teaching generations of magicians more about magic than would have been possible had he given up his secrets.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The Book of Secrets

To become interested in magic is to become a traffiker of secrets.  When you know nothing, you become intent on learning everything.  It's not so much about building a show as it is about amassing the raw material that will, eventually become the show.

To do that means pouring over all kinds of material in order to find effects that may, or may not, be within your skill range until you find items that you think you can do justice to.

This process never ends.

After four decades I have a library of collected wisdom full of books and videos, but among my most valuable books is my copy of Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic.

The Dunninger in the title is Joseph Dunninger.  "The Amazing Dunninger" was an magician and mentalist who pioneered the performance of mentalism on radio.

The book is a collection of columns that were prepared for the general public and which appeared in the popular "science" magazines published by pulp pioneer Hugo Gernsback. 

The articles claimed to give the inside secrets of magic although the practicality of some of the "solutions" provided is open to debate. 

Disclosing the secrets of magic is always good for selling magazines and TV shows.  A performer's life's work goes into collecting them and, when all is said and done, they are the only asset he may have left. 

In the early part of the last century, premier English magician David Devant earned the enmity of his fellow performers when illness forced him to publish a book wherein he disclosed many of his secrets.  In our own time, we can recall the "outrage" of magicians when The Masked Magician specials ran more than a decade ago. 

I love the Dunninger book because, whether or not the secrets are real, it coveys much of the romance of magic.  You get the idea that the magician is in complete control of his environment.  Every element might play a role in convincing the audience that the impossible has become possible.  Sure, it may be a perfectly ordinary deck of cards, but nothing else on the stage is.

Disclosure is bad for business and for that reason Penn & Teller are the "bad boys of magic."  They frequently tell the audience what they are going to do before they do it, or in the case of their beautiful cups & balls routine, as they are doing it and yet it is impossible to follow and ends up being just as surprising as the gold standard routine done by Dai Vernon.





Dunninger's book also holds a special place in by library because it was given to me by my Aunt Marjorie. At a time when I was serious about being a performer and taking my first steps toward doing birthday party shows, this book seemed like an affirmation. To my wide child eyes, this was the real deal: what magicians call the "real work". I imagined myself an insider in the world of magic soon to be rubbing elbows with the likes of Magic Tom.

It was a great gift and one for which I am eternally grateful.

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Secret of Steinmeyer's Origami Box

Having an interest in magic is not that different from being a collector. Unless your interest is mainstream, you are better off with your own kind than trying to explain your passion to civilians.

Because I don't perform magic it is difficult to explain why I have so many decks of cards and a suitcase full of tricks. I suspect at some level it is like if you were John Wayne Gacy and had to explain away the clown costume: it's more than a little creepy.

Part of the reason I don't show people magic tricks is because they don't see them the same way I do. Whereas I might--and I emphasize "might"--be able to execute a classic pass and be totally impressed with that, what the audience will have seen is an uninteresting card trick made all the less interesting because I was staring at my hands the entire time.

After twenty-three years together, I have pretty much exhausted my wife's patience for magic. Her early introduction was my "performing" at family gatherings and the cringe-inducing response she had to that tough audience has carried forward. She thinks it's cute that I have a hobby and a good thing that I'm not bothering anyone, least of all her.

There have been instances, however, when she has seen an effect that has overwhelmed her cringe reflex and has registered as artistic or just plain pretty.

One such effect is "Origami Box" designed by Jim Steinmeyer.

On paper, the effect is simplicity itself: the assistant gets into a box and the magician folds the box on itself to an impossibly small size and then, to prove that there is no place for her to hide, he plunges a sword through the center of the box. The sword is removed, the box unfolded and the assistant emerges unscathed.

What takes this effect beyond the realm of the usual assistant-mutilating tricks favored by illusionists is the simplicity of its procedure.  I have no way of knowing what's involved for the assistant, but to the audience there is folding and there is unfolding.  Much like the artform from which the illusion takes its name, the power comes from simple elements being combined in an artful way.  Whereas you and I might just see a piece of paper, an origami artist can see a swan, or a crane, or even complex shapes.  As audience we see a small box, but to the magician it's large enough to hold his assistant.

I can remember seeing an artist paint a cherry blossom with a few broad gestures and a couple of colors.  There was no sketching, no recourse to reference works; none of the self-consciousness that has plagued my attempts to sketch.  A lifetime of observation translated into a certainty of brushstrokes.  And what was remarkable was that there was not one more stroke on the paper than was needed to convey the image. 

The first time I saw this trick was just like that.

I believe it was on the Arsenio Hall show.  David Copperfield was promoting an upcoming special and he did the trick to the Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street." 

It was beautiful.

To give you an idea of the effect, let me just say that as one of those who knows just enough about magic to be dangerous, I stopped trying to figure it out and was just engrossed in the moment.  There has to be a ridiculously obvious explanation--there always is "once you know the secret"--but I don't care.  In that piece Steinmeyer and Copperfield had produced a true piece of art.  The method, the magician, the materials and the music took me out of my skeptical self and back to that place that could believe in real magic.

I have written elsewhere of magic as storytelling.  Copperfield's presentation of Steinmeyer's effect is a perfect example of this and what is most impressive is that it holds up after multiple viewings.  It's so well made that I don't care how it's made.

In the age of YouTube, it is possible to find clips of the illusion being performed by all manner of illusionists, including Copperfield, and what the non-Copperfield versions share in common is that they fail to understand the story of the effect. 

I can recall seeing video of the effect being performed not for its poetry, but for time.  It seemed to me that the magician and his assistant were trying to see how quickly they could get it done before moving on to the next piece.  In their hands it was no different than a magician plucking a card out of the air.  I have also seen clips of performers who try to ape Copperfield's presentation and they always fall short.  It seems as though they purchased the effect because it met some offstage criterion such as it fit in their truck, or their budget, and beyond that they have no special connection to it.

Sometime after that first viewing, we went to see a live Copperfield show.  When the time came for him to do the illusion I recall poking my spouse and saying something like "this is pretty."  After the show, that was the piece that she talked about.  She was impressed:  not easily accomplished when it comes to magic.

I guess it's not that in that moment she saw magic the way that I do--as a world of secrets--but that I was able to see it like a civilian once again.  And that, like the illusion itself, is a pretty good trick.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Mystery of the Props

Television is as responsible as anything for my interest in magic. Not only was there Marshall Brodien and his TV Magic, but in Montreal we had "Magic Tom."

Magic Tom Auburn was THE local magician.  He hosted a local kids show that was our equivalent to Bozo.  He also seemed to be the go-to performer for live events around town.  And why not?  At the point when I was introduced to him, he presented himself as everyone's idea of the uncle who could do cool stuff.  He was friendly and respectful, great with kids and he could do magic.  What was not to like?

It was with this image in my head that I thought I too could perform for kids.  He made it look so easy that I thought it was easy.  It was not until I had retired from the stage that I came to understand that it was only because of absolute mastery of his material that he could appear so effortless. 

Here are some videos where you can get a sense of what I'm talking about.

So, not only was I hearing that "magic is easy once you know the secret" but I was seeing it every week in the person of Magic Tom.

At about the same time that I first saw the ads for TV Magic Cards, I remember seeing a similar style ad for the Wonder Mouse.  I don't know who was selling it, or even if it was called Wonder Mouse at the time, but I have a memory of seeing this advertised and being completely fascinated by this magical plastic mouse.  There was no abracadabra, no magic wands, just an inanimate plastic mouse that appeared to be able to do impossible things.  It looked like real magic.

Well, here, take a look for yourself:



This isn't the actual ad, but it gives you some idea of what I saw.

As I was preparing this piece, I was surprised to see that the mouse is still being sold. There is a more modern variation called the "Squirmel," but the mouse is still going strong.

This surprised me because when I finally got my hands on one, I remember being so completely disappointed in the "secret." The little "motor" that made the mouse do his wonderful tricks didn't make me think so much of Magic Tom as it did Rocky's famous line to Bullwinkle: "those tricks never work."

As I have noted elsewhere, I was pretty focused on getting caught and so a trick's "technology" had to pretty bulletproof. The part that I didn't get about performing is that elaborate technology comes with its own set of problems. The more the moving parts the more parts there are to break. In its own way, the Wonder Mouse is pretty bulletproof, but for a different reason. It's simplicity means that the performer doesn't have to think about it and can instead focus on his presentation.

What continues to impress me about magicians is that they willing enter into a performance with a hostile audience. The promise of trickery means that the audience is alert for possible clues that will enable them to discover the method. Nontheless, the magician distracts, misdirects and charms the audience so that he or she can pull the wool over their eyes. That's a kind of bravery that I can respect, but otherwise can't get close to.

Magic is storytelling, not technique. Every set of instructions I have ever read begins with the effect of the trick. That is the primary consideration: what does the audience see? The path to accomplishing that effect can take many routes and the actual work of the trick can happen at any point before the end. Some tricks are done before the performer has even begun and others can have a variety of outcomes depending on what happens along that path.

When I was still doing kids shows, I would go to the magic shops--Morrissey's in Ville St. Laurent, or Cramer's on Bleury--and look for the items that I saw Magic Tom use. I remember getting a piece of used equipment from Cramer's that became the close of my show. It was something I had seen Magic Tom use, a glass of sugar that turned into a glass full of candy. That was something a professional used. I used it, so I was on my way to becoming a professional.

It has taken me some four decades to recognize something that should have been painfully obvious: magic is not about the equipment and the technique. These are the details, the accents in the story told by the performer. It's not what happens when the simple metal tube covers the glass, but all about what happens to the spectators when the tube is removed. When they are transformed from cynics and secret-seekers into those who believe in wonder, that's when the magic happens.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Time Tunnel

In my work, I try to write about issues relating to mental health.  As part of that work, I curate our agency blog

It was there that I posted this piece about magic, memory and Marshall Brodien.  It may not be original to this blog, but it is in keeping with it.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

DeLand's Cards Have Superiority

I like Honda cars.

I was an early convert.  We had been a Ford family with the exception of a brief fling with a Renault when my brother and I were young children.  My dad was not one to experiment.  When he found something he liked, he teneded to stay with it and so we went through a series of Ford station wagons.  And when we experienced our first oil shock, he bought a Pinto wagon for my mother.  Always wagons and always with the genuine immitation wood paneling on the side panels.

I don't remember what accounted for the abboration that was the Honda.  I just know that with the arrival of that hatchback, the parade of woodies was broken.

What impressed me about the Honda was that when I drove it every button seemed to be placed where you would intuitively look for it.  Not only did the car handle well and have some gitty-up in its get-along, but it appeared to have been designed by drivers.  They appeared to have thought of everything.

I share that little piece of my motoring past because I appreciate the difference it makes when product developers consider a comprehensive solution to a problem rather than a small subset.  It's the difference between retrofitting an air conditioner into a classic car and designing a car from the ground up to include air conditioning.  In a retrofit, both the car and the add-on system have to be bent to meet the needs of the other.

I have perhaps exhausted the level of my authority to write about cars, but I wanted to make a point about good design.  You can see this on Antiques Roadshow all the time when someone gets caught with a reproduction.  What distinguishes the fakes is the approximation of detail, the vague impressions where the original would have had patiently carved detail.


Watch the full episode. See more Antiques Roadshow.

It doesn't matter what the product is, the difference between good design and great design is in the details.  You know when a product does what you want it to do and when it doesn't.  You know when it fits your process--whatever that might be--and when you have to adapt your process to fit the product.

As mentioned elsewhere, I began my passion for magic by resorting to the shortcuts provided by self-working tricks.  I succumbed to come-ons like those of Marshall Brodien who intoned in his classic TV pitch that "magic was easy once you know the secret."




The cards were so smart that they did all the work for you.

If that were only true.

Over the years, I have purchased many decks of TV Magic Cards--some on purpose and some because I didn't understand that it was the same product sold under a different name.  Almost all of them come with an intricately folded sheet of instructions containing a variety of tricks with which one can "amaze" one's friends.  The decks--properly called Svengali decks--are ideal for television because they are easy to work and they look like real magic.  In real life, however, they cannot be examined by the spectator and so the performer must always be mindful of the enquiring hands.  It is ironic that these decks are sold to young magicians and yet should not be used to entertain young audiences unless by an experienced performer.

Earlier this year, I purchased a DVD by magician Oz Pearlman all about the deck and even though I was familiar with the secret and had these decks all over my house, I was stunned to see him demonstrate how you could successfully riffle shuffle the cards.  It's a simple thing to do--once you know the secret--but it is very convincing in putting over that these are "perfectly ordinary cards."

My big fear as a performer was, and is, getting caught by the audience.  The last thing I want is to be doing my "miracles" with the "perfectly ordinary" cards and have someone pick a card they shouldn't, or see something up my sleeve.  What I saw in the Pearlman DVD that I had not seen before was some of the subtleties that would keep the audience focused on the performer and not their props, on the story and not the procedures.  Whereas  my style as a performer is pretty defensive, I saw that it was possible to "play offense" not by beating your audience, but by keeping them psychologically off-balance.  That little bit of information--even though it came about forty years too late--was worth knowing and worth the price of the DVD and yet another Svengali deck.

From shop.zauberparadies.com.
All of this is mere prologue to a discussion of DeLand's Automatic Cards.

The first thing you notice about these cards is how carefully they were designed.  It seems certain that the intent was to design a utility pack of cards that would suit the needs of the working performer.  Special features are built into the manufacturing of the cards that enable the performer to tell the location of any card at any moment, to locate a selected card blindfolded, to immediately identify a selected card, and much more.  The performer can have the spectator cut the cards into two piles and tell immediately how many cards are in each half.

It's like the Swiss Army knife of trick decks.

I don't know enough about the history of the deck--although there is shortly to be published a new book about DeLand and his many contributions to magic--but I know in my own life I have seen it more typically in toy stores than magic shops.  It's sold to "civilians" and not to magicians and, perhaps for that reason, for many years not much attention was paid to the details.  Like the weathervane, it was intended to convey the impression of magic without having the underlying utility.

I bought my first DeLand deck many years ago and, as soon as I skimmed the directions, recognized that I couldn't use it.  Not because it wasn't useful, but because of the precision of its design, I would be afraid of messing it up.  I didn't even want to shuffle it.

I never performed a trick with it, but I have never forgotten it.  Like the Honda, I was impressed by the thoughtful design.  And like the Svengali deck, I don't think I understood its many subtleties until many, many years later.  (I bet you were thinking I couldn't tie this all together....)

About a year ago, I learned that the rights to the DeLand deck had been purchased from the S.S. Adams company--sellers of black soap, whoopee cushions and many inexpensive magic tricks--by Magic Makers, Inc in South Dakota and that they are now producing a high quality edition of the deck on the same stock used for the ubiquitous Bicycle decks made by the United States Playing Card Company.

I also learned only recently that DeLand ended his days in a mental health facility in Pennsylvania.  It's not relevant for any other reason that I am currently working for a mental health advocacy organization.

Needless to say, I bought a deck.  Still afraid to shuffle it, but still think it's a great idea and a beautiful design.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

21 Card Trick

Like many who come to magic, I have always been drawn to card tricks.  Perhaps I am just a good audience, but they always seem the most magical of effects.  Whereas you might be able to content yourself with a "smoke and mirrors" explanation to the big box illusions, card tricks seem to have no place to hide.  There are few ways to disguise the secret of the trick.

I remember going to see "The Sting" a few times and always being drawn to a short scene where Paul Newman's character, conman Henry Gondorff shows off his skill with a deck of cards.  That was something I wanted to do.

Card tricks were "real" magic and I wanted to be a real magician.

Learning card tricks, I quickly found out, could be very frustrating.  In the days before video tutorials, the only way to learn a trick was out of a book or magazine.  I would go to the bookstores and libraries and search out their magic sections hoping to find a book that would teach me to be as good as Doug Henning or David Copperfield.



I had subscriptions to magician's magazines, I bought a few books, but I could never find a trick that I had any confidence that I could pull off. 

I can remember reading instructions for card tricks in Genii, "The Conjuror's Magazine" and coming to a point where they would say something like, "and then execute a slip cut" and I would be stopped dead.  What is a slip cut?  They didn't explain it, it was assumed to be part of the common knowledge.  It was like being in one of those restaurants where they don't print prices on the menu.  If you have to ask then perhaps you would prefer the McDonald's at the corner.

Another common roadblock was the phrase "by the ususal method."  Again there was not indication what the method was, or where to find it.  It was so frustrating to have the recipe for card magic success and not have access to all of the ingredients.

I remember finding a book called something like "Self-Working Card Tricks" and thinking this was the answer.  It was kind of like finding a cookbook by Julia Child:  I didn't have to master French cuisine, all I had to do was follow the steps and I would be able to look like a French chef.  And after all, wasn't that what magic is all about?  Isn't it the job of the magician to appear to be able to do something he can not?

It was only later that I learned that in the culture of magic, manipulators are held in higher regard than those who rely on apparatus and other shortcuts.

One of the first of these self-working tricks I learned was called "You Do As I Do."  In the trick, the performer and the spectator each have a deck of cards and they each select a card from their deck and when the selections are revealed, they match.  It was simple and direct and it looked like real magic.

I remember seeing a mostly forgettable movie called "Magic" with Anthony Hopkins.  In the movie, Hopkins uses this same card trick to impress Ann-Margaret.  Using magic to impress girls?  Only something that would ever happen in the movies. 

Self-working card tricks depend not on secret moves so much as they do on procedures.  They are essentially mathematics dressed up with a magic wand.

Another classic of the genre is the "21 Card Trick" and this clearly demonstrates some of the principles that underlie this genre of trick and perhaps why it is so far removed from the ideal that I had for myself.

The performer counts out three columns of 7 cards each and has the spectator mentally select a card from any of those on the table.  After identifying which of the columns the card is in, the magician gathers the cards and deals them out two more times.  Following the third time through, the magician reveals the spectator's card. 

There is literally nothing to this trick.  It can be done by a blind person and after watching the performer deal out three columns of cards treee times, there is nothing left for the audience to be engaged by.  I doubt if even Sesame Street's The Count could make all that counting interesting.

Of course, at the time I learned the trick, I thought I was doing a fabulous job of fooling my audiences.  I didn't recognize until years later just why it was that I had to chase them down and force them to sit still while I did one of these "miracles."

Over the years, I have collected books and videos that have filled in the gaps in my knowledge base.  I know now what a slip cut is and I have a pretty good idea of where to look for the "usual method," but I still can't do a card trick that I would describe as real magic.  It doesn't come up that much now, but when I am asked to do a trick, I find myself picking up a deck and starting to count.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Is It So Wrong?

I used to do tricks.

No, not like that.

I used to pester my parents, and anyone else I could force to sit still long enough, to watch me murder an idea that some very talented people had worked on and brought to market.

I pretended to do card tricks and tricks with coins. I had canes that disappeared and one that came back. I had a floating ball and a storybook about a magician who could make a rabbit appear from his hat depending on how I held it.

But I wasn't a magician. I was the person that magicians love to hate. They love people like me because we buy their tricks, but they also hate us because we can never do their stuff justice. We rush through the instructions in order to figure out how the trick works and then we try and "perform" our latest miracle to a less than enthusiastic audience.

Like so many of my peers who discovered magic when "normal" boys were discovering girls, I would go to the magic shop and fall in love with whatever the demonstrator showed me and think that when I showed it to my family that I was every bit as good.

So deluded was I in my pretense of being a magician that I did birthday party shows for children in my neighborhood for the princely sum of $5.00.

Today, at the other end of the telescope, I think I owe those parents their money back, with interest.

I had no business getting in front of an audience. Any audience.

The father of modern magic, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin said that "a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician." When I first read that, I took it as equivalent to the kind of koan uttered by Master Po on the Kung Fu TV series. A magician is an actor? The two were nothing alike. I knew from being in plays in elementary school that actors have to learn lines and pretend to be someone they're not. Magicians know things that others don't. They know secrets and that makes them eminently cool. It also didn't hurt that while I was deepest into magic during these years that there was a TV show about a magician who travelled the country in a private plane and a white Corvette helping the helpless and righting wrongs with his powers.



Magic could be cool; much cooler than being in drama club.

In one of my many courses in a master class of life's ironies, it would turn out that I would spent almost 20 years working in and around the theatre. 

I did what I could to integrate my interest in magic with my surroundings by gravitating to the world of stagecraft.  Instead of being the jet-setting, wrong-righting Anthony Blake, I became the person who stood in the shadows and handed Mr. Blake his equipment. 

I consoled myself by saying that I was in the business of creating the illusion of the world of the play.  (That I can write a sentence like that will let you know just how much of a theatre geek I was.)

"A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician."

Why would you get an actor to play the part of a magician when you could just get a magician?

Like most beginners, I got into magic with equipment that did the tricks for you.  Instead of investing the time in learning the difficult manipulations that, in combination, can create the most devastating of effects, I invested my money in tricks that did themselves.  I bought hook, line and sinker into Marshall Brodien's mantra that "magic is easy once you know the secret."

I can remember being so pleased to have my first deck of his TV Magic Cards.  They promised to impress with the greatest of ease.  When I got them, I was impressed with the secret, but also afraid that the secret was so obvious that I would get caught if I tried to perform with them.  All it would have taken is for one of my patient family member to reach over and snatch the deck from me and I would be discovered to be a fake.

As this fear was imbedding itself in my consciousness, I was also reading about the history of magic.  I recall reading about the fakirs of India and their reputation for supernatural powers.  While we can quickly see from an Internet search that the name of fakir covers a variety of ascetics in South Asia and the Middle East, at the time, my young mind connected my fear of being caught as a "fake" with the formal term "fakir", or as I read it at the time "FAKER."  I want to amaze in the same way that the demonstrater in the magic shop had amazed me, not be a faker.

This drove a kind of magic arms race where I kept looking for effects that would be bulletproof.  They would work everytime and be invulnerable to my "handsy" relatives.

A reasonable person might conclude that, given some time and experience, I would be able to overcome my fears and acquire the technical skill needed to keep my critics at bay.  Perhaps, if I had been more disciplined/driven in my study, I would have done just that, but I rushed into doing birthday parties and to performing magic at family gatherings.

Comedians have a term to describe a challenging audience, one where they were not able to meet the crowd where they were and when the jokes aren't working.  They call those shows "tough rooms."  Working for my two primary audiences was a relentless onslaught of such rooms.  Both crowds, my extended family and parties with 6 year-olds, had a stake in demonstrating that they knew as much as, or more than, I did.  Through my combination of fear and lack of experience, I virtually surrendered control of my show before the first trick.  Audiences for magic and audiences for other blood sports are looking for the slightest sign of weakness and, once spotted, will be relentless in exploiting it.

Unlike the birthday party audience, my relatives saw the magic trick as not an end in themselves--they were not waiting for me to produce candy at the end of the show--they saw my performance as an opportunity to engage in their favorite after dinner game which was to see who could make the funniest critical remark.  That they seemed to really enjoy that aspect of my show made me very conflicted about performing for them.  On the one hand they could be brutal in their criticism, but on the other they really did seem to be having a good time, so I was entertaining, if inartful with my magic.  A reasonable person would escape that experience once and never go back, I, on the other hand, suffering from a kind of magical Stockholm Syndrome, went back time and time again. 

I did find the strength to stop dong kids' parties.  I was forced to admit that my interests in magic were not those needed to be a successful kids performer.  Like many would-be magicians, I was fascinated by card tricks and, you know, kids really aren't.  I was intrigued by the technology of magic and kids want a good story.  Without the story, it's just another adult trying to fool them with what are, in essence, some pretty cheesy props.

And it was at this precise point, that I began to understand what Robert-Houdin meant.