October 31, 2005 By Leave a Comment

A Recommended DVD

Over the years we all hear of moves which are performed so well by certain magicians that their name becomes synonymous with the sleight or routine:

  • Albert Goshman – Spellbound
  • Don Alan – Chop Cup
  • Ken Krenzel – Classic Pass
  • Chris Capehart – 3 Ring Routine
  • Slydini – Lapping
  • Steve Brooks – His Jabba the Hut imitation

You get the idea. Paul Cummins is a name that always comes up when the Side Steal is mentioned. His work with it is legendary.

Paul does Marlo’s Deliberate Side Steal better than anyone. It’s been honed by years of performance and practice. It’s practical and attainable. Last week Paul began shipping his new DVD – The Side Steal Declassified. I can think of no better way to learn this sleight than buying this DVD. I really felt like Paul gave us everything he has on the methodology. He performs about 6 tricks and explains the move and it’s variations very succinctly. Production values were better than most.

I don’t know if Paul will be distributing the DVD through normal channels or just his website at http://www.fasdiu.com.

I’m generally not a member of the camp that says if you get one good trick or idea from a book or DVD you got more than your moneys worth. Not me – I feel screwed. Be warned, there is not a lot of information on this platter, but if you want the real work on one of the most important moves in card magic look no further.

Take care………

Drivel & Drool

Things that really bug me:

Companies that spend a jillion dollars on a web site, yet the programmers aren’t smart enough to strip spaces, periods, dashes etc. from phone and credit card numbers

George F. Bush – 1 & 2

Police departments that have so much time on their hands they do “safety” checks. Can I hear a big Bull Shit!

The Patriot Act – like its going to catch anything.

Names for employees, like “associates” and “partners” OR my new favorite From Sam’s Club – “coach”. What really bugs me most is the places that use these feel-good terms like Wal-Mart would sell their employees body parts to slave traders if it would add .01 to the quarterly income.

“Disrespected” athletes making 8 figure salaries.

Big Oil – I guess everyone saw that Exxon just made more money last quarter than ANY US company in history! I recently wrote about their blatant thievery and some douche bag commented that it was a supply issue – China- India and other palaver spewed out by the American Petroleum Institute. I said then – just wait for the quarterly report. If anyone thinks we got rid of all the fucking bandits and crooks when Enron and Worldcomm crashed you’re fooling yourself. American business is corruption on corruption. We can no longer entrust our well being to “free enterprise”. It doesn’t exist.

Wall Street – speaking of crooks. The Exxon quarter “disappointed” the MBAs, CPAs and CFUs and the stock went down. What a joke our financial system has become.

Alan Greenspan – he’s screwed up more times than George F. Bush II and no one seems to know.

Escalades – the ultimate prickmobile.

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Filed Under: Magic Reviews
October 30, 2005 By Leave a Comment

I thought this was funny

Nothing to do with magic. Just a joke I liked:

A husband takes his wife to play her first game of golf. Of
course, the wife promptly hacked her first shot right through the
window of the biggest house adjacent to the course.

The husband cringed, “I warned you to be careful! Now we’ll have
to go up there, find the owner, apologize and see how much your lousy
drive is going to cost us.”

So the couple walked up to the house and knocked on the door.

A warm voice said, “Come on in.” When they opened the door they
saw the damage that was done: glass was all over the place, and a
broken antique bottle was lying on its side near the broken window.

A man reclining on the couch asked, “Are you the people that
broke my window?”

“Uh…yeah, sir. We’re sure sorry about that,” the husband replied.

“Oh, no apology is necessary. Actually I want to thank you. You
see, I’m a genie, and I’ve been trapped in that bottle for a thousand
years. Now that you’ve released me, I’m allowed to grant three wishes.

I’ll give you each one wish, but if you don’t mind, I’ll keep
the last one for myself.”

“Wow, that’s great!” the husband said.

He pondered a moment and blurted out,” I’d like a million
dollars a year for the rest of my life.”

“No problem,” said the genie. “You’ve got it, it’s the least I
can do. And I’ll guarantee you a long, healthy life!”

“And now you, young lady, what do you want?” the genie asked.”

I’d like to own a gorgeous home complete with servants in every
country in the world,” she said.

“Consider it done,” the genie said. “And your homes will always
be safe from fire, burglary and natural disasters!”

“And now,” the couple asked in unison, what’s your wish, genie?”

“Well, since I’ve been trapped in that bottle and haven’t been with a
woman in more than a thousand years, my wish is to have sex with your
wife.”

The husband looked at his wife and said, “Gee, honey, you know
we both now have a fortune, and all those houses. What do you think?”

She mulled it over for a few moments and said, “You know, you’re
right. Considering our good fortune, I guess I wouldn’t mind, but
what about you, honey?”

“You know I love you sweetheart,” said the husband. “I’d do the
same for you!”

So the genie and the woman went upstairs where they spent the
rest of the afternoon enjoying each other. The genie was insatiable.

After about three hours of non-stop sex, the genie rolled over
and looked directly into her eyes and asked “How old are you and your
husband?”

“Why, we’re both 35,” she responded breathlessly.

“No Kidding? Thirty-five years old and both of you still believe
in genies?”

Take care………

Filed Under: Magic Commentary
October 26, 2005 By 1 Comment

It Is A Magic Show After All!

Recently, I’ve been inundated by actors turned magicians and their clone lectures. Basically, they all have the same premise:

you can take the lamest piece of shit imaginable and through good staging and a well developed character you can have a great performance piece.

Well, if you do this you know what you’ve got? A lame magic performance. It might be entertaining, but it isn’t magic.

If all I want is entertainment, I’ll go to a good strip club, grab a gin and tonic and watch naked women with big gozangas strut around. Now that’s entertainment.

(Actually many years ago – in days when I did periodically go to a strip joint, I watched a stripper, Miss Nude Canada I believe, disrobe and do a magic act – buck nekkid. It was nearly surreal and, at first, you didn’t know where to look, but that was resolved quickly. Put it this way – I have no idea what the tricks were…..)

If you’re doing a magic show – do good magic. There’s plenty of excellent tricks. Tricks that actually fool the audience when performed well. Now, when you add staging and character attributes you really have something.

Don’t ever let anyone sell you on the – there’s no bad tricks, just bad magicians bull shit. There are tons of bad tricks and your audience, the laymen, are actually capable of real human thought. If you’re depending on this just blows right past laymen, get a new trick. It probably won’t.

Do yourself a favor and download these clips of Whit Haydn performing four terrific routines.

Notice particularly, the clarity of the effect. I’m sure no one watching was confused at any point. The magic is technically well done, the character well developed and the staging is flawless.

I still think Whit’s a tool, but he’s a hell of a performer.

Take care………

Drivel & Drool

Goodbye Glenn!?
Glenn Bishop recently announced he would quit his blog(s) to focus on other things. I suspicion we’ll see him back, as these damn things get in your blood.

As I have said before, I think he’s one of the good guys – somewhat mercurial, but so am I. It was, apparently, important to Glenn to make peace with a couple of the Castle regulars that he had issues with. That appears to have gone well and I’m glad for him.

Keep in touch Glenn!

Worth A Read
I’m glad to see MagiCentric back on his game. I felt the Haydn/Bush thing really blew his doors off and I really doubted his ability to come back. Recent posts have put that fear to rest. I particularly liked this Post on originality. He’s one of the few to get it.

I’m so tired of originality for the sake of originality I could scream. You know what I mean:

….and the third coin magically flies from the left hand to the right…..and the deck is now blue! Huh?

There’s no need for me to repeat what he already said so well. It’s worth a read.

Learning the Vernon Wand Spin
I had a heck of a time learning the Vernon Wand Spin from the written directions (the spin only, not the ball vanish), until I ran across an excellent clip on Dave VanVranken’s site. Check it out here. It really helps in the learning process.

Thanks Dave

Filed Under: Magic Commentary
October 21, 2005 By 3 Comments

What the hell is a "parlor"

Parlour (or parlor), from the Fr. parler (“to speak”), denotes an “audience chamber,” but that is not the import of the Hebrew word so rendered. It corresponds to what the Turks call a kiosk, as in Judg. 3:20 (the “summer parlour”), or as in the margin of the Revised Version (“the upper chamber of cooling”), a small room built on the roof of the house, with open windows to catch the breeze, and having a door communicating with the outside by which persons seeking an audience may be admitted.

I’m not sure a lot of us actually perform Parlor Magic, but the venues we work tend to be small areas like a living room with little control over the placement of the audience. I’ve been thinking about the tricks that can be performed in an environment like this. One we could call hostile – at least to a magician

  • McCombical Deck
  • Ken Brooke’s Sidewalk Shuffle
  • Egg Bag – Sterling or Malini
  • Chris Capehart’s 3 Ring Routine
  • David Williamson’s Ring and Rope
  • Some Mentalism Routines
  • Billy Bishop’s Wrist Tie or Jaspernese Thumb Tie

We’re looking for tricks that take up very little room – are foolers – and can be performed in a chaotic environment. We can also assume no safe table is available

As I’ve been going through this exercise, I’m finding very few tricks that conform to the way we must work today. Surprisingly, most of the stuff is rather old. We’ll be going over each of these and adding others as we go along

Feedback and ideas are welcome

Take care………

Drivel & Drool

I’m Afraid It’s Getting Worse

(This is happening in what used to be a free country – the United States of America. Bush is having our children killed to save this and there’s NOTHING we can do! By the time we “exercise our rights as free people” and vote their sorry asses out of office it may well be way too late. Way too late.)

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she ays. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

“At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”

She says the student was upset. “He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business,” says Jarvis. She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.
“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”

Then they got down to his poster.

“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”

At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.
The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further.

“I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody,” she says. “I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service.”
When contacted, an employee in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, “You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that.”

Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period.

Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, “We just handed it over” to the Secret Service. “No investigative report was filed.” Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, “We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee.”

Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: “ridiculous.”

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Filed Under: Magic Commentary
October 14, 2005 By Leave a Comment

New Videos Possibly Worth Consideration

I see L & L is announcing 2 new video sets:

Richard Osterlind’s Mind Mysteries Too

Mind Mysteries Too continues on from the high-water mark set by the first Mind Mysteries series, one of the best-selling video sets in magic history. Transcending the boundaries of traditional mentalism and magic, Mind Mysteries Too completes the circle of Richard Osterlind’s life work to date. You’ll see Richard captivating and astounding a studio audience with his original material and then you’ll go behind the scenes once again, along with host Jim Sisti, as he explains every nuance of the inner workings of each effect. What’s more, each set of performances is arranged as a mini-show, demonstrating Richard Osterlind’s classical approach to routining, an invaluable lesson in itself!

If you enjoyed Mind Mysteries, as thousands did, you’ll love these Mind Mysteries Too!

L & L publishing proudly presents new DVDs Featuring Garrett Thomas

Over the last few years, Garrett Thomas has quickly become recognized as a major creative force in magic, so much so that luminaries like David Blaine, Marco Tempest, and many others have retained his services as a consultant for their television specials.

In this series, Garrett Thomas tips his mitt and offers the complete details on magic that he uses to make a living — amazing effects that have had magicians merely speculating about their methods.

Welcome . . . to the strange and wonderful world of Garrett Thomas!

I’m a real fan of Osterlind’s stuff, especially his magic items, such as Torn & Restored Post-It note and Signed Torn & Restored Newspaper. He also introduces mentalism within the reach of the magic performer. My only concern is whether we scraped the bottom for another set. We’ll see.

The usual warning about L & L should be observed. Announcing the product doesn’t necessarily means it is shipping. Call first.

Take care………

Filed Under: Magic Reviews
October 14, 2005 By 1 Comment

A General Mailaise

It’s pretty easy to project ones own feelings on the rest of the world. Is it just me, or is the country in a deep, deep funk? Between that stupid war that G2 gave us, the hurricanes and the reaming we’re getting from the oil companies, there doesn’t seem much to get up for. It would seem to be a time to turn to something like magic for a diversion and pressure relief, however just the opposite seems to be happening.

The message boards, the blogs and club attendance has really slowed. I can’t understand it.

Personally, I can say that writing a blog gets difficult in times like this. Readers owe an author absolutely nothing, as a blog is basically an exercise in personal vanity. Having said that, I’m sure most of us sit and write and wonder if we’re just pissing in the wind. Some interaction can help.

If you are reading a blog, let the author know. Most, but not all, will certainly appreciate the effort. I know a lot of work goes into a good post and most of us need a little pat on the ass once in a while.

Take care………

Drivel & Drool

The Haydn Saga Continues

Check out this Link on the Genii forum. Supposedly, this is from Doug Bush – the original author of the disputed manuscript included on the SfS DVD on the 3 shell game. I have no way of knowing whether this is actually from Mr. Bush, but it makes for interesting reading.

The only thing that came to mind is Mr. Bush was said to attend the same church as somebody in magic (Joe Turner, I believe). If this is, in fact, the real Doug Bush, he must study from the same book as my favorite holy man, Stephen F. Youell.

Actually, if everything is as written in that message, I guess I would be gloating too…….

Filed Under: Magic Commentary
October 2, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Where Do We Do What We Want To Do

I’m sure most of us really love magic. Sometimes, actually frequently, we get diverted from the performance and study of a fascinating hobby / avocation / vocation and get bogged down in crap like I cover on this blog. Few people think they want to see magic. This is unfortunate, as most people genuinely enjoy good magic – they just don’t know it. When Carson ruled the night millions of people saw great close-up magic performed by performers like Goshman, Gertner and Dill. Today we just don’t get that kind of exposure. It’s more important than ever that we all perform only the best tricks and perform them to the utmost of our ability, which includes major practice sessions. In the coming days we’ll be discussing the best tricks to have with you all the time so you can impress your audience and begin the long process of elevating out down trodden art.

Take care………

Drivel & Drool

Balancing Act

Boy, talk about Rosemary’s Baby. The last two pictures I’ve placed on this blog have been Hillary Clinton and Steven F. Brooks. I don’t even want to think about it. That’ll fuck up the blog Feng Shui big time. Here’s a little eye candy to balance things out:

That should put the Drool back in Drivel & Drool. Now I feel better and balance is restored in the cosmos.

Filed Under: Magic Commentary
October 1, 2005 By 3 Comments

I Love A Good Magic Fight!

If you’ve got a few minutes read this thread:

http://geniimagazine.com/forum/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=10;t=001794;p=1

I haven’t dug too deeply into it, but basically it’s all about Rings and Things 2. They have their defenders and their detractors. Maybe somebody is right. I don’t know.

Anyway, the thread gets going pretty good and Marcella Zimmerman, the main guru at RNT2 logs in and begins to kick ass and take names.

I tell you, she pulls out the virtual shillelagh and starts swinging. What I enjoyed most is she drove head on into some of the Cafe’ insiders that are used to hiding behind Brooks’ enormous bulk and she spews testicles all over the Genii forum. I appreciate Kaufman letting this type of thing run. It’s only fair*.

It’s down to a slow smolder now and may not see more posts, but it was fun while it lasted.

Take care………

* For the Cafe’ Gestapo:

fair (fâr) characterized by honesty and justice : free from self-interest, deception, injustice, or favoritism

Filed Under: Magic Commentary