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No matter where you are, the Parade is always coming right at you. Dust. Water. They’re everywhere. Get used to it. If everyone around you is shouting, react silently. This will cause people to pay attention to you. It’s not raining on you, it’s raining on everybody. You can attract more attention to yourself with [...]
A professional is a guy who can do it twice! – Dizzy Gillespie, in an interview with Paul Halmill I ran into this quote in a slim tome entitled Why Sinatra Matters (which is also a good read if you’re one of those young guys who doesn’t understand where there was so much hubbub about [...]
Environmental performances – like Renaissance Faires – are fertile ground for planting “Mythology”. All groups have their own little myths and legends*… so why not create your own? Faire Mythology is successful because of Rule One: Inexplicable Behavior at Faire… Works. If you do something that has no logical explanation… people will in fact stop [...]
When I was taking a seminar with Jeff McBride, Jeff busted out a very simple, very elegant and effective bit of magic using a rubber band (I’ll see if I can find it and if I can’t, and I can get permission from Jeff, I’ll record it and post it). He was using it to [...]
It’s not unusual for a magician to have a type or style of magic that he loves, but doesn’t perform. Me, I really do enjoy manipulation magic (cards, balls, silk scarves, anything really) but don’t do that stuff in my act. I enjoy really well done card magic… although I don’t do much of that [...]
True to my prediction, I woke up at 4:00 am Sunday Morning. It helped that I went to bed at nine. Up, shower, groom, dress, check out – and I’m there in front of the event center at 4;30, the THIRD person in line. Fastwind through THREE hours or so of hanging out, talking, schmoozing. [...]
Continue reading about America’s Got Adequacy – The AGT Experience
My wife and I spend a certain amount of time in craft stores, which means I spend a certain amount of time wandering randomly around the aisles*. As I spend more and more time studying Magic, my way of looking at the various bits and bobs one finds at a craft store has changed. These [...]
Magic is one of those rare fields which does not require any qualitative demonstration of skill before the practitioner declares his membership in that group. Sort of like “poet” and “Internet Marketing Guru”. However, “Magician” is also one of those fields where declaring yourself to be one inevitably results in a request, if not a [...]
Continue reading about The Necessity of Close Up for the Stage Magician
We perform because, well, because we want to perform – otherwise we’d be doing something that didn’t involve having a lot of people watching. The question comes up, however… Who are you performing for? I’ve managed to narrow the list down to three: The (paying?) Audience Your Peers Yourself And looking at it, that’s also [...]
I think this may be as good as it’s going to get this time around… BEHOLD! Whew. FOUR YEARS in the making – four years and a lot of little video tape cassettes, a lot of downloading, a lot of editing (a lot of editing) and a whole heck of a lot of captioning. Some [...]
