Ye Olde Magick Blogge

Every day, people come by the olde blogge through various google searches. Some of them are interesting…

magic pebble lance pierce: Lance Pierce runs a forum called the Magic Pebble. Lance himself is a great guy (if you don’t know about him) and some of the names on there are impressive. While it’s got nowhere near the traffic that the Magic Cafe does, the signal to noise ratio is significantly better. Why they let me be a member, I have no idea, but I thank my lucky stars that I was grandfathered in before the policy became that you needed to be sponsored to become a member.

use of the wand in cups and balls: If you click on that link at the top of the blog that says “Cups and Balls month”, you’ll find everything you need to know about. Look into the Michael Ammar entry for the DVD review that talks about this, the Dai Vernon entry for some basic theory, and the week 4 roundup for Lance Pierce’s thoughts.

allan ackerman expert at the card table dvd set reviews: There actually isn’t all that much information out there, much to the lament of the Smiling Mule over at the Phantom Notebooks blog. My perception is that, in the greater magic community, the reception has been lukewarm-positive for it, as opposed to the lukewarm-negative for the Wesley James set, whereas amongst the largely silent card experts, the Ackerman set is passable, but the Wesley James set has been vilified. It’s a real shame because, for the most part, a lot of people like to spout off on the importance of learning Erdnase, and yet there’s not a whole lot more than just talk on the subject, with the good work apparently being difficult to get at. I suppose that sort of thing helps build the Erdnase mystique up, but I’m not a fan of that sort of thing. It’d be nice to see a set that really went above and beyond on the subject of Erdnase — frankly, we should ditch the idea that one single source out there is capable of doing all the work in the book, and instead focus on a collaboration amongst different card guys on the key stuff in the book that people want to know about. If that happens in my lifetime, I’ll be surprised, and as time passes, and the link between modern card magic and Vernon grows weaker, I wonder if we’ll have lost something to history.

balls for cups and balls: Here’s something for you… I’ve been playing around lately with rubber balls that you can get from Dollar Stores out there. They’re cheaper than a set of the crocheted ones, they look innocuous, and the best part is, you can classic palm them pretty easily. If you buy a set and they feel somewhat greasy, just wash them in soap and water, wipe them off, and they’re good to go. I’m personally never going back.

best cups and balls teaching: My vote’s for Ammar’s DVDs.

blast off song penn and teller whats the song?: Not really sure, but I think it was a song written for their actual routine, which you can see on the various Youtube clips out there.

card sleights tutorials: Don’t go googling for this stuff, seriously. You’ll get so many half-assed videos on Youtube about them that you’ll spend forever trying to figure out how to incorporate them deceptively into a routine. Pick the sleights you want to learn and research the resources devoted to them.

cups and balls in art and history: Go directly to Bill Palmer’s Cups and Balls museum. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

cups and balls no wand: Yeah, not freaking easy to find good routines of this sort. The ones that come to mind are Tommy Wonder’s routine, and the various chop cup routines out there. I’ve been trying to come up with an ungimmicked one cup routine that doesn’t use a wand, and I can tell you now that I know that no matter how good I can polish it, it’ll still have deficiencies that are solved either with a gimmicked cup or a simple wand. Since wands are easy to come by, it makes it a no-brainer. However, not everybody can motivate the use of a wand easily, which brings us to…

cups and balls presentation ideas: Every now and then, you’ll get a thread on a magic forum or hear some magician complaining about the prevalence of generic patter for the cups and balls, and this is often accompanied by praise for some slightly obscure presentational approach some other magician takes. This is a contempt-breeds-familiarity problem — our audiences are likely to only ever see one or two magicians perform in their lifetime, and as such a lot of this search for presentations that deviate from the norm needs to be balanced by a healthy regard for considerations for our audience. I dislike “I’m about to present a classic in magic” presentation premises as much as the next person, but the routine, if executed properly and clearly, really is strong enough to survive generic patter. Aim for honesty more than novelty. If you can’t be honest without deviating from the norm, then good for you for recognizing it, and best of luck in your search. But if you’re just aiming for something unique to make yourself stand out, then I wish you luck as well, because mindless novelty can be just as mindless as mindless conformity.

cups and balls steals: Not easy to do. Frankly, I consider steals to be one of those intuitive solutions for audience members. Even David Williamson, when talking about his strike vanish, says that he almost prefers to go with a false transfer-based vanish since it allows for a much more clean effect. Make sure that you’ve tried the various false load sequences out there first, before you look into the different steal-based methods. For what it’s worth, Ammar has a nice one on the DVDs.

dave j castle exposer: Yeah, he’s a twit. Don’t let guys like him get in your head, though. Here’s a 10-step plan to dealing with those guys.

how old is juan tamariz: 68, although I suspect he lives through time backwards, and will eventually be born in 2078.

how to do the penn & teller cups and balls: I think, if you watch the routine, you might get some clues about this. Might.

how to perform professors nightmare rope count: While there are plenty of resources on this, Daryl teaches it in his Expert Rope Magic DVD set, and Richard Sanders teaches it on his Fiber Optics DVD. Both of them do it quite well.

jason latimer sucks at magic: Ouch!

juan tamariz the magic way 2nd hand: Best of luck in this search. For what it’s worth, I think it’s less important to own this than it is to just read it and study it. Assuming you can find somebody who’ll trust you not to sell it on e-bay for a profit, borrow it from them. Somebody at your local magic club might know someone who can hook you up.

magic cafe chef anton dvd reviews: The School for Scoundrels guys apparently just put out a DVD of his magic. I’m thinking it’ll be a future purchase, and if I get it, I’ll review it. I like his ideas.

magic cafe sucks: Heh.

memorized deck .exposed on the internet.: Don’t worry about it, seriously. Learn a deck switch and they’ll never see it coming.

men ball exposure hard video: Why do I have a feeling that the other 9 results on the google page were vastly different than what you’ll find on here?

password for cups and balls museum: Just email Bill and he’ll hook you up.

payne six card repeat: A wonderful lecture in this series. Now, it might be funny that I’d recommend it after having already dumped on the idea of novelty for its own sake, considering that his lecture is an appeal to originality, but take a closer look at what he’s saying, and you’ll see that he’s not just talking about novelty, but in being true to your performing character, and coming up with stuff that works for that character.

punctuation in magic vernon: Yeah, believe me, I’m on the lookout for more information on this as well.

richard osterlind stack: This is the BCS, the Breakthrough Card System. There’s currently a bit of a hoo-hah going on with regards to this stack, as compared to the recent work from Mick Ayres and Doug Dyment. If you like brawls, go google searching for it.

ricky jay cups and balls analysis: There’s not too much to analyze here. It’s basically a lot of standard sequences, with strongly Jay-esque patter, and some extra bits of business thrown in to have balls appear under various objects on the table. It draws on a lot of the same stuff that’s in Vernon’s work. Start there.

roman cups and balls magic: If you’re talking about historical references, google “cups and balls seneca” instead (without the quotation marks).

secnd hand cups and balls: Try this… go with found cups. If you go to the Dollar Store you’ll find really cheap metal cups ($1 each), and they handle well and take decent-sized final loads. They might not stack well, but stacking sequences suck anyway.

seymour street conjuring society: That’s a group of us who hang out Wednesday nights at the Railway Club in downtown Vancouver. We’re trying to figure out a name that’ll better encompass what we’re all about. Since we’ve got a busker, two comedy magicians, a card guy, two mentalists, a bizarrist/manipulator hybrid and whatever the hell you want to classify me as, I think we’ll be able to come up with a suitable name that encapsulates us all round about the same time the news breaks a story on airborne pork.

tabary rope routine street busking: Could be doable. The angles on the routine aren’t terrible except for one instance (if memory serves) where you don’t want people standing behind the magician. For what it’s worth, though, rope magic of that type is so damn modular you can easily substitute phases.

tantalizer card trick: Look into R Paul Wilson’s work on the trick, beyond what’s in Royal Road. Worth checking out.

tommy wonder nest of boxes revealed: Trust me on this… not simple. I’d bet good money that if you learned how it was done, you wouldn’t want to do it yourself.

tylererickson.net considering: If this means you’re considering getting him as a teacher, then trust me, it’s worth it.

what magician is patton oswalt talking about?: I’d love to know this as well.

where is the cups and balls museum?: Houston, Texas.

whit haydn’s teleportation device: A significant routine, and a worthwhile study. If you’re familiar at all with Juan Tamariz’s theory and the previously-mentioned “The Magic Way”, then you’ll appreciate how some of that kind of thinking is in Whit’s routine here.

www.erlandish.blog.com: The old Ye Olde Magick Blogge is at erlandish.blogspot.com.

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