A couple of nights ago I made it out to Magic Uncorked in Portland, OR. It’s a magic show in a wine shop that happens semi regularly. The show features three performers and is a lot of fun!
I’m new to this area, however it seems that magicians are really out there supporting magic, there were about six of us that weren’t performing!
Its a great venue and the performers were John Stevens, Moto, Craig Martin and hosted by Dave, who is a magician and co-owns the wine shop Ora et Labora.
The show started at 6pm with drinks and roving close up magic, then the parlor style show started at 7:30pm and went till just past 9pm. For $35 a ticket that included a drink, it was a great deal!
If you have shows in your area, go out and support them!
At a recent gig they requested I do a trick with a donor’s check. I decided to do a Bank Nite type of trick where the check was put into an envelope and mixed with other envelopes. One envelope was selected and the rest were shredded and the selected envelope had the check.
Pretty standard in effect, but I didn’t want to deal with an electric shredder, so I used a manual shredder.
The shredder above says is has a capacity of 2 sheets, however it worked just fine with and envelope with a check sized piece of paper in it. It played fine, and the manual shredder is a great prop to have around. I think this premise is an easy way to customize a trick for an event.
Awhile ago I put a new surface on the top of my stage table, but where it really needed it was on the bottom!
It was getting really beat up and when onstage the audience looks up at this part and many can see the bottom of it. I took it out to the workshop and put a couple of coats of flat black paint and some clear coat on it and it looks way better!
I’m not sure why I waited soo long to do this, but I’m glad I did!
One thing I’m lucky to have is a group of creative magicians that I hang out with! When one of us is working on something and gets stuck, usually one of us can solve the problem!
I’m working on a trick with money that needed an ending. It’s a counting trick, similar to a touch the screen style math trick. The challenge was I got to the forced dollar, but didn’t know how to reveal it. It needed more than, “you picked the twenty dollar bill“.
We played with it for a little bit and finally someone just yelled out the solution. Like it was a kettle slowly boiling, but when it finally boiled it was the perfect ending to the trick!
If you’re not creating with a group, you really should!
In the March and April I’m heading out of the country for a couple of gigs. That means that I won’t be able to work on or ship any products ordered during that time. The dates I’m away are:
March 3 – March 13 March 27 – April 10
If there’s anything you NEED, please plan ahead and order in advance.
Also while I’m away, you can get many of magic products at Hocus-Pocus.com!
The new hot trick right now is the Atomic Deck, which is an ACAAN, here’s the trailer, then I’ll give you my thoughts on it:
When I watched the trailer and the first thing that jumped out at me was this:
That’s a very specific statement, not “NO ROUGH AND SMOOTH”, so that instantly tells me that it’s roughed, just not by traditional methods. I don’t know how I feel about that in its marketing as it’s technically correct, but very misleading.
That aside, the trailer above leaves out something very important, this trick requires a phone or computer. Of course this part of the trick is completely left out of the trailer. It is mentioned in the ad copy, so it’s only sorta deceptive in its omission from the video.
With the current issues that Inject 2 is having, relying on app or website isn’t a good long term solution. The site is only good as long as the deck is selling and they’re paying for the hosting. You’re relying on something outside of your control for the trick to work.
OK, not to the effect, it’s not a true ACAAN in my opinion. You have multiple cards named and multiple numbers and then you essentially pick the combination that will work the best. So instead of Any Card at Any Number, it’s more of a “Selected Card from a Selected Group of Cards at a Number from a Selected Group of Numbers“. That’s a huge thing that to me distances this from the Berglas Effect.
It should look like this: Spectator names a card and a number. The cards are dealt and the card is at that number!
Here’s a video of me doing ACAAN at a gig that I was just supposed to be playing the organ at, however someone requested I do a magic trick.
In playing with the fake “Movie Money” another trick I wanted to do was something like a card across where a selected bill travels from one packet to another.
I like how this trick turned out, it’s got a less packet trick feel to it that many of these other tricks do. I think it feels very similar to Phil Goldstein’s Shinkansen, but has a different method.
If you do a remotely fun show for kids, you’ve have a kid pee during your show because they’re having too much fun and don’t want to get up, or you make them laugh too hard. The other night I had a kid helping me and she was laughing super hard, she stopped and said, “I just peed”!
This is always a hard thing to navigate, you need to deal with it, but in a way that causes the least amount of attention. In this instance the kid didn’t seem in distress and was remarkably calm, so I said, “we’ll pause this trick and you can take care of it”. She left and got a change of clothes and while she was gone I did another routine. Once she was back, we picked up the routine where we left off.
Oh, I had a paper towel in my case, so I put it on the spot. Not so much to clean it up, but to mark it for me so I knew where it was.
Every time this happens you need to instantly read the situation to know what the appropriate way to handle it is.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned I had an upcoming gig where I was booked as a roving mentalist. The gig went well, the thing I struggled with was how to introduce myself, as they specifically wanted “Mentalists” as their roving acts. I figured it out pretty quickly, but it took a few tries to come up with an opening line that made sense.
Here’s what the audience saw for props.
Obviously they didn’t see them laid out like this, they were in my pockets.
Here’s what the full set of props looked like:
The new thing that I added for this gig was ProMystic’s Flux. I really like it, however in trying to come up with an “out” for it when it fails, there’s not a lot to do to get yourself out of it. The easy solution is to simply have two of them, if one fails, I simply get the other one.
I have some ideas for how I’d like to use this onstage…
It’s interesting, but not the greatest trick ever. There’s too much process, it needs to be more direct for it to be good. I like the idea of the upside down bill moving up the stack. It reminds me of a trick that Alan Ackerman (I think) showed me when I was a teenager in the 1990’s with a stack of coins. It was 3 half dollars and an English penny. The English penny started on the bottom of the stack and moved up to the top one position at a time.
This trick with the upside down ten dollar bill moving up the stack was an early experiment with rough and smooth with bills. This one used different areas being roughed and I think that has possibilities with bills.
