My day got exciting, through a unexpected exchange the other day, I ended up with and original Tarbell System (Tarbell Course in Magic)!
This is a first edition (5th printing) of the Tarbell System. The key about how I ended up with this is simply talking to people and being open to the wacky things that they ask!
I’m a HUGE fan of the Tarbell Course, I even had some shirts made a long time ago:
A couple of days ago I hosted a Magic Garage Sale and it was a hit! The turn out was great and the amount of magic that was re-homed that was staggering!
This is a fun way to build some community within the magic scene. We all hung out for a few hours, and this is a way more intimate thing than a more formal magic swap meet or magic auction.
Then afterwards a few of us had some beers and jammed some magic!
I’m really glad I put this together, it was a lot of fun!
When you’re out performing, I think it’s important to talk to people you meet. I’ve met some really cool people over the years, just by chit chatting with them. At a fair a recently I started chatting with the guy selling mystery bags. His name is Gene Haaheim, he’s an old pitch man. He pitched Svengali Decks a long time ago, and also the magic mouse.
We had a great time chatting about some of the older people in magic who used to work the pitch circuit! Gene also did a couple of good card tricks.
Go out and talk to people at your next gig, you’ll be amazed at who you run into!
Last week while performing at the fair, I was doing a trick I thought of about six months ago, but do to the pandemic, I didn’t really get a chance to do in person. The trick uses a gag card that I thought of. The gag is you offer them a “free pitcher of beer” but it’s really a “free picture of beer”.
You can read a bit more about the gag at:
http://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/free-beer/
and
http://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/adding-a-line/
There’s really nothing new to the this aside from the gag. It’s the old out to lunch principle. For a very old method, it still works really well and is very deceptive!
I had a blast doing it last week, and look forward to doing it more in the future!
A friend of mine was in Seattle for a gig and we hung out this afternoon. He brought a loteria set from San Antonio with him. I’d never seen this game before, and from what I’ve learned it’s like bingo. You get large cards with multiple images on them and a deck of cards with a single image on each card.
My buddy asked me if there was a trick that could be done with the cards and here’s what I came up with;
I think that the trick could be made easier by simply cutting the deck so it’s a stripper deck and doing a glide to force the large card instead of the drop force. However doing it with ungimmicked props has a lot of advantages, like it being impromptu!
I’m putting together a magic garage sale on July 11th! It’s a literal garage sale, so you have to show up in person for the deals. What’s left I may try to sell on facebook used magic groups, and a lot of it will probably just go to the dump.
There’s a lot of cool stuff, and I was just going through last night and putting prices on things. The garage sale prices are pretty cheap, there are a lot of deals to be had! If I end up listing stuff on the internet for sale, it will be more than the garage sale prices.
Here’s what I priced yesterday:
There’s a lot more! If you’re going to be in the Seattle area on 7/11/21, send me an email and I’ll give you the details!
People still shoot me notes asking questions about my Take Up Reel. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “will it work with the vanishing birdcages from India?”
The answer is yes, here’s a video of me doing it with one of them:
Pretty much if you can vanish it with a traditional wrist to wrist birdcage pull, then you can vanish it with my take up reel!
-Louie
Click here to learn more about the vanishing birdcage!
Here’s the second video of me revising a packet trick that I got with a collection of magic that I acquired. Today’s trick is the A.C.T. (another card trick) by Bill Pryor.
Here’s a demo of the trick as written, then how I revised the trick:
The big problem with this packet trick is that the whole effect is a “kicker” without the initial ending. What I mean by that is that you start by asking someone to think of a card, but you never reveal it. You need the initial effect for a kicker to really work. I think at the end spectators will still be thinking, “what about the card I was thinking of?”
Also I don’t think the gags are strong enough to carry the trick past you never revealing the card they are thinking of.
During the Pandemic, I did many virtual lectures for magic clubs. I stumbled across a review of one in the Linking Ring magazine:
I really enjoyed doing these lectures. I would like to continue doing them, however moving forward with in person shows opening back up, I honestly don’t think that it would be possible to do them for a donation to the IBM or SAM endowment funds due to my performing schedule. I will keep doing in person lectures at conventions or as I travel and am in an area for the local club. It was nice to be able to give back a little bit!
Today I was messing around with adding stinger music to trick that didn’t get the final reaction I wanted. Stinger music is a short, usually upbeat musical tag that’s used to punctuate the end of a trick. I was really surprised at the effect it had on the trick. It took the trick from a mild response (much less than I thought it deserved) to a good response.
The two places I put it, one in a magic trick and one in a mentalism trick worked out great. The mentalism trick was where I think it really needs it, the effect is there, but it lingers in the audience’s heads. I need something to snap it out of their heads, and this may be the way.
Now for me the trick is to make it make sense. I don’t want to just blast music at the end of the trick. I think there needs to be music leading up to the stinger. This isn’t much of a problem, I just need to find music with lyrics that I can talk over.
I’m hoping to add a little bit more theatrical / production elements to the show. I’m trying to “level up” my show a little bit.
