Moisture Festival founder, Tim Furst, joins the Moisture Festival Podcast. Tim talks about how being a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam led him to learn to juggle and, subsequently, perform in the famous juggling troupe the Flying Karamazov Brothers.
We hear some great stories about Tim’s tours with the Flying Karamazov Brothers across the world, appearing in the movie Jewel of The Nile, and how the Russian government thought they were agents of chaos. Tim also talks about what separates the Moisture Festival from other festivals and why it has been so successful.
There was a fun surprise waiting for me in my email this morning. A while ago Xavi Puk contacted me asking to use a couple of pictures of my flea circus for an upcoming book about flea circuses. Well, it looks like the Spanish Edition it out and available on Amazon.com !
Unfortunately I don’t read Spanish, so I’ll have to wait for the English version to happen. I did run the pages that I’m mention in through Google Translate and I’m used as an example in marketing your flea circus. Specifically how I embrace social media and how I pose / stage pictures.
If you’re into flea circuses and can read spanish, you should check it out. It appears to be a pretty thorough book!
A couple of nights ago my local magic club hosted a lecture by Fred Blanco (Wildcat Jackson) who talked about character development. I’d seen this lecture before at another magic club and when I had the chance to bring him in to the Emerald City Wizards magic club, I took him up on it.
What I like about Fred’s talk is that he breaks character down pretty well. It’s a something you don’t need a theater degree to understand. He does a great job of teaching beginner level character, that’s accessible to everyone.
It was a fun night, and Fred also has a ton of cool props!!!
Last week I ended up with a ticket to the Chicago Magic Lounge’s Virtual Happy Hour. I’ve never been in person to the venue, and on video it looks like a cool place. I think tickets are $15 and we had four magicians, a mixologist and a host. All of the performers were performing live at the venue except for one that was in another country.
I didn’t get a picture of the host Benjamin Barnes, however he did a great job introducing the acts. Personally, I would have liked to see him do a set in there somewhere.
All of the acts used audience participation, with the helper on screen. They were in engaging, and the audience was fairly active in the chat.
One interesting thing that happened during the show was at one point when someone was picked to help out onscreen the guy said something like, “I thought this was all fake…“. What he meant was that he thought everyone helping was a stooge.
That comment raises an interesting question: Do most audience members think these shows use stooges? I don’t know if there’s a way to keep people from thinking that. People have the same thought at in person shows, so it’s not unique to a zoom show. This is more of a concern for a ticketed show than it is for a corporate zoom show.
Back to the Chicago Magic Lounge, for $15 it’s a solid show and worth checking out online. I think the overall run time was about 2 hours.
Recently I started doing a torn and restored card with a postcard. When I started doing it I was using a old promo postcard that had my picture on it. Right now I’m using the idea of a “staycation” for the theme of the trick, so I had my daughter make me a postcard to use for the trick.
One of the things about this postcard that I learned from watching video of the old promo postcard is that the glossy coating makes it hard to see, it’s just a lot of glare. The current batch of postcards have a matte finish, that solves the glare problem.
The thing with creating tricks is that it’s fixing a lot of small problems really adds up to make the bigger picture better!
A few days ago The Amazing Randi passed. I remember as a teenager reading his books. I never expected to run into him. I was probably 20-ish years old and ran into him at a magic shops. We chatted a bit and ended up hanging out while he was in Seattle doing a TV show.
From the stories he told, he’s a guy that’s lived the life of twenty people. He’s pretty much seen and done it all. From touring with Alice Cooper to speaking at huge scientific conferences and he had great stories about them all!
He’s the first person that really turned me onto altering money for magic. Mentioned I should play with putting Scotch Guard on bills. I think I published the trick I came up with using Scotch Guard in a Linking Ring magazine.
From my limited experience hanging out with Randi, he was a cool guy who knew how live life!
One of the things that’s always in the trunk of my cars is a sound system. Travelling with my own has saved soo many gigs. If the venue has one, I always prefer to use theirs, however there have been many times when I couldn’t plug my mic into theirs, or just needed mine to run music.
Recently I did a “socially distant” magic show and there were supposed to have a PA for me to use. When I got there and asked, they said they didn’t. This is a situation where having my own came in handy. I did have to laugh when they propped the door open with a PA system!
Get a small PA, it doesn’t need to be much. For years I travelled with a Kustom PA 50 in the trunk of my car. It’s got 3 channels and doesn’t take up much space.
I still have this speaker, however I switched to the Roland Street Cube EX, as it can run off batteries, as sometimes finding a plug can difficult. The bonus is the Roland Street Cube EX fits in the overhead compartment on an airplane!
In a few days on 10/23/20 at 8pm I’ll be performing on The CW’s Masters of Illusion television show. When I had the opportunity to pitch them some routines, I chose things that had some unique visuals. Tricks that weren’t just a card or coin trick, but offered something more.
One of the tricks that I pitched to the producers of the show was the card trick that I do with a dinosaur costume! It’s a very unique trick visually, and it’s just a fun routine.
Look at the picture above, look at my face inside the costume. I’m having a blast! That’s something that I think is important, even though no one can really see me, I’m performing as if they can see me. More importantly, I’m having fun! That fun is project to the audience, even though they can’t see me!
Whatever you do, have fun. Fun is the secret sauce that makes or breaks most performers.
Whenever a Facebook Live magic show comes through on my feed, I always try to watch them. It’s interesting the variation in people’s set up and what they think looks good, or at least professional.
Here’s a screenshot from a The Virtual Magic show on Zoom that was broadcast to Facebook a few weeks ago:
The problem with this is that the magician kinda thought about his background, but not enough. He’s got one curtain hung, but for $18 more, he could have bought a second one and had a full background.
The other fix is to crop your picture down. An example below is a screenshot of me at a zoom hangout:
The wider shot shows my office around the edges of my screen. I cropped it out of the outgoing video feed. Little things like that make what you’re doing look a lot more professional…or at least not unprofessional.
