The Magic Jam that I put together in Seattle on Tuesday was a blast! We had a good turn out of people I knew and magicians I didn’t know!
For me one of the takeaways is that it reminded me that there are soo many different styles of magic out there and there’s not really one right or wrong way to do it! Peoples styles are heavily influenced by where they perform, whether that’s just for their family and friends, busking, corporate shows or whatever. The venue dictates a lot of the material you do.
The last couple of weeks I started working on a Balls In Hat routine that I learned from Jimmy Talksalot. It starts with two in the hand and one in the pocket and ends with a nine balls coming out of your hat! It’s a really solid routine!
You can see parts of it in this reel from the fair I was performing at:
There’s a ton of great info and routines on Jimmy’s Substack. There’s free info as well as stuff for subscribers. It’s $8 a month to subscribe and totally worth it to read and watch all the content he has up there. The magic and essays are focused on street magic, but there’s a lot to be learned there if you don’t do street magic.
For a few gigs this summer I’m going to be doing the straitjacket wrapped in 50+ feet of chain escape. One thing I started doing about a 8 years ago when I first started playing with the straitjacket and chains was take off the crotch strap.
Here’s before and after pictures of the straight jacket:
I realized that no one knows the crotch strap is missing if it’s not there. I discovered this when I was visiting the Oregon State Museum of Mental Health about 10 years ago. There was a straitjacket on display and it didn’t have a crotch strap and the information placard said that they weren’t used as a restraint, but to keep people from unconsciously doing self harm, Like thru scratching themselves.
Most people rely on the crotch strap as the main point of humor in their routine. I decided I didn’t want to do any crotch strap jokes, so there’s no loss there. Sure my routine may be funnier, but it’s not what I want to put out there as my art.
Each year I do a unique library show. Sometimes material gets cycled back into the show, but it must wait till the third year (two years off) to come back into the show.
Here’s this years set list:
If you look at the set list, there’s one spot where there’s three tricks. I could do: Dad jokes, mind reading or shell game. The variable there is if I can use a TV in the room, I do shell game. I there isn’t a TV that I can use, then I do either my Dad Jokes trick or Wayne Dobson’s Spectrumlist with the librarian doing the trick.
Here’s what this year’s case set up looks like:
This is a pretty quick set up for the show about 30 minutes right now, but it will be 15-20 minutes after a couple of shows. I have about 4 extra tricks that I’ve packed with this show to make sure I have enough material. After this week of library shows, the set list will be locked in and I’ll ditch the extra material…well, I’ll keep one extra bit.
Last summer when doing library shows I noticed that probably 95% of the library shows that I did (indoors) had a TV screen in the room that I did my show in. So this year I planned a trick (actually two and a half tricks) that could use the TV as projection for close up magic.
There’s really not much to my set up, it’s an iphone with a camera app, an HDMI adapter and and HDMI cord. This very basic set up allow me to do the two full trick and one revelation with the screen.
In the beginning of the show during my warm up I do my ambitious card that uses projection. Then later in the show I do my Russian Shell Game routine, which is a three shell game on steroids, and then I use it for the reveal of my nest of boxes routine.
It’s working great and every library I’m doing (indoors) this summer has a TV in the room for me. I do have alternate material in case I can’t do use the TV for whatever reason. I’ve only done it once (so far), but it plays great for those routines and I’m glad I’m using something that’s already in the room!
Within the last 12 month’s there have been three fires at magic shops. Last summer there was the fire at Steven’s Magic Emporium. Then this month there was the fire at Vanishing Inc‘s warehouse and the fire at Magic Shop San Diego.
These could be completely unrelated incidents, or there could be a link. I have zero information about any of these fires, but I wonder that with more and more magic using Lithium Ion batteries in the trick or in the packaging (like Murphy’s Anverdi Color Match package) that these could be the cause. I have zero evidence and this is just my personal theory as to a possible cause. It’s too much of a coincidence to have three of the few remaining magic businesses in the USA all have fires in the last 12 months.
It’s good to hear that no one got hurt in the fires and hopefully all of the businesses will make a full recovery!
Honestly, it’s a trick that’s theming didn’t age well and the trick isn’t that good of a trick without the punchline at the end…which isn’t a great punchline by today’s standards.
One thing that still amazes me is how often magicians complain about people stealing from each other but they don’t take the most basic steps to protect their ideas. The myth is that you can’t legally protect a magic trick, but the reality is that you can. It’s through a patent, the problem with patenting magic is that it’s an expensive and time consuming process.
There have been some very successful magicians who have patented magic tricks. Yigal Mesika patents a lot of his stuff and of course the D’lite is a good example of a magic trick that was very successful where a patent helped protect it.
I personally use copyrights to protect my instruction sheets, art and ad copy. So I’m able to remove people that are pirating those. Then I use a trademark to protect my name, so that even if someone changes my ad copy, they can’t use my name. I have started to trademark the names of my shows, this makes it harder for people to steal the concept of my that particular show.
The challenge with trademarks is that they still take time. The current one I’m working on has been in the system for over a year and hopefully will be approved soon as I just got the notification of publication for it. That means is passed all of the internal USPTO objections and now it just needs to be put out in the monthly publication for normal people to object to it.
If you’re worried about having your ideas stolen, check out copyright.gov and USPTO.gov, they will give you a lot of information about the differences in IP and the processes.
The magic show that I do for summer camps and libraries changes and material cycles in and out. I try to cycle material out and back in about every three years, especially for things that are memorable. One of those things is my Snake Wand Surprise. It’s something the kids remember, and doing it every year would lessen it’s impact. If the kids are anticipating the ending, it’s not as much fun.
Here’s what the routine looks like:
I’m making a batch of them right now so that I have ones for my show and some in stock for sale. One of the things that I do with my personal set is make three sets of “double snakes”. I take two snakes and sew them together and do this with a total of six snakes, giving me three snakes that are double long.
This makes clean up slightly faster as there are only 11 individual snakes to pick up instead of 14. I can repack the fourteen snakes into the wand in less than 2 minutes, so the time saving is negligible. It also gives the snakes more visual “texture” as they fly out.
I don’t do this for the ones that I sell as many people like the individual snakes. This is something that’s really easy to do and you can hand sew them together really quickly if you wanted your set like that.
The batch of Snake Wand Surprises that I’m working on will be ready and available for sale later today. I’m trying to have a bunch ready for this summer as my travel schedule won’t allow me time to make them once my summer performing schedule gets busy in a about a week.
