A couple of months ago I got a Leon’s Improved Glass Penetration by Merv Taylor.
It appears it should have a dozen spikes, plus two hooked spikes, and mine only came with six. Five regular spikes and one of the hooked spikes. These are something that was custom made for the trick, so it’s not something I can just go to the hardware store and buy.
This is where my 3D printer comes in handy. I designed a replica of the spike and printed it out!
The test one came out great, now my next step it to print out a full set of them! I do still need to try to create the hooked spike. I’d like the set to match.
My whole library shows (aside from the nest of boxes and speaker) fits inside of a “carry on” sized case. For me a pack small show is something that just happened, not a requirement. While it’s nice that the show fits in a small case, I don’t mind travelling with a larger one.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I think the key to a show that packs small is using props that give you show visual textures. The idea is to not have a show that looks like everything was selected because its flat or small. A couple of good example of things that I do that take up little space, but are visually large are the troublewit and the lasso. Both of them when I do the routine take up a lot of psychical space in the performing area.
If one of your goals is a suitcase show or a packs small show, try to avoid everything being a flat card. I’ve seen many suitcase shows where it looks like everything was selected because it was flat!
The problem with the trick is there’s soo many props and soo much process to make a rubber band go through a shoelace. There had to be ring on string techniques that could accomplish the same effect in a much clearer manner. One of the challenges of the trick is the audience needs to understand how the line segments that the rubber band make work. If they don’t understand that, the trick will fall flat.
I will say the move that accomplishes the trick is kinda interesting, but not enough to put out a physical trick. I think this trick would be a good magazine item, but not a full release.
When making deliveries, Amazon uses these totes to haul packages:
I don’t know if they’re common enough for people to recognize what they are. They collapse flat and I think they could be converted to a magic prop. It wouldn’t be hard to make one into a tip over trunk. You would also simply put a panel that flips up on the bottom and put it on a mirror base and you’re good to go.
The challenge is that I don’t think they’re quite super common knowledge like a milk crate was. Maybe in a couple of years…
I finally finished reading Ginosko. This is a fantastic magic book, what I like about it is that it’s not just tricks. The whole back half is advice from other magicians and people in David’s life.
For me the routine from the book that’s worth the price of the book is “Asking the 8 Ball”. It’s a transposition of a selected card with the 8 of the same suit. One of the things that makes this great is how the end of the trick where the actual transposition happens, the audience kinda figures it out on their own. What I mean by that is when we get to the point where I reveal the selected card isn’t where it should be, the audience member automatically reaches down and reveals the transposition with any guidance from me.
It’s really a great moment.
There’s tons of other great material and advice in it. There’s a fun vanishing bottle routine in it, I won’t do the routine, but got me thinking about an idea for the vanishing bottle. The book helping me make a connection to something else is always valuable to me!
Another trick that hits really hard is “Post-it Crane”. This is a cool trick, but I don’t think it’ll really ever end up in my main close up magic set because I don’t have the pocket space for a post it pad and the “gimmick”. When I have done it, it’s been for small groups of about 4 people and it absolutely amazes!
This book is cheap at like $25 and totally worth picking up! I got mine at Misdirections Magic Shop.
On this episode we talk to dancer and aerial extraordinaire Mary Pat Letourneau. We discuss her upbringing and how dance got her into aerial arts.
She also tells us what wall dancing is and how it paved the way for a career in the performing arts. She also discusses what she does not and tells us about her workshops that she offers people interested in becoming more flexible. A great interview with a very flexible performer.
Recently I had a magician reach out to me to let me know there were some vanishing bird cages in a magician’s estate. I didn’t have much information to on as to what one of the cages was.
Obviously one of them is a Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing bird cage. This one is cool, because I’ve owned dozens of Milson Worth cage, but never had the instructions, until now!
Now for the interesting cage, the one that’s not clear as to who made it. There wasn’t a lot of information that I could pull from the pictures, so I totally took a gamble when buying it.
Here’s the cage:
It looks a lot like my Owen Magic vanishing bird cage, so here they are side by side:
The dimensions are exactly the same. There are a couple of small differences. The cage I just got isn’t stamped “OWEN” where the cage on the left that’s 100% and Owen is stamped. The lack of a stamp doesn’t mean that it’s not an Owen, as there was a period decades ago were many weren’t stamped. The Owen cage that I already has was much more modern.
Another difference between the two cages are the corner pieces.
The modern Owen cage on the right appears to have the ends peened, where the mystery cage looks like they’re peened and a blob of solder is added. I was chatting with a friend of mine and he found an old Owen Magic Supreme catalog and the ends of the corner bars also have the solder blobs!
This catalog is from the 80’s and back then the Challenge Cage Mystery was $97.50!!!
After asking around a bit, I got this little bit of information:
The size of the rails match those dimensions.
Based on all of this, I’m now 99% confident to call this birdcage and Owen Challenge Cage Mystery!
One problem is that one of the corners needs a repair, it’s missing the solder blob.
I’m sending this out to my birdcage guy and he’s going to repair it and polish up the cage!
-Louie
PS: if you come across a vanishing bird cage, feel free to reach to me to see if I’m interested in buying it!
While I was on the road in Oklahoma last week, I flew in a day early to drive a couple hours to visit a fair that some friends were performing at.
To my surprise, there was also a magic show at the fair.
I don’t know Pat and Tess, but watched the show. It was interesting, it was a 20 minute show and about 6 minutes of that was a merch pitch. I don’t know how I feel about that. Sometimes what is seen as the audience lacks knowledge of whatever financial deal is happening behind the scene and the pitch being 1/4 of the is the deal that was made with the booker.
The show was a quick change act, then the multiplying bottles, the product pitch (activity book and Squirmel) and then juggling. In the show I saw Pat had a lot of drops. At the end of the show, I was going to go up and say hi and introduce myself, however he was onstage re-running the juggling stuff to work out why he was dropped. That’s the mark of a pro! He didn’t just accept the drops, the tried to fix them. That really impressed me!
Yesterday I posted about my simple camera shutter that I use to keep my camera from having TVs or projectors time out due to no signal when it’s not in use. In the video below you can see the projector in use at a comedy club gig:
All of the sound/tech people on the little tour of comedy clubs I just did were amazed at how simple of a solution the little 3d printed cover was!
I feel like I should mentioned that both times I’ve flown with the iphone with the camera cover in my backpack, TSA took it out for additional screening. I guess it looks strange on the Xray.
In using projection at my shows over the summer I learned that some projectors or TV’s will “time out” and turn off if they don’t think they’re getting a signal. The camera I use has a black out option that I used to use, until I learned that the black out can be interpreted as no signal and the TV or projector will go into sleep mode.
To solve this problem, I 3d printed a simple camera cover for my iphone and glued it on.
This is a very simple, low tech way to solve the problem. The camera is still sending a picture to the screen, so it won’t got into sleep mode.
For these shows I didn’t want to run the camera through my laptop and use my Media Star to control it. That’s way too much set up and gear for a library show.
