Category: Magic

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Shut up and dance
or You are feeling very sleepy

It’s difficult writing about magic tricks when you don’t know the method.

You can talk about the theatrics or the presentation or wow factor but the value of a trick issue outside of the performer and their script and style, you really don’t know much about the mechanics. At best, you can try to infer elements about it from the performances to figure out it’s limitations and features.

So I’m going to say right now: I do not know exactly how or why hypnosis works.

But after seeing a number of hypnotists I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, and what’s going on is not a million miles away from the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance”

Continue reading “Shut up and dance
or You are feeling very sleepy”

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Get Knotted
or How To Carry A Professor’s Nightmare

So I mentioned in my previous post that my every day carry used to be a Professors Nightmare and I just wanted to share a couple of tips on how to carry a Professors Nightmare setup in a sensible way, so you can keep all the ropes together and lead straight into a performance, in case you wanted to try this liberating process for yourself.
Continue reading “Get Knotted
or How To Carry A Professor’s Nightmare”

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Linus’ Blanketfort
or Every Day Clutter

A few days ago I mentioned how much I hate the term Organic as it pertains to magic. To re-iterate I get the need for gimmicked props that look natural, like a John Cornelius perfect pen, but somehow nicely engineered objects like that very rarely get categorised as organic. Rather, organic magic tricks are usually pitched at the younger end of the magic market who apparently don’t seem to own anything which costs more than £2.99, so they have to carry gimmicked bottle caps, gum packets and novelty keyrings.

Although the term gets passed around now and again, Organic has been supplanted by the new buzz phrase which if anything I hate even more – though not as much as its three letter acronym

Every Day Carry
Continue reading “Linus’ Blanketfort
or Every Day Clutter”

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Sour Lemons
or Pull Back and Reveal

I am a bad loser. A terrible loser, like absolutely dogshit at handling competitive failure. I’ve had post-competition meltdowns that made a magic club briefly decide to stop holding competitions.

I am also a bad winner. Once I was so chuffed to win one award at a magic club that I carried the trophy with me at the next competition and used it as a prop in my act. These are trophies which you get your name engraved on and give back. Giving it back was hard. So hard that when I next won one of these and went to get it engraved, I simultaneously bought a miniature copy of it to keep.

I’m a fucking freak in any kind of competitive situation. It’s a miracle I’m allowed to compete in these things at all.

And what makes it worse is when I put in a lot of effort. Like… 7 years of effort, to make an act as original as possible, and lose to slightly altered commercially sold routine.
Continue reading “Sour Lemons
or Pull Back and Reveal”

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The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac

A rarity for you all today. not only am I clearing a backlog of old topics by posting 3 times in one day, this post has TWO embedded videos featuring yours truly.

At the start of May I used a new routine I’d been working on to enter my local magic club‘s closeup competition. Within this post you will find a recording of my act AND a separate video giving details of my creative process in coming up with it.

Later today I will post some sour grapes about coming second masquerading as a treatise on creativity.
Continue reading “The Toothfairy Act
or an Insight to the Creative Process of a Maniac”

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The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Over time, I have accumulated a lot of DVDs containing magic instructional videos. So many that I have now reached the point where I only have shelf space for half of them, and most of that shelf space is out of reach. A while ago I started to keep my DVDs instead in plastic sleeves inside a large ring binder, with the case inserts kept in regular A4 sleeves alongside them. I used to have a mere 40 or so DVDs in this type of storage but after a recent concerted effort I have now got two 65mm ring binders, each with 20 pages of double sided 2 pocket dvd sleeves. For those unwilling to do the maths, that’s 160 DVDs, and it is still not my entire collection.

But this time around I did something else alongside the action of putting DVDs into binder sleeves and collecting a huge box of empty black keep cases. I also digitised the video onto a big hard drive.

And I wish I’d done it earlier
Continue reading “The Library of Alexandria
or Fuck the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”

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The Phantom, The Witch and The Crushing Weight of the Modern Media Oligopoly
or Simon Says

Where to begin?

In 2019 the winner of Britain’s got talent was a mentalist called X. It was unlike other winners because throughout the competition, the true identity of the magician behind the mask was only revealed at the very end of the show. It was Marc Spellman¹.

What’s interesting about this story is that I heard from a good friend of his that before the final, the makers of the show tried to convince him not to reveal his identity at all. Ultimately the decision was his, clearly, but they really didn’t want him to.

And to understand why, we have to take a little step behind the curtain of television talent shows, into the twisted contracting of television talent shows.

Continue reading “The Phantom, The Witch and The Crushing Weight of the Modern Media Oligopoly
or Simon Says”

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The Universal Theory of Mind, Perception and Ketchup
or Magic Mustard

I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who may well be the only other human being who reads or is even aware of this blog, when the topic turned to what makes a good magic trick. I’d been rolling around an idea for a while that we should start a podcast, but wasn’t sure what theme to use. My latest idea was “Magic Fixers” where we would take old rubbish tricks we don’t like and see if we could spice them up to make them work in a modern world.
Sort of like a weekly instalment of This post on the Linking Rings

I have some killer ideas for the Hotrod trick.

But the problem was that in discussing the kinds of things we could fix I made a startling revelation about magic, magicians, perception, reality and barbecue sauce.

Or mustard.

Or spaghetti sauce.

But not ketchup.

Continue reading “The Universal Theory of Mind, Perception and Ketchup
or Magic Mustard”

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Purse Strings
or Magic on a Shoestring Budget

At the second this goes live I will just have finished giving a sort of impromptu lecture on the Alakazam discord theatre. I did this as a favour to the store, which is nice, and my friend Wayne who does a lot of promo work for them.

I couldn’t possibly have done it to raise my own profile to ahead of my upcoming book release later this year (hopefully).

If rather than coming here from that lecture you’re one of my regular readers (whom frankly I didn’t realise I had) consider this a little free lesson in how I perform off the clock.

The subject of the lecture is my Purse Strings routine and in the off chance that someone enjoyed it but needed to jog their memory about some part of it, I present this article as a companion piece.

Continue reading “Purse Strings
or Magic on a Shoestring Budget”

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If You Don’t Ask…
or I Also Made This

There’s a little story I wanted to add into the last post which I didn’t mention for the sake of brevity (basically it was getting too long).

When I met Eugene Burger (A very big deal in magic and sadly no longer with us) at a special one day workshop he showed us a trick using a prop called a Glorpy. The standard Glorpy is quite brightly coloured so Euegene had modified his to make it black, and realised that since he was lecturing the trick, he would like to sell black Glorpies for his students.

He reached out to Bill Madden and Bernie Trueblood, the people behind the original Glorpy to ask if he could sell his black version. It’s worth noting that since it’s creation in 1963, the Glorpy has been re-released by various magic publishers and there have even been a number of published sources describing how to make your own. In response to the request however, Eugene was told “You’re the first person to ask.”

So as an aside, when I decided I wanted to use Nedroid’s “I Made This” comic in that post I reached out over twitter to ask if I could include it, knowing full well that half the bloggers on the internet had already posted it on their own spaces with various levels of accreditation and I so desperately wanted him to say I was the first to ask, but alas, he just said yes.