Category: Magic

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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.

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I Made This
or Parasites on the Shoulders of Giants

The following are three stories of things which I have not personally witnessed but which were recounted to me anecdotally in various forms. I can’t guarantee their veracity.

1. At Blackpool magic convention several years ago Dirk Losander saw someone selling a second hand floating table similar to one of his own designs. To prove a point he bought the table in question and smashed it to pieces in front of the seller, admonishing him for trading in knockoffs. It was however later revealed that the table in question was an original which predated Dirk’s entry into the floating table marketplace. For anyone new to magic, Dirk Losander is considered kind of a big deal on the international magic circuit so this was a surprising development.

2. The same thing happened one year where someone bought a copy of a trick named Red from Craig Petty, and tore it up in front of him. For anyone new to magic, Craig Petty was kind of a medium sized deal in the British magic circuit, having presented a review show with World Magic Shop on which he had made his views on copycat magic releases very clear¹, so the fact that Red was functionally identical to a trick called New Wave Prediction by magician Bob King is considered deeply ironic.

3. I am an admin on a facebook group for magicians and as such I saw a similar event play out in real time this very week. A magic shop owner called James Anthony posted a special offer to the forum consisting of a special card deck for a trick named ILC², which is the signature effect of another one of the admins, Lawrence Turner. James claimed to not realise that this was what the ILC deck was, but he has worked alongside Lawrence as this trick was performed and couldn’t possibly have not known.

Intellectual property is complicated.

Continue reading “I Made This
or Parasites on the Shoulders of Giants”

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Rabbit Rabbit
or Prestomatosis

I was mid way through writing a long post about magic, intellectual property, cryptomnesia, and theft, when a little piece of information was brought to my attention that I simply had to share.

In Australia, where the introduction of rabbits caused an ecological disaster that famously had to be controlled by the intentional introduction of a disease called myxomatosis into the wild¹, it is illegal to own a pet rabbit in all but two circumstances:

  1. In a controlled laboratory environment for testing
  2. As part of a magic show

This suggests the possibility that someone in Australia might have become a magician simply because they wanted a rabbit².

Frankly there are worse reasons.

Continue reading “Rabbit Rabbit
or Prestomatosis”

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Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
or Men of Principles

Did you know Jeff McBride was in an episode of Star Trek? They actually wrote the whole episode of Deep Space Nine with him in mind as the character Joran Belar. Penn and Teller, conversely, were in an episode of Babylon 5, as Rebo and Zooty, a pair of intergalactic entertainers, one of whom doesn’t speak.

What’s fascinating to me is that Deep Space Nine is a knockoff of Babylon 5.

J. Michael Straczynski took the idea of a space opera set in a stationary location near a warp gate with themes of intergalactic war, the recent end of the Centauris’ oppresive regime over the Narns, and alien religion which selects the station’s captain as it’s chosen one, to Paramount and they said “Eh, not our bag”…. and then made Deep Space Nine, where a space station near a wormhole is the central key location in an intergalactic war, featuring the Cardassians whom until recently were oppressing the Bajorans, whose religious prophets select the captain as their next… you know, no, I’m sure Paramount totally came up with that on their own.

Anyway Babylon 5 was better, but Deep Space Nine got the drop on them because while JMS was still looking for a production company, Paramount were ramping up and selecting a cast.

Equilibrium, guest starring Jeff McBride was first aired on October 17th 1994, whereas Day of the Dead didn’t air until March 11th 1998, more than 3 solid years later. Some people might say that Babylon 5 stole the idea of guest starring a famous magical act from Deep Space Nine, but frankly I think they deserved a little payback.

Also, Babylon 5 was far superior in every way and Jeff McBride has to live with that.

Hey, did you see Jeff McBride on Penn and Teller Fool us?

Continue reading “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
or Men of Principles”

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Wabi Sabi Let’s Get Grabby
or Inappropriate appropriation

Cultural appropriation in magic is something that hasn’t really been addressed much and perhaps ought to. I’m actually guilty of it myself too a tiny degree in one of my routines. A lot of people don’t really know what cultural appropriation is though and it’s both a big topic to get into and something I can only really give a tiny insight into, given that as a white woman with roots into the ancient history of Yorkshire, the only thing that has ever appropriated my culture is The Last of The Summer Wine¹.

But today I want to blunder through a topic which magic has a terribly history with. That topic is Orientalism.

Content warning on this post for examples of some stuff that’s kinda racist.

Continue reading “Wabi Sabi Let’s Get Grabby
or Inappropriate appropriation”