The Magic of Therapy

The case load is mounting, and I’m told I’m getting one of those “difficult cases.” It turns out to be a young 15 year old male who is currently on probation for attempted murder.  I remember he was number 37 in my case load list.  I was only a feeble minded bachelor’s level social worker then, working for a non-profit whilst the state’s economy was in such disarray that they had suspended our...

Jeff McBride Interviews Kevin James

Jeff: Is it true you are related to a rather famous American showman? Kevin: Before I was ever interested in magic, my grandmother on my father’s side would tell us that we were related to P.T. Barnum. I kind of forgot about it for years, I didn’t really know who that was. Just before she passed, I asked her, how are we related to him? She explained it to me. It seems that our family is related...

A Magical Vision

After award winning festival screenings from Chicago to India and over 14,000 on line viewings, A Magical Vision is getting its premiere DVD release. A Magical Vision spotlights Eugene Burger—his magic, his philosophy, and his influence on the art of magic. For Museletter subscribers, Eugene Burger hardly needs an introduction. That said, Eugene is a far-sighted philosopher and magician who is...

And So It Goes… Tricks

Tricks: The shiny, glimmering metallic shackles dangling while the reflections of light blinds my eyes.  A voice calls out “you call it a trick one more time and I’m going to cuff you with these for one hour to that pole, or until you can figure out how to get out of them.”  Hence, my first visit to a magic shop and the last time I referred to truly magical effects as...

And So It Goes…

The Art of the Lie (oddities): Oh the guilt! The magician’s GUILT! The horrible blinking of the eyes when telling a fabrication….. the treacherous need to look away when performing a slight. Oh, how the art of the lie has suffered its true potential: an aid for truthful expression. And so the little or big lie gets lost to confusion, so sad in its pitiful malformation of existence. It’s not that...

Creating Enchantment: Sources of Inspiration

CREATING YOUR OWN MAGIC I just returned from visiting Jeff McBride at the Magic & Mystery School in Las Vegas where we discussed ideas for new illusions and types of magic. Have you ever wanted to invent something new in magic, but didn’t know where to begin or feel you’re not creative? Here are some tips on how to get started… WHICH CAME FIRST: THE METHOD OR THE EFFECT? Magicians...

Stabilizing

Recently, I talked about a bit about using a smartphone camera to shoot quality video. If you missed it, you can read it HERE. It can certainly be beneficial to those looking to shoot something on the fly without the need for a lot of expensive equipment. In this month’s newsletter, I would like to add to that and share a few options for stabilizing your camera and preventing your footage from...

The Monkey and the Wall

This is a presentation for Robert Neale’s lovely effect Brick Wall. Monkey and The Wall One day, the spirits of the world above and the spirits of the world below met to solve a problem. What to do about Monkey? They were tired of his tricks. “Let’s pool our resources,” Said the Jade-Emperor. He always talked like a politician. “We can build a wall to keep him out of both our...

Magic as Reassurance

A magician begins “doing incredible things with big silver hoops” for no less a purpose that to REASSURE a spectator.  (This we learn in an intriguing illustration in The Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 12, 1904.)  We don’t typically associate reassurance — the restoration of confidence — to tricksters; we all know that a “confidence man” is ironically named. Even so:...

Scriptwriting for Magicians

One of the questions that I get asked the most at our classes is “Is it better to script or just to talk naturally?” When I hear this question, I usually regard this as someone who is asking me to give them permission to be lazy. An argument I hear frequently, is “Well, I don’t want to sound like I’m reciting words from a script.” The answer to this argument is that we are actors playing the...