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While I often don’t keep up with past interests, when I do, there’s some things I love to go back to that still fascinate me. This short little video right here is Chris Brown (no, not the musician - this guy’s a magician, and a damn good one at that) using a shift - nothing but his hands - no props, no gimmicks, for something so simple and powerful. It comes from The Expert at the Card Table by S.W. Erdnase, which primarily was a collection of moves meant for card sharps, soon enough adapted for use by magicians, and changed the community forever. Personally, I’d love to own a copy some time in the future.
Throwback Thursday Midnight(?): Even though I’ve bounced around a lot from hobby to hobby, in high school, I noticed I was bouncing back to, from, around, and in the general vicinity of older hobbies from grade school. Like magic tricks. Besides some illusions that were too high for my skill level, this one was one my first illusion when I started taking magic seriously, and it was fun to play around with. And marked the beginnings of magic nearly emptying my wallet. But however you think it’s done, if you can’t see it on camera, that’s probably not it.
Maybe I’ll record something different this summer.
Fun Fact About Magic: While many people aren’t entirely familiar with its name, the Ambitious Card Routine (ACR) has a history possibly going as far back as 1854. It’s a basic routine that many card magicians first learn. Many methods, with various ways of handling and presentation, are available, some simple, some advanced, so that any magician can tailor the ACR to their own abilities and extend/shorten the routine to whatever it is they want.
One of the greatest contributors to magic as it is known today was a Canadian magician called Dai “The Professor” Vernon, passionate and perfectly willing to pack up and go wherever in the world he catches word about a new illusion, a new sleight, a new something - point is, he wanted to learn and teach, and to advance the magic community forward, which is exactly what he did. Famously, he performed his own ACR routine (using very simple sleights), when he met Harry Houdini, the man who claimed an ability to dissect the truth of a trick performed no more than three times. Poor Harry was a clueless mess by the seventh time Dai Vernon had done his ACR. From then on he was known as “The Man Who Fooled Houdini”. Oh and he’s legendary with cards. Legendary.
So here’s my rusty little attempt with the ACR.
this was my costume from the last time i went trick-or-treating. people usually didn’t get the reference, but i was trying to be MadV, a youtube-magician-turned-i-can-only-guess-the-most-basic-term-would-be-moralist. he’s a fantastic guy, as far as i’m aware, and i highly recommend watching any videos of his. to get specific about the costume, i had a deck of cards(but if i was a good magician, it was probably two) with me the whole night because i sought to imitate him as a magician, since that was how i discovered him.
only thing bad about what i wore was that i didn’t wear glasses the whole time, and i ended up poking my foot at a balled-up newspaper that turned out to be a dead squirrel. might be why, at the last house we were at, karma allowed the nice old guy there to pour the rest of his still-pretty-full bowl of candy into my bag.
however, i’m not entirely sure what i’ll be doing tomorrow night, besides watching walking dead.
when i used to really be into magic, this was one of my favorites, though with a far-from-being-from-this-awesome presentation. maybe i should kinda* start it up again and maybe use it to help my sad sad skills with talking to people.
*because being an honorable magician means buying the more original/creative (read: more expensive) ones. i’m sure my year and a half or so of magic led to me spending more than $500, some of which i didn’t even use.
Derren Brown - Person Swap
several years ago, i was really into doing magic tricks and the occasional bit of mentalism. while i wasn’t the best at mentalism(which i should note is different from being psychic in the fact that mentalism creates the illusion of being psychic) one of the things i really enjoyed was fucking with peoples’ heads. derren brown, who, as far as i can remember, says that he uses psychological principles in his illusions, takes mentalism to another level.
