SOLIDMAGIC

90% of everything is crap.

Alexander de Cova

Crack­ing Magic (7) – Selections

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This and the fol­low­ing art­icles should be of some help in mak­ing prop­er selec­tions. Of course, it must be under­stood that the tricks and books I will sug­gest are purely my per­son­al opin­ion and your taste may vary. Don’t for­get, this is writ­ten with the cas­u­al per­former in mind, who does not have end­less time or the nerves to read them all.

Qual­ity Books
I don’t want to degrade any authors on magic books with my humble sug­ges­tions. It is dif­fi­cult writ­ing about some of the books one likes and not feel­ing guilty of not hav­ing men­tioned oth­er authors. On the oth­er hand, I will have to make some decisions and offer some mater­i­al I would sug­gest for a start­ing point.

In magic, we have an astound­ing amount of lit­er­at­ure and mater­i­al at our fin­ger­tips. Mak­ing a selec­tion is very dif­fi­cult. There­fore, in the begin­ning, I sug­gest stick­ing to time proven and qual­ity writers. When you read the books and are informed, you will notice that many times a “new” trick in a recent pub­lic­a­tion has a pre­curs­or in an older book. And most of the times, this pre­curs­or is even bet­ter than the “new” one. Dig­ging trough the “old” books will bring some nug­gets to the sur­face, tricks that still work today as good as they did then.

The key is that in these times, tricks were pub­lished and described only after they had been actu­ally per­formed for many years for an audi­ence (at least the major­ity of them). What you get with the older books is mater­i­al that has proven to be work­able. There are lit­er­ally no pipe dreams.

When hav­ing only lim­ited means and time to put togeth­er a work­ing lib­rary, I would sug­gest first and fore­most going for the “clas­sic text­books” of magic. If you are inter­ested in sponge ball magic, then read­ing Frank Gar­cia’s “Encyc­lo­pe­dia of Sponge Ball magic” is a good start. Here you have assembled in one place some good mater­i­al that will keep you busy for a long time.

The same with the clas­sic texts on coin magic, card magic and so on. I tend to believe that the clas­sic books like “Expert Card Tech­nique” or “Great­er Magic” were care­fully writ­ten and there is a lot of advice con­cern­ing psy­cho­logy and present­a­tion in them. “Great­er Magic” is still a fant­ast­ic col­lec­tion of the best ideas of the best magi­cians at that time. Doing just the stuff out of “Expert Card Tech­nique” will make you shine as a card star. And the chapter about present­a­tion is worth pure gold.

If you want to make a deep study of card magic, then prob­ably Roberto Giob­bi’s “Card Col­lege” series is the best choice. Just don’t think too much about it, because everything Roberto pub­lishes is refined to the nth degree and you will have sure­fire win­ners in your rep­er­toire. A very inter­est­ing read is his “Ask Roberto” eBook. He presents an excel­lent list of “essen­tial read­ing” books and material.

A very good addendum to your archive, which you can work with on a daily basis, is Rober­to’s “Secret Agenda”. In there are 365 tips, hints, ideas and wis­dom. One for every day. Roberto tips price­less inform­a­tion there.

As you see, I tend to “encyc­lo­ped­ic” type of books for my archive. But it has­n’t to be the big, heavy books, there is a “smal­ler” way as well.

In the forties and fifties, it was pop­u­lar to pub­lish books that were col­lec­tions of tricks by dif­fer­ent authors. Book titles like “100 Tips for Magi­cians” and the like were quite com­mon. Many of these tricks were extrac­ted and reprin­ted from the “big” books and works. So the author did the work of select­ing and search­ing stuff from a spe­cif­ic top­ic for you already and they are served on a golden plate for you. I love these book­lets! Because almost no one is read­ing them any­more, the mater­i­al will appear fresh and trust me, there is a ton of mater­i­al that sparkles inspir­a­tion or can be adap­ted to mod­ern times and used right away.

One of those is, for example, the book­let “100 Latest Tips on Tricks” by Mil­bourne Chris­toph­er. In there are 100 use­ful tips to be included into your act. Some are gags, oth­ers are exten­sions of known tricks and oth­ers are new tricks or hand­ling. When read­ing this book­let, I found more than 20 (!) tricks and ideas that I could (and prob­ably will) use in my work, which isn’t a bad invest­ment at all. The book­let is only $10.00 and you can get it at Lib​rary​.com.

So, go to the Lybrary​.com and search for these authors (of course, there are lots more, but we have to start somewhere):

Mil­bourne Christopher
Jean Hugard
U. F. Grant
Peter Warlock
Hen Fetch
Roy Baker
Ken de Courcy

The mater­i­al they pub­lished on vari­ous top­ics is very worth­while to have a look at. Anoth­er nice thing is there are lots of ideas for the stand-up per­former, an area that isn’t too well covered in these mod­ern times, des­pite the fact that in the real world, what we need (and could use) mostly is an act that is suit­able for an audi­ence of about 50 to 100 spec­tat­ors. There is tons of stuff for that occa­sions in these booklets.

Also, in former times, there have been lots of “com­pil­a­tions” pub­lished. You will find a lot of titles like “100 Tricks With A Thumb­tip”, “100 Tricks and Ideas With A Milk­pitch­er” and the like. Well worth look­ing into these as well. Dig­ging out the nug­gets that oth­er­wise would remain hidden.

Con­cern­ing the top­ic of put­ting an act togeth­er, a fant­ast­ic inspir­a­tion for that is a book­let by Max Hold­en called “Programes of Fam­ous Magi­cians”. Here you find descrip­tion of the acts of some fam­ous (and not so fam­ous) magi­cians of that time. A very inter­est­ing an inspir­ing read to get an act togeth­er. Also there is a book­let by Señor Mardo, called “The Act”. Here are some ideas and sug­ges­tions as well. The point is that these little book­lets get you star­ted some­where. Oth­er­wise, the search for tricks for a pro­gram could turn out to be a nev­er-end­ing one …

The Selec­tion
Now when you have some of these book­lets, read through them care­fully. Ideally, print them out so you can use the pen­cil and the colored text mark­er to high­light and com­ment the inter­est­ing stuff. Then, apply the BSL to the mater­i­al. After that, put the inter­est­ing stuff into your little notebooks.

Your archive will now start to grow in no time.

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mccovas_rabbit

Crack­ing magic (6) – Bull­shit List

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After hav­ing pre­pared everything from the hard­ware side, it is time to tackle the mater­i­al itself. The first thing in my opin­ion is to be able to prop­erly select mater­i­al, or some­times to de-select mater­i­al. There­fore, I changed the former art­icle “The Bull­shit List” into this art­icle, where it actu­ally belongs. The first thing is to spot the mater­i­al not to use.

Clearly, in magic we arrived at a point of the total inform­a­tion over­load. For some years now, I tried to «catch up» but then sur­rendered. No chance to stay up to date, read­ing, study­ing and digest­ing everything that is being pub­lished. What to do? A couple of thoughts …

Become a specialist

At age 51, I decided to no longer waste my time on stuff I won’t use, can­’t learn or which is too dif­fi­cult for me to under­stand. Of course, talk­ing about the lim­ited field of magic now, not real life. Nobody can cov­er it all. So the obvi­ous solu­tion is to some­how spe­cial­ize in some­thing, nar­row­ing the field and becom­ing an expert in at least some tiny little field. «You can­’t do everything, life is too short. Do less and this bet­ter. Or the best you can.» How many times have we heard that?

But it is some­how true. So in what should I become a spe­cial­ist then? Card magic? Coin magic? Com­edy? Mentalism?

I think the dis­tinc­tion into cat­egor­ies is not the best way to go. Bet­ter would be, to become a spe­cial­ist of your own. That way, you can still do stuff from all the genres of magic, without lim­it­ing your­self. But you will only do stuff that is good for you!

A spe­cial­ist of one’s bet­ter self? Easy—just decide on what your strong parts and abil­it­ies _​are, choose the accord­ing mater­i­al you _​can mas­ter and stick to it. That means mak­ing decisions and selec­tions. Put­ting stuff into the garbage. For­get­ting stuff. Learn­ing to handle curi­os­ity. Even­tu­ally, you should end up being someone who knows exactly what he can do and what he can­’t do. What he wants to do and what he does not want to do. That alone helps a lot.

Cre­ate The Bull­shit List (BSL)

Rather than strug­gling (and wast­ing time and energy on the inter­net in for­ums, online-shop web­sites and Face­book) to get the new­est mater­i­al, take anoth­er path. A power­ful strategy is to build the so-called «bull­shit list» or, in short: BSL. This is a list of tricks, moves, gags and mater­i­al you would nev­er ever use. Sit down and ser­i­ously think about what you would nev­er per­form and want to learn. Whenev­er there is some advert­ising of the new tricks in your mail­box, con­sider the pos­sib­il­it­ies of put­ting it on the bull­shit list. Chances are great that you have a couple of hits a day.

Build your own, per­son­al BSL (or, at least, what you con­sider to be bull­shit). Get a very nice note­book and cel­eb­rate this BSL. Cul­tiv­ate it. Hunt for ideas you would nev­er use and write them down.

This maybe sort of a «reverse engin­eer­ing», but it tre­mend­ously helps. You will dis­cov­er a com­pletely new (and effect­ive) approach towards con­quer­ing the newly pub­lished stuff. Just keep your bull­shit list handy all the time. Scan the new released mater­i­al. And put everything on the list that does­n’t meet your cri­ter­ia. Be happy with every new entry. Cel­eb­rate to have more bull­shit on the list. Feel like being the under­taker of that bull­shit mater­i­al. Bury it. Show it to your friends. Talk about it. Then bury it again.

The W‑Questions

Pre­pare to learn the zen-art of ask­ing the right w‑questions in magic:

What is this good for? Why is this so com­plic­ated? Who could use this? Why is this bull­shit? Why was this inven­ted? What did the author think? Who would ever per­form this? Would I really use this?

These ques­tions really help in identi­fy­ing bull­shit. By the time, you will devel­op a fine sense for the accur­ate dis­tinc­tion of mater­i­al. In no time your list should grow into a huge accu­mu­la­tion of bull­shit material …

Use Gene Ander­son’s Lists

Gene Ander­son told us a thou­sand times in his bril­lant lec­ture «The Part-time Pro» how to effect­ively struc­ture one’s own pro­gram. Just use his A‑list, B‑list and C‑list sys­tem. These lists are the oppos­ite of the BSL. His sys­tem works and helps to keep your mind free and focussed. These lists are the base of your archive.

Build Your Own Archive

This task will get easi­er as well. Once you have your lists, start to build an archive around these tricks/​moves/​routines on the lists. Start search­ing only for stuff that is use­ful for your A‑B-C mater­i­al. Noth­ing else. Only things that can enhance your mater­i­al. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, this should be all the mater­i­al that does not land on your BSL. Col­lect that, study it and per­fect it. The pro­cess of mak­ing these selec­tions will be easi­er, the more often you do it.

And that way, in a very short time you should end up being a spe­cial­ist. A spe­cial­ist with a thor­ough under­stand­ing of your­self, your abil­it­ies, your lim­its, your mater­i­al and an intim­ate know­ledge of your own archive of ideas. A spe­cial­ist in bull­shit mater­i­al, in pos­ses­sion of a huge BSL and someone with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of magic.

Spe­cial­ists are in demand. People like spe­cial­ists. Espe­cially spe­cial­ists in human beings. People are inter­ested in people. And not in walk­ing encyclopedias.

Don’t for­get to enjoy your new «bull­shit free» magic …

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Crack­ing Magic (5) – Tools

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The hard­ware is being expan­ded by some very import­ant tools …

Hav­ing men­tioned in the last art­icle already that the com­puter is not my most import­ant tool for the archive, here is one of the most import­ant tools (besides the brain, of course): note­books. Not the elec­tron­ic ones, but the ones made from real paper.

I have been using Mole­skine Cash­ier Note­books (pock­et size) for years now. Before switch­ing to these rel­at­ively small note­books, I used much big­ger Mole­sk­ines. Prob­ably hop­ing that big­ger note­books will res­ult in more and big­ger ideas. How wrong I was!

But first of all: why Mole­sk­ines? They are a bit more expens­ive, but then – they last almost forever, due to the super­i­or qual­ity. And this is what I wanted: a longer note­book life. The sur­face and feel are bey­ond everything else, it is a joy to work with them. The pock­et size with soft cov­ers makes them eas­ily trans­port­able and they fit into almost any pock­et. It is the qual­ity, the brand and the way they look and feel. A sort of cheat­ing and sedu­cing myself. As well as the fact that because I spent a lot more money for them, I will value them more than a cheap spir­al bound notepad.

They come in dif­fer­ent col­ors, which is what I like. I use sev­er­al of them in dif­fer­ent col­ors: a col­or for each cat­egory. One for ideas, one for the act, one for prob­lems to be solved, etc. So it is easi­er to grab the right note­book (and also nicer look­ing on the desk).

When later work­ing with the Gene Ander­son A‑B-C list sys­tem, each trick from the A‑list could even have its own little note­book. The trick that is on the A‑list is worth hav­ing a small note­book on its own! Maybe you will end up hav­ing ten note­books, if your act con­sists of these ten tricks, but then you have it all in one place and – more import­ant – the trick will “live”. it is more fun to do the work of keep­ing a trick up to date when you have a note­book and see how it fills with improve­ments and fur­ther ideas. It is sort of hav­ing a diary of a trick. Or maybe a doc­u­ment­a­tion of a trick­’s evolution.

Bare­bones For Note Taking

There are dozens of inform­at­ive web­sites and blogs on how to take notes prop­erly and prob­ably you have your own sys­tem already. For those who have not, here is my way. Instead of hav­ing you check out all of them on the inter­net and waste time, here my sum­mary and short­cuts that should be suf­fi­cient to get you star­ted the easy way:

  1. One note­book – one category/​topic/​trick
  2. First page is left blank at the begin­ning of a new note­book. When it fills, this is the place to put in a title, short descrip­tion of the con­tent and a brief table of con­tents. That way, it is easy to nav­ig­ate the note­books later.
  3. Each entry has at the top of the first page the date and some tags.
  4. Scrib­bling and draw­ing is allowed, in fact desired. A bad hand writ­ing might be an obstacle years later in try­ing to identi­fy what has been writ­ten. It does­n’t mat­ter how crude the scrib­blings are – only you will see them.
  5. Use post-it notes and book­marks for easi­er ori­ent­a­tion and flex­ib­il­ity. The post-its can be removed, moved and dis­carded as well as expan­ded. They can be shif­ted from top­ic to top­ic. There is always the pos­sib­il­ity to make them “steady” and trans­fer­ring the con­tent per­man­ently into the note­book later. Post-it notes and the book­marks are some of my most import­ant tools (along with the note­books themselves).
  6. Use col­or. Text mark­ers, colored pen­cils and felt tip pens and so on. The more col­or, the bet­ter. The brain likes colors.
  7. And that is enough to know. Go ahead and start a note­book! This shows the “sys­tem” of the mar­velous first page in each and every note­book I have. This is the new home and sur­round­ings for your ideas: the ulti­mate archiver­’s tool kit – I doubt you will need any­thing more in the next few weeks and months to come (besides fresh notebooks).

Why hand-writ­ing?

No need to go into the details here. Prof. Richard Wise­man has done the sci­entif­ic work for us already in his book “59 Seconds”, where he touches this top­ic briefly (and, as the book title prom­ises, it takes only a couple of minutes to learn it). Get this out­stand­ing book here: Prof. Wise­man book on Amazon.

The reas­on I take new ideas in hand­writ­ing is to speed up the pro­cess of their integ­ra­tion into my brain. May sound weird, but works. Whilst writ­ing, I already wrestle act­ively with the idea, and much of the cre­at­ive pro­cess starts with the writ­ing by itself. A big time saver and very effi­cient without me mak­ing a con­scious effort or real­iz­ing it!

It is proven that writ­ing or draw­ing by hand is much more effi­cient than just typ­ing some­thing into the com­puter. There­fore, my main work is done by hand with­in the note­books. 80 % of my import­ant work is done this way. Always.

I tend to see it this way: in the com­puter, all the col­lec­ted ideas and inform­a­tion are invis­ible, hid­den some­where in files that are hid­den in the filesys­tem. These ideas exist as a digit­al file, for sure, but I can­not imme­di­ately see them. Like a drop of water in the ocean. They are not vis­ible imme­di­ately for me, and there­fore not really accessible.

How­ever, in the note­books, the simple act of flip­ping through the pages makes the ideas vis­ible with­in a frac­tion of a second, as if by magic. The inform­a­tion has come to life and can be read, touched, looked at. Far bet­ter and more human way to tackle inform­a­tion in order to lit­er­ally seize the inform­a­tion in your hands.

Why the smal­ler format of the notebooks?

The main reas­on is: brev­ity. As we all know: “Brev­ity is the soul of wit.” How true! And in order to get used to brev­ity and one of the best ways to learn to handle it when tak­ing notes, is to reduce the avail­able writ­ing space! So simple and so effect­ive. There­fore, the smal­ler format.

Take advant­age of a major pro­ductiv­ity hack: Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand to fill the time avail­able for its com­ple­tion. If you have less time to com­plete a task, you’ll likely increase your effort. In our case: note tak­ing will be much easi­er and effect­ive if the space per­mit­ted for notes is smal­ler, not allow­ing those notes to “expand”. Smal­ler space means more notes in less time. Perfect.

Anoth­er point: there is less res­ist­ance in actu­ally writ­ing some­thing onto the paper, which is the most import­ant thing to do with a note­book. A smal­ler space is not that intimidating!

Kick­start

Now what to do with all that for your archive? The most dan­ger­ous enemy lurk­ing here at the start is intim­id­a­tion. You look at all the archives oth­ers have (or reputedly have) and think: “Man … I am nev­er gonna have this … it will take ages … where should I start?”

Put these ques­tions and self-doubts into the trash can. Start the easy way and don’t give a shit on what archives oth­ers appar­ently have or do not have. Think only for your own little archive, the most import­ant one in the world. Get three of the small Mole­sk­ines for the begin­ning. Use the first three cat­egor­ies, one note­book for each topic:

  • Know­ledge
  • Props
  • Abil­ity

Know­ledge: jot down routines, tricks, sys­tems, pro­ced­ures and what else is inter­est­ing and import­ant for you now and in the future for your act.

Props: start to take notes on which props you are inter­ested and jot down the ideas you might have for modi­fy­ing them, mak­ing them per­son­al for your act. Write down the props you might want to have. Draw. Scribble. Col­or­ized. Invent. Think and then design the “hard­ware”.

Abil­ity: start to think about neces­sary sleights and tech­niques you will be using or must be able to execute. Rethink your tricks and start to search for where tech­niques are applied or neces­sary. Research these tech­niques that you need to do your tricks. Find bet­ter ways, jot them down. Take note of what you have to prac­tice or learn. Start think­ing this note­book as a sort of to do list.

Later you can add some more note­books: gags, pat­ter, present­a­tion, routines, tricks, spe­ci­al­it­ies, whatever you want or need. But right now start with just the three! If you have more in the begin­ning, then chances are that you get involved too much into pre­par­ing empty note­books and wast­ing your time with think­ing about per­fect organ­iz­a­tion sys­tems and top­ics. Stay cool. A daunt­ing task can be made into a pleas­ure and fun with a small first step. Three little note­books, small as they are, serve the pur­pose per­fectly and even will make you feel like a “con­quer­or”, will make you feel like a win­ner. That is what we want.

You will be sur­prised how much valu­able inform­a­tion you are going to store with­in the next few days. Work done! You are on the way, because you have star­ted your archive with three little note­books. That was­n’t too dif­fi­cult, was­n’t it?

For me, this sys­tem works so good is because the focus is on that few note­books and not on the vast amount of inform­a­tion that is on my com­puter (which at some times makes me feel help­less and unin­formed). As already said, for me the com­puter is only the place to store and research the inform­a­tion I might need in the pro­cess of writ­ing my ideas into my note­books. That moun­tain of know­ledge would be more in the way rather than a help.

Con­ven­tions And Lectures

Once you got star­ted with enter­ing your ideas and stuff into these note­books, they can (even in this embryo state) be already use­ful for your next attend­ance of a lec­ture or con­ven­tion. Just have the note­books with you and when you see some magic, think of your note­books, eval­u­ate wheth­er the new inform­a­tion could be use­ful for you and if so, put it into your note­books. The books act as a the guide for you. A Zip­lock bag trans­forms the kit into a power tool. All in one place, easy to carry, cof­fee and beer proof, you can use it any­where (even in trop­ic­al cli­mat­ic places) and it is cheap. All you need to con­stantly work and jot down your ideas …

That way, you are pre­pared to squeeze all the rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion tailored to you out of the event. The note­books help you to stay focussed on your stuff. No more distractions …

And that is the whole secret behind the secret!

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Crack­ing Magic (4) – Tools

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Now that we have the little note­book or whatever ready for use, it is time to get some struc­ture onto it. Here is the sys­tem I have been using for years and it proved to func­tion perfectly.

The whole thing is to make the amount of sub­folders as small as pos­sible. In the begin­ning, I made the mis­take of mak­ing one sub­folder after the oth­er, think­ing this would make a “per­fect” arrange­ment. I dis­covered that this led into a com­plete mess, giv­ing me troubles to find what I was look­ing for, because I for­got in which sub­folder I put it. So everything had to be simplified.

Here is the struc­ture: there are sev­en main folders. In each one is a alpha­bet­ic­ally sor­ted array of sub­folders. In these, I keep the actu­al files. Here are my main (top order) folders:

01 – books
02 – tricks
03 – video
04 – performers
05 – scripting
06 – ideas
07 – con­struc­tion area

A short explan­a­tion might be neces­sary. I use only sev­en main folders, because I read that the human brain can­not absorb more than sev­en pieces of inform­a­tion at a time. So I stuck to the mys­tic­al num­ber seven.

The titles of the folders are self-explan­at­ory. The 01 – books has a sub­folder struc­ture of folders named after the alpha­bet. So it will look like

01 – books
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z

The same holds true with the folders 02, 03 and 04 (of, course, you are free to change as much as you want). So when I have some­thing for the archive, let’s say an ebook with a routine by Tam­ar­iz, it will go into 01 – books -> T. At the same time, I put it a copy into 01 – tricks. OR it could go to folder 04 – per­formers -> T. You decide which way you want to pick.

You could make some sub­folders into the 02 – tricks folder by adding the cat­egor­ies cards, coins, rope, silks, kid show, men­tal­ism if you want to. So it would look some­thing like this

02 – tricks
cards
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
coins
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
mentalism
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
stand-up
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
comedy
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z

I use this very simple struc­ture to be able to arrive at any giv­en entry wth a max­im­um of three clicks. So when I search the Tam­ar­iz trick, I either go to 01 – tricks -> cards or (bet­ter) I go 04 – per­formers -> T and then I should be able to get the thing. Here is how it looks like:

screenshot_archive

Nam­ing the files

Even more import­ant than the actu­al folder struc­ture is the way I name the files. At the begin­ning, I was­n’t too good at this, because I did­n’t think this was import­ant. Now I bet­ter and learned that a prop­er nam­ing can be of real help in organization.

That ebook of Tam­ar­iz would be named like this:

Tam­ar­iz, Juan – ebook – name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf

When you decide to use a cer­tain sys­tem in nam­ing the files, you will be able to very quickly scan what you have and find it in no time. The nam­ing gives a real struc­ture to your archive. Also, it is very easy to find some­thing with the com­puter­’s built-in search function.

Tam­ar­iz, Juan – ebook – name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – ebook – name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – DVD – name_​of_​the_​publication.mp4
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – DVD – name_​of_​the_​publication.mp4
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – trick - name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf

The best thing is to start with this renam­ing of your exist­ing data right from the begin­ning, or everytime you move a new file to your archive. For me, it has become a habit when I pur­chase some­thing new for the archive. I change the file­name right when I down­load it into the appropi­ate folder.

Because I know that you want to start right away and are prob­ably too lazy to cre­ate the folder struc­ture, I have made up all that for you and you can down­load the zip-file with all the folders already set-up for use. Down­load it, extract it to your hard drive and start put­ting some stuff into it!

Down­load the struc­ture here: filesys​tem​.zip

Have fun!

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Sem­in­are sind Pop­corn für die Seele!

by

Gedanken von Robert Stacher

Sem­in­are, Work­shops, Super Prac­tice Ses­sions – sie sind das Zauber­salz in unser­er Suppe. Wo sonst würden wir alte Bekan­nte und Fre­unde tref­fen und über unser eigenes Rep­er­toire plaud­ern können? Wofür würden wir sonst unser Geld aus­geben, wenn nicht für Requis­iten und Hil­f­s­mit­tel, die kur­ze Zeit später in der Schublade oder auf eBay landen?

Ich liebe Sem­in­are! Sie sind mein per­sön­lich­er Tritt in den Hin­tern, sie sind meine Flü­gel, die mich auf mein­er Reise in den Zauber-Olymp vor­wärts tra­gen, der Treib­stoff für mein­en Motiv­a­tionsmo­tor! Das rede ich mir zumind­est ein. Denn eigent­lich bin ich ein Zauberzwerg, der ein­mal ganz gross wer­den will. Nur muss ich aufpassen, dass ich auf mein­er Insel der Seli­gen nicht von den vielen Gulliver’s zer­trampelt werde. Eines fernen Tages werde ich ganz bestim­mt mit den „unver­gleich­lichen Mys­ter­i­en des Robert Stach­er“ die Show­bühnen dieser Welt erobern und in jede Fernse­hkam­era lachen. Bis es aber soweit ist, set­ze ich mich gemüt­lich mit Fre­un­den bei einem gep­flegten Bier­chen zusam­men und lausche aufmerksam den weis­en und unant­ast­bar­en Worten des Sem­in­ar­leit­ers. Der weiss näm­lich, wie es gemacht wird. Er ist mein per­sön­lich­er Gul­li­v­er, mein Jam­ie Oliv­er der Magie. Zumind­est für diesen Abend und die näch­sten Tage.

Ich bin ein Kind des Cyber­space und dah­er in der glück­lichen Lage, in ein­er Inform­a­tions­flut zu ertrinken. Ich bekomme alles unaufge­fordert auf dem Sil­bert­ab­lett ser­viert. Ein Klick, ein Chat, ein Down­load – mehr braucht es nicht, um heutzutage ein Know-how aufzubauen und über­all mitre­den zu können. Der erlauchte Kre­is der glob­alen Insider ist eindeut­ig durch seine IP-Adresse iden­ti­fiz­ierbar. Büch­er wer­den nicht mehr gelesen, son­dern gebrowst. Zu Vernon’s Jugendzeiten wur­den Geheim­n­isse wie ein Schatz gehan­delt und nur tröp­fchen­weise in mon­atelanger, ver­trau­lich­er Briefkor­res­pondenz unter ein­er Hand­voll Fre­un­den aus­get­auscht. Aber Ver­non hatte halt weder Inter­net noch ein Handy und auch keine Sem­in­are zur Ver­fü­gung. Sonst hätte er es sich­er zu was gebracht.

Sie sehen, es man­gelt mir also sich­er nicht an Geheim­n­issen, Trick­prin­zipi­en oder sub­ti­len Vor­führfi­nessen. Der Wert mein­er Bib­lio­thek ents­pricht einem Mit­telk­lassewa­gen, meine Zauber-DVDs habe ich in unzäh­li­gen Stun­den aus lega­len Quel­len im Inter­net her­unterge­laden. Eines kann ich mit Stolz behaupten: soll­te irgend­wann unsere Zirkel-Videothek ver­brennen oder das Inter­net kaput­tge­hen – ich habe von allem ein Backup! Zukün­ftige Zaubergen­er­a­tion­en wer­den es mir danken.

Trotz alle­dem bin ich ein Ruh­el­oser auf der Suche nach dem Hei­li­gen Gral der Magie. Irgend­wo da draussen muss es den eier­le­genden Woll­milchtrick geben – ein Kun­st­stück, das meine Kolle­gen und Zuschauer in Ehr­furcht ers­tar­ren lässt und mein­en Status und mein Selbstwer­tge­fühl mit einem Mal um Poten­zen steigert. Wo ist der Trick, der mich von der Per­son zur Per­sön­lich­keit wer­den lässt? Ant­wort: in den Sem­in­ar­en dieser Welt!

Nir­gend­wo sonst bekomme ich in 2 Stun­den anschau­lich demon­striert, WAS jemanden erfol­greich gemacht hat und WARUM. Hier finde ich die Kochrezepte zur Kar­ri­ere! Jam­ie Oliv­er zeigt es mir, redet mir gut zu und macht mir Mut. Ich brauche nur noch nachzukochen und schon bald werde ich von den Massen gefeiert. Dann brauche ich meine Stand­ing Ova­tions nicht mehr durch Wortspielereien erzwin­gen, son­dern die Zuschauer wer­den vor laut­er Begeister­ung auf Ihre Stühle verzichten!

Eigent­lich nehme ich mir jedes­mal vor, die Rezepte auch wirk­lich nachzukochen. Ich möchte sehen, wie sie meinem Aud­it­or­i­um schmeck­en. Allerd­ings überkom­men mich bereits in der Zubereit­ung­s­phase gewisse Zweifel: irgend­wie hat bei Jam­ie Oliv­er alles so müh­elos und per­fekt aus­gese­hen… Und obwohl ich dies­el­ben Zutaten ver­wende sieht das fer­tige Gericht bei mir irgend­wie gar nicht so toll aus und schmeckt auch lange nicht so gut! Wie macht das der Jam­ie nur? Er wird doch wohl nicht unsag­bar viel Zeit invest­iert haben? Aus sein­en Fehlver­suchen gel­ernt haben? Oder gar sein­en Kochlöf­fel in die Hand gen­om­men haben? Herrschaften, das wäre doch wirk­lich absurd!! Nein nein, ich bin mir sich­er: er war in einem gehei­men Seminar…

Für mich steht fest: Sem­in­are sind die Kino­filme des 21. Jahrhun­derts. Mod­erne Unter­hal­tung mit Motiv­a­tionsfeel­ing, interakt­ives 3D-Hol­ly­wood mit allen wichti­gen Zutaten: Span­nung, Spass und Spiel mit einem Happy End. Sie bieten 2 Stun­den Abwechslung in meinem grauen All­tag, ich kann mich zurücklehnen und geniessen. Ich bin bereit, die Sem­in­ar­leit­er zu verehren und von ein­er idealen Vor­führ­welt zu träu­men. Und ich kann vor allem Souven­irs mit nach Hause neh­men; Magic Mer­chand­ising zur Erin­ner­ung an schöne Zeiten. Viel bess­er als Fernse­hen, You­Tube oder Face­book zusam­men! Wenn es auch noch ein Sam­melal­bum von Pan­ini gäbe, ich würde es glatt kaufen.

In Sem­in­ar­en fühle ich mich sich­er und gebor­gen, sie kom­men mit Schutzfak­t­or 50 und sind garantiert wasser­fest. Ich kann in Ruhe alles the­or­et­is­ier­en und disku­tier­en und brauche mich nicht um die lästige Prax­is küm­mern. Ich gehe viel lieber in mich als in medi­as res! Sem­in­are sind das Pop­corn für meine Seele: ein paar Funken genü­gen, die Hitze wird ent­facht und schon wird aus einem Maiskorn ein her­r­liches Pop­corn. Es gibt dabei eigent­lich nur ein­en ein­zi­gen Nachteil: wis­sen Sie, wie Pop­corn nach weni­gen Tagen schmeckt? Da ist es auf jeden Fall vorzuziehen, sich frisches Pop­corn zu machen. War­um das alte Zeugs von gestern essen, wenn ich für Nachschub sor­gen kann?

Sem­in­are wer­den niemals aus­s­ter­ben, solange Sem­in­ar­leit­er Geld und/​oder Anerken­nung brauchen und solange die Besuch­er süchtig nach Unter­hal­tung sind. Nur wer die Block­buster gese­hen hat, ist ganz vorne mit dabei und kann mitre­den. Jeder profit­iert und alle sind glücklich!

Je mehr Jahre verge­hen, desto älter werde ich anschein­end. Viel­leicht werde ich eines Tages begre­ifen, dass Sem­in­are keine Abkürzung auf dem Weg zum Erfolg sind, son­dern eher Umlei­tun­gen und Baus­tel­len. Aber bis es soweit ist, besuche ich jedes Sem­in­ar und freue mich über mein kur­z­wei­liges Leben! Und soll­te meine akt­ive Zauberkar­ri­ere irgend­wann ins Stock­en ger­aten, dann wechsle ich ganz ein­fach die Seiten und gebe Sem­in­are zum Thema „Mein Leben als Sem­in­arbe­such­er“. Ich bin mir sich­er, es wer­den viele Leute kommen…

Crack­ing Magic (3) – Tools

by

IMG_7864
A quick view of my usu­al archive work­space. Everything needed here …

Now we are going to dis­cuss a couple of tools that are use­ful in build­ing our archive. These are not many and may dif­fer from what you have been using already. Again, very few and simple categories:

com­puter
note taking
storage

Com­puter
In these days almost every­body owns a smart­phone, tab­let, note­book or oth­er com­puter. Stor­age is easy and the capa­cit­ies and pos­sib­il­it­ies almost end­less. One of the reas­ons most of us have more stuff on our devices than we ever need. Maybe it is the greed for pos­sess­ing all that inform­a­tion and “valu­able” PDFs, DVDs, etc. That greed is an obstacle and with all that stuff the con­fu­sion and mess appear as well.

Some may say: “Yeah, but maybe I will need this some­times …” That may very well be, but NOT now in the phase of build­ing the archive! What we now need is a “blank screen”. Noth­ing more.

I have met magi­cians that have a NAS serv­er at home and they showed me how they could con­nect to that from every­where (in fact, they showed this to me in the break of a lec­ture). They were really proud they could access all the ISOs and PDFs. But for what? Is it really neces­sary to have con­stant access to all of that per­man­ently? I don’t think so.

What we need is a very simple digit­al stor­age sys­tem for our per­son­al archive. I use an old 13″ Mac­Book. All my per­son­al archive and work­ing mater­i­al is there. All the magic and ideas that are rel­ev­ant for me. One place, one device. No more. Of course, the con­tent is backed up in the cloud and on an extern­al hard drive. But the tool I am work­ing with every day is this simple old notebook.

I updated and installed a 500 GB SSD drive plus 8 GB RAM. That is enough speed and power to work with it com­fort­ably. But even a smal­ler net­book would be fine, provided you have some WiFi and access to some stor­age device, in order to exchange the data.

The whole point is to have a sep­ar­ate device for the archive, which has noth­ing to do with your reg­u­lar com­puter peri­phery. The idea behind that is to save time by not being dis­trac­ted by the fea­ture the main com­puter has: inter­net, social media, movies, etc.

It should be small and handy, easy to under­stand and oper­ate and (most import­ant) free of dis­trac­tion. And it should be small and port­able, yet have a prop­er key­board for the input. The reas­on for this is that when I read a book, or work on some­thing, I will have it right besides me, in order to imme­di­ately take notes or write down ideas. When I travel, I have it usu­ally with me. There­fore, it should be as small and light­weight as pos­sible, but still oper­able like a bet­ter typewriter.

The oth­er argu­ment for hav­ing an extra device is to retain the gen­er­al view of the archive. I know that all of my magic stuff is on the device and I know where it is on the device. No oth­er magic routines, PDFs or whatever on any oth­er device. That makes my archive clean, eas­ily search­able and effi­cient to work with. No time wasted search­ing for stuff. It is all in one place.

Soft­ware
I don’t use too much soft­ware for my archive. The most import­ant is the soft­ware that is used for tak­ing my notes. I found that Sim­ple­n­ote is per­fect for me. It is (as the name implies) VERY simple in all aspects: the UI is only bare­bones, text is without any fancy styl­ing and addi­tion­al fea­tures, it has full text index­ing and the notes can be tagged.

One of the biggest advant­ages is that it is very quick. Mak­ing a new note is just one click and that’s it. Type your con­tent and for­get about the rest. The moment you type it in, it is auto­mat­ic­ally saved. It is a work­horse and designed for real-world every­day use.

The con­tent can be stored in the cloud (while it is saved loc­ally as well), which means you are pro­tec­ted against loos­ing the data. Sim­ple­n­ote is free and a really good, uncom­plic­ated choice. Go here to their web­site and see for your­self. Sim­ple­n­ote is freeware.

Because my eBook col­lec­tion got massive in the past years, I decided to pur­chase the soft­ware Devon­Think, which is a very pro­fes­sion­al solu­tion. But you don’t really need this now for the begin­ning. In the begin­ning, it is suf­fi­cient to put your PDFs into your file sys­tem (more about this in a later post).

One thing you will need is a prop­er text edit­or. I don’t use Word, but the free­ware altern­at­ive Lib­reOf­fice. This is com­pletely suf­fi­cient for doing almost any task. It is quick, ver­sat­ile and con­nects you with the Word-world. But then, I don’t use it to often.

For typ­ing my scripts, I have been using the CeltX soft­ware for years. it is very com­fort­able and use­ful. All is format­ted, I don’t have to think whilst writ­ing and there are lots of addi­tion­al, use­ful fea­tures (like note tak­ing, index cards) that make writ­ing a stage play or script a breeze.

And, of course, you will prob­ably need a PDF-Read­er, like Acrobat Read­er or some­thing else, in order to access the PDFs. I decided to cut down the require­ments to the abso­lute min­im­um. Most of the mod­ern note­books and oper­at­ing sys­tems like LINUX have everything I need for my archive already on board.

My little archive com­puter is used only for

stor­ing digit­al pub­lic­a­tions (PDF, eBooks, DVD, audio)
tak­ing notes
writ­ing scripts
the invent­ory list
some research

I delib­er­ately do not have any fancy soft­ware installed. Just the very basics, to not get con­fused and dis­trac­ted from the main tasks con­cern­ing my archive.

So – get that old note­book back from your kids (that you gave them because it was “sooo good” and enough for them). It is more than adequate for your per­son­al archive task … 🙂

Finally: in order to elim­in­ate any tempta­tion, delete all data on that note­book that has noth­ing to do with the archive. You want to start with a blank and maid­en place for your archive!

How­ever, remem­ber that the com­puter is NOT the most import­ant part of the archive. But a use­ful and timesav­ing one.