Alexander de Cova

Recently I wanted to upgrade an addi­tion­al SSD on my 27″ iMac. So I searched in the inter­net for some instruc­tion­al videos, which I found (see video below).

https://​www​.you​tube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​0​3​L​g​4​I​g​J​d04

Some­thing dawned on me. With this really excel­lent instruc­tion video, I was able to add the SSD drive. But—and that is much more important—I actu­ally learned a lot about the inner work­ings of my iMac. I now know much bet­ter what is going on behind the glass screen and why everything is as it is. It does­n’t make my writ­ings any quick­er, but strangely I feel more com­pet­ent in using the computer.

Would­n’t it be of bene­fit for us in magic, if we first com­pletely dis­as­sembled and then reas­sembled every gim­mick or prop? That way, we would gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the inner work­ings, and that would undoubtedly improve the way we handle the thing.

Of course, people who build their own props nat­ur­ally do have that advantage …

This top­ic has been around for dec­ades and many times you will hear that expres­sion ‘old but gold’. Most of the times there is the recom­mend­a­tion to ‘just dig into the old lit­er­at­ure’, because it is there where you will find the hid­den treasures.

That may well be right, but the prob­lem is where exactly start to ‘dig’. There are thou­sands of thou­sands of books, magazines and book­lets to choose from. So, where to start?

I will now explain the way I tackled this prob­lem. Keep in mind that these are only my per­son­al thoughts and it is my way to go, based on the exper­i­ences I had. They might be use­ful for oth­er per­sons as well.

Truth is, that you will end up search­ing and search­ing, find­ing not too much really worth your time and energy, because you will get lost and bur­ied under­neath the amount of mater­i­al you find. Most of the time the ‘research’ is noth­ing more than an inter­est­ing (but time con­sum­ing) read. The point is that you have to know exactly where to look and which authors are interesting.

Luck­ily, in these times we have such great help from our com­puters. Every­one with a comp has an invalu­able tools at his hands and can build up a per­son­al lib­rary or archive. The most import­ant point is to have or build a sys­tem that makes sure you find what you want.

The major­ity of the rel­ev­ant lit­er­at­ure these days is avail­able in PDF format which are indexed. You can eas­ily search for a cer­tain top­ic and the comp will bring up all the cor­res­pond­ing PDFs, if you have the right soft­ware to do this. The advant­age of the elec­tron­ic books and magazines is the fact that you don’t have to store the huge amount of phys­ic­al books in your home. In the case of the magazines and peri­od­ic­als this can be massive.

In my case, I built my archive around the soft­ware DEVON­think, which is avail­able for almost all plat­forms. I am aware that the pro ver­sion (in which an OCR mod­ule is incor­por­ated) is not that cheap, but on the long haul it pays back. Once you start work­ing with that soft­ware and put­ting in one PDF after the oth­er, you will be amazed how effi­cient and quick your researches will be. Adding new books to it is a breeze and the index­ing is done automatically.

Now for the sources. In order to com­pile a per­son­al work­ing lib­rary, you’ll have to some­where get the PDFs. Luck­ily, there are per­sons who have done that work for years already. There are people like Denis Behr that have built a com­pre­hens­ive data­base for search­ing for many years. Or there are people like Chriss Wasshuber, whose www​.lybrary​.com has estab­lished itself as one of the num­ber one places to go, if you search ebooks and PDFs on magic. Wasshuber­’s col­lec­tion is vast and will make you happy for many years. So I sug­gest you start there.

How to know what to search for
The main prob­lem is to know where to start and what to search for. Many times people ask me for a sort of ‘list’ with all the sources where the good­ies are hid­den. The prob­lem is, that this list would be enorm­ous and would­n’t make too much sense. Many dream of hav­ing such a list, going through the books and magazines men­tioned there and then have the holy grail. Besides, that task would take years.

The reas­on for this demand is usu­ally that the magi­cian is only seek­ing for some­thing ‘new’ (even if this means it is actu­ally old, but unknown to the oth­ers). He wants some stuff to show to the oth­ers that appears to be ‘new’ and fresh. But that is not the right approach. It is like going onto the ocean for fish­ing, but not know­ing which fish one wants and where. It is end­less and on the long run frus­trat­ing, lead­ing to more or less nothing.

The more effi­cient way is to focus on your cur­rent magic­al prob­lem. You will have to know exactly what you want and what your prob­lem is. Focus­sing is para­mount. If you don’t, you will get lost in the ocean of inform­a­tion avail­able (and it is an abyss). If you take a magazine like Genii, which spans over forty years, then you can ima­gine the amount of inform­a­tion that is con­tained in there. But there is no com­puter soft­ware that is able to pick the ‘gold dust’ out for you. You will have to do it your­self. That is the reas­on why you should have a plan of what to look for.

The thing I real­ised over the years is that the amount of ‘addi­tion­al’ inform­a­tion, that is pro­duced in research­ing a cer­tain top­ic is vast. If you search out for ‘col­or chan­ging silk’, for example, you will be sur­prised of how much addi­tion­al stuff is emer­ging! Stuff you did­n’t think of when you star­ted your ini­tial search. To keep track of that addi­tion­al stuff alone is a monu­ment­al task.

The secret in build­ing such a lib­rary is to keep it small and humble in the begin­ning and (maybe more import­ant) to early start spe­cial­ising. It makes no sense to dive into illu­sion plan sys­tems and stage illu­sions, when your primary interest is in the new­est vari­ation of the ‘mat­rix’ effect. So focus on the range of magic that is import­ant to you. From there on, start to add stuff.

Here now a few ‘begin­ner­’s recom­mend­a­tions’. This little list is by no means com­plete or pre­tends to be, but it is a worth­while start­ing point for someone who quickly and effi­ciently wants to build a sol­id per­son­al lib­rary. I per­son­ally would sug­gest you start right out with the magazines. The reas­on is that mostly in the magazines there are reviews and recom­mend­a­tions of good books and hints for where some nug­gets are hid­den. So, by read­ing care­fully through the good magazines, you will get a lot of inform­a­tion on the books, too. Anoth­er point is that so many tricks, which are repub­lished in a book, at first appeared in a magazine. Many times it is simply not neces­sary to have the book, because much of it’s con­tent was pub­lished already in the mags.

A selec­tion of magazines for the start
GENII
The Link­ing Ring
M.U.M.
ABRACADABRA
MAGIC magazine
MAGIGRAM
CLUB 71
PABULAR
OPUS
SPELLBINDER
Pall­bear­er­’s Review
EPILOGUE
THE GEN
Chap’s Scrapbook
Cen­ter tear
JINX
SPHINX
KABBALA
Magic Circular
Hugard’s Magic Monthly
APOCALYPSE
Richard’s Almanac
Magic­al Arts Journal
Arcane
Pentagram
New Pentagram
Stanyon’s Magic
The New Phoenix
The Tops
MAGICK

As you can see, this little selec­tion alone is a massive amount of work! But when you take the time to index all this, you will have a VERY good start­ing point for your archive. If everything is text-index­ing ready, the search will be quick and effi­cient. You will be sur­prised how ‘cre­at­ive’ you are and what amaz­ing mater­i­al is wait­ing for you.

Read an inter­est­ing art­icle about the inter­net (and smart­phones) killing magic. The top­ic is, of course, a real­ity we magi­cians in these times have to face. But not only we magi­cians, also the theat­er, music and all the places where there are live per­form­ances of artists. It is a change that occurred, con­cern­ing the atti­tude of today’s audiences.

To sum the art­icle up, there are a couple of ways pre­vent­ing the spec­tat­ors from ‘google­ing’ for the secret of the trick they have just seen (many do this right in the performance).

1. Do not name the trick by a name that can be found on the inter­net. Give the tricks dif­fer­ent names. If you show a Cop Cup, then do not name it Chop Cup, but call it by anoth­er name, for example call it the Hindu vase. Fool the spec­tat­ors in their Google search …
2. Per­form the ‘single trick’ effects early, and fol­low with the more elab­or­at­ing mul­tiple cli­max routines. That way, the spec­tat­ors will simply have no time start­ing a Google search.
3. Use tricks that involve many dif­fer­ent prin­ciples and meth­ods. Good are tricks that rely on subtle things and non appar­at­us tricks. Nev­er call mis­dir­ec­tion by name (it can be found on Google) but nev­er­the­less use it.
4. Stay away from tricks with the smart­phones. People know smart­phones and what they can do. Even if they don’t get the right meth­od, there are more than enough ‘tech­nic­al’ solu­tions on their minds. Use smart­phones only for the selfies with (or without) the spectators.
5. I would add a anoth­er point: Don’t do tricks which are chal­lenges to the audi­ence (or where the present­a­tion might sug­gest a chal­lenge). OK, any good trick is a chal­lenge intel­lec­tu­ally, but then people don’t like being challenged.

There is quite some­thing true in this art­icle, even if I per­son­ally don’t agree with all of it. It’s a shame we have to deal with these kind of spec­tat­ors, but then this is the world today. Most people go out there to enjoy them­selves and party, see­ing the theat­er room or the per­form­ance place merely as an exten­sion of their liv­ing room. They have the ‘power’ of the smart­phone with them and can record and com­mu­nic­ate whilst watch­ing a show. And they go there with the con­vic­tion that they are the real stars of the evening.

Years ago one went to a nice place to see the sur­round­ings, build­ings or whatever. One stood there and watched these things. In fact one even trav­elled far just to see these things. Today, most of them go to these places, turn their back to them and make a selfie (with the object in the back­ground). It is not import­ant any­more to just see that thing, but to doc­u­ment and later to show to the oth­er media mon­keys that one has been there. Self-sta­ging, no more.

So, when see­ing a magi­cian, it is not only import­ant to get a selfie with him (to later show one is import­ant ans was there), but also to find out how the tricks were done (to show the oth­er mon­keys how clev­er one is). Being fooled and con­fess­ing that in front of oth­ers is not accept­able for these individuals.

Is all this killing magic? I don’t think so. But it very often kills the atmo­sphere and feel­ing of a show. It depends on how cap­able the per­former is in con­quer­ing the situ­ation and fas­cin­at­ing the spec­tat­ors. Giv­ing them simply no time and motive for a search in Google for the trick­’s secret might be the way to go.

And to keep in mind that the atti­tude of the spec­tat­ors these days has massively changed. The major­ity of them are social-media-blurred people con­stantly cel­eb­rat­ing and re-enact­ing them­selves. Sure we can­not change that trend, but we can be aware of it and adapt our present­a­tions accordingly.

I found this one and I had com­pletely for­got­ten about it. Some exper­i­ment­a­tion with Ver­non’s Sev­en Card Monte. The setup is the same as Ver­non’s using a DF-card. Try to fig­ure it out …

Just a remind­er for this nice tech­nique, which is described in one of the Ver­non Inner Secrets of Card Magic Books. I don’t know why we should buy each and every ‘new vari­ation’. This kind of stuff in the books is more than good enough. In this demo I bring the joker from bot­tom to top, the second run is com­pletely false.

Such a great tech­nique, and—as Ver­non used to point out—a very good sub­sti­tute for the over used double cut. Mean­while one of my favor­ite over­hand false shuffle tech­niques, because I can do it without look­ing at the hands—and it is 100% surefire!

Here is some­thing for you guys, who like fid­dling around in the work­shop (although I just did this on my kit­chen table in 30 minutes). All star­ted when I read Cody Fish­er­’s bril­liant ‘Bill in Lem­on’ routine. His rou­tin­ing is excel­lent, and I love the ploy with the bor­rowed ‘tip’ (the spec­tat­or’s bill).

I could­n’t get hold of the jar Cody uses (close to impossible to get in Europe), so I had to switch mater­i­als. Here is what I came up with, it is a tip jar bowl actu­ally and it looks (and works) good. You should know Cody’s routine, oth­er­wise the whole descrip­tion will not make too much sense for you. UK read­ers will have an advant­age, because the big bowl and the plastic pint glasses come from the UK …

Get a plastic fish bowl. This is used in bars for serving drinks! Then get a sup­ply of polycar­bon­ate pint glasses. I abso­lutely love the UK, the pubs, and, of course, the pints (not only the glasses, but the con­tent as well!). Now this is great that a com­mon pub item is used in a magic trick! I found both on Amazon, a quick search for polycar­bon­ate pint glasses and plastic gold fish bowl will give the desired results..

First you will remove the bot­tom of a pint glass. I used a bore belt of appro­pri­ate dia­met­er for this, but you could use a nor­mal saw as well for this.

Then with a qual­ity epoxy glue, fix the pint glass right into the fish­bowl and let it dry thor­oughly. Next step is to remove the bot­tom of the bowl with a Dremel like tool. You will end up with a sort of milk pitch­er thing.

The idea is to wedge the lem­on with the hole side up in the pint glass, near the bottom.

Due to the fact that the polycar­bon­ate is sort of flex­ible, it will jam there safely. But you can eas­ily dis­lodge it by press­ing lightly down on it. It will fall through the ‘tun­nel’ into your hand or wherever you want it to be.

Stuff some stage money into the com­part­ment. The tip jar bowl will look like its filled up to the rim with bills. Quite decept­ive and innocent.

Go ahead. Do some­thing with this baby! 😉