Alexander de Cova

Some­times You­tube is good for research­ing and stor­ing his­tory. This clip is a very nice com­pil­a­tion of rare foot­age of Ed Marlo. See­ing it reminds me how good they were back then, espe­cially Marlo him­self. Impressive.

I have no idea who put that out­stand­ing col­lec­tion togeth­er and uploaded it, but then I would like to thank this unknown per­son for doing it. This should also stop those magi­cians claim­ing Marlo was only the­or­et­ic­al and could­n’t do his stuff.

Won­der­ful thoughts from Seth God­in arrived in my inbox. Most of what he thinks up and writes is very use­ful to me, as a start­ing point for my own train of thoughts. Of course, I tend to see it magic wise (quote):

Writ­ing the first draft of a com­puter pro­gram is easy. It’s the test­ing that sep­ar­ates the pro­fes­sion­al from a mere hack. Test and then, of course, make it better.

The same thing is true with: Res­taur­ant recipes, Essays, Web user inter­face, Cus­tom­er ser­vice, Man­age­ment tech­niques, Licens­ing agree­ments, Strategy, Rela­tion­ships of all kinds.

The reas­on it’s so dif­fi­cult to test and improve is that it requires you to acknow­ledge that your ori­gin­al plan was­n’t per­fect. And to have the humil­ity and care to go ahead and fix it.

No fair announ­cing that you’re good at start­ing things. The world is look­ing for people who are good at pol­ish­ing them until they work.

So true, and so valu­able for magic. Maybe we also should acknow­ledge that fact of life, change our usu­al believes and ded­ic­ate ourselves to test­ing and thereby improv­ing our routines, tricks, moves and sleights.

Too many magi­cians stop­ping too early to think (accord­ing to Ver­non) and too little magi­cians dar­ing to test their work (accord­ing to God­in). But isn’t it that what the great mas­ters of our art did for dec­ades to ‘pol­ish’ their routines instead of con­tinu­ously invent­ing unfin­ished tricks? Isn’t it that what we appre­ci­ate in routines that are ‘smooth as a silk’?

After years of unsuc­cess­ful search­ing for prop­er knives sets and not find­ing them, I decided to go for myself and make them up. Here is the pro­ced­ure, which will give you some nice knives and sets in any col­or com­bin­a­tion you might want.

First of all, I use some of the cheap imit­a­tion knives from China. They are basic­ally ripp-offs of the clas­sic Enar­doe knives, but they work well here, because they are very cheaply made and you can eas­ily remove the handles, spray paint them and glue them back to the knife. You could get them here.

After hav­ing sep­ar­ate all the parts (which is quite easy because of the cheap glue and sloppy work­man­ship they use) everything is cleaned from the glue. Then I spray painted the parts in the col­ors I wanted.

Last step is to assemble them back again in the desired col­or com­bin­a­tions (using prop­er glue this time). Ready for all the fancy and exot­ic knife routines!

Who said cop­ies are bad? They only give you extra work and trouble re-build­ing them into the prop­er thing …

Recently I found again a per­form­ance clip of Spain’s great Cam­illo Vazquez. Still think this routine has ‘some­thing’. Some lovely moves and sub­tleties in there.

Amaz­ing what can be done to that ‘Dizzy Dom­in­oes’ trick that Tommy van Dommelen inven­ted and Ken Brooke mar­keted in the 70ties. Great handling.

Also the dice stack­ing routine strikes me. There are two little things in there that are rally clev­er. Some­times Cam­illo fin­ished with the pro­duc­tion of a whis­key glass (full and unpre­pared) from under­neath the cup. That was the ver­sion I saw him per­form at the ‘Munich Magisch Con­ven­tion’ in 1981 and I was com­pletely blown away.

Wish we’d see more magic of this kind these days. What an awe­some per­former, what style and eleg­ance. Cool!

When I saw this, I only asked myself: “Is any­body out there actu­ally per­form­ing it?” I mean, sure, there went quite a lot of build­ing into it, but then? I know Tora is build­ing and invent­ing a lot of stuff and some is really nice made. But then I doubt wheth­er this style of magic is the best in 2016 …

But could­n’t he have taken the time and energy and inves­ted into a prop that makes sense nowadays? Nobody is using such a radio (which to me looks more like a dec­or­ated shoe box) and the only place for such a thing might be in a Mickey Mouse com­ic film.

What com­pletely escapes me is the con­nec­tion between a book and a radio (along with that strange hand move­ments used for dis­play­ing sheets of paper).

Come on, guys, we have 2016, haven’t we? 🙂

https://​www​.you​tube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​o​d​y​b​g​I​9​d​R14

Finally, here is the full ver­sion of my switch­ing concept, using an unpre­pared glass box (you could even use a nor­mal glass for that). Jon Allen has built his ‘Par­agon’ effect on this one. It is the grand daddy of them all … 🙂

A word on copy­ing: When I ori­gin­ally released this, we (Chris Wasshuber and me) sold it for 5.00 EUR. As soon as it was out, some bas­tards put it onto their file serv­ers and even sold it! And I have seen people claim­ing it as theirs. Then there were some idi­ots accus­ing Jon Allen of rip­ping this one off from me, which is not true, because Jon asked me in writ­ten form for the rights to use it in Par­agon. And, of course, I gave him per­mis­sion. Mute, you ‘all know­ing inter­net magic-police’ people. 🙂

I have long been think­ing about this digit­al steal­ing and how to pre­vent it. There is actu­ally no way—except for the cre­at­or giv­ing away his stuff for free? At least then, it makes no sense for the copy cats to dis­trib­ute cop­ies. What a sh**** ‘magic­al’ world we live in. I hate being ripped off!