Alexander de Cova

In the magic com­munity arrises from time to time the top­ic of ‘being a cre­at­or’ or ‘cre­ations’. So – time to take a short look at what cre­ation, cre­at­ors or ‘being cre­at­ive’ could mean.

If we look it up in the dic­tion­ary, the res­ults will be some­what like this:

To cre­ate:

To bring into existence.

To invest with a new form, office, or rank.

To pro­duce or bring about by a course of action or behavior.

To pro­duce through ima­gin­at­ive skill.

To make or bring into exist­ence some­thing new.

In magic, we often reduce the term ‘cre­ate’ some­what and many think, a cre­ation is only about put­ting out some­thing com­pletely new. Some­thing that has nev­er before seen. Often we con­fuse and mix the terms ‘cre­ation’ with ‘inven­tion’. In my view, this is sort of nar­row-minded. While the lat­ter deals exclus­ively with the nev­er-been-before, the former is much broader.

To cre­ate some­thing doesn’t neces­sar­ily mean it has to be abso­lutely new and nev­er before been there. Cre­at­ing some­thing can also mean to take some­thing exist­ing and chan­ging it or adding some­thing worth­while or import­ant to it.

Cre­at­ing can also mean to take an exist­ing trick and to write an ori­gin­al script or present­a­tion for it. Some very good tricks are only so good because of the new slant on the present­a­tion a cer­tain per­son gave them. Before, they were mere little puzzles, until someone thought about how to elev­ate it from the puzzle level into the mir­acle class. So, this per­son actu­ally cre­ated something.

To cre­ate some­thing has to do with con­trib­ut­ing some­thing own.

A recent example is Matt Johnson’s peek envel­ope (After Dark). The under­ly­ing prin­ciple (that spe­cial envel­ope) is not new. In fact, I have such (switch­ing) envel­opes in my archive for many years. In former times they were used solely for switch­ing bil­lets, bills, cards or as a quad­ruple out (with double facers in each compartment).

But then Matt added some cer­tain extras to the envel­ope, which trans­formed it into a gim­mick which enables you to peek an inform­a­tion writ­ten on a busi­ness card which was inser­ted into the envelope.

So, he didn’t invent a new prin­ciple (the envel­opes did exists before), but, by adding cer­tain import­ant details, he cre­ated a ‘new’ peek envel­ope. As a mat­ter of fact, because he did this, he can be called a creator.

If you are inter­ested in this envel­ope, go to his web­site at: http://​www​.urb​an​decep​tion​.com/​a​f​t​e​r​d​ark. It is worth the twenty bucks he charges.

Maybe in magic we could take some heat off this top­ic and omit the use­less and often embar­rass­ing dis­cus­sions, if we tackle the cre­ation prob­lem from this angle, with a bit more open­ness and tolerance.

Every­body who con­trib­utes some­thing own to some­thing known, can be called a cre­at­or, the same as the per­son that pro­duces some­thing entirely new.

Cre­ation is not about some­thing new, but some­thing unique and from one’s own soul and brain.

Pass it on!

Recently visu­al­ist Will Tsai per­formed his ver­sion of the Mat­rix effect on AGT. As it could be fore­seen, it got a tre­mend­ous reac­tion on the vari­ous social media and magic forums.

The main point of dis­cus­sion is without a doubt the ques­tion wheth­er this routine could or should be labeled as magic or not. Obvi­ously, the table used does all the work. Some people com­pared it to ‘play­ing’ a play­er piano or instru­ment on stage, fak­ing the actu­al play­ing a musi­cian has to do on his (real) instrument.

In a cer­tain way, this is true. There is no actu­al sleight-of-hand on Will’s side. The effects are brought through the mech­an­ic­al table and his work (which he did per­fectly) was to syn­chron­ize his hand actions and move­ments with the res­ults of his mech­an­ic­al table.

I don’t mind (as a magi­cian) to use gim­micks. We all did and do. It has always been done. Just take a look at the old mech­an­ic­al tables with all the mech­an­isms, trap­doors and oth­er gim­micks built inside. See the mech­an­ic­al cups for the cups and balls pick­ing up the small balls or pro­du­cing them. See all the gim­micks that have been inven­ted to replace sleight-of-hand in the miser’s dream effect. Many times, the use of gim­micks has actu­ally improved an effect, made it stronger.

There is noth­ing to be said against the use of these gim­micks, IF they are built into the routine in an intel­li­gent way and used there in such a way that the spec­tat­ors have no idea that a gim­mick could be used.

Ideally, this is (was) done by mix­ing the gim­mick with the sleight-of-hand. So in Will’s routine, he first star­ted with the cards and the coins and went on to per­form a (admit­tedly super clean) ver­sion of the Mat­rix effect. He could have used a simple (or more elab­or­ated) pure sleight-of-hand ver­sion of this, but didn’t. But this doesn’t mat­ter, because what the audi­ence sees is a Mat­rix with coins and cards, and they assume it is done by him, using sleight-of-hand. That is because he handles the cards, puts them onto the coins, etc. With each move there ‘could’ have been some­thing done by him, but no one ever saw some­thing. So far, so good.

Now for the prob­lem­at­ic part. He went on to the second phase, repeat­ing the Mat­rix effect, where the coins gath­er and travel back to their places – but this time there are no cards and his hands are way above the coins, don’t even touch­ing them. The trans­lo­ca­tions hap­pen in full view.

Sure this looks like trick pho­to­graphy, and some folks even came to the con­clu­sion that video edit­ing and cam­era tricks were used in his performance!

He topped it all by chan­ging the four coins into rose petals, singly and in full view, again with his hands not com­ing near to the coins/​petals. A beau­ti­ful effect idea, but the trans­form­a­tions looked a bit mechanical.

For me, this is an unne­ces­sary over­load, giv­ing away the secrets of his mar­velous mech­an­ic­al table. Had he put in some (even very tiny) ‘fake’ moves, or at least covered the coins with his hands (espe­cially in the chan­ging into petals sequence), then everything would have been much more mys­tic­al. He could have shown the hands to be totally empty after each pas­sage, and the mys­tery would even have heightened. Nobody would think of the table being the reas­on for the ‘magic’.

It is a pity that now even lay per­sons can eas­ily come to the solu­tion that the table is gim­micked and does the work. There are even You­tube clips out already, explain­ing in detail the mech­an­ic­al vari­ations. The inter­net is fast and a TV-format like the AGT has a wide reach and media cov­er­age and pub­li­city. Means that quite a lot of people get this inform­a­tion in a very short time.

The routine was a big chance to cre­ate an incred­ible Mat­rix routine and incred­ible magic. The old­timers knew that it is harm­ful to magic to present mech­an­ic­al won­ders ‘pure’ and always used gim­micks in com­bin­a­tion with genu­ine sleight-of-hand techniques.

Some­times it is no good going too far and cre­at­ing (by mech­an­ic­al means) some­thing which seems abso­lutely impossible and screams for a tech­nic­al solu­tion in the minds of the spec­tat­ors. For them, once they come to the con­clu­sion that a tricky table is used, the magic and the ‘power’ of the magi­cian is gone. The whole thing is reduced to a mech­an­ic­al puzzle. It is explain­able. The feel­ing of magic should that there is no explan­a­tion possible.

So unfor­tu­nately the beau­ti­ful concept and tech­nic­al solu­tion is more or less reduced to a ‘mech­an­ic­al gim­mick demon­stra­tion’, which was fine when Kempelen demon­strated his ‘Chess Play­ing Turk’. But Kempelen openly stated that it is a machine and used magic­al tech­niques to hide the human secret. Same with the auto­matons Jean Eugene Robert-Houd­in put on dis­play. They were openly dis­played as mech­an­ic­al marvels.

Magic is magic, and mech­an­ic­al toys are mech­an­ic­al toys. If I had to mix them meth­od wise, I would always at least pre­tend to ‘do something’.

I would fake to do some sleight of hand.

Pass it on!

This is a little extra for an ACR, that can be used before reveal­ing that the card rose up to the top. To begin with, the ambi­tious card is on top (without the spec­tat­ors know­ing this, of course). The per­former shows the top three cards not to be the signed card. After that it appears back on top. Take a look at the video clip, which shows all the action.

After the usu­al false shuffles and cuts, the first turnover is from Gary Ouellet’s book ‘Close-up Illu­sions’ and is called ‘Not on the top, not on the bot­tom’. This is a very inter­est­ing and good book, by the way. Lots of prac­tic­al stuff in there.

After the double card is face-up in the left hand, the next card is pushed to the side and turned over with the help of the double. It is then taken right onto the double card.

The next card is turned over with the help of these two cards. Here a small ‘acci­dent’ hap­pens and the card drops onto the table. This must not be over­played. The ‘drop’ serves to motiv­ate giv­ing the two face-up cards tem­por­ar­ily onto the deck, to free the hand in order to pick up the card on the table.

This trans­fer is an ‘action in trans­it’ and the focus is on the card on the table. The two (three really) cards are placed into pos­i­tion to per­form a sort of Ascanio’s ‘float­ing double lift’: the cards rest on the middle fin­ger and when the fin­gers are slightly opened, the three cards ‘ride’ on top of the deck to the side. Mean­while the oth­er hand has picked up the card on the table and places it face-up onto the three cards on the deck, which are then all turned face down. The selec­tion is on the top.

The video clip should make all this clear. Import­ant is that the float­ing double is per­formed in the off-beat moment whilst pick­ing up the card on the table. Cas­u­al­ness is the key here. The hand­ling appears very open and no double lifts should be suspected.

Cheat­er version

Before put­ting the ambi­tious card on top of the deck face down and before the shuffle, put a bit of saliva onto the back of the top card. This will help keep­ing the double togeth­er dur­ing the ‘float­ing’.

Pass it on!

When Len­nart Green put out his com­mer­cial routine called ‘Stolen Cards’, it proved to be an imme­di­ate hit in the card magic world. Like many, I imme­di­ately bought a set. Without his inven­tion and routine, this humble offer­ing would­n’t exist.

The trick is a very strong one and fairly easy to per­form. With this present­a­tion, I changed a couple of things, which make the whole routine more logic­al (at least in my mind). It is based on a gambling theme, lucky cards and money: all things that belong togeth­er. Now we have a com­pletely self-work­ing card trick, which registers very well with laymen.

I intro­duced three bills with pre­dic­tions writ­ten on the backs. The atten­tion which is on the bills helps to cam­ou­flage the actu­al work­ings of the trick.

I also changed the deck to a PRISM-Deck, which is avail­able through Card Shark. In my ver­sion the final effect is the col­or change of the backs of all cards, which is a strong effect indeed.

First, you have to decide on two force cards. I always use the 9 of Clubs and the Jack of Dia­monds. Remove these cards from the PRISM-Deck and replace them with two cards from a gam­ing themed deck, such as a ‘Golden Nug­get’ deck or some­thing similar.

The Jack of Dia­monds is on the second pos­i­tion from the face, the 9 of Clubs is on the back of the deck. That way you can put the deck into its appro­pri­ate card case and it will appear as if all the cards have the same back design when you take the cards out of the case.

For the pre­dic­tions, take three dol­lar bills and write the pre­dic­tions on the back of each of them: 9 of Clubs, Jack of Dia­monds and on the third one you’re write ‘The two cards match.’

Present­a­tion is very simple. Put one off the bills in front of spec­tat­or. We will call them spec­tat­ors A, B and C. Spec­tat­or A gets the 9 of Clubs pre­dic­tion, B gets the Jack of Dia­monds and C gets the ‘match’ pre­dic­tions. Of course, the pre­dic­tions are put face-down in front of the spectators.

Take out the deck from the case, so the spec­tat­ors get a flash of the back card. They will assume it is a nor­mal deck with the gambling-themed back design.

Turn the deck face up and spread it on the table. Every­body can see it is just a nor­mal deck of cards. Gath­er up the spread and hold the deck in a phase of deal­ing position.

Approach spec­tat­or A and start deal­ing the cards singly into a pile onto the table. But here you do you the first two cards from the face of the deck as a double (like a double deal). This pre­vents the spec­tat­ors to see the face of the Jack of Dia­monds tour early. The Jack of Dia­monds thus becomes the lower­most card of the face up pack­et on the table.

When spec­tat­or A stops you, you take his bill and put it right onto the face up pile on the table. The bill will pro­trude over the cards, which is exactly what we want.

Imme­di­ately put the rest of the deck right on top of the bill on the tabled pack­et. This will put the 9 of Clubs dir­ectly over the bill with the ‘9 of Clubs’ prediction.

At this moment you will ring in some mis­dir­ec­tion and ask spec­tat­or C to take up his bill (but do not show the pre­dic­tion to the oth­er spec­tat­ors) and read the pre­dic­tion on his bill for him­self. This will put the atten­tion on the spec­tat­or and divert the atten­tion away from the actu­al con­di­tion of the cards.

Now pick up the whole deck from the table and turn your atten­tion towards spec­tat­or B. As before, start deal­ing cards singly face up from the face of the deck onto the table, until the spec­tat­or stops you. At this point put spec­tat­or B’s bill on the the face-up pile on the table and put the cards in your hands right on top of it. This will bring the Jack of Dia­monds right above the second bill.

Again you are using some mis­dir­ec­tion to cov­er the actu­al pos­i­tion of the bills and the cards. For this you will use once again the help of spec­tat­or C.

Have him read aloud and show the pre­dic­tion on his bill. After he has done this, spread the deck on the table in a wide rib­bon spread. Remove the bills and the cards dir­ectly above them out of the spread and push them for­ward on the table. The pre­dic­tion reads ‘The cards will match’ and you show that they indeed match with the pre­dic­tions writ­ten on the under­side of the bills!

Then you say that the cards also match in anoth­er way: Turn over the two cards on the table and show the match­ing backs. This will get a moan reac­tion, but this is exactly what you want.

Turn over the PRISM-Deck on the table and show all the dif­fer­ent colored backs: the two selec­ted cards are indeed the only two cards with match­ing backs in the whole deck!

That is the trick and everything can now be examined.

I enclose a clip of a (very spe­cial) per­form­ance of this trick, which I gave as a present to the magi­cians attend­ing the recent magic con­ven­tion in Ger­many. The per­form­ance is in Ger­man lan­guage, but it shows the hand­ling quite clearly.

Spring flowers have been a top­ic in magic for more than 100 years. Ever since Buati­er de Kolta inven­ted them, they have been a fixed com­pon­ent in magician’s rep­er­toires. It is sad that the flowers avail­able from deal­ers look just out­right crappy and cheap.

One source I know of which deals with bet­ter look­ing spring flowers and how to make them, is a manu­script from Pro­fess­or Spell­bind­er in the Wizard’s Journ­al (the spe­cif­ic art­icle is called ‘How to make spring flowers more real­ist­ic’). This manu­script is worth a look up for every­body who plans to use arti­fi­cial flowers in his act.

The Pro­fess­or describes some ways to make truly astound­ing and real­ist­ic spring flowers, using arti­fi­cial flowers for the con­struc­tion in com­bin­a­tion with some parts of the tra­di­tion­al spring flowers from the dealers.

Here are some more inspir­a­tions for spring flowers, which could let these old props shine in a more real­ist­ic way. Instead of using feath­ers and cheaply fol­ded tis­sue paper, try using the more mod­ern Ori­gami folds in con­struct­ing the flowers.

Of course, cer­tain things in the con­struc­tions would have to accord­ingly changed. As well, as steel spring (which could be taken from the com­mer­cially avail­able flowers) should be added.

Her an instruc­tion on how to fold a beau­ti­ful Ori­gami flower, which can be squeezed flat and looks fant­ast­ic, if you use the right multi-colored paper:

And here some beau­ti­ful thing, which could be made even big­ger (with more flowers) and in multi-col­or. This pop-up card is suit­able to be built into all flat things and makes for a beau­ti­ful display:

The samples giv­en here work fine, espe­cially the fold­ing card with the three-dimen­sion­al flower bou­quet in the middle sug­gest many uses in magic tricks and is very easy to construct.

So I hope this thoughts will bring back that beau­ti­ful effects with flowers into nowadays magic.

Pass it on!

Magi­cians tend to over-eval­u­ate the import­ance of per­fec­tion. They try to achieve per­fec­tion in their tricks and moves, and most of the times some­thing oth­er very import­ant (present­a­tion) falls behind. Ever since Dai Ver­non brought that ›per­fec­tion‹ to the atten­tion of magi­cians, this mys­ter­i­ous thing cir­cu­lated around the magic circles …

There is a very good say­ing: ›Per­fec­tion is for begin­ners. Good enough is what the real pros aim for.‹

I learned this les­son only after years of strug­gling in magic. How many times did I try to come up with a valu­able and per­fect trick, routine or gim­mick. How many times had I built some­thing, tried to improve it and then thrown it away, because of all the atten­tion to the little details that should make the per­fec­tion actu­ally ruined everything.

Worst of all the feel­ings that were left in me: being a looser, not being able to fin­ish it per­fectly, and so on.

Why per­fec­tion is bad most of the times

»A true per­fec­tion­ist is always look­ing to get bet­ter but real­izes that per­fec­tion is unattainable.«

The Prin­ciple That »Done« Is Bet­ter Than »Per­fect and Nev­er Completed«.

Recently I found an art­icle on the inter­net about ‘tips on per­fec­tion’ (I don’t remem­ber the source, unfor­tu­nately). I will give these 11 points as a food for thought:

1. Per­fec­tion­ism doesn’t have to con­flict with »sweat­ing the details«. It’s nat­ur­al to assume that just giv­ing up on per­fec­tion­ism means you’ll no longer have any atten­tion to detail. But that’s absurd. There’s a dif­fer­ence between aware­ness of detail and expect­ing per­fec­tion in order to fin­ish some­thing. It’s still pos­sible – in fact desir­able – to stay on top of things to the level in which you need to in order to ensure a high-qual­ity out­put, but this doesn’t mean you get to be unreas­on­able with respect to the over­all outcome.

2. Striv­ing for per­fec­tion means you’ll only do 10% of the things you want to do. When you focus on fin­ish­ing one thing before you can start anoth­er, you’re bound­ing your cre­ativ­ity and pro­ductiv­ity. If you spend too much time »per­fect­ing« some­thing, you’re likely doing it at the expense of mov­ing on to the next thing.

3. Per­fec­tion­ists have high­er blood pres­sure, anxi­ety, and men­tal health prob­lems. This almost goes without say­ing and has been backed up in numer­ous stud­ies, but if you expect per­fec­tion, you’re going to have high­er stress levels which will affect your over­all men­tal and phys­ic­al health. Relax­a­tion, med­it­a­tion, and »slow days« are hard to come by for people who are always push­ing to make everything perfect.

4. Just doing some­thing over noth­ing puts you in an élite group of people. In so many cases, just doing some­thing is enough. Sign­ing up for a class even if it’s not the per­fect time, turn­ing in an assign­ment even though you know you could have done more, etc. There are hun­dreds of examples where the major­ity of people will agon­ize until things are per­fect and nev­er do any­thing at all, while you can get some­thing »good enough« out for the world to see.

5. Per­fect is the enemy of good. I love this Voltaire quote and use it in soft­ware devel­op­ment all the time. It’s too easy to strive for per­fec­tion and lose sight of the fact that you’re, in many cases, doing this at a huge over­all cost.

6. Fail­ing fast can shorten your learn­ing cycle. Some­times it’s best to take an iter­at­ive approach and ignore per­fec­tion as a means to learn. »Fail fast« is a fam­ous Sil­ic­on Val­ley max­im when it comes to new busi­nesses, because if you’re going to fail, it’s best to do it early at a time when you have the resources to turn it around. If you’re striv­ing to be per­fect, you could fail when it’s too late to anything.

7. Focus­ing on per­fec­tion­ism takes your focus away from the things that really mat­ter. If you’re doing any­thing you can to per­fec­tion, you could be miss­ing out on your top three focus areas com­pletely. Bal­ance is a good thing.

8. Just doing some­thing will start to expose shal­low fears. Sim­il­ar to fail­ing fast, you may not know what you fear until you give some­thing a shot. You thought you were afraid to fail, but maybe you’re really afraid to suc­ceed. The soon­er you can identi­fy your fears you can put meas­ures in place to work through them.

9. Col­lab­or­a­tion and per­fec­tion don’t mix. Have you ever tried to work with oth­er people on some­thing but first deman­ded your con­tri­bu­tion to be »per­fect«? That’s a sure-fire way to a failed part­ner­ship. Col­lab­or­a­tion requires iter­a­tion and being open to feed­back in both dir­ec­tions – if you’re shoot­ing to be per­fect, or if you believe you are, you’re not going to play well with others.

10. It isn’t what you do all or some of the time, it’s what you do most of the time. Some­thing I live by which I first read in Body for Life by Bill Phil­lips. There’s nev­er a »per­fect time«, and you can nev­er execute some­thing »per­fectly«. But if you’re able to per­form well most of the time, it can make up for the times when you’re not »per­fect«. Per­fec­tion isn’t pos­sible, but spend­ing more of your time doing some­thing well is.

11. Per­fec­tion is impossible. Every phys­ic­al thing is in a con­stant state of change, so even if you think something’s per­fect, it won’t be per­fect for long. Give it up.

Pass it on!