Alexander de Cova

This pro­ject is loosely based on the BURNERS series, which I pub­lished in Ger­man lan­guage. The books will enable access to my mater­i­al for the Eng­lish speak­ing world. Besides some scattered sets of lec­ture notes, a few issues of the SCRAPBOOK magazine and a few DVDs, there has­n’t been much of a detailed and com­plete col­lec­tion of my updated mater­i­al in Eng­lish lan­guage so far.

The release of the first book of this series is sched­uled for late sum­mer 2017. It is a soft­cov­er book, con­tain­ing some of my best and most prac­tic­al mater­i­al. It cov­ers magic from all realms: close-up, cards, stand-up, stage, men­tal­ism and more. You will also get a couple of the­or­et­ic­al art­icles, ram­blings and instruc­tions for build­ing the props neces­sary for some routines.

Each volume is about 150 pages, richly illus­trated with pho­to­graphs and line draw­ings. And yes – it feels and reads like my actu­al per­son­al note­books! It will be avail­able through a couple of respec­ted dealers.

Finally, I found a ring that is per­fectly suited for these count­less ring/​rope routines. Finally a ring the spec­tat­ors will recog­nize and know what it is! Onstage, I could ima­gine even using the lion’s head as a deco, remov­ing the ring, do the routine and repla­cing it after­wards. Cute stuff that took me some time to per­suade the own­er to sell it to me. Knock, knock …

Pass it on!

Com­par­ing the past and the present times, it seems the magician’s scene is more and more dom­in­ated by trends.

I see people get­ting heav­ily involved into pro­du­cing and pro­mot­ing busker’s pouches and com­plete ‘busk­ers’ out­fits (from table to pouch to cups to wand). I see more and more shell games (and the mani­acs). When invis­ible thread was hip, every­body lev­it­ated everything. To this day there are hun­dreds of small cof­fee tables float­ing around on the stages of the world …

In card magic for quite some time the thing is semi-auto­mat­ic. Or the oppos­ite: card­istry. Some of you old timers (as me) might remem­ber the small pack­et trick craze. Then came the memdeck.

In coin magic there was (is) three-fly (I remem­ber very well when it was mat­rix). Then came the time of the flip­per coins, shells and whatever gim­micked coins.

While this tend­ency to fol­low trends seems to be as old as magic, in these mod­ern times with the inter­net everything exploded. We have groups in Face­book ded­ic­ated to the fol­low­ers of a trend. We have for­um places and dis­cus­sion groups. The mere pub­lish­ing of pic­tures of a ‘new’ props pro­vokes a mass of people who also want it. Then the dealer’s busi­ness starts.

What both­ers me is that if too many get on the train of a new trend and walk out and do the stuff, then the pic­ture gets fatu­ous. The audi­ences see too many people doing the same stuff with the same props. Magic starts to look boring.

One thing that harms magic is that there are tons of people enter­ing the place, who have no idea of how to per­form the stuff nor the tech­nic­al cap­ab­il­it­ies. They are just inter­ested in col­lect­ing or hav­ing the new­est stuff, be it routines or props. Their interest is in show­ing off the good­ies they got as quickly as pos­sible to their unsus­pect­ing spec­tat­ors, and not in devel­op­ing and cre­at­ing a magic­al exper­i­ence for the audience.

By nature, magic should be a field pop­u­lated with indi­vidu­als. Artists that have their own and dis­tinct­ive style, tricks and props. But what do we have? Legions of people own­ing the same props and doing the very same routines/​tricks with it. Legions of people who are not true magi­cians, but stub­born and nar­row minded people with a fright­en­ing tend­ency towards get­ting totally obsessed with something.

When Cel­lini star­ted his street busk­ing in the 70s, this was a ground break­ing thing. With the excep­tion of a very few old timers scattered through­out the world, nobody had done this kind of street per­form­ance before. There­fore, Cel­lini was unique and special.

Now we have dozens of man­u­fac­tur­ers of pouches, ’street cups’, wands and tables. We see dozens of Gazzo/​Cellini clones. Cup, cup, cup, balls, balls, oranges, oranges, lem­on – booom. That’s street magic!

People think in order to be a good street magi­cian, you have to do the cups and balls trick. Without it, you are no ‘real’ busk­er. Cel­lini talked with me at length about that. Because he was doing the cups, I didn’t want to do it reg­u­larly on the streets. He liked my atti­tude and encour­aged me to devise an act for the streets without a pouch, table and the cups. And I did! A com­plete street act, work­ing solely out of the pock­ets of my suit.

These trends in magic hamper the cre­ativ­ity and unique­ness of the indi­vidu­al per­former. Trends degrade the people into mind­less sheep fol­low­ing the herd. All look the same, all do the same.

The worst thing is that people spend so much time on the props and work­man­ship, that they for­get to prac­tice and hone their per­form­ing skills. So they go out with their fant­ast­ic new props and fail to act in per­form­ance. What the hell does the nicest sil­ver hand-spun cups set help with a poorly executed and non decept­ive false trans­fer (of the

Is it the lazi­ness of the ‘magi­cians’? Or their inca­pa­city of gen­er­at­ing ori­gin­al stuff on their own? Fol­low­ing trends in magic is no good thing. It is the easy way, the cheap way. But surely not the road to the ulti­mate suc­cess as a performer.

Stay­ing con­sciously and con­sequently away from trends and work­ing on ori­gin­al (or long for­got­ten) mater­i­al seems to be a healthy way for me.

I only do hope that I don’t start a trend with that …

Pass it on!

In the past years there has been a reviv­al of the ‘magic’ with a Rubik’s Cube. More and more clev­er meth­ods to do vari­ous effects with it. The craze once again started …

For me, the cube has always been a toy. A soph­ist­ic­ated one, but still a toy. The idea is to get it solved. The quick­er this hap­pens, the bet­ter the per­former is.

As with almost everything these days, com­pet­i­tions star­ted. Who is the quick­est in solv­ing it, doing it blind­folded and behind the back, etc. Typ­ic­ally, in these com­pet­i­tions a lot of kids enter and show off their gift.

The same happened to dice-stack­ing. What was a nice effect and nov­elty for us magi­cians, trans­formed into a sport. Same with that silly cup-stack­ing business.

I don’t mind the cube craze. Magi­cians are often like small chil­dren and there­fore, some­thing like the cube has to be tackled. But, per­son­ally, I don’t want to per­form these effects and I am not inter­ested in it because they don’t impress me. What might be an accept­able demon­stra­tion for a men­tal­ist (doing it blind­folded, behind the back or demon­strat­ing memory) is reduced to a mere trick with a toy, when the cube sud­denly with a toss into the air right­ens itself.

Of course, there are some impress­ive demon­stra­tions with this toy. I remem­ber one where a few dozens of the cubes were involved. But for me the cube simply doesn’t fit into a close-up show, nor into table hopping.

Magic is about enter­tain­ing people, inter­act­ing with them and – above all – present­ing some­thing they won­der about. A magic­al effect. Stand­ing there in front of them and show­ing off one’s abil­ity in solv­ing a toy puzzle doesn’t seem to fit into my under­stand­ing of magic.

On the oth­er hand, as my friend Wolfgang Moser from Aus­tria proves, some very nice visu­als are pos­sible with the cube. But these have noth­ing to do with solv­ing the cube. The trans­form­a­tion he does on this clip is the meth­od from a trick that is over a hun­dred years old. That always has been done with a big die that no one would recog­nize in real life.

Does the Rubik’s Cube have a place in magic?

I think: yes, def­in­itely! It is the per­fect item to replace the old fash­ioned dice magi­cians have been using for ages and that nobody these days accepts. A lot of the old appar­at­us tricks with big dice could be revamped, tech­nic­ally improved and so could start a new life in the his­tory of legerdemain.

Pass it on!

This one really changed my life and atti­tude towards the work with a thumb tip and any fol­ded slips of paper or bills inside it. It is what I would call a clas­sic­al ‘hack’. The main prob­lem for me was that often I couldn’t retrieve the bill or slip, due to my dry hands.

Also, some­times the inser­tion of the slip was a bit of a fum­bling. All this changed, when I cut the thumb tip as shown in the photo. The roun­ded cut out is on the upper side of the tip. This sort of enlarges the open­ing and makes it so much easi­er to do the bill switch or retrieve the slip after a vanish.

To make things even easi­er, I glued a strip of teflon foil to the inner side of the thumb tip (the white strip in the photo). The teflon makes sure the paper slides out eas­ily, even out of the rub­ber type thumb tips.

I am sure when you give it a try, you will notice the dif­fer­ence and nev­er again use a ‘nor­mal’ thumb tip.

Pass it on!

Daniel Madis­on’s video­clip makes the rounds and it seems that more and more card men dis­agree or laugh at it. I like Daniel Madis­on. He is him­self and unique. And I like the clips he puts out. Very enter­tain­ing. He is the best Daniel Madis­on there is on this planet.

Nev­er before has someone dared to claim that he is bet­ter than Erd­nase and that he can prove it. Card experts dis­agree and think of this state­ment as being out­rageous, but think: no one (includ­ing even Ver­non) has ever seen this S.W. Erd­nase per­form. There are no You­Tube clips, no Vimeo, no FB posts of him to com­pare. The car­di­ology depart­ment of our craft isn’t even sure of who he was!

So – if no one ever has seen S.W.E. do a single move (show me the per­son who has), then it could well be that Daniel Madis­on is right on his claims! WE assume, because we have stud­ied the book and made it our bible, that Erd­nase must have been incred­ible with the cards. But what if he just was a very good the­or­eti­cian, know­ing all the import­ant things and details, but a bum­mer in live per­form­ance? I have had that exper­i­ence many times in my magic­al life, read­ing and hear­ing about a legend and then see­ing this man for the first time in real life, being com­pletely des­troyed and dis­ap­poin­ted by his weak per­form­ance skills.

The cute part is that there is no motion pic­ture ref­er­ence on how these sleights actu­ally have to look like. Card magi­cians try to con­vince each oth­er for dec­ades this or that sleight has to look like this, not like that, and so on. Funny and amus­ing. It is like try­ing to start a dis­cus­sion on how Homer­’s voice sounded .…

What really delights me is the fact that Madis­on’s sole bring­ing his name into a sen­tence with our undis­puted god of card magic has triggered that huge reac­tions! Daniel Madis­on has broken a taboo of the holy art of card magic. What a crime! There is no fun allowed in ser­i­ous card­istry. This is a ser­i­ous art, some­thing young men in their per­son­al devel­op­ment have to take ser­i­ously. Study­ing Erd­nase in magic is like attend­ing an élite uni­ver­sity. The qual­ity of the moves you know and their per­form­ance reflects the advance­ment of your per­son­al devel­op­ment and what a man you are (or dream to be). After all, you are not just a magi­cian, but you are a ‘card man’. That’s a vast difference!

Card men always have been for some to me unknown reas­on hunt­ing legends and ghosts: now Madis­on is stir­ring it all up and adding oil to the fire. And it works! An inter­est­ing way to imme­di­ately get the imme­di­ate atten­tion of the (card men’s) world.

If S.W. Erd­nase is the god of the card magic world, then Madis­on is the dev­il. The coun­ter­part. See the mys­ter­i­ous tat­too signs all on his hands and fin­gers, that should be prove enough! And since the begin­ning of time the dev­il said he could do bet­ter than God. And he proved it. Take a look at the world.

I am Alex­an­der de Cova. I am a thread man. I am bet­ter than me, and I can prove it! And if I can­’t prove it, I am sure Daniel Madis­on will help me. Then I will be bet­ter than both of us and the rest of you.

Thank you, Daniel Madis­on, you presen­ted me with some inter­est­ing and enter­tain­ing minutes. I thor­oughly enjoyed them.

🙂

Pass it on!