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rjs Loyal user 296 Posts |
As I mentioned in my earlier post on The Event 2017, Luke Jermay demonstrated his Marksman deck.
I have my doubts about the need for such an overkill deck, but others may disagree. I enjoy collecting modern marked decks (Ted Lesley, Bob Farmer's do it yourself from scratch deck, Boris Wild, Speed Readers, Ultimate Marked deck, Phoenix Marked deck). I even bought Nyman's The Code and Henry Evans' Daredevil Deck. My favourite at the moment is Phill Smith's DMC Rouge decks. I also have ordered a brick of the soon-to -be released Butterfly deck which has been described optimistically as a game changer. The magic world seems to depend on inbuilt obsolescence. Just as you think you have found the perfect product a new one is launched that supposedly surpasses everything that went before. The ultimate perfected Holy Grail has endless versions and modifications and pitfalls and regressions. As you may recall, I acquired Ken Dyne's Passed Out Deck , the ultimate tossed out deck routine. This cost a lot of money. And now I've seen an ad in the latest Genii for Alex Hecklau's MindVisit deck which appears to emulate Ken's effect. Will the quest ever end? Will my credit card implode? But back to the performances: Bill Cheung, a Chinese magician, did a beautiful trick where a signed selection ends up in a sealed deck. This was a dazzling combination of sleight of hand and shadow work. Henry Evans made use of similar black art in his Three Card Monte 2000 and I think he credited his brother, a non-magician, for the idea. Roberto Giobbi is famous for Card College, the New Testament of card magic. He fielded questions from Joshua Jay about his new book Hidden Agenda. 366 miscellaneous entries - one secret for every day of the year. For example, one entry refers to the Charlie Chaplin shuffle which appears in the silent movie, The Immigrant. These joke moves have been turned into convincing casual shuffles by modern card magicians. Anthony Owen performed a low-tech lottery number effect. Afterwards, he showed how he'd been influenced by the inscribed Medallion effect. The weakness in the trick is camouflaged. Owen's effect seemed to go down well, but I prefer Mark Chandaue's (higher-tech) Numbers shown at the LADS convention. The advantage with Mark's version is that the performer can hand out a genuine lottery ticket at the end. Woody Aragon lectured on material from Memorandum, his soon-to-be released book on the memorized deck. He was also generous with his time performing close-up magic for an enthusiastic table outside the main theatre. Jamy Ian Swiss is a veteran New York magician. He is also well-known for his strong & verbose reviews in the Genii Magazine. He is fascinated by the card to impossible location plot and has developed different versions. He showed the one where a signed card appears inside a metal Mints Container. The problem for me is that we don't usually have such mint holders in the UK or Australia. I grew up on tubes of Polo mints or large packs of Murray mints or Fox's Glaciers. Then came the era of Tic Tacs. And gimmicked versions of card to Tic Tac Box have recently gained favour. In the UK metal containers would probably look out of place, but Jamy has developed a method of switching in and out the metal container. The Ben Earl lecture was the outstanding lecture of the weekend. I have seen Ben perform in a small basement theatre off Leicester Square and he did not disappoint. In his Sessions lecture, he performed direct effects with simple plots. He vanished a coin in one hand and made it reappear in the other hand. There were no gimmicks involved. He used deceptive sleight of hand. (The presentation reminded me a little of Australian magician Phil Cass' Fisherman's Wharf routine, though Phil's is a very different trick involving the miraculous transfer of water from one hand to the other.) Ben then showed his novel approaches to the classic production of four aces from a shuffled deck - the easy way and the hard way. He confided that the easy way paradoxically looks more impressive than the hard way. I believe that the hard way was employed when he successfully fooled Penn and teller in their original Fool Us series. Ben also released new DVDs at the Session on Real Ace Cutting and his Coin work. To paraphrase Landau's review of the young Bruce Springsteen: I saw the future of magic and its name was not Dynamo but Ben Earl. He made me feel I was seeing magic for the first time. The Late Night Show was an energetic comedy session led by Danny Buckler. The subtle distinction between mentalism and mental magic was finally sorted out. Chad Long performed his famous plucking card from wall illusion. Lune Kram, from Denmark, executed a baffling any thought of card from 52 pockets, which fooled the audience when he turned round and revealed the correct jumbo card stuck to his back. On Sunday morning magician Guy Hollingworth, who in between gigs is a legal expert on intellectual property rights, gave an unusual talk on magic patents and copyright. In America to patent a method, you have to register it and explain it in sufficient detail. The John Gaughan patent for David Copperfield’s flying can be found online under Levitation apparatus US 5354238 A. By studying these details and the diagrams supplied, it makes it easier for an outsider to work out the method. So you have to protect your secret by actually exposing it yourself. If someone copies your method, you can then take legal action. But if someone exposes your method, my understanding from Guy's lecture, is that you can't sue them. To sue them you have to prove it was your method. And the strongest proof would be that you had patented the method. But this means the outline of the method is already documented. And the information is accessible to the public. Which means it is no longer secret. Are you still with me? Horace Goldin tried to sue an American tobacco company for their ad campaign which included the method behind his Sawing in half Illusion. But he failed. You can try to sue someone if they infringe copyright. If they copy your method and gain financially from this, you may well have a case, but it is a long and difficult process especially if the other magician operates in another country. Teller was eventually successful in suing a European magician for copying his rose illusion. Guy also said that even if you develop a trick and own the patent, this lapses within a fixed number of years. In the UK, it is only 20 years. Novelist have greater protection. In the UK their copyright expires 70 years after their deaths (not 70 years after the publication of the book). That's why Agatha Christie who died in 1976 is still in copyright to 2046 even though many of her famous books were written in the 1920s and 1930s. Stephen Long gave a talk on 13 things or steps to stimulate creativity. But he lost me with his first graphic (thing first) on Acknowledgement. I expected he would say something like before you can claim to be creative you need to acknowledge and credit those that went before. But by acknowledgement he meant something completely different: like acknowledge you have the ability to be creative. I enjoyed his equivoque talk a few years ago at a previous Session, but this talk did not hook me. Maybe it was because the subject matter was too elusive. To achieve creativity in any field is difficult enough, but to teach it may well be impossible. The afternoon saw a Memorised deck clinic chaired by Joshua Jay with contributions from Woody Aragon, Pit Hartling and Denis Behr. In my opinion, brute force memorization of a deck is too demanding and off-putting. However, De Cova's method for memorizing the Tamariz stack makes the task much easier. (Scrapbook Magazine Issues 3-7, downloadable from lybrary.com.) It takes one hour a day for just five days. Then you consolidate your recall and concentrate on the handful of cards that might still pose problems. I found that I followed De Cova's recommendations for most sections of the deck, but added my own idiosyncratic associations to lock in confusible cards. I am familiar with Pit's work on the MemDeck after attending an intensive workshop a few years back in Manchester. His In Order to Amaze has now been published and it contains material from that workshop. Pit performed the ultimate miracle poker deal. He designed this trick with help from his friend Martin Eisele. Any hand called for can be dealt out in a poker setting. Truly astonishing Eric Mead gave the final afternoon lecture at the Session and he certainly lived up to his reputation as a communicator and teacher. He spoke in depth about his obsession with the Three Fly coin trick and how it had evolved over the last 30 years. Three Fly is essentially a visible coins across at the fingertips. A coin trick performed away from the traditional table. The trick can be traced back to Chris Kenner in 1987 but it took Eric ten years to develop his own version. He went into detail on the alternative ways of performing the trick. He also pointed out the potential weak points in any routine. Should you make use of the one-ahead principle? And if you use an extra coin, how do you convincingly hide this? What palming techniques are the best for hiding a coin while apparently showing that the hand is empty? Are these techniques good enough? You clearly have to establish that your hand is empty, so any discrepant position of the fingers would look suspicious. Isn’t it better to display a genuinely empty hand instead? But then how do you perform the trick? And crossing the hands to enable switches will also look suspicious. Can these be minimized? Eric discussed these issues for almost an hour before performing his routine based on the Kohler method. But I found this analysis quite fascinating (unlike last year when a famous Spanish magician spent an hour repetitively explaining an Ace production card trick). Even when Eric had informed us in detail what moves he would be making, when he eventually performed Three Fly it was utterly magical. Eric then spoke about Tim Conover's improvement to the Tommy Wonder sock coin routine. Conover developed a clever technique for a copper silver finale which left a genuine ungimmicked coin in the spectator’s closed hand. I then visited the dealer which room opened on Sunday. Michael Weber commanded a crowd of acolytes who were justifiably impressed by the quality of his sales pitch. I stood back and watched a wave of baffling Ten Card poker routines - each one more puzzling than the previous one. These are the elite versions that eluded Bob Farmer's massive collection. The climactic Poker routine looked especially impossible. The spectator/victim was given an easy opportunity to win one hundred pounds. He actually held both sets of poker hands in each hand, one face up, the other face down, but despite a free choice somehow ended going for the losing hand. "You are one of the worst poker players I've ever encountered." Weber's words seemed somewhat unfair. As an onlooker, I felt slightly uncomfortable by this remark. "But you are also one of the most generous human beings I've ever had the pleasure to meet." This instantly broke the tension and won applause and chuckles from the crowd. I realize I had been fooled again by Weber's verbal delivery as well as by his routines. Owen Packard had his Big Blind stall next to Weber's. But at the time was doing minimal business due to Weber's charismatic impact. In the lull, I showed Owen some fiendish mechanical puzzles sold by a Finnish dealer. These were genuine challenges far removed from the ephemeral plastic toys sold by Tenyo. Finally, Phill Smith, creator of the DMC Rouge deck, showed me a new effect, Rootsavant, an impressive mathematical feat of rapid calculation. I loved the way he camouflaged the method. And that was unfortunately the end of the Session for me as I had a long drive home. |
phillsmiff Inner circle UK 1794 Posts |
Great write up, super comprehensive! I didn't like all of his stuff but for me the coin transposition Ben Earl did was maybe one of the highlights of the event - sometimes when effects are that simple it kind of bumps the spectator up against the method and there's nowhere for them to go, but for some reason his incredibly simple handling felt unnervingly real, I loved it.
Glad to get the chance to show you Rootsavant too, glad you liked it! Phill
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rgemagic New user uk 55 Posts |
The sessions is always worth visiting. The different groups never seem to mind new people coming and watch when lectures are over
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