Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Update

For those (few) of you who have been checking here (ever more irregularly, no doubt), I have not been able to add as often as would be ideal, in part because of my new coauthored
  • book
  • just out (June, '05). This book has been in the works for over a decade. University of Chicago did a great job on the production. The book is not about magic, however, except in the overarching sense of explaining how many seemingly disparate parts of the world--complex systems, living beings, economic markets--work. In a sense this is to do with magic, as creationists like to suggest that certain things (mainly life or humans) are so inexplicable they could only have been done by supernatural means. In any case, I urge you, if you are interested in such, to buy a copy. It will help support me do things like reveal all my card tricks on this here blog.

    Since my last April post, I received a welcome and complementary letter from amateur magician Derrick Chung informing me that the match trick in fact has appeared in print in Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic. Also since my last visit I knocked some stuff around with prestidigitorian Nico Suarez. Both Nico and his brother Andreis are accomplished sleight of hand artists. I pat myself on the back (a difficult move by any stretch) because I got Nico interested in magic when I used the Flip (of Holland) vanishing drumstick move on a pen while he was working take out in a Moroccan restaurant; now he is the official magician for the city of Albany. Nico and Andreis have an unpublished book of original material sitting around and I will ask him if he will release a couple of samples exclusively (hah hah) to this site. In the meantime, I will post something I wrote a while ago, developed years ago, but that has never been published. The effect is modification of a Frank Garcia trick to apply to playing cards. The biggest obstacles in performing it are two fold: the Curry Turnover Change, and Mylar, which doesn't seem so easy to procure as it used to be. When I made this trick up in the 1970s I was in possession of sticky backed sheet of Mylar from which I could make the cards.