Heading back to Vancouver

Well, today's the day I get back on the train back to Vancouver. In looking back at the stuff I've written about on the olde blogge about the second Minnesota trip, I think that there's a fair bit there, but there's also a ton of other stuff I've left out. I guess, to summarize the most important things I learned...

* Fundamentals: There are so many moves out there that we all know about that can look amazing, that there's not necessarily a need to find something obscure just to fool people. Just as an example... People who mourn the lack of a convincing overhand false shuffle that's on the level of the recent offerings in the false riffle shuffle, for instance, need to rediscover the Greek Shuffle. It can look really, really good, certainly better than those overhand false shuffles built on the concept of runs of cards. Same goes for the Classic Pass, the Schneider Vanish, the push-off double lift, etc.

* Re-evaluation of classics: For those who are trying to figure out their own character (as I'm still doing, admittedly), a great way to do this is to simply take classic effects and try to figure out how your character approaches them. This isn't new advice, but my own inklings in the past have been that, because I wanted to stand apart as a performer, I needed to gravitate towards complex or obscure effects, rather than the simple ones, as if I could somehow sculpt effects that reflect who my character is. Yet while this is a good long-term goal, it's not something that can be easily done while you're still evaluating your character, while you still have questions that need answering. And, truth be told, if you've got a character, certainly he ought to be applicable to simple, basic effects, such as a simple vanish and reproduction of a coin, or Copper/Silver, or Triumph, or Ambitious Card, or the Cups and Balls, or the Invisible Deck. Presumably the character can still express himself through these simple effects, which have the added advantage of being proven, so that once the character has been field-tested you can then have a better sense to how to bring it to more exotic material.

* The Biggest New Rock: Perhaps the single most useful thing that I acquired in terms of magic here was the Cups and Balls. Once you've trained with it, and trained properly, you'll find yourself in a position to do the routine impromptu -- and I mean truly impromptu, using borrowed cups and understanding how to find the final loads around you. And the knowledge learned with the Cups and Balls bleeds so much into other aspects of magic, including structure, managing suspicions, executing simple vanishes (which, if down, allows you to handle broader techniques such as switching for like or unlike items), misdirection, improvising, motivating actions, economy of movement, retuning classics to fit new parameters, etc.

* The Arsenal (Routines): In terms of classics, the Cups and Balls (using 1, 2, or 3 cups), Slop Shuffle Triumph, the Ambitious Card, vanishing and reproducing a coin, Coins Across, Dr. Daley's Last Trick. With a day's preparation I could probably get down an effective Copper/Silver routine, a good card-to-pocket, Be Honest What Is It?, a Benson Bowl Routine, Crazy Man's Handcuffs, the venerable spongeballs, some permutation of the 2-in-the-hand-1-in-the-pocket trick, a couple of coin assemblies, and an impromptu version of Colour Monte. Also, I've probably got any number of things that I can do with the sleights listed below -- card forces in particular. Truth be told, though, the part I'm most excited about is that through study of the above, I've now got some ideas on routines that I feel range from almost totally original to, at the very least, unique in my particular market. Sorry, I won't be tipping that stuff just yet except amongst trusted friends... and maybe not even then.

* Other classics studied: I got a whole boatload of notes on the Miser's Dream and some good stuff with billiard balls manipulation.

* The Arsenal (Sleights): Old sleights polished include the Classic Pass, Schneider Vanish, Top Change, Spread Cull, Bottom Palm, Top Palm (which still needs work, though), the Hindu Shuffle Force (yup, the sucky 'flash' version that I used to rail against), the $100 Bill Change, the Shuttle Pass, and the Han Ping Chen move. Stuff I didn't know before but now have a bit of a handle on include the Le Paul Natural Jog Control, a multiple-card bottom palm, and various forms of the Flying Shuttle Pass. I was also luckily able to learn new work on Bobo Switch, the Clink Pass, the wand Push-Through Vanish, the Turnover Pass, the Cross Cut Force (if you can believe that), Bill Simon's Prophecy Move, the Dribble Force, the Riffle Force, and probably a few others that I've forgotten.

* Gambling demonstrations: Anybody who wants to do them for people in a performance context needs to be burned as badly as I was burned in a proper gambling context. So much of the stuff that people actually use at the table, you don't see in "gambling expert" DVDs. I'm hoping that the reason why this stuff never makes it in there is because the people doing it realize that they've got to keep that stuff underground. Unfortunately, I don't know that the customers who pick up the material are fully conscious of what they aren't learning. What's more, when you get a chance to see the work done live, you learn whole new things about attention control, motivated actions, how there are so many different strategies to getting towards a base result (in gambling, getting the winning hand)... and these things are tremendously useful object lessons in magic. Also, it would certainly expose the folly of the "I wouldn't want to play cards with you" nonsense patter.

* The Theory: A deeper understanding of the "Magus" archetype, ambidextrous and holistic training, guerilla training in the mall, punctuation, magic as language, the gap between expectation and effect, getting ahead while impromptu, the value of a secret, FASDIUing with any prop... Also, Tyler better publish his thinking on templates sometime soon -- the information is already out there, it just needs to be codified. Frankly, Jay Sankey could probably do a DVD on it tomorrow.

* One other bit of theorizing that I came to was the fact that all moves suck. That's every move in magic, including your favourite. I might write more on that in future.

* Media notes: Since rediscovering where I want to go with my character, I've got a greater appreciation of Sankey and Richard Sanders. Derren Brown's Absolute Magic is well worth reading. Joe Mogar has some of the best work I've ever seen on the colour-changing knives in his Chameleon Knives DVD -- seriously, watching it made me want to add it to ye olde bagge of trickef. Jamy Ian Swiss's Shattering Illusions is pretty good, although it goes to show that just because you might be a smart dude with a good vocabulary, it doesn't mean your immune to the same sort of sycophancy that plagues the unwashed magic masses -- you can just rationalize it with more eloquence than most. Also, speaking of sycophancy (heh heh, hypocrite am I), Al Schneider might just be one of the most under-appreciated guys in magic -- not that he gets zero respect or anything, but the magic community throws regular parades in honour of people whose work that doesn't come close to matching what this man has published.

And that's it for the moment, I guess. There were many things I started writing and then stopped while I was here, and they're saved in the draft mode. I don't know which ones will come out and which will stay hidden... For instance, I've got a fair bit to write about regarding the uneasy marriage of card magic and gambling (most of it admittedly being regurgitations of Tyler's ideas) but I'm going to hold off on that until Tyler decides to put up a Youtube video demonstrating that he's got the chops necessary to give greater credibility to that blog post. Besides the stuff sitting in drafts, there might also be new brain-dumps needed just to totally purge the system.

It's been a good boot camp. For the most part, it's been magic training of one form or another every single day for seven weeks. I really feel like a new chapter has started, and that the next time I'm out there trying to do magic for money, I won't be hindered by self-doubt about the quality of my material. At some point, Tyler Erickson's going to start getting his work published for a wider audience, and when he does I would encourage anybody to pick it up. I understand his fear of flashing his metaphorical tits to the greater magic community, but having seen Tyler's tits, I can honestly say...

Ugh, I don't want to finish that thought.

In any case, that's it. When next I post I'll be back in Minnesota. Here's hoping the laptop survives the trip.