Color Flow

July 23rd 2008 Posted in Random, Flow

Over the last year or so I’ve been slowly moving away from the word “magic.” I don’t know if it’s the sheer number of eye rolls I’ve seen from people mentioning magic or what the deal is. You can just see people thinking of their uncle performing a boring counting card trick or rabbits popping out of hats. I don’t know who said it, but when they said “The rabbit is dead,” they were right.

I’ve been moving more away from magic and into something that could be classified as maybe performance art. Creating a piece of fiction in real time. I like that so much more. So anyway, here’s a bit I’ve been doing lately. It uses Flow but not in a magic kind of way. I use it to create something that people hopefully aren’t equating with a magic trick, just a moment of strange. Here it is:

You’re at a party and you see a girl wearing a green t-shirt. You give a startled look. You ask what kind of shirt it is. Frantically you ask someone to look at the tag. They say it’s made by the Acme T-Shirt company. You shake your head and say “You haven’t seen the reports have you?” and “Have you noticed any side effects?”

Then, you pull a little bit of her shirt out and flatten it on a nearby table. You slam it with your half empty bottle of water. The water turns the same color green as her shirt.

“I can’t believe they’re still selling these shirts,” you remark as you quietly slip out of the party. I promise this is something that they will never forget.

The Method: You simply need a bottle of water, Flow gimmick, some food coloring and patience (you wait till someone with the appropriate colored shirt shows up.) This is not something you want to do for the “wrong” person. I will leave it up to you to figure out who would appreciate the weirdness of this and not punch you in the face. That is a skill worth developing…

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Still Lacking Ambition….

July 23rd 2008 Posted in magic, Card Magic

Ok, so I’ve been looking over the comments and emails that I got from the Lacking Ambition post. Some very interesting things that were said and folks were kind enough to point me in some directions about “entertaining” ambitious card routines.

Now, having said that, and being very thankful, I still think that I’ll stay away from the ambitious card plot. Maybe it’s just not for me. I can sit down and do probably about 2 hours straight of card magic, right out of my head, and with a normal deck of cards. And maybe, if I was doing 2 hours of only card magic, the ambitious card would have a spot there. But if I had to do ONE card trick, the ambitious card bit wouldn’t be it. Without (and usually with) a decent presentation, this becomes a “I’m more clever than you,” trick and that doesn’t interest me. I want to engage the people around me, I want to move them, or make them think. I don’t want to merely entertain them with a puzzle. And that’s what I don’t like about it.

So, I guess it’s just a matter of personal preference. I have since found some very good ambitious card routines. Some really visual bits of business and magical moments. But I’m not sure that would ever replace the other card stuff I do. Where the climax happens in their head, in their hands. And doesn’t happen over and over again.

The last thing I want people to walk away saying is “How’d he do that?” In the end, if it’s about me then I’ve failed miserably. I talk about this at great length in The Miracle Model. About how the current working model of magic doesn’t do you or other magicians any good. How we’ve been indoctrinated into thinking and doing magic under a few limited contexts and that lessens the impact (not to mention reputation) of magicians. I am certainly guilty of it myself. Once I do that first miracle for a bunch of people and I know they want to see more, it’s hard to stop. It takes all the discipline in the world not to sit there and do 2 hours of amazing card magic. Or a 4 hour set of everything I know for an audience that would love to see it. And maybe, in my head, an ambitious card routine is the epitome of that kind of thinking. The card rises to the top of the deck once and it gets a great reaction, and I get that performing buzz, so let’s just keep doing it.

For me, The Ambitious Card Routine is a gateway drug to repetitive, self indulgent magic. I don’t want to get hooked….

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