11.22.2005

Who's on first?

My very first club date in America was at the Elks club in Long Beach, California. A stroke of good luck that was going to add a whole eighty bucks to my worldly wealth. I was very excited and ready to take the ‘Elks’ by storm. After a one-hour drive to
Long Beach I made myself known at the club and was directed backstage to meet up with the other acts. Now it is amazing how often the entertainment bookers of these kinds of organization make truly rational decisions but this one was a doozy! The committee had determined that four acts would be appropriate for the occasion and the booker had decided that the perfect choice would be two magic acts and two jugglers. He furthermore decided that the ideal running order would be to have the two magic acts in the first half of the show and after a brief break to continue with the two jugglers.
Of course, there is no payment for the job of booking entertainment at a service club and maybe it is bookings like this that are the reason.
Upon arriving in the dressing room I discovered that the other magician on the bill was Mr. Electric and Carol, a very serious
name in magic. I was very impressed. I was also somewhat astounded when Marvyn (for that is indeed Mr. Electrics first name) suggested that he opened the bill and leave me to close the first half. I thought my stock in the magic world must be on the rise. This was the evening that I learned the age old secret of variety acts; always go on first or as close to the beginning as you can.
To cut a painful story short Marvyn and Carol opened the show with a dynamic set that featured customized versions of every trick I did, all carefully adapted to the theme of their show. I followed and proved that lightning seldom strikes twice on one night. I didn’t die on stage, but I was quite sick!
After the show I chatted with Marvyn who was very kind and quite complementary about my show. Especially my version of the classic Chineese linking rings, maybe this was because it was the only trick I hadn’t duplicated. In fact, in what I later discovered was pure Marvyn at his best he planned an entire act for me based on linking things together.
As I remember I was to change my name to Link Lewin. Marvyn was the King of themed magic. What I should do, said Marvyn, was buy the Himber Ring Trick, which would allow me to link rings borrowed from the fingers of audience members. It sounded like a great idea and the next day I drove into Hollywood and paid fifty dollars to Joe Berg as a down payment on this very trick. It was the best investment I was ever to make in magic. Every magician needs one special trick to make his own and thanks to Mr. Electric I had found mine. I never did change my first name to Link, but due to this encounter with the gracious and friendly master magician.
I had taken a huge step forward in my career as a magician.
Oh, and I never again felt flattered at being asked to close a variety bill, like a true pro, I merely say; “You know, It might be better for the show if I open.”

11.15.2005

Billy McComb at the Conway Hall

There is a very special hall in London that changed a lot of things for me it is called the Conway Hall. When I first started to watch magic shows this was a very important spot because
once a month there was a magic show there that featured the best performers in London. Actually some might not have been that good but at age eleven it never occurred to me at the time. There was a small musical combo that accompanied the acts. If I close my eyes I can still conjure up the vision of the drummer who’s name was Alfred. He looked like a merchant banker perched behind his drum kit, in fact he probably was a banker but not on the first Monday of every month. During the show he could have been one of the ‘Sultans of Swing’ as he rapped out drum rolls, riffs and rimshots to punctuating the onstage antics. I saw many fine magicians perform on that stage John Wade, Ali Bongo, Alan Shaxon, George Kovari and many others.
The night that I remember the best at the Conway Hall was the night I first saw Billy McComb. Billy was a legend in magic
and a full time magician who didn’t have to worry about a real job to distract him from the world of magic. Billy had an easygoing Irish charm that won over an audience by the time he had finished walking out onstage. To this eleven year old he was nothing less than dazzling.
The first time I sat in the dark theatre and watched Billy perform I realized that what he did is what I wanted to do. In many ways I have never changed my mind and that most of my life has been devoted to trying to be like him.
What took my breath away when Billy performed was the way he blended non-stop comedy and amazing magic.
other comedy magician fell far short of the mark when you compared them to Billy. Most intriguingly he performed small tricks that seemed to make the biggest impact I had ever seen on an audience. He turned blank pieces of paper into five-pound notes. He put a half crown inside a tiny Schweppes bottle. Best of all, he took a tiny piece of white thread and after breaking it into small pieces he elegantly restored it all the while causing huge waves of laughter with a steady stream of one liner jokes. I remember watching him standing in the spotlight in his sharp mohair suit, gazing intently at the piece of thread as the entire audience burst into wild applause. The fact that he later produced a live hen from nowhere was amazing but not the same class of thrill for me. No I had it straight in my mind I wanted to be Billy McComb. If I could be half as charming, half as witty and able to transfix an entire theatre with a piece of thread, well that would be just fine for me. I didn’t get to meet Billy that night but I soon did and that is a whole other story. Move over Houdini the young magician has a new hero.

11.09.2005

Waiting for the postMAN.

Once you had decided to become a magician you started the lifelong pursuit of finding tricks to perform. When you first begin this is largely accomplished by spending endless hours pouring over magic catalogues and deciding on the tricks you absolutely can’t live without. Then you get a money order, send it away and then you wait for the postman to bring the precious box to your front door. The most exciting part of this procedure is the waiting because it allows you to let your imagination run wild about the ‘miracle’ that is making it’s way to your hot and sticky hands. You keep re-reading the description in the catalogue, visualizing every aspect of the next addition to your show. Magic catalogues have a language all there own, partly truth and partly fiction! Certain phrases are special flags that attract a youthful customer. My special favorites were ‘Packs flat and plays big’, ‘can be performed surrounded’ and ‘Needs no resetting’. At the bottom of the catalogue listing for the trick (just before the price) was a list of ways in which the trick was not accomplished. This list usually included; ‘No threads’, ‘No magnets’ ‘No mirrors’ and very often threw in a ‘No skill required’ as well. It was enough to keep your mind racing for days. Generally speaking when you finally got to rip open your parcel your first reaction was sheer stark disappointment. What was inside the package seemed like a waste of time and money and even if you could make it work it wouldn’t fool the village idiot. However you were stuck with it, because another ubiquitous phrase in magic catalogues is ‘No refunds and no exchanges’.
These magic dealers have to make their living somehow and they have chosen the route of packaging inexpensive items into much more expensive bundles by combining them into a ‘So-called trick’. I am not saying that magic dealers are unscrupulous but I certainly wouldn’t let my daughter marry one. A very early lesson in magic is that secrets cost money. The strange part is that if you spent long enough working on the trick, rehearsing it in front of a mirror and tinkering with it, you sometimes ended up with something that actually worked! Not always, in fact not very often, but every now and then you ended up with what we in the magic world call ‘a keeper’. Even weirder was the way that sometimes a fellow magician could really fool and impress you with what you later discovered was a trick you had long since discarded either physically or mentally. The magic dealer and postman may have brought the trick to your living room but it wasn’t going to go much further till you added a little something of your own.
I would like to tell you that it all changes as you get older and wiser but it doesn’t. I have a garage full of props that seemed like a good idea when I bought them. In fact the only thing that changes is that the older you get the more money you spend/waste on tricks you will never perform. However along the way though, something does change, you start to develop a style and a personality all you own and that is when the magic really begins. How does this subtle change exert it’s self? My belief is that it has a lot to do with your powers of visualization. While it is very rare to actually see the future, with a little practice it becomes quite possible to look carefully at yourself in the present and project that persona into the future. Maybe it is all that standing in front of mirrors
Intently watching your physical body. Seeing not just what you are but what you wish to become. This seems to be a trait shared by many performers, watch any actor who doesn’t think he’s being watched and you will notice they never pass a mirror without a glance. It is visualization not thought projection but maybe a little bit of time travel is involved. Unless I am very much mistaken the core message of my teacher is contained in just six words. I am I can I wish. It is the intensity and order of these three forces that creates your future and turns visualization into reality. We will discuss these three forces in more detail later but right now I want to see if the postman has delivered the mail. I am expecting a package with a new trick in it that ‘packs flat and plays big.’

11.07.2005

Jupiter and beyond.

Sometimes things seem so normal and natural that you don’t realize that they might be something else until they are gone. As a rather young child I had a strange ritual that put me to sleep every night. I would lie in my bed and imagine that I was sitting in an invisible chair suspended in a dark and featureless place somewhere in a space somewhere above or within me. When I felt very comfortable I would then pretend that I was revolving on my axis in a forward direction until it felt very natural and easy. Then came the difficult part. I would imagine that while still revolving in a vertical direction I would begin to feel myself spinning sideways and around a horizontal axis. It was a very strange mental feeling that took a little while to get just right and after it did then things started to happen on their own. I would get a strange ‘whooshing’ sensation and begin to move forward at a very fast speed, at least it was a feeling of rolling forward at a fast speed, except I wasn’t really moving everything was rolling around me and my vision remained straight ahead. It felt a little like being a bowling ball moving in an unstoppable line going faster and faster. When I hit a certain speed everything turned into blurred straight lines and small square lights. That was it, but it happened night after night for several years until one night it didn’t happen. It just stopped. I tried to recreate the experience but it never happened again so I just let it go. Forty years later I sat in a cinema in Henderson, Nevada watching Robert Zemeckis’ film “Contact’. The movie was based on Carl Sagen’s Sci-fi novel and starred Jody Foster and suddenly the movie recreated this experience for me in vivid cinematic terms. Jody Foster sat in a chair and the entire process was reenacted as a physical experience. It was a stunning moment and my memories flooded back to me with such power that I started to cry as I sat there surrounded by my family in the half empty movie theatre. My eyes filled with tears and I wept and wept like a child, excited and amazed that my childhood memories were not mine alone and they had been recreated and shared. I intuitively realized watching the movie that the motion and basis of the experience was intimately connected with the movements within an atom. All my life I have felt strangely driven but without any particular goal or direction other than a curious conviction that if time was going in a forward direction then I was moving in the opposite one. For a moment or two sitting weeping in that theatre everything came together for me and although I couldn’t have articulated it I knew who and what I wasn’t. For about fifteen years I had been reading books about quantum mechanics and puzzling my mind about the sub-atomic level of being. Sitting in that cinema everything came together for me. I realized that the nuclear/sub atomic world wasn’t something you read about or thought about. It wasn’t something to be analyzed it was something to be experienced. It was something that you were.

11.02.2005

The man with the Snake

One of my first real mentors in magic was an elderly man with the slightly sinister name of Roy Cowl. Roy was the kind of person you say; “Wow, he’s a one of a kind!” Then after a time amongst magicians you realize they are not only ‘one of a kind’ but are well represented in the magic world. These men usually dress in black, are balding and have much younger wives. They also own large snakes and keep them in their living rooms in glass tanks covered with old bedding. At least that’s what Roy did. He kept an 8-foot python in this manner, I always referred to it as Monty but he never got the joke.
I had first met Roy in Brighton at a meeting of the Sussex Magic Circle where he was a member; although rumor had it he had long since stopped paying any dues. Roy was something of a rogue member amongst the group and was allowed the luxury of doing pretty well whatever he considered suitable. This seemed to suit Roy just fine. I had won the junior performers award three years running. Not quite as elite as it sounded as there were only two junior members in the club. The other junior was a kid slightly older than myself called Neil who was awkward and uncoordinated. These are not the best attributes for a magician and I quickly became the club favorite causing Neil to loose interest in magic altogether. My parents kept the silver plated cups I won in prominent display throughout their lives. I never won any awards again and they prized them mostly because they had been present to see me win them. No success I achieved in America seemed quite as real to them as those cups. After my second win Roy decided to take me under his wing. Nobody in the club actually said anything bad about Roy but there was a clear undercurrent of disapproval over the matter. Being under Roy’s wing didn’t amount to much more than spending the occasional evening in his rather dismal flat hoping to God the python was in its glass tank. Roy gave me advice, told me stories and sold me a few tricks he thought would improve my act. Even at my tender years I was aware these were probably tricks that Roy wanted to unload from his own repertoire. One of these props was a Lippencott box. What you may ask is a Lippencott box? Well I didn’t know either but according to Roy it was going to be the key to my future success as a magician. Without the rhetoric, it was a small wooden box with various hinges and hidden secrets that allowed an object to be introduced inside it secretly. The main use for this device was to allow the magician to apparently make a prediction about future events. There may have been other uses for the box but I could never determine them. I decided to debut this trick in conjunction with the Mid-Sussex Fair by predicting the headline of the local newspaper two weeks in advance of the actual paper being printed. A pretty cool piece of magic if all goes well.
With as much ceremony as a teenager could muster the box was signed, sealed and placed on display in the window of ‘Beaumont’s Menswear’. The box was to remain there in full view before being brought to the fair and opened during the festivities. There was nothing out of the ordinary in this stunt and many a magician has done it before and since. What made my prediction cause a stir was the timing. The night before the unveiling of my prediction the entire country was ablaze with the bolt from the blue news that the Beatles manager Brian Epstein had died. Was it suicide or natural causes, who knew, but everyone wanted to know the details so they could make a guess. The T.V. and newspapers went into overdrive and the entire country was intrigued by this event. Up until then the Beatles were the golden boys of Britain and nothing negative had cast a shadow over the mop tops.
Rather cunningly, I phrased my prediction carefully, and said that one of the Beatles or someone close to them would die. Sometimes it is more convincing to be a little vague rather than too accurate. I received a great deal of press for my stunt and enjoyed every word of it. I had studied Houdini and knew that publicity and press were the first steps to becoming a super star. Well it didn’t work out quite like that but I did learn a valuable lesson about the way of the world. If events work with you, then the sky is the limit and if they don’t, nothing amounts to much. If the headlines that day had read ‘New tax increases’ my moment in the sun would have been a lot less bright. The important lesson was about time-shifting though. By setting up my stunt two weeks in advance I was able to reap the dubious benefits of psychic powers. Although I didn’t know it at the time I had chanced upon the ‘One Ahead Principle’ in it’s most primitive form. R.I.P. Brian.