Magician and Sleight of Hand Artist
Magic Trickery
Adaptability, Integrity, and Reliability
Jul 28th
I received an email from a young magician looking to be my apprentice.
from his email:
I am contacting you as an aspiring sleight of hand artist/stand up comic. My enquiry is to ask if you have worked with an apprentice in the past or if you have an option to do so? Regards, -------
My reply included the following:
Dear —–, If you are interested in learning how to be a magician as a trade I can give you the opportunity to learn about all that is involved.
a 40 to 80 hour working week involves 25% gigs, 70% marketing and business, and 5% skill building/creativity. “
Thank you for your prompt reply. As it has only been a hobby rather than a vocation, I can admit that I only put in the 10-15 hours a week on average but most of that is research and perfecting tricks.
I gotta say, 10 to 15 hours a week is an excellent amount of time to use for research and perfecting tricks. It’s an important part of being a magician, though it is only part of the skill-set needed if it is to be pursued far enough to become professional and worth hiring.
As I was driving my kids to school this morning I asked them if they could list three things that should be on the top of the list if you are going to be a professional magician.
I ended up being the one to come up with the list, since the afore mentioned email exchange had got me thinking about what is crucial in this business.
A I R . I made this into a little acronym to help my kids remember it. I now think of Mike Myers in the Love Guru when I come up with acronyms.
Adaptability, Integrity, and Reliability
I initially had it in a different order, but it didn’t quite fit my lofty ideals ( I R A )
Adaptability. As an entertainer there will inevitably be requests from potential clients to perform for an audience which you may not have imagined you would be performing for. If you are adaptable, you will be sensitive to the need of the client and work out the best way to fulfill the need. However this has to be balanced with integrity.
Integrity comes into play when you see that you have limitations and do not over-promise, and say you can do something you can not do. This can be difficult when you really are desperate for work, however, you will only besmirch your reputation by not delivering the goods after promising that you can do it.
Reliability comes into focus here as both integrity and adaptability will be enhanced by your reliability. Being on time, always is so vital to your own attitude toward your own work. Arriving late at a gig makes you drop several stars on the clients rating of your performance, without even seeing anything you do. This is not the same as when someone has low expectations and then they are pleasantly surprised by what they see. It’s more a case of them seeing you as incapable to start out with and everything you do after that is just lucky.
I was very impressed that after my little dissertation in the car, on the way to school this morning, my 8 year old daughter remembered what the three things were.
A I R
A Magical Proposal
Oct 18th
I was asked to stage a street show and time it in such a way so that a specific young couple could walk up and the man would somehow get roped into a trick at which point I would make a ring appear, and he would propose to his girlfriend.
This was one of those things that I knew I would only get one chance to get right. Fortunately I decided to do a few trial runs earlier in the evening, as a street show is quite different to performing for an audience that is expecting you and has hired you. It was a good experience and I would recommend it to any performer to test out their show on a walking street as you can quickly see which parts of the show need to be a bit more interesting, as pedestrians are under no obligation to stay and watch.
The funny thing is that the couple came about 20 minutes earlier than I had expected and I was still in the middle of one of my “trial runs”. I had never met either of them before but I soon realised who they were. Fortunately I got it right! Also the person who was going to film the event suddenly realised the same thing and grabbed the camera from my box in order to film the moment. They got an evil look from a spectator, until the spectator noticed me giving the nod of approval to go ahead and take the camera.
Why do magicians love playing cards?
Jul 14th
What is it about playing cards that holds such an allure for magicians? Why is it that there are more tricks using playing cards than any other object on earth?
Who was so clever as to invent a device that could entertain so many billions of people and also contain the secrets of the universe?
Wait a minute! Secrets of the Universe?
Ok. Well, maybe not exactly the secrets of the universe, but at least some ideas about our view of the universe: and more specifically the solar system. Even more specifically, the Calendar.
Lunar Calendars and Solar Calendars and were in use many millennia ago.
The Solar Calendar won out as the one we use today, but a deck of playing cards cleverly combines the two in a matrimony of ideas.
But there are practical reasons why magicians use playing cards in so many of their tricks.
Playing cards are practical. They do not take up a lot of space and you can create incredible magic results if you know what you’re doing. Sometimes even easy tricks can be fascinating. Though I venture to say, that spending a bit of time learning more advanced card tricks are well worth it and the resulting impression on an audience is many times stronger than the basic “pick-a-card” trick. With a little box filled with 52 pieces of card you can take an audience on a journey of amazement and engage their imagination to such a degree that can rival any form of entertainment. Can. This of course is not guaranteed. But it can. So that’s one reason magicians love playing cards. Portability, usability and versatility.
So far I have been able to incorporate the use of playing cards in the following forms of magic entertainment: transformations, vanishes, apparitions, time travel concepts, mind reading, gambling based concepts, lost and found concepts, espionage concepts, master memory, suspension or levitation, ghost themes, synchronicity themes, mathematical themes, remote control (of a human) theme, destiny theme, truth/lies theme, estimation themes, luck, thought transmission, and other unclassified tricks that are just done because I can.
So what else is of interest about a deck of cards?
Even though there are possibly thousands or tens of thousands of card tricks I still think that new tricks will continue to be published because cards have evolved along with modern people and are intrinsically linked to our psyche.
The numbers in a deck of cards are of great interest. And this is where we find the Lunar and Solar calendars interlaced.
There are 52 weeks in the solar year. There are 52 cards in a deck. The Joker could be the leap year’s extra day, if you really want to stretch the comparison further.
There are 4 seasons in a year (at least in most cultures and in the most dominating areas of the world). There are 4 suits in a deck.
There are 13 lunar months in a year. 28 days x 13 = 364. Each suit in a deck of cards is made up of 13 cards.
That’s just the beginning of the many interesting things found in the numbers of which a deck of playing cards is made up.
If I were to continue looking for links to human culture or even to us human beings I might draw a comparison to there being 2 colours in a deck: red and black. Male and female, if you want. Or yin- yang if you prefer.
There are ten “spot cards”. Ace through ten. (though by some definitions this doesn’t include the ace) But I’m trying to find significance with the number ten, so I’ll say there are 10 “non-face” cards in a deck. Ten is a very meaningful number to us humans: ten fingers! And the base ten number system is used worldwide.
There are 20 “non-face” cards of each colour. Still a significant number as our fingers and toes add up to 20.
Actually there are quite a few interesting things about the number 20. The Tzoltec calendar upon which the Mayan and Aztec calendars were based worked using 20 and 13 as multiples. Both those numbers are significant in a deck of cards. And what’s more 20 x 13 = 520. There’s that 52 again, magnified ten fold. And 100 fold equals 5200, the number of years that it takes for the Pleiades to reach a zenith.
Playing cards began appearing in Europe with the Gypsies we know from at least 1370 AD. The term ‘gypsy was shortened from Egyptian, though this has been disputed by some scholars (I can’t really understand why this is disputed). The Italian Tarocchi cards were said to contain vestiges of the learning of the ancient Egyptians, according to “Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards” By William Andrew Chatto, pub. 1848
In this book Chatto also mentions other speculation that King Edward I might have brought the game back from Persia.
Am I the first person to notice that playing cards have significant astronomical numbers and that their origins can be traced east, while the same numbers had significance in the western lands of the Americas? Probably not, but I wish I could find more information about it.
All that to say, I think it’s a fascinating study.
