magic is about honesty
everything here is true
except for the bits I made up
Dani DaOrtiz, whom we hosted for a series of special events in 2013 (and again in 2016) is a true wizard. And he has a very special way of making your brain hurt. He does this sort of thing*
* Shared for no other reason than to add a bit of magic to your Wednesday.
For those using the Lie Detector app which is part of Denis Behr's trick in Seventeen Secrets Volume 2, he made a small update which improves the working. You should go to his site and redownload the app to get the slightly better version. The method behind the trick remains exactly the same, but the output of the app has been made slightly clearer, which makes the effect clearer in the eyes of the audience. The change came about because of suggestions from Dani DaOrtiz while he was in Toronto recently.
For those of you that bought the book but haven't tried the trick because of the [secret stuff] involved, you should. It's one of the most ingenious combination of diverse principles that I have ever come across and the result is an iPhone that appears as though it can read minds.
Last year, my show Lies, Damn Lies & Magic Tricks was in the Summerworks Performance Festival at the Scotiabank Studio Theatre. As an experiment, we included an announcement at the beginning of the show along with the cell phone notice saying "non-flash photography is permitted, weird stuff will happen and it belongs on YouTube and Facebook" just to see what would happen. Now, eight months later, someone DropBoxed me a the video they shot of a portion of the show from the audience.
I don't actually have all that much video of my performances and I'm always happy to see it. So even though this is (formerly) unauthorized footage, I'll share it, so that if there's anyone else out there who has something stashed away, perhaps they'll share it.
This remains one of my favourite tricks that I've ever performed. Those of you who have seen more recent versions of it know that I've changed the story from "waiting in a hotel bar" to "waiting in an airport lounge" proving that either my memory is getting progressively worse or I'm a better liar than ever.
This is one of the stranger projects I've ever worked on. I helped my friend Ben Train to write a small booklet of his card magic. The result was Anteater Consortium. It contains seven items which vary in difficulty from self working to moderately difficult. As you can guess from the title, none of them have particularly serious presentations. If you can't track down Ben directly to obtain a copy, you can get one from Denny & Lee's Magic Studio here.
