A Sold Out Event No One Was Invited To

On April Fool's Day, Toronto saw a one day convention for magicians, The Browser's Bash. (Named after the local magic emporium, The Browser's Den of Magic.) The event received a rather prominent writeup on the front page of the entertainment section of Thursday's Toronto Star. 

“Browser’s Magic Bash is an annual massive meetup for 400 mostly local and a few international magicians. Here, amateur and professional escape artists, mentalists, comedians and prestidigitators convene for a quasi-networking, quasi-educational get-together that is really more like a massive family reunion than anything else.

With niche magic shops petering out, and web tutorials readily available, chances for modern-day magicians to hang out with tons of their peers don’t arise often. So when an opportunity presents itself, up-and-coming magical entrepreneurs jump on their chance to poke around for tips from the pros, while hobbyists come out to hang with part-timers and everyone gets to gawk at the impressive tricks done by masters of the craft.”

I'm frequently asked where I go to learn what I do.

[As an aside, I believe based on reading that "Where do you learn how to do that?" has replaced "How did you do that?" as the most popular question audiences ask. This seems to be a recent shift, and I think it's due to the influence that Harry Potter, or more importantly Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has had in popular culture. My audiences can now imagine a magic school, even though there really aren't such schools in real life.]

The truth about us is that we're not terribly secretive people. Magicians are horrible at keeping secrets. The reason has primarily to do with vanity: If you come up with a truly interesting idea, you want credit for it which leads to the idea being promoted in one form or another. So in actual fact the "secrets" of magic are being disseminated all the time, just slightly off the side of the road where you don't notice. 

In a typical year, I add twenty to fifty books and a similar number of periodicals about magic to my library. By and large, these books aren't especially hard to procure. In the magic world, my money is just as green as yours — fabulously rainbow-coloured in Canada. But educational resources, and gatherings like this are easily accessible if you know where to look for them.

As Fox Mulder was famous for saying; The Truth Is Out There.

Magic & Martini at SpiritHouse

Last night, we hosted another sold out performance of Magic & Martini at SpiritHouse in Downtown Toronto. Thank you to everyone who attended the show. We are currently sold out in Toronto through the end of May with some spaces in Oakville and Hillsburgh. 

Readers can use the code olive for a discount on tickets purchased online. 

Photos by Tyler Williams

Bits of Mathematical Art

The Scientific American Blog posted examples of the kind of symmetrical and visually striking art you can make with mathematical formulae. The pieces are by "mathematical artist" Hamid Naderi Yeganeh and worth taking a look at. As the magician Cardini used to say, "Oh see the pretty thing. 

Msgr. Vincent Foy

I learned recently that Monsignor Vincent Foy passed away at the age of one hundred and one. He was an important figure in magic in Toronto who also happened to be a distinguished Catholic priest. 

As is, I'm sure, true of most disciplines; many of the notable figures in the field go completely unheard of in the world at large. I'm not sure what to say when people ask me who my "favourite" magician is (why would I be boring enough to settle for just one?) because most of the possible answers will involve people they have never heard of. And many magicians make meaningful contributions to the craft, sometimes over the course of decades, as pure hobbyists while maintaining normal human jobs. 

In this case, he was the ghostwriter for two very important books highlighting the magic of Canadian master magician Ross Bertram. He also published some smaller pamphlets under the pen name of Dr. George E. Casaubon (in case someone objected to a priest knowing his way around a deck of cards.) Later in life his collection of one-handed cuts with a deck of cards was compiled and released in A Cut Above. 

I had the opportunity to meet him twice when I was invited to perform at his residence as part of Magicana's Senior Sorcery program. They were always sure to reserve him a front row seat for the many magic shows hosted there. 

This photo was taken in 2015 a few months before he hit triple digits. 

Msgr. Vincent Foy

Remembering Daryl

On Friday, magic lost one of its brightest lights to depression. A magician who typically went just by Daryl (like Madonna or Cher) committed suicide at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. Unfortunately, there have been some nasty fabrications that have crept their way into the story — there really is such a thing as fake news. But the truth is he is gone, and that's tragic. 

When I was first beginning my studies in magic, someone recommended that I torrent a television special by some new guy called David Blaine. Anyone who remembers those days knows that files were frequently mislabeled for reasons that no one was ever quite sure of. Instead of a network TV special, I found a grainy transfer from a VHS cassette of a guy in a a red bow tie demonstrating something called the "Arthur Buckley Multiple Shift."

While I never found a use for the Arthur Buckley multiple shift, I did learn that the clip was from The Encyclopedia of Card Sleights, an eight-cassette series that was... well... exactly what it said it was. Daryl was considered a master technician and his knowledge of magic — particularly close-up sleight of hand — was encyclopedic to the point where he became known as the "magicians' magician".  On top of that he was delightfully entertaining and charming in an over-the-top cheesy sort of way that worked beautifully for him. He was a teacher and inspiration for a generation of magicians. Recently, Jamy Ian Swiss wrote a column about him, which does a good job of summarizing the impact he's had on the world of magic. 

Last year I was involved in assembling an online exhibition which included two performances by Daryl on a Canadian television series filmed in Calgary; The Magic Palace. These would have been filmed about 1980, at a point in his career before he had won most of his awards. He had maintained that signature goofy style when I met him twice in Toronto over the past ten years. He gave a fantastic four-hour workshop in my friend's parents dining room.

Mental health issues like depression are hard to imagine in performers because they/we live a life where we are trained to be cheerful on command. In the past year, I've had to do shows immediately after a significant other broke up with me and immediately after the funeral for a friend and colleague. 

The surprising thing is that it's not that difficult to do.

The muscle memory of performance — of lines and jokes and well rehearsed choreography — overcomes you and the response from an audience is a very effective way of placing you in the moment and blocking out the outside world. The problem is after, when the emotions are supposed to return, they don't come back quite right. Part of the grief and sadness gets brushed away or buried and never seems to get dealt with properly. Then it comes back in quiet moments. It's a very strange feeling.

For the past two days, this has dominated my Facebook news feed. Hidden amongst the condolences are some uplifting messages of people sharing their own experience with mental health issues. Slowly it's becoming something that people feel more free to talk about which is an essential step towards people being able to seek help.

Some Optical Illusions

Psychologist and collector of weird knowledge with a British accent, Richard Wiseman, put together an interesting assortment of optical illusions to make your Wednesday weird: