New dates for Magic & Martini in Oakville

Our next three performances of Magic & Martini at O'Finn's Irish Temper in Oakville are sold out. We've added an additional night on Friday, June 16. The show is designed to be an extremely intimate and interactive performance for small audiences; perfect for those who want to get dressed up for a special night out. Performances are strictly 19+ with dress code.

Tickets are now available. Readers can use the code olive for a discount on the price of tickets when booking online:

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Tickets are also available for performances in Toronto and Hillsburgh. 

A Scientific Approach to the Paranormal

An interesting TEDx Talk about the search for ghosts with a surprise twist at the end. (Less of a surprise if you're familiar of the work of "Ross and Carrie":

Spoiler alert: It does have a happy ending. 

When The Onion does Magic

According to The Onion (according to some, as reliable a source of news as any these days)

“LAS VEGAS—Fearing the regrettable incident from his past would continue to follow him for the rest of his life, white Bengal tiger Montecore confirmed Friday he was still struggling to find work after mauling magician Roy Horn during a show at the Mirage casino in 2003. “Whenever I go out looking for a job, it seems like the first thing people focus on is the time I attacked Roy in the middle of a performance, and that usually ends my chances of landing anything right then and there,” said the chronically unemployed tiger, who explained that show directors’ discomfort with his work history had forced him to cobble together a variety of “small-time gigs” at low-end circuses and, at certain points, even busk on street corners by jumping between milk crates to make ends meet. “I’m motivated, I’m highly trained, I’ve got visually stunning pigmentation—I should be getting offers left and right. But you have one bad night and, poof, it’s all gone. Was it a mistake to bite my trainer in the neck and drag his body offstage as he screamed for his life? Of course. But does that mean I shouldn’t get another chance to dazzle audiences with my grace and litheness? I don’t think so.” At press time, Montecore was waiting in line for his unemployment check and contemplating selling his anal gland secretions for extra cash.”

On the intersection of Magic and Skepticism

On April 2 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the Pangburn Philosophy Club hosted an evening of magic. I wish I had been there; I was actually on a plane as this conversation was happening flying back to Toronto from Vancouver after having done some shows there the week before.

The renowned Canadian magician and escape artist, James Randi, was interviewed as a kick-off to the evening before the magic show.

Randi was a respected performer and escape artist and also designed illusions for Alice Cooper. He had another facet to his career exposing fraudulent psychics and faith healers — the two names that spring to the top of that list are Peter Popoff and Uri Geller. Later he founded the "James Randi Educational Foundation" which investigated claims of the paranormal and offered a "million dollar challenge" to anyone who could demonstrate psychic or paranormal ability under controlled experimental conditions. Later still came out as gay well into his eighties. So an important role model to many, many people the world over.

Matt Dillahunty is a magician, but is primarily known for his debates with religious people. He runs a video channel called the "Atheist Debates Project" where he deconstructs different arguments, good and bad, and is an ongoing project to make people more reasonable. I love his personal motto:

“I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible.”

— Matt Dillahunty

Here is their full conversation on stage, which runs just over an hour:

The one thing he said, which seems to have generated some discussion is that he prefers to be called a conjurer instead of a magician. Superficially, conjurer just sounds like a snobby British equivalent to magician. Although originally, a magician was supposed to be a person with "real" powers whereas "conjurer" has built into the definition the idea that it's magic tricks — a facsimile of magic. 

Personally, I've opted to go with magician. This is primarily because it's simpler. (There's nothing worse than having a word on your business card that most people won't understand.) But also out of a desire to reclaim magic as a secular term. Since we all know "real magic" doesn't exist — subject of course to your own personal definition of real — we should be able to use that term for the magic that people do in real life... you know... in a magic show. 

Photos from Magic & Martini in Toronto

Last night at SpiritHouse in Downtown Toronto, we had another sold-out Magic & Martini. Thank you to everyone who came out to see the show! Here are some photos from the show from Tyler Williams. 

We have several upcoming shows in Toronto, Oakville and Hillsburgh. Readers can use the code olive for a discount on the price of tickets when purchasing online. 

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.