Naquada

What can you say about Geoffrey Durham that hasn’t been said. The man is a legend, not just for his tricks, but more for his performance and understanding of how to be yourself and not a magician.

He started by saying how special blackpool was to him. At this first Blackpool convention in 1977, he saw a trick, and it impressed him so much, that he went straight home, didn’t see any more of the convention, and practiced and worked on the routine he’d seen.

His first piece of advise was ‘Never be the magician, they just do tricks, theres more to it than tricks, people want to like, and see you, not so much the tricks that you perform‘. There’s so much truth and logic in that. He underlined that fact by saying that if you want to succeed as an entertainer, you have to be yourself, but he also said that magicians are entertainers who pretend to do thinks they cannot do. The secret of success is to be an entertainer that can make both those statements true, and sit between them. He talked about people that had managed to achieve this, the likes of Mac King, Tommy Cooper, David Blaine and others.

He also talked about something I think is very much missed by people, the fact that people don’t not like say card tricks, they dislike you doing, say card tricks. In essence, someone might say, ‘I hate magic‘, when, in fact what they mean is ‘I hate all the magic I’ve been shown‘, which is entirely different.

Geoffrey spoke a lot about his new book (which is next in my reading pile at home), and the contents being around bringing out you and how to bring out the best of you, peppered with a few of the solid tricks he’s earned his living from over the years. He showed a few effects from the book, a very clean and cleaver dictionary test, which he attributed to Maurice Fogel, and a Magic Square routine, which he’d worked on with (I think) David Woodward, whereby he was adding an ending. The standard magic square routines, don’t really have an ending, but what Geoffrey showed, basically that the magic square was a prediction, proved by having an envelope with the ‘magic total number‘ written in it from before it was chosen, meant there was some purpose to the effect.

He closed with the Gypsy Thread and the Selbit Blocks, bringing a great and very informative lecture to a close

David Solomon was mentored by Ed Marlo, so you know the material was going to be good. David started the talk, recounting about W.C.Fields and used this to go into a 4 card monte, and onto a 7 queen monte, basically the Gypsy Curse routine with a few twists in it. Each effect was strong and very visual, a 4 jack (or wild knave) routine was a very clean jack assembly effect, with each jack visibly vanishing from each packet to appear in the leader pile with what seemed like no special moves. The method was as with everything Solomon did, simple, sensible and visually very striking..He also performed and explained a large card spectator selection poker deal (the spectator gets to choose to keep, or give away each card), always leaving you with the higher poker hand, and a nice oil and water routine with blue backed and red backed cards.In all a very good, strong and entertaining lecture, and certainly a much better morning that yesterday first few sessions

The Martin Sanderson lecture was always going to be a tough slot, first thing in the morning after the night before.. Martin started off with some transpositions of cards, following into an ambitious card routine ending with a card in mouth. He then followed with chosen card to envelope, and for the second time this convention, the benefits of a card vanish with the Omni deck was shown.

Martin used two two spectators really well, and did a very good coin routine with one of the coins ending up under the spectators watch. There was also a very nice chop cup routine using a lime and a kiwi (the fruit not the inhabitation of New Zealand). The routine ended up with a borrowed signed bill ending up in the kiwi fruit.

The final effect was a ring flight using a small toy dog instead of the normal key fob. Generally a fair start to the day, but fairly slow I think due to the amount of alcoholic beverages consumed the night before..

The die hards of us are know on the final lecture of the night, and possibly not one really for getting on for close to midnight and the early hours of Saturday morning.

Lennart needs no explanation of just how unbelievable his card work is. In his great style of appearing very clumsy with cards, he dealt perfect poker hands, dealt selected cards on demand, vanished cards on dealing, controlled, changed and otherwise completely screwed with your perception of exactly how the physics of cards really work.

He also did a great ‘reverse matrix’ effect, where he dealt (or vanished) cards under four coins, to then show each card under the coins to have vanished, reappearing under the final coin (you have to just think cards vanishing as they are dealt and reversing the normal idea of a matrix!)

I also saw a nice new move, to replace my standard shuffled deck to to sorted cards that I regularly do (the green angle separation). This move allows (apparently!!!) you to get the cards into numerical order in one pass!!

Being so late, it really just hurts my brain to watch this stuff and try and understand what he’s doing.. but it’s just amazing stuff…

David Stone was always going to attract a crowd, and the Spanish Ball Room at the Winter Gardens was packed with standing room only. In an almost Copperfield like experience the session started with a section from Davids DVD.

The lecture started with some clean and sharp coin appearances, vanishes and transpositions, including a very nice coin to mobile phone transformation. More coin transpositions followed, ending up with a coin to bottle of wine.

It’s always very refreshing in a lecture to have to double take on a number of items, many of the card case vanishes, or deck vanishes completely caught me out, and hand me wishing you could just ask him to just do that once more!!

The explanations of the effects where mingled in with comedy, jokes, and visual off beat moments, even producing a girl from under the table.. twice.. with a costume change!!

Repeated productions of full glasses of drinks from the sleeves of his jacket, and more bottles of wine appearing from no where, all added to a truly excellent lecture and session. There were a number of things that I loved about this lecture, not just because of the fact he fooled me badly a few times, but also because I’ve now got some nice additions to a routine I’ve been working on based around my old salt and coin routine.

Ending the session with a signed card to mobile phone battery compartment, David Stone got a standing ovation from the audience.

update: apparently the second girl was a completely different girl to the first one, I’m not sure if thats more, or less impressive that he performed the entire lecture with two girls under the table!!