Naquada

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!!

After a bit of a sorry start to the day with lectures, Steve Shawn Farqurhar pulled it out of the bag with his lecture. Not only was he funny, both in his act, and his explanations, but what he did was just class, clean, clever and innovative.

The three time Fism Award winner delivered what he classed as classic stuff with a twist from his working material. He started his lecture by doing a classic matrix, but with a twist. He only used two coins, and he used photos of his hands to cover the coins, as opposed to his actual hands. He did a clean matrix effect, and repeated the effect to show the coin physically still in the photo on his hand. He repeated it again, but now with the classic four coins, and again with photos of his hands.. again ending up with the coins in the photo.

Another really nice effect that he explained was a great signed CD effect. Getting a spectator to sign a blank CD, he removed the silver from it, to leave the signature on a clear see through CD. Following this with another CD effect, where the names of two selected cards appear on the back of a previously signed and blank CD. The interesting twist was that only one selection appeared at a time.

The crowd really loved Shawn’s performance, and he continued to wow the audience with deck vanishes, where selected cards transposed places, and left the ‘deck’ as a solid clear block of glass, again he repeated the same effect, but instead of a solid block, he vanished all the faces and backs of the cards, except the spectators card.

The ended up by performing and explaining a really nice torn and restored photo of his daughter. Well, it was actually a torn and almost restored photo. In fact the signed photo was restored in the wrong order, leaving the spectator with quarters mismatched on the photo, but their signature still in place.

The whole lecture was really great, full of comedy, clever and visual magic, and really was a fantastic evening session.

Note that the reference to Steve Farqurhar not Shawn Farqurhar was an in joke and part of the competition to see who read all the posts in detail from Blackpool. It was also a play on the awful compere on the Saturday night misintroducing Shawn as Derek, and then David!!! You can see just how insulted Shawn was by this on his blog.

Derek Lever, The Convention organiser for the Blackpool Magic Convention announced today that the Blackpool Magicians Club, would be buying their own Theatre club, and hoped to have the venue up and running for next years convention.

This is pretty big news, that was hidden away in the convention program. Effectively, this means that the Blackpool Magic Club is the first magic club in the world to own it’s own performing theatre. Derek Lever said, that “This would make the Blackpool Magic Club the envy of the magical world “. He also added that the theatre would be used for various events around the convention period next year, possibly hinting at a repeat of this years Shazam shows in the run up to the Blackpool convention this year.

The idea of a magic society or club having it’s own theatre to perform in is certainly a great idea. The potential for lectures, shows, events and further methods for creating income huge.

It will be interesting to see where this takes the convention next year.

Update: The location of the new headquarters for the Blackpool Club, and its theatre is the old Claremont Theatre Club on Sherwood Road. The full address is at the rear of 1, Sherbourne Road, North Shore. Blackpool. FY1 2PW.

Chris Priest lectured on his ‘Close up Masters’, items from his professional close up act. Starting with a nice coin appearances followed by a clean coins across, finishing the effect with a very clean looking coin through spectators hand. He also had some very nice ‘invisible and re=appearances of a coin, in both his own, and spectators hand. Finishing with a jumbo coin production.

Chris really brought up the quality of the lectures today, filling the first 10 minutes with very strong and clean coin magic from his Masters Coins DVD. Chris worked through the explanation of the coins across, and coin productions.

Next Chris moved onto a gambling themed effect with two spectators, with a nice clean transposition of red and black aces. Performing much better than the previous lectures, Chris did some very solid and workable card transpositions and effects, focusing a lot on how to work receptions and tables. All very valuable stuff, and very much focused on those magicians working residences and table magic at restaurants and I assume wedding receptions and corporate events.

Chris lecture was solid, and had good content, and for those of us working real world situations like tables, it was a great session.

FFFF regular International Magic Convention second place winner Patrick Przysiekchi hopefully was going to pull up the lecture standard, starting with a flaming intro to a six card repeat, he at least woke up the audience. He talked about various ways to introduce business cards or normal cards with a flaming start (fires always a good hit with me, second to big pyrotechnics!).

He did a fairly nice effect based around football, a variation I think (dont quote me on it) based on Jim Steinmeyers Bermuda Triangle from his book Impossipuzzles (or as Richard Morrell mentioned Paul Harris’ Art of Astonishment) The basic effect is that four people have 10 footballs on a ‘pitch’ on the table. A fifth spectator adds a ball at a time, the balls on the pitch are moved around, and each of the four spectators still end up with 10 balls each. The routine continues until the fifth spectator is left with, guess, 10 balls, meaning all five spectators have 10 balls.. a very puzzling effect, but again, seemed to miss something.

The next effect involved a chose card reappearing back in the deck reversed as a small card. In a quick add on effect the chosen black 8 card turned into a billiard eight ball, and then a red 3 balls.

Patrick then ran into a multiple location routine, 6 cards were chosen and appeared at various different locations, in the deck, pocket, and wallet, the routine was based around some principals of marking and locating cards, but these really weren’t only well explained, again leaving us a little bemused and confused.

The classic gypsy thread was revolutionary re-invented with… Dental Floss.. with newspaper clippings of reports of people escaping from prison using dental floss as a reason for the effect.. slightly odd but…

The actual effect was no different to a classic Gypsy Thread routine, and to be honest I missed the point of why we needed to be shown this. Following on there was a fairly nice ring on rope under hank , that seemed to use again an older principle, but was fairly convincing. A water in newspaper vanish (using the very standard method), reappearance of the water, into a cup and a final re-vanish of the water was the penultimate effect, followed by a three ring linking ring routine set to Christmas music and poetry.

Again, potentially a good lecture.. but wasn’t as great as I’d hoped.

David Sousa’s lecture was around, I think, stage craft. Although it was Davids first lecture in English, and his first lecture outside portugal, the lecture was a little bit confusing. What David was basically explaining was very good advice: Watch and consider your angle and visibility to your audience when performing on stage.He spent a good 10 minutes running through large flip sheet drawings of Audience to Performer location diagrams, with angles and measurements.

This section really started to feel like a maths lesson, as 90 degree, 180, and 140 degree view points were discussed. Unfortunately a large number of the audience started to leave part way through, and David tried to pull them back with showing more effects, that then personally just confused me more about what was going on.

A White to Black Dice transposition failed because the effect hadn’t been setup, after setup, it was then shown as almost a throw away effect. A named king was produced from an previously displayed large envelope, but again, it seemed confusing as to what happened, and why, and the whole lecture seemed to end up as a rushed dealer pitch, with a hint of desperation to keep the audience in the room, and focused on the performance.

It was a bit of a disappointing start to the lectures for today, but might have been partly down to language, David’s first lecture outside his home country, and the fact he was lecturing for the first time in English. A shame really as the session had the potential to be quite good.

I had a good discussion today with Richard Kaufman about the April issue of Genii magazine. The monthly magic magic will contain an in-depth article about the recent performance of the hooker rising cards.

Richard was very excited about the article, stating that “this was the real deal”, the colossal 27 page article in Aprils issue is written and illustrated by Jim Steinmeyer, and from the preview issue that Richard was kind enough to let me look through, it details a lot about the illusive effect, it’s history, and even includes a good number of photos, and drawings of the setup from the recent performance.

The Hooker rising cards is one of magics most closely guarded and discussed effects. The performance containing a number of cards rising from a deck, under a glass jar, even any card called for slowly rising from the deck. It’s a great effect that few have been privileged to see, and if you weren’t amongst the lucky few to have witnessed recently, this article is definitely for you.