I recently spent a day in the library of a legend. His scholarship on the history of magic is profound and thorough. He and his lovely wife entertained myself and the sapient pig for an afternoon. When I say entertained, there was no performance. All of us relaxed, shuffled off our desire to ‘perform’ and settled into more sedate pleasures.

He showed me such wonders. His collection extends all through a five bedroom house in Hull, and he knows it so very well. His study, where he writes monthly for the magic circular, contains three walls of shelves double stacked with rare and interesting books. I’ll keep the details to myself, but one of the lovely little joys for me, was reading a book only semi-rare. It is called Elliot’s Last Legacy, and it is by Houdini. Actually it was largely written by a friend of his, and he swooped in to put his name on it.

None-the-less it contains a dream-like description of one of Dr. Elliot’s performances. I was swept up in the simplicity of form, and feel compelled to share it with those of you who still read this site.

This is a paraphrasing, rather than direct quotation, because I wrote so many things out by hand. Some of them contain small errors in grammar, and thus the text will not be exact. Without further ado…

He entered from the left side of the stage, attired in an evening dress, crush hat, and carrying a cane; stood the cane (which had a knob handle) at right front of stage where it remained upright. Removing hat he placed it over the handle of the cane thus making an improvised ‘table’, which he completed by spreading a silk pocket hand-kercheif over the crown of the hat. From his upper right hand pockethe then produced a glass of water, upon drinking which and drying the glass, he placed it on top of the handkerchief and hat. Elliot next made a bare armed production of a full deck of cards, from which he had six selected and marked by choosers and then returned to the deck. He then caused three cards to rise from the glass on the ‘table’ and the other three cards to slowly float up from the deck to his hand. Each of the six cards, as it rose from the glass or deck, was scaled (v.tr 4) out into the audience.Elliot then removed the pack from the goblet and with a tossing movement, caused the deck to vanish; by a similat tossing movement the goblet melted away and finally, the silken pocket handkerchief by slow rubbing between the palms. He then finished by removing hat from cane, placing it on his head and removing cane from floor. Then carrying cane in right hand walking to the left side of stage, he doffed his hat and made exit. Next, holding the deck in the left hand and using that hand only, Elliot would bring any card selected to the front of the deck; in fact the cards called seem to appear on the face almost instantaneously. Finally, after working a series of other fine card effects, followed with the remarkable manipulative work with a two and one half inch billiard ball. Elliot then removed the pack from the goblet and with a tossing movement, caused the deck to vanish; and by a similar tossing movement the goblet melted away, and finally the silken pocket handkerchief by slow rubbing between the palms. He then finished by removing hat from cane, placing it on his head and removing cane from floor. Then, carrying the cane in his right hand, walking to the left side of stage, he doffed hat and made exit.

As a magician, you could perform in a wide variety of arenas. In fact, there’s quite a tradition of us turning up in new formats and mediums.

In early egypt we were holy people, or scholars, and sometimes street performers. In France a new format was born when the magician dropped the formal robes and wore what we would now consider formal evening wear. This broght the art indoors, and created stage magic.

Later we traveled with scientists, and presented the latest gadgets to the age of reason. There were the medicine shows, selling quackery to the public, and then the birth of cinema. Yes, all true, and one of my favourite facts is that Melies the magician, became the world’s first film-maker.  Don’t take my word for it, look it up yourself!

So the time has come. I’m endeavouring in new mediums myself. Of course the genre is not new to me, but I am looking forward to creating, designing, producing, and executing. I look forward to occasionally using my knowledge of deception as entertainment, and blending it into the pursuit of all things ludic.

What medium, you ask?

Well, alternate reality games of course.

This blog will remain as is, fear not. However, I will also be blogging on all things ARG for my esteemed colleagues at Winterwell, over at this odd little site.

In my last post I was lamenting the disappearance of one of the great performances of ventriloquism from the internet. While a piece of my heart vanished with that video, it inspired the search for others, and a chance to dip into the history of ventriloquism. This transforms the old into the new, in the endless cycle of entertainments.

Ventriloquists used to perform without the dummy. They used to hold conversations with ‘off-stage’ characters or members of the audience. They would sometimes sing, or do birdsongs. In a sense they were performers of mimicry, rather than people who could ‘throw their voice’. In my mind, vents are magicians too, and I share freely with them when I meet them. Their illusion is auditory, but they are illusionists none the less. Of course there are differences, and I cannot do what they do, but I do not consider them so differently than magicians, or magiciennes as the case may be.

One of my favourite stories of ventriloquism comes from the eighteenth century. I must confess I have just hunted through my bookshelf to give you an exact quotation, but failed my quest. My enthusiasm to find the reference would appear to be equally matched by my lack of time for this writing this post. Unfortunately this seems to be an increasing trend.

So with apologies, we shall work from memory.

A vent was performing on a cruise ship, and performing in the older style I mention above, by holding dialogues with invisible characters or mimicking noises and people. During the performance he was consistently disturbed and interrupted by the buzzing of a fly. Attempting to espy the nuisance, his eyes wandered a great deal during the performance to the mirth of the audience. Of course they would’ve attributed this to part of the act, and to his skill in as a performer.

Close to the conclusion of the act, his gaze fell upon a member of the audience, who looked bored and seemed not to be paying attention. Slowly though a sly grimace swept across the spectators face, and the performing ventriloquist recognized another great polyphonist of the day. He suddenly realised he had been dueling with an illusory fly, produced by an equally skilled practitioner of the art!

After the show they laughed heartily, and the ensuing two week cruise to New York found these mischievous gentleman producing all sorts of auditory illusions and pranks on an unsuspecting captive crew and audience. This culminated in a ridiculous hullabaloo when the arrived at Ellis Island and disembarked to be processed by customs. Upon approaching the customs desk they giggled like schoolboys while the posh woman in front of them was accused of smuggling pigs into the country within her great baggage cases. The sounds of an entire barn-yard were clearly heard emanating from her baggage until the customs official demanded to inspect it and found it contained a rather mundane selection of evening wear and ladies toiletries.

The lady and the customs official were not amused, but the vents must have laughed all the way to to Broadway.

Witness then just how versatile ventriloquism can be, and share my joy at finding at least another performance that makes me smile. Even if you sometimes find them creepy, which I know many people do…trust me this is worth watching…

Nina Conti in Montreal…

Last weekend, I spent time with Sharon down in London at the Magic Circle Collectors day. We met up with our friend Will Houstoun, a fine magician and magical historian.  It’s always fun to session with him, and he delivered a great lecture on his new book.

Richard Evans delivered a fantastic lecture on Isaac Fawkes, adding to our primary source on the legend by a factor of 20! He has found nearly 1000 articles in newspapers of the time. Many of these are placed by Fawkes himslef as advertisements, but luckily for us they detail his routes, his routines, and the cost of his show. This means a route book could be created! I really like Richard and hope to meet him again. Unfortunately, his research is not up on the web, and you’ll need to track him down yourself.

Richard Stokes delivered the most controversial lecture, and is obviously worn down by reactions to his research. I thought he made his points clearly and everything he states is verifiable. The truth will out. Unfortunately, as Brits we have a lot tied up into the legend of ‘The War Magician’. I mean, we couldn’t have France’s legends of Houdin and the bedoiuns, and not have our own war magician could we?

So some of you may have guessed I was joking in my last post, fulfilling a long promised hoax.

I may be more infrequent in blogging here as other issues are increasing, but I am here to stay.

66a Church Rd.

He comes onstage and opens suitcases filled with light. He speaks, we laugh, he opens up. It’s like having an verbose and funny friend who is down on their luck, and lamenting a loss. He shows up, you offer him tea and sympathy, and of course he returns the favour by protesting too much with false bravado that ‘it isn’t so bad’.

If I told you what this play is about you’d think ‘how good could that story really be’. This is proof that it’s the showman and the method of the story, and not the story itself that should concern you. Daniel Kitson is a cat chasing a yarn, one that leads us through every nook and cranny of his beloved flat. On the way through you catch glimpses of his life, his humour, and his home.

The next day, the Mentor gave a talk. He brought three books on magic:

Hocus Pocus

Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

and another which will remain nameless.

Not only was the talk brilliant, he brought the books to life for people who had never heard of them. I don’t mean just the story of those books, I mean the story of those particular books. He flipped their pages and showed us the words written in them by some previous reader. The comments of some magician centuries past, on how he thought the trick of severing a horse’s head was ‘Nonsense’. He recalled how they had found him, enticed him, and ultimately provided some way of paying to acquire them on his limited means. Bibliomania of the most delicious kind.

Afterwards, I found myself briefly holding a suitcase with more than my yearly salary’s worth of books in it.

Then the drinking began.

When I woke up, I recalled that I had agreed to participate in a Scavenger hunt all over the city. 100 items, 12 hours, 42 teams, three comrades and one prize of £2,000. We didn’t win, but we were close. I personally solved clues on museum rooftops, found references to frogs in old books, joined an aerobics class, put a butterfly in a matchbox, got a document from 1936, and a postcard of the Forth Rail Bridge predating 1950. My team were brilliant, and I look forward to ‘arging’ with them again.

The exhibition of what we all gathered is on this Saturday at 2:00. Come along, I’ll tell you the story of finding weird stuff….

mr e, originally uploaded by piglicker.

Monday night:

I met Denis Behr, a magician from Munich. He was in town and I thought I’d get a copy of his book, and avoid paying the shipping. We’ve never met before, but it’s common to just phone or write other magicans and meet up in their city. We only spent a few hours together, but it was a good laugh.

I got the chance to show him around the Festival theatre and tell him a bit about The Great Lafeyette (and strangely forgot to tell him he was born in Munich), and Arthur Lloyd two of the most amazing performers who ever lived. That I live in this very city and can recount their story to visiting magicians or showmen is a recuring pleasure.

We popped over to the Marquee de Sideshow and we were able to grab a quick bite to eat and see Shep Huntly. Paul Zenon opened things up for the show and did a classic of magic with a lemon freshness. I said last week I was looking forward to seeing him compere, and he didn’t disappoint. I even had the bemusing experience of watching Frodo sprook for himself in the third person. Having all these guys within spitting distance is a rare treat.

First of all, it’s the credit crunch and we need more £3-5 pounds shows in Edinburgh.

Second you get to see some classic sideshow stuff, like blockhead and lifting car batteries with sensitive portions of the anatomy. I’ve seen the fomer many times and the latter in other forms, but it sure beats reruns of Cracker.

Third, it’s great to see some short and sweet shows this year. The shows they put on are 15-30 minutes long and running all the time.

So if you have an hour to kill between shows, the Marquee de Sideshow doesn’t just talk a good game, they deliver a show up close and personal. Check the nails yourself; I did. You may wish they were a little farther away to be honest, since in their own words they will do “what other people couldn’t, shouldn’t or wouldn’t”.

The saxophone was weeping, the keyboard was winking through the weariness, and the guitar was whispering weltschmertz. The drums itched out the urgency of young love, in my favourite venue: the Spiegel tent.

Scott Hamilton and the Sermon Organ Trio might not appeal to all of you, but a good friend, a strong beer, and free steak afterwards convinced me that comraderie still exists. That was a sunday spent, and the next day at work just bearable because of it.

The pasteboards were represented as well, and gloriously so. Guy Hollingworth performed his Expert at The Card Table. While I disagree on some of the academic conclusions of ‘The Man Who Was Erdnase’, turning it into a show was indeed worthwhile. It is a story worth telling, even if the facts need a little colouring outside the lines.

Let’s face it, most people don’t have the stomach for the subtlety of ‘probably true, but not fully proven’.

I digress.

The show was an inspiration. I have read through Guy’s books with laugh-out-loud pleasurable moments. I know (or at least have read) some of the methods in his show. It was a pleasure to watch, and even more so to see it working. A symphony for fingers and a dance with misdirection. It may be the best show with cards I have ever seen live. It is without a doubt my recommendation for the magic show to see this year.

Faithful readers know how I feel about Captain Frodo. He is a gentleman and a scholar, and I am delighted he’s returned to our rainy city. He has returned with La Clique, and rumours have it that a smaller tent means a bigger show.

Take the Marquee De Sideshow for example….

Paul Zenon’s usual lounge wizadry? That would be plenty.

He has exceeded the expectations by working a smaller stage and sharing it with other extraordinary people. While I love his magic, I have always felt he had a knack for being a compere incomparable. He strikes me as a man with convictions and perfect diction. I think Jim Rose has a serious run for his money, and he’s not on home turf….and that’s as exciting as Barnum and Bailey’s early rivalries.

To come: Jim Rose, Circus Oz, Ali Cook, La Clique, The Marquee De Sideshow, The Mentor’s book-talk.

Brown paper packages and a customs manifest. Christmas on Saturday morning.All the packages contain significant books:

Magic of the World, John Mulholland, 1965 no dustjacket

Breslaw’s Last Legacy (Reprint of 1811), LE number 172 of 560

The Expositor, or many mysteries unraveled (Reprint of 1805) LE number 415 of 1000

but one package in particular contained four booklets. Softback, two pamphlets, two softcover bindings. The smell of dry paper.

These four things bear boring titles:

The Paul Fleming Book Reviews Volumes I & II

How’s Your Library?

Cues for Collectors

Essentially, bookporn doesn’t need to be judged by its cover.

‘How’s your library?’ for example contains a number of pages illustrating what famous magicians’ bookplates look like. Thus if you are to find one in a secondhand bookshop, that has a bookplate, you may be resonably confident of recognising it.

Cues for Collectors contains such enticing chapters as:

* ‘Odd and Unusual Books’
* Mythical Magic Books
* The Cheaters
* The Scarce and Rare
* Thomas Johnson’s Dainty Conceits

Here is an excerpt of Mythical Magic Books for your delectation:

“William Fennor, a pamphleteer, poet and entertainer, published in 1617 a book titled The Counter’s Commonwealth. Actually the book was completed in October 1616. It took the form of a dialogue between the author and another inmate of a counter (i.e., a debtor’s prison – Fennor was actually in one when he wrote the book). In chapter 2 he says “Why sir,” said I “there is a book called Greene’s Ghost Haunts Coney Catchers, another called Legerdemain, and The Black Dog of Newgate(etc.).” The only seventeenth century conjuring book known to have been published prior to this time was Sa. Rid’s The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, London 1612 and 1614.”

Essentially, two of these books can be identified if allowances are made for mistakes in titles (hauning instead of haunts), and predate Fennor’s book. The third however has not turned up in over 400 years. A ghost among rare books.

Some of the mysteries encountered are fresher and ephemeral:

A sixties era photograph containing 26 men was tucked into one of the booklets. They are smiling, some standing, some seated. A cursive hand on the back reads:

“To Steve Chaiko

The last meeting of the New Haven Magic Society

P&F Studio 1968

Russ Dowden”

Why would a magic society have a last meeting? What would bring them to smile into to the camera before vanishing forever?

The yellow springs themselves, originally uploaded by Benimoto.

“American conjurers were at their best in the open air under the night sky. When tom-toms beat and campfires cast flickering shadows, their strange feats were as awe inspiring to fellow tribesmen as the occasional flashes of lightning that streaked across the sky.”

According to Milbourne Christopher the earliest known European reference to native American or First Nations magic appears in the chronicles of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. These record Cortez’s gold hungry expeditions in Honduras, 1524.

Escapology seems to be a strongly represented form of magic in these communites, the ability to escape often expounded as proof of the assistance of spirits. Jonathon Carver studied the Cree in Canada from 1766 to 1768. He records witnessing an extraordinary escape too ordinary to merit mention here.

“American magicians of that same era used sleight of hand to change the colour of balls or cards. How much more effective to conjure with feathers and snow!”

The Role of Conjuring in Saulteux Society by Dr. A. Irving Hallowell discusses the construction and use of conjuring lodges. Often a medicine man would be tied and bound by a challenger and left alone in the lodge. These lodges would then begin to shake violently, and moans or wails could be heard emanating within. The medicine man would then appear untied at the door, or be found in inside still tightly bound. Occasionally they would be found to have vanished entirely, or perhaps have been replaced by a bushel of corn or box of rifles.

I regret that I do not thus far count among my coorespondances either a Native American magician or historian. I suspect there are books and studies written by tribe members themselves, and I await someone more knowledgable than myself to make me aware of them.

Until then we must settle for a theatrical ending of this post, where I lose my head, and provide you with a description of a decapitation. This is but one star in a vast constellation of decapitations throughout the history of mysteries, but it is fitting in that it takes place under the open sky.

“The ceremony was staged at night by the light of a campfire. The conjurers of the Kwakiutl tribe on Vancouver Island placed their victim face-down flat on the ground. When the executioner raised his knife for the cutting stroke, assistants scurried forward to kneel and shield the horrible sight from sensitive eyes. Down flashed the blade. The men moved aside; the head was several inches from the body. It was lifted by the swordsman and held high to be seen by all who dared to look. After the head was put on the ground close to the neck, the assistants converged again and joined the chant that would make the victim whole.”

“In New York, as in China, (Ching Ling Foo) offered a challenge to rival wizards. If anyone could duplicate his bowl production, it was announced, Ching would pay $1000 for the pleasure of seeing it. William Ellsworth Robinson, “The Man of Mystery,” a New Yorker who had been with Kellar, Hermann and other masters, accepted the offer, but learned it was just a publicity stunt.

Furious Robinson built a complete act along the lines of Ching Ling Foo’s production and took it to Paris, where he masqueraded as a genuine Chinese. Later in London, as Chung Ling Soo, he was a sensation.

Ching Ling Foo went on from the United States to play continental theaters, then returned to China. In January, 1905 Ching was performing at the Empire Theatre in London while Chung conjured at the Hippodrome. Ching challenged Chung to a battle of magic. Chung arrived for the test, but Ching didn’t. Ching said that unless Chung would prove he was a real Chinese, he wouldn’t meet him. There the matter ended.”