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Monday, May 16, 2011
The Life & Magic of Stewart James
A Magician's Quest for the Perfect Card Cheat by BARRY GORDEMER
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| Courtesy Pleasant Hill Historical Society
Allen Kennedy, the master of the "center deal," in Kansas City in the 1950s.
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In the The Magician and the Cardsharp, author Karl Johnson documents Vernon's quest to find the one man who was able to perform the holy grail of card tricks — the so-called "center deal," dealing a specific card from anywhere in the deck, undetected.
Vernon's search took him from one sleazy dive to another: bars, nightclubs, pool halls, and smoke-filled back rooms. In 1932, the trail finally led him to a little white house in Pleasant Hill, Mo., where Allen Kennedy lived.
Kennedy didn't disappoint Vernon, showing him exactly how to perform the trick great gamblers had assumed was a fairytale.
Vernon died in 1992 at the age of 98. But at the Magic Castle, a Los Angeles club for magicians, there's a seat permanently reserved in his honor.
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The Magic of the Human Mind by BARRY GORDEMER
I certainly was no Dai Vernon or David Copperfield. In fact, if you knew how I did most of my tricks, you would be thoroughly unimpressed. As a lot of magicians like to say, "It's nothing you couldn't do for $19.95."
Certainly there are plenty of effects that call for expert sleight of hand... stuff that can take years to master. But degree of difficulty does not matter. Usually the secret behind the most mysterious tricks is very, very simple.
Dolly Parton is fond of saying, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap." I discovered it takes a real genius to create simplicity.
One of those geniuses lives in my back yard. For more than 60 years, Al Cohen ran a magic shop in Washington, D.C. He's retired now, but at 80 years old, he still smiles like a mischievous little boy.
Cohen is a master of misdirection, the art of getting your audience to look away just as you do the toughest part of the trick. I've heard stories of a magician who distracted his audience by having an elephant walk across the stage.
Cohen takes a much simpler approach.
"For example, if I was doing a card trick, I'd ask the guy, 'Have you ever seen this one before?' He'd look up at me and say, 'No.' The moment he looked up, [and was no longer looking at my hands] that's when I'd do my move. He never saw a thing. I fooled a lot of people that way."
And Cohen didn't have to clean up after the elephant.
One of the oldest tricks in magic is the Cups and Balls. It dates back to ancient Egypt. Three tiny balls disappear and reappear under three ordinary cups. No smoke, no mirrors, no trap doors, no digital effects (computers were a tad scarce back then). The Cups and Balls relies solely on sleight of hand and misdirection... pretty easy stuff, really. But the trick is still amazing people literally thousands of years later. Talk about genius!
Over the years, the more I learned about fooling people, the more I began to believe in real magic... the magic of the human mind.
Back in my performing days, I loved to watch faces in the audience just as the trick reached the "tah-daaaaah" moment. For one instant, one nanosecond, you could see in their eyes that they actually, truly believed in magic. There'd be a moment of silence too small to measure, then applause — small at first then louder — as the sense of wonder dissolved. I'll never forget those moments. I'm convinced people want to believe in the impossible. They want miracles, no matter how small.
Al Cohen told me his favorite moment as a magician:
"I did a trick for a little boy. He was probably about 5 years old. Anyway, he looked up at me and said, 'I know how you did that.' I said, 'How?' He said, 'You used magic.' It's the best explanation I ever heard."
Me too.
Barry Gordemer is a senior producer for Morning Edition.
Essential Magic Conference 2011
James Randi linking neuroscience with the magic in the Gaiás
Irreverent skeptic, James Randi, one of the most famous magicians in the world, walked on the streets of Santiago yesterday on his first trip to Galicia, shortly before the conference-show which, accompanied by the Galician neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde, offered in the City of Culture. For ninety minutes Martínez-Conde and Randi took the stage at the Gaiás the essence of a meeting, Neuromagic2011, this week, the Illa de San Simón, compares the ideas and experience of magicians and neuroscientists. Interacting at all times with the public, the neurobiologist and was evidenced as illusionist magicians manipulate the audience's attention, diverting their eyes and manipulating their perception of things, all lessons human brain researchers successfully applied in their studies on cognitive impairment, learning processes and memory loss.
Considered a global icon of the fight against fraud paranormal, Randi, 82, shot to international fame for his attack on popular beliefs in the paranormal, supernatural powers to cases of so-called metapsíquicos. Has investigated the claims of hundreds of psychics, removing some of the best known fraud and for three decades has become the scourge of the famous mentalist Uri Geller, who even went to challenge publicly removing their tricks in a famous documentary, entitled Beyond of science.
This is Randi's commitment in the fight against fraud through its educational foundation, established in 1996, offers a prize of one million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal qualities under controlled conditions. Years pass and the prize is still no owner.
@ elcorreogallego trends is
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