 |
| Online Exhibiton โดย Magicana |
Monday, May 16, 2011
The Life & Magic of Stewart James
A Magician's Quest for the Perfect Card Cheat by BARRY GORDEMER
 |
| Courtesy Pleasant Hill Historical Society
Allen Kennedy, the master of the "center deal," in Kansas City in the 1950s.
|
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.
 | |
|
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
Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion By Jonah Lehrer
No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn't stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it's a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you're shown that it is not.
The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. "People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple."
For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."
Now that on-the-job experimentation has taken an academic turn. A couple of years ago, Teller joined a coterie of illusionists and tricksters recruited by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, to look at the neuroscience of magic. Last summer, that work culminated in an article for the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience called "Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic." Teller was one of the coauthors, and its publication was a signal event in a field some researchers are calling magicology, the mining of stage illusions for insights into brain function.
"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says. READ MORE
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)