Jeff McBride released his Commando Act on video a number of years ago. It was a brilliant idea. It was an entire act that he could carry as hand-luggage on a flight. The biggest prop was his linking rings. If his luggage got lost Jeff could still perform.

Around that time I was beginning to pare back on my children’s act. This was purely pragmatic. If I am going out to do a show, I like to do a second or even a third while I am at it. The most I have ever done was seven during a communion Saturday. To take on that amount of parties in succession you need an act that breaks down quickly, and that involves little set-up. Ideally you need an act you can carry in one trip from the car.

Adding to my problems was that air travel changed completely after the 9/11 attacks. The good old days of flying with a seventy kilo flight case are long gone. I perform each December in Lapland, and take every other opportunity to travel at other people’s expense. But now I had to cram two forty five minute acts into one suit case and one piece of hand-luggage. In fact both shows had to fit into the hand-luggage, with room for a few books.

Could it be done?

From that problem arose my Kids Kommando Act.

Here are the rules:

1. The act has to use ordinary props that every magician would have anyway.
2. There can be no special kids props, or dealer routines.
3. The act must fit into a toilet bag for easy travelling.
4. The act must be capable of being loaded into the pockets of a regular costume.

The act that resulted is suitable for small to medium sized rooms. It is ideal for birthday parties, and groups of up to sixty or seventy kids. It is not suitable for large rooms or big stages. It is also an ideal starting point for close-up workers who want to make the jump into children’s magic (where the money is). It uses the skills any good close-up worker will have anyway.

Needed: Two sponge bananas. One sponge carrot. Three regular sponge balls. A few modelling balloons. Eighteen playing cards. One ribbon. One thumb-tip. Set of ropes. Mouth coil.

Set-up: The sponge bananas and carrot go into my left-hand trousers pocket. So do the 18 cards, and the mouth coil. In my right-hand trousers pocket I put the thumb tip and ribbon, as well as one of the modelling balloons, ready for the balloon-eating effect. Two sponge balls go into my right-hand jacket pocket. The other goes into my left-hand jacket pocket, along with a handful of modelling balloons. The ropes go into my right-hand trousers pocket.

The Routine.

I open by explaining that I became a magician recently but went into the wrong shop for my wand. I ended up with a banana instead. Now I do the repeating banana effect. Every time I put the banana back into my pocket another one appears at my fingertips. Eventually I get fed up and accuse the kids of slipping me bananas. I get them to promise not to give me any more bananas, then put the final one away. A carrot appears at my finger tips.

I then blame hunger for my problems, and tell the kids I must stop to eat a sausage. I produce the doctored balloon and go into a routine loaded with gags, which culminates with me eating a fully inflated balloon, the producing a mouth coil.

Now I explain to the kids that the venue was built over a graveyard, and a ghost is annoying me. He is sitting on the head of one of the kids. I tell the kids that ghosts are afraid of Barbie Dolls, and I have Barbie’s hair ribbon. So I produce the ribbon, and do a one-handed knot to catch the ghost. Then I vanish the ribbon with the thumb tip, then produce it from the stomach of a kid.

After this I explain that I did not always work as a magician. I used to be in charge of quality control in the spaghetti section of an Italian restaurant. This is my cue to do the Professor’s Nightmare. But any rope trick would do. I like the Professor’s Nightmare because it does not involve cutting any ropes. So the one set of ropes will last me forever.

I now stop for a public safety announcement. I tell the kids that if they are swimming they have to be careful of jellyfish. They have a habit of laying eggs in girls’ hair. Then I produce a sponge ball from the hair of one of the girls, and go into a simple sponge ball routine.

Now I take nothing from my pocket and tell the kids that what they are looking at is a new deck of cards from Japan, that are so miniaturised that they can only be seen if we moisturise them. I place the nothing on my tongue, then produce the eighteen cards (cards from mouth as done by Bill Malone). With the eighteen cards I do the six card repeat, throwing cards on the floor as I go.

I pick a boy and a girl, and have them race to pick up as many cards as possible. Then I divide the cards evenly, nine to each child. I then do cards across, pretending to be a pick-pocket. This provides a lively close to my act.

The whole routine takes forty five minutes, and fits into my pockets. It is my act when I travel. I was able to do it at my brother’s wedding with just what I could stuff into my suit pockets. I was able to do it in a Himalayan village 15,000 feet above sea level, in my hiking gear. I did a season in Irish Ferries with it.

It is not the only routine that meets my criteria for a Kids Kommando Act. Quentin Reynolds’s beautiful routine with a pocket hanky would fit in perfectly. A linking rings routine with ninja rings, or a ring on rope routine, or a rigid rope would also work. The possibilities are legion. Misers dream using a borrowed cup would work – and would suit a skilled close-up worker.

What are your ideas for a Kids Kommando Act? Don’t be afraid to comment – all suggestions are welcome.

Tony Black (real name Anthony Galvin) is a hypnotist and mind-reader based in Munster, but who performs throughout the country. His hypnosis show is a good deal wilder, and less structured, than most, with a heavy emphasis on comedy. Often he opens the show with one of his mind-reading routines, such as Russian Roulette with exploding toilets.
Tony has been performing magic for twenty five years, and hypnosis for fifteen. His show has brought him all over Ireland, as well as three tours of the middle-east, and a summer as the only hypnotist on the Greek isle of Kos.
As a magician he has spent twelve winter seasons in Lapland, three summers on the high seas, and been arrested twice for driving while blindfolded. His book Teach Yourself Magic has sold extensively in Britain and America. He also briefly held the world record for the longest public lecture (62 hours 15 minutes).

This is the final of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think. I would now like to formally thank Owen for allowing us to use his three essays, and hopefully we will be seeing more from him here in the future!

Hello! I have loads of money. Seriously I’m absolutely rolling in it, i have cash coming up to my eyeballs. I mean really, just the other day I dropped a 50 Euro note on the ground, I could have bent over and picked it up but i didn’t because I’M ABSOLUTLY LOADED! Yeah, that’s me, the guy who’s made of money, all self made of course, and my house is huge and I have seven cars, twenty gorgeous girlfriends and an Olympic sized swimming pool with a retractile sunroof and waterproof plasma screen at the bottom so i can watch David Blaine specials while I snorkel…

Not very convincing is it?
You see, when someone comes up to you and spends all his time trying to prove something to you, we tend to question it. In fact, the more he tries to prove it, the less we believe him. Let me give that example properly – from my limited 22 years of experience of life on this planet I’ve noticed that the people who constantly talk and boast about how much money they have are usually the people who have no money at all or are very insecure in their wealth and know full well they’re about to lose it all. The same with sex, I used to go to an all boys boarding school, where it was of course customary for the majority of the boys to boast constantly about their sexual conquests, despite the fact everyone knew these people were still sending valentines cards to their own right hand.
But those who really are wealthy? Or those rare cases who were were getting all the action these adolescent morons only dreamed of? They never talk about it, they never mention it, they just KNOW it. They know it and you can tell it about them as soon as you meet them – they don’t need to prove it because they know what they have and they know everyone else should know what they have and even if they don’t – they don’t care.
So where the bloody hell am I going with this? Allow me to elaborate with another example.
Hello. Would you like to see some magic? Here choose a card. You put it back in the deck. I shuffle them, i snap my fingers, and look it comes to the top. I put it back in the middle, snap my fingers and its back on top. Every time I do it your card comes to the top. Amazing isn’t it?

Allow me to translate this awful piece of bog-standard patter into the subtext behind it:
Hello! I can do magic! Look, I can do magic! See I can do magic! I really can do magic! Yes! Its magic! I can do magic!
Not very convincing is it?
You see, this is the impression that I get about a lot of magic, as magicians we spend almost all of our time trying to PROVE we can do magic. All of the focus of most of our tricks seem to be based around that, and there is nothing convincing about that, not only that but there is nothing even remotely INTERESTING about that either.
Now there are many different reasons we may perform magic, some of us do as part of a comedy show, and our aim is comedy – in my street show this is the case, the show is about the comedy and the magic plays a secondary role to it. Some of us do it in motivational speaking, where again the magic takes a secondary place to something else, in this case the “Look i can do magic” presentation may just work. However the reason I got into magic believe it or not, was because I wanted to do magic! And this is what I try and do when I perform magic close up. Anyone who’s seen me on the street or on the stage will know my show is mainly stand up comedy – but as the few who’ve seen my recent close up performances will know, I’m a different performer.  I’m relaxed, polite and most importantly, I DON’T DO TRICKS. I spent a long time considering this – if you really could do magic, just supposing you really could – you would not spent all your time showing off and trying to prove you could. So what would you do? For me the answer was that I would be someone who told stories, taught lessons and revealed hidden knowledge about the spectators life and the world around him and would be using magic to illustrate it.
The first routine I changed was the ambitious card that I already mentioned – now I no longer talk about the card, I tell them outright at the beginning a card is a meaningless thing, and ask them to make it meaningful by writing there name about it. The routine from then on is no longer about the card, or my ability but about them, I’m not telling them about what I’m doing or what’s happening (after all they have eyes, they can see that) and suddenly i started getting more gasps and reactions then ever before. I will post of video of this some time so you can see what I mean.
A lot of “bizzare” magic tends to lean this way I know, its an area that far too few magicians study, but again there can be a little of the “look I can do magic” flaw in bizzare magic performances. The less you state, the more you imply, and the more powerful it is. The less emphasis you put on the magic, the far more powerful it is, it should look like you are performing something only trivial, something that’s only a glimpse of ones ‘true power’ to use a very pretentious phrase – a brief glimmer, but one that is so powerful, like a gnostic only needs a brief glimpse of the divine spark within him to break free from the Demiurge’s prison, so too a spectator only needs a brief glimpse of magic to break free from the mundane reality that society confines them too.
Isn’t it strange? The way we set our sights so low? I don’t want to be just another magician I don’t want to be Dai Vernon, or Slydini or Ed Marlo. I want to be Simon Magus, Merlin, Mephistopheles and Cthulhu. I want to change the world, raise the dead to life and bring war on the Demiurge one mind at a time. Yes, its an impossible target, one I probably will never obtain, but if I aim that high and miss, what I hit, surely can’t be a bad thing? But then, that’s just the impression that I get.

This is the second of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think

“These metaphysics of magicians and necromantic books are heavenly… a sound magician is a mighty god!” – Christopher Marlow: Dr Faustus

According to legends, Doctor Faustus, a professor at Wittenburg university in the late seventeenth century, having achieved the pinnacle of scholastic achievement made a diabolic contract with Mephistopheles, the servant of the devil. In exchange for his soul Faustus was granted twenty four years of almighty power upon the earth which he used to pass away the time and briefly satisfy hisinsatiable lust for knowledge until finally he was taken unto eternal damnation for his sins. Rather sad really.

The myth of Doctor Faustus is one which truly fascinated me as a magician. For I believe there is a Faustian pact we make when we become magicians.

When we learn magic we gain the power to perform miracles beyond belief, break the rules of reality and show people something that is potentially life changing. However in exchange we feel as if Mephistopheles has indeed taken part of our soul. We lose the ability to be amazed, we find ourselves unable to appreciate miracles and find ourselves turning into sceptical and cynical old men, tattered and withered like Dorian Gray’s picture decomposing in his attic. It is a trade off, an unholy trade off. But one I wouldn’t want to reverse even if I could. I’ve made my diabolic contract and now I want to make the most of it. What makes me despair is seeing magic used for such pathetically meaningless purposes as it is most commonly used for.

What are these people using their infernal trade off for? To make a silk handkerchief disappear and maybe, just maybe raise the briefest of briefest smiles as they interrupt someone’s conversation for the sake of ’showing someone a trick’. Even that word goes against everything I want my magic to be. Its degrading isn’t it? A ‘trick’. How can a ‘trick’ ever be meaningful? How can a ‘trick’ ever be art? How can a ‘trick’ ever be more than a trumped up schoolboy prank with no more purpose than to fool some one and put us one tiny mental notch up the ladder above that person? Even the word ‘illusion’ which has become very popular doesn’t cut it for me. By its definition an ‘illusion’ is something that isn’t real, and after all what is reality except what we perceive with our minds and senses. If my eyes and brain tell me that the object in front of me is floating or the man I’m talking to is levitating then it doesn’t matter whether there is some device holding that man or object up – it is now part of my reality. When a card metamorphs in my hands and someone watching truly believes it’s happened. Then as far as ‘reality’ is concerned has it just not happened?

This is the power of magic for me. We live in a world where we find ourselves lost without imagination, without direction, without hope allowing ourselves to drift aimlessly in a sea of nine to five existence’s and alcoholic binges as our only ‘release’ as the people manipulating our lives continue to pull the strings and make us dance to their command. Magic has the power to change that. Magic can shake peoples world up to the foundation, grab there soul screaming from there body for a brief second and scream at them that there is so much more to the world than what they have been indoctrinated to believe. No other art form has the power of doing this in the way that close-up magic can. The painter may be able to conjure up images that inspire us, and the musician maybe be able to whisk aural metaphors that communicate beyond language but only the magician has the power of the miracle at his disposal.

In the same way the hieroglyphics call primal truths to us from thousands of years in the past and an aboriginal talking drum carries the ‘dreamings’ of tribes across the Australian outback so can our magic call across the deserts of our spectators minds into the billowing oceans of their subconscious. And that is power. The sort of phenomenal power Faustus relinquished his place in eternal paradise for, but now we have that power are we to waste it by using it for the same pointless amusements as himself? Or do we seize that power, like Lady Macbeth tempted by the wyrd sisters. Let us sign the contract, bite the forbidden fruit and show some sympathy for the devil or whatever tempted us in the first place.

I know I may not always be successful in my attempts to wake people up from the ‘reality’ they’ve got so used to but if it happens only once and I can use my art to in some way create something more meaningful then just fooling my audience. Then I’ll know my Faustian pact was worth it.

Owen Lean
Authors note: Please note I’m speaking metaphorically. Don’t really sell your soul to satan, thats a really really daft thing to do folks.

This is the first of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think

What is it you first think of when you think of magic?

Got an answer? OK now imagine that you’d read the question before you became a magician. What would you have thought of? Would it have had anything to do with cards, silks, coins, doves or whatever it is we tend to associate magic with now we’ve been initiated.

Its a question I used to ask some of my friends who weren’t magicians – they would usually bring up images of a supreme power able to command the elements bring fear across the lands. When I asked them what they thought of when they heard the word “magician” – the response was to do with some form of funny little man in a tuxedo and top hat with a gaggle of scantily dressed assistants – generally the images aren’t too positive.

Why have we created such a divide between these two images? Surely doesn’t the magic we can do have the potential to be just as frightening and have the same ability to shake people’s worlds the way the magic does in fantasy novels and role playing games? Robert-Houdin is often quoted as having said “A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.”, but do we do that? Honestly when we look at our acts can we say “Yes, If I met somebody who could really do magic that’s exactly what I think he would do!”. Honestly if you really had magical powers would you stand on a stage and produce fans of cards, make billiard balls multiply and pull a signed and freely selected rabbit out of your assistants sponge bra? I wouldn’t.

Because magic is something much more then that. Granted if we want to call ourselves illusionists then this is unimportant as all these things could be classed as “illusions” – but I for one never learned magic because I wanted to create illusions – I wanted to do magic. This is why I like walking down the street use floating a banknote over my hand. I believe that in the moment some people see that banknote float something extremely powerful happens – up until that moment the person currently staring at you knew that the world was simple, logical and could be explained – suddenly in a single moment all that certainty has been broken and destroyed – after a few seconds, their brain kicks back in and realizes there has to be some kind of logical explanation like magnets or something but still the fact remains that they have had that moment – that moment that grabs them out of themselves and screams at them “there is more to life then what you think is real” and throws them back – in that moment their are taken back to the primitive, a state of mind where the laws, restrictions and limits that society imposes on us cease to matter, because the society and world we knew ceases to exist – I don’t think the phrase “childlike wonder” encompasses enough -

its something pure yes, but at the same time it is something pure in that was a Japanese mythical daemon posses “yu-gen” in being so pure it is both sublimely beautiful and completely terrifying. That is what I mean by taking magic back to the primitive – returning both the art itself and its spectators to a pure state that is free from restrictions and limitations.

Where to the limits come in magic? Only from ourselves. Why do we only levitate? Why not fly? Why do we catch bullets with out teeth, why not stop them in midair before they come towards us? Why do we turn the twenty pound note back into a fiver again? If I could really turn a five pound note into a twenty – I’d give it away, after all I can just create another one can’t I?
Expensive perhaps. But perhaps it is the distinction that removes a magician from a man in a silly hat.

To say I’ve ‘published’ this before would be vain and inaccurate. I have however told a number of people and posted it on a forum or two. I decided to post it here as it has served me very well and is so straightforward that it is utterly unpublishable!

A word of warning, the method used is totally missed by lay people. They will give you a lot more credit than you are due. If you are stupid enough to drunkenly let slip how it is done they will probably get violent, very very violent.

Method:
To get this out of the way now, you force a card. Do it however the feck you like as long as it looks like a fair choice. I use a slip force but any will do. Hell, a cross cut force could even work! The power of this effect relies entirely on presentation, at the end I will list a couple of points that are important to bear in mind.

Presentation:
You open by saying that if you wanted to find out what card someone was holding by asking either/or questions, the fewest you could do it with is six questions. You point out this would be very easy if they could only tell the truth so you say they may either tell the truth or they may lie for each question, whichever they want to do. Then they select a card. You start by asking a series of questions, I’ll demonstrate with an example:

The card forced is the Six of Spades.

You: Is it Red or Black?
Spec: Red. (Lie)
Y: Clubs or Spades?
S: Spades. (T)
Y: Above or below 7?
S: Below. (T)
Y: Odd or Even?
S: Odd. (L)
Y: Above or below 4?
S: Below. (L)
Y: It’s the Six of Spades isn’t it?
S: Wow!!! Will you sleep with me??? (Not guaranteed)

That’s basically it! Fairly self-explanatory.

Notes:
1. If given the chance the card I like to force is the Seven of Clubs. At the question ‘Is it above or below 7′ most spectators will hesitate. I just smile and say give me back my 7C and stick it in the deck without looking. It is fucking hilarious! They will be blown away.

2. If I get a less general choice of card (peek at top and bottom card) I prefer to go with one that is below 7 as it eliminates court cards which are a pain in the hole.

3. This instantly resets. All you have to do is peak a card.

4. Unusually you can repeat this for the same crowd a few times, this due to one big reason. That is the fact there is no big deal about the card choice, it is purely incidental. There is also a fuck load of time and situational misdirection from the card choice to the reveal. This makes it som much more effective than forcing the card and revealing it straight away!

5. I have an improved version but I’m not telling you! I have to keep some secrets!!! Maybe it’ll pop up in one of my performance videos and you can try work it out!!!

The magicians notebook.

Like most magicians, I have at various stages had the habit of going through a vast amount of material. When ordering something (lets say a book or a DVD) I will normally flick through it and find a couple of things that catch my eye. One or two of them might really stand out, and they will duly be learned and added (or not) to one of my routines.

There will however always be effects that stand out to me, but I decide not to learn them now for one reason or another. Maybe I don’t have the prop that it requires? Maybe it just does not currently fit into my routine? Maybe it requires some knuckle busting move that I don’t have time to learn at the moment?

On my desk I have a A5 (copy size) puka pad. It has a number of dividers in it, and I have these labeled: Cards, Coins, Mental & Other. Any time I find an effect which I want to keep track of, I jot down the trick, it’s location, a brief description of the effect, and I leave the rest of the page blank so I can add notes later.

So for example, opening the notebook in the ‘Cards’ section I might see the following

A Simple Switch
Art of Astonishment (book) Vol 3, page 115
Card Flourish: deck in one hand, card in the other, top card springs from both causing them to switch places.

This way, if I am looking for an effect to add to my routine at a later date, I can flick through this notebook rather than picking one of the 20 odd magic books, or 20 odd magic DVDs (or piles of lecture notes, or VCR tapes, or instant downloads etc etc you get the idea) and browsing through a bunch of effects that I will probably never use with the hopes that something will catch my eye.

I hope this is usefull to someone, because it has been to me!

In this current time of youtube magic, there seems to be a demand for ‘Instant Gratification’. People don’t want to learn magic, they want to be able to do it.

This is bad.

People want to skip the foundations, people want to be able to watch a video on youtube and show it to all their friends a few minutes later. This harms our art.

When you go out and preform tricks to the public when you are not ready, you give magicians in general a bad name. I am nearly willing to bet that almost every person here who preforms regularly has met people who dislike magic simply because they have only ever been exposed to bad magic.

So this post is for all the people who want to get started in magic the right way. The way that builds a solid foundation in the art that will allow you to properly develop as a skilled preformer.

Please note, I have tried to provide the ISBN-13 below where I could, but at times I could only find the ISBN-10. Book shops should support both anyway.

Where do I begin?
Every one has to start somewhere, and the best place to start is probably with something that gives you a bit of variety. It can be intimidating to be faced with something like Card College, or Modern Coin Magic when you don’t have the experience behind you to appreciate it. So here are some books that I would recomend picking up. Most of the books here can probably be ordered direct from your local bookshop.

Mark Wilson’s Complete Course in Magic : ISBN 978-0894716232
The Art of Magic & Sleight of Hand, Nick Einhorn : ISBN 978-0754810926

Where do I go from here?
Once you have had your good solid introduction to magic, it is generally time to focus on one area at a time. Magic has a really broad spectrum. There is an awful lot of different skill sets out there. From cards, to coins, to sponge magic, to stage magic, it can be quite intimidating. Most of the books that are seen as ‘classics’ focus on one specific area. Most magicians typicially find a ‘favorite’ type of effect quickly, so hopefully you should not have too much difficulty deciding where to move on to next.

Card Magic
The Royal Road is recognised amongst most magicians as the book that every card magician should start with. I agree to some extent, but in my opinion you would be better off with Card College. It is much more detailed and easier to understand. But it is also much more expensive. The Royal Road will probably set you back ten or fifteen quid, where as a complete set of Card College will probably hit you for the tune of 130-200 USD.

The Royal Road to Card Magic : ISBN 978-1406793918

Card College (5 Volume Set)
Vol 1 : ISBN 978-0945296188
Vol 2 : ISBN 978-0945296157
Vol 3 : ISBN 978-0945296225
Vol 4 : ISBN 0-945296-33-9
Vol 5 : ISBN 978-0945296447

Coins
There is probably only one book that most people will recomend when it comes to coins, and that is Modern Coin Magic. While there is a huge ammount of material out there that focuses on cards or mentalism alone, coin work seems to lack alot of the specialist work. (Then again, I have never really been into coin magic, so I could very well be wrong). That being said, on most ‘Lecture’ style DVDs (Most magic DVDs are in this format) you will find at least a couple of coin effects, so it is important to know the basics.

Modern Coin Magic, J. B. Bobo : ISBN 978-0486242583

Mentalism
Mental magic is quite a different beast to sleight of hand. It generally requires much much stronger preformance skills. Alot of what you do will totally rely on you convincing the spectator. There are very few succesful magicians that have both a strong mentalism act and a strong sleight of hand act. Most seem to choose one or the other. There is really only one book to get you started here though, and it covers pretty much every foundation that you will need. From billet (Small pieces of paper used for predictions) work, to blind folded driving.

13 Steps to Mentalism, Corinda : AISN B000NUJ6AM

Sponge Magic
Sponge magic is a firm favorite both with magicians and spectators. It is very visual, and can be made very entertaining. Steve Dacri has released a great new DVD set called ‘The Sponge Ball Tool Box’ which is a great start. It comes with a DVD, some sponges and some other gimmicks to help improve your routine. I wont provide a link to the product as I don’t want to promote any specific online store. A google search returns plenty of results anyway.