I seldom buy one trick books or one trick DVDs. Generally I feel screwed when I do so and the after market value is pitiful.
I made an exception recently and bought John Born’s book Meant To Be… It is subtitled Principals and Techiques for the Sopisticated Magical Artisite. It is actually an exhaustive treatise on the Any Card At Any Number Plot. You can read a bunch of reviews at Jabba’s magic site, so I won’t redo what’s already been done. Just say – it’s an instant classic in my mind.
What I wanted to point out was Ken Krenzel’s Foreword and his description of John’s magic. I continue to be amazed and the constant denigration of magic in favour of entertainment. This has come to mean use a criss-cross force and then drop your pants so the audience can read the clever tattoo on your ass revealing the card. All in the name of entertainment.
Listen to what Ken writes:
John holds that the magician’s primary goal is to utterly amaze, drop jaws, and elicit audible gasps from your thoroughly bewildered and clueless spectators.
That’s magic, my friends. Don’t fall for the entertainment bromide. It’s an excuse for bad magic.
Take care………
I think it would work better if they used funny underwear with the selected card printed many times all over the underwear.
That way you could have several different cards printed on lots of different underwear.
And when you want to repeat the effect just change the underwear.
I am joking of course but in today’s magic world I have a feeling someone might do this and sell this from some web site or at a magic convention for comedy club magic.
Later,
Glenn Bishop