Author: Roberto Giobbi

Today’s subjects: Remembering Pavel; Why you should have two sets of your most important props; Q&A on Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 69, gone online Sunday, April 24th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

Thank you…

I was recently reading an article by a manager trainer in Das Magazin, the literary supplement of a Swiss newspaper, that it is better to thank others, rather than apologizing to them. So, when you arrive late at a meeting, instead of saying, “Please excuse my being late”, or some similar set phrase, say, “Thank you for waiting for me.” Hmmmm…

In this sense, to all those who had temporary trouble downloading the files of Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction, because Dropbox shut down my account without previous notice (!), justifying this with “too high traffic on your account”, a problem not even the “experts” I’m working with knew about, I say, “Thank you so much for your kind patience and understanding!”

As of this writing all works well again, and with a bandwidth of now 4TB there should be no more traffic jams. I can assure you that these two days were more stressful to me than the months it took to produce that (22 hours of teaching, in 25 Lessons, resulting in a 19,4GB heavy download).

Remembering Pavel

I started to call this blog The Magic Memories, because I wanted to tell you about real “memories” from my magic life, but I now realize that I keep getting carried away by more topical subjects and more recent events.

So, I have made a resolution: In future posts I will try to include one “Memory” from my (magical) life and that will mostly be about an interesting person I met in the past, mostly magicians, but not only.

Setting order to the hundreds of Lecture Notes I have, one by Pavel caught my eye, and I was reminded of the exceptional person he was.

I will readily admit that when I first read his book The Magic of Pavel (ed. by Peter Walock, Supreme Magic Co., England 1969), I was not so impressed: Too much “color”, silks, and records.  Later, when I got to meet him personally, as he had booked me to lecture and perform at his famous “Pavel’s Magic Day”, a yearly gathering he organized in Geneva, when I was still quite young and known only to a few “insiders”, I was moved by his kindness and knowledge. It was only in the following years that I realized what an inspired and hardworking individual he was: When genius and diligence come together, you get a result like Pavel and his magic.

Two events further cemented this opinion: First, his lecture on the use of magnets in magic I saw him give at MagicValongo, a magic convention we were both booked at by Fernando Castro. I was in awe of all those problems he had identified and to which he had found an original and practical solution using magnets. One of the ideas I remember was his “Card in Balloon”, where a magnet inside the ballon would imperceptibly get the selected card from the deck without apparent extra moves.

His lecture on magnets was exemplary of how an intelligent, knowledgeable and inspired person tackles a subject, and although I would not use one single idea from the lecture, I found it highly inspirational and it was then and there that I realized Pavel’s full genius.

I’ve always felt that this is the true gain one should get from a lecture, much more than individual tricks and techniques, although that’s OK in the first ten years of doing magic. But after that, you don’t want to walk away from a lecture doing the tricks the other one does.

If I go to a museum and get a guided tour that helps me understand the painter and his or her paintings, I don’t expect myself to repaint that same painting, but rather to gain an added understanding of painting that inspires me to do my own paintings. Just a though, nothing more…

Pavel had a knack for creating straightforward and easy to follow tricks, and he had some excellent ideas in the field of card magic, too.

Second, a ten-hour flight we did together from Paris to Bogota, were we had been booked to the prestigious InterMagic convention, organized by Gustavo Lorgia, in 1996. We sure had a blast discussing magic in all its aspects, and when he started to tell me about how he had come up with several of his best ideas, e.g., the “Walking Knot”, which won him the first prize in Invention at the FISM convention in Lausanne in 1991, I simply sat there in awe and listened.

Here is a card trick from his lecture notes Pavel’s 15 Micro Tricks (ca. 1980), and I assume he would have endorsed my initiative to present you with this gift in today’s The Magic Memories. I’ll first give you Pavel’s original description, then my comments suggesting a variation. To read or download the scan of Pavel’s original text CLICK HERE.

And here are my comments:

Start by having the blue-backed QH face up in the red-backed deck, and the red-backed QH on bottom of the blue-backed deck.

For more photos see the Pavel Homepage – CLICK HERE. And you can find various recordings of his performances on YouTube.

Always Two Sets

You might have noticed that I offer to buy one set and two sets of “The Red Card” on my webshop.

This led Stephan Jochum from Germany to asks, “Why are you offering two sets of your “The Red Card”? The trick doesn’t have consumable materials, does it?”

This question is more interesting than I suspected, and it reminded me of the advice I received as a young man from Max Bühler, aka Cherry Maxim, who at that time was the president of the Zauberring Basel, the magic club of my home town in Switzerland. When he invited me to his home for a “Magic Session” – one of those wonderful real-life reunions before Internet and virtual meetings – I noticed that he had two – sometimes even three – copies of the same prop. When I asked him about it, he explained, “Oh, you always buy at least two copies of the props you use to perform, just in case one gets lost, stolen, or damaged.”

I admit that to me, the nineteen-year-old wise guy who thought he knew it all (what a mistake!), this sounded at best eccentric.

Later, as a full-time professional (since 1988), I was reminded of his words, and can only say that the man was absolutely correct, and I now have copies of most of the props I use professionally.

Q&A on Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction

As soon as the trailer appeared, and the first among you received the files, in came several questions that I thought might be interesting to most, so I’ll answer them below.

A1: No, the numeration changed, but the titles stayed. Also, all chapters are in the respective volumes (except “Deck Switches” – see below). So, the chapter “Riffle Shuffle Techniques, Part 2” is chapter 33 in the book, but Lesson 30 in the videos. But this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is not so difficult: You have a Table of Content and even an Index to find the corresponding item in a few seconds 🙂

A2: NO, only as a download. This is 22 hours (!) of teaching, that would make a full-fledged Netflix series🙂 With today’s increased prices for logistics this would almost double the costs, and multiply the investment necessary for the production of the physical items (DVDs, packaging, storage etc.). The only drawback I’ve encountered, is the limited bandwidth, which is only a problem in the first few days, when dozens are trying to download a huge file at the same time. But that seems out of the way now.

Ref. Sharing Secrets: Although there are many practical examples in the book in form of tricks and techniques,  it is essentially about theoretical concepts. The best way, in my opinion, to understand and learn these concepts, is to put them into practice in a technique and/or performance. Therefore, the references to Sharing Secrets help identifying the moments and places the theories are applied, and thereby facilitating their instillation. This is arguably the most important benefit of the whole Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction. Period.

Q4: What is the difference between Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction and Card Magic Masterclass?
A4: These are two completely different projects, led by two different visions. The Card Magic Masterclass project came about when Joshua Jay, together with Andy Gladwin, founders of Vanishing Inc., invited me to their “Session” convention in London in January, 2018. Josh asked if I could do a video-Download with five or six of my favorite False Shuffles, as this is a sleight many are interested in. Briefly, since I think holistically and conceptional, Card Magic Masterclass was the result! It concentrates solely on sleights classed in the five big categories that define the operational side of card magic: False Shuffles & Cuts, Controls, Forces, Switches, and Palms. There are no tricks.

Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction, on the other hand, is the reflection of the Card College books volume 3 and 4, with almost all its content: Techniques, Tricks (including the presentations!), and Theories, the sacred Trinity of Artistic Card Magic.

If your budget is tight, I recommend you get Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction (only available directly from me at www.robertogiobbi.com). If you have time and a little more money, get both (Card Magic Masterclass is only available as a download from VI, no longer from me, as they’ve found a clever way to boot me out…).

A5: No, I haven’t, but I have written a complete book on the subject, The Art of Switching Decks, that also contains a DVD with the eighty-minutes lecture I gave at the Genii 75th Anniversary Convention in 2012.

If you have more questions, use the “Contact” field on the webshop to get them to me, and I’ll try to answer them in one of the upcoming posts.

Important Advice

Once you have downloaded the 25 Lessons from Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction in form of MP4-files, don’t just leave them on your computer (that can be damaged), but also put them on a separate backup-harddisk, and also store them in your Backup-cloud. For everyday private use I can recommend Dropbox, or any similar service. The link will remain in your account, but things can change, including the link, whereas if you have the files  on your computer and/or harddisk, you can watch them anytime, anywhere, and even on your TV set via Wifi or by connecting the harddisk with a cable to your TV.

And now have a successful week – I look forward to having you back for next week’s The Magic Memories 70!

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 68, gone online Sunday, April 17th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

Happy Easter!

Yes, I know, not everyone is celebrating Easter, but hey, a Holiday is a Holiday, and whether political or religious, a Holiday is just a good idea, or so it seems to me – so good that it needs to be capitalized: get together with family and friends, have a nice meal, talk about the things of life, and at the end be a better person than before, regardless of politics or religion. Now apply the same idea to magic…

Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction (Final!) Update

Today’s blog is going to be a short one as we are still fully immersed into the roadwork required to bring Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction to you, if all goes well next week!

Stay tuned, and make sure to be on the mailing list for The Secret Newsletter (you can subscribe on the home page of www.robertogiobbi.com) to receive the announcement of the launch in a few days.

Here is what I can already tell you:

• a total of 22  hours of teaching, without bla-bla, just essential information, still in a pleasant and relaxing atmosphere
• 157 techniques, plus variations thereof
• 42 laypeople-oriented tricks, magical and entertaining (in this order), done for a small audience, that show how to apply the technical concepts taught in a real performance
•  5 camera-angles in a no-frills set that focuses on what is important
• 25 Lessons: 11 lessons for Card College 3 – Personal Instruction, 14 lessons for Card College 4 – Personal Instruction, together 25 lessons for Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction, plus an informative “Introduction” that tells you how to best study the videos, and an “Envoy” at the end
• You can get each volume separately, or both at a special price to be announced soon. A bit later every lesson can even be purchased individually
• all of this at a fair price that will not be an expense, but an investment, with many returns…

There will be almost all techniques from the Card College books 3 and 4, PLUS several new ones.

And many of the tricks that are in the books, PLUS over a dozen new ones.

So, if you have the books, you’ll get quite a bit of extra material, if you don’t have the books, well, you also get it 🙂

But even the tricks that are already in the books and are interpreted here, have been completely revised presentationally. The books came out in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and meanwhile I’ve expanded my vision of magic. A lot of what I had been doing intuitively at the time has been brought to process-level, much of it named and described in my latest book, Sharing Secrets (2021). I think you’ll find the presentations I’ve come up with, to be inspirational and of great practical help for your own magic.

As in all my books, I have made every effort to stay away from preaching or being dogmatic: All sleights, tricks and theories have an open architecture that will allow you to capture the essential ideas, use them as-is, if you wish, or adapt them to fit your style and requirements. As a teacher I want you to become better than me 🙂

There has often been one misconception about the volumes 3 and 4 of Card College that I would like to clear up here: Many believe that the material in these two volumes is more difficult than in the first two.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Although the Card College books are not an encyclopedia, but a course, I’ll use it as analogy by saying that in an encyclopedia the volumes M to R and S to Z, are not more difficult than the volumes A to F and G to L. Did I make myself clear?

Yes, a few items will require patience and practice, such as the techniques taught in the chapters about “Advanced Palming” or “Advanced Passes”, but most other chapters, like “Sandwich Techniques”, “Tilt”, “Estimation”, “Turnovers”, “Reverses 2”, and others are as easy as pie. And several of the tricks performed can be done after just a very moderate amount of study.

As a matter of fact, today’s gift to you, is a performance-only clip from “Lesson 30 – Riffle Shuffle 2”, dedicated to the wonderful complexities of the Riffle Shuffle, and it uses the easiest of all False Riffle Shuffles to retain the entire order of the deck that you will ever learn: You can acquire it in just a few minutes, provided you can do a regular Riffle Shuffle already, but that’s all. The piece is called “Reality and Fantasy”. And if you “use your head” you will find you can do this even without any sleights…

To enjoy “Fantasy and Reality” CLICK HERE.

Have an excellent week!

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 67, gone online Sunday, April 10th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

I keep receiving lovely feedback and questions, for which I thank you, although I apologize for not being able to answer them all. BUT, today I’d like to answer three of these questions.

Remember & Forget Tricks

JR Russell from Seattle, whom I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago (!) on the occasion of one of the “Card Clinics” I did with Jamy Ian Swiss, and who flew jets off on an US aircraft carrier (nothing less!), asks: “How do you remember all the tricks and routines you do?” This is indeed a question that should interest most, including myself!

Clearly, it is the type of question that doesn’t have an answer that will fit everyone in every situation, but what question does? JR asked the question in the context of me performing tricks in each of the two Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction video productions, a total of almost fifty tricks. Coming soon…

This leads to answer #1: Practice and rehearse a lot.

Even though I have now almost fifty years of performing experience on my shoulders, which certainly helps, due to the Corona situation, I have performed very little in the past two years, something neither I nor my colleague performers have ever experienced in our lives before.

So, I simply made a list of the two times twenty-five tricks, and then spent at least ten days, about three hours a day, practicing and rehearsing them (ten days for each set, I mean!). You can do less tricks, but regularly practicing the tricks is possibly the best method to remember them, as obvious as it sounds.

Answer #2: Make lists.

In order to know what you want to remember and practice, keep a notebook (paper or electronic) where you list the tricks you want to remember. You can make categories, such as “Impromptu”, “for laypeople”, “for magicians”, etc.

I said this before, and I’ll repeat it here: If magic is your hobby, you are tempted to keep buying and learning new tricks. Fight that temptation, but only partially: Reserve 25% of your magic time to practice always the same (favorite) tricks, and 75% of the time you just do “new stuff” or what pleases you (e.g. wasting time in chat groups, watching useless YouTube videos etc.). You’ll find that the 25% make you advance artistically, but the 75% might keep up the joy… (percentages can be changed).

Answer #3: Instead of lists use The Deck (or Bag) of Tricks.

I have written about this in various places, among others in my Genii column “The Genii Session” (March 2003): If you are a subscriber, you can access everything published in Genii electronically and read the article there. Briefly: Take a deck of cards, and then write the name of a trick on the face of each card. Ideally you get 52 tricks. If they are card tricks, you can now shuffle the deck, turn over the top card, and then practice that trick with that very deck. Repeat to taste…

You can also write techniques on the face of the cards, which you want to remember and practice, or any other non-card-trick, but obviously you need to have the relative instruments at hand.

If you take a zip bag, you can put The Deck of Tricks in it, plus other instruments, such as a purse with coins, dice, safety pins, a wallet with a few packet tricks, bills, etc. Now you have The Bag of Tricks!

Instead of the deck you can use file cards, but a deck is so much nicer, and you can use that very deck to practice.

The photo below shows various of my Decks of Tricks: in one some cards have sets of three tricks, in one deck all Heart cards are Ace Openers, Diamond cards Ace effects to do after an opener, Clubs Ace Closers… etc.

Answer #4: Organize Tricks in Sets.

This is what I did in my book Card College Light: There are seven routines, each consisting of three tricks.

Three or five is a good number to fill from 7 to 20 minutes approximately. To arrange three tricks in a little routine is arguably the single best way of remembering them: As you start the first one, the other two will automatically follow.

It helps if you give the routine a theme, e.g., “The Extraordinary Aces” (combination of three Ace-tricks), “The Power of the Mind” (combine three mental card tricks), “The Five Senses” (combine five tricks, each showing how one of the senses is used in a “magical” way), etc.

Answer #5: Videotape the Tricks.

I used to do this in the first ten years of my magic career, and then somehow stopped doing it, and started to write books instead!

But obviously you can create a small D-base with the recording of the tricks you like most. So, even if you haven’t performed them for a longer period of time, you can watch your video of the trick, and then quickly bring it back to performance level.

Answer #6: Use Your Head.

Now that several doors have been opened, you can find your very own way of better remembering your tricks. But they all have one thing in common: You probably need to work more than you’ve worked up to now – as in life, there are no shortcuts to success, but, fortunately, some ways are more comfortable and pleasurable than others, and if you are like me and have a Hedonistic penchant, that’s what you are looking for 🙂

Remember & Forget Books

The question above made me think of yet another, similar question, namely how do you remember the content of the books you’ve read?

Unfortunately, again similar to the above question, there is no “magical” answer, no “deep secret” only a few chosen ones have access to – or maybe there is… but I simply don’t belong to those. The answer is again: Work! Better: Think and work. More precisely: Think, write, and work. Picasso, talking about (the lack of) genius, made an analogy by saying, “The poor have to work!” Now, if a genius like Picasso, or Tamariz in magic, on top of their super-human talent keep working, well, you know what comes out…

However, it is one thing to run around aimlessly, but quite another thing to run in the correct direction so that you reach your destination. So, let me give you some ideas of how you could do this, and as always this is just my opinion (nada más y nada menos).

Some seem to worry about having bought more books than they can read. That’s a false problem, because buying magic books encourages the authors to write more. So, if you like someone’s writing, by all means buy all his or her books, if you can afford it. Consider: You probably own a car that speeds up to 180 km/h (or  more…), but you hardly ever use that, right? So, why not have a library with more books than you will ever read? Occasionally you might find a reference to it, and then you can immediately go to it in your own library. My credo here: Buy as many books as you can afford, and have room for 🙂

The real problem is, of course, that we would like to remember more of the books we really like. The so-called “Ebbinghaus forgetting curve” shows that after one day we remember about a third of what we’ve read, and long-term almost nothing. How to get out of the dilemma?

Here are a few suggested strategies to counteract forgetting what we’ve read:

1. Be merciless on your books by underlining and highlighting important passages (use different colors!), and making notes at the margin. See photo further down from Expert Card Technique.
2. After each chapter reread the passages you marked, and then formulate the essence of these passages in your own words – this goes in a notebook, paper or electronic. See photo below of The Vernon Companion.
3. When you’ve finished reading the book make a resumé of ca. 200 words, writing down what the essence of the book is for you, and make a list of the tricks, techniques, presentations, subtleties, and theoretical concepts you want to remember. Open a new note for every sub-topic you can identify. So, if in Card College I write that to built self-confidence in doing the Classic Force it helps to have an OUT, open a note that says “Outs for the Classic Force”, and make a list off all the strategies you know. And each time you learn a new one from a lecture, video, book etc. put it in that note. And if in the list of “Outs” it says “Perform a Quick Trick”, well, open yet another note titled “Quick Tricks – Quickies – Quick Card Discoveries”, and then make a lits of all quick tricks you know. Keep “feeding” the note, as you would feed your cat or dog, and if you don’t have a cat or a dog, do it anyway!
4. Put these notes in a paper or electronic notebook, with a table of content and/or with tags, so that later you can find what you are looking for.

As an additional strategy start a BOB (Book of Books): Take one of those Moleskine-type notebooks, or again Evernote (or similar note-taking app), and make a list of all the books you’ve read, with the reading-date and a short comment to go with each book with your opinion about the book. To do so is far more than a mere pragmatic activity, it is a small auto-biographical opus that will remind you of important parts of your life…

Want an example of how I do it? Below see two screen shots of my notes in Evernote.

Brief comment: I have a “Notebook” in Evernote titled “Books/Publications”, and within this a “Sub-Notebook” titled “Books read” into which I can now place an infinite number of individual notes, one of them being the note you see below for Mike Perovich’s book The Vernon Companion.

You’ll note two PDF-symbols in the note: That’s where I took my smartphone and with a scanning app made a one-page scan of the page in the book with the list of the tricks; I use Readdle’s Scanner Pro for iPhone. If you click on the PDF symbol, the PDF opens and can be read (the PDF itself is again highlighted and annotated – this is like the Gozinta Boxes…).

In another part of the notes – the note being about ten pages long because it’s such a fantastic book –  you would find PDFs that I have extracted from the Vernon books, e.g., when the Cups & Ball Routine is mentioned, I’ll add a scan of the trick description from the Ganson book.

I might supplement the notes with text clipped from Internet, using Evernote’s excellent “Web Clipper” function, or there might be voice notes I add using the “4Memo” app, and occasionally a video clip. The video clips can be quick clips I take of myself doing a sleight or other bit (5 seconds or so), using Mac’s “Photo Booth” app. For clips of existing videos I own as MP4-files, I use Quick Time Player, and it’s function “CMD-T” (“T” for “Trim”) to extract the few seconds I need to complement the written note.

I can still recommend Evernote, although as far as I’m concerned the latest versions have been “over-improved” by the zealous development team, and similar to Microsoft’s WORD, they now manage to kill a product that was so good by adding features nobody really needs, and changing the design to make it confusing. This is, by the way, exactly the same thing that happens in magic over and over again… we magicians sure don’t live in a vacuum, as Max Maven used to say.

Here are the screen shots FYI:

And here, for your entertainment pleasure, as my fried Daryl might have said, a sample page from my copy of Hugard’s & Braue’s Expert Card Technique…, mistreated with highlights, underlines, and notes on the margin…

To Clip or Not to Clip

Steve Hirsch, a journalist from Washington who enthusiastically practices magic as a hobby, and who came to see me in Switzerland years ago, asks, “What are your thoughts on the utility of card clips?  I use one and find it adds a little elegance (the René Lavand effect, if you will) and a little psychological reinforcement that I only have one deck if I’m switching. Nevertheless, I’m wondering if this is an unnecessary affectation in your mind.”

My answer is: DON’T!

Wait, I’m joking 🙂

See the photo below with just a small selection of the card cases and clips I have. I am by no means a collector, neither of props nor books (although close to 4’000 books might lead some to think the contrary, but they are wrong…).

The clip on the upper left, the one made of metal with the engraving of my ex libris (Vanni Bossi did the engraving!), is from a series I had made here in Switzerland at a time those made by Jennings and Porper where no longer available (they are again now, I believe). Each of the clips/cases you see has a little story attached to it…

Seriously, I never show off neither the clip nor the box to the audience, except if the box is part of a presentation, which is not often.

However, when I travel, by air or by land, I always put every deck I use in a clip: It simply keeps it fresh and flat.

Minutes before I perform, I take the deck(s) out of the clip and put the decks without the clips in my pocket, or wherever I need them. So, the audience never gets to see the clips.

Taking them out of a clip in front of an audience, I believe, makes the cards look “prepared”.

That’s my opinion, and you’re welcome to yours, as always 🙂

Arghh, sorry for being so long, but it’s all so fascinating, isn’t it?

All the very best for the coming week – and come back for the next The Magic Memories 68 next week with hopefully exciting news on Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction 🙂

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 66, gone online Sunday, April 3rd, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

Prologue With Snow

As I got up this morning, this is what I saw by looking out of the window – the photo shows a view from my studio in the loft of our house, that’s what you would expect Switzerland to look, wouldn’t you 🙂 But this is not what we usually get in April, except in the Swiss Alps…

In any case, this is the perfect weather to write today’s blog!

Scoop at Neurosciences

Preview to Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction

Here are a few comments, if I may: I have in various of my publications, interviews and posts repeatedly pointed out the importance of keeping a notebook, actually several (!), at least one of them about what I call “Presentational Problems”. “Problems” here in the sense of having a presentational idea – sometimes just a prologue, sometimes a complete plot – but no performance piece to go with it. My Agendas have dozens of such “Presentational Problems” that await being married to a good trick.

For years I’ve had several optical illusions on the back burner, one of my favorites being the “White Triangle”, see a version of it in the illustration below. The black lines, btw, are not even necessary.

The reason this illusion intrigues me more than most others, is that you can see something that is not even there. I mean, you don’t mis-read something or see something move that doesn’t etc., but you virtually see something that is not, a complete visual paradox, if you will.

I always knew that one day I’ll be able to use it as the presentational hook to some kind of trick, and that’s what’s happened here with “The Triangle of Mystery”, at least its a first satisfactory attempt (let me know if you agree).

The trick plot, to which I have finally managed to attach the white-triangle-illusion to, is a piece in the trick-family of “Everybody’s Card”, a beautiful plot that unfortunately has several technical and presentational problems.

The result you see is something I’ve made up recently, so doesn’t have the years of performance feedback I usually want for my publications, but I think it has several merits as a didactical piece, so that’s why I chose to include it in the course as part of the “Force” lesson.

Lots more to say, of course (as usual!), but let’s leave it at this.

To enjoy the clip CLICK HERE.

Wish you all a most successful week!

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 65, gone online Sunday, March 27th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

What is the Most Difficult Thing in Magic?

In last week’s The Magic Memories (64) I asked you: “What do you consider the most difficult thing in magic?”, this being a question I’ve never been asked in all those interviews I’ve given.

Funny (or not…): I got about a dozen comments on the video of me doing “Thief of Thought for Twins” (see below), but not one single reader commented on this question. What a world are we living in 🙂

I ignore the fact that many are possibly more interested in the fun part of magic rather than the philosophical-theoretical-academic aspects of magic, and will give you my answer to the question, whether you want it or not 🙂

Here is my answer: In the many years of discussing magic in the most diverse situations with kindred spirits, and in giving lectures, and one-to-one coachings, live and via Skype, I come to the conclusion that the most difficult thing is to distinguish our own reality from that of our spectators. Dai Vernon approximated the problem when he said: “The difference between a professional and an amateur is that the former knows what the spectator thinks.” Occasionally he varied this by saying that the difference was that the professional knew what an effect was.

Nowadays, most who have been into magic for a while and have seriously studied it, know that the deception doesn’t take place in the the performer’s hands, but in the mind of the spectators. Yes, that’s the theory, but as so often the difference between theory and practice is even bigger in practice than in theory. 

So, the next question is: How can we know what happens in the spectator’s mind? Certainly, experience helps, remembering that to become good at something takes a long time, and to become very good at it takes a very long time.

But this alone is not enough, because we all know people who have been into magic for decades and still do magic as if they were in their first year. You have to understand before you practice, but once you understand, you have to practice. So, it is a question of both understanding and experience. And it takes about ten years to get to this point (in exceptional cases a bit less…).

Obviously, one would think, that if you understood how the human mind worked, it would help. Well, yes and no. Basic knowledge of psychology – the scene that studies the human mind – is irremissible (see the books recommended in “Chapter 27: Theory” of Card College Volume 2). But there is a point where this is no longer practical.

We can see this with the new interest the neurosciences take in magic: They do a lot of experiments and are quite serious about the matter. However, I cannot get rid of the impression that many of them are about as interested in the art of magic as researchers are interested in the rats they use – magic just seems a convenient vehicle to prove the theories they are making up.

I have now read several of their publications, sat into various talks and even been invited to one of their conventions, and I have yet to find one important piece of information that I did not know and with which I could better understand or improve a magic performance piece.

Of course, they tell me quite a bit of things I did not know: About synapses, transporters, receptors and what have you, but all of this is about as useful to us magicians as ornithology is to birds (to borrow an utterance Richard Feynman made about the philosophy of science).

On the other hand, if I read the books by Ascanio or Tamariz, about In-transit Actions, Positive and Negative Insertions, False Trails, to mention just a few, I can immediately identify a flaw in a trick and make it better. These, plus dozens of other concepts, are identified, succinctly described and illustrated with practical examples in Sharing Secrets.

But all of this is, as always, just my opinion, and those who believe the contrary are right, too.

Thief of Thought for Twins – The Comments

First, you might want to watch the five-minutes video again, to refresh your memory – CLICK HERE.

Here is some background information about this video, in no particular order.

The Twins, Really?

Let’s first clear something: Although there is absolutely no camera trickery in the recording of the performance, what you see is what I did, the “twins” are not twins, of course. It’s Guillaume Cerati twice.

Explanation: We taped this first with Cerati 1 on my left. Then Cerati 2 (still Cerati 1… sorry for the confusion) sat on the opposite side of the table, to my right.

We set up the laptop on the table so Cerati 2 (actually Cerati 1, oh my….) could watch the taped performance again, and we filmed just him on this side of the table. By looking at the video he could react properly, and of course I had occasionally addressed the (invisible) Cerati 2 as I performed for Cerati 1.

Then Cerati (1 & 2 back in one), in his studio in Grenoble (France), edited the two videos according to the necessities of the effect (whatever that means…). If you did not get that, you can get Skype lessons from me at $ 150 for 75 minutes 🙂

OK, this cleared (for there were a few who really believed Cerati & Cerati were twins…), let’s proceed to the trick itself.

Vernon’s Handling

Although I’ve know about this trick since Dingle’s Complete Works (Kaufman, 1982), and then a bit later from The Classic Magic of Larry Jennings (Maxwell, 1986), it was not until I saw Dai Vernon perform his version in a lecture he gave at the Magic Castle on April 1^st, 1977. No, I was not there, but had the good chance of watching the video of it in the early 1980ies. BTW: The video is now legally available in a set of 17 DVDs titled Dai Vernon’s Revelations – 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Box Set by L&L Publishing, and it comes with another two fantastic video lectures by Dai Vernon – I transcribed and commented all of them, and maybe I’ll make this available one day.

Anyway, in this lecture he introduces the trick, crediting it to Larry Jennings, by saying, “I put little touches to it, it’s called the Vernon touch. Larry and I are great friends. Larry is a great technician. This is a very effective card trick because every effective card trick has to have a beginning, a middle and a climax. That’s like a good play that has an opening, a middle, but the climax is the most important thing. That’s why the Cups and Balls is a great trick, it has a beginning, a middle and a terrific climax in form of the loads, a lemon, an onion…” And of the trick itself he said, “I don’t know of a purer trick, all is based on the buckle of the bottom card.”

And then he proceeds to perform and explain the trick (without the selection and the presentation you saw me do). His presentation starts with this Prologue, ““Houdini claimed that nobody could fool him three times in a row with the same card trick. Now, I claim that I can fool the smartest guy living twice with the same trick. I can’t fool him three times, but I can fool him twice. I show you what I mean.”

For Jennings’ original handling see Mike Maxwell’s The Classic Magic of Larry Jennings, p. 95, “Ambitious Classic.” Dai Vernon’s version is elegant, to say the least, and reminds me of the Russian painter Bryullow, who corrected a pupil’s painting. “How is it possible? You only changed a detail, yet it is completely different.” “Art starts where this detail begins.”

As a curiosity, here is a photo from one of my notebooks with my write-up of the trick (it received four out of five stars…):

Genesis

The information about who first came up with this plot, as so often, is not clear. If you are interested in this type of information, a place to start is Denis Behr’s “Conjuring Credits”, CLICK HERE.

Briefly, Bruce Cervon in his version “A Matter of Psychology” from Ultra Cervon states in the introduction to the trick:

Several versions of this effect have reached print over the years. To the best of my knowledge, they were all inspired by the trick about to be explained. While reworking anideaof Ray Grismer’sI evolved the trick I call ‘A Matter of Psychology”: I demonstrated it, with the presentation given below, to many at the Magic Castle. Even Dai started doing it! Derek Dingle was one of the people who saw it there. He developed a handling of his own, which he eventually performed on a national television show; and for a time the trick became associated with him. When Derek eventually published his handling, “Too ManyCards”, in The Complete Works of Derek Dingle, he mentioned having seen me perform the trick at the Castle. My friend Larry Jennings was the first to put methods for this plot into print, when he contributed ‘Ambitious Classic’ to Epilogue Special, No. 3; and consequently many believed the trick to be his invention. Good tricks have a way of getting around. I thought my original version, been published before, might be of interest.

So much for a short look at the “historical part”.

The Presentation I Use

In the Nineties I spent a week (yet another one!) at Juan Tamariz’s summer home near Cadiz and he showed me a three-part routine made up of the effect I call “The Palindrome Cards” (see The Magic Memories 59), “Ambitious Classic” and a third I don’t remember: In all three or just one (?) he used the presentation of “I’ll make you forget your card”.

That was the first time I came across this presentational idea, and I took note, but never used it as I considered it Juan’s.

Years later my Spanish publisher Laura Aviles, of Páginas fame (originally called Editorial Frakson founded by Juan Tamariz), gave me the reprints of the books by Padre Wenceslao Ciuró, a priest who wrote over a dozen influential magic books between 1952 and 1978 – Tamariz keeps recommending them, as they were his first magic books, and indeed they are very interesting to the day.

In one of them, Juegos de manos de bolsillo  – tomo1, «Hacer perder la memoria», p. 80 (1961), he describes a simple trick that uses exactly the presentation of “I’ll make you lose your memory” (see the short PDF of this HERE). Ahhh, that’s were Juan probably got it from. This went into my folder for “Presentational Ideas” (I’ve written about this in several of my The Magic Memories: It is a sub-notebook in my Evernote with hundreds of presentations that await their association with a trick).

That’s how Vernon’s version and the presentation came together and formed what you saw me do in the video. There might be other people who had similar ideas, but I didn’t know about them, and they were of no influence to my work.

The First Few Problems and Their Solutions

They way I study a trick is to go through it chronologically, identify what I believe to be problems, and then try to find the most elegant solution to each of them.

The first and last problems are always the Prologue and the Epilogue (see Sharing Secrets, p. 88), and once those are solved, they almost automatically define the presentational plot of the trick.

This was taken care of with Ciuró’s idea. And according to the old journalist credo “No first sentence without the last”, I had made up the Epilogue-line: “…and don’t forget that you just witnessed a minor miracle!”

The next problem was the repetitive structure of the trick, actually a “double repetition”: Not only do you repeat the same effect with the Ace, Two, Three and Four, you also do each one twice. This was solved by the pacing, and of course by the line, “…but now you have forgotten your card, haven’t you?”, which becomes a Running Gag with an unexpected denouement.

However, the last card bothered me: In the other versions the last card, the Five of Hearts, simply changes into the Five of Spades. As always I ask: Why? What’s the dramatical and magical reason for this transformation?

Yes, a capable performer can make this an effect, and it shows in Dingle’s performance on the Dick Cavett Show (3rd OCT 1974). Similar to Fred Kaps’s 11 £ Trick, which also has no real climax, through proper presentation and force of personality such tricks can be made effective, but for the average performer it will be a problem.

Therefore, the idea of changing the last card into a selection seemed obvious to me, although I have yet to find a version by someone else who does the same thing. (My friend Rafael Benatar does it for birthdays, and has the message “Happy Birthday, (name of person)” appear on a duplicate 5H, and that’s a good solution, too.)

More Problems, More Solutions

Most technical problems are taken care of by Vernon’s brilliant construction using the improvised double-backer. And the need to repeat each phase because of this, has already been taken care of by the presentation.

Remains the small problem of how to load the face-down selection to under the five-card-packet. I find it absolutely unacceptable to take the five cards, put them on top of the face-down deck (which at this point is no longer necessary in the perception of the audience!), to display them, and to then steal the card.

BUT, “If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain” (this BTW, is not a Bible saying as I thought, but can be found in “Of Boldness”, an essay by Francis Bacon from 1625 – bless Internet, for once…). Thinking about this problem reminded me of the first time I saw Juan Tamariz in 1978 at a convention in Düsseldorf, Germany, where in his lecture he did one of his early versions of “Oil and Water” (my favorite, later published in Pabular magazine). In this he needs an extra black card. He starts by placing four red cards face up on the table, and then four black cards, but apparently by oversight he tables only three.

I clearly remember how I completely went for it, and thought, “Oh, he only has three…” As soon as I had thought that, he says, “Oh, wait, there is a black missing here…” He picks up the deck, takes the black card he apparently left on the face of it, and then adds it to the three-card-packet… thereby adding the extra red card. He got me with this, and all of the audience, too…

So, this was the solution I adopted for my version, and as a Bonus it also solved the problem of how to avoid that one of the Heart cards from the five-card-packet would be selected, and how to control it to the top. That’s what I call a good deal: One question asked, three problems solved!

At the beginning I take out the AH, 2H, 3H and 4H, in any order, and put them aside in a face-down packet, explaining, “I put these aside, because I don’t want you to choose one of these.” This action allows me to naturally bring the 5H to the bottom. Automatically this suggested its use as a Key Card: It makes all the sense in the world, since I need to look through the deck anyway a moment later to find the 5H.

This leads to the next problem: What type of Key Card Placement and subsequent Key Card Location & Control to use. Your knowledge and abilities are the limit.

In my case a quick mental check of the available tools led me to the Hindu Shuffle as a procedure to have the card selected and tagged with the Key Card (5H), my motto in these cases being: As sophisticated as I can, but as simple and safe as possible – the three “S” (Sophistication, Simplicity, Safety).

If the Key Card goes above the selection (using the Hindu Shuffle Bottom Extraction Placement as you can see me use in the video), when you afterwards cut the 5H to the top, the selection ends up directly under it, from where it is stolen by using an Intelligent Double Lift (Sharing Secrets, p. 54).

The belief that the selection is hopelessly lost is further cemented by the very clean replacement of the selection, and by setting the deck aside, as if it was no longer used. It is now that the previously tabled cards are picked up, the “missing” card noted, then located in the deck and added as you can see me do in the video. From here on the things take their course…

Oh, one more thing: One might be tempted to tell about the cards et aside and that the whole story of making the spectator forget a thought, but that would be counterproductive. The information would function as a Negative Insertion (Sharing Secrets, p. 52), and you would risk that the card is forgotten before you even tell them that you intend to do so! However, if you tell them all this at the beginning, as part of the Prologue, not only can you go straight to the effects after the selection, you also make sure that they won’t forget the card.

There might be a few more things to say, but let’s leave it at that – as if that was not enough 🙂

The Moral of the Story

Sorry for having been a bit text-heavy in this blog, but there are things that cannot be simplified, or else they become trivial. If you’ve read up to here, you are with me 🙂

I hope to have been able to describe how to study a trick – at least one way of doing so – using the practical example of the above piece: Go through the trick on its horizontal timeline, stop each time you identify a problem (ask questions!), recognize the open architecture this implies by going into a vertical line, mentally listing the available solutions (or write them down), and then select the proper solution. Try out the resulting piece a few times, then keep it the way it is, if it is good, or change it. Continue like this until you are satisfied. This is the path to perfection: You’ll never reach perfection, but having it as a vision will lead to excellence.

Wish you a healthy and prosperous week,

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 64, gone online Sunday, March 20th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

Today’s contribution is a film clip of me performing my interpretation of Dai Vernon’s hitherto unpublished version of “Ambitious Classic”. Read more below.

What I Would Ask Myself

I received quite a few lovely comments on last week’s blog that featured the interview Damian Jennings did for Vanishing Inc.’s The Insider.

With all those interviews I’ve given in the “Pandemic Years”, and the ones before (!), I was wondering what questions have NOT been asked, yet, and that would be interesting to ask. Reminds me of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s (1742 – 1799) Waste Books, a term traditionally used for bookkeeping, actually his scrapbooks or notebooks, with often amusing and always thought-provoking original ideas. Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud both greatly admired Lichtenberg for what he had written in these notebooks. Years ago I put it in my bathroom and read it in less than a year – I recommend you do the same as an instructional and entertaining way to kill dead time (how is that for a tautology, or is it an oxymoron). Read what the NY Review Books has to say HERE. And buy a copy…

So, one of his aphorisms I remember said: “With some authors I would rather be interested to read what they choose not to publish, than what they published.”

Coming full-circle, the question I’ve never been asked by any of the interviewers and therefore (if I remember well…) have never answered, although it is implicit in various of my writings, is: “What do you consider the most difficult thing in magic?” I wonder what you would answer. What do you think is the most difficult thing in magic? I’ll give you my own answer in next week’s blog.

Thief of Thoughts for Twins – The Performance

We have just finished taping the last segments of Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction scheduled to be released end April, hopefully before my birthday, May 1st, as a gift to myself, but above to all of you, who will accept that gift… in return of a modest remuneration 🙂

We started taping on January 11, 2022, and after four three-day-marathons, we finished by taping the twenty-five tricks and their detailed explanations that go with Card College Volume 4 on March 15. That’s a total of twelve days, not counting the week-long preparations and the even longer editing, correcting, uploading and publicizing, most of which is still ahead of us.

I say “us”, because my partner in this mega-project is Guillaume Cerati of Ceratifilm,  a professional magician from Grenoble, France, and film-buff. He brought in all his professional equipment and know-how, and we set up a small film studio in my home, now called Castle Mountain Studios – my German-speaking readers will understand the allusion to my street address “Schlossbergstrasse” 🙂

This is the first time I produce a video project myself, and in spite of the additional work, time and finances this entails, in the future I will not do it anyway else, if at all possible.

Sure, the taping of Card College 1&2 – Personal Instruction with Jim Steinmeyer and Frankie Glass was a great experience. But taping all of it in three days was one of the most stressful experiences I ever had… and at that time I was thirteen years younger 🙂

It was one of the hottest months of June, and in the studio the air conditioning had to be switched off during takes because it was too loud… and we taped from 9 to 5, with just short breaks, not counting my travel and set-up times before and after.

The product eventually came off well, but in 2009 the decline of DVDs had already set in, downloads starting to become popular, and of course the ripping of DVDs made it easy to pirate videos. Artistically the project was a great success, but the huge production costs, involving super-professional equipment and personell, swallowed much of the profit. The DVDs made it into a second edition, but ultimately had to be sold off at $ 10 instead of the original $ 125 through Richard Kaufman (who acted as an advisor during taping) to those who renewed their subscription to the magazine.

In spite of all this, Jim and Frankie initially set up a contract that kindly allowed me to regain the copyright of the videos after ten years.  These are now available as downloads from my webshop, as a complete course, as well as in individual lessons, the latter at less than the price of a coffee at Starbucks (which as an Italian I’d rather not drink…). And of course they started the idea that I have now picked up with Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction fourteen years later. For this, and the kindness they extended to me during my stay in Burbank, Los Angeles, I will always be thankful to them.

After this very brief excursion into the past – after all this blog is called The Magic Memories (!) – back to the present: Being my own boss allowed me to do everything the way I wanted and at the pacing that suited me. I really think that we have done everything which is necessary, and left out all that is not needed: maximum attention on content, minimal but still professional in every way on formal elements. I did everything from treatment, scripting to performing, and Guillaume (almost) everything else: Cameras (we have five angles!), light, sound, check, continuity, editing, set and graphic design, and a large etc. In other words, he had to split himself up, not in two, but in multiples of himself!

At the end two of him were left, Cerati & Cerati, and I could convince them to act as spectators to my “Thief of Thoughts for Twins” that we did not include in the Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction (you can imagine what the rest looks like…). To watch the performance CLICK HERE.

Next week I’ll give you some background on the trick and make some comments with information that should allow you to learn the trick, or at least apply some of the ideas exposed to your own work.

All the very best for this week,

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 63, gone online Sunday, March 13th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

As you are reading this (provided you read it on SUN 13th MAR 2022…) we are taping the “show”, i.e., the performance of ca. 25 tricks to go with the fourteen lessons of Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction, and their detailed explanation thereafter (three days of full-immersion).

I’ve been preparing everything for the past ten days almost full-time, as it is my ambition to not only demonstrate the tricks, but to perform them – as you will appreciate there is a huge difference, and it takes an awful lot of time 🙂 Obviously, I could do this in such a short time because I have now over forty years of experience on my back…

As a consequence, this week’s Magic Memories (63) will be short, and I look very much forward to a lengthier blog next week, when I hope to answer the question various readers have kindly sent in.

Yet another Interview…

Those who have been following my blogs will probably have had enough of interviews I’ve done for at least a dozen of hosts in the past two years.

But just in case you haven’t, or if you are new to this place, here is a chat of almost 60 minutes Damian Jennings did with me for his “The Insider” by Vanishing Inc. and which aired for the first time on Monday, March 7, 2022.

There are, though, several questions that have never been asked before, so you might find something of interest. As always I try to stay away from trivial things and attempt to make links to useful ideas and concepts, so that at the end you go away with some valuable information you didn’t have before – that’s the ideal, of course. And you should find some amusing bits, too 🙂

The following link will take you to the VI-page, where you can either listen to the Podcast, which is the first thirty minutes of the talk (there will be a sequel soon), or see the complete thing as a video via YouTube. To make your decision CLICK HERE.

Literary Award

I hope you will forgive me for blowing my own horn just a little by telling you that the Magischer Zirkel von Deutschland, Europe’s largest magic society (as far as I know), has awarded me with their “Schriftsteller des Jahres”, i.e., they have bestowed upon me their “Literary Fellowship”. This is already the second time, the first time was in 1987 when I had published almost nothing… If you read German, or want to practice your German, or want to see how good your translator app is, you can read their laudation BY CLICKING HERE.

I have now received almost all important awards there are for my output as an author of magical literature – I only lack the Allan Slaight Award, which unfortunately I will never receive (why is another story); I say “unfortunately” because it is the only one that comes with serious money.

One day I will write about awards in magic – in general, I mean – as it is interesting from different points of view, but today is not the day 🙂

All the very best,

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 62, gone online Sunday, March 6th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

Pat Perry’s Close Theatre

I’ve meant to write about my friend and professional magic colleague Pat Perry and his amazing “Close Theatre” a long time ago, but each time I start this blog I get carried away by some topical event. However, today is the day, as my friend Christian Engblom likes to say (next time you see him ask him to tell you the joke of the French, the Italian and the Finn bragging to each other about how often they make love).

Swiss-born Pat Perry, originally a draftsman in construction engineering, turned to magic full-time at the beginning of the 1990s.

Like several of his colleagues from Zurich, he learned from one of the best: Jim Cellini. Jim had relocated to Zurich, Switzerland, and was teaming up with Pedro Bedognetti, who at that time owned a swell brick and mortar magic shop called “Pedro Magie”. This was later taken over by Hörbi Kull, who organized some remarkable magic events and conventions (the history of magic in Switzerland might surprise many, but we’ll leave this for some other time).

Jim had not only released some of his creations with “Pedro Magie”, he also became a tutor to several talented young people who patronized the shop. And Pat Perry was among the most talented.

I had the pleasure of seeing him grow up and improving his artistic qualities from year to year: He started out doing close-up magic, quite successfully for corporate and private functions, and now owns his own theatre!

In-between he collaborated with one Archibald, and together they came up with an absolutely unique act that won them first prize in the category of “General Magic” at the FISM World Magic Convention in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2003. I had the good fortune of sitting in the audience for the occasion, and was as enthralled by their performance as everyone else – they received a well-deserved standing ovation, and the title of World Champions. You can see  a one-camera recording of their performance BY CLICKING HERE (although it does in no way do justice to the live performance – but you get an idea).

Last October (2021) he kindly invited me to perform at his theatre, which I did with a 75-minute “infotainment show” (I guess that’s what they call this nowadays) titled “Think Differently – How to Deceive Others But Most of All Yourself”. I got the idea for this over twenty years ago from my much admired friend Lennart Green, and I plan to one day tell you a bit more about it, including giving the detailed script, as I believe it might be interesting and even useful to some of you.

Anyway, Pat also has a yearly show he calls “Pat Perry and Friends”, where invites two colleagues to perform in a 75-minute show with him. Below you can see Arthur Roscha, Pat Perry and myself posing for a before-Corona show.

Pat’s Close Theatre is a true jewel – if you get a chance to come to Zurich, Switzerland, which you should do anyway, try to catch one of Pat’s shows – book well ahead, as even now, shortly after the Corona restrictions have been lifted, the theatre is sold out weeks in advance. The venue offers a first-class view from every seat, either on the table-top for close-up magic or for parlor-style magic just behind the table. The theatre has everything needed in sound, light and video equipment, and all the superfluous is left away.

I could obviously go on forever telling you about the show etc., but suffice it to say that Pat, who specializes in Mental Magic and Close-up, delivers a highly sophisticated performance and leaves a deeply impressed and entertained audience behind.

His theater has 76 seats, the ticket is an average of $ 70, and you get some extra close-up magic taking place in the attractive bar located just next to the theatre, and performed by the master himself. Here are a few pictorial impressions of the magic in the bar and in the theatre.

Arturo Brachetti

Two weeks ago I made an improvised trip to Italy that came about in this way – a nice example of the Butterfly Effect (see Sharing Secrets, p. 28): I have bought a small magic library from a magic friend and mentor who has now retired from magic. The book collection BTW has over 600 volumes, and I have now at least 400 volumes in double, so if you are interested, send me an email, and I’ll send you a PDF-list (ca. 40 pages long!). However, keep in mind that this might only be interesting for those living within the European Community (I ship from Germany), as shipping outside of it is becoming prohibitive (if the parcel goes over 5 kg), and you might get better deals from second-hand bookshops on your own continent.

Anyway, with the books came the complete file of the German magazine MAGIE (from 1918 to today!), Magische Welt (another 75 years), and Hokus Pokus, the Swiss magazine (founded in 1939). Sadly, almost nobody is interested in old magazines anymore, but I was reminded of the library of Don Silvio (see The Magic Memories 49), with over 22’000 volumes on magic. Upon calling him it turned out he missed exactly those three magazines. Not wanting to make the full trip to Cherasco, a six-hour car drive, I asked if we could meet half-way between Basel and Cherasco, and imagine my surprise when he said: “I’ll be in Varese tomorrow to attend Arturo Brachetti’s show, why don’t you come along.”

Now you must know that Don Silvio was Arturo’s first magic teacher, and Arturo, whenever he can, will promote Don Silvio’s foundation for Children of the World. Briefly: I drove to Varese, a comfortable four-hour car drive, had lunch with my good friend Gianfranco Preverino (more on him in another blog), and in the evening we got VIP seats, courtesy of Arturo, with whom I had conducted a lengthy interview for Genii years ago, but which unfortunately was never published…

What to say about Arturo’s show? In one word: Phenomenal!

His inspiration originally was Fregoli, the Italian and then world’s most renowned quick change artist, but I must say that even Fregoli would agree that Arturo has by far surpassed him.

Brachetti is a highly creative and original performer, and his show cannot be put into words.

In one of his most interesting talks he says that the difficulty of quick change are not so much the changes themselves (as if those were not difficult!), but the motivation why the change occurs. Arturo and I have discussed this several times, and we both agree that this is of course exactly the same in magic: Why do you do this and that? There must be a reason, and it must be captivating to the intellect and the heart – Logos and Pathos (a missing chapter in Sharing Secrets).

The show has to be one of the largest revue-type shows I’ve ever seen, in my opinion more spectacular than even the Las Vegas shows I’ve seen (he travels with two huge trucks where I could fit my house into…). Nonetheless, it is essentially a One-man Show. Amazingly enough, Brachetti manages to impress with state-of-the-art revue-type elements, such as special effects that mix music, laser and video, but at the same time he always stays personable, speaks with the audience from time to time, and at all time keeps up an engaging communication. There are not many shows like this, and right now I can only think of Penn & Teller, who also manage to fill a huge theatre, and at the same time do “big illusions” and stay on an almost one-to-one basis with the audience.

I can only say that if you ever get a chance to get a ticket to Brachetti’s show, grab it, as you will remember it for a long time. Since he speaks in his shows, you will “only” be able to see him in countries that speak Italian, French or English (as far as I know…). But that’s not so bad, is it?

There’s a lot more I could tell you about Arturo and when I first saw him as a young chap debuting at Manfred Thumm’s Magic Hands Convention in Böblingen (1979?) with a ten-minute magic and quick change act… and today he’s a celebrity, a mega star in the world of theatre, with countless TV appearances to his credit (see “Best of Magic”) and numerous of the most prestigious awards in the performing arts. What a pleasure to have been able to follow his career and be friends with him! (If I manage to find the interview, I’ll put it up here…).

Update on Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction & Good-bye

That’s all for today, folks – look forward to chatting with you again in one week’s time.

The Magic Memories (63) might then be a short one only, as on Sunday, 13th March, the plan is to tape the “show-time-part” with some 25 tricks from Card College Volume 4, plus the detailed explanation of them the following two days, to complement the fourteen technical chapters we’ve already taped last week. Looks as if this is going to be another up-to-ten-hours-long tutorial reflecting Card College 4 – the Book.

All the very best!

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 61, gone online Sunday, February 27th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

Thoughts on Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction

I’m writing this on Saturday morning, and Guillaume and I just finished yesterday taping the technical chapters of Card College 4. Wow, what a deed 🙂 In two weeks time we are scheduled to tape the show part with about 24 performance pieces and their explanation. The cumulative duration of volume 4 will be short under that of volume 3, and between eight and ten hours – I will be able to tell you more once all is edited and assembled.

After several weeks of preparing, it took us two full days to get just this technical part into the box, a total of fourteen chapters, with over one hundred techniques, plus innumerable references and additional mentions of concepts, thoughts, psychological and, yes, even some philosophical considerations.

In spite of the wealth of material, comments and opinions, I truly hope to have been able to remain truthful to my own credo, that of never be trivial and not to waste neither my time nor the time of my future students. Yes, I know, it is somewhat of a fine line I walk whenever I’m writing, lecturing or taping anything related to magic, as I’m putting myself into the role of a teacher, who is supposed to know more than those who are reading or watching me. It has, though, never been my intention to appear aloof or to talk down to someone who knows less, and I truly hope that my sincere enthusiasm for the art and science of magic, card magic in particular, shines through all of my “teachings”. All these things I do are really borne out of my own necessity and passion to try to understand a universe that becomes bigger each time I myself learn more about it. Although I truly enjoy doing all this, I’m also humbled each time I approach a new subject, and I start to get an idea what Socrates meant when he said, “I know that I know nothing”, possibly the wisest utterance in the history of civilization.

The Preparation

Back on track: It took me weeks of preparation, just to get all the material from volumes 3 and 4 back “at my fingertips”, and then to script the content and how to best present it, to what degree of detail, and what examples to use to make it understandable in context.

Obviously, when you’ll be watching this, and hopefully getting some new information from it, so as to expand your own magical horizon and learn new thoughts, tools and performance material, all of this hard work should be as invisible as the proverbial 90% of an iceberg, and everything you hear and see should look as easy as pie 🙂

Anyway, in all those preparatory weeks, I went through the material I had essentially written before 1994, that was the date when Card College 3 & 4 first appeared in the original German language. I was then possibly at the peak of my technical evolution. In the past weeks I had to relearn quite a few sleights I’ve rarely been using since those times.

I hope this doesn’t sound like blowing into my own horn, as it is not meant to be, but coincidentally, when putting order to my things in between heavier work, to relax, so to speak, I came upon my very first “official” publication The Cardmanship of Roberto Giobbi, edited by Walt Lees, published by Magico of NYC in 1984. And here is what Walt Lees wrote in the foreword (I had completely gotten about these kind words).

I first encountered Roberto in December 1980, when he was brought over for the “International Day of Magic” by Ron MacMillan. Within a few hours of his arrival, several people came up to me and asked, “Have you seen that Swiss lad? He’s terrific!” In fact, I never got to see him work then, althoughI did sit in on an informal session that he had with Juan Tamariz.

It was not until 1983, that our paths were to cross once more. Roberto was in this country for six months, studying the language and was able to meet him many times for sessions and discussions. I found that, unlike so many people, who gain a reputation for digital dexterity, he was, in fact, a deep thinker. Far from being a mere finger flinger, Roberto spends most of his time thinking about and studying the finer points of misdirection, acting and psychology. Sit talking to him for a little while and you will very quickly find yourself in a discussion about audience control, spectator handling and the manipulation of people’s perceptions. These are of far more importance to him than twenty new double lifts or the latest flourish.

This attention to the finer points of presentation clearly manifests itself in Roberto’s performances and, we hope, to some extent in the material in these pages. It shows up most clearly in his handling of the riffle force, described herein, but is there, in all of the other items, just below the surface.

We would like to make it clear that this booklet is not intended for the beginner. The magic explained, although not complicated or difficult, does require a good, basic grounding in card work and a fair degree of performing experience. Given these two requirements, the reader will find some very practical, useable material.

Walt Lees July 1984

 

End of quote.

The Riffle Force Walt mentions is, by the way, the one discussed in Card College 1&2 – Personal Instruction Lesson 16 – The Force 2, the same as in Chapter 15 in Volume 1 of Card College; in my original it is in Volume 2, but this is another story I might tell another day…

The Choice of Hercules

As I was saying, this prep work forced me to look at my own work from yet another viewpoint. I realized that in the coming decades, after 1994, I rarely or even never used some of the techniques and concepts I had described in the books. 1988 was when I left my secure job at Autodesk in Switzerland and turned to be a full-time professional. I consider myself very fortunate that I stayed an “amateur” at heart, pursuing all those things that were of no direct relevance to the success as a performing professional.

Nonetheless, I had to make a few decision, e.g., should I spend time to learn and perfect a Middle Deal, a Bottom Deal, a Classic Pass, a five-hand-run-up Riffle Shuffle and a Table Faro Shuffle, or should I invest the thousands (I’m NOT exaggerating) of hours to study psychology, communication, staging and other matters that are – in my opinion – far more important for a successful, communicative, artistic and memorable performance (some would call this complex construct merely “entertainment”).

This is considering the fact that after decades of study and experience of (card) magic I can truthfully say that there are virtually no card problems using the aforementioned sleights that cannot be solved equally well (!!!) with other sleights and strategies. Mind you, not that these “surrogates” were easier, no, not at all, EVERYTHING well done requires understanding AND practice, but they don’t take up so many hours. Above all, studying strategies rather than mere sleights has far wider application potential.

The Utility of the Useless

This leads to several questions, one of which is why I should have included them in my Card College books in the first place.

One, because at that time I was using practically all of the items from the books at some point or another in one or several tricks and presentations, so the content is a reflection of what I was doing. This practical experience and the sincerity coming from it make up a great part of the authenticity of these books. At the time I was simply passionate about the subject and trying to present it in the most didactical and meticulous way possible. Nowadays I realize that this is one of the major reasons why the books have been so successful to this very day.

Two, because Card College – a title Stephen Minch and I came up with in an attempt to translate the German Grosse Kartenschule (literally “Big School of Cards”) – is Kindergarten, Primary School, High School and College/University, in chronological order, volumes 1 and 2 being from Kindergarten to High School, volumes 3, 4, and 5 being University. To follow along with this analogy, we know that what we learn in Primary School are the basic skills we need almost 100% for the rest of our lives, those from High School we can forget up to 80%, and those of University, well , depending on the discipline, you can forget about 40%. It is only afterwards, when you enter “real life” that you recognize how to deal with and solve the daily problems.

So, if you agree with this simplified math more or less, you will also understand that with Card College I wanted to precisely define, accurately describe and pleasurable teach not only what is absolutely necessary – the Basics from volumes 1 and 2 – but also the subjects that are part of the infinite universe of card magic.

This is why I have dealt with advanced Palms and the Side Steal (volume 3), or with Culling and Stacking Systems (volume 4), when 95% of most people performing card magic would be well served with just the Spread Cull (volume 1 of the American Edition) or the Top Palm, and would probably never use one of the sophisticated culling or stacking techniques. But, similar to University, it is a good thing if you’ve heard of these things, and practiced them to a certain degree, without then using them in real life. You might agree if I say that in magic, as in life, these things become part of our personality and competence. And this is something our audiences feel, as they are experts in reading these subliminal signals, even though most do not know that they have this skill…

Now, I have tried to the best of my knowledge and abilities to discuss all those topics (including the “Classic Pass”!), so that you get a good grounding in those subjects (e.g., Estimation!). And similar to University, if you want to specialize in the subject, the door to this infinite universe within the universe has been opened to you. As such I believe that the books, and now the videos, are helpful to find your own way in an informed manner, rather than just navigating through the infinite galaxies of Internet (YouTube…) and getting lost… not always, but more often than not.

Closing Comment

When I started writing this week’s blog I intended to simply briefly mention the Card College video project I’m currently working on, not at all for commercial reasons, but just because this is what occupies my mind and time at the moment. But it turned out to be a much longer rambling, one subject leading to the next. Ah, what a beautifully complex thing the Art of Magic is! If you’ve been reading up to here, it means I could catch and keep your attention, and there’s a little lesson there, too 🙂

All the very best for the coming week!

Roberto Giobbi

Hello everyone!

These are The Magic Memories 60, gone online Sunday, February 20th, 2022, at 0:07h sharp.

I’ve received some lovely feedback on the book list I started in The Magic Memories (58), so here is the second part, as promised.

Several who wrote in commented on books I mentioned, others suggested additions, and still others said my list sent them back to books they have in their library but haven’t touched for years – well, what more can you expect from a little Sunday Blog 🙂

For the readers who joined us now and for whom this is the first blog, let me remind you that this is a very particular list, namely of the fifty books I would like to keep if I had to give away the remaining 3’950… plus 40 yards of magazines… check back on the foreword in The Magic Memories (58).

The (ca.) 50 Books I Would Like to Keep – Part Two

26. Kaufman, Richard, Williamson’s Wonders. Williamson is one of the few geniuses of our time, and along with Tamariz, Bloom, Andrus, Ascanio, Vernon, Slydini (and a few others…), he reminds me of the incredible privilege and pleasure I had to meet all these people in my lifetime, and to be able to call almost all of them my friends. I saw David for the first time when he visited Switzerland in the early eighties on his first lecture tour. Since then I have rarely seen such a wonderful synergy between virtuosity in execution and brilliance and ease of presentation. This book has some of his best ideas.

27. Lang Neil, C., The Modern Conjurer. I’d keep this as representing the rich literature of the time (Prof. Hoffmann, Sachs etc.). Of particular interest are the over 500 photos in the trick descriptions, most of them depicting Charles Bertram and Mademoiselle Patrice (the wife of the author!).

28. Le Paul, Paul, The Card Magic of Paul Le Paul. For simply being one of the best books on card magic, and for sentimental reasons.

29. Marlo, Ed, Marlo in Spades. The very first of Marlo’s publications I bought from a dealer at a magic convention as a seventeen-year-old, a revelation of sophisticated card magic. I practiced the first item, the “Barnhard Fan Steal” for years, until I found a way of doing it using the Flat Palm rather than the Classic Palm as suggested. I made quite a reputation for myself at my club for performing the hard stuff from the book, at a time were most did just simple self-working card tricks.

30. Marlo, Ed, The Cardician. For being the first “big” book by Marlo I read.

31. Marlo, Ed, Revolutionary Card Technique. When the Dollar was still high toward the Swiss Franc, and I was a student with little money, the booklets by Marlo were terribly expensive, but I got whatever I could from Marlo, together with a friend. Now Magic Inc. has brought them together in a collected edition.

32. Mendoza, John, The Book of John. For being one of the first books with really well-described professional performing material. His routine for the Benson Bowl inspired mine that I use to this very day. I’d want to keep his other book, John – Verse Two, too (I performed the McDonald Aces by Mary Wolf from this book on my very first TV appearance on Swiss TV…).

34. Miller, Charlie, Magicana. For the immense amount of practical material and insight, but also as a souvenir of meeting Charlie, who came to my show when I performed for the very first time as a young magician in the Close-up Gallery of the Magic Castle. We then met at the main bar downstairs and had a lovely conversation, albeit too short. I regret I did not ask him to meet again.

35. Minch, Stephen, Ever So Sleightly – The Professional Card Magic of Martin A. Nash. For having been one of the very first books with card magic of a performing professional, a revelation for eighteen-year-old Young Giobbi. And for having hosted him in Switzerland, translated his lecture and be taught personally some of his “inner secrets” during some memorable private sessions. His other two books, Any Second Now and Sleight Unseen, I’d smuggle in, too.

36. Minch, Stephen, Daryl’s Ambitious Card Omnibus. This signed copy with a heartfelt inscription will always remind me of a friend who is sorely missed… and of his exceptional magic talent. And the content of the book is great, too.

37. Minch, Stephen, The Vernon Chronicles Vol. 1, 2, 3. For being the cream of the material that went into Bruce Cervon’s famous Castle Notebooks (later published in five high-priced volumes). Volume 2 is my favorite, as it contains some of the great “smaller works” of Dai Vernon’s, but as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote (from memory), “The full moon reflects in the huge ocean, but also in the smallest puddle.”

38. Minch, Stephen, The Collected Works of Alex Elmsley Vol. 1 & 2. For being the “complete works” of yet another genius I had the pleasure of meeting several times in my life. The first time was after the books had seen publication, in London, in a pub called “The Phoenix” (fitting name as Elmsley had “literally “risen from the ashes” with these books). Gordon Bruce had kindly set up this meeting. After I performed a few things for him, one using an Elmsley Count, of course, he gave me one of the nicest compliments I ever received, when he said, “You have very innocent hands.”

39. Nathanson, Leon, Slydini Encores. For having been the first book I bought describing the magic of this genius. I practiced every trick in the book… and performed a few over the years. As a 21-year-old I had the privilege of meeting Slydini personally, at one of the Ron MacMillan conventions in London, and I saw him lecture! I would like to take the other books about his magic with me, too, of course…

40. Nelms, Henning, Magic and Showmanship. For being possibly the first “theory” book I read. Almost every page has underlinings, highlights and comments at the margin. Although most of the tricks used to illustrate the concepts are not very good, the book remains to this day a useful and practical resource for anyone who aspires to perform before real people (not magic friends or YouTube clips).

41. Page, Patrick, Magic by Gosh – The Life and Times of Albert Goshman. For having known Albert, and having met him on several occasions, hosted him in Switzerland, and translated his lectures several times, but also because he always told me that I was the first to pre-order and pay his book! I’ve seen his act live many times, and I never got tired of it – a true original.

42. Perovich, Mike, The Vernon Companion. For having been a book that has truly fascinated me after a longer period of not reading magic books, at least not many. Without knowing each other personally, I sent Mike several pages of questions. He answered with a ten-page letter (!) responding to all my queries, and more. We’ve since become very friendly and correspond regularly.

43. Ponsin, La nouvelle magie blanche dévoillée. This book from 1853 preceded those by Robert-Houdin, Hofzinser, Devant, Bertram, Roterberg and Conradi, and contains some of the finest plots of card magic. This book alone would keep me busy for years.

44. Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène, La vie d’un artiste. For being the first magic (auto-)biography I ever read, and for being one of the two best, to this day, when I have read hundreds.

45. Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène, Comment on devient sorcier. For being possibly the first book written by a professional performer, with lots of original material, wonderful plots, useful techniques and an inexhaustible amount of practical advice. The first book by a highly creative and skillful artist with a superb capacity of introspection and the ability to put complex matters into simple words; with lots of “theoretical” concepts (the eye, the pause etc.).

46. Stars of Magic. For being the most important document of the magic of New York’s “Inner Circle” (plus Allerton from Chicago and Bertram from Toronto).

47. Stowers, Carlton, The Unsinkable Titanic Thompson. I have hundreds of publications on gambling and cheating, among them dozens of biographies, most of them by so-called “converted gamblers”. This I would want to keep as it was possibly the first of its genre, and simply… because.

48. Tamariz, Juan, The Five Points in Magic. For having been the book by Juan that I translated into German for the Magic Hands Convention by Manfred Thumm in Böblingen 1982 – I was 22 years old then. But what was even more, I translated his 90-minute Live-Lecture at the convention eight (!) times. Toward the end I knew the lecture by heart, and my translation came before Juan even spoke the words. We had a very good time.

49. Tamariz, Juan, Sinfonia en mnemonica mayor vol. 1 & 2 (Mnemonica). I was the first outside of Spain to whom Juan explained his mnemonic system to the n-th degree, after he had fooled me time after time with his ingenious concoctions. Back home I fooled the pants off the boys (no girls doing card magic then) with what I had learned. As far as I know I was the first to use Juan’s mnemonica outside of Spain, and these magnificent books remind me of it. Besides, I would learn a lot of what he told me then and which I have forgotten.

50. Tamariz, Juan, El arco iris (The Magic Rainbow). For being the most important book on magic, and because it contains all those theories, thoughts, tricks etc. that Juan has been telling me in the hundreds (thousands?) of conversations we had in the past 44 years.

2 Bonusses for the full deck

51. Vernon, Dai, Revelations (edition of 1984). Although I must be one of the few who dares saying that you do not need to study Erdnase in order to become a good magician, this version has Vernon’s comments and is a lesson in how to study a book, any book. And for having one of the best forewords in magic (by Persi Diaconis).

52. Vernon, The 20 $ Manuscript. I was able to acquire a “pirate copy” of its time; precisely the fact that it is a “fake” of a legendary publication makes it twice as interesting…

Another Bonus for the First Joker

Waldmann, Werner, Grosse Zauberschule. Not a good magic book at all, BUT for nostalgic reasons, for it was this book, discovered in a public library, at age fourteen, that opened the window to my future.

…And the Second Joker, Of Course!

“The Prophecy” and “The Red Card”

By the time you read this, everyone who ordered “The Prophecy” from me should have received it – if you haven’t, please let me know via the contact form on the webshop. If I had had the time and contacts, I would have released this in a very limited quantity, and at ten times the price. In this case Penguin Magic is the publisher and producer, so it was produced in a large quantity, very reasonably priced. However, there is always a price to pay: One batch of the wallets has an elastic band that is a bit too tight. It is really only slightly, and won’t interfere with its use, especially not in the routine delivered (“The Prophecy”), but I understand that a few are a bit unhappy about it. I apologize, but in such cases authors are at the mercy of factors they cannot control.

HOWEVER, in this particular case you can fix the problem (in case you have one of those wallets): Seize the elastic band with both hands between thumb and forefinger, and then pull on the band in opposite directions. Do this by moving from left to right over the band’s entire length. This will weaken the band, and after a few “work-outs” you’ll find the wallet looks as it should.

In any case, regardless of what “prop” you buy, you’ve always got to work it in, even with playing cards and coins this is the case, of course.

As for “The Red Card”, my batch arrived a bit late due to storms in the USA and other logistic problems, but I shipped a few days ago, and everyone should receive his and her parcel by the end of next week. If you don’t, let me know.

“The Prophecy” and “The Red Card” are pieces with a similar phenomenon: A prediction. Therefore, it goes without saying that you should not use them together in the same act. I use them alternating as closers or as an encore, and found myself using “The Prophecy” even more than “The Red Card”, although the latter is a bigger fooler for magicians than the former.

Update on Card College 3&4 – Personal Instruction

We’ve finished taping the techniques, the performance and the explanations of the performed tricks (22!) of Card College Volume 3, and now my friend Guillaume is editing the eleven chapters, most of which are over one hour long! I revise and make additions, with references to books to check, these have to be installed, then checked again – a monumental task, I can tell you! But it looks good. And in spite of the enormous effort necessary, it is nothing compared to writing, editing and publishing a book. I know what I’m talking about 🙂

Right now I’m writing the treatment for the technical part of Card College Volume 4, and we will tape next week (4 days!), and then in another two week’s time we’ll tape the performance and the explanation of the tricks. We’re right on track, and we should be able to release end April or early May, in time for my birthday 🙂

Wish you all an excellent week!

Roberto Giobbi