by IAIN » Apr 13th, '07, 10:09
I believe it was Marvell who asked about him a while back...There's a mini biography of the man on wikipedia thats pretty much true if you are interested...
For a little while now, i've had the Britland/Breese Canasta books, the audio book, and the dvd of a half hour show of the late great man...
It seems to be that alot of magicians at around that time, had a somewhat snotty attitude towards him. Mainly because of his methods...
Some were of the obvious and therefore sneaky and never noticed, some were tried and trusted traditional methods...and the rest was bare faced cheek and psychological ploys...
One of the reasons why i love Chan so much, is that he flew by the seat of his pants sometimes...well, quite often really...and bear in mind, telly was live in those days too - if it screwed up...that was it...
His manner - polite, measured, precise and adamant...his build - a tall, slim gent with an excited grin and swept back hair...superb...he had a real air of control and power about him...
And what stood him apart from other mentalists and magicians, was that he strode the scientific and psychological approach instead...he stated very strongly that he didnt believe in telepathy, but his experiment would look very much like it...
"whatever you say, it shall be so..." is what he said to Ted Moult, after him picking two unseen cards, and placing them into his two pockets...chan named the two cards, and then told Moult that whichever pocket he thought that the cards would be in, then "they shall be!"...and he was right too...much to everyone's amazement...
The People newspaper would expose various mind-readers quite often those days, and chased after Chan too...exposing some of his effects, however, Chan embraced that fact...and was surprisingly quite open about how they "might" be done...
He did fail, on live tv, but it never seemed to matter to him...people were still amazed at how close he got to achiving the impossible...getting so close to a prediction can still be a miracle if performed correctly...a lesson we should all embrace in my opinion...
Magicians were often not impressed by him, except a few, Basil Horwitz loved him, and most importantly, the public did...they were mystified and entertained by this charming man...with his clipped half english-half east european accent....
He released The Book of Oopses, an interactive mind reading book, and had his own column in a national tabloid for some time too...
He seemed quite a private man too, shunning the limelight after the 60s, and performing at people's dinner parties instead, as he fell back in love more and more with painting instead...he would also perform at casinos and the occasional low-key stage show...
His act, using playing cards, books, people, letters and numbers to construct predicted sentences, words, actions and thoughts - using his very own self-labelled PSYCHOMAGIC...(which, if you google that term nowadays, is something completely different!)...
His book test, is a thing of terrifying beauty...bold as brass, and the best there is...
a stepping stone between magic, and psychology...and the acceptance that not everything would work...no tricks, but experiments...no rabbits or wands...but pencils and paper and playing cards...
no outs, no safe-bets, but excitement and wonder...
i salute you mr canasta, you will remain a wonderful inspiration to me, and i can only hope i can contribute a fraction of the amount that you have to magic...
if you look at some modern day people, you can see echos of canasta reverberating through them...i hope to hear that echo for many years to come...
Chan Canasta - Chananel Mifelew, 1920 - 1999...long may your memory remain...