talkmagic.co.uk

I had a nice video but lost a memory card reader and.... Anyways, I ( although I said this before) have cut of all purchases of magic related items and will now devote it to mentalism. I've been trying for the past year to completely cut of magic but... obviously I failed . But now I am hopefully committed to make the switch and will probably stop all but mentalism altogether within the next two to three months.


I've admired mentalism for the past year and have several books on it but I just couldn't bear to part with card tricks, but I'll probably stick with some mental card magic until a I get new books. Now I'll stop rambling on and just say "Good bye magic, Hello Mentalism".

My apologies for a lengthy post.

What do you mean when you say you're stopping all magic and only doing mentalism? I'm confused, since the overwhelming majority of mentalism is just magic anyway, but with someone "pretending" to read minds to make it seem spookier. If you don't have any God-given mind-reading skills, then mentalism for you will just be magic techniques dressed up.

queen of clubs wrote:What do you mean when you say you're stopping all magic and only doing mentalism? I'm confused, since the overwhelming majority of mentalism is just magic anyway, but with someone "pretending" to read minds to make it seem spookier. If you don't have any God-given mind-reading skills, then mentalism for you will just be magic techniques dressed up.

if i could fill up the screen with no's, i would..but i completely and utterly disagree with you there Kate...

i kinda know what you mean...but no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ad infinitum...

Notice how i edited your quote too? i'd politely request you do the same please...

i know you said "majority", but even so...

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and....no...

i guess what I'm saying is...no.

Fair enough, Iain. Since it's you who asked, I removed the last sentence of my post...

I stick by my assertions, though. Mentalism is not psychic. It's based on magic principles. A magician might invisibly change a card and a mentalist might do a similar change with a folded up prediction. A magician might peek a card in order to later cull and reveal it and a mentalist might also peek a notepad or whatever.

People like Tomo are skilled in unprepared mentalism, but it's still just a trick in the sense that you tell someone you're reading their mind but are you f**k.

I have nothing against mentalism, by the way - I've recently become very interested in it and I've done some demonstrations that went down better than I could have hoped for - but maybe it's just a character flaw I have, it annoys me when people talk about mentalism like it's "real" or somehow something seperate to magic. It's just tricks and methods and sleight of hand and misdirection and memorised technique presented in different clothing to parlour magic.

For instance, Ian the Magic-Ian says he's giving up magic, but if he ever wants to replicate something like Derren Brown's ESP deck prediction then he's still going to need to be able to perform a false count and a gambler's switch. If I'm not mistaken, they are magic techniques.

oh i didnt say it was psychic!

im saying that mentalism goes beyond magic principles...there's lots of other deceptions that rely on sleight of mouth and action, rather than hand...

plus genuine stuff too - suggestion, p**-sh**, and various other techniques that are never employed in any magic at all...

i certainly agree that for an example, coin sleights begat billet work...and there's lots of cross over...

but also, mentalism does go beyond card sleights, misdirection and so forth...

thats what makes it more exciting (for me anyway) to perform, cos there's always a chance that certain things will fail...as well as the lunacy of hypnosis and suggestion...

if magicmonkey is about, he'll tell you about me making him super strong, or teaching relaxation techniques, and bronz's mate who i did a chi-enfused power touch knocking him back a bit more than i thought it would (sorry andy!)...

then there's ideomotor responses, stroop test based things, and...well..i'll shut up now before the mentalist mafia hunt me down..

but trust me kate, the skill set is vastly different if/when you want it to be..

and thank you for altering your post, many blessings upon your trousers for that...

just a quick example by what i mean is, i can verbally force a playing card...without a deck to hand...with no extras, or anything whatsoever...not just playing the averages, but genuinely prod you towards saying certain things without you knowing...

its certainly not psychic, but its certainly not card magic either...

and bear in mind, i love just as many cardicians as i do mentalists...

I was going to get involved but I have my clever head on tonight.

By the way, I'm sat here in front of the screen trying to teach my ankles and feet to make "rapping" sounds like the Fox sisters. Damn, those gals must have had weird joints. Their clicks could fill a theatre. Am I the only one ever to try and replicate this? Probably. If anyone has any tips on joint clicking, do let me know.

I'm sure you could gimmick it paul...hmmm...now there's an idea...

IAIN wrote:I'm sure you could gimmick it paul...hmmm...now there's an idea...

Yeah, I'm sure there'd be a market for a simple, small device to make rapping sounds. Apart from obviously just clicking your heels together. Perhaps Mr. Browning has one already he'd care to share???

BTW - thanks for the you-know-what received today (was it? Or was it yesterday?). Time for lybrary?

Don't you just hate it when people speak in riddles? Take it to PM for god's sake Mr. Bell!

I too feel very tempted to go to all mentalism. It reallly does allow the audience to believe it a lot more than "Magic" does.

I think I will practice a little magic on the side, but try to present myself in more of a mentalist way.

Ian

Does that mean that you're changing your log on name to Ian- the mental Ian?

Jason Waskett wrote:Err, getting away from the subject a little, but doesn't it refer to a device in "Hiding the Elephant," that someone came in to a shop to ask for it to be repaired. Whoever (and the name escapes me) actually figured out what it was for and when he wrote out the receipt, he put "repairs to T**** ******G device." She paid quietly, and never returned . I could be getting mixed up, maybe it was in the book "Victorian magic." So they must be out there, and will save you getting arthritus.

I have "Hiding the Elephant"! I suppose it would be too much to expect there be a digram of said device. I will check.

Wasn't it an apple on a piece of string they started with before they learnt to click bones.

Jobasha wrote:Wasn't it an apple on a piece of string they started with before they learnt to click bones.

Yeah, apparently. The thoery that I like the best (not that it's probably the truth, but I just like it) is that Katie Fox manifested these rappings somehow without knowing it, while Maggie Fox invented ways of "keeping up" with her sister. Katie was the really weird, deep, interesting one. Maggie just appeared to be a nice girl who got caught up in a whirl of seances, Victorian New York parties, and opium. Worth swapping the sponge balls for I'd say.

But yeah, apples first, rappings later. A good point to make is that this was all before electric lights, so every night folk were living in candle lit houses with shadows jumping and leaping in every corner. Add a very excitable and superstitious mother, a few unexplained knockings, and away you jolly well go.

I thought the Foxes found they could make clicking sounds first. Just the sort of stupid thing you discover you can do when you're a child, like wiggling your ears or bending your thumb backwards.

Then at some point they did a joke seance, incorporating the clicks, and it had a far more powerful effect than they'd intended.

Robbie wrote:I thought the Foxes found they could make clicking sounds first. Just the sort of stupid thing you discover you can do when you're a child, like wiggling your ears or bending your thumb backwards.

Then at some point they did a joke seance, incorporating the clicks, and it had a far more powerful effect than they'd intended.

They did it firstly to scare their mother (who was a very excitable type). It worked better than they imagined, and before they knew it their mother had invited in neighbours and the local priest to hear the strange noises. The girls thought this to be a great wheeze, and when someone said "Are you the spirit of some troubled soul?" they of course began knocking like billyo. And so it begins...

And were it not for them there would be no Derren Brown, no Banacheck, no Max Maven, no Corinda, etc. etc. Or at least there might be, but they'd all be pulling rabbits from hats and spilling sponge balls everywhere. Yikes.