talkmagic.co.uk

Hi folks.

I am not a magician. But I just signed one in Africa. The guy has many amazing tricks, majority of which dont seem to rely on any gimmicks or gadgetry. Being African he mumbles a lot about higher powers, spirits but at the same time claims his are simple illusions and basic magic. I cant make up my mind which is which. He is the first magician i have seen perform his tricks with limited audience manipulation or management. (he does his magic tricks irrespective of where the audience is and some times with little or no preparation at all. In a sense he is a true street magician. (African street magicians have to be much better than most in the western world because you could easily be lynched by your audience if you displease them or if they catch onto your tricks. They mostly work for a few dollars a day before moving on to the next location. Often they scam many a victim in various ways promising them charms, spells, gems and all manner of wealth).

so right now I seem to be under the spell of such a practitioner of magic. This is where I need help. And no, I dont want specifics. Just basic confirmation that one of the tricks I am about to explain is just a typical illusion or something supernatural.

RESTORED CUT ROPE..

No! this is not your typical restored rope trick. (Visit google and all those tricks are completely bogus and juvenile compared to what he does).

Firstly, he ties a note in the rope to make it one loop. Then he folds the single loop into a double loop. There is no trickery in his method as he shows you everything, even holding the double looped rope quite openly for every one to see. Then he tells you to cut the rope. Because the rope has been double looped you end up cutting it in two places. (the cut is made very near the initial note that created the first single loop).
After you make the cut, the note in the rope is now left hanging off one of two ropes. This he tells you to cut off. He takes this note from you every time and puts it in his pocket. (If you have searched for this trick on youtube, you know that most magicians rely on this same note to create the false illusion of two severed rope ends sticking out in the hand in which the magician holds the rope.)
This is not the case with his trick.

when he puts the note in his pocket you can still clearly see 4 ends of the rope. (the long ends are hanging down while two shorter ends are just sticking out at the top of his hand but you can see them clearly.)
He then covers the two shorter ends with his other hand and begins his incantations. After a while he tells two audience members to hold the two longer ends and stretch them out. He chants once again and some times appears to put the two shorter ends, covered by his hands inside his mouth. When he is done, he tells the audience members to pull hard and completely stretch out the rope. Of course when they stretch it out, the two shorter rope ends have dissappeared off to somewhere and the rope is completely fixed. There is absolutely nothing left in his hands and he will show them to you very clearly. I have the trick on video and will upload it soon after editing it. (Its a huge video including tricks of him eating razorblades..Not just swallowing like other magicians, but biting off pieces and actually chewing them while you watch and hear the pieces crunching in his teeth. BTW.. he also chews and swallows glass. (not fake glass or ice or anything but real glass) So I have to edit the vid and trim it to just show the rope trick.

Have you guys seen this trick done this way before? Is this real magic or something else? Like I said, I dont want to know how he does it. I just want some kind of confirmation of the nature of this trick.

PS. The man does the restoration trick with almost anyting you can loop. I was stunned when I saw him do it with an insulated wire that had been selected by a skeptic friend of mine who could not accept what she had seen when he restored some blades of grass that had been randomly picked. (this he did twice after she protested some kind kind trickery on the first turn.

Sounds like a good trick. Never heard of it before.

You have to keep in mind that if you know one or two methods to anything in magic, you become what's called "half-smart". It's not a negative statement or an insult, it simply means that since you are aware of a method, you will look for specific things that give away the specific method. Cut and restored objects must me one of the oldest tricks every done, and the number of methods available to accomplish it can probably fill several fat books.

The way I see it, there are several things to consider. He may be using a method that is obscure and you are not familiar with. He may be using different methods every time he does the trick (this would make it very difficult for laypeople and "half-smart" people to detect the trickery). Most importantly, you have to think rationally. If he could really restore damaged or cut things, he would not be performing on the street for a few dollars a day. Just like if Uri Geller really had psychokinetic powers, he wouldn't waste them on cutlery that can be bent by hand.

Now, eating razor blades and glass is a very old stunt. There are a couple guy on here who have done it themselves, and they tipped that the key is to grind them very fine with the back teeth. Again, knowing one method makes any other method seem all the more miraculous. Magicians often fool each other by using unconventional methods to accomplish conventional effects.

Thank you for your reply. I will not claim to be smart. But I have observed the video of this trick over 30 times and cant make heads or tails out of it. I have seen the trick performed in a variety of ways with different materials several times. But because the trick is done so basically with no gimmicks outside of the performer's right hand that never lets go of the shortest ends of the rope, wire or whatever he is restoring I have argue that it may not be a simple magic trick but something more. The 4 ends created after the rope is severed are very visible and have to be accounted for in any solution one may come up with. The solution has to also address his ability to do this same trick with not only fibrous rope, string or laces, but insulated wire (which means he also recombines the rubber insulation along with the threaded copper wire within the insulation. (also have video of this trick done with insulated wire in front of a street crowd but wont be posting this because we are making a tv show out of this). I will post the video of the trick with the rope as soon as file conversion is done. (plz be patient.)

I am ready to accept any plausible explanation so as not to make a fool of myself believing in silly things like transmutation (I believe that is what the ability is called in the children's cartoon, Full Metal Alchemist)


Ps..Did I mention he turned Sand into sugar as the climax of the street show with a born again Christian heckling him and calling on Jesus to block his magic? (We have all this on camera) But more on that trick(or transmutation) later. First I have to figure out how the hell he reassembles stuff!

While it sounds like a great trick (and - yes - it is most certainly a trick!), please don't ask our members here for possible methods of how it is achieved.

If you read our Forum Rules (here: ftopic12876.php), you will see that we do not permit questions of his kind.

Thanks for your understanding

So wait, are you honestly saying that if you can't figure out how a magical effect is achieved, and no one will explain it to you, your next mental step is to believe in supernatural powers?

You might want to reconsider your approach to rational thought...

-Stacy

Penn & Teller do an excellent cut and restored turban with mixed methods. It's a good illustration of how, by mixing methods, magicians can turn tricks into real mysteries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... AP4#t=202s

The4thCircle wrote:So wait, are you honestly saying that if you can't figure out how a magical effect is achieved, and no one will explain it to you, your next mental step is to believe in supernatural powers?

You might want to reconsider your approach to rational thought...

-Stacy

(I'm assuming gender here, forgive me if I'm incorrect)
He saw something he couldn't explain and rather than dismiss it as just a trick or instantly declare it a miracle he attempted to consult experts. That sounds like a good rational thought process to me. He doesn't deserve snide comments from you.

You might want to consider your approach to polite conversation.

By the way this is entirely off topic I know but

Zanji wrote:I am ready to accept any plausible explanation so as not to make a fool of myself believing in silly things like transmutation (I believe that is what the ability is called in the children's cartoon, Full Metal Alchemist)

Now I'm a massive nerd and this is the only anime show I've ever enjoyed so
A few things that feature in Full Metal Alchemist: Limbs being torn from bodies after a failed resurrection, a religious zealot serial killer, monsters based on the seven deadly sins, good soldiers dealing with the bad things they did and the mass extermination of an entire race of people caused by the fascist military government the main characters work for.

Full Metal Alchemist IS NOT A CHILDRENS CARTOON!

Let's not start getting snidey with each other, it's always worth remembering that people from different cultures may have a different view to magic and the supernatural than we do in the west.

I don't care what cultural differences there are, I'm deeply offended. How dare he say Full Metal Alchemist is a childrens cartoon.

Sorry if I came across a little bluntly but frankly I'm a little baffled that someone on a forum for magicians who knows about some cut & restored methods could see someone performing a similar but methodologically different routine and assume the next most likely option for it was "real magic or something else" and that they want "any plausible explanation so as not to make a fool of myself believing in silly things like transmutation".

Wait no... baffled isn't quite the word.

The word is incredulous. I don't believe anyone on the cusp of such an ideological conversion would ask magicians to save them from superstition. However I do think that a person might fake such astonishment to get methods explained. I guess in my post I was being slightly facetious, approaching from an angle of sarcastic humour, which I felt fit the spirit if not the wording of the original question.

In short, I read the original post as "African dynamo did a cut and restore, tell me how it was done or I'll start following him as the new messiah."

And the appeal for us to save him from believing in nonsense is either to make the explainer feel like they're doing a great thing by saving someone from superstition (ala JREF debunking) or to appeal to someone's ego (sort of 'if you can explain it, you must be super clever') either way I don't buy it.

I do however agree that cartoons can be for adults.

Just look at My Little Pony.

-Stacy

In answer to the original question, it's most likely to be something else and that something is called conjuring, also referred to as magic but not of the supernatural kind.

"Is this magic or something else" Isn't that an Eddie Cochran song?!

Just basic confirmation that one of the tricks I am about to explain is just a typical illusion or something supernatural.

I can assure you that it's an illusion. I think if I had found a way to beat physics then I'd probably be able to think of a better use for this power than joining pieces of rope together.

Woah... What a barrage of responses.

First let me tackle this issue. I am not interested in knowing the exact methodology of the trick. I would settle for a simple answer in this form. "Yes its nothing but a magic trick. The Great Magician XYZ used to perform a similar trick and I know how exactly its done" I stated earlier on that this would suffice.

I have also stated, I am not a magician. I just happened to have signed one and I am his manager.

As for the question about my sanity, I am very stable. Yes I have seen a some one perform what I believed to be a magic trick. I recorded it on video and have since seen him perform the same trick multiple times. And every time he uses absolutely no gimmickery are gadgetry outside of the rope or wire or string that has been presented to him by some one completely independent.

Now if any of you witnessed something out of this world like a magician do something incredible like say levitate 6 feet off the ground with absolutely no visible contraptions or gadgetry you would like wise be baffled.(I have not witnessed this) You too would likely question what you just saw especially if you had been part or the preparation team for the performance and you insteand saw something you completely didnt expect. I do believe I did the right thing in contact people in the field who may be more experienced about the trick I witnessed that has me baffled.

The part regarding making a fool out of myself is where I go challenging real scientists to explain what he does. (there are some organizations out there that will apparently pay you quite a bit of money if you can show them something truly paranormal) And NO I am not interested in the bogus JREF mythical million dollar challenge where you get paid in "IOUs"

Let me also state this. I have seen the guy perform other tricks and stunts and he claims to be able to do many many things. (hold his breath for 30 minutes or more, stop cars from moving with his bare hands, this I have seen with 4 bikes and have it on tape as well (and no he did not secretly tie the bikes together) turn sand into sugar (on video as well).

I have invested quite a bit into this guy,lawyers, camera men, editors, presenters, his monthly paycheck etc all cost money. I am not a rich guy. Just some one who is on one side ready to believe but on the other side scared that I have run into one of the worlds most talented con men. (And that part about him being a con man is 100%. Its almost silly or has turned into a game for him trying to figure out ways he can con me)


As for him being a simple African street performer with powers like transmutation (this is supposition) I cant explain it. I have researched this (as far as one can research black magic in AFrica.lol.) and this is the same question Africans themselves ask about these people. (In the locale I found him they are known as FUSA) Which means people who change things. (direct translation) The myth is whatever they change almost always goes back to its original state or degrades in some way or form (this is myth. Dont go claiming I believe it or that I am making an argument for why the guy is doing simple street performances). Hell from the mumbo jumbo about voodoo he is always spouting off, he claims that there are rules to how he can benefit from his talent.

Me, I dont know. I am just the curious guy who is greatly fascinated by this stuff. I am also the investor who has put in quite a bit into the guy and I am somewhat concerned about my investment. (though not too much because just what I have on video already is intriguing enough to interest a few people here and at least recover a percentage of my investment.)

I hope that clears up a few things for all of you.


Ps.. Full Metal Alchemist is probably not a Children's cartoon. I have seen but one or two episodes with children about the age of 12. (hence my assumption it is a children's show.) And it was a child of similar age who made the FMA reference when I showed some friends and family the videos. So I am sorry about the mixup.