J. C. Wagner

J. C. Wagner died last night. To read more about him, please click on the link to view the blog of R. Paul Wilson.
http://machinebreak.blogspot.com/2010/08/farewell-jc-wagner.html

DEALING WITH MAGIC: The Rise & Fall of The Supreme Magic Company

Every now and then on magic websites or in magazines you’ll read the sales pitch that a particular book is the most important thing to have happened in magic that year or whatever. Whether or not such products live up to that description I don’t know but I do know that this book by Ian Adair is an important event for anyone interested in the history of British magic.

Adair modestly deprecates his own effort at autobiography at the start of the book by stating “In writing this book, I didn’t set out to win any literary prizes, nor will I expect grand reviews for my writing skills.” Actually, his book should receive grand reviews for him having at least written and made generally available some form of memoir about contemporary magic in the UK whereas many, whose magical careers have included writing, have not.

It’s never easy for someone to write a memoir on a particular form of career where others in that field are inevitably mentioned. It immediately prompts responses from readers with details that may aid, support or contradict the information given - sometimes in an unkind way. And so it takes a brave person to put themselves into such an arena, especially if it includes a controversial topic such as the demise of The Supreme Magic Company. But that is a process which historians rely on. Sometimes the people who won’t normally put pen to paper on the subject of a period in their life suddenly do in response to someone’s autobiography.

Adair’s autobiography is a very candid one. He writes of his successes, which is natural considering his successful career in magic, but he also includes his personal failures and does so without any trace of self-pity or excuse-making.

The first half of the book is Adair’s autobiography from childhood to present day. The second half of the book consists of mini-essays or memoirs of people and events. That may seem to be a strange thing to do but it has allowed Adair to give space for detailed information on specific topics about The Supreme Magic Company and even his own method of creating magic tricks.

The book is available directly from Ian Adair; for inquiries please email magicianadair@hotmail.co.uk

Card Stalking by Al Smith

Every now and then, a modest looking publication comes along that deserves a lot of attention. Card Stalking by Al Smith is one of those books. It is not a book for absolute beginners; it is one from which professional magicians can obtain some new card tricks for their working repertoire.

While every trick is original, Smith gives the history for a type of trick if there are earlier similar versions. Full acknowledgment is noted where known. To his credit, Al Smith thereby lists the shoulders of the giants he is standing on in having created some of these tricks rather than take the full glory for himself (which seems to be the trend these days).

Several tricks have motivated me into practising some card sleights which I have not used in a long time and to be honest, it reminded me of how useful they are. Most of the tricks have a comment section at the end which sometimes provides useful alternative methods for performing a trick.

If you wish to know more then please click here to see Al Smith’s flyer for the book. To make inquiries you can email Al Smith directly at albertesmith@myway.com.

Sand Sculpture Festival at Weston-super-Mare

The sand sculpture festival at Weston runs from the 22nd of May to the 5th of September. Below is a video of a selection of photos I took of some of the sculptures. It isn't free to get in but thankfully it's worth the small fee they charge. For more details go to www.westonsandsculpture.co.uk/

Wig On and Wig Off.

Whenever I watch Heston Blumenthal on television, there's been something about him that seems familiar. When I realised what it was, I had to put together the two pictures below. I wonder if Fabio can cook?

Martin Gardner dies at the age of ninety-five

I have just heard that Martin Gardner has died; he was ninety-five years old. Most of the obituaries and articles that have suddenly appeared announcing his death present him as a mathematician and puzzle master. As yet, I’ve haven’t found any that speak of him being a creative and talented magician. When he wasn’t writing directly about magic, the subject of magic still permeated most of his other writings.

Gardner knew such luminaries as Dai Vernon and Faucett Ross and was a friend to other creative card men, such as Bill Simon. One of Gardner’s books, The Encyclopaedia of Impromptu Magic, is highly regarded; Paul Daniels and other professional magicians have praised it and remarked on its usefulness in providing material for ‘on the spur of the moment’ publicity opportunities.

So while many of the articles describe Gardner as a polymath in terms of mathematics, philosophy, literature and other subjects – let’s also remember that he was just as influential in the world of magic, and as in all the subjects he wrote about, stimulated curiosity and intelligence regarding it.

Answer to 'Who Is It?' Competition Number 3

To my surprise, a lot of people quickly provided the correct answer. From these correct answers a name was randomly chosen 'out of a hat' and a large bar of chocolate is on it's way to Janis.

The answer is R. Paul Wilson, one of the stars of BBC's The Real Hustle. In the film Shade, he plays Mr. Andrews and is seen only briefly. The film is full of references to card magic (see the review in the latest issue of The LaBaL for full details) and begins and ends with a shot of a pair of hands displaying sleight of hand with playing cards. The film itself is not award winning material but worth a look for people with an interest in the history of card magic for a game of 'spot the reference' in terms of character's names, etc.

Who Is It? Competition number 3

I've decided to make this a difficult one. No picture clue this time; it's all down to your knowledge of British television magicians. He appeared, fleetingly but instantly recognizable, in the film Shade - which is about card players and con men. His name didn't appear in the end credits. If any British magician was going to advise on and appear in this type of film, it would be him. Those are all the clues that you are going to get. A real toughy, this one.

On other matters, I haven't commented on the election because there has been an overdose of the subject in every form of media. Now that we finally know the result here is my only comment:

Welcome to Britain's new sitcom: Dick and Dom in Da House.

Let's hope we laugh more than we cry.
[Photograph the property of Getty]

Walter Booth, Magician and Filmmaker.

In any of the popular histories of magic there is usually a slight detour into the era of silent films. The French filmmaker Georges Méliès is usually the example cited. A British equivalent to Méliès was Walter Booth. Lamentably, despite his creative contribution to film making he is possibly one of the most unappreciated and overlooked filmmakers of early British cinema.

Booth was born in 1869. He was a porcelain painter and an amateur magician. At some point, he joined Maskelyne and co. at The Egyptian Hall. Some time after that Booth joined the filmmaker R. W. Paul. I don’t know how that came about. It may have been because J. N. Maskelyne and R. W. Paul were friends and therefore Booth would have had the opportunity to meet Paul.

Booth brought a good deal of inspiration to R. W. Paul’s films. Trick photography and themes of magic and magic related topics became subjects of their silent films. Paul and Booth seemed to have shared Maskelyne’s scepticism towards Spiritualism and so there are a couple of humorous films on that, one of which includes an expose of the kinds of tricks that might be used at a fake séance.

Booth moved to several other film companies after leaving Paul’s firm. I do not know of any one DVD that brings together all of Booth’s existing films; however, the British Film Institute released the collected films of R. W. Paul (depending on the outlet where you buy a copy, prices can vary from £6 to £20). For some reason, after Paul left the film industry he burned all his negatives; this collection by the BFI is pieced together from many different sources and many of the short films consist only of fragments. Nevertheless, it is about two hours and twenty minutes long, which consists of sixty-two short films, and the commentary by Professor Ian Christie does discuss Booth during appropriate films which were written and directed by Booth. Booth made about thirty-five films and fifteen are on this DVD. They are not all magic related but his knowledge of stage work, theatre acts of his day and of the trick photography of Méliès is apparent in these films.

In 1915, Booth went into advertising and little is known of his career from that point. We do know the date of his death, 1938.

Conclusions to 3D Tests

The first thing to do is to provide some information which will answer the questions I have been sent.

The most popular format for 3D pictures, without using special glasses or viewers, is the one that uses the cross eyed technique. This sounds a bit odd but bear in mind that the Magic Eye 3D images that were once so popular relied on people going slightly boss-eyed; so it's not unusual for the viewer to develop a knack of doing either. There came a point where the cross eyed method became more preferable, perhaps because it was easier to learn. Way back when, books like Magic 3D by Tom Johnstone discussed how to create the images and may have been the first to use the phrase 'photographic freeviewing' to describe viewing 3D photos without special glasses. The principles involved were partially used in other books such as Boris Vallejo's 3D Magic mixed Magic Eye images with 3D renderings of Vallejo's fantasy artwork. Both books introduced the cross eyed method on some of the images as an alternative to Magic Eye boss-eyed technique.

In some ways the crossed eyed method harks back the Victorian stereoscope viewers. On these the double image of a scene used what is now known as the 'parallel' method. The image for the left eye was on the the left and the image for the right eye was on the right. The cross eyed method has the image for the right eye on the left and the image for the left eye on the right. That is about the only difference.

The images used to be created by one method; there were two cameras, not more than six centimetres apart (to approximate the view of a pair of human eyes), and each take a photograph of the same scene at the same moment. When the photographs are placed or printed side by side they can be viewed by either the parallel or cross-eyed method as 3D images.

Computer technology eventually had a say in the matter and various methods were thought of to take a single photograph and alter it, pixel by pixel if need be, to create a second photograph which, when placed next to the original, would create the required 3D effect when viewed cross eyed or through a stereoscopic viewer.

Hopefully, that is enough dull tech stuff to satisfy the curious.

The results of the software I have been testing is that only the double images created for the cross eyed method are of any worth; even then I still have to correct each image for anomalies. The other 3D images it can produce, such as anaglyph (which require the red/blue lenses on 3D viewing glasses) are abysmal.

Below is a 3D image, for the cross eyed method, of Veronica Lake. I do not know the name of the owner of the copyright of the original to give them credit. This image and the one in the previous blog entry were chosen by others as photos to test the software. Once again, the instructions are to click on the image to load a larger version; then look at the two images cross eyed until a new image appears between them - that image will appear tobe 3D.