Everything revolves around my upcom­ing MZvD lec­ture tour, where I’ll be present­ing my new lec­ture “60/​60 – Best of ARCANE CRUMBS.” Right now, the phones are ringing non-stop, and there’s a lot of nego­ti­at­ing over dates. A list of tour stops will fol­low as soon as possible!

News from the Blog

Dive into my pub­lished articles.

• Light­ing Rehearsal
  When two magi­cians in Vienna try to set a stage for video takes, it looks like this. At that time, we were try­ing to con­ceive a small video ses­sions series (which never happened). I abso­lutely love my friend Michi Schuller for his patience, …
• Diag­onal Palm Shift
  Well, a move that is a life­time com­mit­ment. The move that sep­ar­ates the ‘boys from the men’. Here is how far I am so far. Import­ant here as well to notice the ama­teur­ish video edit­ing, all done by myself. 
• Chink-A-Chink
  I can’t remem­ber how long I do this routine. And how I simply love it. Every time, when I wanted to ‘improve’ upon, and learn one of the fan­cier, more mod­ern stuff, I fell back to this clas­sic Gos­h­man rendi­tion. At that time, I was heavily …
• Scot­tish Coins
  On this video you will see my good buddy Alais­dair McCova per­form his hand­ling of a Scot­tish vari­ation of a trick of Slydini — the coins across. I am sure all you know­ing guys out there will have no prob­lem fig­ur­ing out the moves. They …
• Shank Shuffle
  For many years I was refer­ring to this as a vari­ant of the ‘Zar­row-Shuffle’, until Karl-Heinz Ritter from Munich cor­rec­ted me, point­ing out to me it’s actu­ally more of a shank shuffle. For years I believed I was doing a proper Zar­row, which I was not (incom­pet­ence?). …
• Cloth­peg Switch
  Here it is — just for the record. I developed this in 1985 (I have wit­nesses). Mike Por­st­mann was instru­mental in it by sup­ply­ing me with an idea that had actu­ally noth­ing to do with it. But it sparkled my ima­gin­a­tion. The result …
• Gaelic Switch
  This is my all-time favor­ite uni­ver­sal switch for coins. It is a work­horse, that you will take to your real world shows and use when the other fancy sleights stay at home in the stable. I use it with the ‘wild bending …
• Slydin­i’esque False Cut
  Just a reminder to not for­get this stun­ning and fun-to-do tech­nique. I use this all the time when work­ing at the table. So simple, so con­vin­cing. Slydini was the mas­ter! Also note my sub­lime audio edit­ing — your hear all the back­ground noise of the pub we …
• Shaxon Envel­ope
  A slight modi­fic­a­tion of the clas­sic Shaxon/​Lewis switch­ing envel­ope. Note how my take on it makes it pos­sible to dir­ectly retrieve the bill or bil­let from the packet proper, when pla­cing this into the pocket. This is very use­ful for …
• Hindu Force Hint
  A little sub­tlety on the Hindu Force. Makes it much more con­vin­cing. Years later I found out that (appar­ently really all-know­ing) Max Maven had the same idea years before me. What should I say? At least — I hit upon it by myself without Max’ help! 
• A Trans­pos­i­tion Concept
  Here is how I make a simple card trans­pos­i­tion stronger and more mem­or­able. The main thing is the glass bit. By turn­ing the glass (thus indic­at­ing the trans­pos­i­tion), everything is much clearer and impress­ive for the ordin­ary spec­tator, who is dis­trac­ted by …
• Diag­onal Palm Steal
  This is the tech­nique I use for steal­ing a card from the middle of the deck. I worked on it, because I wanted to do Ascanio’s ‘Baroque Trans­pos­i­tion’. Lovely routine and the tech­nique fits very well here. Of course, you should know the original …
• Mul­tiple Card Switch
  This tech­nique seems to be a Marlo Action Switch (or whatever). I’ve been using it for ages to switch in/​out mul­tiple cards and pack­ets. Some­times, I will do it without a table — it then becomes a sort of ‘float­ing top change’. Judge for yourself. 
• Action Switch
  Lovely switch here with the help of a couple of bills. Might be use­ful when you want to switch out a set of gaffed cards for nor­mal cards or whatever. Think for your­self how this can be logic­ally integ­rated into a routine … 
• Sponge Ball Van­ishes
  Here a couple of van­ishes for all you sponge work­ers out there. Here we have the K.O. van­ish, the 1 – 2‑3 van­ish, the ‘Chop­stick Van­ish’ (as pub­lished in Apo­ca­lypse years ago) and the clas­sic ‘Rezvani Van­ish’, which later became known as the …
• Killer Kiwi Switch
  I love this one! If you ever per­form the signed bill in Kiwi, try it. The point is that you have an unpre­pared Kiwi on the table. In your pocket, there is a pre­pared one (with the hole in it). In …
• Bill Van­ish in Silk
  I have been using this tech­nique and hand­ling for more than 25 years. The main thing about it is the way the TT is stolen from the silk, once the bill is inser­ted. Pay atten­tion that it is the first finger …
• Loewe Palm
  Again, an old but rarely used top palm tech­nique. Why? It is decept­ive, fast and sure­fire. Get to it and resur­rect it … 🙂 
• Revolver Van­ish
  One of my favor­ite coin van­ishes. It util­izes what Al Schneider calls his ’ snap back tech­nique’. I should men­tion that I strongly believed I ‘inven­ted’ this tech­nique com­pletely inde­pend­ent from him in 1988, when I was work­ing on my stage manip­u­la­tion act. …
• Erd­nase Bot­tom Palm
  Here is my exe­cu­tion of the clas­sic bot­tom palm Erd­nase style (well, more or less). The bot­tom palm comes in handy when in dif­fi­cult per­form­ing cir­cum­stances when all the Ramsey/​Malini ‘wait’ tech­niques failed … In the explan­a­tion part I use a plexi-deck for better …
• Fred Robin­son Van­ish
  Unfor­tu­nately I never met this gen­tle­man in per­son. Maybe I com­pletely missed him 30 years back when at a con­ven­tion in UK. Evid­ence of a big­headed young­ster, who thought he knows all and every­body. Wish I could turn time back … So here, 30 years too late, my humble rendition …
• Key­card (Re)Placement
  Over the years my eyes got worse. And my ‘tem­por­ary per­form­ance memory’ (per­form­ance cache). Which means that when I present a trick using a key card, and I have to remem­ber this in the per­form­ance, I tend to simply for­get it! Just stand there with a stupid …
• Bash­ing Al Schneider
  In the past weeks I worked hard get­ting through Al Schneider’s monu­mental ‘The The­ory and Prac­tice of Magic Decep­tion’. Amaz­ing work, quite a lot to swal­low. Heavy stuff. Then, some guys poin­ted out to me that Schneider is a ‘low-key’ per­former, lack­ing esprit and …
• The Price of Suc­cess
  Recently I read a very inter­est­ing art­icle by John O’No­lan. Being the under­dog is easy, you can say whatever you want without the mob attack­ing you. Once you have (or are) some­thing, once you speak out and show your work, things change. The spotlight …

• «
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• »