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!

From the Blog

Dive into my pub­lished articles.

• The King of Cards
  On my recent lec­ture tour, I spent a won­der­ful even­ing after the lec­ture din­ing with my friends. Sud­denly a small dis­cus­sion about Denis Behr’s new full even­ing pro­gram came up. Some guys had seen it already, and the talk was about Denis’ opening …
• Mak­ing Old Paper
  If you’re aim­ing to infuse a sense of genu­ine antiquity into your present­a­tion mater­i­als – whether it be an old-style let­ter con­tain­ing cards, akin to those used in the Gipsy Curse, or per­haps a cal­en­dar resem­bling an ancient leather-bound tome – here’s …
• The Blank Book Test
  As a magi­cian, I’m usu­ally reluct­ant to reveal the secrets of my craft to fel­low con­jur­ers, pre­fer­ring to keep these mys­ter­ies close to my chest. How­ever, given my prom­ise to you, I’ll make an excep­tion this time. While I have a gen­eral fondness …
• Sub­tleties
  Sub­tleties are fine in magic routines, but they will not always work as inten­ded. Much depends on the audi­ence’s level of atten­tion and intel­li­gence, and their interest and focus on the per­form­ance. So you can’t always be sure that the subtleties …
• Ricky Jay
  R.I.P. With him, magic has lost one of the major cre­at­ive forces and an out­stand­ing per­former, cre­ator, his­tor­ian and ambas­sador of the art of magic. A truly out­stand­ing, ori­ginal per­former and per­son­al­ity. Thank you for all you have given to us. You will live on …
• The Miss­ing Dol­lar Bill
  An intro­duct­ory present­a­tion for the Fred Kaps $11 Bill Trick: First tell the old story about the res­taur­ant and the 3 guests. The bill for the 3 cus­tom­ers is $30. Each pays $10. Later, in the kit­chen, the owner explains that the …
• Tables at Com­pet­i­tions
  One thing that sad­dens me when I see con­tests at (many) magic con­ven­tions : the tables of the close-up, card magic and par­lour cat­egor­ies. How often have we seen a simple, plain table dec­or­ated with an ugly piece of mater­ial? “Attached to the …
• The Stand­ing Ova­tion
  In the past years, the SO (stand­ing ova­tion) seems to have become a “reg­u­lar” at magic con­ven­tions. The most recent example is the FISM in Busan. Wit­tus Witt remarked on his blog that maybe this FISM-con­­ven­­tion will enter his­tory as …
• The Easy To Per­form Trap
  It is not uncom­mon to see the phrase “easy to per­form” used in advert­ise­ments for magic items. As some of my research in the magic com­munity has shown, the major­ity of magi­cians (ama­teurs and pro­fes­sion­als alike) are attrac­ted to advertisements …
• Kill With Magic
  In recent years, there seems to have been a trend in the magic of advert­ising: the way in which advert­ising copy is worded. More and more often we read words and sen­tences like these: “This will fry your brain!” “This is a killer effect!” “Des­troy them with this!” “This …
• Con­scious Selec­tion
  One of the inter­est­ing things for me is to ana­lyze my buy­ing habits. As most of us, I went through the tedi­ous pro­cess of being remote con­trolled by the deal­ers’ cata­logues, the ads in the magazines and, of course, the internet …
• Enough
  Recently I acquired a very inter­est­ing read: John Naish’s book ‘Enough’. It’s main top­ics are about get­ting the idea of ‘hav­ing enough’. Whilst being a ‘non-magic’ book, it is a very inspir­ing and thought pro­vok­ing read for us magi­cians, who are facing the same …
• My Idea Gad­get
  People like giz­mos and gad­gets. So do I. The cra­zier, the bet­ter. I want to share with you my one of my ’idea techniques’.The photo shows my typ­ical idea work­space. I use the light­bulb, which actu­ally is a con­tainer with a screw­able lid. This …
• Catch Phrases for Scripts
  Script­ing is very import­ant for magic. It is an art for itself and depends largely on good ideas and novel slants story wise. When writ­ing a script for a magic trick, it is some­times not so easy to find an effect­ive intro line. Sometimes …
• The Plot in Magic (1)
  One of the most import­ant things for a proper the­at­rical per­form­ance piece in magic (or Men­tal­ism) is the plot. Many routines lack of a plot. They seem like a use­less demon­stra­tion of clever prin­ciples, designed and put together to show­case the performer’s cleverness, …
• Break­ing the Rhythm
  It is the little things that really make the dif­fer­ence. This post is to make you aware (or remind you, if you have for­got­ten) of some bril­liant ana­lysis and think­ing by Ascanio regard­ing the Ham­man Count. Usu­ally this count is done in …
• René Lavand’s Trick
  Since my youth I was addicted to the ‘cut­ting the aces’ by Dai Ver­non (see Stars of Magic). Espe­cially when I learned of the the­at­rical present­a­tion of PUNX, which is described in his book ‘Setzt euch zu meinen Füßen’. What a gem! But then …
• A good ques­tion …
  From time to time ques­tions like these arise: “What makes a good cre­ator and how can you become aware of them?” I faced this ques­tion quite a few times. The answer is quite dif­fi­cult (or was). Mean­while, I answer with cita­tions from the Bible: “By their fruits …
• Battle The Mon­key Brain
  If we believe research­ers and sci­ent­ists, we all have the mind of a mon­key. This ana­logy, slightly humor­ous though it may be, is actu­ally an inter­est­ing one. Con­sider that we have around forty thou­sand sep­ar­ate thoughts each day, many of them on the same …
• Rubiales Pre­mon­i­tion
  Whilst watch­ing the explan­a­tion of Rubiales’ genius ‘Blind­side Deck’, this idea occurred to me. You might find it inter­est­ing to play around with. The BSD is set-up as fol­lows: 26 cards from Eddie Joseph’s Pre­mon­i­tion deck (bank 1), 26 cards (bank 2). A …
• Trib­uto a Len­nart Green
  Cuando Len­nart Green pub­licó su rutina comer­cial lla­mada ‘Stolen Cards’, res­ultó ser un éxito inme­di­ato en el mundo de la car­to­ma­gia. Como muchos, com­pré inme­di­ata­mente el juego. Sin su inven­ción y su rutina, esta humilde ofrenda no exi­stiría. El truco es muy …
• The Diary Effect
  This is my ver­sion of the clas­sic ‘Diary Effect’ as inven­ted by Ted Dan­son. It was inspired by and is loosely based on ideas by Patrick Page, Eddie Joseph, Mark Els­don, Mike Born­stein, Richard Web­ster and Bob Cas­sidy. I wrote up …
• Magi­cian Fooler
  Many magi­cians are very fond of Juan Tam­ar­iz’s bril­liant routine “Neither Blind Nor Silly”, pub­lished in his won­der­ful book SONATA. I did it for a very long time and still use it as described for lay people. What an effect this trick has! I …
• Float­ing Glasses
  Do you remem­ber the old trick, where two glasses are placed with the open­ings down onto a clear glass plate (or a book), which is then turned over with the glasses being appar­ently sus­pen­ded in mid air? I always liked the trick, because of …

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