The Genii Forum

Lisa Cousins

I am resurrecting this thread to report an interesting happenstance. Last night we had the Ron London lecture here in Albuquerque, and he showed a little routine with a rope and a vase which was designed to demonstrate that a little genie lived in the vase. At the break I was talking to one of the o...

Lisa Cousins

Hi, Clay. I just wanted you to know that I've attempted to vote in this poll probably a half dozen times since you posted it, but I always get a "Gateway Timeout" on the window when it opens. I can't vote, and therefore I can't view the results either. Maybe there are others who are experi...

Lisa Cousins

I very frequently have the problem of people hearing "musician" for "magician" - and then when they understand "magician" they think I might mean something Wiccan, and I have to say "rabbit out of a hat magician." I've never pulled a rabbit out of a hat in my ...

Lisa Cousins

Bill Goodwin is posting? WHERE THE HELL IS MY PENUMBRA?!?

Lisa Cousins

The strangest thing. Mitch Dutton wrote to me remarking on this "perfect storm" of a Magic Castle week, and as I reviewed it once again in my thoughts there was something very noticeable about it all: Bill Goodwin was there for pretty much everything that I described. The talk with Mark Co...

Lisa Cousins

To comment further on the other shows and scenes of the week, it was a real treat for me to see Joel Hodgson in the Parlor. Mystery Science Theater 3000 wasn't just a funny show, it was a coping strategy. It was about answering all things tedious, perplexing, and annoying with a playful, friendly sp...

Lisa Cousins

I saw the show in the Palace of Mystery (or, as it was being called this week, the Palace of History) twice: the first show on Monday night and the last show on Wednesday night. There were several significant differences between the two. In the first, Jim Steinmeyer introduced his stage-sized "...

Lisa Cousins

Originally posted by Bob Farmer: I once saw Jack Chanin do a fabulous routine with a thumb tip that was painted bright red -- but you never saw it. Wait, wait, wait. You saw this? And by that I mean: YOU saw this? You yourself? The reason I'm asking is that I've heard the story of the never-seen br...

Lisa Cousins

I know someone who addressed this ingeniously. When he was getting married, he told his wife that when he spent money on magic, she was to spend the identical amount on something for herself. He said that in his mind he just always doubled the price of everything in his magic-buying decisions, that ...

Lisa Cousins

Nate, you'll like Robert Benchley's version of your point: "Still, you can't ever tell. Joseph Conrad didn't begin to write until he was forty. Napoleon never even saw a steamboat until he was fifty-eight. Mozart never wrote a bar of music until he was ninety. Anything can happen, but it usuall...

Lisa Cousins

Originally posted by Jim Coles: Or just drop the magic entirely and be the people's walking man. It had never before occurred to me that the people needed a walking man, but now that it's been said I don't know how we've gone so long without one. If this guy won't take the gig, let's waste no time ...

Lisa Cousins

Jim, I'm sure that if Stan's restaurant featured even the slightest touch of magic, it would have caught your notice. How could it not? Maybe Stan only considered having magic at the restaurant, and then Biggie talked him out of it. Jack Greenberg, I was not aware that Stan Musial was originally fro...

Lisa Cousins

Bill, I loved reading through that, and I would call you "The Man" if that designation hadn't already been taken by somebody else on this thread.

Lisa Cousins

I've been informed that Stan Musial was reported in the magic press as having opened a magic-themed restaurant.

Did anybody ever eat there?

Lisa Cousins

Here is the text that serves as caption for the "Ireland's Yearbook" photo: "Claude Keefe and his protege, the famous Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals, voted most valuable player more times than any other, and ardent magic fan and hobbyist. Here he is locating a selected card un...

Lisa Cousins

Does anybody have any information whatsoever about baseball great Stan Musial's activities as an amateur magician? I learned of this through Fran Marshall's 1946 book You Don't Have to be Crazy , and then I saw a photo of him in the 1959 "Ireland's Yearbook" fanning some cards for Claude K...

Lisa Cousins

Jon, I did enjoy the movie. If the Tesla/Edison rivalry was in there to echo the rivalry of the magicians, I would point out a critical difference: Tesla didn't clobber back. He left it to time to show that he was a superior genius bullied by an egomaniac, whereas the magicians just wouldn't quit.

Lisa Cousins

Bowie as Tesla! Such a Prometheus! A lab with glowing glass orbs and gigantic metal contraptions shooting crackling bolts of electricity all over the premises!

Man, those were the days when science was aesthetically thrilling.

Lisa Cousins

I'm sure that the author only intended the analogy to go "so far," as Bob Coyne has indicated, but the human mind doesn't work that way. It runs all over the place. It peers behind doors. It will carry a thought forward, and continue it. This fact is one of the greatest challenges to magic...

Lisa Cousins

Originally posted by Ian Kendall: The link to ID/Evolution is that when the subject of Irreducable Complexity comes up, one side seems to say 'we don't know how this happened, therefore it must be the work of a god'. Or perhaps, "My own complex intelligence recognizes this as a work of complex...

Lisa Cousins

Doug Peters, I want you to know that I got and appreciated your original joke up at the top there, but I'm glad you spelled it out in fuller detail. Penn and Teller's bullet-catch trick is a terrible choice to illustrate the point the author wishes to make, because the only two possible explanations...

Lisa Cousins

I've been a long-time Penn and Teller fan, and I remember Penn's observation in one of the books that the ability to mutilate cutlery has to stand as the lamest super-power ever. I also remember being touched to tears by a news story in the national press about two years ago, where a teenage girl in...

Lisa Cousins

My best presidential innovations were really more organizational. I limited our business meetings to fifteen minutes, and enforced it with a baking timer. The timer went "ding" and we moved on to the magic. Maybe this isn't a problem with your group, but we would often have business meetin...

Lisa Cousins

Originally posted by Asrah: Try quitting magic like Dick Cavett (I believe) once did... dropping his props one by one down a sewer grating. Did that really work for him? Because it didn't work for me. It turned out there were still such things as cards and coins in the world. Obviously I was being ...

Lisa Cousins

By all means, drop the art. And don't waver about it, either. Just quit and walk away. I've done it myself numerous times, and I do succeed, sometimes for as long as three or four hours at a stretch.

I bet that sounds like a joke - but it's not.

Lisa Cousins

Walking back to Magic Inc. from the hospital one night, Chris said "I think Jay's going to get better. I don't think this is how Jay dies. There's no punchline in it." That rang so true that it filled me with hope, and I was very sad that things didn't go that way. After all the dust had s...

Lisa Cousins

Just a hunch, but I think many here would enjoy my blog post for today, entitled "Sputnik" at lisacousins.blogspot.com.

Be aware that you can click on the image for an enlarged view of the enemy.

Lisa Cousins

Chris is the grandson who lived with Jay at Magic Inc. for the last three years of Jay's life, who chauffeured Jay around after Jay lost the eye and wasn't able to drive anymore, who smuggled beloved kitty-cat Bongo into Jay's hospital room when Jay was dying, and who sat at Jay's bedside strumming ...

Lisa Cousins

My favorite illustrations are the ones that serve no practical use as visual instruction, but are there just to sum up the spirit of the piece. Magic books are magic shows, and I appreciate this sensitivity to the overall experience. No audience will ever see those images, but the tone of them will ...

Lisa Cousins

Jay Marshall was a crier. Maybe David Blaine is more like Jay Marshall than like Houdini. Emotionally rich. Or maybe David Blaine merely aspires to be emotionally rich, and he puts himself through these melodramatic public challenges and crushings for the sake of feeling a feeling. The most subtle, ...

Lisa Cousins

I didn't watch the special, but the stunt had my attention. All week I enjoyed looking at the photos people were posting, seeing him there by night and by day, hearing the news of what he was doing and how it was going. The poster is beautiful, especially the version with Lincoln Center. And so, Mr....

Lisa Cousins

Okay, the phrase "something to do with" was much too vague, and I see how it could easily be interpreted to mean that the hilarious article was BY him or ABOUT him, or even that by at some point reading it or even hearing about it from a friend he could fairly be described as having had &q...

Lisa Cousins

Thanks for that. I always suspected that David Acer had something to do with that hilarious "Magic Shop Employee 'Not the Same' After Losing Virginity" article that appeared in the Onion several years ago. Has enough time gone by for him to admit it?

Lisa Cousins

THE MAGIC IS YOU!!! , eh?

Well, what if YOU are intellectual?

Lisa Cousins

You know, almost a century ago Stephen Leacock made this very same complaint about drama. He mourned the glad old days when people mounted action-packed, grand-scale melodramas for the sake of making money, and deplored the switch to theatrical "art" where the performers just sat around ha...

Lisa Cousins

Peter Lamont did not say that Jamy Swiss should stick to second deals. He suggested that the reason the book left the Genii reviewer (Jamy was never named) "starving for air" was that the reviewer was "out of his depth." Then, conceding that everyone has their own particular stre...

Lisa Cousins

Fran Marshall also names Edward Windsor, the love-embracing crown-ditcher, as a magician, and she quotes from a 1929 newspaper notice which reports that "the prince has an amusing and rapid fire patter, as captivating as his conjuring." Is that a positive review? We don't know. We only kno...

Lisa Cousins

From "You Don't Have To Be Crazy" by Frances Ireland (Marshall): "One group of famous Americans no one would suspect of being magic-minded is the St. Louis Cardinals. These boys got their start during training in Cairo. Time hung heavily on their hands, and they began to watch Claude ...

Lisa Cousins

John Cox, I can hardly believe it's you. I was thinking about you - I don't know, yesterday or the day before. Within the last 48 hours, anyway. I was musing upon how great it is to hear a person talk about something with enthusiasm, and I thought of your appearance in a Houdini documentary I saw fi...

Lisa Cousins

The thing I really like about Bamberg's ILLUSION SHOW is that he seems to have begun writing it with regular people in mind, but then he can't quite "hold that thought," and instead falls into this tone of chatting with his magic chums. That's a really fun book. So is Dan Waldron's Blackst...

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