Bruce...
Thanks for the mention... and thanks for the chat the other day...
To clear a little confusion up... I am not the Anthony Blake that is the mentalist from Spain... and he's not the award winning close-up comedy magician from California that runs the Ojai Magic Bar in the quaint resort town of Ojai, CA... :)
The only other "strong" connection outside of magic that we have is that we're both latin... he from Spain and I originally from Cuba...
I didn't discover that there was another "Anthony Blake" in the world of magic until one day when I was doing domain name research for a website I was working on and came across his... luckily I was able to read and comprehend his site since it's completely in Spanish...
While the name confusion may be a little more "perplexing" in the magic world, I too have been confused for another Anthony Blake -- the former producer/writer of the TV show "The Pretender" -- you should see the emails I used to get from people thinking they were contacting him... now I and my company "The Blake Marketing Group (BMG)" get confused with the BMG/Bertellsman Music Group quite a bit... my mailbox is always getting a notice of bankruptcy with BMG's (theirs) record club included or a payment or two being sent (always returned with a nice not and the real address included)...
It's a bizarre coincidence that there are two people involved in the "magic arts" with the same name (although more people know me as Tony Blake than Anthony Blake)... but outside of our art few people really know the name (both his and mine) except for in our own countries or localities (unless they were huge fans of the old Bill Bixby/Mark Wilson series "The Magician", wherein Bixby's character was also named Anthony Blake after having been changed from Anthony Dorian in the initial pilot)...
Thanks for the compliment on my marketing... that's the "mainstay" in my life... I'm a well known marketing consultant and copywriter and have one of the most popular marketing, entrepreneurial, business, PR and success websites on the Internet (The
Entrepreneurial Success Forum itself gets over 3.8 million visitors a month!)... I work one-on-one with large and small companies as well as with mom-'n-pop businesses and publish a wide variety of books, tapes, videos, courses, etc. within the marketing/direct marketing field (here's my
bio )...
After a 9-year "hiatus" from magic I have come back to the fold... it is something that has intrigued, enveloped and enriched my life since the age of 7, something that provided my livelihood for quite a bit of time in my teens, twenty's and early thirty's as a working professional magician (15 years of working stand-up clubs across the US, plus corporate/private gigs), and a familial "home" to come back to -- one that has been beckoning me to return for some time...
Currently I have opened and run the Ojai Magic Bar in Ojai, CA where I perform on Fri/Sat nights (but may be expanded to 4 nights a week during the summer)... we opened in mid-April and have been building an amazingly steady (and magic hungry) crowd... this past weekend was amazing, we had to turn away crowds 4 days straight and I performed over 15 shows in that time (the famous Ojai Classical Music Festival was being held in the park next to the bar)... Ojai is a "high-end" tourist resort that attracts visitors from all over the US and the world... it boasts several unique spa's, wonderful galleries filled with original art, interesting shops, a beautiful, lush green valley (plus an interesting "phenomenom" called the "Pink Moment" where the entire town turns pink around sundown) and a fantastic respite for many from the L.A. area that trek up to the town each week to get away (it is also home to many actors, directors, musicians, artist's, philosophers, writers, etc. -- including Scott Bakula, Malcom McDowell, Mary Steenburgen, Ellen DeGeneres, Larry Hagman, David Crosby, etc.)...
As for the lecture tour... the plan is to launch it in the fall... currently I am working out what will be included in the lecture (there will be some new variations of tricks and routines from the original "Greater Magic" as well as some new works I've developed -- all fully credited)...
I'm very happy to be back in the "magic" fold... my brain has been buzzing with new effects that I've been developing (and because of the marketer in me, hopefully bringing to market), digging through my magic library (which gets added to regularly -- I just received a huge package of my order from Richard's "scratch-n-dent" sale yesterday) and playing with new and old gimmicks... it's fantastic to entertain people once again with magic... to create wonder and awe in their eyes and minds... to see their reactions and hear their comments... to turn fantasy into reality, the impossible into the possible...
Hopefully this fall, when I launch the tour, I'll get to meet you Bruce as well as many others on this board and around the US who love magic as much as I do... when we're ready to go I'll let you and everyone else know...
The magic "arts" have been very good to me... and it's wonderful to be back within its arms again...
Success!!!
Tony Blake
