The Genii Forum

Jack Shalom

People are very bad at estimating their own risks.

Genuine question: Would you say biased in any one direction? Do you think we tend to underestimate or overestimate risks to ourselves?

Jack Shalom

Or a Brazilian telling someone from Portugal they're speaking Portuguese Portuguese?

Look up "Portuguese Portuguese" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It doesn't exist. Yet "British English" does. Again, language is not a strictly consistent system of logical imposed rules.

Jack Shalom

there is no such thing as British English I prefer to go with the OED and Merriam Webster, thanks. Language is not a consistent system; there are historical and usage reasons why the term does indeed exist and why in the kinds of contexts I used it in, it is more descriptive and communicates meanin...

Jack Shalom

https://www.merriam-webster.com/diction ... %20English

Jack Shalom

If the whole first season is gone, it may signal a re-packaging of the material for syndication, re-sale on video media, or some conglomeration deal. Probably more about Fallon than Jay.

Jack Shalom

I have met rather a lot of wicked people in my time including a few crooked gamblers. They are not nice people and have criminal backgrounds. They aren't the brightest sparks in the drawer. I doubt they can even spell let alone write books full of dozens of sleight of hand techniques. They know abo...

Jack Shalom

Anyone doing gambling demos "exposes" in 1902? "Reformed sinner" lectures were pretty popular at the time...

Jack Shalom

After 20 years, is this thread finally settling down? Reversed names: I just read about a restaurant co-owned by Bill Murray in Charleston SC. He owns it through his company, Yarrum Properties. I believe this is common in the real estate industry. Also, I drove a Yellow cab in NYC during the late 7...

Jack Shalom

That's pretty interesting. I think a lot of the common view of Houdini was that despite his earlier King of Cards moniker, he wasn't that skilled. But he seems to have some chops in this late piece of film.

Jack Shalom

I guess Michael has never sold secrets for money...

Jack Shalom

Professor Hunter:
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/illu ... y/magician

Jack Shalom

Color footage of burning rope strait jacket escape
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/burn ... y/magician

Jack Shalom

Jon, decades ago I wrote an article for Theater Annual magazine about the theatrical aspects of three-card monte. You can read it here:
https://jackshalom.net/2017/09/30/findi ... ard-monte/

Jack Shalom

Or as John Wayne allegedly said, Once you can fake sincerity, you got it made. The traditions of acting go back thousands of years until now. They include acting a character from someone else's script, but also improvisation, clowning, mime, oration, story theater, vaudeville, and so on. Tom's narro...

Jack Shalom

Nor agonise over the role of the Magician as ‘an Actor’.

True, but he wouldn't have had to: Dickens was known as an excellent and enthusiastic amateur actor throughout his lifetime. He would have understood the connection instantly.

Jack Shalom

From Robert-Houdin's The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic: "7. Although all one says during the course of a performance is--not to mince the matter--a a tissue of falsehoods, the performer must sufficiently enter into the part he plays to himself believe in the reality of his fictitious statement...

Jack Shalom

Yeah, I loved that, too. I'd love to design a show just to give out programs like that!

Jack Shalom

I was wondering about the lovely printed magic program of Dickens listed there. Of course, such printed programs have gone out of fashion, but I wonder what people here think about them--do they spoil the surprise, or do they help cement magical moments in the audience's mind?

Jack Shalom

Mark, what you are railing against isn't TRAINED acting, but BAD TRAINED acting. There's a world of difference between the two. GOOD TRAINED actors will have you believing the trick went wrong, and the coin is really in the other hand. And that they--unlike David Copperfield--really had a grandfathe...

Jack Shalom

If the rate of a million views a day holds up, you'll reach a billion views only within 3 years! Surely, Mark, even you, despite the horrors of the modern world, can hold out that long.

Jack Shalom

Jonathan Townsend wrote:Paul Harris's Solid Deception from 1976 "Intimate Secrets".

Jon, that routine uses Tilt, but it is not a Triumph routine.

Jack Shalom

One could perhaps start with the following: "Behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Yes, that was Stanislavski's formulation of the concept of acting; we more commonly call that "pretending." But alas that is exactly the formulation that has been rejected by some he...

Jack Shalom

The audience knows that the actor is not really a man who eats human livers with a bottle of chianti; he acts as if he were for the entertainment of an audience. The audience knows that the magician is not really a man who can make people levitate; s/he acts as if s/he were for the entertainment of ...

Jack Shalom

I can't fathom what that communication gap would consist of. It is pretty clear that you look at all our contemporary peers and see an abundance of actors and that what they currently are doing is indistinguishable from acting. I.e. "Don't change, keep on doing what you're doing!" The com...

Jack Shalom

Why would any magician be interested in the vast literature and body of knowledge relating to acting, if you tell them that all that is identical to what they already do? This is a very strange line of argument, Tom. By this line of reasoning then why would magicians want to study magic since they ...

Jack Shalom

How does this conversation contribute to the betterment of our field if (presumably) we already understand that "acting techniques" - or whatever one wishes to call them - can be applied to the performance of magic? Why does it matter a whit if one person labels the application of such te...

Jack Shalom

Intriguing. So you've decided that "actor" arbitrarily include kids playing, but arbitrarily exclude those who are pretending via paper. Are you trying deliberately to not understand? The body, the voice, Tom. That's not arbitrary. Do you really think writers are the same as actors? So th...

Jack Shalom

Almost, Mark. Too many of them ignore that they are part of an art with a long tradition that tells you how to comport yourself up there--and so end up talking into their sleeves--but their passes are really good.

Jack Shalom

An animator's work is also an expression of the same thing, as is a writer of fiction. So, if you write fiction novels, you are an actor? If you draw animations, you are an actor? Someone who is lying to their spouse about where they've been is basically telling a fiction, so that person can also p...

Jack Shalom

A kid pretending that the floor is lava isn't an actor but a kid wading through the primordial plasma of drama. A clown is pretending in a structured way that is unique to clowning. An actor is pretending in a structured way that is unique to acting. Ah, so glad you wrote this, because for me it cl...

Jack Shalom

No acting required--it just happens--like magic!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipuhaWhJ_EY

Jack Shalom

Tom, the concept of subtext is a basic basic acting technique taught to first year acting students. You personally might not like using it for magic, but to deny it's an acting technique is absurd. Magicians might like to look at the chapters in Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares on Bits and Objective...

Jack Shalom

Acting is pretty boring while conjuring is exciting.

Oh my. Not much more to be said after that. From now on we will discourage all those who pretend to be or do, in the interests of extinguishing boredom.

Jack Shalom

It is only on this forum where some people believe "Actor wanted" means they are looking for an illusion act or similar. I don't believe I've seen anyone on this forum who believes that. I suppose it depends on what the word "is" means. When a person says a magician is an actor,...

Jack Shalom

An actor is a person whose profession it is to portray a dramatic character in a scripted performance, usually at the theatre or in media such as film, radio, and television. Then your contention is that a magician is not a dramatic character in a scripted performance usually at a theater or in med...

Jack Shalom

Waiting for a definition of actor and acting. Without that, there's no point to this discussion.

Jack Shalom

So the person reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy isn’t an actor because it’s being performed - in one? Those in one person shows aren’t actors because they are singular? I'm agreeing with you Brad. That's why I said "metaphorically." A juggler appears "in one," because we think of the ...

Jack Shalom

A magician metaphorically performs "in one." That is, in front of the curtain, to signify that he is not an actor. But he's lying and that's what magic is all about.

To be more succinct: an actor acts "as if." A magician acts as if "as if" is not applicable.

Jack Shalom

Whether one wants to call a magician an actor or not is not too important. What is important is that magicians, as part of their toolkit, use techniques that have been described and refined by actors over centuries. There is a literature out there about it, too. It would be as silly to ignore that a...

Jack Shalom

Magic means brotherhood, so no FISM WCM or FISM Europe event can be organized in a country that kills their brothers.

Good luck with that. It doesn't take a historian to know that that eliminates just about every sovereign nation on earth.

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