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Great video by a not very popular singaporean. I love the sound of the cards as he flourish, and the music fits so well too.
Congrats Mr. Harapan.
Hi guys,
I guess most of you have noticed the Interviews tab on the top navbar of the blog, or at least have seen a couple of them either here or at my youtube channel.
I started this initiative because I thought our art lacked personality, i mean, we knew each other for our avatar and signatures in the forums and our perfect manicure (which i didn’t ever have) from the videos.
First I thought of trying to interview the big names only so that we could demistify themselves and put them closer to us poor average card guys, but then, after a while i thought it would be interesting to interview anyone that was in the “spotlight” or had anything interesting to say about our art.
The easier method i though of was sending them some questions in a text file that they should answer whenever they had some spare time.
This way i got a few interesting ones but then i got to ask my friend Jordan Lapping and he came up with the idea of doing the interview in front of his webcam, thus making it even more personal and impromptu.
I loved it and then I started asking many people to do that for the community.
The responses were priceless, and this was what made this blog be what it is now, so I feel like I have to thank you for building up this whole thing with your videos, articles, card gossip and constructive comments.
There are some great interviews for you to watch if you didn’t already and some other scheduled for the future, here is the list of the names that we’ve got so far so select one, sit back and enjoy and after that mind leaving a comment or asking them a question.
TheCuso interviews Kent
TheCuso interviews Chris Hestnes
TheCuso interviews Kate
TheCuso interviews Vincent Dark
TheCuso interviews Jaspas
TheCuso interviews Ineski (taken down temporary)
TheCuso interviews Mattgic and MaXim
TheCuso Interviews Adam
TheCuso interviews Pierre Tran
TheCuso interviews David Blanch
TheCuso interviews Bone Ho
TheCuso interviews Jordan Lapping
TheCuso interviews Daren Yeow
TheCuso interviews Jonas Haglund
There are some great interviews coming up like Kevin Ho’s,that he might film this weekend, Cardshark88’s (co-founder of The3C and youtube top subscribed card guru), Justflourish staff (Sebastian, Tical…), Luka, Brendan Conner, Justin Kelly, Scenacle french guys, Scott and Sean, Allan Hagen, Ling and many more.
So i would like to hear from you about what do you think about this whole initiative and how could it be improved, who would you like to be interviewed in the future or what other ideas do you have to bring the artist closer.
Leave a comment and chose your favourite interview.
- Alejandro Portela
Just a move I’ve been playing with , a one card card thing , hope you like it …
trei mens three in ROMANIA
credits : brendan CONNER , dan and DAVE
XCM or ECM (Extreme Card Manipulation) is the most visual branch of live performance with cards which is also called “Flourishing”.
Flourishes are not “works of magic” in and of themselves, but rather lend a difficulty and dexterity level to any magic routine that is performed. In their present form, playing cards have only been around for about two hundred years, but the techniques that are applied to their handling are ageless.
As those techniques are improved and refined, the Master Card Conjurer is able to not only find a selected card hidden in the deck, but so manipulate the cards through artistry that the magic “trick” turns into a “card kata” of sorts (much like the martial artists who know how to wield a sword, but at the same time, can place together a group of movements to demonstrate skill in a given set).
With the rise of 21st century media and the internet, there has never been such an explosion of concentrated interest in the artistic handling of ordinary playing cards. Taking the manipulation of cards to a level that goes beyond “pick a card”, shuffle, cut, and spread, the XCM master demonstrates a keen skillfulness in the art of card conjuring.
XCM is now in its most popular phase with the worldwide communication medium of the internet, and the ability to reach across the globe and band conjurers of like-mind together.
XCM “officially” stands for Xtreme Card Manipulation, though the ECM acronym is also used for Extreme Card Manipulation. XCM was first introduced by De’vo Vom Schattenreich and published for the first time in his interview in Genii Magazine in August of 2004.
XCM is set within the category of card conjuring, but as a subset of card flourishing. It relies solely on the agility of sleight of hand card manipulation without engaging the spectator in a magic presentation. It does not involve card productions, color changes, back palming, or other “mystery sleights” that are often accompanied by a magician’s patter. Rather, the deck itself is used in an ingenious manner to demonstrate the ability the card conjurer has in “manipulating” the 52 cards as a deck of cards.
As a matter of fact, the identities of the cards themselves mean little in XCM. The Ace of Spades, for example, is simply a card that is part of a larger stack of cards. It is the deck as a whole which is broken up into parts and moved with nimbleness that attracts the viewer’s eye.
The reason this art is not called simply called “card conjuring” or “card manipulation” is because of the nature of the act. It takes on the challenge of handling the full deck to move within extreme examples of agility and dexterity in both hands. The term “Xtreme” or “Extreme” does not refer simply to the difficulty of the moves but to all the aspects of an XCM routine. Now, the card conjurer who takes the independent moves of XCM and incorporates them in his card conjuring routine will benefit himself greatly.
The more a magician demonstrates ability in an art form, while at the same time creating card miracles, will be the real card conjurer.
-Dr. C. Matthew McMahon CardConjurer.com
Picture by Stein Halvorsen
Today i stumbled upon an auction for a brick of Jerry’s Nugget Casino playing cards at eBay.
For those of you that are not familiar with the terminology, a brick means a case of twelve decks of playing cards not the cubic piece of concrete used to build the casino back in the days.
The funny thing is that this so called brick is up for grabs for $1500 (USD) if you buy it now, a hilarious amount of money for any average card punk like everyone of us.
But lets take a closer look at the price…
Jerry’s Nugget Playing Cards. ONE DOZEN DECKS BOXED
1500/12 equals $125 for each sealed deck which, considering the prices they are being sold lately, it’s quite cheap actually.
We all saw these decks sell for over 250 bucks each, and we keep seeing this like every day.
Of course you can get an opened pack for much less but if you plan on reselling them in some years this could be your way to start, i mean, it’s now or never.
Lee Asher commented somewhere in this blog that he used to buy these decks for .50 at the Jerry’s Nugget casino back then but now you wont see them for less than $150 easily.
If you dont trust me you can always go to eBay and search for finished items and you’ll see what i’m talking about.
Here are some other auctions that are currently at eBay so you can compare the prices:
Jerry’s Nugget Playing Cards. ONE DOZEN DECKS BOXED
Jerry’s Nugget Playing Cards - Rare! SEALED BLUE
Jerry’s Nugget playing card deck - rare magic bicycle red
Jerry’s Nugget playing card deck - rare magic bicycle blue
Jerry’s Nugget playing card deck - rare magic set of 2 jerrys
Jerry’s Nugget playing card deck - rare magic bicycle blue
So here are my questions,
Do you think these decks worth that much?
Do you find it an attractive price?
How much would you, sincerely, pay for this?
Leave a comment and we’ll discuss.
You can see and download it now in vimeo’s high quality. A great video by Dan and Dave Buck.
Sign up for a vimeo account or watch it there without loging in Dan and Dave’s Reel at Vimeo
What would Ashford Kneitel think about this move if he happened to read the blog?
For those who liked F 501, consider this as a present ;)
This was shot the same day, at the same place as F 501. Here is the whole Scenacle team: Mattgic, MaXim, Dimitri, 7heart and Aristote.
Enjoy !
I enjoy making videos. Something most of us have understood by now. But when I started editing the Blackpool video, something felt.. not right. After a couple of days, my Macintosh HDD decides to mess up and suddenly get a complete disaster failure. So I lost everything. Which is also incidentally the r
eason I still shoot HDV on Mini-DV tapes. Even if you do experience a disaster situation, you’ve still got your footage. Since then I’ve experienced another disk crash, but that was some super-silly error I made on my laptop, and has very little to do with the Blackpool video.
Over the last month it feels like I’ve spent all my spare time to edit this video. A little AppleScript I wrote tells me that I’ve spent about eight hours and forty-two minutes on the video. This indicates how incredibly little spare time I’ve had
Being set back by the hard drive crash was a good thing. What didn’t feel right at first, feels right now, that I’ve re-done it.
This will be the last video I make for a good while. I can say for sure that I’ll be putting out something, between August and September sometime, but wouldn’t bother going more into details about that right now.
Well, what a great chance to share this work of mine.
Most of the people in the video I’ve met on multiple occasions before. As always, some of the best moments of my teen life have been spent with you guys. Hope you can say the same.
(Right click and save as…)
It’s been official for quite a while now but for those of you that don’t read dan and dave’s newsletter (sign up if you didn’t!), Chad Nelson is going to teach his underground sleight of hand masterpiece: the Clipshift.
You saw it in the Queen’s performance inside the Trilogy (the last vanish), it’s also in the Blackpool 2008 video as a color change performed by my friend Jordan Lapping, you also saw it in “Dan at the convention” as well as in many other underground videos all around the scene.
And now it is going to be taught to anyone willing to pay for the dvd!
Expect hundreds of youtube vids showing it, expect not being able to fool your favourite oldschool magician in town…
Come on Chad, call it off, be a worst magician and come up with some other average stuff but keep this underground, it is too good to be shared to the public!
Here are my 2 cents. Use it as your avatar in the forums or whatever you want, we must Save the Clipshift!
To all the card artists around the world… DON’T BUY SURFACED!!! :P
Stein Halvorsen at a very popular talent show in Norway.
Date: April 2007.
