8 ms·
Cards as Weapons (1977)
- jansan 3y agoPlease forgive me for digging this up every other year, but I think this is such a wonderful tongue in cheek resource for a wonderfully weird topic. Also, be warned that book pages 33 and 34 may be NSFW in some regions on this planet ;)
- cdchn 3y agoI was just skimming through before even reading the comments and I hit what you were talking about on page 42 and thought "Wait hold up.."
- ASalazarMX 3y agoThe clothes obscured the careful position of the arms, they were removed for pedagogic reasons.
- progre 3y agoThank you for the, uh... Warning.
- klyrs 3y agoPage 56 is where it gets really steamy
- empath-nirvana 3y agoFor such an obscurantist profession, the quality of technical writing in books by magicians is so incredibly consistent. I'm going to recommend another really excellent, long out of print book by a famous magician: https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Derren%20Brown%20-%20Pure%20Effect.pdf https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Derren%20Brown%20-%20Pure%2... It's an absolute gold mine of tips on performance and full of detailed technical explanations of how he did some of his most famous illusions. (and the answer is not NLP or subliminal suggestion or anything he talks about in his patter, most of the time).
- jdietrich 3y agoI'd like to recommend two of Darwin Ortiz's books, Strong Magic and Designing Miracles. They're high-level theoretical texts on the perceptual and cognitive basis of illusion and I've found them to have a great deal of applicability to UI/UX design.
- tptacek 3y agoIt helps when the magician is Ricky Jay!
- laurieg 3y agoThat is a fantastic book. It was very much written for magicians and gives away many of Derren Brown's famous routines so reader beware! The aspects of showmanship and performance really stuck with me. I often remember snippets of the book even today. One of my favourite stories is when Derren is having dinner with friends and their child says "Show me a magic trick!" So Derren asks the child to name a card. He then flips over, by pure coincidence, the card the child named. Of course, he was planning on doing a more elaborate routine but he was present enough to notice that he would not be able to top his accidental trick and put the cards away. He talks a lot about taking risks in performance and being attentive to the energy in the room. Of course, you need some solid reliable tricks as well to back this up!
- empath-nirvana 3y agoAlso where he talks about how the performance of mind reading. I think a way to think about it is that it _is_ mind reading in a way, in the sense that you have to understand how your audience is perceiving _you_, that you need to act in a way that matches their _expectation_ of how someone who could genuinely read minds would behave. His real genius is in identifying a kind of pseudo-scientific patter that would allow a skeptic to enjoy a mind reading performance. You can do the same crude trick that a mentalist or spiritualist would do, and wrap it in patter about neuro-linguistic programming and subliminal messages and psychology and with a few winks to let them think they're in on the secret and suddenly a hard bitten skeptic falls for the same sleight of hand trick that a gullible grandma fell for in the 19th century. Like, he accurately says that what he's doing isn't paranormal or "real", but his explanation on stage almost never matches what he's really doing.
- TylerE 3y agoMy favorite magician of all time, and it's not even close. Was really said to hear he passed a few years ago. He could REALLY do this, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F93VCA_TCQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F93VCA_TCQ Actual card throwing starts at about 4:30.
- nutate 3y agoAs a kid I had access to that book and I got to be a pretty wicked card thrower. Haven't tried it in a while.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoIf you still have a copy, a coworker from a previous job said that it's worth quite a bit (hundreds, apparently).
- TylerE 3y agoOnly the hard cover. Paperback is also valuable, but only about 15% of the hardcover.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoDid your parents know about the pretty topless/naked lady in some of the pictures?
- nutate 3y agoOddly my parents owned a bookstore, so yea I was growing up in the opposite of the GOP vision for Florida.
- ralphc 3y agoSame here, this was when I was a high schooler. I was a habitual card thrower for a while. I remember walking down the hall, flicked my hall pass. My enthusiasm was better than my aim and I nailed a girl in the back of the head. Whole lotta apologizing happened.
- onychomys 3y agoI am not 100% convinced that this isn't just actual magic. The manipulations are pretty amazing and then at the end it's mindblowing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWvRorX0KhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWvRorX0KhQ
- lisper 3y agoThe card throwing is just a skill, there is no trickery involved. But what is shown in this video is magic facilitated by extreme skill (as opposed to, say, a gimmicked deck).
- TylerE 3y agoHe did use gimmicks sometimes, albeit it usually a set deck that he then pretends to false shuffle.
- TylerE 3y agoMany of the methods Jay used he learned from Dai Vernon. This vid explains Vernon’s signature trick. https://youtu.be/PQpQwLBDQKwP https://youtu.be/PQpQwLBDQKwP One key to Jays magic (and really any good mahician) is that NOTHING is coincidence. Every hitch, stumble, and stutter is there for a reason.
- ctrlp 3y agoSaw Ricky Jay 3 times in the 52 Assistants era in very intimate theaters and he was just amazing.
- readingnews 3y agoI note that on the books title, it says he is the author of this book: https://archive.org/details/learnedpigsfirep0000unse https://archive.org/details/learnedpigsfirep0000unse Which has an amazing title.
- 0x0203 3y agoIt's also an amazing book. In addition to being an incredible magician and entertainer, Ricky Jay was also a wealth of knowledge on the history of magic and all things related. The referenced "Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women" is just scratching the surface of the subject.
- supportengineer 3y agoLots of references to famous contemporaries. Very silly book! It certainly keeps you turning the pages.
- gumby 3y agoIf you don't know who Ricky Jay was, this is a nice introduction.
- m3kw9 3y agoWell don’t bring a deck of cards to a fist fight
- dang 3y agoRelated: “Cards as Weapons” by Ricky Jay (1977) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26106453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26106453 - Feb 2021 (2 comments) Cards as Weapons by Ricky Jay (1977) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048850 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
- bragr 3y agoI was not expecting a fully nude woman on pages 40-43. Perhaps could use a NSFW flag.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoThat very pleasant woman, both topless and fully naked later, also took me by surprise. No mention if her nakedness is part of the flick/attack position. I just browsed the book, but there's also a foot-card-flicking picture, and some ladies operating a man with a card. I don't have time to read it right now, but surely will later, seems like a fun weekend book.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoMakes me wonder what the selling point of the book was originally
- GoofballJones 3y agoThe late, great Ricky Jay was one of the very best card magicians who ever lived...plus a fantastic magic historian.
- agumonkey 3y agoI don't know about you guys, but I often think magician are great computer scientists.. pre-planning order and configurations to obtain a known result..
- vunderba 3y agoWhen I was a kid, my father and I used to hurl cards at each other in the unfinished basement, and as fast as we could throw 'em, I'm grateful that my vision was so historically poor that I wore glasses at an early age. Fellow enthusiasts should also check out videos of card magician Jeff McBride who has a parlor trick would sling cards into the audience. https://youtu.be/uUaYUk0alRo https://youtu.be/uUaYUk0alRo
- JKCalhoun 3y agoYou're supposed to take turns trying to score a card tossed into an upturned hat lying in the center of a room.
- mightybyte 3y agoI remember running across this book in a bookstore in the 80s! What a blast from the past. In particular I remember the picture on page 73.
- gowld 3y agoI don't understand what this passage is trying to say. There's an obvious possible intent, but the wording seems to not match it. Quote: " A Sad Footnote to a Sad Footnote Famous Bullet-Catching Trick Annemann was considered a strange figure in magic and, by all but a few, he was thought a genius in the methods of duplicating psychic or mental phenomena; he was a creative thinker but always a reluctant and nervous performer. It was big news when advertise- ments for his full evening show appeared in the New York press. Annemann was to ap- pear at "The Little Theatre in the Sky" atop the Chanin Building on New York's 42nd Street on January 26th and 27th, 1942. The feature of the show was to be the famous Bullet-Catching Trick. A committee purchased, examined and marked a bullet which was then loaded into a rifle belonging to a spectator, a marksman, who had never met the performer, The marksman hoisted the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the mouth of the performer who stood blindfolded on the opposite side of the stage with his hands behind his back. The commands, "Ready — Aim — Fire!" were given. A shot rang out and the performer dropped to his knees; there was a trickle of blood from the comer of his mouth and then miraculously the marked bullet was seen to emerge from between his lips. Over the years twelve magicians had lost their lives presenting this spectacular effect, and the magic fraternity spoke of the upcoming Annemann attempt with strained antici- pation. It is easy to speculate that Annemann, too, felt the strain, not only of this trick and this show but of the other confused pieces of his life. He did not do the performance. On January 12th, a few miles away from the theatre, he locked himself in his room and committed suicide. " It skips the part where there's an attempt to "magic" the bullet?