Essential Magic Conference 2011 is Coming!

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Aaron Jones

Well the Essential Magic Conference is getting close to its second conference this July. This year it will be held July 7,8,9, 2011. I attended last year and I will attend this year. You can click here to read my review of the 2010 Conference. It looks like thay have a great line up this year. Some of the presenters from last year are back with a new ones for this year. There will be 33 presenters at this event. The surprise for me this year is that David Copperfield will participating. For the list of all the presenters for this year you can check here. The nice thing out this conference as it is an internet conference you have access to the content after the live event and the DVD’s that come after. There were a few technical issues last year and I hope that they will be solved. Also, last year it took some time after the live sessions before the replay feed was available to watch. This year it would be nice to see them be uploaded faster after the event than last year.
I am really looking forward to this year and I hope to see you there as well.
Below is a video highlighting last years conference.

Aaron

Impressed! My First Copy Of The Gibecière Arrived

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Gibecière

This week I officially joined the Conjuring Arts Research Center, party because I was so excited and impressed by the access to the Ask Alexander search engine. I blogged about this here. With membership you also receive their semi–annual journal on Magic History Gibecière edited by Stephen Minch. All I can say is WOW. This 180 page publication is worth the price of the basic membership alone. It already has me captivated. One reason is there is an article that relates to my University Degree which is on Japan Society from the Meiji Restoration (1868). There is a series that continues in this issue about Magic in Japan from that time so I am all set to get into it. If you are serious about magic the Conjuring Arts Center has done a great job of producing, and researching on the history of magic very academically and you should really check them out.

The Expert at the Card Table

I also ordered their reprint of Erdanse’s The Expert at the Card Table. It is done “Bible” style. A great little carry around version of this classic text on card magic. I was just impressed by Ask Alexander and now they have impressed me again with the publication that goes with membership. I highly recommend joining the Conjuring Arts Research Center.

Aaron

The Conjuring Arts Research Center & Ask Alexander

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Aaron Jones

Ask Alexander

Sometimes there are services and products that you didn’t think you needed but once you tried you now can’t live without. This happened with me for Twitter. Now I don’t know what I would do without Twitter but before I used Twitter I never really thought much about it. Well askalexander .org is like that for me now. Those of us who registered with the Essential Magic Conference all received a free month preview of Ask Alexander. Can I saw wow! Ask Alexander is run by the Conjuring Arts Research Center whose Executive Director is Bill Kalush. What is the Conjuring Arts Research Center you may ask well here is a quote from their site:

“The Conjuring Arts Research Center is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts, which include psychic phenomenon, hypnosis, deceptive gambling, mentalism, ventriloquism, juggling, and sleight of hand techniques.”

Ask Alexander one of the services that they run is a search database of magic books, magazines, and newsletters. I can say it is fantastic. After my preview month I will continue with the service. You can save publications in the database in a personal bookshelf as well when you research on a topic you can keep them in collections and download them as one PDF or have it emailed to you. Very useful. It even works well on my iPhone. If you are a magic creator, lecturer, magic consultant, magic historian, or just love magic you should have a look. It is not free and there is a yearly membership price and a few levels of membership depending on what your needs are. You can see those listed here. It is well worth it, and like I mentioned I will be continue with a membership after my preview.

In the picture you can see one of the searches I did. You can see my vanity as I searched myself . It turned out to be cool because I found a bunch of Ring Reports I did for the Victoria Magic Circle in the Linking Ring in the late 1990′s that I forgot about and and other places where I was mentioned and this brought back a lot of memories I had forgotten about.

I want to thank Bill Kalush and the staff of the Conjuring Arts Research Center for giving us at the EMC the free month preview.

Aaron

Magicana

Posted on October 12, 2009 by Aaron Jones

There is no doubt that magic is an art form and there is one organization from my home country Canada that promotes magic as a performing art on many levels and that is Magicana. My good friend Julie Eng is the Executive Director and the Artistic Director is David Ben a major force in promoting magic as an art. If you are into learning about magic on a more artistic level you should check out the Magicana web site. Some of the more recent projects from Magicana are the Sid Lorraine blog and the Tony Eng Youth Fund. Tony was my magic teacher and mentor and I was lucky to grow up working for him and learning all that I did from him. This fund is to help those young magicians get a chance to improve their magic the way Tony would have liked it. These are just a few of the many program of Magicana. If you want to learn more check out their website as well you can listen to David Ben talk about Magician on the 2 part podcast by the Magic Newswire. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

So if you are into learning more about magic as a real performing out I suggest you check out what Magicana is up to.

Aaron