On Friday February 3, 2011 My magic friends Shinnosuke, Masashi and Kinnikun performed at Hakubi Fruits Cafe and Bar in Takamatsu, Kagawa prefecture. It was a great show with awesome magic friends. The audience was also awesome and they really enjoyed the show and were fun to perform to. The venue itself was excellent. We did a stage show, a close-up show then table hopping after. I hope to get the chance to perform there again very soon! Thanks everyone!
Aaron
Aaron
At Bar Intiki Magician
This month I will be performing at Bar Intiki Magician in Takamastu, Kagawa Prefecture. I will be peromfing close-up magic at various times during the evening with a few other magician. The dates and times I will be there are:
August 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16th from 8:00PM until 12:00AM
Aaron
Luis de Matos, Rudy Coby, William Kalush, and David Copperfield only at EMC!
The second Essential Magic Conference was held July 7, 8, and 9 2011. And wow it was another great year. Here is my review from last years event. Again this year the event was 3 days packed with great speakers. There were some returnees from last year like Eric Mead and Max Maven who are always great to watch and hear, but also some new presenters like Rudy Coby, David Kaye (Silly Billy), Fuji Akira, David Berglas and a whole lot more. The event and the content was excellent and was equal to if not better than last year. Both events had very high quality performances and talks that all magicians should see. One of the best parts of this years event was the tour David Copperfield gave of his magic museum.
On the technical side there were a few updates to the viewing system like the ability to now watch the event from an iOS device like an iPad. They also seemed to move the live chat which I believe was under the video feed last year to the side bar which I think was better. There were some technical glitches this year especially during session 7 which was the first session on the third day. From the EMC staff explanation it was a problem with their provider’s stream leaving Portugal. This caused session 7 to be unwatchable. However by session 8 the problem seemed to have been solved and during that time they created an backup stream to help those that where still having issues through another provider. I know some people where upset by this but the EMC staff was working hard to resolve this issue and they did. Sometimes problems happen unexpectedly and there is nothing you can do about it. However I applaud the EMC staff who got things back on track.
One sad point was that the live chat seemed to be a place this year from a lot of complainers which caused me not to want to use the chat. Most of the event seemed fine for me except the one session where they had big issed but other times it was working great. People who had difficulties at really brought the feeling down with what I think where complaints there we too strong. Such as this is a rip off etc. EMC is far from that. Anyways such is the net.
Overall I loved this years event and I applaud Luis de Matos, Marco Tempest, and David Britland from another great event and I look forward to next year event.
Aaron
AHHHHHHHHHH!
Today I would like to share another stupid magic story of mine. I have shared parts of this story in a post from over a year ago but today it gets it’s own post. My story has to do with forgetting what language I have to perform in. When I went to Japan in the summer of 2001 I performed my regular show except for one effect that I worked on just for Japan and of course in Japanese. I put the effect together and rehearsed before going to Japan in Japanese so I had only ever performed this effect in Japanese. In Japan the effect went over well and I still perform this effect to this day. Well, after I came home from my 2 month trip to Japan I had a stage show the next evening in my hometown in Victoria. This show was at a restaurant near my home and seemed like an easy event to do while still jet lagged. So I arrived at the venue set my stage show and then started the show. Everything was going well until I got to my final effect and this was the effect that I had performed only in Japanese. Now of course I was in Victoria BC Canada now and performing in English not Japanese. It was at this moment that I realized I had never performed this effect in English. All the timing, jokes etc. were written in Japanese for a Japanese audience. Lucky I was able to pull the effect off in English but man did I sweat. Luckily I had rehearsed the technical parts and performed it enough that this part was automatic and I just had to quickly stumble creating an English script as I performed it. As far as I know the audience didn’t notice anything but I was sure happy when I finished that effect. Lesson I learned from this is be careful if you are a bilingual performer and performing in different countries and in different language while suffering from jet lag.
Aaron
Ouch My Thumb!
Going to start another section to my blog and is is “my stupid magic stories”. These will be stories I have of things that happened to me because of doing magic, things that happened during my shows, at magic conventions etc. I hope you will find some of the storie interesting!
The first story I would like to share happened when I was 15 in the December of 1990. This was during the height of my Christmas shows and this year was really the first year for me to have a large amount shows where I made a lot of money. I remember well that for this Christmas season I had bought myself a nice stylish tuxedo like suit with a shirt with some cheesy frills. It was in a style that was hip for 1990. Anyways, it was a family Christmas show for a kind of boat club if I remember right. As I was 15 I could not drive yet so my mother was my driver and was at the show. The show stared well but the problem came when I did the cut and restored rope. You can probably smell what is coming. Anyway I started the routine in my regular way as I was taught by Tony Eng at that time and there is a sequence where a member of the audience cuts the rope. So I had this about 8 year old boy come on stage and cut the rope. I even did all the cheesy lines of “don’t cut the pink cut the white, the pink’s my finger” etc. Well the kid cut the rope and at the same time he did cut through my thumb. At first I thought it was just a scrape. I sent the kid back dipped behind my table and sucked the blood off and all seemed fine. I quickly finished the rope trick and moved on to the next effect which was the magic colouring book. This is where things got worse. I realized when I riffled through the colouring book that there was red all over the pages, well that red was you guessed it my blood. At this time audience members also noticed that I was bleeding very badly. A nice lady came running up with a band-aid and I patched up my thumb and went on with the show. After the show when I got home I was heart broken as my frilly shirt sleeve was covered in blood and I was never to use it again. And here is the kicker to this story the next day I was helping Julie Eng with her Christmas shows as her assistant at one of the shows the kid that cut my finger was there!!!! It was like he was he was coming back for seconds. Anyways when you perform a cut and restored rope effect be careful or if you are an audience member asked to cut a magicians rope be careful! I am lucky I didn’t need any stitched but my left thumb still bears the scar.
I hope you enjoyed the first of my stupid magic stories.
Aaron
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
It has been two years since I have been able to attend a Hanami party. Hanami is the Japanese tradition in that take place in the spring when Japanese cherry blossoms boom. People take to the parks to sit under the Sakura eat and drink. This year I went with some magic friends, Shinosuke and Maji Nishida. We had the party with people from a resultant that we use to alway go to when Maji Nishida and I lived in Sakaide. It was a great time and I need to attend more events like this.
Aaron