Midwinter Musings
It has been two years since my last update here at Warg. We can blame the pandemic for most of that, but to some degree, I’ve had my mind occupied elsewhere. I’ve finally amassed enough new material to make it fun and joyful to write about it, so I’m neck-deep in writing a new hardcover book.
I also managed to negotiate an amicable transfer of rights of my former books Vortex and Maelstrom. For a long time, it seemed they would never get reprinted, as they were in a copyright limbo after Hermetic Press was sold to Penguin. But now I am free to reprint them as I see fit.
And finally, I’ve been asked to write a chapter on Misdirection in Richard Kaufman’s updated Greater Magic project, which is very exciting but exceedingly difficult on more than one level.
Mystique
I’ve had great fun since 2017, working with an ensemble of magicians, under the name Mystique. Each month, we produced and performed a new show, consisting of mostly new pieces or updated classics. All highly experimental – we even decided to make the project non-profit, to ensure that none of us would be lured into thinking about the commercial value. Just to see where it would go, if none of us had to think about making money. So far, we’ve produced 40 different full-evening shows.
In the autumn of 2019, we did our first lecture, and the lecture notes can be obtained here: Constant Change by Mystique. The photo above is from a performance of the piece “Callmark” (Photo: Olav Holten).
Highlights at Warg
It is probably not strange that a creator is the most proud of the most recent creation, and I am indeed very proud of Present Company that I created and performed for the very first time in December 2019. Had it not been for the virus shutting everything down, I would have performed it all the time. It will take a bit of work to make this gem really shine, not that it is difficult – quite the opposite; it is very easy – but because it make use of five spectators, and figuring out how to block and position them requires a bit of experimentation.
Building an Act by Tommy Wonder is another highlight. Solid information on how to create both an act and a full-evening show.
Sixten Beme’s wonderful card-linking trick is described in The Replete Card Link, which collect all of Sixten Beme’s work on the plot, from his original Complete Card Link, via his One Card Link, to his own favourite unpublished handling.
For those interested in making their own books or lecture notes, we have Stephen Minch’s Hermetic Press Stylebook (updated March 2020) and my own Self-publishing, both essential collections of advice on how to write, and how to illustrate. Both are “name your own price”, so if you want to pay $50 then pay $50, and if you can’t afford anything, then pay nothing.
There are several other interesting items on this site, but to name just one more, I’ll pick Moonshine Monologues – my treatise on the Multiplying Bottles. You can see a few of the ideas in practice in this video:
Vanishing Inc
I am very happy with my collaboration with Vanishing Inc (with the sole exception of the packaging design for my piece “Of Dice and Men” ). I am (as I’ve been told repeatably by multiple sources) not always easy to work with, and their patience with me is on the verge of reaching Stephen Minch-levels. Among the highlights there are my Session 2008 Lecture, that deals heavily with misdirection, and contains a full explanation of a remarkable Travellers routine titled “Mr. Fogg”. And they also offer a huge bundle with 19 of my ebooks to a price that can’t be beaten (except by pirates. But don’t support pirates. Support the creators!). There are other items in the works, and with some luck, they will see the day of light during 2022.
Penguin magic
For some years, I’ve had a conflict with Penguin Magic, but happily, it have been resolved. Some years ago, they produced a few very nice DVDs/video downloads with material from my two Hermetic Press books. If you haven’t seen them, they are recommended: Vortex – Off the page and Maelstrom – Off the page. And my Penguin Live lecture is often cited as an excellent source for practical hands-on lessons on misdirection.
Card-Shark
My deck “Factory Blanks” is ‘out of stock’ at many dealers. My guess is that because the deck can’t easily be demoed at dealer stands – it require at least a living room “Parlour” setting – it doesn’t sell as well as items that can be demoed close up, and the impetus to replenish the stock is thereby low. Which is a pity, because it is a remarkable item. I could go into the scientific theory behind it, the high/low spatial frequency stuff, but in practice it simply means that you have a deck that appear blank and unprinted from 2-3 steps away, but when seen from an armslength away, the deck appear printed with outlines of a full deck. This, combined with a little ‘double speak’ make the audience think that everyone have been shown a completely blank deck, while one spectator think that everyone have been shown a regular deck that have been taken out of the printing machine before it was completely printed. And thanks to that, you can do any kind of regular card trick for one person, and the rest of the audience will believe you’ve done the most impressive mentalism feats. The audience will think that the spectator mentally made up a card freely in their head, and all you did was to make a standard Riffle Force with a seemingly blank deck. Card-Shark have plenty of Factory Blanks in stock.
MetalWriting
I just heard from Andreas Sebring at MetalWriting that he just completed the 2021 run of “Quantum Logic” – the routine I performed on Penn and Teller’s Fool Us. That means that he is opening up a new waiting list for his next batch. If you’re interested in these exceedingly well made props any my routine, notify your interest here: Quantum Logic.
Arkane Shop
Usually, it doesn’t carry much weight when someone endorse their partner’s work. But I will do that all the same, because I’ve seen a lot of Nikola Arkane’s work, and it isn’t crap. Her upcoming book “POP!” on kid shows is really good, and its predecessor Becoming FizzWizzPop is a great guide on how to get into the kid show business.
Her book “In Plain Sight” is a delightful emulation of an old comic magazine, and contain 7 routines she created during lock-down.
Also, on her shop site, Nikola write a blog about her thoughts and experiences as a performer. Some of her posts that I found extra interesting was the Bridge Card Survey, and the one about the fear of close up. Take a peek at it!
Happy Holidays and best wishes for the New Year!
I hope that you and yours will be safe, and I hope that the pandemic will ease up enough during 2022 to allow performances again. Take care!
-Tom Stone
- Published in Featured
Impro for Storytellers
Keith Johnstone is the inventor of theatresports and in “Impro for Storytellers”, he writes about the importance of stories in improvisational theatre. He argues, that without interesting storylines impro simply degenerates into a loose collection of gags and becomes a lot less interesting. The same is basically true for most magic performances as well. A lot of what we do is interactive, where we break the fourth wall and communicate directly with the spectators. Which makes it a bit strange that many of us rely on “patter” and stocklines, so that the dialogue itself becomes a barrier between performer and audience. That becomes especially odd in close-up performances. I think it was Paul Harris who described it best: -“Wait a minute, I’m trying to have a meaningful conversation with you, and you respond by performing ‘patter’ at me?”
The reason that we rely so much on store-bought dialogue, I think, is because what else is there in our realm? We have to say something, all the theoreticians say we need to both have a script and rehearse it – but nowhere within our craft do we have the necessary tools for devising a compelling open-ended script. Well, until we get those tools, we need to look outside our own domain. And “Impro for Storytellers” is the best resource I’ve found so far. It is like a cookbook filled with techniques that can be applied directly on almost any magic performance. Obviously, since the main focus of the book is theater improvisation, not everything can be adapted, but there are still hundreds of techniques that can.
In improvisational theater you’re on a stage with no script and no idea what’s going to happen next. You’re totally reliant on your co-players and an audience is watching your every move. You can either open yourself to these circumstances and be present and aware of your co-players and surroundings or you can build up a number of defenses and try to play it safe. From that perspective, it is a bit easier in a magic performance, since we always have the magic routine to rely on as a safety net. Using the techniques in this book, you’ll be able to learn how to integrate the spectators’ reactions into the routines so that they becomes an essential part of the performance. You’ll learn to recognize and differentiate between audience responses that moves the action forward, and those that will lead to dead ends – as well of numerous techniques to ‘kill’ nonproductive threads. You’ll learn numerous techniques on how to weave separate isolated comments and events into something that feels like a consistent and planned show.
Most of the exercises in the book are designed to bring your awareness to here and now. Like, don’t worry about what you’re going to say in a minute – when a minute has passed, the scene may be going in a totally different direction. Focus on what’s happening right now with you and your audience. Being present here and now is a skill that can be obtained. And it’s a vital skill in performing strong material.
You can find the book at Amazon and many other places.
- Published in Hinterland
What’s in a name?
Warg, both the site and the name, is the amalgation of several disparate thoughts, discussions and events from the last 2-3 years. And since this new site desperately need contents to replace all the “Lorem ipsum“, I thought I should tell you a bit about the background.
For a long time I’ve had a primitive shop page as a subdomain at my regular site www.tomstone.se. The reason for the subdomain was that I didn’t want people to confuse my hobby project (the shop) for my actual profession (being a performer). But since my two books with Hermetic Press was published, the shop page have been more or less dead. All my new ideas since 2009 have instead been channeled out via my bimonthly column in Genii magazine. However, I’ve always intended to start up the shop again, because I enjoy writing, drawing and doing graphic design.
We have several really clever and creative magicians here in Scandinavia, but who has not got the recognizion they deserve yet. I’ve always thought that it would be nice to put the spotlight on them somehow.
For quite some time I have had the desire to learn more about filming, and since 2010 I have very slowly amassed all sorts of camera equipment, to the degree that I today have a small film studio in my home. And being a magician, the idea of shooting instructional magic films is close at hand. However, since my main focus is to learn to film, I need to be behind the camera rather than in front of it…
Two years ago, during a discussion with my friend Johan Ståhl, I mentioned that I planned to take up the shop again. Johan then suggested that I should make sure to separate the shop from my regular work even further. I.e. not using a subdomain of my regular site, but to come up with a whole separate name & site for it. He had several good points. Among those, the thought that a separate name gives a larger freedom in what I can do with it.
An odd side effect of all this is – Since this is a hobby project, I don’t really have to make a lot of profit. Meaning that I can offer a much larger percentage than usual to those I decide to work with.
So, after some thought, I finally decided to start a site where I can offer ebooks and video downloads. And I named it Warg.
The name is because I wanted to use the name of some animal. The intention of the site is to host a pack of scandinavian magicians, and what kinds of scandinavian animals are there that also is found in packs? Wolves is one answer. The old and ancient scandinavian name for wolf is “warg“. And, interestingly, “warg” is a word that J.R.R. Tolkien used in his fantasy books, so there are several tangents to magicial worlds here.
There are even more connotations involved. I’ll offer instructional ebooks and videos while beeing mostly self-reliant. And the most famous combination of instructions and self-reliance I know is a quote from a swedish cookbook from 1755: “You use what you have”. The name of the author is Cajsa Warg. The association between Warg and pragmatism is strong.
And finally, in George R R Martin’s series “A Song of Ice and Fire” (a.k.a. “Game of Thrones” ) the word Warg, also known as skin-changer, is the name of humans who can enter the minds of wolves and other animals. And if these instructions are done right, they will enter your mind and change the way you think.
So, that is what is in a name.
- Published in Featured