Bill Montana Penguin Live Lecture

I knew of Bill Montana from the bizarre forums I frequent, I knew him to be a stand up guy, he's just given away so much good information there. His Dark History and Pitch Book Posts are must reads. And he gave me a copy of his spirit bell book for free just because I was curious. So I was surprised to see all the negative reviews on his lecture. I checked on the cafe for reviews and found it to be a bit more balanced, definitely seems a polarizing lecture, people either loved it or hated it. So with that in mind plus my personal knowledge of the man I decided to get this lecture.

After viewing I can see why so many people hated it, but in my opinion those people are idiots. I think the biggest problem for penguin's audience is the lack of a line of standard easy to reproduce effects. Not everything he does works perfectly but seeing as he aims to be real, that's the sort of thing you have to expect from real life. A lot of what he teaches lacks the ta-da moment of the sort of stuff we normally see from penguin. What it does have is the potential for a deeper connection and impact. Take his Pulse effect, where two or more peoples heartbeats synchronize. What's more personal than your heartbeat. Take the effect away from traditional performance venue and over into say a private reading. You do enough readings on readings and you'll see the idea of doing a little something before the reading to help get on the same mental page as the sitter and in less esoteric books it's often some simple mentalism trick. Instead use pulse and at the start tell them that you need to get lined up with them then after say "Two hearts beating in unison and where the body goes the mind follows."

The lecture also came with two PDF's, The Lotus Flower and Psychokinetic Plastic. Both are wonderful ideas that we get to see in use in the video.

Thoth's 27 Messengers by Craig Browning

Thoth's 27 messengers

So full disclosure, while I find no fault with the author from a technical stand point I do feel strongly about him as a person. So my review may be harsher than it needs to be. If not for the supplier I trust, the booklet, and the mention of Philmon Vanderbeck being the inspiration I would not have purchased this item.

So lets get right down to it, this is a reading method jazzed up with 21 card trick. And it is good. But it was good the first time I read it in the supplemental OORT. More on that in a second. There is also some fascinating history about the 21 card trick, from the introduction of 7*7*7. In fact pages 6 - 18 (more than half the actual content) seems to be entirely from other works. The details of the actual method matches my supplemental OORT word for word. The difference is one of formatting. The issue I have is I was promised a work based on an idea of Philmons not an exact copy of his work.

As for the actual works of the effect, theres a small fib on the ad copy for that as well. It says it uses just the major arcana but in actuality you also need 4 aces and a blank card. (I've never had a tarot deck that came with a blank card so their existence was news to me) So its a 27 card trick. One of the things I'd liked to have seen included is a way to scale it down. Its a math trick and should be work able with any multiples of three.

As for the bits of this tome not penned by others we have most of that space filled with a sample reading. Which I found to be well worth the page space. There's also a bit on what to do if the wrong card comes up or if a dark card is the one picked.

There is also one page devoted to the booklet. The booklet is a great idea in theory, but what you're given needs a lot of work before it looks professional enough to hand out to people paying for your services.

I'm not unhappy with my purchase, I've paid more for less. In the end I feel that you're better off spending a few bucks more on The supplemental OORT which has the exact method plus so much more.

If you found this review helpful or thought it sucked let me know in the comments.

Edit to add, I've been informed that the reason it has to be 27 and not something smaller like 12 or 9 is because that is the amount that will let you spell out any name.

Slate Killers by Bob Cassidy

I'll come right out and say that I don't think this was worth $20. I think you can tell Penguin thinks so too otherwise why tie on some unrelated info to the end, more on that later.

It opens with a performance, pretty strait forward. Bob opens on the history of the items as legit tools. Then he has a participant hold the slates while another person picks a word out of the dictionary. That takes the first 10 minutes out of 50.

Then cut to Bob alone at a table. He start by explaining how to justify the use of slates. Then he shows several ways to prove the slates blank and a few sample routines including how to to properly Hindu force. Here and there he sort of mentions other idea and methods without to much detail. Then he says his good byes and the screen goes black. This is at about thirty minutes. The last twenty minutes are about a threaded dictionary and a peek wallet.

It's good info but it could have been more rather easily. I think penguin realized that it was a little on the light side info wise for the price point or why add the threaded dictionary and wallet part. The threaded dictionary is a dictionary that lets you open it to the same place a participant did. Which in this context is kind of useless. Slates are not really a find out what the participant picked and mark it up that way kind of tool. It can be done and how to do it is sort of mentioned offhandedly but they definitely couldn't say they taught how to mark the slates after you know what spectator chose.

I think I would have appreciated him showing us how to make the slates, he just says to cut them out of DVD cases about playing card size. So making nice slates takes trial and error. His look really nice, the one's I've made so far are no where near as nice or as uniform. And so far I've ruined three cases. Just finding case that I could use was a pain. Most had that recycle symbol punched into them. I also would have like more info on handlings I thought of a few obvious options watching it that could have been added. I would also have like to see some info on presenting them as spirit contact tool seance style. You know actually delivering a message. The video really just shows them a reveal for standard mentalism.

If you found this review helpful or thought it sucked let me know in the comments.

Switchcraft Version 34

It's been over two years since I bought Switchcraft but I got an email today about an updated version and I guess a few emails must of went to spam because this is 4 versions past the last update I got. I've not read it yet but I know it'll be good. I just feel like mentioning this cause nothing else I've bought in all my magic time gets free upgrades like this. It's approaching 800 pages and it would have been all too easy for Elliott J. Bresler to release all this work as 4 separate books at $25 a piece. This work is way past being a good value for the price and would hurt no ones collection.

The Cairo Cards

The Cairo Cards are a marking system for business cards from Mevproshop.com. As most books on billet work suggest marking at least one billet and I liked the idea of the impromptu zener card effects, I decided to give it a go. I did find one review (http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/sutra120489.php) for it, before buying it. I'm not quite the fan that guy is. For me I'd say that my final verdict is "Great idea, iffy execution". In full disclosure I don't have a copy of MS Office, being a Linux user at heart I use open office and have no desire to buy Office, so my first complaint is most likely a result of that. The base copy before changes had some alignment issues, that carried over to printing, I printed them without changing anything to see how they fit on the cards, not well. I know that not every thing has to be perfect but the alignment is noticeably off from card to card, to the point where some of the text left a couple of cards. The way they are put togther fixing the alignment isn't too much of an issue but it is potentially tedious. I'm not too upset about that because I knew pre-purchase I was going to change a lot of the textual design.

Now the first thing I did after I got my files was open the file and try to spot the marking system, I had an idea while looking at them that proved wrong, and I had to re-read the secret part of the manual twice to get it, but once I did it's a pretty easy system to read. Now about my wrong idea, there was a fuzzy bit on each palm that changed a bit from card to card. This turned out to be the word "PROSHOP", that they are marked with the creators mark is not an issue in and of itself. The problem is that it was obviously added to each hand image separately which results in minor variations in placement and the biggest problem is the font is completely different from that already on the hand. A difference that is even clearer when printed out, I can't help but feel that it would be even more evident on a higher resolution that would result if I got the cards printed by a printshop. It's not an issue performance wise but I can't help but feel that I just don't want that to appear so blatantly on something I hand out to people.

As for the actual marking system I feel it's pretty good, it's biggest limitation is distance. It's hard for me to tell which is which after the cards get about an arms length away or in poor light, though the book does off a suggestion on a way to improve the visibility at the cost of deceptiveness. When folded all the possible marks are in the same quarter so as long as you fold that to the outside it's pretty easy to see which you have at a glance. I've tried out the first two of the three routines on people and it went well.

All in all what I got could have been better, and to get all the use out of it I want is going to take a bit of effort on my part. That said I'm basically satisfied with what I got as I got exactly what I was promised.

Cathy Shadow's Doing It For Real review.

Cathy Shadow's Doing It For Real, it's from Paul Voodini but while he may have wrote it down it's content is from another. Cathy Shadow is the pseudonym of a reader Voodini met a psychic fair. Which is important, as once you read the thing you may be tempted to balk at your purchase, but these are techniques used by a real worker as convencer of genuine power. She's someone with no magic or mentalism background and as such these demonstrations lack what some would call "the works" most of it boils down to real intuition. Which Voodini has long claimed a belief in. So if you're looking for the next big magic trick you won't find it here. While these pieces can definitely be use as part of a larger routine, I also like the suggestion that doing  these causally will help you better understand the thoughts, feelings, and emotions experienced by someone who is actually psychic. And remember that a fail now and then can make you seem more legit and you can always follow up with a sure fire hit.

Switchcraft supplements.

Just finished the supplements. There is some very very good stuff in there.  The quality is just as good as the main book and for the most part my complaints and compliments remain unchanged. Every thing is simple, strait-forward, and well credited. The problem I have remains the same, in order to achieve simplicity something else has to go and I feel that in this work good choreography is what is given up most often. I feel that nowhere is this more clear than in the Annemann for Everyone supplement. In order to do the Annemann switch deceptively he decides to add blocking. Reaching across the body and doing the switch behind the arm. While this works well for card cheats, I think performers should avoid it. It's bad choreography, it looks bad. It requires you to have something to reach for and if you knew you were going to need it why not have it on the side it needs to be on from the start.

I also kind of feel that it not really Annemann's switch anymore, at the very least you can't use it in all the same ways. With the Annemann switch you should be able to pick up a billet and hand it to someone and somewhere between  those two steps the billets has changed. Besides the bad choreography the simplified moves require more justification for your actions than a more difficult switch.

Good choreography does more than improve the look of things, it makes it harder to deconstruct latter. You don't want your spectator saying to their friends latter "Well he did do _______ so I guess he could have done something then."

If I thought of this as more than a beginners tome the bad choreography would be a larger complaint, but when you're first starting out doable deceptive moves are more important than flawless choreography. When I started in magic like most my original sources were a bit on the random side and one of the results is that I learned the push off double before a regular one. I have a pretty good push off which is a strong double but I spent so much more time alone mastering it than I would have had to do for the regular. Looking I'd have rather been doing magic for people than mastering complicated moves alone because performance skills take just as much time if not more to get the hang of. My audience management skills sucks.

Near the end of the the book there a lot of stuff on the Acidicus Novus peek. Which was a bit of a surprise after all that talk about how good switches are. I would have liked to see more complicated switches but no such luck. Now I know one's entertainment value is not based off the complicatedness of one's moves. As you can learn from the works of Paul Voodini you don't need any moves to be entertaining. But to advance one's skills and avoid plateauing one needs to do deliberate practice and that means practicing at a level above where you're at and learning from your mistakes (so some intermediate moves near the end would have been nice). If you love magic and mentalism as an art shouldn't your goal be to progress your skills. Just doing enough to get by is what you do for work, not for your passion.

One last note there is a mentalist I talk to from time to time on Skype and just about every time we even mention billets he has to tell me about this lecture he attended of a switch master who performed a switch for him that completely floored him. How much more powerful a switch can you get, in front of a mentalist at lecture where all you're talking about is switches. Talk about test conditions, do you need a switch that strong, probably not but I feel you should at least aspire to it.

Switchcraft by Elliott J. Bresler Review

There is no shortage of praise for or suggestions to buy Swithcraft. That plus all the extras put this on my radar a while ago but I lacked the surplus funds to get it. I finally got the push to go ahead and get it and I can't say I'm disappointed. 625 pages for $20 is hard to beat. I won't be reviewing all 625 pages as most of that is supplements and extras. This work is the result of one man's attempt at finding what he considers to be the best switch. Now I do consider the switch to be a necessary part of a mentalist's toolbox but I do not think I'd go so far as to say that all mentalism can be done with a switch. To me that would imply that the switch is superior to other moves. Sometimes you need a switch and sometimes you need a peek.

After a brief introduction most of the first 80 pages of Switchcraft are devoted to 13 switching methods. There are a lot of excellent pictures, enough that you could practically learn just from those alone. The basic switch is simple and strait forward and I would be surprised if you hadn't mastered it in 10 minutes of practice. There is a down side or two that I feel I should mention. First is that it requires two hands and the passing the billet back and forth twice which means you have to find motivations for all that. The second downside which is probably mostly personal preference can be remedied by the variation which the author calls "cumbersome" is that it requires my hands to be in what I feel are odd positions. To start the switch you have to bring the hand with the billet up into the empty hand, which means at some point the empty hand has to be above the one holding the billet. Playing around with it I just could not find a starting position where the empty hand was above the one with the billet that felt right and bringing the empty hand up and over feels off. These two complaints remain for most of the switches in the book. Are either of these two things really that big an issue, not really the first would be a problem if the book didn't have any effects in it and left motivating all to you, and the second is solved with a variation or being less picky than me. All that aside I have to say that these switches will get you out there doing mentalism faster than any other switch I have read and you can always practice the harder ones like Annemann's in secret until you're ready to switch your switches. I also would like to say that you should try them all out, because even if you don't like it on the page you might like it in the hands. Which happened to me with the second technique in the book.

So you've learned some switches now what, page 80 bears the title "Presentation options and sample routines". Here the author assures us again that with the switch we can create any mentalism effect imaginable shy of the spoon bend. But I still have not seen anything that makes me want to replace the peek I use with a switch. First he covers the switch as an out and even has an idea for an out for use with a truly unpredictable spectator. He also touches briefly on psych-forces and Dual Reality. Next up is switching as forces, which when you think about has some advantages of a change bag full of similar billets. The sample effect for this section is aimed at children, I can't say I've seen many children's mentalists. But if you like it I don't think it would be hard to ramp up to the appropriate levels for adults, plus no matter how much you say no someone always wants you to perform for kids. Then we come to actually reading billets which I thought was the mainstay of billet work. After a couple sample one-on-one routines (and a heads up where to find more) a separate section actually covers how to read the billets in secret. He limits himself to read methods that he himself has used successfully. With that bit of ground work covered we get a couple multiple billet multiple spectator type effects. I'm most of the way through at this point and going item by item would just be redundant. The book continues to page 125, which means the next 500 pages are free extra content.

I have to say that Elliott Bresler seems to go out of his way to give credit where credit is due and even where he came up with and idea himself he has a humble if you know a source for it or similar I'll credit it properly attitude. I know I complained earlier about wanting to get all the secrets I paid for and Bresler tries so hard to ensure that all the relevant info possible is included that he can get a bit repetitive. This is a work by a man who is enamored with the subject matter and it shows.

My final verdict is that Switchcraft is the best billet switching book for beginners out there but nothing in it is really intermediate or advanced. But it's probably needed, like the author says you don't see a lot of stuff concerning switches coming out.

I may review the supplements later, they build as they go, so I'm trying to avoid moving forward in them before I'm sure I've got a good understanding of what I've already covered.

Update: Just felt I should add that navigating the 625 pages of Switchcraft is very easy thanks to all the bookmarks.

If you found this review to helpful or you thought it sucked let me know in the comments section.

The Swami By P. Craig Browning

http://www.lulu.com/shop/p-craig-browning/the-swami/ebook/product-20536357.html

A free book on the use of the Swami, how could I say no. Let me start by saying that I don't like Mr. Browning at all. Seriously everything that I have say that's nice about this work wounds my soul. I've never found anything to disagree with him about the actual working of effects but just about any other matter we disagree on. You won't find me buying any of his works but I have a hard time saying no to something that's free. I've not read all his free works but I have read his free books on bizarre and seance work. This book on the swami is so much better than those two in execution. And it has actual effects in it which I don't recall those other two having. Some of the effects are from other performers other than Mr. Browning, a great boon to the tome. The effects all seem like they are good, can't say till I actually try them. And there is a going over of Acidus Novus, (this is the second place I've seen it taught and I wonder at the >$100 price tag of it if so many places have permission to teach for far less money) My biggest complaint so far is that the gimmick that he teaches how to construct unless you already own the tools would cost you more than just buying several pre-mades. And according to him the gimmick will last forever if taken care of so it's not like you'll have a lot of uses for the tool after you make your gimmick. My second biggest complaint is the same as for his other works in that there are some poorly edited points.

This is Mentalism Vol 2.by Rich Ferguson from Ellusionist

So nine effects that according to the Ellusionist website geared towards the serious mentalism worker. I mainy bought this as way to qualify for an LTD deck for the promotion that Ellusionist had when they released Blackmail and Lockdown. I didn't care to get Lockdown and so I just picked one of the other things I wanted that would qualify for promotion.(big fan of the eany, meany, miney, moe meathod) I ended up with "This is Mentalism Vol 2" by Rich Ferguson from Ellusionist. I'll do my best to not reveal to much but to give an honest review.

Vision:
Vision is a two prediction effect where you have two spectators think of something and you figure it out. Now there are several bits of business going on behind the scenes that make this effect work. I don't know if the really fast back and forth is just Rich Ferguson's way or if it's vital to the effect but it's not for me. Now this effect requires a force and depending on the force there's a chance the effect will half fail. Other than that all the rest of it is pretty strait forward and not too complicated. It's not a bad effect but it's not for me.

Psychometry Prediction
Three spectators think of something, write it on the back of a business cards and then seal them in coin envelopes and then performer mixes divines whose envelope belonged to who and what they wrote. Like the last effect there are several magic principles at work. You have to build a gimmick as well. There a lot of choreography going on here, and I've rarely had to blow away three spectators at once. So this effect seems like a bit much for something I may never use. It's a good effect and the principles are solid and one's a mentalist should know, but rarely can I think of a time where I've had the attention of more than two spectators. That said this could be scaled down but why would I want to go through all the trouble when the first effect on the disk is the same sort and doesn't require I build a gimmick for each performance.

Undercover
A person picks a word writes it down, the mentalist reads their minds. It's a gimmick based effect and rather strait forward and simple. Which means more than the ones before the impact of this effect relies on the performers ability to sell it. The principle could be use in other ways but here it used with a book. I know book tests are classics of mentalism but I don't like the idea of carrying around a book just for an effect, especially one like in this effect. In fact I don't like the idea of a book test in close up/strolling magic settings. I think they're better in more parlor or larger setting. If you could set this up in someone home and make it look natural and impromptu that would be awesome.

Hidden Key
Another book test with another gimmick, even if it is really clever gimmick it's still a book test. The gimmick in this one is a bit more complicated than the last but it has a longer life span. With all the ways out there to divine a word spectator has chosen I fail to see the point of carrying a book of any real size aound around unless you plan to use it to force a word.

Unwritten
A newspaper test. I can get much more behind this one in the field than a book test. This one requires you to make another gimmick but one that will last a very long time and that you make most of the way often enough I'd bet.

Way out of this world
It's a variation on the 'Out of this world' card effect. I'm not a fan of the OOTW effects to begin with and I can't say this one changed my mind any.

Recount
A bill test where the spectator takes $1 dollar bill and performer divines the serial number. A fair bit of prep required but once you have it all put together you'll be ready to go, just be careful not to spend your setup.

Lie to me
Probably my favorite effect on the dvd, although I'd may or may not use the lie detector like patter. Simple effect objects in a bag spectators each take one and the magician divines the who has the odd one out. Not really difficult but it is one of those effects where it takes acting because the performer doesn't know which one right away.

Wiregram
I'm kinda iffy on the inclusion of this on the DVD. I mean I'm sure if you own a wiregram then it's valuable information but if you don't well it does lose some value.

Blackmail by Bobby Motta From Ellusionist

http://www.ellusionist.com/blackmail-by-bobby-motta-and-peter-mckinnon.html

To me the biggest downside is that they give you six gimmicks and only five pieces of cardstock. They say the 6th gimmick is for practice and to use the matte side of the cardstock because it takes the writing better. But the problem is you can not erase the writing on the matte side. You can kind of erase it from the gloss side but it's still faintly there. I solved that by buying poster board and gluing two sheets together then cutting it into the right sized pieces. They say one gimmick will last 20 performances if you're not trying to conserve it. I believe that to be true from my playing around with it. But it only came the five pieces of cardstock not even enough to get a good practice going.

The up is it does what is said it would and does it well.

The DVD itself was good, about 45 minutes long, strait forward, nothing fancy, and ended with performance clips. They go over just about everything you could need to know to get started. And it offered some good routines, one of which is a stage routine from Bobby Motta.

It is very much a utility gimmick and not a trick and the more you know about mentalism going in the better. But I don't feel that you have to know a lot to use Blackmail but the more you know about it the better. You could buy it and just do the effects on the DVD, but it is a mentalism gimmick for use with mentalism effects. So the more you know the more use for it you have. Although as an out it packs much flatter than an invisible deck.

Update: I've been doing the lottery routine from the DVD and basically just playing around with the gimmick and so far it has only failed once and that was after it was damage in my pocket and I decided to keep using it just because it was my practice one and the damage was only at the top inch of the gimmick and I figured I keep away from that part. But other than that I'm loving it.

If you found this review to helpful or you thought it sucked let me know in the comments section.