By Brian Park
Executive In-depth Editor|
What is magic?
Magic- the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces
In today’s society, however, I feel magic is greatly undervalued. If people want to start magic, they go look in the hobbies section to learn magic tricks. However, I can tell from experience that many kids and teens in today’s society never had been interested in magic due to the rise of videogames and TV shows that constantly preoccupy them. From my memory, I have rarely seen magic tricks performed live in front of me from the countless number of people I have met in my lifetime.
People who perform magic are called magicians, or illusionists. When performing magic, magicians create miracles by their performance, chatter, and sleight of hand.
When magicians have a flawless performance without tensing up or spilling cards all over the floor, the audience is able to recognize their skills.
With clear chatter, or description of the trick, the audience will able to understand how the trick progresses, won’t get distracted or wander off, and ultimately be amazed when the trick is shown at the end.
And finally, sleight of hand is dexterity in the hands that allows magicians to perform moves in front of spectators without them even knowing. This is basically the “secret” part in magic.
I bet many people only know Houdini as the greatest magician of all time and do not know of some of the great magicians living among us, such as David Blaine, David Copperfield, and Chriss Angel, which is unfortunate. Some people actually might actually be able to recognize David Blaine from his most recent crazy stunt in New York City, “Electrified: One Million Volts Always On ” where he stood within an one million volt artificial lightning storm for three days while wearing a chain-mail suit, ending on Oct. 8. See this here!
To me, magic is an opportunity to amaze people while interacting with them. I love seeing the reactions of people to whom I perform to, but most importantly, magic is to bring other people happiness.
By the way, all you need to start learning card magic is a deck of cards. They are available at Walmart, Target and Walgreens, and I recommend Bicycle brand playing cards for beginners.
So while you’re still learning the basics, here’s a 11-part TV program featuring the amazing magician David Blaine to spark more interest in magic.
Part 1:
And here are some simple, beginner magic tricks to amaze your friends and family without any sleight of hand. But be warned, some of them can be pretty awesome, but they aren’t the coolest tricks ever; I might get to those later.
Jack the bounty hunter:
Magician’s force:
Every video blog I do will include a question for myself to answer, sleight of hand tutorial, and links to videos of magic tricks that can be performed by watching the tutorials and practice!
The next question is: Why start magic?