Michael Kras
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Gross!!!!Here's an intriguing question... to those of you, like me, who wouldn't touch geek magic with a 10000000 foot pole... If you had to perform ONE geek effect, what would you perform?
For me, it would be Pop-Eye... a truly disgusting effect in which you pull your eye out of the socket.
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Dbaker
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Well, there are two "geek magic" effects that I use occasionally - though neither is used in the "Maynian" context.
Bleeding Hearts (by me): Magician slices his arm with a selected playing card. As blood runs from his wound, he cleans it away with a paper towel. The blood has stained his arm and has left an impression of the selected card's initials (7C, 9D, etc.)
and
Pocket Sawing in Half (by Andrew Mayne): At some time during the performance, the magician chats about sawing people in half. As a gag, he takes out a piece of paper with a silhouette of a man and holds it in front of his torso. he then has a spectator cut the paper across at the same height as his waist (cutting the picture's waist as well). Ta da! we've cut a man in half! The magician then turns sideways to reveal that his torso and waist have separated by nearly 12inches. After "pulling himself together" he moves on to the next effect.
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Craig Browning
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Re: Gross!!!! | Michael Kras wrote: | Here's an intriguing question... to those of you, like me, who wouldn't touch geek magic with a 10000000 foot pole... If you had to perform ONE geek effect, what would you perform?
For me, it would be Pop-Eye... a truly disgusting effect in which you pull your eye out of the socket. |
Weenies!
My biggest inspiration in life was the later Richiardi... his Buzz Saw was the most gruesome of the day... blood spewing everywhere. For most all of my career doing big illusions I featured the Buzz Saw, Rock styled Guillotine and the Cremation in my fall season shows and the public ate them up! I was also the first to have "blood" spill with the Impalement illusion.
Macabre Magic has been around much longer than this white-washed "society" oriented stuff that Houdin fellow introduced to the world... go look up the Hindu Rope Trick and how it was original presented (i.e. chopped up kid parts falling to the ground). Or better yet, the decapitation of livestock and switching their heads; that goes back to the early days of Egypt.
Ok... I'm teasing you guys but the point remains that the history of magic is rife with such demonstrations and acts of being a human oddity (just look at Criss Angel or David Blaine and how well they keep up that particular side of things -- both of them genuine oddities). It is something to be learned about and understood from both, the psyche of the performer as well as the audience... don't fear it, LEARN ABOUT IT. Such things can prove very enlightening. 
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