Close-Up

Harry
Lorayne died last month.  He was 96.  Most people, if they were familiar with his
name, would have thought, “Oh, the memory guy,” because that’s what he was
famous for.  He’d tell you it wasn’t a
parlor trick; he could teach you how
to exercise your memory, and he did it in corporate seminars as well as on
Johnny Carson – twenty-four times – I’ve Got
a Secret , Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Good
Morning America , the list goes on. 

For
me, though, Lorayne was a close-up card magic guy.   He wrote ten or a dozen books about it, one
of them, The Ha-Lo Cut , explaining
his single most useful sleight, which is essential to performing Gary Ouellet’s
show-stopper of an effect, Finger On The Card.  
(This is inside baseball, Gary Ouellet another influential popularizer
of close-up.)

A
vocabulary note.   Magicians don’t perform
tricks .   They perform effects .   And the dizzying variety
of lifts, palms, forces, counts, spreads, peeks, breaks, culls, and false
shuffles are called sleights .   Any given effect can involve one or many
sleights.  

Buddy Karelis .   Buddy Karelis was a classmate and a pal of
mine, who lived out in Belmont ,
a bus ride away.   We were both into
magic, but we were at the age where we were more into gimmicks, not sleights,
per se.   We were ten.   I can pinpoint this, because I remember watching
Davy Crockett and the River Pirates
together, a two-part broadcast event of enormous significance.   (Davy had gone down at the Alamo
the year before, the Mike Fink riverboat episodes were a prequel.   Disney recognized a merchandising bonanza
when it presented itself, coonskin caps, “flintlock” muskets, and lunch boxes,
we had ‘em all.)   Buddy and I were gear
freaks, always getting new stuff to show off to each other, a lot of it mail
order: spring-loaded paper flowers that compressed into a wrist-held clip, and
exploded into a full bouquet; Chinese boxes, where giant dice changed spots, as
you slid them back and forth behind their doors; the baby guillotine, where a
finger in the upper slot was magically unhurt, but dad’s Chesterfield in the
slot below was sliced in half.  

Daddy & Jack’s .   Daddy & Jack’s joke shop was on Bromfield St. , off
Tremont, behind the Parker House.   Like
its cousins, Little Jack Horner’s, and Jack’s Joke Shop in Park Sq., they were
nervous about kids coming in, because the back of the house was adult
novelties, but they were serious enough about magic to have guys behind the
counter who could demonstrate effects.   A
lot of the tricks were gaffed, like a Svengali deck, with shaved cards, so if
you reverse a card, you can strip it out.  
This isn’t magic, in the classic sense, because A) anybody can do it,
and B) it’s no mystery how it’s done.  
Magic is when the ordinary is made to do the impossible.   The punchline of a joke, the reversal of
expectations.   The reveal .                                       Carl Bertolino, house magician, performing at Little Jack Horner's:

David Reddall .   Dave Reddall, an adult pal of mine, and another
mystery writer, as it happens, comes by the house one afternoon, and out of the
clear blue, whips out a deck of cards and does – I don’t remember – maybe the
Elmsley Count, or something like.   I’m
watching with my mouth hanging open.   I
haven’t done any magic in something like twenty-five years, and I’m astonished
not only that he’s into it, but that he
hasn’t said anything about it before .  
It takes me back to Buddy Karelis and Daddy & Jack’s.   Dave is amused and gratified to find a
kindred spirit.

On his
recommendation, I buy a couple of Harry Lorayne’s books, basic sleights,
passes, double lifts, shuffles, card control.  
This of course leads to Erdnase, The
Expert at the Card Table , as annotated by Dai Vernon – acknowledged by and
large to be the best living card handler, at the time – and the book sets me
back something like $75, which seems like serious money.   But what I come to realize is that I’m not
particularly interested in performing
the tricks.   I’m interested in the
process, the method .   It’s the sleights
I want to learn, the techniques.   I don’t
care that much about fooling people.  

Looking
back, I see a development, maybe what I’ve thought about before as The Approach
To The Canvas.   I was just a kid when I
saw Blackstone (Harry, Sr., not Harry, Jr.), and it was a marvel.   Years later, I saw Doug Henning, also a
terrific showman.   But quite recently, I
saw a guy named John Carney, who’s among the best current close-up card people
(and who did in fact study under Dai Vernon), and I have to say, seeing
somebody do close-up, in a fairly intimate setting, is enormously more
satisfying than seeing a big stage show.  
It’s not the circus, it’s just for you .

 
And
watching close-up, literally close up ,
isn’t so much about being manipulated as it is being invited into the performer’s
confidence.   There’s a sense of
participation.   I might suggest a link to
the notion of craft , that much of it
could be said to be hiding in plain sight.