Aloha 🌺

Thank you for the site so far, it is, pound-for-pound the best writing about magic in the modern world. And it's one of the only resources for the non-professional performer.

I have to say, I have been surprised by the number of things that you've written that sound like something I wrote somewhere, or said to someone, just recently. Don't know what that means, exactly, but there it is.

—Curtis Kam, October 21st, 2015

This was Curtis Kam’s first email to me, sent about a decade ago. I think I joked with him afterward that saying, “Your writing is brilliant—it sounds like something I’d say,” is a bit like saying, “Your body is fantastic… and so similar to mine!”

Curtis was a regular reader and early supporter of the site. He would write to me a few times a year to give some insight into something I’d written about, or just to say he enjoyed a particular post. He was a bit of a rarity: known primarily as a coin magician, yet fully aware of how underwhelming and meaningless coin magic can often feel. That kind of self-awareness is uncommon (and valuable).

Curtis passed away just recently. Others are better positioned to speak to his contributions to the art—and to the kind of person he was. But I wanted to pause the regularly scheduled posts to take a moment and remember him.

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Here’s a post inspired by one of his emails: The Curtis Kam Judo Switch

And below is my review of his final Penguin Live lecture, excerpted from an older issue of the Love Letters newsletter.

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Dear Curtis Kam,

Hey, brother-man! How’s it hanging? Decent. Decent.

I wanted to write to you about your recent Penguin Live lecture. I have to be honest with you—I only begrudgingly watched it. I just really don’t like coin magic, generally. It’s like the worst parts of all magic tricks: long, multi-phase routines; the same thing happening over and over; no real purpose to any of it. It’s rare for coin magic to get the kind of reactions I’m looking for when I perform. But if you like polite applause, then buddy, you’ll love coin magic.

“This coin turns from silver to copper.”
<clap clap>
“Now this one does.”
<clap clap>
“And finally this one.”
<clap clap>

Mildly impressive tricks done repeatedly is almost the definition of a coin routine. Here’s the thing… if that first moment got a big response, that’s all you’d do. You wouldn’t repeat it four more times.

Then there’s this dumb thing people in magic say: “People like tricks with money because people care about money.” Like… okay. I guess it’s true that people care about money. But I don’t think they give a shit about your pocket change, dum-dum. The concept of money in general doesn’t automatically drive people crazy. How do you think anyone survives working in a bank? You think they’re just flipping out every time they deposit someone’s cash? “Oh my god! 140 dollars!”

People care about their own money. They don’t care too much about yours. Would you do cigarette magic with pregnancy tests just because pregnancy tests mean something to people? That would be weird.

Coin magic might benefit from being more of a novelty for some people. Other than pulling a coin from behind someone’s ear, coin magic isn’t something most non-magicians are familiar with—not the way they are with card magic. So that might win you some points the first time or two you show them a coin trick. But when we’re talking about performing long-term for friends and family, the novelty wears off, and quickly the effects all blend together in people’s minds. Which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

But you know all this. I feel like your work has evolved to address these issues. And your lecture had a number of tricks that break the typical coin magic pattern—and the ones that don’t are at least playing with the form.

There was one trick in particular that I really enjoyed. I’ve made a couple tweaks to it that I think make it cleaner—and maybe even a little more interesting. And that trick is…

Curtis Kam’s third Penguin Lecture is over two and a half hours long and contains 12 tricks.

Before I get to my favorite one, here are a few other effects in this lecture that I really enjoyed:

CoinRoll: This is a coins across routine, but instead of the coin traveling invisibly from hand to hand, it travels in the form of a small silver ball that rolls from one hand to the other. So, you start with three coins in your left hand, and an empty right hand. You close your hands and a little silver ball rolls out from your left hand, across the table, where you pick it up with your right hand.

Now you have two coins in your left and one in your right. (No silver ball is in sight.) This is repeated two more times until all the coins have gone across.

I was just bemoaning coin tricks where the same thing happens over and over. Well, for this trick, that might be necessary. It’s such an abstract idea that the first phase won’t be as appreciated as it should be. You need to give them some time to wrap their minds around the concept first.

I don’t know that I’ll ever perform this, but if so I would likely do it as a follow-up to a standard coins across. I might not even perform the standard coins across myself. I might show them a video of someone else doing it. Then as a “peek behind the curtain” I will perform this trick and say that either I’m “slowing down” the procedure so they can see how it’s really done.” Or that I might say that I’m working my way up to be able to do it as quickly as it’s done in the video so the silver ball is never seen.

The Lawyer’s Tale: This is a weird coin logic puzzle type thing with a finish that I think is magical. But I can’t be 100% sure. I don’t know how normal people will react to it. It’s a grower, not a shower. It’s a “thinker.” I think your audience has to be not too dumb, but also not too smart for this one to really hit home. I fall right in the sweet spot for this, so I found it weirdly intriguing.

You might watch this and say, “I don’t get it,” or, “That’s obvious,” depending on how much smarter or stupider you are than I am.

The impromptu version is better than the gimmicked version, in my opinion. Which is good, because while this isn’t the sort of trick I would prepare to perform, it’s the sort of bar-bet/trick/story that I could see myself performing when out with people and we have some time to kill.

Science Project: This is a vanish of 12 coins at once—6 quarters and 6 half dollars. It uses some additional “arbitrary” items. But the particular items he chose all have a kind of “romantic” element to them and I think it sort of adds to the magical-ness of the effect.

✿✿✿

The trick that I was drawn to most from the lecture is called The Impossible Is Now.

Here is how it’s described on Penguin’s site…

A coin, a ring, a dollar bill, and a trick in which the audience is told when the magic is happening, but they don't believe it until it's not happening anymore.

So now you know what the trick looks like.

Okay, no, you don’t.

But I’ll tell you what the trick looks like when I perform it, which is somewhat different from how Curtis does it.

When I’m out with someone, I tell them I want to give them a gift.

I pull out a little wrapped present from my bag. It’s about the length of a cigarette.

“Actually,” I say, “There are two gifts here. There’s the physical gift wrapped up here. And then there is the mystery of this gift.”

I have the person I’m performing for remove their ring (if it works for the trick), or I’ll take off one I’m wearing.

“This is the mystery part,” I say. And I thread the present through the ring and have them slide the ring back and forth along the present. “It might not seem like much of a mystery, but it will.”

I ask them to pinch one side of the present. I slide the ring off the other side and set it aside.

I make very clear my hands are empty, then I take the little present from them.

I rip off the two ends and let them drop to the table.

I hold one end of the wrapping paper, which starts to unroll. (It’s a piece of wrapping paper about the size of a dollar bill.) It unrolls and the object inside reveals itself. It’s a half dollar. (Something that, obviously, can’t fit through the ring.)

I then give them the half-dollar to keep. A “lucky” coin as the second part of their present.

✿✿✿

Okay, so when Curtis does this he takes a dollar, rolls it up, pushes it through the ring, then unrolls it to show a half dollar is now in the bill.

While I was taken by the trick when I first saw it, there was something about it that didn’t sit right with me. After a little thought, I realized what it was. If you’re making the half dollar “magically appear” in the dollar bill, then the part with the ring doesn’t really matter. Because you could have made it “magically appear” after it went through the ring. Does that make sense?

I think the reaction is less clean than it could be. “I saw him roll up the dollar and there was no coin in it. And that coin can’t fit through the ring.”

With this “Little Gift” presentation, you’re telling them there’s something inside the wrapping paper. In this case the reaction is a little more straightforward. “That thing in there couldn’t have been in there.”

Beyond that, I think the gift presentation is just generally a little more interesting.

And it feels cleaner to me. Your hands are absolutely empty. The present is sealed. They’re holding onto the gift. There’s nowhere for anything to be other than inside that present.

This trick requires a gimmick a lot of you already own. And you’ll need a regular ungimmicked coin to switch in.

I’ve been carrying this around in my computer bag while I’ve been testing it out. I roll the little present at home and seal up one of the ends with tape. When it looks like the opportunity to perform this might arise, I load the present and seal (or reseal) the other end.

Ideally I’d like to carry this ready to go at a moment’s notice, but I’m not sure that would be good for the gimmick. I’ll have to test if the gimmick still works as it should if it’s inside the package for a day or a week or whatever.

Curtis Kam’s Penguin Live 3 is available for $40 from Penguin Magic.