James Brown Lecture - Northern Magic Circle Spring Parade 2009

April 5th, 2009 by Richard Morrell

James Brown has amazing self belief coming from his thinking that he doesnt mind failure and likes to take risks to pull off a great moment of magic. He talked about his way of working, and then ran us through three very strong card effects.

The first was a Thought of Card to pocket, James placed a mystery card in his pocket where one card was peeked and another named and James used the named card to try and reverse engineer the peeked card, he then pulled the named card from his pocket.

Caught Three Times is a trick based on John Careys Slo Mo Collectors. James had three cards chosen and placed back in seperate parts of the deck, then two court cards were placed face up in the middle, and slowly, and one at a time the three selections materialised in-between the court cards.

In The Hands Sandwich was a take on a plot twist I first saw Kostya Kimlat use in his collectors routine, and I believe Gary Jones has a one card handling, simply two sandwich cards are placed on a box, a selection made and meanwhile the sandwich cards have vanished off the box to appear back in the deck surrounding the selection. James prefers to make as much of his magic happen in a spectators hand so has changed the handling slightly, puttiing the sandwich cards onto a spectators hand, so that after the selection has been made the card sandwich instantly appears on their hand.

James ended the lecture by saying that he didnt care if he messed up and took that philosophy with hecklers, after all he wanted his magic to be fun, and to have fun in doing it, it was a great sentiment to end a fun lecture.