The Regenerative Power of Amazement

"Magic" evokes amazement and astonishment. The above picture shows me amazing a couple of women at the Ithaca Farmers Market in Ithaca, NY. I love being able to give people the gift of this kind of laughter and amazement!

I believe one's life degenerates into an uncreative, dull necessity without amazement. The ability to be astonished, or amazed, allows us new glimpses into the ordinary, and opens doors to the extraordinary. This stimulus of astonishment keeps life fresh, interesting and vital in a society weighed down with practical necessity and routine.

It's HEALTHY to be amazed! People who are deprived of access to that experience, or shut it off within themselves, are likely to tire, become depressed, rigid, and lifeless. Amazement is a sign of vital life.

Take a moment to think back over your day today. Was there anything "magical" about it, or romantic? Did you look at some ordinary thing in a startling new way that gave you a smile or turned your head? Did anything extraordinary put you in a state of wonder today? Or was your day humdrum, routine, predictable and boring? We were not born to be 100% practical – we need some magic in our lives!

When you are in the grip of astonishment it is impossible to be tired. A tired life is a life drained of magic. It’s also impossible to be depressed. One thing I’ve noticed over the years of performing close-up magic for people: the moment of amazement is almost always accompanied by smiles and laughter.

People often ask me whether I know how other magicians do their tricks. Well, I know some, and there are a lot I don't know. Sometimes I don't know because of simple ignorance, but often (especially when it comes to large scale illusions) it's because I don't want to know. Why? Because I like being amazed just as much as I like amazing other people, and if I know I'm not going to be doing a particular trick myself, I will often times forego learning the secret in order not spoil that childlike sense of amazement that other magicians can evoke in me.

I’m blessed to have fallen in love with magic as a child. It has kept me young. I hope you have found the magic in your life, too, and that it continues to amaze and inspire you.

Wealth

Well, I'm sitting here in a hotel in Rutherford, New Jersey, the skyline of NYC visible 13 miles away. I have two shows tomorrow in New Jersey, both school assembly programs, presenting "Magic With A Message" -- the message is about bullying.

This is the trip I took last week when I got my schedule all screwed up and got a week ahead of myself. Today I made the drive again -- although not before double-checking on the date!

A very nice hotel maintenance staffer spent about 15 minutes trying to get my little DVD player hooked up to the room television. Finally succeeded when he came back with some new cables. Turns out my cable didn't have a long enough pin on the tip.

Good chance I won't be watching anything anyway. I have so much work I want and need to do (including writing this little blog post). And when I am alone in hotels I value the time spiritually, as a chance to go within, meditate, and connect with my true priorities. It's so easy to get caught up in the daily patterns and demands, as we all know. Being on the road is a great opportunity to step out of all that for a while, evaluate, think, and pray.

Tears came to my eyes on the trip here (an almost four hour drive), as I thought about how wealthy I am. Why is it that "wealth" is always immediately understood financially? Wealth means having an abundance, an excess, of what is highly valuable to you. I have close friendships that go back 40 years, a beautiful wife, and a wonderful 6 year old son. I have deer and wild turkeys right outside my livingroom picture window. A fabulous cat named Sushi. I am virtually surrounded with goodness.

I don't have financial wealth, and, frankly, I just can't get that excited about it, and have never been motivated to achieve it. My passions are for things that money can't buy. Do I want more money. Sure! But I never want to forget that right now, at this very moment, I am exceedingly more wealthy than Howard Hughes and so many other money-chasers in this world.

Amazing Mistakes

As a magician, I love to be amazed. Sometimes mistakes can be as amazing as successes. I amazed myself last week when I drove 200 miles on Tuesday for a gig on Wednesday morning. After 4 1/2 hours of driving I arrived at the hotel to check in, only to be informed that my reservation was for next week. I was flabbergasted! In disbelief I pulled out my contract and, sure enough, the gig was for the following Wednesday.

What made this even more amazing was that I had made the hotel reservation only the day before, and I made it for the correct date. I had also called the client and confirmed the gig a few days earlier. Nonetheless, I still drove 200 miles to a gig that wasn't until the following week!

I turned right around and drove 200 miles back to Ithaca. Crazy. At least I had my iPod with lots of interesting radio shows downloaded, so I wasn't bored on the trip. But it literally amazed me that my circuits could have gotten crossed like that. I must have been really revved to do that gig!

On the drive back home I was laughing with a friend about the experience. He was commenting, tongue in cheek, on how conscientious I had been to drive 4 1/2 hours as a dry run just to make sure I wouldn't get lost the following week when it was time to do it for real. How utterly professional of me to go so far out of my way as to make a 400 mile roundtrip just to measure the amount of time it would take me to get to the gig so I wouldn't be late the following week!

And, he added, how crazy!

My flub-up was a real life mistake, but when magicians make mistakes during their show it is particularly funny, because the magician is pretending to wield magical powers. The magician is supposed to be able to do incredible things almost effortlessly. So when a magician screws up, you can bet the audience is going to laugh!

Next time maybe I'll share a few hilarious magician mistakes that I've made and that I've heard about from others.

Heluva Good Cheese Magic

As you might expect from a company with a name like “Heluva Good Cheese,” my audience Saturday night had a hell-of-a-good sense of humor. I did some strolling magic from table to table before dinner, and then an after-dinner show of mentalism. It was a nice holiday party, and the only strange thing was that only about a quarter of the employees showed up to take advantage of the free meal and entertainment. The company is doing well despite the country’s tough economic times, possibly because they value their workforce enough to acknowledge them.

If you want to create magic in someone’s life, acknowledge them for something. My wife Sally Ramirez and I just celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary on December 4, which was a time to acknowledge a decade spent in each other's presence. Those are the obvious acknowledgements, of course, but if you’re like me there’s probably someone who deserves your acknowledgement right now, but you have been neglecting to give it. Wouldn't we be smart to go do that right away?

Cheers.

Mission Impossible

Well, those folks at Warren Real Estate in Ithaca know how to have a good time, and it's great to see people who work together also have fun together. We had a blast and they loved the magic.

Some of the comments they made that stuck with me:

"Hey Kate, you have to see this! This isn't just 'pull a coin out of your ear' stuff... this is incredible!"

"Are you a vampire?"

"Hey, could you make our commissions increase?" (Sorry, I don't do requests.)

After one trick a guy said, "I know that how one was done! That's a mathematical card trick."

He made this comment after I let someone shuffle the deck, and then I dealt cards to the table while spelling the name of whatever Ace he wanted. I spelled A..C..E...o..f...C..L..U..B..S.. and put down one card for each letter. When I turned over the next card, it was indeed the Ace of Clubs.
I asked him how it could be mathematical if the deck was shuffled, and he started into a long and complicated explanation.

"Well," I said, "I'll tell you what. The deck is still in a randomly shuffled state, so why don't you name another ace?"

He named the Ace of Diamonds and I magically found the Ace of Diamonds in a completely different way. I did the same thing with the remaining two aces, finding each one in the shuffled deck as he named them.

"So much for mathematics!"

He wasn't offended by being proved wrong, and I think that's partly because he was a nice guy, and partly because of the way I present magic. For me it's not about proving that I'm a superior being with the power to fool people. I'm not trying to get one-up on you, I'm trying to create an experience of wonder and astonishment for you. I'm trying to put you into another world for just a few seconds, a world in which you get to experience all normal rules and laws being cancelled, a world in which you get to experience the impossible.

Someone actually said that last night: "That's impossible!"

"That's my job," I replied. "Mission Impossible."

Spilling Wine on Michelle Pfeiffer

Tonight I'll be doing close-up "mingling magic" for the staff at Warren Real Estate. Amazingly, the owner of the company has my name: James Warren! When we first moved to Ithaca three years ago I kept seeing signs in front of buildings and homes all around town about "James Warren." I thought, wow, they really go out of their way here to welcome newcomers!

Well, they're not quite so extravagant as all that, but Ithaca is certainly the friendliest of towns, and I'm excited to be able to perform for some locals tonight since so much of my time is spent performing in other cities and states. And it's always so much fun to do "mingling magic," the sleight-of-hand magic that happens right in front of your face, which makes it that much more amazing. And I love the personal interaction with the people.

It's also fun because it is so spontaneous, and anything can happen: like the time I spilled wine on Michelle Pfeiffer's dress. Yep, you read that right -- Michelle Pfeiffer. It happened at a high-end restaurant in downtown Los Angeles where I was performing. Michelle and Robert Redford were filming a movie nearby and she came in for dinner with 8 or 9 crew members.

I did a trick that involved a card magically changing into another card, and I placed the card face down on the table so no one could see its identity. The moment I turned away someone reached out to grab the card. I didn't want it exposed prematurely to spoil the surprise, so I lunged for their arm -- and in the process knocked over Michelle's wine glass.

As the liquid spilled over the edge of the table onto her dress her entire entourage at the table became deathly silent. I held my breath as Michelle looked down at her dress. Then she looked up at the crew, shrugged, and said, "It's wardrobe."

Everyone broke into laughter at the wardrobe mistress' expense, and I could rush to the trick's climax in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Michelle Pfeiffer is a doll.

Stage shows are by-and-large rote matters; but mingling magic always yields anecdotes worth remembering!

Meditation Lengthens Life - Amazing Scientific Evidence!

Today I listened to an amazing interview with Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota. She was interviewed on Krista Tippett’s public radio show “Speaking of Faith.” Dr. Taylor became famous for bringing the heart of a dead animal back to life using stem cells. She works in a field sometimes called regenerative medicine.

I’m devoting my blog post today to this interview, first because I found it quite amazing (and as a magician I have a nose for amazing things and make it my business to find out about them), and, second, because I know it will be helpful for some who might read this entry.

This interview may have been just the push I need right now to propel me into some kind of serious meditation practice, which is something my wife has been suggesting to me for a decade now.

The first half-hour of the interview is all about stem cells and stem cell research. Then they broach the topic of meditation. And what is the connection between stem cells and meditation?

Stem cells are not the possession of fertilized eggs and fetuses only. Right now, even as I write, there are billions of stem cells in my blood, and many of them are being shipped in to various parts of my body to replace damaged cells. Our organs and tissues have stem cells that can repair them, which is why a skinned knee does not leave a scar. For most of our lives we have stem cells in all of our organs and tissues, and these cells are able to heal damage. They handle the normal wear and tear that our body suffers, such as the damage caused to the interior walls of blood vessels as a result of eating cheeseburgers.

Stem cells exist within our bodies throughout our lives until we get so old that we pretty much use them up. Skinning your knee at age 72 may leave a scar because as we age the number of stem cells we have go down, and the ones we do have are not as potent and have very limited functionality.

Dr. Taylor says that ultimately if our body takes enough hits over a long enough period of time we run out of stem cells. At any given time we have a certain number of stem cells in our blood. As we mistreat our bodies the number of stem cells in the blood increases to try to keep pace with the damage. Ultimately this fails, and then disease sets in. Dr. Taylor’s goal is to help us move backwards along this continuum.

How does all this relate to meditation? Stress ages your stem cells. Dr. Taylor says that decreasing stress means increasing the number of stem cells we have in our body.

I was amazed to hear that there is scientific data from some of the best laboratories in the world showing that the way a cell knows how old it is is through a little piece of DNA on the end of our chromosomes. This is called a telomere. Every time your cell divides that telomere gets shorter. After reaching a certain point it says, “Oh dear, I’m old now . . . time to die.”

Guess what. Stress makes that piece of DNA get shorter! Hearing this from a reputable, top laboratory scientist just blew my mind!

Even more incredible, there are ways to lengthen telomeres!

Dr. Taylor has done experiments with Mattieu Ricard, famous Buddhist and French philosopher who has worked with the Dali Lama (and is also a trained cell biologist). Ricard and several of his colleagues meditate while researchers at the University of Wisconsin measure differences in brain waves. Dr. Taylor predicted that meditation which produces positive brain waves changes would also have a measurable effect on your stem cells. Ricard agreed to allow cells in his blood to be measured before and after meditation. What they found was a huge increase in the number of positive stem cells. Dr. Taylor said it was the largest increase she had ever seen after only 15 minutes of meditation!

These stem cells are coming out of the bone marrow and entering the blood stream, meaning that they are available to the body for repair work. Bodily inflammation of any kind – whether the externally visible kind that develops from a skinned knee, or the constantly erupting internal inflammations in tissue, organs and blood vessels – Dr. Taylor says that inflammation is the body’s signal (we might say its Roman candle, its literal “flair up”) asking for the necessary cells to heal the damage. If your body is able to get the right cells to that location you heal; if not, the inflammation increases.

Meditation is essentially sending cells to the sites where you need them to deal with stress before it erupts into physiological inflammation.

Maybe the idea that meditation lowers stress and therefore lengthens life (all other factors being equal) is old news to you. If so, listening to this interview will at least arm you with an empirical basis for your intuitions.

Was it old news for me? Well, I have never doubted that various kinds of meditative practices bring health benefits. But that did not amount to the conviction necessary to sit down and actually start practicing.

I am impressed by scientific evidence. When they start measuring Mattieu Ricard’s blood cell level, and when they start getting down to the level of telomeres – their role in aging and their manipulability – I am impressed. And I am robbed of any excuse.

I can’t see how anyone can listen to an interview with Doris Taylor, care about their health, their body, and their inner rejuvenation, and not start working on integrating some kind of meditative practice into their life.

I highly recommend listening to this program. But here’s an important tip: when you go to the website, do not listen to the regular 50 or so minute show. Rather, download the entire one-and-a-half hour interview, available under “Unheard Cuts.” This version has no music, no announcer, no fanfare, no introduction – it’s just the entire uncut, unedited interview. I always listen to Speaking of Faith that way. You get so much more!

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/stem-cells/

Why Ripping Up Playing Cards Is A Beautiful Thing

In my first post I mentioned spending a couple of hours ripping apart playing cards in order to practice magically putting them back together. Some people may think you have to be out of your mind to spend hours doing such a thing, but that’s because they don’t see the beauty of it. There are indeed many ways to waste the hours of ones life, but most people would agree that responding to beauty is not one of them.

It always makes me sad when I encounter the occasional person in an audience who hates magic. Usually this is because they view it as a challenge: the magician is out to fool me, but I am not a person easily fooled and I’m not going to let him fool me. This attitude possibly stems from a previous encounter with a magician who tried to do just that – fool the person. There are, unfortunately, plenty of magicians out there for whom magic is an ego boost, who want to use their tricks to “conquer” the spectator, perhaps even demeaning and embarrassing the spectator, or at least projecting a condescending attitude. A sad business indeed.

There are also a few people who cannot handle magic no matter how it is presented to them, because they cannot tolerate the loss of control and the mental confusion that a good magic effect introduces into their otherwise neatly controlled and compartmentalized life. I actually had a spectator walk away in the middle of a close-up routine that I was performing for a small group, uttering the words “I can’t handle this. This is messing with my head.”

I find from my experience, however, that almost everyone loves magic. It cuts across generational, racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. Even without speaking a word, I could perform a trick for a child in America and a grandfather in China – and it would have the same appeal to both. Both would react with amazement, and both would smile because they are amazed. There is something beautiful in that. To get that amazement and that smile I find it worthwhile to spend hours ripping up cards and magically restoring them.

I also find it beautiful for another reason. Sleight-of-hand is beautiful in a way similar, at times, to mathematics. Lovers of math can and do spend hours working out problems. It’s a form of contemplation. They enjoy the search, the hunt for solutions. But they also fall in love with the beauty of those solutions when they are elegant, efficient, and clever. A solution to the problem of how to simulate the miraculous with a deck of cards or a handful of coins can have a similar beauty. I admire the oh-so-clever solutions magical thinkers sometimes come up with, incorporating a deviousness that just has to make me smile. In sleight-of-hand, as in math, less is usually more. One searches for elegance: the less secret moves one needs to resort to, the better. It’s a beautiful thing to contemplate how someone has constructed the illusion of a torn and restored playing card, eliminating awkward moves, introducing misdirection to cover necessary inconsistencies, using natural movements as a cover for secret maneuvers, and so on.

Of course, the beauty of method is something the average spectator never gets to see, because letting them in on it would spoil the illusion. And it is important that the magician never lose sight of the goal of the art: to give the spectator the gift of astonishment. It is possible, at times, for magicians to get too caught up in methods, perhaps preferring a particular trick because one is enchanted by its modus operandi, even though the illusion that trick creates does not generate much astonishment for spectators and cannot be made very entertaining.

Maybe at the end of the day magicians – at least working magicians such as myself – are engineers. Whether the method is elegant or not, we have to build the bridge. Magic for me is the art of astonishment. When someone hires me to entertain they will get humor, yes, and they will get audience participation, yes, and lots of fun: but what they’re paying for is an experience of astonishment. That is not true of all who perform magic. Some of them are comedians who do magic, and they are willing almost to throw away the amazement for the sake of the laugh. If laughter is main thing you’re looking for, don’t hire James Warren. When you hire me, there will be laughs, of course; but I’m going for the juggler – I want to blow your mind. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you're reading this, stop right now and take a moment to remember something you love to do that gives you a sense of beauty, something that might make a stranger think you've gone daffy. Then go out and do it on this Thanksgiving Day, and be grateful!

CRIMSON CD Party

I'm a mag-ician, but my wife, Sally Ramirez, is a mus-ician, an astounding vocalist, and last night I had a reason to brag. I attended a party celebrating the release of her new CD, “Crimson.” (It also happened to be close to her birthday so we celebrated that too.)



What a blast! Sally was in great form, surrounded by some of Ithaca’s most fabulous musicians. I say “her” CD, but it’s actually her collaboration with guitarist Doug Robinson, who also produced the CD. It was nice to be a proud husband, out of the performing limelight and just going along for the ride.

If you want to hear some fabulous latin jazz, take a listen to some samples from Crimson, by Sally Ramirez and Doug Robinson.


Sally with musician Joe Crookston, whose CD "Able Baker Charlie & Dog" was awarded "Album of the Year" by the International Folk Alliance. Joe, his wife Kathryn, and their daughter Josie are part of what makes living in Ithaca, NY, such a rich experience. If you've never heard Joe's music, you're in for a treat!

Making New Friends

In my first post I mentioned aging and its possible impact on the ability to perform sleight-of-hand magic. There's a story about Dai Vernon that has always meant a lot to me. Dai Vernon is generally considered to be the father of modern close-up magic. He was affectionately called "The Professor" by magicians because of his encyclopedic knowledge of magic. Born in 1894, Vernon lived in robust health right up until a few years prior to his death at age 98. He knew everyone who was someone in 20th century magic, including Houdini. He lived the colorful life of an expert magician obsessed with learning and inventing secret moves, and this passion even took him at times into circles of crooked gamblers and cardsharps in an effort to uncover their legendary concealed secrets.

By the way, there's a great book about Vernon's now legendary search to find a gambler, the only guy ostensibly capable of dealing cards directly from the middle of the deck – the "holy grail" of card sleights. The exciting and amazing story of this search is the subject of a book published recently called "The Magician and the Cardsharp," by Karl Johnson, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about the world of gamblers and cardsharps, and likes a hard-to-put-down narrative.

The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist

A bust of Dai Vernon ennobles the waiting area in front of the “Parlor of Prestidigitation” at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. That little niche is devoted to Vernon, and the wall is covered with photos. It wasn’t until I had been a member of the Magic Castle for almost ten years that I realized Vernon’s remains were in a small box resting on a ledge high up above those photographs. What a surprise to realize that although Vernon died the very year I joined the Magic Castle, so I never got to meet him, I had nevertheless performed almost 300 shows in the Parlor within earshot of his ashes!

I opened this blog with reference to a story about Vernon related to aging that has meant a lot to me. One night Vernon was seated at a bar in the Magic Castle next to magician Johnny Thompson. As I understand it, Vernon was already in his 80’s at this point, and he pulled out a couple sheets of legal sized paper filled with a list of names.

“What’s that?” Johnny asked.

“These are friends of mine in magic who have died,” Vernon replied. Certainly, that is one of the hardest things about aging: experiencing the loss of loved ones and friends, watching ones world shrink like a melting polar ice cap, dear bits and pieces cracking and breaking off here and there, leaving one progressively more and more alone.

Hearing this, Johnny offered condolences. Vernon’s response was inspiring.

“It’s okay,” he said, “I keep making new friends.”

There is magic in life when I open my heart to let life happen. And when I do, life continually renews itself, and creates fresh and amazing surprises.

Ciao.

The Blog Begins!

To myself I seem “normal,” or at least familiar. The fact that I am a magician is fun and exciting to me. But I also know the mundane, trudging side of my life, not to mention its very unmagical, all-too-often downers. Being a magician is all pretend; living a life is all too real. Nevertheless, people are fascinated with magic, and I am told that the daily adventures and misadventures of a magician would be of interest to many people. Thus this blog.

If you have ever wondered what it’s like to be a magician . . . well, I cannot answer that question in the abstract; I can only share what it’s like to be this particular New York magician on this particular day. If that sounds interesting, hang on for a bit and see where the road takes you.

As for my magic business, check out http://www.warrenmagic.com/. As for my magic life, stay tuned to this New York magician’s blog.

For my first trick, ladies and gentlemen, I will attempt to publish a new post every day or every couple of days. Eventually I hope to settle into a rhythm and a schedule so that you, dear reader, might know when to expect new posts.

In case you're curious, today Magic Man spent a couple of hours practicing ripping apart playing cards and putting them back together -- not with tape or glue, but with magic of course. (Yeah, I wish! Actually, simulating the piece-by-piece restoration of a playing card is a knuckle-busting feat of macho sleight-of-hand, especially the Hollingworth version I've been working on. I learned it back in 1995, performed it for many years, but had to relearn it today because I stopped doing it several years ago. Yes, it's easier to relearn than to learn the first time, but it's still no picnic. Sleight-of-hand's a bitch; and then you do it again.)

During this practice session I spent some time worrying about getting older, sadly anticipating (and trying not to anticipate) arthritic, gnarled fingers that will no longer be able to flick a Bic much less a playing card. Not that my hands are tending toward that eventuality -- but my imagination sometimes goes to places like that, even in the midst of laughter and joy.

Today I also spent some time playing with Nate, my six-year-old son. Speaking of flicking, we played a game that involved flicking plastic monkeys into a plastic palm tree. If the monkey hangs on, you flick a second one. When all four of your team-monkeys are hanging on, you win a banana. Hang on, my friends: I promise you no bananas . . . only the thoughts of a New York magician. Ciao.