"This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end. No safety or surprise, the end.” – Jim Morrison, The Doors.
Is the Mayan calendar predicting the end of days correct? Maybe yes and maybe no. But why tempt fate? When is the last time you said that you would do such and such, “if it is the last thing I ever do,”? Well, time may be growing short my friend and now could be the time to do that “last” thing. Whether it’s talking to a long lost friend, forgiving someone, or telling someone you love them, now is the time for all good men (and women) to do what needs to be done. But if December 21st comes and goes with a fizzle, then by doing that “last thing” will be one more thing you can cross off your bucket list.
But one thing is for sure, it is the holidays and I want to celebrate the season and also my one year anniversary of The Magic Word with 77 podcasts in the archive since August 10, 2011. Okay, my calendar is off and it’s actually more than one year. Maybe I have a little Mayan blood in me. So this extended podcast is my holiday gift to you.
This podcast is “Ginormous”, as my grand daughter, Sarah, would say. It is definitely epic with interviews with magicians from around the country, over the border and across the ocean. I talked with a sampling of 15 magicians whom you may know and some you may not. But the variety of topics and their perspective on each subject is more than just a little fascinating. I focused our short chats on their areas of expertise.
But it seems that I was more than just a little ambitious in trying to keep these “brief”. And in the end, I had nearly five hours of interviews. So, rather than uploading this in one long “Ginormous” podcast (at over 130MB), I broke it up into smaller bytes of five, back-to-back podcasts. They are mostly unrelated to one another; however, there is a thread that goes through some of the discussions: the importance of youth involvement in our art to ensure the life, health and future of magic.
To make it easier to locate the chat(s) with the people you want to hear, here is a time chart of where we start the conversations with the following people in this Part One:
00:02:12 – Richard Kaufman, editor and publisher of Genii Magazine, gives us a peek at The Genii Speaks column for January 2013 where he talks about the death of printed magazine and the rise of digital editions. Plus we talk about the rise and fall of desktop publishing in magic and its evolution into less writing and more talking and performing on videos on sites like YouTube http://www.geniimagazine.com/
00:28:58 – Marc DeSouza talks about the magic lecture circuit: the importance of what is being taught, the difficulty of going on tour, and the level of interest and attendance at lectures.
00:45:57 – Banachek discusses the state of magic and mentalism on television now and in the future. http://www.banachek.com/
