Extremely Extreme - Twice Nightly

As a kid I did do a lot of card stuff, but never got beyond basic sleights, really, as I liked ingenuity so I could concentrate on the performance, etc.

Later in life I got into juggling instead, and helped spread that craze far and wide, in the process generating students who far outshone me, and meeting people from other cultures who simply blew me away.

So the combinations you find in XCM (extreme card manipulation) profoundly impress and delight me, but I no longer have any desire to spend the time necessary to actually do that stuff. If you have no idea what I mean, look at Penguin Magic's demo video of the recent champions doing their thing.

It's come a long way from whenI saw Channing Pollock (live!) with his elegant moves...this vid starts with basics and ends with Freestyle!

Who was Channing Pollock I hear some people think... aw...

And of course, he didn't do it competitively, he just made a good living all over the world!

OK, OK, one serious flash at 2:50, but hey, he did this onstage...tv can be as cruel to card magicians (not XCM manipulators) as it used to be to ventriloquists!

Before all that was Geoffrey Buckingham, and I even saw Ron Macmillan do his award-winning billiard ball routine (YouTube doesn’t have everything, we didn’t always record everything back then!)

And, before my time, but much imitated, Welshman Cardini started the whole thing with his slightly tipsy Gent returning from a night out (makes sense of cards, cigars, billiard balls), as amused and confused by what is happening as we are. If you have ever been that drunk or stoned, you will empathize! An actor, not just a bunch of tricks...

Jeff McBride talking about it all

Of course, people filmed this from their Black and White tv, so you have to live with the quality of this 3 minutes

If you can bear it, here’s nine minutes

Not to put down the moderns, with great equipment and more time on their hands, but I remember being at a juggling convention when Karl-Heinz Zeithen showed some scratchy old video of Rastelli and Francis Brunn (also an acrobat and ‘flamenco’ mover), and these old films got standing ovations from a whole room full of jugglers...Here’s Francis with the great Jack Benny (making juggling ‘interesting’)

Here’s Francis (no embedding, but a clearer video - follow link to YouTube) in1969, at the age of about 47 – and remember this guy didn’t get one good take in front of his home video (after 100 takes) he did this stuff TWICE NIGHTLY.

Go practice....