Beyond Deception, Volume 2
From the Wizard's Corner
Several years ago, Jeff McBride came to me and the rest of the team at the McBride Magic & Mystery School with a new project. He wanted to be the first to offer a regular weekly broadcast tailored just for the magic community. We - Jeff, Eugene Burger, Larry Hass, George Parker, Bryce Kuhlman along with Leo Diaz, Tim Wise, Jordan Wright and several others, committed to do a weekly contribution to the show. For the first few, we were all on our web-cams live each Monday evening, usually unscripted, but following a particular theme. It was challenging. We eventually came to a place where Jeff would host the show "live," but the rest of us would provide a 5-7 minute prerecorded segment each week. With every show we worked to raise the production level just a bit, until we reached a point where we each had fully developed pieces, shot in high definition video, with good sound, and against thematic backgrounds. My segment is The Wizard's Corner, which is where the sub-title of this volume comes from.
Each week, we agree upon a theme, and each of us writes up and produces a segment on that theme. After about two and a half years, I realized I had over 100 essays, most of which, with just a bit of re-writing, might be of interest to a wider community in magic. This book, Beyond Deception, Volume 2: From the Wizard's Corner, is the result. I've taken my favorites of the scripts and expanded them a bit, editing them so they are more readable than the original scripts, which were designed to be delivered verbally on camera, and not for reading.
I hope you'll enjoy reading my thoughts here, and that they will invite you to re-consider your own thoughts and ideas about our art. It's only by that kind of continual questioning, continual re-evaluation, I think, that each of us continues to move forward, in our own careers, and in our ability to help raise the bar for the art we all love.
