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theChicago SessionChicago SessionChicago SessionSimon Aronson, John Bannon, David Solomon

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It’s a bright and breezy Saturday afternoon on the North Side of Chicago. Simon Aron-son, John Bannon, and David Solomon amble northward on Clark Street toward Frances’ Deli. An attentive waiter ushers them from the front door, through a bustling cluster of tables, to a corner booth. Menus are studied, Denver omelets and corned-beef sandwiches emerge from the kitchen at regular intervals, coffees are refilled in a steady stream. All the while, happy patrons downing sodas are unaware that the three men near the back of the room are responsible for some of the best close-up card magic of the last thirty years.

Aronson, 64, came to Chicago from New York to study law at the University of Chi-cago. He recently retired from a successful career in real estate law. Bannon, 50, grew up in Virginia (among other places — his father was in the navy), and practices law with a firm headquartered in the Sears Tower. Solomon, 64, is a print broker and Chicago native. He lives in suburban Highland Park.

An impressive list of credits follow members of the trio wherever they lecture, wherever they session. In the 1980s, Aron-son and Solomon collaborated on Sessions; subsequently, both have published multiple best-selling volumes on card magic (Try the Impossible is Aronson’s latest, while Solo-mon’s well-received The Wisdom of Solomon was released in late 2007). Bannon’s books, including 2005’s Dear Mr. Fantasy, are also regarded as neo-classics. And the list goes on: all three have substantial bodies of work in the arena of video, have released successful marketed effects (Red See Passover, Twisted Sisters, Printing on Demand), and contrib-uted to countless magazines.

Informally, the triumvirate has been dubbed “The Chicago Session.” Its weekly meetings sprang from the void left by Ed Marlo’s death in 1991. Every Saturday, Aronson, Bannon, and Solomon gather to talk about card tricks. The contribution each has made to the field is unquestionably substantial. Their passion for the subject is unceasing and their reputa-tions impressive. There is a relaxed atmosphere among the three old friends, but even after twenty years they continue to challenge one another, butt heads, and bust chops. Cards are on the table before the ice water arrives.

A waiter approaches the table to take their orders. Aronson goes first: “I’ll have the breakfast skillet, easy on the potatoes, but with lots of veggies. Load it up. Just remem-ber, easy on the potatoes. If there’s too many potatoes, I’ll send it right back.”

The waiter turns to Bannon, who requests “The Cajun burger with cheese, but oth-erwise plain. No lettuce, no tomatoes, no onions. Just plain. With fries.”

And for Solomon? “N’awlins chicken salad.”

The lunch guests at this meeting of The Chicago Session, GABE FAJURI and ADAM RUBIN, staged the following interview amid a table full of plates, cups, French fries, ice tea, and breakfast skillets. Between mouthfuls of food, they tried to uncover what has, for nearly two decades, kept the magic and ideas as fresh as the coffee.

MAGIC: The beginning is a good place to start, so the first question will be about your childhoods. Who was your favorite magician as a kid?ARONSON: Dunninger, and that’s because I was really intrigued with the mentalism, even back then. I started mentalism at sixteen or seven-teen, and I kept reading books that told me kids couldn’t pull off mentalism. Dunninger had his own show and the things that impressed

me about Dunninger were two qualities. First, he had a way of blowing everything up. Every trick he did was a blockbuster. He didn’t do little magic, and he really had the people seeing the size of it all. Second, because of the mental-ism it was totally hands-off. You didn’t get the feeling of him doing much, so the impossibility shows through. BANNON: For me, it was Woody Landers. I was in high school, and Woody would come down from Richmond to the magic club. He would have read everything, bought everything, prac-ticed everything. He knew everything there was to be known at that particular time. He was actually very good. He would fool you really bad and then teach you how it worked.SOLOMON: The best magician I ever saw was Fred Kaps, on Ed Sullivan. The other one that I love is Ricky Jay, who’s a tremendous influence on all of magic, including card magic.

MAGIC: But now we’re talking about influences, about whose hand has guided and shaped magic. Continue, please. BANNON: The two biggest influences on the modern close-up performer persona are Don Alan and Paul Harris. If you look at anybody who does card tricks — and I mean anybody — I would say it’s a reasonable proposition bet that they will use a line that originated with Don Alan, and one little goofy thing that was authorized and sanc-tioned by Paul Harris.SOLOMON: And one move that was invented by Edward Marlo.

BANNON: The other guy who had a lot of in-fluence was Martin Nash. You watch those Martin Nash tapes and you hear all these lines that you’ve heard forever and they turn out to be his.ARONSON: John’s talking about presentation. When you talk about Marlo you’re talking about first methodology, and second, if you want to step back a meta-level, how to think about magic. I think the Marlo stuff was much more about not giving up, approaching it from all angles.

MAGIC: So, how did you get in with Ed Marlo?SOLOMON: When I got out of the army and came back to Chicago, Steve Draun did a trick for me and I couldn’t figure out that trick to save my life. I said, “That’s gotta be the best trick I’ve

ever seen!” Steve says, “Well, if you think that’s good, you should come down to the Three Bears and you can meet Marlo.” So we went there. Marlo was there and we sat at the table adjacent to him. There was quite a long period during which we would hang out and sit near his table. And then, eventually, he invited us to come and sit with him. But I first saw Marlo at another shop. There was a whole culture of magic at the Treasure Chest, a magic and nov-elty shop in Chicago’s Loop. I went down there and behind the counter was Eddie Marlo doing estimation tricks. I don’t even remember what they were, but he did two estimation tricks and his book on the subject was one of the first things I ever bought from Marlo.

MAGIC: Who was he sitting with while you guys were hovering?SOLOMON: Alan Ackerman was in town at the time, and so was Dick Kester. Jimmy Nuzzo, too. I got to know about Marlo’s material through Jimmy. We would session and he showed me all the stuff Marlo showed — the side steal and work like that.

I once spent an afternoon with Marlo and Alex Elmsley. Elmsley was complaining that he had never seen anyone do a good bottom deal, one that didn’t scream out. So he said it was worthless to learn the bottom deal. Then Eddie does five tricks in a row with the bot-tom deal and Elmsley has no idea how they’re done. I’m sitting down there watching this, and I almost fell off my chair. And now you see on the Elmsley videos how Elmsley even-

I said, “That’s gotta be the best trick I’ve ever seen!” Steve Draun said, “Well, if you think that’s good, you should come down to the Three Bears and meet Marlo.”

tually did learn to do the bottom deal, and did it quite proficiently.ARONSON: The first contact I had with Marlo was through the mail. I had read his Faro Con-trolled Miracles book and was intrigued with the faro because it had a mathematical bent. I worked out something with the faro restacking pack as a way of forcing a fourteen or a fifteen number after consecutive shuffles, and I mailed the idea to Marlo. I got back a postcard and he said he would add it his collection of ideas. About two months later I went to a lecture in the back of Magic, Inc. That was a time when Eddie was still going to lectures. I saw him in line and I introduced myself.

MAGIC: Didn’t you meet Dave at Magic, Inc.?ARONSON: Yep. We were both students at the

time, and some guy comes up to me and says, “Do you want to see a trick?” I said, “Yeah,” I picked a card, and that was 1965.

MAGIC: Had you guys heard of each other by reputation?ARONSON: No, we were kids. We met way be-fore anyone had any reputation. I lived in the dormitory at the University of Chicago and Dave would try to come out every other week or so, and we would get together trading secrets. Where we are now is the outgrowth of that.

MAGIC: And you, John? How did you join the group?BANNON: When I moved to Chicago we met at a lecture and started talking, and I started coming here [Frances’ Deli] on Saturdays and that was, what, fifteen years ago?ARONSON: Twenty years ago, 1988 or ’89. John came in at the very tail end of all the Marlo stuff. Only a year or two before Marlo died.BANNON: When I came to Chicago and started hanging out with these guys, they were as old then as I am now.ARONSON: So we’re looking for new law stu-dents to join the group!

MAGIC: Let’s get down to tricks — the state of the art, so to speak. Why are there so many bad variations of good tricks out there?BANNON: I believe that in order not to chill in-novation you have to suffer fools. You let the marketplace decide whether the variation is worth it or not.

MAGIC: And there are lots and lots of variations in the marketplace these days, aren’t there? BANNON: Well, originally — when we were com-ing up through the ranks in magic — there was an editorial hurdle that went away with desk-top publishing. And there was a financial bar-rier, too. And now that’s gone, with electronic publishing, downloads, e-books. ARONSON: One of the big problems now is that making money with magic has shifted from entertaining the public to making money off of magicians, and that’s what’s promoted all of the variations and quantity. It’s way too easy. The magic-buying sector buys anything it sees — just spends money — and so your fame comes not from being a performer or having great ideas, but by selling through lectures anything that makes you money.

BANNON: I do like the new genre though, the stuff that the Buck twins are doing — Card-istry or whatever it’s called. I think it’s new, I think it’s valid. It looks pretty cool. It’s short-attention-span theater. I gotta tell you, the new Buck brothers DVDs, [The Trilogy], the first trick on that thing fooled me the first ten times I watched it.

MAGIC: Do you have to be fooled by every aspect of a trick to really be taken in?ARONSON: I agree with the axiom that a magi-cian is fooled if he doesn’t follow any one component of the method, so there are lots of tricks where I feel confident I know about 80 or 90 percent of what’s going on. But if there’s one element that I don’t understand I feel totally taken in and fooled.

MAGIC: What if it’s a long, boring effect?ARONSON: First, you have to care about the ef-fect, but if the method is interesting it might be something cool or useful for a totally different trick, so I care about that. I care about knowing about tools that are useful.SOLOMON: I was fooled so badly by this guy at Escorial. I can’t remember his name, but here’s what I saw: He borrows a deck from the audience, the deck is shuffled by a specta-tor, placed on the table, and is cut in half. Then he says, “The top two cards are the three of hearts and the two of diamonds.” And he picks them up and he shows them. And he’s right! So he puts down the pack and the cards are shuffled — by a spectator —

and he keeps doing it over and over again.ARONSON: When Juan Tamariz first introduced his memorized deck into this country in the early ’90s, I was totally fooled — and I was using a memorized deck. He fooled me with it. I have a habit of really burning people so, for me, if something is happening or if some-one’s misdirection is really good, then I can be fooled because I won’t even realize I’ve been misdirected.BANNON: Deck switches will kill ya.

A couple of times I’ve been fooled and then it turns out it was marked cards. So now I know to look for them. And if I see something on TV that I really don’t get, I usually assume it was pre-show.ARONSON: All three of us have been victims of marked cards. And we talk hypothetically about what kinds of effects we would construct if we had a deck of really well-marked cards that could be read at a distance. It turns out there’s very few. Very few that don’t scream out “marked cards,” anyway.BANNON: And all of them are by Al Koran.SOLOMON: I’ve also been fooled by tricks that Steve Forte has shown different people. That Ace-cutting trick that Bill Malone does is one of them [Scarne’s Aces]. Norman Beck does one of Steve’s tricks that’s really incredible. I know Forte, and I’ll never forget when he came to visit Marlo and did all of his gambling material.

MAGIC: What was Marlo’s reaction?SOLOMON: Marlo’s reaction? He was numb. He was totally numb, and then Forte tried to show him stuff and Marlo said he didn’t want to see it, and told him to wait until the following day. And then Marlo systematically showed him tricks and Forte begged him to tell him how they worked. So Eddie said, “Okay, we’ll trade some.” Forte had fooled Marlo badly. And then Eddie fooled him. Marlo figured out what Forte didn’t know about and he got him.BANNON: I think that was Marlo’s real strength. He’d size you up and figure out the one thing you didn’t know, and fool you with it.SOLOMON: It wasn’t just one thing. Marlo could fool you any day. We were with him constantly, and he would fool us with stuff, we had no idea what it was. We saw him do mathematical stuff, things with gaffs, sleights…ARONSON: Once he found out that I was really into stacks and setups, he would make a point to fool you with your own stuff.

MAGIC: Getting back to the Buck twins, is your interest in what they do indicative of your interest in overt displays of skill when it comes to magic? ARONSON: I think the best skill-laden tricks are the ones where it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything. The Steve Forte–type stuff we’ve been talking about.BANNON: That’s a whole different genre.

There are lots of tricks where I feel confident I know about 80 or 90 percent of what’s going on. But if there’s one element that I don’t under-stand, I feel totally taken in and fooled.

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MAGIC: What would Marlo think of the Bucks’ material?SOLOMON: He thought it was juggling.ARONSON: What was that phrase he used to use? That was a move filled with “fascinat-ing suspicion.” That was a phrase that Eddie used to use.BANNON: The juggling provides a context for that style — it’s a way of being natural. Of course, I’m the youngest guy here, the hippest guy in the room. [Smiles.]ARONSON: “Hippest” isn’t the word I would have used.

MAGIC: So now that we’re discussing current trends in magic, spend a moment on the Blaine phenomenon. What about his “presentation” of magic, such as it is?BANNON: “Hey, watch this.” That’s a viable pre-sentation for magic. ARONSON: Blaine made that purposeful in retro-spect. He started off doing it and then people started catching on and then he decided he was doing it on purpose. I don’t think it was a tactical decision to say, “Uh, watch this,” as opposed to have an interesting line.BANNON: I think all of us are too old to get it.SOLOMON: I get it, but I would much rather watch Kostya Kimlat perform.BANNON: He talks too much.SOLOMON: That’s your opinion. I like the way Lennart Green performs and I like the way Shoot Ogawa performs. And they all have chops.ARONSON: And if you want humor you can add David Williamson to the list.

Kostya has a lot of potential. I’m friendly with Josh Jay, and I think he’s great. Derek DelGaudio, too. And Karl Hein. He does fun magic and he does it well. Incredible balloons as well. If he had been in Chicago, maybe Marlo might have taken up balloons. Did you know Marlo invented the Tree of Hearts? He said he did it to show people he had a sense of humor.BANNON: I think Shoot Ogawa is very good. He’s one of those guys who’s thinking and practicing all the time. And he has the advantage that he doesn’t talk too much. A lot of the young guys have the same old problem, that people are more interested in what they’re saying than what they’re doing, and I don’t think that should be the case in close-up magic.

MAGIC: But a lot of the popular magicians you see on TV hardly say anything at all.BANNON: If you’re talking about Blaine, then I think he does that on purpose, and I’m not of the generation to appreciate that kind of slacker thing, but kids understand it, in a different way from how we do. That’s why I think he’s smart to plug in to that kind of thing.SOLOMON: Some of the things I’ve seen him do are really smart. It’s not about chops. But

some of the things I’ve seen him do, he does very well.BANNON: Well, too many magicians are talk, talk, talk. They front-load their magic with narrative and story and way overload the context. It’s boring to me and, I think, selfish as a performer.ARONSON: I agree with John to a point, that there is a real danger of talking too much and giving them an additional component to think about. So as soon as you have a story where X represents something, now they have to start making connections — you know, the Queens represent the four witches and the picture cards represent death and the box represents life as a whole — then they have to start thinking about connections as opposed to follow-ing the trick. But otherwise, you use lines that don’t require them to think too hard, enjoyable lines, with enjoyable vocabulary, enjoyable words, and that’s fine.

MAGIC: Let’s get back to influences. All of you are authors, and each of you has published books about card magic. What book first reeled you in, hooked you on magic and card tricks?SOLOMON: The first book that really got me was Expert Card Technique. I began with the card moves right away. When I was thirteen or four-teen years old I bought the Inner Secrets books, the Vernon series, from Abbott’s.BANNON: For me it was The Amateur Magi-cians Handbook by Henry Hay. You could get it at the library. Frank Garcia’s books came out in the ’70s. He was the Michael Ammar of his time. J.K. Hartman started putting out his manuscripts, and I had those.ARONSON: The earliest books on magic that re-ally turned me on were Bruce Elliot’s [Magic as a Hobby and Classic Secrets of Magic] and the Annemann stuff, like Practical Mental Effects.

MAGIC: Was there a magic shop where you hung out?

[Left to right] John Bannon, Dave Solomon, and Simon Aronson session at Frances’ Deli in Chicago.

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BANNON: It was called The Magic Shop; it was run by Earl Edwards in Norfolk, Virginia. It was basically a head shop, but he sold magic in the back. It smelled like incense. And Earl was this very old patrician kind of Southern gentle-man. He was the last guy you’d expect to be running a head shop.SOLOMON: I went to Roosevelt University in Chi-cago. Every day when I finished class, I would walk across the street to Ireland’s magic shop, and then to the donut shop where the magi-cians hung out.ARONSON: I grew up in New York, so I was a follower of Lou Tannen’s. Lou took me under his wing. I probably spent three-quarters of my bar mitzvah money paying him to teach me magic. Over the course of two-and-a-half years, every one of the demonstrators at Lou Tannen’s became my friend and helped me along.

MAGIC: All of you are respected “back-room” magicians, serious amateurs, but none of you have had ambitions to be professional perform-ers, have you? Did any of you make a living with magic?ARONSON: I worked my way through eight years of college and university doing nothing but birthday parties. Three, four a week, on the weekends.BANNON: You should see his old clown outfit.ARONSON: And then during the ’70s I worked my way through law school doing a mind-reading act. BANNON: I never ever wanted to be a profession-al. I think it’s a hard way to make a living. If I had to do it for a living, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.SOLOMON: I have fun giving lectures to other magicians, going to other countries. That’s the fun for me.ARONSON: The old adage is, “The professional does a few tricks for many different audiences and the amateur does many, many tricks for the same audience.”

MAGIC: How do you balance magic with work?ARONSON: You retire.BANNON: I don’t. I work all the time and I do magic when I can. Magic is a nice refuge and a nice thing to come back to; it is a hobby of mine that I’m very serious about. I do make the time for magic. I keep a deck of cards in my desk but, as a rule, I do not do tricks at work. If we win a big case or something and we have a party, I’ll do tricks.ARONSON: I could never have done as much with magic if it were not for my work. When I was at my work, I did tricks for my friends there; that was my test audience. I never would have started writing books if I didn’t have a full-time secretary and a word-processing department. I didn’t even know how to type when I started writing my books. They were at my beck and call, so I used them, and all the girls in the

word-processing department loved it because they thought it was more interesting than writ-ing a legal brief, and they were helping me with illustrations. I don’t think I could have pro-duced those early books without their help.

MAGIC: Each of you knows thousands of card tricks. And each of you is known for inventing or releasing specific tricks. When asked to per-form, what trick do you show a layperson?SOLOMON: I do the Ambitious Card. I end it with the card in the pocket.BANNON: I would probably do Twisting the Aces, which is the first- or second-best card trick of all time, the other being Triumph.

MAGIC: Two Vernon tricks top the list? In-teresting.BANNON: I’ll tell you why. Besides being a great effect, the underlying method [to Twisting the Aces] would never, ever occur to a layman. I don’t care how smart they are, no one on his own would ever arrive at the notion of an Elmsley Count. Showing three cards as four, while hiding one. It’s a fabulous effect with an unfigure-outable, un…SOLOMON: Unfathomable?ARONSON: Unfigure-outable sums it up. If it was a totally impromptu situation, I would do Out of This World; if I had a chance to prepare, I’d do my Side Swiped.

MAGIC: When pressed, what effect would you show a magician?ARONSON: Like Eddie [Marlo], I’d try to figure out “What does this guy know, what is this guy familiar with?” — try to size the guy up and see what’s gonna hit him best — and do a different trick for every magician. There’s no one answer to that question.

MAGIC: What’s the best trick you’ve come up with?BANNON: These guys will tell you, what I do now, I do with a regular deck of cards that has very little set-up. ARONSON: It’s not like we care or know about each other’s repertoire.SOLOMON: I am quite proud of John’s and my Mexican Poker. That’s turning out to be one of our best-known effects.BANNON: For me, Play it Straight Triumph. Play it Straight will still fool anyone who doesn’t know it. To me that’s one of my more successful tricks. I should’ve named it the Bannon Tri-umph. [Smiles.]

MAGIC: What does it take to make a trick popular?BANNON: In the old days, it took people who worked in magic shops performing it. But I don’t think the market is the same anymore.ARONSON: The interesting thing about [Mexi-can Poker] is that it was around for four or

five years, and it took putting it in a book for anyone to notice it. Almost the same as it was in MAGIC Magazine. Sometimes you publish a trick in a national magazine and it doesn’t get any attention at all.BANNON: The discussion sites have a lot to do with it, too. The guys on the magic boards. They’ll get a book and go, “This trick is totally awesome!” Then the next guy goes, “Yeah, I tried it. It is awesome!” and the third guy goes, “Oh man, I gotta get this book!”SOLOMON: But then you get a trick like Mexican Poker, and it turns out to be in five different books, and five different professional magicians are doing it — including Harry Anderson — and they’re putting it in magazines and having variations — including Paul Wilson who offers it as a download, and that other guy who of-fers it as a download — and Eugene [Burger] is doing it, and it gets around that way. And J.K. Hartman put it in his book [Card Dupery], and it gets around that way, too.BANNON: It’s because it was in my book [Dear Mr. Fantasy]. [Smiles.]ARONSON: Which is interesting, too, because sometimes things are in books and no one per-forms them until they’re put on video.

MAGIC: What videos would you recommend to a beginner?ARONSON: Michael Ammar’s videos. You want to bypass thirty years of education and search-ing? Take the Ammar course.BANNON: And that’s the standard response, “Oh no, you’re not gonna do all the digging and the research and all the hard stuff.” But what’s wrong with that? Why not start with the good stuff?ARONSON: It’s just as well if they start there or end there. Ammar is a good teacher, and he’s a good selector.

MAGIC: What books would you recommend to a beginner?ARONSON: Volume One of Card College. There are starting books for each generation and I think none of us has read a real beginner book since we were young. I hear Nick Einhorn has a great book out in England for beginners, but you can’t expect that we’ll be going through books like that. Every four or five years, there is a good book coming out for beginners of that generation. I really think that the Bruce Elliot books still stand up.BANNON: For beginners who are past a certain threshold, Card College is the way to go.ARONSON: Roberto knows the subject matter and knows how to write well. He has organized good material and it flows.BANNON: And Roberto, unlike Ammar, doesn’t get a lot of grief for what he does.

MAGIC: Switching gears, is there a plot or method that you continually gravitate toward,

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something you’re constantly working on?ARONSON: I’m obviously partial to the memo-rized deck as a method or a system for doing a lot of tricks, because it’s so straightforward and simple but not intuitive. It’s not the kind of thing that people think about or know about. It can be very deceptive, even for magicians.SOLOMON: I have a trick I would like to do. I saw Juan [Tamariz] do a trick in a club. He placed four Jacks into different places in the deck, and then he waved his hand over the deck. The deck cut itself, and a Jack came out; cut itself, and a Jack came out; cut itself, and a Jack came out; cut itself, and the last Jack came out. Then he hands the Jacks to person on his left and he hands the deck to the person on his right. It was the greatest trick I’ve ever seen in my life.BANNON: The best trick I think I’ve ever seen was performed by Jay Sankey, years ago at Fechter’s. He did this trick where he wasn’t talking and he was holding up speech bal-loons — Jon Allen put out something similar [Silent Treatment], but this one was much better. He holds up the balloons and the first one says, “Pick a card.” Then he drops the deck, and the next balloon says, “Oops.” And the next one says, “Is this your card? No? What about this one?” At the end, he holds one up that says, “It’s time to tell you why I haven’t been speaking.” And he pulls the signed card out if his mouth. That was twenty years ago, and a damn good trick. And also the organic method of the whole thing, because with the “oops” thing when he drops the cards, he’s clearly planned that mo-ment in advance and that’s when he loads the card into his mouth. I think. It left an impres-sion on me.

MAGIC: What do you look for in creating new effects?ARONSON: In terms of cards, I’m not trying to get something new. I try to go back and see what I can do to old stuff, something like Scarne’s two card transposition [Switchcraft] or any card at any number — classic plots — and see whether I can come out as pure as I need to and satisfy the hard challenge. And by and large, it’s sad to say, I’m finding that some of the older things are much better than some of the newer ones.SOLOMON: Marlo used to read constantly. He read everything, and he would start with lousy tricks and turn them into good tricks. Last night I read a pamphlet that describes a trick in which you take a blue deck, cut it into four packets, and pick up the top card of each packet to show that they’re the four Aces. Immediately, the Aces are revealed to have red backs. In my opinion, you’ve just showed the audience how the trick is done. You must have switched the cards because obviously those are not the blue cards that

were sitting on top of those packets.BANNON: Wait a minute. Doesn’t the audience believe that you magically changed the color of the blue-backed cards? [Smiles.]SOLOMON: That might be the effect he’s go-ing for. But when I look at something like that, I say that’s not a very good trick. But you could use the same thing, so I wrote to the author, saying that he could do the same thing if he just delays the change. Put the Aces back in the pack without revealing the odd backs and then ribbon spread the deck to show you can still find the Aces, even with the cards face down, because now the backs have changed. I still don’t think that’s a very good trick, but it’s a way of thinking, and that way of thinking is about recognizing ele-ments of things, changing them around and

maybe you wind up with something great. I think we do that a lot.ARONSON: I think part of it is what you expect or want the spectator to believe or think. None of us expect the spectator to believe that you’re truly magical. We probably vary and differ in our weightings of whether we want them to believe they’ve seen a great skill or whether they shake their head in disbelief because they can’t believe their eyes as to what they’ve seen, or whether they’re going wind up trying to puzzle it out. Sometimes I’ve had some interesting memorized-deck locations that maybe were a little too impossible, but maybe to get away from the idea of a stack these guys suggested presenting it as a demonstration of skill. That has a lot of validity to it.

I want to make sure that my tricks have surprise. I think surprise at the end — not only that is unexpected, but once it’s revealed is very organic and upon review almost should have been expected because of fore-shadowing. It’s a very Aristotelian-type sur-prise. That’s the kind of surprise that brings a kind of theatricality to it.

MAGIC: Why cards?ARONSON: What can’t you do with cards?BANNON: Before I went through law school, I tried to do a little of everything: ropes, rings, silks. But once I went into law, I felt I didn’t have enough time for it all, so I decided I would just do cards because I always liked them the best.SOLOMON: I found that if I was doing mainly

cards and I tried to do coin tricks, they looked under-practiced, and the same was true with ropes. At one point, I did it all — the rings, everything. And if you’re not doing it all the time, then you can’t make it look right. At least the cards I play with every day.ARONSON: All three of us have a real admiration for other kinds of magic that we see. Stage mag-ic, rope magic — everything. And we admire the people who do it. It’s just, you can’t be good at everything; you have to pick and choose your battles, and cards give you more than enough room to work with.

MAGIC: What makes a good magic trick?ARONSON: There are so many different things. Plot, method, conditions…BANNON: There is a difference between good

and bad tricks, and I have a highly refined idea of what I think is good and bad, but I don’t know that I can explain it.SOLOMON: Sometimes you read a trick that’s not so great, but then you see a good performer do that trick and it entertains and fools you. So good tricks can be done well and good tricks can be done badly.

MAGIC: Presentation is, for the most part, a mat-ter of personal taste. But what about method?ARONSON: I like the idea of the duck analogy. On the surface, a duck is smooth, elegant and relaxed. But underneath he’s paddling like mad. And I think the effect has to be like that. What the spectator sees has to flow evenly and in a straightforward fashion that they can follow; it shouldn’t be confusing or complicated. I think “anything goes” on the method, as long as the audience is unaware of it and does not suspect anything.BANNON: Unfortunately, that leaves you with a short list. I think sometimes you have to do method-driven things, and you have to find some reason to explain them or give them con-text. That doesn’t necessarily make a bad trick. In fact, it can make a good trick, because you can do things you otherwise could not accom-plish at all.ARONSON: I think John is right, but you want to make sure the justification is expected, not convoluted.BANNON: Simon will ask me, “Why did you pick up those two cards and put them back on the deck?” My response is, “Because

I like the idea of the duck analogy. On the sur-face, a duck is smooth, elegant, and relaxed. But underneath he’s paddling like mad. And I think the effect has to be like that.

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that’s how the trick works.” The trick is to explain why you did that.SOLOMON: It’s a combination of subtlety and misdirection, and I also think it’s the thing that looks the most natural to do. So I’ve been try-ing to make everything look natural.ARONSON: The Professor’s ideas can be taken too strictly, and then they don’t allow for repetitive phases, and I want to expand to at least that. Certainly I agree [with Vernon] that confusion is not magic, and the specta-tor has to feel that he is following the logic of what’s happening.SOLOMON: Even if it’s not natural, it has to look natural. John has some things that are not natu-ral, but they look natural because of misdirec-tion or context.BANNON: Like an Elmsley Count. For example,

why don’t you just spread the cards? But we don’t. We count them. And it looks like count-ing is a fair way to do it, even though it’s not the way a layman would do it.ARONSON: In mentalism, they say to try to make it look like a real mindreader would do it.SOLOMON: The one thing that we do quite frequently is to impose conditions on a trick. Let’s say a trick is usually done on top of the deck. The condition we impose is that it should be done away from the deck. By doing it away from the deck, it changes the whole look of the trick. An example I like to bring up is this one: Elmsley had what I consider to be one of the perfect tricks, Between the Palms, and everybody made variations on it. They were all steps backward, because they used double lifts from the top of the deck. Elmsley made the switch in his pocket, and to me that was the perfect method. Sometimes in an effort to improve, we go backward. It has happened to all of us. People show me variations of my Oil & Water with counts and slips and all sorts of moves, and once you lose that straightforward nature it’s no longer a magic trick.ARONSON: Here’s another piece of theory. What-ever the plot or procedure is, you don’t want to use a method that is intuitive to that plot. In Oil & Water, why would you want to openly rearrange the cards? Of course that can be a chops question as well. Technically you can do anything if you can do it perfectly.SOLOMON: I think Juan’s idea of canceling is something we try and do. Once you’ve executed

the method, the audience can’t get to it because you’ve cancelled out all possibilities. Simon does that a lot. In fact, he has some patter in which you might think the method is one thing, and then another, and then he goes on to dis-prove each theory.ARONSON: We often discuss this issue with re-gard to the mindreading act. Some people think that, some way or another, Ginny must be able to see. And as I’ve mentioned, that’s kind of ironic because it’s the only blindfold act in mag-ic where she legitimately cannot see. Hypotheti-cally, yeah, she could see, but she is facing only one part of the audience and then I move to the other side behind her back and then she starts getting details she couldn’t possibly see anyway. So it does wear people down and cancel out methods in the audience’s mind.

SOLOMON: Or the Juan stuff, where he has one guy shuffle, shuffle, shuffle and then he hands him his deck to shuffle but really the guy keeps shuffling the same deck. It’s all about the subtle-ty. In the spectator’s mind, both decks are being shuffled the whole time.

MAGIC: What is the strangest source of inspira-tion you’ve found?SOLOMON: I read and I watch DVDs. I go to bed thinking about something — a trick or a prob-lem or something — and in my sleep, during my dream state, I work it out. That amazes me and I love to do that. I have a notepad next to my bed, and a pen that illuminates. I wake up in the middle of the night with an answer, but sometimes it’s not exactly right. I’m not good with math, even in my dreams.ARONSON: It does help to have the humility to admit that you have some blind spots. All of us come here with tricks, expecting them to be improved by the other two.

MAGIC: So everyone at the table can say, more or less, that the majority of his work in the magic world has been shaped and influenced by the other two in The Session.ARONSON: Not exactly. My first book was in ’78, and even before then I was publish-ing ideas and effects. The place where we first became known was in Racherbaumer’s magazines: Sticks and Stones, Kabbala, and Hierophant. It was the late ’60s and early ’70s, all the way up to 1980. Racherbaumer was the publisher of periodicals, and they were good

publications full of good magic. That was a ready source of good tricks there. And Dave and I had tricks in all three.

MAGIC: Let’s put it a different way: How has your participation in this brain trust affected your work?ARONSON: What’s amazing is how different the three of us are. I think we can admire and share with each other, but we think differently and we have different goals; we’re interested in dif-ferent effects, different presentations, different methods. So I don’t think we wind up stepping on one another’s toes.SOLOMON: I feel a little different, because I’ve come up with tricks that we’ve worked on together, and then the idea triggers me to go on and on. Simon says we’re all different, but the synergy is just fantastic. From time to time, we start with a trick that we all talk about and work on, and in the end we end up with a totally different trick. And that’s because a unique synergy has evolved between the three of us. One thing that’s pretty remarkable is that the three of us each tend to take ownership of the parts of the trick that we invent, and I don’t think there’s any jealousy between us as a re-sult. Therefore, it becomes easier to work it out when you lay it down, and then the three of us have ideas about it and I think that’s really ben-eficial when you have someone who you know is not gonna go out and show somebody else or grab your trick.

Look at the way we came up with the poker trick [Mexican Poker]. We saw the Elmsley trick and we started working from that, and John had the idea for the Nine and the Eight, and then I later developed some ideas and was working with Tomas Blomberg, and Tomas came up with the idea for the full house. And so the combination of it all, that was really a col-laboration that happened over the course of a year. We’ve come up with tricks right away, too, but sometimes it takes longer.ARONSON: We’ve had tricks that take ten or fif-teen years and they’re still not done.BANNON: Simon takes really good notes, and sometimes he’ll be digging through old stuff and he’ll find something we were kicking around years ago. So we’ll start working on that again.ARONSON: I cannot think of any trick that I put in print that didn’t benefit from Dave’s and John’s input. It varies in many ways — it might be a patter line or a substitution of a move, different phases, maybe adding a repeat — but very, very rarely do I come out with something that didn’t benefit from their advice.BANNON: Simon’s wrong a lot [grins]. The other thing is that it’s a crucible. I don’t con-sider a trick done until I bring it down here on Saturday and show these guys and hear what they have to say. Most of the time, I listen to what they say. u

From time to time, we start with a trick we all talk about and work on, and we end up with a totally different trick. And that’s because a unique synergy has evolved between the three of us.