081: Part 4 - The End of the World/Year Podcast

  Part Four of this extended, end of the year, end of the world podcast features three magicians who are staunch members of world-wide magic societies. In particular, it is interesting to hear the quite opposing viewpoints of their organizations from the Presidents of the S.A.M. and the I.B.M.

00:00:00 - Chris Bontjes, President of the Society of American Magicians discusses his past five months in office, what he and the organization have accomplished, the redesign of their website, membership advances, focus on the youth, next year’s convention in Washington D.C., what he has planned for the balance of his administration, a look at a new $3MM liability insurance program the S.A.M. will roll out in February 2013, and more. http://magicsam.com/

00:20:25 – John Pye, International President of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, talks about his term in office, his accomplishments as well as the goals and future of the I.B.M. https://www.magician.org/

00:34:52 – Will Houstoun, Editor of The Magic Circular which is the official journal for The Magic Circle (TMC), joins us from London and talks about TMC activities, the status of any changes to the journal, Circle award winners, and highlights from “across the pond” during this past year that made the news and the “telly”

Part 4 The End of the World/Year Podcast
Scott Wells

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070: Dan Garrett - A Look Forward Into The Past

Welcome to the 70th podcast on The Magic Word. Dan Garrett was passing through Houston during his recent lecture tour entitled, "Forward Into The Past" that was dedicated to Duke Stern and Tim Conover. Dan is a Past President of the Society of American Magicians as well as a full time professional magician, dealer, lecturer, author and generall all-around good guy.

In this podcast Dan talks about his friendship with the late Martin Gardener and the Gathering for Gardner (http://www.g4g-com.org/) and those who attend (i.e. Percy Diaconis, Mark Seddeducati, and others). Dan has a passion for science fiction and online gaming, too, which we discuss. Dan talked about mentoring new magicians and how young people might find a mentor. His interests in magic go beyond the traditional but also include the allied art of juggling. With this broad background, Dan seems perfectly suited for discussing the future of magic including digital magazines (i.e. Kozmo's "Reel Magic" and other paper magazines that have gone digital), conventions, and more.

This was one of the more interesting discussions I have posted but it was also the single most difficult. Easy from the standpoint that Dan and I have been good friends for over 25 years so the discussion (as well as the Coca Cola for Dan and the scotch for me) ran freely. But the audio crashed as it was being saved. We knew that the magic of the moment that we captured on the podcast could not be duplicated. So I spent six hours meticulously finding, saving, pasting and editing this podcast. Despite all my efforts, there are still about ten minutes out of our hour and ten minute chat that were lost. But I tried to make the edits as seemless as possible. I hope you will enjoy this talk with one of the world's leaders in magic. I hope you will also enjoy a couple of sound clips from Firesign Theater to get us into and out of this podcast.

Dan Garrett - A Look Forward Into The Past
Scott Wells with Dan Garrett

Download a MP3 file of this podcast by Clicking Here then right click to save the file. You can also download the MP3 media file directly from the RSS feed by Clicking Here.