Patrick Ferri's WRECKAGE-O-RAMA!!!

I had a show this past Sunday out here in LA ( Pasadena ) that went really well.  I will be in another ahow next Wed. as part of the same improv and sketch group ” The Chaotiques “. Below is a flyer for the show :

I spent the past week working for John Gaughan : a master illusion and magic prop builder for everyone.  Here is an article the New York Times did on John a while back :

MAGICIANS ASK : WHAT IS UP HIS SLEEVE ?

Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times

HE’S NO FANTASY John Gaughan with the Turk, a chess-playing automaton with a legendary background.

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Los Angeles

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Man of Wonder

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Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times

 

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Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times

WHO GOES THERE? Stepping inside John Gaughan’s studio with its 18th- and 19th-century magic props and human-looking automatons can be disconcerting. Even Mr. Gaughan says, “It’s pretty spooky at night in here.”

CHANCES are you’ve never heard of John Gaughan.

He doesn’t advertise. He doesn’t have a Web site. There is no street entrance to his workshop, a former 1930s aircraft school alongside railroad tracks on a dry, industrial stretch of road that straddles the city limits of Los Angeles and Glendale. Visitors must drive around back, past stacks of steel beams and cans of spray paint, toward a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

That Mr. Gaughan, 68, is not easily found befits an artisan who has spent most of his life creating large-scale illusions for many of the world’s most famous magicians and illusionists: Siegfried & Roy, David Blaine, Criss Angel,David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Mark Wilson, Ricky Jay.

He has also created stage illusions for enchanters of a different sort: Jim Morrison, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper, Barbra Streisand, Cher.

Yet while Mr. Gaughan’s artistry has, for instance, helped Mr. Angel seemingly jump through the body of another man, Mr. Gaughan doesn’t get the glory. In the world of legerdemain, his are vital but unseen hands.

“You know, in the old days of comedy there was a Charlie Chaplin and then there were the rest of the comedians,” said Milt Larsen, who in 1963 founded the Magic Castle in Hollywood, the clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts, which promotes the art and history of magic. “In music, there was Irving Berlin and then there were the rest of the composers. There’s always some king of the pack, and as far as I’m concerned, Johnny Gaughan is the king of the pack.”

In online forums, where science and magic buffs debate how illusionists seemingly defy the laws of physics, there are those in the know who succinctly answer: “All I have to say is John Gaughan.”

Follow Mr. Gaughan out of the sunlight, beneath an arch of iron griffins and into his warehouse. He shares it with a pair of shrieking parrots: Luther (retired from a circus in Buenos Aires) and Max (who used to wow the crowds at Busch Gardens). The space is filled with satyrs’ heads, masks, handcuffs used by Harry Houdini, a glass box penetrated with swords, a videotape labeled “floating heads.”

Discomfortingly human-looking automatons, frozen at a chess board or on a trapeze, peer from dusty corners.

“It’s pretty spooky at night in here,” said Mr. Gaughan, winding across uneven floors toward a little office practically wallpapered with 18th- and 19th-century magic props (wands, wooden hands, tiny cages, a spirit bell to conjure the dead).

In the digital age, when magicians have slick rock-style television programs and their illusions are on YouTube, Mr. Gaughan runs a low-tech operation. Three men work in his shop, and much of what is there is from another era, when a magician could send a chill through an audience by simply evoking Mephistopheles (as opposed to having himself run over by a steamroller like Mr. Angel has done).

“The way we do it here, we just get a piece of plywood and just start cutting and whaling on it,” said Mr. Gaughan, who in the abracadabra industry is known for “big magic,” such as levitating and morphing a beast into a prince in Broadway’s “Beauty and the Beast.” “We don’t even draw pictures or anything because it has to be built for your eye and in all different directions.”

He helped create illusions and props ranging from the trick wheelchair that concealedGary Sinise’s legs in the film “Forrest Gump” to levitations at the Kabuki-za Theater in Tokyo. For a television show with Mr. Blaine, Mr. Gaughan worked on an illusion in which a woman’s watch vanishes and reappears down the street in the display window of a jewelry store. Mr. Blaine then picks up a piece of newspaper, holds it to the store window and pulls the watch out without cracking the glass.

Mr. Blaine said in an e-mail message that Mr. Gaughan is “a magical genius.”

Mr. Gaughan said he admires Mr. Blaine’s integrity: “He doesn’t use any stooges at all.”

Stooges, or audience plants, are commonly used by magicians and stunt performers. “That’s kind of the assumption,” Mr. Gaughan said. “You know, I can’t really say one way or the other because of — I just shouldn’t.”

Keeping secrets, not only from the public but also from other illusionists, is essential to Mr. Gaughan’s reputation.

“The reason people come to John is that they trust him,” said Jim Steinmeyer, an illusion designer who has collaborated with Mr. Gaughan. “They would stop coming to him if they didn’t.”

Mr. Copperfield and Siegfried & Roy, through publicists, declined to comment for this article. A publicist for Mr. Angel did not respond to interview requests.

Nowadays Mr. Gaughan is one in a circle of elders of magic. But growing up in Dallas he was just another boy who hung around a shop called Douglas Magicland.

“I was the demonstrator and he was the kid who would come in,” recalled Mark Wilson, 79, the magician who produced and starred in network television’s first weekly magic series, “The Magic Land of Allakazam,” shown on CBS and ABC in the early 60s.

Before long, Mr. Gaughan, then 14, began working for Mr. Wilson and his assistant (and wife), Nani Darnell. “He would help us put magic kits together that we would sell in department stores,” said Mr. Wilson, who has taught the likes of Cary Grant, Dick Van Dyke and Johnny Carson to perform tricks.

In 1961, Mr. Gaughan followed Mr. Wilson to Los Angeles, where he also studied industrial design at California State University. As Mr. Wilson’s star rose, he opened his own workshop in a house on Venice Boulevard. During the Watts riots, Mr. Wilson said, “Johnny went to the house and stayed all night to be sure everything was safe.” (Mr. Gaughan said he was perched on the roof with a fire extinguisher.)

Eventually, Mr. Wilson moved his operation to the space that is Mr. Gaughan’s shop (though he is relocating to another site about three miles away).

Mr. Gaughan is also a top collector of magic memorabilia, restoring antique devices and replicating lost creations such as the Turk, a famed 1700s chess-playing automaton that rarely lost a game, trouncing Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, according to legend. It was destroyed in a fire in 1854. Using a couple of pieces that survived the fire, Mr. Gaughan succeeded in building a working replica of the automaton after some 25 years.

“There are 8 or 10 people that build illusions,” said Mr. Steinmeyer, who is the author of “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear.” “To me, what’s unique about John is his interest in historical work.”

Mr. Steinmeyer and other professionals credit Mr. Gaughan with unraveling enduring mysteries and reintroducing them to modern magicians. “What’s a shame is that secrets fall out of fashion,” Mr. Steinmeyer said.

 

IN describing Mr. Gaughan’s abilities, his peers point to a 20th-century illusion called “Impossibilities” created by Dr. Samuel Cox Hooker, which, as Mr. Wilson described it, has “fooled every major magician in the country.”

Mr. Gaughan acquired the illusion from Dr. Hooker’s estate, cracked its secrets and performed it twice at the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History. Playing cards rise and lower at his command, and a disembodied teddy bear head floats off a table.

Mr. Wilson had read about the illusion and thought: “Well, of course if I see it I’ll understand it. I’ll know how to do it.”

But that was not the case.

“He just fooled the hell out of me,” said Mr. Wilson, quickly apologizing for his enthusiastic language. Even so, he said, “I don’t think I want to know how to do it because I enjoy being fooled.”

And Mr. Gaughan enjoys fooling. Standing beside the legendary chess-playing Turk, he said: “There’s been over 800 different books and articles and plays, even films, about this piece, and no one ever got it right. The way I got it was I found some letters in one library written to another guy that was in another museum and put them together and it kind of told the story.”

The resurrected automaton has been on tour, including to Hungary, the homeland of its builder, Wolfgang von Kempelen. “It still fools people,” Mr. Gaughan said.

 

 

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. 5 Who determined the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who stretched the line upon it? 6 Whereupon were the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner-stone thereof, 7 When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?      From the Book Of Job                  God asks Job to Declare in the passage.

Peter Matthiessen quoted this line from the Bible in his famous book ” THE SNOW LEOPARD”.

My first exposure to the quote was 8 or 9 years ago in the Tim Powers novel “DECLARE”.

In January of this year I was able to answer the question; the same exact answer that Peter Matthiessen came across in the Himalayas in 1973 :  ”I WAS THERE !!!” Every one of us was there.  It is what the famous Cornell Physicist Carl Sagan was saying in the early 1970′s: “We are all ‘Star-Stuff ‘ !”   All of the material in the universe was made during the Big Bang.

How small does “awareness” go ?  Experiments are happening in science now that are pointing to cellular awareness;  and particle awareness.  If this is true then we all have  all of the information in the universe already inside of us.  We should be getting our answers from inside of us.

Here are a few new insights about Ego :

1)  When we are young our egos are telling us that we can achieve.  We can be “That Good”. We can impress our parents, our family; girls ( why I wrestled !).  We can get attention and approval if we work hard and strive.  Everything we are being taught to us by our parents and teachers is reinforcing this ego.

Then, as we get older and we have setbacks and failures in life , something curious begins to happen with the ego.  It no longer is telling us how good we can be.  It is now telling us how “We will never be that good !  We will never measure up !  We will never achieve or impress anyone  !”  And because we were taught to listen to the ego by everyone we ever trusted we start to believe it when it tells us what we will never be.

2)  Let us consider the person who doesn’t really care how he looks ;  or what other people think of him or her.  Obviously this person is full of himself; full of ego, to ignore the guidelines and opinions of others.  He just might be an egotist.  But here is another perspective and consequently the paradox :    The person that cares about how he looks in the eyes of other people; the person that cares what other people think; that person has standards.  Their ego has set a standard for them ( and everyone else  for that matter ) to live up to.  A standard established by other people and forced upon them.  That person that is trying to live up to a standard might be the supreme “egotist”.  The person that worries about how they appear to their neighbors,co-workers, wether or not they are too loud or uncouth, or unmannered; wether they are “good enough”.  That person might be the supreme egotist.  It might be exactly the opposite of what we have been taught.

I had a show in Pasadena on Thursday night at The Icehouse Comedy Club with my old NYC , Hemi-Helmut Show partner Mike Mendola.  Fascinating !  It is getting very exciting when I perform now because  each show seems to hold something special in store for me.  Change Comes From Within !

I went to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre  to see a couple of films in the Film Noir Festival that is being held now.  I went with Mike Mendola, his girlfriend Ellen and my new roommate John Fontain.

Fim Noir was a style of cinema throughout the 1940′s and 50′s that had hardboiled characters with cynical attitudes and firly tranparent motives to get “the girl”.  They were mostly but not always crime dramas and filmed in a low-key black and white lighting.

I also did an improv workshop at The Icehouse in Pasadena where I have a small spot in a show coming up this Thursday.

Last thing :  I have finally got the Human Flag; a pose on a pole.  I will post a photo of it soon.  4 years trying.

Here is a video/song from the Zambonis :

The Theory of Relativity : My Version :

There are 2 boys, Dan and Craig, playing pitch and catch with a baseball on the deck of a boat.  Sherri is watching them with a radar gun to measure the speed of the ball. The boat is traveling East at 10 mph.  Craig is at the front of the ship awaiting a throw from Dan.  Dan throws the ball to Craig at 40 mph.  Sherri measures it with the radar gun.

Now , let’s put Sherri on shore with the radar gun and do the same thing ; Dan throws to Craig.  This time Sherri gets a speed of 50 mph : the ball is going 40 mph and the boat is traveling another 10 mph. Simple.  Now let’s move Sherri out into space but allow her to still focus the radar gun on Dan’s throw of the baseball.  The earth is spinning East at 1070 mph.  So when Dan throws the ball to Craig this time Sherri gets a speed of 1120 mph.  Of course Dan is thrilled he can throw so fast and Craig denies it.  Now it gets a little trickier. When Craig throws the ball back to Dan into the West, Sherri measures it as -1040 mph traveling West ; or at 1040 mph traveling East.  The equation for all of these is RATE = DISTANCE  /  TIME  [ miles per hour ]

Now before I go any further I wanted to express my take on the philosophical aspect of relativity.  Nothing is changing for Dan and Craig !  They are just playing pitch and catch on a boat.  They are the participants. Isaac Newton’s world of science and math is perfect to them.  However , everything has changed for Sherri.  She is the observer.  Her reality, her truth is completely different.  She is watching Craig throw the ball to Dan into the West and the ball is traveling East !  Her reality is completely relative to her position.  Now Sir Isaac does not hold up anymore.

O.K.  Now let’s go back on the boat and give Dan a flashlight.  Dan shines the light at Craig and Sherri measures it while she is on the boat.  The radar gun reads 700 million mph.  Good.  Now let’s put Sherri on the shore and have her measure the light as Dan turns on the flashlight and shines it at Craig.  We expect it to read 700 million + 10 mph more to account for the speed of the boat, right ?  It does not.  It still reads 700 million mph.  Humm.  Let’s put Sherri out in space again and try it again.  Dan turns on the flashlight towards Craig and Sherri measures it.  Now we expect 700 million mph + 10 mph of the boat + 1070 mph for the speed of the Earth’s spin.  Nope.  It still reads 700 million mph.  What the heck ?

So, if our speed is staying the same then either our distance or our time is changing in the RATE = DISTANCE  /  TIME  equation.  And I think that is where Einstein started.  From there it keeps going further out into thought experiments and then it is up to science to prove what is happening in the mind.

I am losing my mind !!!  Finally.  Thank God !  I have been trying to lose my mind, I think, since I was 12 years old.  I packed all of my Little League things in a box in the fall of 1977 and stuck the box in the attic.  I never had the right guidance, however, to finish the job.  Better late than never.

Got a long run in today.  It helped the process of actually losing my mind.

I am taking out the trash ! 

Here is why I now believe in a higher power : Trombone Shorty !

Celeste and I got a mention on Annie’s blog. Here is the link :   Annie’s Blog

I also was thinking about my two totaled cars in 2010 ; a Toyota Yaris in January and a VW Wagon in June of that year and this quote from Paul Coehlo came to mind :

” Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

I bought new shocks for my wagon in case I drive west and I bought some sheet music for trumpet yesterday: Peanuts and Lord Of The Rings.

Schrödinger’s Cat is an idea experiment that particles are not determined until they are obseverved. Here is the Wikipedia link :    Schrödinger’s Cat Experiment.

Basically,  my interpretation of it is, that inside the box, the cat is both dead and alive and neither or possibly all, simultaneously .

I believe that everything that is happening at the Quantum Level is happening at a human level and also it is happening somewhere out in the Universe.  I recently heard of a gymnast that is now doing 2 full backs with 6 twists on a trampoline.  I believe that there is a particle that behaves just like that and probably a galaxy that mimics it as well.

Anyhow, one of my extended thoughts on the experiment is that when two people ( countries ? ) are disagreeing they are both right… and wrong… and neither simultaneously.

Just wanted to write that down before I forget.

That might be a direct proportion.  I am not sure; it is just what I am seeing right now.

Here is another thought of mine :  put your energy, attention and love on what you are doing right now !  Wether you are writing, talking to a friend, digging a fence post hole,going for a run or doing any aspect of your job.  The rest will take care of itself.

I had a dream 3 or 4 nights ago that I was working in Australia in August; about the same time as the Kangaroo Hoppet World Loppet cross country ski race.  So I am going to buy my World Loppet Passport and start getting my tickets punched.  I would like to be skiing when I am old.  That is a long time from now but still ….

Here are some photos from my nephew Michael’s Confirmation last week in Eastern Mass.

Cameron, Michael and Brad

Michael's Grandparents with my mom on the right.

Here is the first part of an excellent interview with George Lukas that Bill Moyers did :

The first quote is from the documentary  film “Man On Wire” and it is from the protagonist Phillipe Petit :
“In the middle of all this madness I suddenly had hope.”

The second quote is from Adam Smith who wrote “The Wealth Of Nations” :

“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”

The cat that Joan and I found hit in November in Poestenkill, NY is doing just fine at Joan’s house and has really taken a shine to her husband.  She has named him Crash and and he is as healthy as he is going to be; which is pretty health all things considered.

Skied all last weekend up in Lake Placid, NY.  It was pretty good on Saturday and just o.k. on Sunday. I was able to get  more of my family on cross country skis.  This time it was my brother Brad’s two young boys Cameron and Roman.  Their first time on skis and it is at Mt. Van Hovenburg !  Unbelievable !!!

It should be the end of skiing this year.  However, if my gut says to buy roller skis for the summer than I will buy roller skis this summer.  Geez, I never thought I would be roller skiing !  Celeste and I made the Lake Placid Facebook page.  Talk about Facing your demons ! Here is the photo that was taken by Sue and we are posing with her dog Bear.

Lake Placid w/ Bear

Here is the link to the webpage : Lake Placid Facebook

Below are some photos of the camp I did recently at the Parker School with SeanO and Eric Shovah plus some shots of The Millbrook School Circus Intercession :

My friend Frank Torre had a great quote that I will share :

” What comes after I don’t know ?  It doesn’t matter ! ”  Back when I knew everything, I at least realized that it didn’t matter.

My friend Don Van Patten reminded me while we were talking the other night of the only time he has seen fear in me;  and it happened 28 years ago.  Donny had his leg amputated and I visited him at the hospital.  He said that when I came in to his room I was “white” with fear.  It was me looking in the mirror and seeing my own physicality coming to an end.   I was even afraid of losing my health when I was in high school.  It is time to face that demon as well.

Here is another photo that my brother took of me with an “Original 6″ NHL hat on.  Brad bought it for me at the Lake Placid Hockey Store :

New hat for the collection