Podcasts about conjuring arts research center

We are joined by William Kalush, who is the director of the Conjuring Arts Research Center in New York. The Center is dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of performance magic, including the history of playing cards, ventriloquism, juggling, deception, and sleight of hand tricks. The Center offers an extensive library of books and periodicals. and aims to provide the world’s most expansive collection of material relating to conjuring. We discuss Ricky Jay, Tommy Cooper, Houdini, the history of conjuring books, and how the Center was created.

Today's Guest: Larry Ratso Sloman, author or co-author of celebrity memoirs from Howard Stern, Abbie Hoffman, Anthony Kiedis, Phil Esposito, Mike Tyson, and a biography of Harry Houdini   Order by clicking the DVD cover above! Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, co-author of Howard Stern's 'Private Parts' Writing the biography of a well-known person in pop culture is an assignment fraught with trap doors, two-way mirrors, and shackles. Some writers even disdain their subjects. Others hopelessly suck up to the person, if living, in hopes of winning their favor. Journalists working the genre, however, are usually after something more. They took on the life of an individual because they believe -- through professional research and interviews -- that they can add more color or depth to what’s known about the figure’s public and private lives. Today’s Mr. Media guest, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, has trod the path of biography and ghostwritten autobiographies a number of times in his career. He wrote Steal This Dream about the life of 1960s dissident Abbie Hoffman. He helped Howard Stern pen his life story in two memorable books, Private Parts and Miss America. When Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers needed someone to help tell his story, Kiedis turned to Sloman. The book many people remember Sloman best for, however, may well be his chronicle of Bob Dylan’s remarkable 1975 Rolling Thunder Review concert tour, On the Road with Bob Dylan. That is also where he earned his unusual nickname, which I’m told he wears with pride like a badge of courage. Sloman’s latest book, written with William Kalush is The Secret Life of Houdini, the Making of America’s First Superhero. Larry "Ratso" Sloman Website • Twitter • Wikipedia • IMDB • Order Horward Stern's Private Parts from Amazon.com BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Houdini is a fast read, thanks to the focus on storytelling and the wealth of incredible detail that you and your partner uncovered about the magician and the man. Can you tell us a little bit about how the book came about and the style in which it’s written? LARRY "RATSO" SLOMAN: I first got interested in magic when I co-authored or ghostwrote -- David Blaine’s memoir, Mysterious Stranger. It was a hybrid book. That book was part reminiscence about his various stunts and being encased in ice and being buried underground. It was also part teaching you how to do some magical effects, and it was also a kind of history of magic. For the history part, David said, “You have to go work with Kalush, because he produced all my shows, and he’s got the most amazing magic library in the world.” So we spent a lot of time at Kalush’s library, the Conjuring Arts Research Center. We did all this research, and we did a chapter on Houdini in the David Blaine book. That was my first exposure to reading about Houdini. I read all the extant biographies of Houdini at the time, and I remember sitting around with Kalush and saying, “You know, it’s really strange. I mean, there are all these gaps in Houdini’s story, and he makes strange career choices. I think there’s more to this than meets the eye.” And Kalush says, “I agree.” And the more we looked into it, the more we said, “It’s time to take a fresh look at Houdini,” and that’s the genesis of The Secret Life of Houdini. ANDELMAN: What about the storytelling? What I really like about the book is that every page is almost a separate anecdote in some ways in that you’re always storytelling. It’s not so much analysis, which some people expect in biography, but it’s storytelling, which is what I expect, and I really like that. Order 'Undisputed Truth' by Mike Tyson with Larry Ratso Sloman, available from Amazon.com in print or as an ebook by clicking on the book cover above! SLOMAN: It’s funny the way we wrote this book. In a way, we almost wanted to do a celebrity biography of Houdini akin to the ones I had written with Howard Stern and people like that. We wanted it to be accessible; we wanted it to be anecdote driven. There was a professor at NYU, Silverman, who had done an exhaustive biography, which kind of laid out a lot of the facts, and yet it really didn’t. The story wasn’t driven by these anecdotes, and to us, that seemed the best way to capture Houdini. He’s such an incredibly complex guy. ANDELMAN: You did a tremendous amount of research in terms of organizing stuff that was arcane and seemingly unconnected. SLOMAN: Thanks to what we lovingly called, “Ask Alexander.” It was based on Alexander the Mentalist, and what we did was create a huge, huge database. We scanned in every known Houdini book, all the magic magazines that Kalush had in his collection, all the letters, and all the scrapbooks, and made them text searchable. The book could have taken 25 years to write if we weren’t able to really have that instant access. This research project was over two years. So at the beginning of research, you may come across a name. A year and a half later, you may come across that name again and say, “Wow, I think this guy has something to do with…” Well, we just put the name into the database, and boom, in five seconds, we had every hit on that name. It was a tremendous expedient. I think it’s really the first Houdini biography of the digital age, and we were able to collate all this incredibly diverse material. ANDELMAN: Now, a lot of writers -- and Doris Kerns Goodwin comes to mind -- have been in trouble the last couple years with issues of plagiarism. I’m not saying that you did this, but my question is, when you scan in material like that, how do you avoid that? I mean, Doris’ comment was, “It was inadvertent that I used material from another source,” but when you go to this digital type of system and you scan in all this stuff, it would seem like the situation is ripe for that kind of abuse SLOMAN: Our book is full of citations. We very liberally use Houdini’s own writings. We use letters that he had written. I don’t think the problem so much is plagiarizing anything, because the analysis that we did was almost separate from the writing process. We overlaid the analysis onto the writing, and the analysis was basically between me and Kalush, who was the magic expert. So if there was a question of how Houdini did something and we wanted to reveal that, and a lot of times we didn’t reveal that, obviously. But there were times where we did reveal some of his methods, and that was overlaid after the main narrative had been written already. ANDELMAN: Will the way that you used technology to research this biography affect the way you do it in the future? SLOMAN: Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s no other way to do it. It’s so overwhelming to have that amount of material, but when you have it in a way that’s manageable and that literally you can do searches in microseconds … All the major newspapers now have their entire archives in databases. We were able to find out a lot about John Wilkie, who was the head of the Secret Service and whom nobody really knew anything about. We were able to find out his connections to the world of magic through an article in the Washington Post in 1908, because of this new technology. It is certainly an incredible boon. I’m sure we would never have been able to find those articles if not for that. ANDELMAN: I think one of the most controversial revelations in the book is Houdini as a spy. SLOMAN: It’s funny. It was controversial at first. The magic world is very insular, so a lot of these guys were saying, “We don’t know about this, so therefore it can’t be true.” But when you get a guy like the former head of the CIA, John McLaughlin, who reads the book and says, “Yeah, I’ll write an introduction to your book,” and says in the introduction, “This is absolutely plausible to me.” So I don’t think you could have anybody better vouching for your theory than the former head of the CIA. ANDELMAN: Absolutely. Well, it’s a great read, and I hope it’s doing well, and I hope more people will read it. Order by clicking the book cover above! SLOMAN: Well, it’s doing well, and in fact, the latest wave of unbelievable press and attention has been the whole exhumation thing, and that was based on our research. It was one of these serendipitous things. Two years ago, I attended the annual Houdini séance that Sid Radner, a Houdini scholar and collector, puts on every year. That year, it was in Las Vegas, because he was also auctioning off a lot of Houdini material. At the séance, there was the great-granddaughter of Margery, the world’s most famous medium at the time, who was Houdini’s adversary in the last years of his life. I approached her. It turns out she lives in Long Island not too far from where I have a weekend place, so I said, “Could I come and interview you?” figuring that there may be some great family anecdotes about Margery and Houdini, and she said, “Sure.” And I go to visit her and her husband, and they make me a nice dinner, and we have a great interview, and at the end of the interview, I said, “You wouldn’t happen to have like some letters or any kind of documents laying around?” She said, “Oh yeah, come on.” And she takes me into a spare bedroom, and she opens up the closet door, and the entire closet is filled with boxes and boxes of correspondence, including correspondence with Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, all the leading luminaries of the spiritualism movement. It’s got over thirty scrapbooks of Margery that were amassed by her husband, and nobody had seen this material for 80 years except for her and her mother. My jaw dropped. I wound up spending the next two weeks over there every day. She was such a doll, she even helped me carry the material to the local store to Xerox it. Those thousands of pages were then put into the Alexander, made text searchable. From that material, we developed the most compelling part of the book to me, which was the last few years of his life and how the battle with the spiritualists may have ended with Houdini’s dea

It's that time of the year again, when the days grow shorter, a chill creeps into the air, and the supernatural and otherworldly are ubiquitous—even in the library world. Join American Libraries Associate Editor and Dewey Decibel host Phil Morehart for a very special Halloween edition of the podcast, featuring conversations with: Greg Hager, director of Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana, which is notorious for being one of the most haunted libraries in the United States. Phil and Greg talk about the library’s history and haunts, and how it uses the internet to help visitors spot its ghosts. Jake Adler, head librarian at the Conjuring Arts Research Center in New York City, a library and research facility devoted to the magic arts. Phil and Jake discuss the facility's collection of magic-related books and periodicals, its availability to researchers and the public, and more. Daniel Kraus, award-winning author of numerous horror and fantasy books, including The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, the latest volume of which was released October 25, and Trollhunters, a book coauthored with filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro that is coming to Netflix as an animated series in December. Phil chats with Daniel about his projects and inspirations, their favorite horror films, and more.

Peter Kreten is joined on the phone with William Kalush, the executive director of the Conjuring Arts Research Center in New York City, and author of The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero. In this interview Kreten and Kalush discuss Houdini's impact on magic, how Kalush first got into magic, and what the Conjuring Arts Research Center is. For more information on the Conjuring Arts Research Center, please visit www.conjuringarts.org.

As I begin the next season of the Magic Newswire's "Spirit of Magic" podcast, it is a pleasure to introduce you to the Master in Residence of the Conjuring Arts Research Center, the amazing David Roth.  In this first in an ongoing series of conversations, David will discuss a wide array of topics including the relevance of magic with coins at a time where the quarter is the largest coin that most Americans will be familiar with. Dai Vernon's circumcission, the Spaghetti Sessions, the El Cerrito Seven and so much more. 

Bill "The Triggerman" Kalush joins us on this episode of the Magic Newswire podcast. Bill founded the Conjuring Arts Research Center in 2003 which has on its' board several significant figures as David Blaine, Steve Cuiffo, Mike Caveney, and Philip Varrichio. Kaulush has been a close friend and associate of David Blaine since they first met in the early 1990's and has consulted with David on almost every television special that he has produced. Bill appeared on "David Blaine : Dive of Death" when he pulled the trigger on the rifle used in Blaine's bullet catch. In addition, Bill was the co-author of the bestselling biography "The Secret Life of Houdini : America's First Super Hero."