What spin doctors do at home.

What do those whirly, dodgy people do at home? I tell no lies. They watch even more spin. They span all spun spin. And they turn & turn the most fine upstanding citizen dizzy. This is the Buckland magic take on spin. 

Swallow your woozy pills kids. It's my feigning interest act. With double mock.

A selection from a Tony Wood Conceptual Video Art gallery event.

"Gravity always wins" Ian Buckland 1981 on his
 television series The Magic Bag ABC TV.

Her magical loveliness, Mabel Sperry.

Do not be concerned, in a mere flick there will be neat and delicious Mabel tales zooming towards you. She was the striking, xylophone-playing wife of great touring illusionist McDonald Birch. Was she ever.

Here are those promised extra tales. Buckle up:

This is a kind of private entertainment for me as the later ambulance story will show. I have the original Maurice Seymour photograph of the scan you see, hanging in my hallway. Ah yes, the beautiful and oddly crazed Mabel Sperry, wife and box-jumper to that terrifically glamorous US stage trickster McDonald Birch; he of the swift red jackets and sweep of silver hair in his latter years of nonchalant decline. 

It is a striking image Seymour has made of Mabel. Though it's a lost one. It submerged itself under the thousands of photographs he shot of show business royalty. Some of them so shimmering that they they've burned their way into human brain history. Try a little search and you'll be thinking, 'ah yes, that one of musician Duke Ellington in a top hat'. And so on.

Somehow I know that Maurice fuddled around in a pile of props strewn on his Chicago studio floor and came up with this spectacular headdress. I am guessing that the stack of outfits was supplied by Mabel. The head decoration looks exactly like one worn by her in the Chinese sequence of their 1940 shows, In those she looked as usual like a knock-out drop but her husband's oriental outfit suggested he'd hopped straight out of bed and wandered onstage in his pyjamas.

But when the headdress emerged from that pile of knick knacks, that sharp Maurice Seymour 'eye' honed in. He slipped it on to her head and before she could react in any other way the shutter was released for keeps with this sublime image resulting.

Now for an anecdote of the local sort. Whenever my father fell over I had to call an ambulance. Inevitably when the ambulance ladies turned up and before anything happened of a health nature, each one of them went into a fainting spell coo-ing alarmingly as Mabel's picture loomed near the front door. This was a common thing and my dad and I used to wait for it each time there was a medical disaster. I sometimes had to drag the ladies away from the picture to perform the emergency work at hand. Though now I know precisely what kind of gal can thrill the lesbian delight valve. I look on my Mabel picture in the hallway as a public service.

Oh damn it, here's another snap of Mabel and that husband of hers. This is their classic 'money in the bank' publicity shot. And it was so lovely of Mabel to throw in her trademark 'Hollywood knee' just for us. She was generous to a fault.

Oh and I must confess that I tossed in something too. Yep, that eye-zinging Ken + Julia Yonetani artwork chandelier made from uranium glass and lit with ultra violet, no less ... that's what I did. It is just so beautiful [sigh]. Those bedazzling Birches deserve it.

IB.

Korla Pandit. Then, exotica became cool.

Only the naturally glamorous can wear 

a giant sapphire with certain abandon.

Please click it up big in screen-filling deluxe.

1951 

YouTube clips often do not 

work on handheld devices. 

This link is here, good luck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ytSC8rz84

Something fascinating happened.


I am researching an interesting 1940s US magician Tommy Woo. I bought the remainder of his magic collection about eight or nine years ago and I have a photo of him taken by a then famous Hollywood star, glamour photographer called John E. Reed.


As I searched any remnants of his work and details about photographer Reed, I found an image of someone I've been thinking about all of my life. He was a pianist, organist I was entranced by as a child. The Australian ABC television network ran filler clips of this young man performing for plenty of years. The ABC must have picked up a package of his fifteen minute films. You'll see why that happened. Anyone who cracks the fifteen minutes of fame remark will have to leave the room. He was well ahead of Andy.


From time to time I've recalled this pianist and realised I had no idea of his name. But there, in a Google link, was an Indian name connected to a picture by John E. Reed. I was thunderstruck when I saw who this person was. It was ... Korla Pandit! So I spent some time seeking out bits and pieces, as we all do. I lucked into some video clips. Back then it was incredible to see anyone playing an organ and a grand piano at the same time. That was enough then to ensure excitement. Yes, yes, ambidextrous ambience.


He was apparently one of the most famous people on early US television. His androgyny took the fancy of people everywhere. He was the first to have his little tea-time show syndicated across America. He was so successful that a certain Wladziu Valentino Liberace saw what could be achieved ... and ... muscled in. Liberace convinced Korla Pandit's show producer to take him on instead. The producer dropped Korla and produced instead the now famous Liberace TV shows in the same way. Liberace had something better, the gift of the gab. Cool was replaced with schmaltz.


Pandit was later known as the Godfather of Exotica. That was surely the thing that wildly excited me. There was not much exotica in the Buckland home in those years ... except for me, of course. And Korla Pandit is now widely accepted as the person who popularised exotic music and he predates all the others by years. He paved the way for precious, exotic, high camp imports like the Peruvian Yma Sumac the Inca Princess. You are sure to have heard her enchantments warbling away at equally exotic parties here and there. Though, she was very, very good.


Korla Pandit never spoke on television until he attended a televised reunion of a San Franciso TV station in the 1980s [most of his shows came out of KTLA Los Angeles]. He simply used his remarkable eyes during presentations. 


In the end his producer clearly thought his production company was due for a refresh and Liberace's line of patter and shrewd goop won out. However Korla went on playing music for the rest of his life.


I remember being dumbstruck to see someone who was probably my mysterious organist in that marvellous Johnny Depp movie Ed Wood. It was him. How clever were they to get Korla Pandit to play in a down-at-heel nightclub scene in the film? The timing was spot on because Korla would have been at his height during the making of those early Ed Wood Z-grade flicks. It made no difference that Korla was about 60 years older in the Tim Burton movie. How clever is Burton? However, after I left the movie theatre in those pre-Google and internet days, I had absolutely no way of following up on who he was. I still did not even know Korla's name. How things have changed.


Now my childhood wonderment has been revealed to me. I busily downloaded as many clips of him as I could. He died in early 1998, four years after the Ed Wood film was released. But before he whisped away into nowheresville, and this is really cool ... Korla made a punk record with the Los Angeles band, The Muffs.


Some people are really good aren't they?


Oh and here's the John E. Reed picture of Tommy Woo. He started my search and he deserves the credit wherever he is.

But shh. Quick come behind the crimson velvet curtain; there's something I must whisper in your ear. Like so many others, Tommy stopped being glamorous with all that dazzling Brylcream and oriental snap and opened a tawdry trick shop in San Diego where he grafted a living selling cloth snakes that jumped from peanut cans and vomit ala fake. 

Woo who!

Tommy Woo performing with Loyd's equally 

exotic Chinese Sticks with fire-branded 

insignias and turned jade ends.

Liberace always knew how to pick the most enjoyable support acts for his extravangazas. He knew that giving audiences preceding acts as lovely gifts he would be adored even more when he arrived on stage. That, my friends, is true show business nous. In da house.

The Shop of the Mind.

Magicians universally love old magic shops that look like this. 

There are only a couple left in the world.

Phillip looking at you.

Phillip Cooley pictured by IB Detroit 2002.

Phillip is doing very well, thank you very much. And so he should.

Get a good seat.

Seats in the front row at family prices.

It's more an innate-mare.

Gesticulation can be fun.

Wrist not in peace.

Seer, mystic and magician Erik Jan Hanussen advertising material by wunderkind artist Theo Matejko from 1927. 

First poster to sell the intent not the personality. Matejko's illustration was inspired by the hand of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling Adam. 

The very strange Erik Jan Hanussen predicted his friend, the politician Adolph Hitler would rise when no-one else thought so. 

No matter, the Nazis shot Hanussen six weeks after that rise in 1933. He was very well connected and close to all the inside information as clairvoyants often are. Too well connected it might seem. And being half Jewish was a dangerous thing in the midst of Nazi lunacy. Let's leave to one side that he was also half-mad.

There is good reason and evidence for me to believe that Erik taught Hitler about body language and the power of the salute. A curious individual. It would be very hard to like someone who started a newspaper and then blackmailed people so that he would not print scandalous stories about them.

Here, a chilling thought. The hand could be seen as the frightening Nazi salute on the way up. 

After you've perished that thought, what a pretty hand it is? It predates Disney's famed animated fairy dust and was created at the exact time when Walt was making it big. Don't things seem to link together as you surf history? Hold that thought.

IB.

*Handy.