Music: “Nothing Is Good Enough” by Aimee Mann (iTunes)
History:
I was lucky enough to discover Dan and Dave Buck before they got super-famous with their hit DVD The System. After watching their performances & tutorials on Hit the Road, I was so inspired by their smooth & visual style that I decided to look them up online. Sure enough, they had a website up and I bought every set of notes they had so I could learn all the stuff inside.
My curiosity still insatiable, I got into contact with Dan Buck and started to email him with questions I had about flourishing, card handling, practice, video making and all sorts of other nonsense. Being the insanely nice person that he was (and still is), Dan replied to each and every one of my emails, and over time we were acquainted enough with each other that I was made the moderator, then administrator of their forums.
About a year later, my family and I went to visit California and Las Vegas for the summer. While in LA, I hazarded a chance and asked Dan if he would be interested in meeting up while I was there, and he agreed. While Dave couldn’t make it (he was down with pneumonia at the time), I got to hang out with Dan for a couple of hours, during which he totally blew my mind with all the awesome new sleights & flourishes that he showed me.
As luck would have it, my Dad had a video camera with him, so he filmed the two of us while we were discussing card stuff over lunch. When I got back to Singapore I edited a few clips from the footage together and sent it to some friends as evidence of having witnessed the second coming. Somehow, the video got leaked out by one of my friends, and it started to get spread around like crazy, inspiring a whole bunch of people to include Dan’s handling of Joey Burton’s Skater Cut in their videos, as well as early attempts of the TCTCSA variation that would later come to be known as Pandora.
Thankfully, the Bucks didn’t get mad about the footage leaking out, and I got to meet the both of them again the following year. In August of 2007 I moved to Orange County, which made it a lot more convenient for us to hang out. So far we’ve collaborated on a video and a set of notes, and I’m looking forward to other projects we’ll be working on in the future :D
-Kev
[...] not every day you get to meet someone you’ve been looking up to for years. As with my first encounter with Dan Buck a few years back, finding out that these great artists are just people like you and I is just a [...]