A while ago I was hanging out with a couple of Canadian friends, and one of them mentioned the female phenomenon of ‘breaking the seal’. Apparently, if a girl is out drinking and she goes to the bathroom just once, it ‘breaks the seal’, thereby causing her to have to keep running off to the bathroom again and again and again, all throughout the night.

Now, this post isn’t about pissing (I sure hope not), but the reason I mention seal-breaking is because it seems like something similar has been happening in regards to my videographic online presence lately — the last major release I can recall being actively involved in was in 2009, and since then it’s been mostly a dry spell for me, save for the occasional incidental appearances in Singaporean jam videos every now and then.

Somehow, though, The One-Card EP proved to be a seal-breaker, because ever since then it seems like a new video with me in it comes out just about every week or so. Asides from the Theory11 Interview I posted last time, here are two videos and a new On Demand release, ordered in terms of my prominence in the video:

1. First up is Dan and Dave’s On Demand tutorial for my four-card production called ‘Fourgasm‘, which is a sweet all-at-once production that I usually get into from the Molecule 2 cut. It’s only 95 cents, too, so what have you got to lose? Besides 95 cents, I mean.

2. When I was staying in Berkeley and preparing for my talk, I took a couple trips over to San Francisco. During one of my visits I met up with fellow flourishers Jack Hernstadt and Ian Palima to just hang out and show each other what we were working on. They each brought cameras, so here is Ian’s edit of footage from both of ‘em:

3. Finally, with the advent of another convention where Allan Hagen is present, there must necessarily be a new ‘sessioning’ video that comes out of it, and this time I was fortunate enough to be featured in it, even though the total runtime of my inclusion probably totals less than 4 seconds.

In the video below you can see my handling of a riffle shuffle flourish by Dan Buck, as well as an interesting application of Morningstar by my buddy Huron, which in retrospect was probably also inspired by a magic routine by Danny Garcia.

Also, Tony Chang is a beast. Just sayin’.

Last weekend I was in San Diego to give a talk at this year’s Magic-Con. The topic of my presentation was creativity in card flourishing, specifically in relation to remix culture and stealing elements from outside of magic and flourishing to create new hybrids and possibilities.

The guys at Theory11 caught up with me afterwards to prod me on some more examples of this. You can check out all this and then some in the video below:

Click here to purchase The One-Card EP

A few weeks ago Dan and Dave Buck approached me about doing a few On Demand videos for their site. I figured it’d be a good teaser for the kind of stuff to expect from the new Virtuoso project debuting later this year, so I agreed to shoot a few things with them.

One of the ideas I had for a download was a collection of some of my favorite one-card flourishes I’ve been tinkering with over the years. Many have made their debut in video form before — Raccoon and 2πr can both be seen in Portable Playground, Raccooooon is in the Smooth Operations trailer, and Rocky Raccoon first appeared online in the form of Ink.

Read the rest of this entry »

O hai thar.

Sorry for the long hiatus, guys. No, I haven’t converted to Scientology yet (though I did pass by that creepy building more than a few times during my stay in Cali). Basically, the past week has seen me busy with socializing and sight-seeing in Los Angeles, where I was able to catch up with many an old friend, hang out with new ones, meet a bunch of my idols, and eat lots of tasty food that I haven’t had in nearly a year.

Writing about it all would take too long, so to keep it visually interesting (and to save you from a lot of scrolling), I’ve posted all my photos from my stay in L.A. to my Flickr account, which I’ve linked to on this page. Given the 1000-word/picture law of conversion, my calculations indicate that this should save you a lot of time in comparison.

Clicking on the link below each photo will take you to that particular day’s photo set, and clicking on each photo within the set will bring you to a bigger version of the image, plus a little description attached. It’s a lot of clicking, I know. But hey — I had to take, color-correct, transfer, upload, describe, and then link all of these. Quit whining. Read the rest of this entry »

Update #3: We’ve hit the goal! As a gesture of eternal gratitude, Keith is sending awesome Swedish chocolates to everyone who helped out. Way to go, guys!

Update #2: Thanks to donations by generous readers of this post, members of the Genii program, and others who have heard of Keith’s predicament and have done their part to help out, we are now only $100 short of the goal! This is amazing! I’m using a lot of exclamation marks! Fudge yeah!

Update #1: As per the comment below, Michael Weber has agreed to waive Keith’s fee for the workshop if he’s able to make it to San Diego in time! Way to go, Weber!

Click here to help Send Keith to Magic-Con! We did it!

This is Keith. Keith needs your help.

Keith is a Canadian close-up magician currently studying in Sweden, so when he heard that Michael Weber was going to be doing an exclusive mentalism workshop at Magic-Con this year, he did what anyone familiar with with Weber’s material would do: he got super, duper jelly.

But Keith wasn’t about to let 5,000 miles, let alone reality, get in his way. Keith had already missed out on a previous lecture Weber had given in Toronto last November, and as the saying goes: once bitten, twice shy.

So now, Keith is doing everything he can get his ass over to San Diego in time for Magic-Con, which includes doing gigs off the hizzo in order to raise money for the plane ticket, food, and other traveling necessities. So far there’s been a lot of progress made, and it looks like he just might be able to make it over here in time… but a grand and a half is a lot of money for an exchange student, and there are only so many gigs and odd jobs one can do before ticket prices start to go up and seat availability starts to go down.

Which is where you, dear blog reader, come in.

If you’d like to help Keith make his dream of attending Magic-Con this year come true, click the link below to be taken straight to Paypal where you can make a donation of anywhere from $0.01 to $10,000. Odds are, most of you will tend towards the lower side of that spectrum, but no matter — every penny (or in Keith’s case, öre), counts.

Click here to help Send Keith to Magic-Con! We did it!

I’m excited to see how this turns out. Even if you can’t donate, do pass this link on to any magician friends you know! I’ll be updating this post as I hear from Keith in the upcoming weeks. With any luck, I’ll be hearing from him in person in about 17 days :)

Today I stumbled across this oldie from over seven years ago while transferring some files from an old hard drive to my computer.

This was from around the time where I would keep an extensive playlist in my iTunes library of potential songs to use for future card videos/short films, and ‘Ch-Check It Out’ by The Beastie Boys was one of those songs.

It lay in the waiting list for ages, until one day I was re-watching Dan and Dave’s Spring Jam with the sound off (I was in school) and it struck me that the energy of the video could totally match that of the Beastie Boys track.

So I fired up Sony Vegas, did some scrubbing and syncing, and it worked out just as awesomely as I had first conceived it in my head.

Ch-check it out:

Dan and Dave Buck – Spring Jam (Beastie Boys Remix) from Kevin Ho on Vimeo.

“How embarrassing… a house full of condiments and no food.” – Narrator, Fight Club

When I was in school, I used to have this pencil case that I carried with me to all my classes. In it I would accumulate all the necessary writing tools that I thought I needed, just in case — a couple of pens, a mechanical pencil, a regular pencil with an eraser at the end of it, an independent eraser just in case the regular pencil’s eraser was too hard or ran out, a small bottle of white-out, a ruler, a stapler, and even a pair of scissors.

Over time, the inside of the case started to become a graveyard of stationery. Loose bits of pencil lead and stray staples scattered themselves around the walls of the case. Out of six pens inside — varying between gel, ballpoint, and fountain, at that — only two worked, and those were usually hidden behind the scissors and the stapler. God knows how far deep that eraser was buried.

Eventually, I got so fed up with all the time I was wasting fiddling around inside my case trying to find a workable writing instrument that one day I just emptied out my case over a table, threw away everything that wasn’t working, and then put only three items back inside: a functioning ballpoint pen, a mechanical pencil with lots of lead stored inside, and an eraser for corrections.

Turns out that’s all I really needed. Read the rest of this entry »