Music: “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann (Amazon)
History:
Like many others who started earlier on in the flourish game, two of the first instructional DVDs I watched were Cap Cuts and Generation X. One particular type flourish that caught my attention in both videos was the 5-packet line display – the Line Cut in Cap Cuts, and the Tudor Cut from Gen X.
When it came to the handling though, both moves seemed like they required the card handler to have big hands in order to make the display as straight as possible. That meant that if your fingers weren’t able to stretch as far as the flourish required, it would end up as a bent, misshapen array of packets. Which is fine with some people, but I felt that the best part about the display was the fact that all the packets could be extended into a straight line – it gave it a sense of structure that suggested a sense of discipline on the performer’s part. So after toying around with different grips and holds, I came up with a handling for the 5-packet line display that allowed for more flexibility and a definite straight-ness, regardless of hand size. It became my signature move for a while, as proven by hundreds of photographs I posed for since its inception.
Flash forward to the end of July 2005, and I’m racking my brains trying to decide which of my moves should be the last in the Summer Series. I ended up filming this video, which was the first one which featured me talking to the camera. Lots of slurring and mention of the word ‘thingy’, I know – my enunciation skills weren’t very well developed at 16.
Instead of just posting the video up standard, I actually hid the link to it in an already-underlined comma on the site, causing people to click everywhere in frustration. Seeing as how I had a bunch of Google ads up at the time, this strategy earned me quite a bit of revenue, which was pretty awesome at the time.
After I took my mredux.tk site down later that year, this video also disappeared with it. I would later teach it in my first set of notes on magic, Couch, but other than that the video remained unavailable for a while. After learning that people had been trading the video around to get other ‘underground’ material from others, I decided to re-post it on my Vimeo page. In retrospect, there are a lot of things I could do better in the teaching, but hey – time to move on to bigger and better things, yeah?
-Kev
best cut ever (i think u where inspired by the tudor cut, but this is far better)
great job man
Yeah—I wanted to combine something as straight as Cap Casino’s “Line Display” with something of a vertical nature like the Tudor Cut. Glad you liked it.