Magicians

Magicians upset by Fox Broadcasting Co. television shows that expose the mechanics of intricate tricks claimed Wednesday to be making sponsors of upcoming shows disappear. But, on closer inspection, the disappearing ads are, like magic, something of an illusion. Spokesmen for a coalition of groups representing magicians said that several national advertisers, including Wendy's International Inc., had agreed not to advertise on upcoming shows.

If only these stage sorcerers could reach into a black top hat and pull out a home for their magical paraphernalia. Short of cash and abracadabra moments, the Society of American Magicians is struggling to find a public venue for its vast collection of antique stage illusions. After a freak accident forced the closure of the group's Hall of Fame and Magic Museum in Hollywood, the society moved its trove of tricks into a Pico Rivera self-storage center. "We'd love to reopen the museum.

Armed with milk-carton monsters with scary tin-can eyes and leis made from plastic soda-can holders, magician Timothy Wenk mesmerized Truman Benedict Elementary School students Tuesday with a suitcase full of garbage. Wenk, who uses magic to teach children about recycling, first dropped an empty, clear-glass Coke bottle into a wrinkled brown paper bag and pulled out a green Sprite soda bottle.

He was the founder and chairman of the board of Calabasas-based ValleyCrest Landscape Cos., the nation's largest landscape services company, whose projects have included the gardens at the Getty Center and the rooftop community garden at Walt Disney Concert Hall. But Burton S. Sperber preferred being called the "head gardener. " Sperber, a Malibu resident whose lifelong love of magic rivaled his passion for horticulture, died Friday of complications from surgery at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said company spokesman Dennis Kaiser.

Randall Richman swears he didn't drink the night he was arrested for drunk driving. He admits that he did eat fire. The breath test that measured his blood alcohol at twice the legal limit wasn't detecting liquor, according to the 32-year-old magician from Westlake Village. It was reading three different lighter fluids. "I use the stuff that says on the bottle, 'If you drink this, you're going to die,' " Richman said.

Seven days after he entered a transparent coffin set 6 feet into the ground, magician David Blaine was helped out looking fit but slightly wobbly. Hundreds of spectators cheered when the three-ton tank of water that covered his see-through coffin on Manhattan's upper West Side was lifted and Blaine sat up and smiled. The coffin had given him only about 6 inches of head room and 2 inches on each side.

Siegfried and Roy illusionist Roy Horn has been transferred from Las Vegas' University Medical Center trauma unit to the UCLA Medical Center. "This is the next step in the recovery process," said the magicians' spokesman, David Kirvin. Kirvin declined to comment specifically on Horn's condition. The illusionist was mauled onstage by a tiger during an Oct. 3 performance at the Mirage Hotel and Casino, where the duo has been performing since 1990.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Wednesday denied a magician's request for the deletion of a segment from a Fox television program next week that the magician claims unlawfully exposes an illusion he designed. Judge Robert O'Brien rejected the application for a temporary restraining order filed by magician Andre Cole, who is also a designer of elaborate effects for major magicians such as David Copperfield.

He was just a shy little kid who could only manage a card trick when he first started. Now Ron Porter performs at magic shows around the world. But he will be slipping back into his hometown library in Fullerton on Tuesday afternoon to show other kids a thing or two. Porter will be at the main library at 4 p.m. and the Hunt Branch Library on Thursday at 4 p.m. to launch the library's new season of after-school programs.

France lost its status as the world's artistic and intellectual capital following a flowering after World War II. Because the French pursue an unquenchable quest for La Gloire they have been trying ever since to recoup. It's really sort of lovable. Governments, however, are incapable of legislating talent, so they usually fall back on the creation of institutions. France is no exception. For a decade and more it has been spawning culture palaces faster than you can flick a dust mote off your lapel.

Magician Rob Zabrecky has a bar of skeleton-shaped soap in his bathroom in the Valley, even though Halloween isn't on the horizon yet. The skeleton, like so much about Zabrecky, is a manifestation of his obsession with the macabre. It's an obsession he has cultivated for the last 12 years, eventually embodying it in the persona of his alter ego — a darkly comic character called Odd Man. At Hollywood's Magic Castle, where Zabrecky is a member, he performs as Odd Man, but his shows are short and completely devoted to his theatrical brand of magic.

The text message was from Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini. "Abracadabra," it said. Presumably, this was code for "I'm awake, and I'm ready for the interview. " That was the case. But as Las Vegas illusionist-magician-trickster Tomas de la Cruz (a.k.a. "Smoothini") said on the phone a few minutes later, "I have to use that word some time. I don't use it on stage, so I find ways to make 'abracadabra' cool. " He chuckles, but it's clear he's also serious about making abracadabra - or magic - cool.

To say that Ricky Jay does card tricks is, as Mark Singer once noted in the New Yorker, somewhat akin to suggesting that "Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone. " Jay is one of the greatest sleight-of-hand artists ever to fool and wow an audience. A few years back, at a theater in Westwood, I saw him quote a ballad by the French poet/thief François Villon, as translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, while simultaneously performing the famous party piece of his stage act, piercing the skin of a watermelon, or, as Jay puts it, the "thicker pachydermatous outer-melon layer," with a single playing card flicked at 90 mph from between his fingers.

"The Girls of Lighthouse Lane: Katherine's Story" Erica Tamar Katherine lives on a rocky island called Durhan Point during the early 1900s. She is the daughter of the lighthouse keeper. She dreams of becoming a famous artist. She sets off to follow her dreams, but then something very bad happens. If you want to know the rest of the story, you'll just have to read the book. Reviewed by Megan, fifth grade Vena Magnet Arleta "A Wrinkle in Time" Madeleine L'Engle Three youngsters, Calvin, Charles and Meg worry about going on a mission.

The Last Greatest Magician in the World Howard Thurston Versus Houdini & the Battles of the American Wizards Jim Steinmeyer Tarcher/Penguin: 377 pp., $26.95 It takes some courage to write the biography of a man the reading public has mostly forgotten. Yet that's exactly what Jim Steinmeyer does in "The Last Greatest Magician in the World," a biography of the now-obscure Howard Thurston, the illusionist who held the title by acclaim in the 1920s and '30s. It's a clever marketing trick, and a necessary one, to include Houdini's name in the lumbering subtitle, but it's a piece of misdirection that, like many events in this telling of Thurston's life, doesn't play out quite the way it's supposed to. That's a shame because Thurston's life is fascinating.

Magician James Randi, who has devoted the latter part of his career to exposing fraud, scams and charlatans, and a network of skeptics known as the 10:23 Campaign launched a major campaign Saturday against the manufacturers of so-called homeopathic drugs, charging that the companies that sell the drugs are packaging worthless products that are cheating customers out of their money. In an online video , Randi consumed an overdose of homeopathic sleeping pills to demonstrate that they have no effect, and skeptics elsewhere consumed large overdoses of other homeopathic drugs in similar demonstrations.

With a flip of his wrist, college freshman Thomas Meier performs the most amazing sleight-of-hand trick imaginable: He causes the noisy crowd in his dormitory hallway to vanish. Actually, the raucous USC students who moments before were laughing and shouting on the third floor of Trojan Hall have disappeared into a neighboring dorm room. They have gathered to watch Meier click on a videotape that shows him winning a world magic championship two months ago in Germany.

It may be tricky, but a coalition of angry magicians is trying to make Fox's latest magic special disappear.

The magic man is in his element. He's working a crowd in the back room of a Philadelphia sports bar, his baseball cap turned backward and the sleeves of his sweat shirt pushed up over his thick forearms. A dozen men are huddled around him, transfixed. That's not because he's Jon Dorenbos, long snapper for the Philadelphia Eagles. It's that he's holding a deck of playing cards, effortlessly riffling them with one hand, sometimes shooting them to the other in a graceful arch. Fanning the cards, Dorenbos has one of the men select one, sign it with a felt-tip marker, then put it back in the deck.

Kicking off a triple bill from Regent Releasing is "The Magician," in which a hit man improbably allows himself to be filmed in action. That's the cream of the jest in writer-director-star Scott Ryan's darkly comic faux documentary, a gritty, shot-off-the cuff gem and a top prize winner in its native Australia. Ryan's wiry, cocky Ray joins forces with his former neighbor and film student pal Max (Massimiliano Andrighetto, who actually shot this film) to document his exploits. The picture unspools like a disarmingly amusing shaggy dog story with Ray, who sees himself as a vintage Clint Eastwood antihero, sounding off on various subjects only to bring us up short, reminding us that Ray is the real deal.