Daniel Garcia gave an outstanding lecture for us on April 11th. His audience tested close-up magic is fantastic. We were fortunate to have a professional journalist in the audience and he wrote the following article.
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Greg Koren You know Greed, right? It’s the money trick that made Daniel Garcia famous.
A dollar bill turns into a five, the five into a ten and the ten into a twenty. Then the twenty turns into a fifty, and by fifty I mean cent piece—as in half dollar.
Garcia concludes the trick by tossing the half dollar to the nearest spectator. “Don’t get greedy,” he says.
But it’s hard not to. The man who jokingly refers to himself as the “best damn magician in the world” is so generous with his time and attention, so happy to share his knowledge and inspiration, you just have to have more.
And time after time he gives it.
Take Greed, for example. During Garcia’s recent lecture at The Magic Warehouse in Owings Mill, MD, the 28-year-old not only performed and explained the trick to his audience’s delight, he also traced the trick’s origin to his teen years, when his family lived “paycheck to paycheck” and Monopoly money provided the prototype.
He recounted how he scraped together enough real money to videotape instructions for making the Greed gimmick, how with help from his “brothers” he dupped a few dozen copies of the tape and sold them all at a magic convention, and how he used the funds from that convention to make more copies to sell at the next.
On and on, until he found himself sneaking into the Magic Castle through the library entrance, where he quickly cemented his reputation as a cutting-edge creator of close-up and street magic.
Garcia gets inspiration from everywhere.
The first time a Greed-y spectator told him to turn the twenty into a fifty, he improvised the half-dollar climax when he realized he had the coin in his pocket.
After observing how a bent pedestrian sign looked straight from a certain angle, he came up with a bending paperclip trick called Clip-Trip.
For Pressure, a trick he presented at The Magic Warehouse that involves passing a borrowed iPhone through a blown-up balloon, Garcia was inspired by questions from audience members.
George Bradley of Silver Spring, MD, asked if Pressure’s method could also be used to capture a chosen card. Joe Bruno of Randallstown, MD, asked if inflating the balloon fully before deflating it to the desired size might facilitate the final effect.
A less-assured magician might’ve dismissed such questions as impertinent. Not Garcia: “I live for them.”
Garcia’s been interested in magic since he was five and saw David Copperfield escape from Alcatraz. He remembers thinking, “I want to be able to do that!”
Today, the Huston, Texas, resident is credited with some of the strongest street magic on the market, including two tricks with dollar bills (Greed and Fraud) and two card tricks (Torn, a restoration effect, and Fallen, in which the deck “falls” through a signed card).
Garcia served as head consultant on David Blaine’s last special, and says he “respectfully declined” an invitation to serve as such on Chris Angel’s.
Dressed for his Magic Warehouse lecture in an engineer’s cap, faded blue jeans and a black t-shirt emblazoned with a skull, lightning bolts and the ominous declaration Throwdown, Garcia performed his William Tell card stab and a signed card in balloon called Pop!, as well as the new rubber band trick Stairway that he co-created with friend Marcus Eddie.
With Stairway, a folded and paperclipped dollar bill slowly and visibly climbs up and down two rubber bands that’re stretched between the performer’s hands. The effect is featured on the DVD Five.
Garcia also performed his signature rubber band trick Jacob’s Ladder, which he says was inspired by Dan Harlan’s Traveling Cash routine. The effect appears on Garcia’s DVD Symphony and is a favorite of 14-year-old Josh Schmid of Glen Burnie, MD, who attended the April 11 lecture.
Josh performed Jacob’s Ladder for an admiring Bradley during intermission.
Bradley says Garcia is both inspired by magicians and inspiring of them. He saw Garcia at the recent Magi-Whirl Convention in Washington, D.C., and was impressed by his laid-back demeanor.
“He’s a great entertainer and an genuinely nice guy,” Bradley says.
Garcia says he loves hanging out with magicians. He loves magic that feels organic. “But I still get nervous every time I perform. Shhhhhhh!”
In his wallet—which is itself a prototype of the Garcia Wallet that’s slated to come out next year—he carries Greed and Fraud, the utility device Loops, and two as-yet-unreleased effects, one of them for restaurant workers.
And in his heart, Garcia carries profound gratitude for his greatest influences: his parents. “They are my fuel,” he says. “They are the reason I am who I am today.”
