I could not disagree more with this statement. If there has ever been a single time the ambitious card rarely did enter a theatrically magical arena is precisely with Tommy Wonder's routine.

Of course, like you said, this is about opinion. Nuff said here.

Ron

Just where did I say that you should do something without adequate justification or meaning? All I said was that the "justification" doesn't have to come by way of some dorky, bogus story about elevators or "how they deal in the Vegas casinos." You really don't need to come up with an artificial, exterior reason to justify everything you do (well, maybe you do, but I certainly don't). That's a lazy way of defining meaning in magic, and it heightens the public perception of magicians as geeky bulls****ers.



Ironically, I have recently had this exact debate with somebody who used the T & R plot as an example of an effect that (to him) lacked justification. So obviously, different people (magicians and spectators) find different levels of meaning intrinsic to different plots, and respond differently to them. But that's hardly front page news.



Presentation is everything, and if that expresses your attitude while presenting ACR, I'm glad you're not doing it! But thankfully the rest of us aren't limited to performing it with that level of apathy.



Then why can't people tell such a theatrical, physical script through the ACR? Again, your lack of response to it doesn't limit my ability to make some intense theater with a simple plot like ACR. To the contrary, the simpler the better, because then it's easier to focus the audience's attention. And with a simple plot I can extemporize and put my own stamp on it.



Again, if that is the attitude you exude when you perform, then you just shouldn't be doing it. It's certainly no shame on you that you don't respond to ACR or Twisting. You don't owe it to the effect just because it's popular. But it's kind of strange to me that you would argue against its intrinsic merits for others, as if your lack of response to it was the final word. You're just not a candidate for the effect, and that's OK.



That's seems really arbitrary to me. What's the difference, unless you're taking spectators' torn money and actually handing them back new $100 bills? The whole reason that you're restoring it is because you tore it in the first place, which is just as arbitrary and "meaningless" as tearing up and restoring cards, or turning a card over invisibly, or making it rise to the top of the deck under increasingly impossible conditions. Or sawing a lady in half, or levitating, or making balls pass through cups, or making sponge balls reproduce. I really fail to see any difference between ACR and any of these other time-tested, classic effects of magic other than the fact that you don't personally respond to it. And again, that's OK. But just don't tell me what I should or shouldn't respond to, and especially don't tell me that my audiences aren't going to respond, because I know that you'd be dead wrong on that one.