Turn Your Shop into a Place of Initiation

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1941 BU Walking Liberty Half Dollar Magic Coin in capsule, $225.

Most silver half dollars run from about $35 for something decent all the way down to crap coins at $8 bucks apiece, if you don’t mind the fact that the coin is unrecognizable and basically worth the silver scrap price and not a lot more.

Even cheaper is the half dollar you get from your local grocer or bank clerk. You’ll need a half dollar in order to learn the very first trick a performing magician learns, which is called “The French Drop”.

The French Drop is the Very First Trick You’ll Ever Learn, if you learn from a pro, and learning The French Drop requires a specific and very serious and very official Initiation into the Order of Performing Magicians.

I’ll give specifics in a moment, but first, let’s examine the concept of coin magic itself:

One of the most natural and easiest tricks for which to find a prop is a coin trick. Almost everyone has a coin of some kind or another. The most common coin for the French Drop is the U.S. Half Dollar, but there are plenty of other coins and plenty of good reasons to use an unusual coin. Continue reading →

Holiday Shopping Ideas

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We all want to find that perfect Xmas present — the one that packs small but plays big, that looks like a million and costs like a candy bar. Well, bunkie, you’ve come to the right Huckster Booth!

So let’s build a Holiday Gifting List a little differently this year. I’ll post a few of my personal favorites from my collections on zazzle. Lemme show ya a couple of cheapie stocking-stuffers that will blow your mind:

Continue reading →

One Day Is All You Get

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Della appeared at the gallery as we set up the small booths.

Living life, you only get one day at a time, no matter how it may seem. The illusions of passages and connectivity and coincidence control create a condition of deep, deep sleep.

Waking up from that zombie sleep can be tricky and difficult, if you don’t know exactly how to go about stimulating the waking state — there isn’t any other way.

Banging the Waking State on the head won’t open the door.

Get the job done right. Join the Gallery Group and take a bite of responsibility and right action.

Your first job is to get with the group, the POG — Pack Of Green.

If you have no experience in our D2 Safaris, get some. Everything you do in the gallery space will depend largely on your spiritual growth through the interactions experienced in the Safari runs.

The Gallery is a common space where many dimensions intersect.

You are expected to develop a working wormhole from your home universe or dimension — that’s “where you live”, which may be defined as: “Where you park your cell phone”.

Think of your Cubby, Cubicle, Divider Wall or Jewelry Booth as your face. Continue reading →

The Next Step

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Now that you’ve joined the Ashram for $30 a month and gotten a place in the gallery — either a cubby at $100 per month or a booth for $200 a month or both — it’s time to look at the program.

You are now part of a team.

That team operates in the subtle plane, but manifests clearly and tangibly in the gallery as a group of artists and artisans.

The art varies widely, as does the crafting. Materials and methods are very much unique to each of the experienced artists of our Grass Valley Graphics Group, and that creates a lot of excitement in visitors to our space.

Because we specialize in miniature works of art, our walls are filled with lots of interesting things to see. People tend to stay longer in the gallery precisely because there are so many paintings, drawings, sketches, embossings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings and more, and the longer they linger the more likely they’ll shop, meaning you get the sale.

How the support boils down is that whenever we have some surplus, it can be applied to promotion and publicity, but keep in mind that money can’t buy you love, and you can quote me on that! Continue reading →

Gallery Strategies

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So you’ve found a great, natural wood-floor, well-lit gallery space, and you rented it. Now what are you going to fill it up with?

My first answer would normally be “Nothing”.

Me, I’d leave the gallery totally empty except for a few very large, very impressive celebrity art in the form of paintings or other types of hanging pieces, and maybe a few full-length sculptures, a meeting area on a luxury Persian carpet, and that’s it.

My preference is to make a few good sales a year, rather than keep the register going “ka-ching”, but that’s not how we’re going to run this gallery, because there’s a lot more at stake here than celebrity art and celebrity artists.

We have a work community. Continue reading →

Why Are You Here???

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St. MIke at Cosmo Street, 1969.

Back at Cosmo Street, when St. Mike uttered those now-infamous words, “Why are you here?”, newcomers would brighten up, and old-timers would groan, “Not again.”, and that’s where they were wrong.

Of course, again.

Repetition is the key to the mysteries. Only when the initial novelty has worn off can one actually penetrate into any order of knowledge.

In short, you gotta do it a million times just to get the rhythm.

Why you are here is not a casual question, nor is it all-inclusive. In that particular case, it meant, “Why are you on Earth in a human incarnation?”

You should have some idea of what you’re trying to do with your lifetime, other than just spend it on vacation, on a continual quest for absence of pain and persistence of pleasure.

Basically, that’s what a paramecium does all day long. Continue reading →

The Therapeutic Value of Work

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Crushing Anxiety, Hopelessness and Despair are your Christmas gifts from the present administration. Donald Trump is doing everything he can to make you, personally, the target of his contempt and social pathology.

Even without Donald J. Trump and his mean-spirited friends, you’d be hard-pressed these days to get through the Dark Hours of the Soul, and if those Dark Hours are happening every night and well into the daylight, you need what I’m selling.

It’s not just your ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill snake oil, either. It’s something you make yourself, and you control your destiny in this regard all the way through the project. I’ll explain:

You’re sitting or standing around minding your own business, when all of a sudden, a million bad thoughts and worries and fears come crashing into your brain, just when you most need quietude and calm, serenity and peace. No matter what you do, it’s bothering you and it won’t stop. Continue reading →

Nevada City Tours

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Old Fire Station, Broad Street, Nevada City, photo by E.J. Gold.

If you click onto nevadacitytours.com, you’ll note that the first listing takes you to zazzle, where you’ll initially see postcards, views of Nevada City and environs, that I took when I was regaining my walking skills after the second surgery in 2002.

The gallery is well within view here — it’s just to the right of the middle of the photo, inside the historic and very haunted New York Hotel. We feature very high-end ORIGINAL art by Chagall, Miro, Picasso, Degas, Manet, Gauguin, Matisse, Rembrandt, van Ostade and many more.

Our first offering will be a very rare and very personal Jasper Johns 0-9 lithograph in colors, pencil-signed and numbered, but the most important aspect of this offering is that it came from Sotheby’s and carries with it all the documentation from Sotheby’s auction house in New York City.

You’ll see at my gallery — and have a chance to buy or help sell — museum-grade art, which could be purchased by an art patron in your hometown, on the public’s behalf, then bequeathed to your local art museum. There may be tax benefits to the estate by so doing, but the social and cultural benefits far outweigh personal wealth. This can be a legacy that you can leave for future generations, or help facilitate if you can’t buy.

Here’s an example:

This is a very unusual form of Jasper Johns’ zero through nine series; it’s pencil-signed and numbered by the artist. It’s small, personal, and very, very limited in the edition size. JASPER JOHNS — Zero Through Nine (0-9) — color lithograph — Ca. 1978 — Edition 60 — Signed – Numbered – Dated – C 160×124 – S4 – G 781 – Full Margin — Sotheby New York – 05/13/87 – # 833. Continue reading →

Mass-Murdering Fuckhead?

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Hey, I wasn’t the one to say it first in public. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yuliz Cruz said “I am done being politically correct. I am mad as hell. This is genocide.”

Meanwhile, Mass-Murdering Fuckhead Donald Trump tweeted back, “The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.”

Human suffering means nothing to him. Death and destruction mean nothing, no matter to whom they happen, but to brown and black people, he doubles down on not caring.

Donald Trump is going to go down in history as a Mass-Murdering Fuckhead, just like Adolf Hitler, although you can’t get anyone to believe that, quite yet, but wait, you’ll see what happens, and Donald’s name will be besmirched forever.

He doesn’t care how it happens, as long as he stays more famous than Obama, he could care less how history sees him, and as an advanced Altzheimer patient and paranoid-schizophrenic with delusions of poverty, he couldn’t give two shits, and he doesn’t.

The reason he’s totally shameless is that he really, really doesn’t care.

Nothing means anything to Donald Trump. He has no reality on anything around him, and very little reality even on his own self.

In short, he comes up short. Continue reading →

Trump is a Social Disease

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Trump Sucks Eggs.

I say this and more, with no apologies. After the insults that Trump delivered to our national sports heroes this weekend, all bets are off, and I’m doubling down Presidential Style, on my claim that Trump is totally insane, with no holds barred on that accusation, and I can prove it, and will heretoforth lay down the particulars:

Never mind my association with the Gestalt Movement. Forget my background. Just on the basis of simple observation and logic, I can tell you in a nutshell — pun intended — what’s wrong with Donald J. Trump.

Sure, he’s an NPD, a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a classic textbook case, but there’s a reason why, and I’m prepared to tell you what it’s all about, deep inside what passes for a mind in the case of Donald J. Trump. Continue reading →