Claes Gellerbrink

Barry Jones and Stuart MacLeod

The waitress at Yamashiro smiled when she saw the two bright-eyed gentlemen at the table balancing spoons on their noses. She stared in amazement when one began to shake his head back and forth vigorously without the spoon dropping. She screamed when he gleefully pulled the spoon off his nose to reveal the four-inch nail burrowing into his nostril. He offered me a latex glove to check the nail's veracity. The waitress hurriedly brought the check.

Our poor server might have been less horrified if she'd known I was dining with Barry Jones and Stuart MacLeod, the famous young Scottish magician duo known for their gory dark humor and their penchant for sharing their secrets with their audiences. Jones and MacLeod are in town this week to do their first show for the American public at Largo tonight at 8 p.m.

The two met as teenagers at school in rural Aberdeen, Scotland where they bonded over their love of magic and their distaste for the cocky mentality of the magicians of the day. "We thought most magicians came off as dicks," said Jones. MacLeod agreed: "There was no drama, no comedy, just a guy showing off. Our goal was to take the ego out of it."

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PHOTO BY STAR FOREMAN

Magic Castle frontman Milt Larsen, left, with his straight man, architectural historian George Siegel

See also:
*Derek DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães Created the Most Popular Show at the Magic Castle in Years. But They're Not Finished
*Magic Castle Battles Back From a Halloween Fire. Was it a Message From Houdini?
*Slideshow: Inside the Magic Castle

As a performer and a writer for such 1950s TV shows as Truth or Consequences, 81-year-old Milt Larsen is a natural frontman. He cheerfully admits, "To spend 50 years lying about this place just came naturally to me. If I don't know the history, I'll just make up something."

He's talking about the Magic Castle, the exclusive, members-only club in the hills above Hollywood, which is dedicated to the art of illusion. This month, the castle has been celebrating the golden anniversary of its 1962 opening.

Even with its celebrity members past and present — Neil Patrick Harris is president of the board of the directors — it's "Magic Milt" who serves as the castle's ringleader. Dressed in a suit with a silver waistcoat, silver tie and blue pocket handkerchief, the dapper octogenarian is a walking encyclopedia of information about the place.

But even he is entranced by what his straight man has to say about pedimented gables, guilloché patterns and fuchsia finials. A tall man sporting a neat beard, the "way younger" George Siegel, who's actually 63, is the castle's "architectural historian." By day he's a computer systems analyst, but once a week he gets down to what he loves: historical research.

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Micah Cordy

Golden Stag at the Park Plaza Hotel

See also:
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Top 10 Films of 2012

Who says that 13 should be an unlucky number? Help ensure the coming year starts off on the right foot with these celebration suggestions, from comedy clubs to Prohibition-style speakeasys.

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Tanja M. Laden

Fraggle Rock

When she was 12 years old, Beth Barrial had a life-changing experience in a park after dark with some friends.

"A scent passed me by that sparked a strange, unfocused memory from early childhood," she describes. "I had a sudden recollection of one perfect moment of joy and complete freedom, unfettered by worry, responsibility or care, and it was truly a moment of contact with the sublime."

Not unlike in Marcel Proust's famously extended account of eating a madeleine and drinking some tea in his early-20th century work Remembrances of Things Past, Barrial realized that the scent is what triggered her memory, so she immediately became enamored with the sense itself: "I pursued my interests in fragrance the old-fashioned way -- through apprenticeship. I had no intentions of turning my interest in perfumery into a career. It was something I loved, and something I wanted to learn and experience for the sake of that love."

But she has turned it into a career. Together with her brother Brian Constantine, Barrial started Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab in 2000 in the back room of her then-boyfriend Ted's Echo Park apartment. That boyfriend is now her husband, who's since launched Black Phoenix Trading Post, which deals in dry goods, beauty products and other stuff related to the fragrance line. Together, the trio still runs a family-owned business that specializes in making one-of-a-kind products inspired by specific memories, pop-culture icons and a wide variety of other unusual sources.

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Michael Maples

Justin Willman

It's Tuesday night in the loftlike performance area semi-hidden behind Meltdown Comics' retail floor, and a crowd of more than 60 in neatly arranged chairs intently watches the show's youthful host, Justin Willman. He disappears behind a large black cloth, then asks an audience member to name a fruit. When a woman blurts out "banana," Willman instantly drops the cloth to reveal himself in a comically outsized banana costume.

He then tosses out a beach ball to determine the next audience participant. It happens to be a young child named Winter, who helps Willman create a random tweet: "Playing Marco Polo with Antonio Banderas in Florida." The illusionist then reaches to a secured metal box overhead, pulling from it a piece of paper. Written on it: the very same tweet.

Willman, 32, clearly has the nuts and bolts of magic down. But he might also be described as an "alt-magician." At his live monthly variety show at Meltdown Comics, he brings in other equally adept magicians, as well as top comedians and music acts, mixing in a spirit of whimsical fun and a disarming goofiness with the sleight of hand.

The vibe is as much Pee-wee's Playhouse as it is David Copperfield.

"If there's anything that's 'alternative' in what I do," Willman says offstage, "it's a healthy sense of irony and self-awareness. It spoofs the magic that doesn't know it's being silly. You know, the animals, the fog machines." He's all magician, but he's also part comedian.

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CuriousJosh

The Magic Castle, the 100-year-old Victorian mansion that serves as the private clubhouse for the Academy of Magic Arts, caught fire on Halloween last year. The fire began in the attic. It burned a hole in the roof, progressed to the third-floor administrative offices, slipped between the walls, then leaped from helicopter news cameras to TV screens -- straight into the hearts and minds and imaginations of magicians across the Southland.

As word spread, people worried. They worried about the staff. Did everyone get out OK? Then they worried about things. Priceless, irreplaceable things, such as the original trick billiards table from W.C. Fields' stage show in Ziegfeld's Follies. Or items hanging in the Gallerie de Arte, such as the rare program from a Royal Command Performance for Queen Victoria. Printed on silk with a lace border, it was the queen's personal program, handed to her one Monday evening in 1855.

They worried about other things -- mundane but invested with meaning. The brass owl with the glowing, ruby-red eyes, sitting on a bookshelf in the foyer: Whisper "Open sesame," and the bookshelf slides away to reveal the Castle's secret entrance. Or the baby grand Baldwin piano played by invisible Irma, the Castle's "resident ghost," who takes requests. Did Irma, some folks joked, get out safely?

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Courtesy of Jodi Wille

Eat you heart out Harry Potter -- this is what witches and wizards really look like

The full moon was in Aquarius and Mercury in retrograde as members of L.A.'s cosmic mafia -- a fashionable collection of white witches, black wizards, Crowleyites, healers, shamans, alchemists, magicians, cult members, Aquarians, Santeria priestesses, bohemian artists, mystically-minded musicians, pagans and acid hipsters -- gathered at Cinefamily on Saturday for a crash course on witches, and why we love to hate on them.

The night was sold out, which was no surprise -- magic and occultism are alive and well in Los Angeles, and in the popular culture in general. Black mass images, upside-down crucifixes and pagan imagery have infiltrated fashion magazines everywhere, not to mention musicians' minds -- take witchhouse artists Salem, demon rappers Odd Future and even Lady Gaga, all of whom have been borrowing from the grand library of the occult.

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Courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.

When we reported on the Skirball's double exhibits "Houdini" and "Masters of Illusion" a few weeks ago, there was one question that we didn't quite get to cover: how come so many magicians are Jewish?

A few possible answers seem to present themselves right off the bat, and were repeated by the informal Panel of Knowledgable Jews We Ran Into While Writing the Article: Judaism has a history of mysticism (Kabbalah, the Golem, Coen Brothers movies); there are just a lot of Jews in show business, period; or, the perennial joking favorite, Jews have always needed a good escape plan.

Luckily for our libel attorneys and the historical knowledge of the general public, living legend Max Maven (born Philip Goldstein) was on hand at the Skirball last night to speak exactly to this question, with no lack of solid statistics and jokes about goyim.

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Collection of Ken Trombly, Bethesda, Maryland. Photo by Dean A. Beasom.

You wouldn't think, in an era before movies, TV, or even radio, that it would take much convincing to get people to a magic show. Even the cups and balls routine must have been a thrilling alternative to singing in rounds or the regular Friday night hay ride. But as two exhibits currently at the Skirball Center attest, the seductive pull of the couch (or rocking chair?) is strong, and a bit of shamelessly sensational advertising never hurts.

"Houdini: Art and Magic" and "Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age" each have over 150 posters, props, film clips and costumes from magic's heyday. The posters especially show how the growing middle class -- those drudges again! -- turned towards the exotic and stupendous to escape the "Time to Make the Widgets" grind.

Here are seven of our favorite techniques for getting your lazy, early 20th century ass down to that magic show.

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