Cibini Newsletter 3

Introduction

As promised, my newsletters are many, many months apart - keeping the spam to a bare minimum. In case you missed it, my previous newsletters are hosted here:

https://magiciancibini.blogspot.com/

Many of you might suffer, like me, from email clutter. If you are not interested in my newsletters, I apologize in advance for the inconvenience this one time. PLEASE REPLY WITH “UNSUBSCRIBE” IN THE SUBJECT LINE, and I will remove you from my list – you can include a reason, but don’t need to.

Before you delete this, scroll down, you might find something of interest (such as my book or travel recommendations).

Meanwhile, please like/follow me on Facebook and subscribe to my Youtube channel.

News about me

Before the current pandemic, I had been performing more and more, especially during the busy corporate holiday party season in the winter. This was tough at times, given that I had a full-time “grown-up” office job which required evening and weekend work fairly often. However, I had picked up momentum, and performing magic gave me too much satisfaction to turn down potential events.

Cibini was the life of the party. We booked him for a birthday party with 90 adults. He performed while walking around and interacting with our guests. His quick wit and magic performance had everyone talking about him all night. He was very professional and accommodating. While booking, he did offer a private show to showcase his talent but we were comfortable based one everyone's reviews. I would definitely hire him again for another party. - Recent customer

Obviously everything has changed nowadays, and every single booking I had this spring was understandably canceled. I will have to adapt my performances to avoid passing out objects for examination, and human interaction in close quarters. Maybe close-up magic as we know it is finished, or at least, it will be for the next few generations. It’s too early to tell.

Next Performance

I have been working on the perfect show for the past 20 years, and have not gotten there quite yet. Without a set date to commit to, I have a hard time getting my act together (no pun intended), and always find ways to tinker with and improve my material. A diplomatic person would call me a perfectionist.

I had come really close to creating a show for the public at large, which I had begun to advertise on AirBnB experiences. Of course, the pandemic brought everything to a halt. I will let you know when I have a show open to the public, although I have to rethink my material significantly, to be able to allow for an experience compatible with social distancing.

Historical magic

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), a clockmaker from Blois, France is considered by many the father of modern performance magic. He brought the art form from the streets and outdoor carnivals to respectable theaters and refined his performances for discriminating audiences.

His life was full of adventures (including using his sleight of hand skills to advance France’s foreign interests), and he was extremely creative. In addition to using sleight of hand and cutting edge science to mystify his audiences, he was quite the builder of automata - sculptures which moved using clock-making principles. An example of an acrobatic figure is below:

Like many of us, he did not have the courage to follow his passion until well into middle age, when he finally took the leap into performing full time magic.

What to Watch

Shin Lim won a previous edition of America’s Got talent. He has a poetic style and revolutionized magic with playing cards (or rather, reintroduced old methods which had been out of style for some time). He also incorporated smoke into his routines, a fad which has spread like wildfire among magicians trying to recreate his style.

Here are all of Shin Lim’s performances on America’s Got Talent:

Magic Trick explained

One of my favorite magicians, if not my favorite one, who goes by the name of Lance Burton, gives away a simple trick with a little handkerchief. Or does he?

Personal Revelations

Given the rapid, forced industrialization of my native Romania under communism, most people of my generation also had relatives in the countryside, and I was no exception.

While my father came from an urban, aristocratic, academic family, my grandparents on my mother’s side lived in the country and worked the land. (My mother had two sets of parents, her biological parents which I mention here, and her adoptive parents. That will be a story for another newsletter).

Villages in Sibiu county

A formerly agrarian country, the rural sector had been the backbone of the country and the economy, but after the Soviet invasion and occupation, people’s land and livestock were “collectivized”. In other words, their property was seized and given to the state. They were forced to become government employees (no other employer was allowed), and they worked on their former plots of land.

The new authorities coerced my grandparents to give up their land by threatening to expel their son (my mother’s brother) from school if they delayed the process. They gave up, and ended up keeping much less livestock than before - a couple of cows, a couple of pigs, a few sheep (all property of the state now), and a few chicken which provided them with meat and eggs. Since private property was abolished, the livestock did not belong to them officially, and they were not allowed to slaughter the large animals (although the authorities didn’t bother counting the chicken and their eggs). In time, given the deteriorating economic conditions, my grandparents were unable to keep the cows, and eventually the sheep and pigs as well, given the cost of maintaining them and the fact that their role was now to raise the animals until slaughter time, when the government would pick them up. My grandparents had known adversity - my grandfather was drafted to fight on the Eastern front, and he was shot in an ambush but miraculously survived. Economic hardship was not pleasant, but the worst aspect was the psychological one. These people had lost their status of free individuals and suddenly found themselves serfs to a new, foreign master. My parents and I spent quite a lot of time there each year. My grandparents lived in a village of about 300 inhabitants called Aciliu, which was in a valley and a bit more isolated from the main road and the train station. There was electricity but no running water. My mother’s siblings and other relatives lived in nearby villages as well as the main town in the area, called Sibiu.

Sibiu today

My grandparents walked to a well (about 20-30 yards from their house, which had been built by hand many years before) and drew water from the ground with a contraption and a bucket. I never had an issue drinking water from the well, despite it not being treated with chlorine or various chemicals, like the city water I was used to. I was always told to warm it up in my mouth for a few seconds first, because it was very cold. Romanians do not tolerate the cold as well as Americans (many people here in the Mid Atlantic, with a climate comparable to that of Romania, request ice in their drinks even in the winter, and turn on their air conditioners even in the spring or fall!)

Typical well

Cows were not used for meat (since slaughtering an animal, which now belonged to the state, could land one a multi-year prison sentence), but rather for traction and milk. Oxen - stronger than cows, but useless for milk production - were no longer used, and ox-carts were generally pulled by cows. The village cows went out during the morning to graze with an overseer (a cowboy, why not?), and came back every evening. It amazed me how each cow recognized its own house and came back to it on its own accord. Sheep husbandry had been a local tradition for millenia, and there were many intricate details about the proper pasture land during various times of the year. For a large part of the year, the sheep were away with a shepherd, grazing on high altitude grass far above the villages.

Sheep having lunch

Everything people ate was local, in season, and organic, by today’s standards. (Well, perhaps not organic, communist regimes used lots of fertilizers and pesticides, and weren’t too worried about the environment - they wanted to grow production at all costs, to show that the socialist economic model could keep up with the capitalist one). Central planning could not accommodate an entire food supply chain like the market does in Western countries today - where one may eat grapes from Chile, tomatoes from Mexico, and eat fish from Japan, all out of season. Alcohol (mostly wine and a local schnapps made from plums, grapes, pears, or other fruits) was made at home, and most vegetables came from the small family garden. Often, villagers “stole” corn from what had been their land before the confiscation, and ground the maize into cornmeal - polenta was a staple. When the cows and sheep were milked, the measuring cups for the government always came up short, and villagers were thus able to enjoy fresh milk, as well as other dairy products they made at home (mainly butter, sour cream, cheese, and yogurt). I would love to claim that the food was chemical free, but the authorities pumped a lot of land full of fertilizer to increase yields (especially for export). Some areas were spared, some weren’t, and some fertilizers were more harmful than others.

As communism with its socialist economy advanced into what was dubbed, without any sense of irony, “the Golden Era”, food became more and more scarce. In the cities it was heavily rationed - like in Cuba today. Some underground jokes (which could get you in trouble during those times) included:

This year’s harvest was average. It was worse than last year’s but better than next year’s. 

1965: ‘Hello, economic police? I spotted my neighbor eating caviar!’ ‘We are on our way!’

1975: ‘Hello, economic police? I spotted my neighbor eating meat!’ ‘We are on our way!’

1985: ‘Hello, economic police? I spotted my neighbor eating!’ ‘We are on our way!’

Romania’s famous cosmonaut, Prunaru, leaves a note for his mother: ‘I am going to the Soviet Union, and then I will join them on a mission to space. I will be back in 30 days.’ When he comes back home, he sees a note from his mother: ‘I left the apartment to line up for cheese, I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

A little boy knocks on the neighbor’s door. She answers.

He says ‘Ma’am, did you make soup?’

‘I sure did, little boy. Do you want to have some?’

‘No, thanks. My mom just sent me to ask you if she could borrow your chicken bone.’

Luckily, most people had relatives in the country, who could find fresh (in summer and fall) or pickled (in winter and spring) vegetables, a few spare eggs, a chicken every now and then, and on rare occasions, even red meat. The risks of getting caught slaughtering a pig, sheep, or cow were enormous, and the bribes to the party officials were substantial, but when there’s a will, there’s a way. 

Home-made cheese

Regardless of the hardships, trips to Aciliu and the countryside were always idyllic for me, and an oasis of freedom away from the concrete jungle where I grew up.

Aciliu seen from graveyard

Street in Aciliu

Book Recommendation

These days, everyone talks of politics. The latest antics of Donald Trump or the various Democrats vying for attention are front page news. One may think it wasn’t always this way, but I will recommend a pleasant lecture which will dispel that notion. Paraphrasing from the Bible, there is nothing new under the sun.

In the second half of the 1800s, Romania was dominated by two political parties: Partidul Liberal and Partidul Conservator (no translation needed, I presume; for the linguists out there, the definite article in Romanian - the the - comes at the end of the word, which is common in a few Balkan languages, but different from Western Romance languages which put the article before the noun, e.g., el partido).

Romania’s foremost satirist and playwright of the era, Ioan Luca Caragiale, wrote A Lost Letter, a scathing play of political (and moral) corruption in a small (unnamed) provincial town in Romania. People reference that play even nowadays, more than a century later, because the archetypes and their behavior is so prevalent in today’s democracy.

It may even be relevant to American politics, or to any democracy.

An opposition politician is trying to gain the nomination for the upcoming election via blackmail, having found a love note compromising those in power. Almost every single character is corrupt in his own way - yet hilarity ensues. 

Here is an excerpt.

And here is the link for the Kindle version. I may be able to send a PDF to anyone interested, just email me.

Vacation Recommendation

In the spring (our spring) of 2018, I went to the highlands of Peru. Skipping Lima, due to time limitations, I flew straight to Cusco, Peru via Bogota, Colombia (where I got to spend a half day). Cusco is a charming town, although the soroche, or altitude sickness, got to me the first day. I don’t know whether it was a matter of suggestion, or the real thing, but one moment I was hopping around excited about my arrival, the next moment I was dragging my feet up the steps to my lodging accommodations.

Cusco's main plaza

Typical steep street in Cusco

Maras salt mines

Machu Picchu

Ollantayambo (with Inca ruins)

Floating islands (uros) on Lake Titicaca

Island on Lake Titicaca

At 4335 meters above sea level

Your friendly magician, tired after hiking near Machu Picchu