The Century Club in New York is a private club for artists, writers, actors, designers and other creative types. It is a beautiful building filled with art, and with an inviting library with floor-to-ceiling books. I had worked there before - when I presented with Dr. Edelman - but I’d never had a chance to really look around much, so it was a treat to be able to do a show for the club’s Fifth Floor Forum series last night. I had a lot of fun performing for the ‘Centurions’.
After the show, my friend Bonnie Roche invited me to join her for dinner. At our table was art historian and art dealer Robert Simon, who recently discovered a Leonardo Da Vinci painting of Christ - titled Salvator Mundi - which is now on display at the National Gallery in London. Needless to say, we had an absolutely fascinating conversation about his astonishing discovery! You can see a great CNN interview with Robert here, and below is the painting…
For the third year in a row, I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. This time it was held in Washington DC. My friend Stuart Firestein and I always manage to have a series of adventures at this conference…
One night we found ourselves at a party at the Spy Museum, and from there we went over to the Air and Space Museum where Jeff Lichtman from Harvard presented mind-blowing images from inside the brain showing how our neurons are connected to each other. His talk was followed by a very fancy party hosted by Zeiss, the manufacturer of incredible microscopes. In fact, this party was sofancy that they served miniature, two-bite, baked Alaskas and chocolate mousse-filled brownies for dessert. Friends from Columbia University brought over the CEO of Zeiss, James Sharp, and had me do a bunch of magic tricks for him. Then James Sharp took us over to Jeff Lichtman, and I did magic for him as well, and was able to ask him questions about his amazing presentation.
Tipped off by my friend Moran Cerf, we then headed to the third party of the night. Stuart used to drive a cab in DC many years ago and when he heard the address, he worried that it was in a dangerous neighborhood. But that didn’t stop us! Late at night, we pulled up at an Animal House-like party in a 2-story home FILLED with students where we found Moran and Christof Koch, (the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science) in the middle of the throbbing crowd.
It was a fantastic and very nerdy night.
Performing magic for James Sharp, the CEO of Zeiss:
Performed at a benefit last night for the first and only Spanish school in New York, the Centro Educativo Español de Nueva York, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. Spanish people sure know how to throw a party! The guests were incredibly stylish and the food was delicious. They had even brought in a huge ham and were slicing little pieces of it all night long.
Last week I posed as a professor of radiology from the University of Wisconsin at a Siemens sales meeting down in sunny Florida. For a few minutes, I appeared to be just another boring clinical speaker talking about the greater efficiencies gained by using Siemens equipment, and then… everything started to go awry and the ‘lecture’ turned into a funny interactive show.
My friend Thomas Fraps in Munich developed this concept over the past 10 years and is now working with me on expanding it in North America. There seems to be quite a demand. It certainly was a fun show to work on, and many of the meeting participants mentioned that it was the highlight of the conference!
This week I performed at a party at Luxembourg House in New York, to kick off a conference about education in Luxembourg. Until 2003 — when the Grand-Duchy’s first and only university was founded — Luxembourgers wanting to go to college would have to study abroad. This conference brought together educators and business people.
I was invited by Michel Franck, who is not only the President of the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, but also the architect who supervised the renovation of the Luxembourg House after its previous owner, Irving Berlin passed away.
In my show I celebrated music from Luxembourg by playing some songs from the Eurovision Song Contest. Luxembourgers in attendance got a bit nostalgic when hearing the 1965 winner France Gall sing “Poupée de cire, poupée de son“…
My old assistant, Luke Leafgren, is a Ph.D. candidate and the acting resident dean of Winthrop House at Harvard. This week he brought me to Cambridge where I lectured on Perception at Ken Nakayama’s Vision Sciences Lab during the day, and did a show for the students at Winthrop House at night. It was just like old times, working together with Luke, and we had a great time. Thank you, to all the students who came out and packed the Junior Common Room at Winthrop House!
L: With Luke in Harvard Yard; C: Ken Nakayama and a student help out with a magic trick, while parrot behavior expert Irene Pepperberg looks on; R: The show at Winthrop House.
[click to enlarge]
The Harvard Crimson videotaped the show and did this interview:
A few months ago, I witnessed the amazing theatrical event Sleep No More. Last night I went back to join some friends at the Manderley Bar, which is part of the show at the McKittrick Hotel. There was a fantastic three-person band playing. The lead singer, Mr. Reed, had his own drum kit, and there were extra drums just behind the band. At the very end of the set, just as they were passing off to the disk jockey… a member of the audience suddenly jumped up on stage and joined the band for a jam session. Can you guess who this famous drummer is? (If you listen carefully to the end of the jam, you will hear his name…).
Needless to say, the audience went crazy!
By the way, the very talented Mr. Reed was discovered on the subway by the producers of Sleep No More. Check him out on the L-train platform:
Just returned from a quick trip to Shanghai. Left on Tuesday morning and returned Saturday morning. It was my very first time in Mainland China, and I am already eager to return!
I was part of a very large event to celebrate the opening of Mrs. Prada’s Miu Miu store there. It was a spectacular evening which included a fashion show, a variety show, a rock concert, and dancing into the wee hours.
On the last day, I was able to slip in some sightseeing. There is an extraordinary connection between new and old at every turn in the city.
Sometimes life is like a short story come to life. When I flew to London recently, I happened to sit next to a publisher named Jamie Byng who owns a company called Canongate Books. We both went right to sleep, but in the last fifteen minutes of the flight, we woke and started chatting. When he heard that I was working at a party in London, then an after-event for the Monaco Grand Prix, giving a perception lecture at the University of Parma’s Department of Neurosciences, and finally attending events at the Venice Biennale pre-parties, he started giving many ideas and suggestions. He is one of those old-school publishers who is the biggest fan of his own authors. As a result, he told me about one of his favorite authors named Geoff Dyer who had written a love story set at the Venice Biennale art fair. Then he suggested that I join him in his car from Heathrow to his company in Notting Hill, so he could give me a copy of the book. Well, that is what happened.
I carried that copy of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi with me on the whole trip. Then in Venice, at a fancy party thrown by Dasha Zhukova, my friends Jan Rothschild and Jason Kaufman introduced me to their good friends Rebecca and… Geoff, a novelist. I immediately asked, “Wait, are you Jeff in Venice, Geoff?” He laughed and said “Well, yes I am!” It was a most magical meeting that he describes at the end of an article that appeared in the Guardian a few days later.
Here’s an excerpt:
It is impossible to say anything about Venice that has not been said before, says the eponymous hero in my novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Including that remark, replies Laura the woman he has fallen for, thereby completing Mary McCarthy’s self-reflexive observation in Venice Observed. Venice is more thoroughly surrounded by quotation marks than any other place on earth.
[…]
The dark water was dappled with lights from water taxis; it was beautiful, magical, romantic and full of promise, and the fact that I had already written up such a romance did not diminish this reality-remake of it at all. Then, through a daisy chain of introductions, we met a magician called Mark Mitton who, in spite of the jostling of the champagne-lashed crowd, produced a deck of cards and treated us to a display of close-quarters tricks. At one point he took my wife’s wedding ring from her hand, made it disappear and reappear half-a-dozen times until finally it vanished completely – only to show up again in a sealed envelope in my jacket pocket. The night had jumped out of quotation marks, as if by magic.
