In this latest edition of Bwog’s recurring feature highlighting students’ hidden talents, Alliance of Magicians Bureau Chief Mark Hay sat down with a performer that would rather not be labeled a magician.

Throughout our little chat I keep trying to label BK (a stage name), CC ’13, a magician, but every time I offer up the title, he squirms a bit and wriggles away. BK calls himself a “performer” or an “entertainer,” and most of his shows are a display of mainly his proficiency in several forms of dance, theater and piano. They just happen to feature the occasional and unexpected floating cane or suspended fireball. He may be a general “performer,” but, as he admits, “I… buy a lot of butane.”

Indeed, magic is the key feature in most of BK’s acts. That little, inexplicable and entrancing factor, as he explains, is what gets people to sit through and enjoy a two-hour show. But to call it a “magic show,” he says with just a hint of derision, would kill all of the magic. Over the years BK has developed a rather nuanced philosophy of what magic truly is – one that, as per his strained and searching answers to my questions, appears to be ever evolving. However, at least he seems to be certain on some aspects:

Magic is personal. It is an extraordinarily intimate and stylized form of communication that may convey feelings and thoughts that cannot come through in words. BK was born with this skill (…or at least that’s the stage story. He later tells me he picked up an interest while working with special effects artists backstage on other performances). But for magic to maintain this ethereal and strange communicative power, it must be unique to its handler and should be tailored to each individual; magic isn’t just some cheap and expected parlor trick. Removing the surprise and the mystery robs BK’s art of its voice and makes it cheap.

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In the latest installment of our recurring feature devoted to students’ hidden talents, Safecracking Bureau Chief Mark Hay shows us that some talents require anonymity.

Schnitzel’s talent is not so much hidden as it is, of necessity, clandestine. Under New York Penal Law 140.35, just by possessing the tools of his trade, Schnitzel (ed. note: nickname was self-chosen) is already a criminal offender – hence the need for anonymity. But Schnitzel doesn’t care all that much; he is a proud lock pick. In fact the first words he speaks to me as I enter his room are these: “So wait, do you want just lock picking stuff or miscellaneous breaking and entering tools? Because I’ve got some useful stuff here.” He pulls out a dark package and lays out a selection of picks – the eager tenderness, the absolute love and devotion, with which he handles each one tell do not speak of larceny, but rather of intricacy and art.

Although Schnitzel received his first set of picks as a gift from his father, he did not start to practice until his sophomore year of high school. At this point, he was a practitioner of what he refers to as “urban exploration, or exploring abandoned factories and opera houses and stuff” – an adrenaline rush, to be sure, but that was never the point. Rather, the goal was the youthful euphoria of discovery – to attain an experience most people will never achieve. And in the case of the lock picking involved in these explorations, the adrenaline can actually be a profound hindrance, given the meticulous and subtle nature of the craft. Read more…

During our time at Columbia, most of us meet one or two group leaders, student government presidents, star athletes, and the like. But there are many Columbians whose profiles are lower, yet their talents are just as (or even more) awesome. Here’s our recurring feature devoted to those students: this time, we present Taylor Chaintreuil, a world-class footbag competitor.

Watching Taylor Chaintreuil, CC SEAS 2013, “footbag” is like watching an exquisite dancer. Her movements are quick and extremely athletic, but also rhythmical and very graceful. At the beginning of the semester, before the cold set in, passers-by outside of John Jay thought she was dancing to her own imaginary rhythm. But the real explanation starts with Taylor, a bored freshman in high school, Googling “hacky sack,” and finding herself stunned by the skills of some of the masters, “busting the biggest craziest moves you’ve ever seen.” After researching more about footbag, the technical term for hacky sack, she decided it was what she wanted to do.

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During our time at Columbia, most of us meet one or two group leaders, student government presidents, star athletes, and the like. But there are many Columbians whose profiles are lower, yet their talents are just as (or even more) awesome. Here’s our recurring feature devoted to those students: this time, it’s Tim Sun, who’s currently in Germany competing in the World Rubik’s Cube Championship.

About ten minutes into our conversation in Butler Café, I ask Tim Sun, SEAS ’13, about his technique for solving the Rubik’s Cube. He reaches into his pocket under the table and produces a standard 3x3x3, six-colored cube. He immediately begins spinning the layers of the puzzle around in a multicolored blur, outlining his strategy: using a mix of memorized algorithms and intuition, he solves two layers first (preferably those adjacent to the yellow or white base), then the opposite face, then the final layer. The entire process often takes less than 12 seconds. For the rest of the interview, the cube remains whirring above the table as Tim scrambles and solves it.

Tim is originally from New Jersey, but attended the Shanghai American School for all four years of high school. He first learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube his freshman year, when a friend brought a Cube to class and solved it in under a minute. “I thought that was really fast back then,” he said. He was immediately intrigued. He had been interested in other puzzles before, particularly Sudoku, but these paled in complexity next to the Rubik’s cube. He kept working to improve his speed. Read more…

During our time at Columbia, most of us meet one or two group leaders, student government presidents, star athletes, and the like. But there are many Columbians whose profiles are lower, yet their talents are just as (or even more) awesome. Here’s our recurring feature devoted to those students, starting with Anna Cooperberg-Gonzalez, aka “that girl twisting herself into a pretzel outside Butler.”

While sitting around bored and restless, Anna Cooperberg-Gonzalez, CC ’12, likes to stretch. Except, as she puts it, “when I do it … it’s a little more extreme than usual.” Anna, it so happens, is a student of circus arts, namely aerial fabrics (twisting about in the air) and contortion (twisting about anywhere). In her youth, she found herself compulsively drawn to the monkey bars, to anything that she could climb, swing from, and snake about, really. So naturally when she happened to attend the Independent Lake Camp in the summer after 7th grade, originally intending to practice dance and do some zip-lining, she fell in love with the camp’s fabric climbing programs.

Now, after years of trapeze and fabrics and contortions, Anna is basically an elastic girl, and it is in her nature to stretch, bend, twist, and scurry up long pieces of fabric to perform absurd gymnastic routines. Indeed, it is so much a part of her soul, her drive, that as we speak she casts an eye up to the ceiling of the Butler lounge. I ask her if she’s thinking of scaling the wall and swinging about from the lights. She keeps her eyes to the ceiling, cogs spinning in her head, and absentmindedly replies: “I always look to see if I could rig a fabric up in a room. Yeah, this room is no good. I wouldn’t swing from the lights. It’s just not safe.” Read more…