The Gloaming

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There are two things I preach that might seem at odds with each other. The first is that if you want people to think you have real powers you're a total nutjob. The second is that you should strive in your performances to give people an experience that they can't immediately write off as "just a trick." 

These goals aren't at cross-purposes. Patrick Stewart wants you to feel he is Macbeth when he is onstage playing Macbeth. But he does not want you to feel he's Macbeth when he leaves the theater. 

The world is completely comfortable with the concept that what the actor is doing is "fake." And yet people are routinely moved by a great acting performance, not just in the moment, but also as they reflect back on it later. They don't get caught up in it being "not real." In fact, if Patrick Stewart had been insistent on trying to get people to think he was really Macbeth—and he walked around in the costume and only answered to Macbeth—that would probably ruin the performance for you. You'd be like, "Oh god, what is this corny shit?"

Similarly, with magic, I'll often perform an effect where, for instance, I read someone's mind. In that moment, I want it to feel like real mind reading. I want them to think there's no other way it could have been done. But because I'm most often performing for friends or people I'll see again in other social situations and because I'm not a weirdo, I don't want them to walk away thinking I want them to believe I have these powers. If anything I want to capture their imagination with the fact that these things somehow can be done without having any special abilities.

So that duality is something I think readers of this site understand. I want people to find themselves believing the unbelievable as they are caught up in the performance, but I'm not looking for people to give me credit for abilities beyond being entertaining and crafting an interesting and fun experience for them. 

But there is a third layer of reality that I've been focusing my attention on in recent years. An area I call The Gloaming. This is the layer where the "performance" reality and the "offstage" reality get blurred. 

No intelligent, modern audience will really believe you have magic powers. I think that's a statement we can all pretty much agree with. At the very least they won't believe someone with real powers is on America's Got Talent or has been sitting at their Thanksgiving table for the past 20 years. Maybe someone with real powers exists somewhere, but it's not someone they know or someone doing an ABC special or someone performing at a T.G.I.Fridays.

So we can't get people to believe in "Magic" but we can use our magic to increase the level of mystery in people's lives. And while I have a moral issue with pretending they're genuinely psychic, because that is done for personal gain, and I have a moral issue with pretending to talk to someone's dead relatives, because that's manipulating their memories of someone they care about, I don't have an issue with willfully obscuring the line between reality and fiction.

(In the past I've received the occasional email where someone has questioned if it's right of me to not be completely upfront about what's a trick and what isn't. I remember a couple people thought this post (which isn't really a trick) was somehow manipulative. If you have a problem with that, you've lost your sense of perspective. There's a gigantic difference between saying, "Your dead mother wants me to send this message to you," and orchestrating something to increase the mystery or serendipity in someone's life.)

The recipe for pushing the audience into the Gloaming is this:

  1. You have to perform effects that feel real in the moment.
  2. Your audience needs to understand you're not asking them to think the trick itself is real.
  3. You need to shift the focus off yourself and your magic abilities and onto some other semi-believable concept.

Some examples:

The Distracted Artist style of presentation
(Sample) Performance: My ring switched places with his keys.
Reality: It's a trick.
The Gloaming: Is it possible this could have happened unintentionally? Are magic methods like that?

In Search of Lost Time
Performance: The card I freely named was turned around in the deck
Reality: It's a trick.
The Gloaming: Did I really lose five minutes of time just like that? Or is their some other explanation?

Mr. Yento
Performance: A little sword penetrated a ring.
Reality: It's a trick.
The Gloaming: Is there really a mysterious man sending off little tricks to magicians all over the world? Is it even possible a trick could be constructed so that it would be impossible to backtrack and figure out how it was done?

You see? The idea of The Gloaming is, in part, to switch the way we prioritize presentation and effect. Since we can't use tricks to get people to believe in "Magic" (in the long term), perhaps we can use the tricks to reinforce the presentation and it's that presentation that stays with people (beyond the point where the details of the trick fade away). The Gloaming is a way to use magic to tease, fascinate, and mystify a modern audience without asking them to believe in magic. Instead it's about giving them the chance to consider ideas on the fringes of possibility. Ideas that are perhaps more interesting, romantic, or fun than the concepts we typically present people (i.e. "I'm an a potent wizard!" or, "I can read body language cues.")

This is a subject we'll pursue more in future posts. 

On Monday I'm going to suggest a change every close-up magician can make to the way they perform. It's something all of you do—ALL OF YOU—and it will sound like such a little thing when I mention it, but if you make this change it will go a long way towards satisfying that first element in the recipe mentioned above: performing effects that feel real in the moment.

Tricks for Kids

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Coming in JAMM #4

In this issue of the JAMM there will be a special section of The Splooge (non-magic content) where I discus ways I lied to my friend's kids recently when I was forced to babysit for them. I think there's probably a parenting rule that says you should never lie to your kids. But I'm not these kid's parent, so screw that rule.

Subscribe to the JAMM and find out ways to manipulate your kids and other brats you're stuck spending time with.

 

 

Gardyloo #22

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Wassup, my beautiful babies?!

I'm back. Just like Jesus, when he rolled the stone from his tomb and said, "Wassup, my beautiful babies?!" I have returned.

I hope you had a good week. Let's do some housekeeping.

There may be some copies of The Jerx, Volume One available over the coming months. There are a few reserved copies that could become available again. And I may release a couple from my personal vault. Like the way Disney used to release Pinocchio on VHS every ten years. 

I would say, "Don't hold your breath," but if you're interested in a copy if one becomes available there is a little form on the "Buy the Book" page. When and if any become available, I'll go through the people who signed up there.

I wanted a one-on-one variation of Michael Murray's The Solution because I don't tend to perform in groups too often. 

The ebook below contains my handling/presentation which is fairly similar, but which is designed to play for one spectator.

Click on the image to download the ebook. The password is on page 9 of Michael's book. It's the word that goes in this blank...

"Note: As you demonstrate the turning procedure, be sure to ______"

Screen Shot 2017-04-16 at 12.54.48 PM.png

In the last post I mentioned Michael Weber's Charge Card effect and Marc Kerstein's app that goes with it.

Michael informs me the cards are still available. For $30 you get two cards and illustrated instructions. Write to Psience.Mail@gmail.com if you're interested. Marc's app is available here. Although you can use the effect without an iphone/Marc's app, I prefer to use them together.

[Note: I've also been informed this was included in the goodie bag for the Genii 75 bash. So if you attended that you may already have this stashed away somewhere.]

As I said in that post, this isn't a good magic trick. But it is an interesting moment of almost-possible seeming technology that people find fascinating. 

I will sometimes ask a stranger to rub the card on her sweater. Then I'll use the charge she captured to charge my phone. 

Does anyone recognize what these cards are in the Ratatat video for Pricks of Brightness?

Magic ads make a lot of bold claims, but are any so inaccurate as this one I found on Penguin?

Make a bet?

If the apostrophe in "liner's," the cover illustration, or the "Certified Funny" ribbon don't depress you, the music and "jokes" in this video will. Don't watch if you suffer from suicidal ideation.

Universal Presentations

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What would you say if I told you the best presentation for the effect you're working on isn't one that was specifically written for that effect?

You'd probably say, "Huh... okay... I guess that's possible."

Okay, so maybe this isn't the most earth-shattering revelation you've heard in your life, but I do think it's a bit counterintuitive. Before I ever gave these things much thought I probably would have imagined the best presentation for an effect would be one that was unique to that effect. Certainly the best love letter would be one written specifically for the person you're giving the letter to, yes? So wouldn't the best presentation be written specifically for that trick?

I don't think so. (And, in fact, maybe the love letter thing is wrong too.)

I want to talk about the subject of Universal Presentations. I'm capitalizing that because it's a concept I'm trying to establish here. (This is the curse of being modern magic's most influential thought-leader. I have to establish these concepts before I can talk about them. "Uhm... Andy, if you just read a magic theory book you'd realize these concepts are already established." Hmm... maybe so. But that would require me reading one of those boring books on magic theory and I value my time so that will never happen. Checkmate, ding-dong.)

It's a little difficult because we sometimes use different words to address similar concepts, or the same words to refer to different concepts. We will use "patter" and "presentation" interchangeably. But then we sometimes use "presentation" in a broader way as well. And it doesn't help that I'm making up my own concepts like "performance styles" and "universal presentations." 

But so we're all on the same page, here is how I'm differentiating these things:

The Three Layers of Presentation

Trick-specific Presentations (or Patter): This is your script. The words you say for a specific trick. "While traveling through darkest Africa, I came upon a mysterious sponge ball." 

Universal Presentations: These are broader conceptual ideas, and presentations that can be used for many tricks, not just one. A better term might be "Generic Presentations," but that doesn't sound as nice.

Performance Styles: An over-arching setting in which your magic presentations exist. With "The Wonder-Room" Style, for example, you are a collector of interesting artifacts that are on display in your home. You can go on to pull out some quarters and do a trick at a bar, but it won't exist in that style.

There is some overlap between universal presentations and performance styles; the lines are a little fuzzy and will vary from person to person. The distinction I make is that a performance style is a little world you create which all your effects could live in (I believe in having more than one style, but you could limit yourself to only one). A universal presentation is something that can be used for multiple effects, but would be odd to do so for all your effects.

Here's an example: "I want to try a test of your memory," is a universal presentation, because it can be used for a lot of effects. But you would probably never limit yourself to that presentation for all your tricks, so it wouldn't really be a performancel style.

The Peek Backstage style, is both a universal presentation and a performance style, because "Can I show you something I'm working on?" is both a context the trick exists in, and it's a broad presentation as well. 

The Romantic Adventure of the Distracted Artist are performance styles, but not universal presentations because they're a framework of how you perform, but don't suggest what you would say/do for a given effect.

This is all getting too clusterfucky. I think I'm going to write up a glossary for this site soon.

My point in this post is that I think people who care about their magic often spend a lot of energy on trick-specific presentation and patter and it's not a very good investment of time. Once you've established the performance styles that appeal to you, then your time should be spent identifying good universal presentations. Trick-specific presentations are almost unnecessary for the amateur performer. 

Here's an example. This is our friend, Madison Hagler, performing Tenyo's Tower of Dice with a very trick-specific presentation.

Is that a good presentation? I don't know. I'm not even sure I understand it. I don't think it's the type of thing that Madison would be like, "Ah! This is my finest writing of all time!" I just think he was trying to come up with something to say beyond, "Here are four dice. Now there are eight dice." And it's a completely different thing to come up with a patter to deliver as a soliloquy to a camera, then it is to come up with the words you say when presenting something to another human in the real world.

And that's kind of the problem, isn't it? So often people come up with a patter/presentation that could be delivered to a camera just as easily as it could to a human. That's not a good sign. I mean it's not a good sign for an art whose strength lies in its interactivity and the experiential nature of witnessing it live

Let's look at that Tower of Dice trick and forget the idea of a trick-specific presentation for it. What might be a better universal/generic presentation for it? Well, I think the one I mentioned above works perfectly with it: A Memory Test. You have a stack of dice that you're covering up for some reason, and there's the reason, to test someone's memory. That's the "universal presentation." You could give this a context. You could say this is part of the general test for intelligence that was the precursor to the IQ test (Now you've put a "universal presentation" (memory test) into a "performance style" (the Engagement Ceremony)).

Stack up the four dice.

"All you need to do is pay attention to the numbers that face you on the stack."

You cover them up with the box. 

"What was the number on the bottom of the stack?"

"Six."

"Good. And what was the total of the numbers that faced you?"

"Uhm.... fifteen."

"Try again."

"Uh... let's see. 6, 3, 2, 4. So... yeah... 15."

"I'll give you another peek," you say and lift the cover again, then cover them back up.

"Yeah," he says, "it's fifteen."

"Well wait... you already said the bottom four were 6, 3, 2, and 4. That's fifteen in itself. What were the rest, just blank or something?"

"The rest?"

"Wait... how many dice do you remember being under here?"

"Four."

"Oh dear, you really failed the memory test. There are 8."

Lift the cover.

You see? It's like a tennis match that goes back and forth. This type of thing is considerably more fun and interesting for people than a lecture or a story accompanied by a magic trick. 

And there's zero need for any trick-specific presentation or patter. You don't need to "script" anything because what you say is built into the universal presentation you're using. As long as you can carry on a normal you're all set because the interesting part is established in the performance style and the universal presentation.

Yeah, but I cant carry on a normal conversation. That's why I got into magic. 

I promise you, you can do it. At the very least you will look no less awkward stumbling through a genuine interaction than you do reciting a script in someone's living room with a bunch of pre-written jokes and bits of business. 

But isn't scripting important?

For a "performance," yes. For casual situations, no. In fact it's detrimental. There's really no interpersonal situation where coming off scripted is a good thing.

Ah, but what about something like this. You tell the story of the kid in your neighborhood who could stop time. That's one long script.

No. You're confused. That's one long transcript. That's the interaction that took place and I wrote it up after the fact, as best as I could remember it. I didn't go into the interaction with that all written out. 

Going into the effect I just knew I wanted to tell the story about a weird kid in my neighborhood who learned to stop time. Then there were two or three other beats or pieces of information I knew I wanted to hit. I knew I wanted to mention a specific book on mass hysteria to give it all some credence. And I knew I wanted to have this line:

"But I said there were two reasons I know this isn't just some misremembered moment from my youth. And the second reason is this... I can do it now too."

I wanted that moment where this story jumps from the past to the present.

In fact, the Donny Ackerman script is really a universal presentation. It's a universal presentation about stopping time that could be applied to 100s of tricks. And beyond that universal presentation it was just a matter of improvising a story that was heavily based on a real kid I grew up with.

Yeah, but I can't just improvise stories like that. 

Okay, that's fine. But your options aren't just A) improvise some elaborate story or B) memorize some elaborate script. This is where Universal Presentations come in. Because they do the hard work for you. For a presentation to be applicable to a wide range of effects, there must be some kind of general appeal to it. That's what you want because it will mean people will be able to buy into the presentation with little effort. 

Look at all the hard work Madison has to do just to establish and execute the premise in the dice trick. He talks about the phrase "Rome wasn't built in a day" and what that means, and then he has to suggest these dice are a demonstration of building something, and then he has to establish the idea of the value of things that come together immediately, and he's bringing up the big bang, and then finally the climax of the trick comes. And in the end you're probably lucky if your spectator feels, "Ah, that was all worth it."

But with a Universal Presentation you can just say, "I want to test your memory," or, "I received this trick in the mail from a crazy Japanese magic inventor. Let's try it out." or, "I have this trick that I've been working on for like six months and I think I'm finally getting it. Would you take a look and see if it looks good from an external perspective?"  In a sentence or two people completely get it. And any trick-specific patter will naturally arise from the universal presentation.

I still don't get how coming up with a really clever presentation that is only applicable to a specific trick can be a bad thing.

Here's how it is... As I've said before, in casual circumstances, magic works best when it is a demonstration of some larger concept. That larger concept is your universal presentation (time travel, esp, aliens, hypnotism). If your trick only has a trick-specific presentation and no universal presentation then it is, at best, representative of a larger concept. But people don't get excited about symbols and parables. They want the feeling of something real.

Always strive towards demonstrations over representations. In my experience people would much rather see a "genuine" demonstration of this weird thing you found that teleports an object to the other side of the room than a trick where the coins represent Spock and Captain Kirk and they go into this hand and they come out the other hand as if they've been through a teleporter.

Trick-specific presentations bring the focus to the hands and the sleights and the props. On the other hand, a universal presentation—because it can be used for multiple effects—by definition has to be about something greater than these things on the table in front of us.

I'll leave you with a couple ideas for universal presentations that friend-of-the-site, Tim Gaffney, suggested to me in a recent email.

The Start-Up Presentation

Tim writes: 

I use this a lot - especially with magic apps or other gadget magic.

"Have you seen this? A friend of mine up in Silicon Valley is at a start up with this cool stuff...He asked me to try it out - show it around...see if I can get some early stage investors…"

I use something similar fairly often. Specifically with Michael Weber's Charge Card effect and the app Marc Kerstein designed to go with it. (I don't know if Weber's effect is available anywhere.) Essentially it's a plastic card the size of a credit card that you drop on your phone and a green light on the cards slides down as your phone absorbs the energy stored in the card into your phone's battery (the percent on your phone's battery increases as this happens). 

I carry this with me everywhere. Here's proof. (I'm on an Amtrak train as I write this.)

If I'm sitting next to someone on a plane or in a bar and I know I'll never see them again, I'll tell them about how I invented this cordless way to recharge your phone's battery in an emergency that you can just keep in your wallet. And I tell them how Apple and Samsung and the other big cell phone manufacturer's are blocking it from being released. "The best part is, to recharge the card you just place it on your microwave or refrigerator at night and it will absorb the excess energy coming from those devices." That's the part people really like. It's so simple!

The only problem is that no one has ever thought this was a trick. They all think it's 100% legit. I'm not even sure how I would play it off as a trick. And while I normally don't like taking credit for things that do seem like tricks, in this case I figure it gives them a better story. "I ran into this guy who invented the most useful thing...."

The Job Interview Questions at Google Presentation

Tim writes:

I uses this for anything that is a puzzle effect, a brain teaser effect, a Q& A effect, etc.

Most have heard the stories about the weird questions and the weird stuff you have to
do when you are a genius interviewing for a job at Google. If not, it makes for interesting
conversations.
 

I think this is a great way to get into any puzzle type of effect, or a trick that is designed to seem like a puzzle. 

Here's how I'll use it. I'll talk about how I was interviewing for some consulting project. Maybe at Google or maybe at some un-named mystery company. Then I'll go through some of the weird questions they asked me and how I answered them. And I'll end by saying, "And then they showed me this," and I'll demonstrate some trick for them. Maybe something like this. It doesn't really matter what the trick is. (See? That's how universal presentations work. It doesn't matter what the trick is.) I'll say they let me have it for a few weeks and they want me to report back with my guess as to how it works.

And then just to add some intrigue I'll end with this.

"The weird thing is, they're calling me every couple days to see if I've made any progress on figuring it out. And I'm just like, 'Dude, if you want to hire me, hire me. Is this little puzzle thing that important?' But I think I had things backwards. I thought they were giving me this as a challenge to see if I could come up with the solution. But I'm beginning to think this is a little stranger than that. I'm beginning to think they don't know how it works either. And they're bringing people in who they've heard have a knack for this sort of thing and they're hoping one of us can explain it to them. But if that's the case, where did this thing come from?"

 

 

Gardyloo #21

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I'm off next week. As I mentioned when we were gearing up for year two, there will be new content 48 weeks out of the year. Next week is not one of those weeks for me. Next week is my spring break from this site. Imagine me in Lake Havasu drinking vodka off a slalom down some co-ed's asscrack. That's not what I'll really be doing. In reality I'll be doing my taxes and taking naps. 

In the April issue of The JAMM (coming out tomorrow), I review Michael Murray's effect, The Solution. 

Soon I will be releasing a short pdf with a variant of the effect called the SOLOtion. It's a one-on-one version of the effect that is really killing people I've performed it for. It's not the identical effect but it's very heavily inspired by Michael's trick so I will be giving it away as a free pdf to people who own The Solution (similar to the pdf I release for Marc Kerstein's Wiki Test).

A somewhat Distracted Artist moment on The Flash. (Although I think this guy oversells it.) As spotted by reader M.K.

Reader F.A. writes in to say,

I really love the Transgressive Anagram concept and have been using it fairly frequently since you first wrote about it. One of the nice things about it that you haven't mentioned yet is that it's very easy to practice because Yes and No responses come at you in equal measure. So you can practice the anagrams just by flipping a coin to simulate getting a yes or no response. With traditional anagrams the only way I found to practice would be to run through the full anagram in my head, but I wouldn't be able to practice dealing with actual responses in real time unless I was doing it live for a person. But with TAs you can just flip a coin and that mimics the actual 50/50 responses you will get for every guess in those anagrams.

Here's another idea I've been using for a context for Tenyo tricks. It's very similar to the ideas I've mentioned in the past in that it's a context that distances you from the prop. Rather than showing up with your little plastic gizmo like a goofy little schoolboy, you discover the prop with your friend and work through it.

I do it with this bad boy.

And I tell my friend that, in this one village in Japan, boxes of cereal are showing up on store shelves with a free magic trick inside (I point to the yellow and red oval and say that's what it says there). I tell them it's become a real phenomenon over there because the tricks seem like children's toys but nobody can figure them out. And the the boxes are only on the shelves in one small area of Japan. I tell them I have a friend who is teaching abroad and was able to snag me a box and how I'm lucky because otherwise they're going for a couple hundred dollars when they show up on ebay. 

"And the weird thing is, at first, Kellogg's in Japan was promoting this and retweeting a lot of the hype it was generating, but then a couple weeks later they deleted any mention of it from their social media, and now they're paying to have any reference of it removed online. The latest is that they're telling people not to eat the cereal in these boxes because it isn't from an actual Kellogg's production facility as far as they can tell. So nobody knows what's going on."

We open the box and dump out the cereal and there's a sealed plastic bag with a little trick and some instruction cards inside. We open it up and follow the instructions and the trick unfolds leaving us both baffled. It's a seemingly innocuous trick where a ball penetrates into a sealed clear plastic box. But the presentation makes it so much more interesting to people. The reactions far exceed what they are when I just perform it as a standard trick. They're not even comparable.

And then, later that night, we can make "Sausage Mix" from the back of the box. So it's a win-win all around.