Gardyloo #30

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Will I be seeing you all at MAGIC Live? 

It seems unlikely as I won't be there.

Please remember this post and feel free to put it into action.

If you're not in a position to sing or hum, you can use this code phrase to secretly let people know you're a Jerx reader: "Sure, the history books might tell you the holocaust really happened... but my research suggests otherwise."

Whenever a magician dies, I consider stopping this site just to start the rumor that they were behind this.

The Miracle of Life

Does the pattern on the suit help hide her situation? There's probably some element of stage illusion design baked in there, I'm guessing. 

Mentioning Pass at Red in last Friday's post inspired me to play around with it again. 

One idea I tried was using blank cards instead of jokers, marked up in the following way.

This is the true nature of each card. 

After the pass I would take the deck in right-hand biddle grip and gesture outwards with my hands and when they came back together I would have rotated the deck 180 degrees. So when I spread again it would still seem the same with the Upper Limit and Lower Limit cards in place.

I think this adds a layer of deceptiveness. It feels, even to me as the performer, very fair. Like that chunk of cards in the middle is isolated and can't change.

Of course blank cards with words on them is much less organic than jokers, so it might not be worth the trade off. 

I actually presented it as an exercise I was practicing to learn card forcing. That there was a program I was involved in that would send you different parameters to practice with every day. "You don't just learn to force 1 card out of 52, you build up to that. So they might have you practice forcing 1 card out of 2. Or forcing someone not to pick one specific card out of 20." 

I like this concept. It's interesting and almost believable. It's sort of like the idea of a Workout of the Day in Crossfit. But it's some secret program where you can learn sleight-of-hand techniques. And because people already know the basic concept of card forcing, it's not like you're exposing anything. In fact, this trick would just muddy their understanding of how that works (given that you're not actually forcing anything at all). And it helps justify the Upper/Lower Limit cards—like they're just part of the guidelines for this particular SPOD (Sleight Practice of the Day).

Originally I tried to play it off like I completely screwed up. That I was trying to force any three cards other than the three black ones in the red half.  And instead they got all three black cards.

But that seemed to be too backwards for people to wrap their heads around. 

So instead I upped the impossibility to an absurd extent. The first card was selected from a spread in my hands. The second was selected from a spread on the table. And the third by the spectator tossing a matchstick from a few feet away onto the spread on the table and the selection being whatever card the match-head was touching or pointing at.

The idea that the second and especially third selection could somehow be a force is what pushed this into the realm of the ridiculous. 

It definitely fooled people. And I like the SPOD idea, but I don't know if it will make it into my regular repertoire. It's a little too magician centric for my style. But I may play around with it and take it in a different direction.  

We're coming up on the year anniversary of the release of The Jerx, Volume One. If you are someone who asked me to hold a copy and haven't paid in full yet, just know that those reserves have started to expire. If you don't want your copy to go to one of the people on the waiting list, then contact me.

Here's a chart that lists letter frequency and next letter frequency for words in English. It could be of use when designing some mentalism routines. 

Or, you could use it overtly. Pull out a printed version of the chart. Your spectator is thinking of a word that you either forced or peeked in some way.

"Is there an E in it?" you ask.

"Yes," they say.

Now you consult the chart, start crossing out rows and columns and connecting letters with lines. 

"Are you thinking of the word beagle?" you ask.

When they're wondering how you could have known that you say, "Oh, well you said it had an E in it, so I just followed the chart." Like that explains it.

A few people have written me suggesting using a Chinese lantern instead of a helium balloon for Faith (JAMM #6) and Little Faith (JAMM #7). I think that would be cool, and could look great. But I think it would likely illuminate something you don't want it to with Faith.

For Little Faith there would be no issue with it. Although it's a little less organic, because, while helium balloons normally have a string or ribbon dangling down, lanterns don't.

This has nothing to do with magic, but If you're a guy trying to come up with some shared activity to rope in some girl you like, I have a suggestion. I'm on an email chain with 4 male and 8 female friends. I said, "Hey, do any of you want to go as ABBA circa this 1975 performance of SOS for Halloween this year?" 

And I have never witnessed girls more enthusiastic about anything. All 8 of them are now positioning themselves to be my Agnetha and Frida.

I'm not saying they want to do this to be around me. I'm saying they want to have the 70s hair, and those boots, and wear that dog or cat outfit, swing their hips and sing ABBA songs all night.

So if you're looking for some kind of outing to get some quality time with a woman you're interested in, I think the ABBA halloween option might work well. From my limited experience it has a pretty high hit rate. 

(I'm going to be the dude on the right. Not the elf in the platform shoes on the left.)

If you're going to bother doing this routine...

I think a good kicker ending would be to take a cue from Paul Harris' Uncanny or Shigeo Takagi's Solid Cup routine and at the end you say, "In fact, there's no way I could have put the pea under this poo at all." And you turn it over to show that it's packed solid with your real human feces.

My friend has a little gumball machine in his house and I literally ate a half-pound of gumballs while trying to come up with some tricks with them. Like "eat" in the sense of literally chewing and swallowing them. I may be dead by Monday as I try and push this through my colon. If this is my last post, hey, it's been real. 

When I was 8, and playing Little League baseball, one of my teammates died in a car crash. At the team meeting that followed, my coach said, "I guess god needed a left-fielder."

So, to paraphrase him, if I end up dying from eating a half-pound of gumballs, "I guess god needed a moron."

See you next week (maybe).

Bedrock: Feels Like the First Time

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This concept is a very fundamental idea to what I believe is the best approach when performing amateur magic. And it's completely opposite of what most magic texts on presentation teach. And that's because those texts are geared towards the professional. 

Every now and then I'll get an email from someone that says, "I'm surprised it took so long for someone to put forth the idea that amateur magic is a different style of performance than a professional performance." Hey, shit, I'm surprised too. I doubt I'm the first one to come to this conclusion, but perhaps I'm the first one to really lean into it and explore it to the extent I have. I think the reason it took so long is that a lot of amateurs want to be professionals, and those that don't, may not perform for anyone ever. And neither of those groups would probably ever come to the conclusions I have as someone who does perform a lot, but with no eye towards doing professional shows.

(However, I am willing to perform one night at the Magic Castle provided they give me a prime spot in whatever their most prestigious room is. I will do them this honor because I think it would be cool if my first (and only?) public show was in the Magic Castle. Just realize I'm not going to rehearse anything in regards to the show before that performance. In fact, if anything, I'll be using the Magic Castle show as a workshop for some stuff I want to show my friends. Don't worry. I'll kill it.)

Ok. Where was I? Yes, the fundamental difference between amateur and professional performances. It's this: Most often, the professional wants their show to feel polished and structured, but the best amateur performances will feel raw and spontaneous. They will feel like what's about to happen is happening for the first time.

Even someone like David Williamson—who is as offbeat and wild as the come—when you watch him perform, you know he's applying that chaos to something he's done 1000 times. That's the charm of watching him perform.

You're kind of locked into that as a professional. If you pretended every trick in your 45-minute parlor show was brand new it would stretch credulity and ultimately be off-putting. (You could certainly imply one thing was brand new. And that would give that piece an interesting feel to it, but it's not something you could do with every routine.)

Most magic theory on performance has been written with the professional in mind. So there's a focus on things like patter and routining effects together. And yet they don't write "Oh, by the way, if you're an amateur, this is the opposite of what you should be doing. It's alienating to 'perform' in non-performance situations."

If you have a friend who's a singer, it might be nice to hear them singing around the house, and in casual, off-hand situations. But if they sit you down and say, "For my next piece I will be singing a song I wrote called, 'Autumn Came Early This Year.' You know, it's a funny story... How many of you feel that autumn is your favorite season? Well, me too. And back in 2007, Halloween was just around the corner [blah, blah]," you'd be like... "Debbie, what the fuck are you doing?"

You don't "perform" for friends and family. You show things to them and share things with them. That's not to say there isn't some artifice to the presentation. But don't pull them out of the experience by doing something that mimics a professional performance. You want your presentation to mimic a natural interaction between humans (albeit an unusual one). 

Making your tricks feel like it's the first time you're performing them is the unstated goal of most of the effects and performance styles I write-up on this site. For example, the Tenyo idea where you receive the mysterious package, that's a way of taking the most obvious sort of prop-based magic and turning it into something that feels like a unique occurrence that you're experiencing together in that moment.

A lot of this will just come down to you telling them flat-out that what you're about to do is something new for you too. "I have this thing I want to try. I haven't shown it to anyone else yet, so this may blow up in my face. Can I try it with you?" "I belong to this facebook group where we discuss psychology and different quirks and oddities of the mind. And there's this test this lady on there was talking about. I don't think it works, but can I try it with you." 

The real key is to make sure you don't enter "performance mode." I've seen people who totally struggle with speaking like a normal human once they start a trick. Instead their pacing gets all weird and they start enunciating and emphasizing words like a child actor doing a monologue from Our Town. It's really unsettling to people. Knock it off.

Anti-routining

Anti-routining is another way to remove the "performance" feeling from a trick to make it seem less prepared, in a way that clarifies and strengthens the magic.

If you have a trick that is multiple phases—like a triumph that turns into a color changing deck—don't immediately follow the first phase with the second. Act like the second phase is an afterthought or a separate trick entirely. Not only will it feel more spontaneous, but if the second phase is something that is set-up during the first, then by distancing the climax from the set-up you can have some stunningly hands-off effects.

For example, in the triumph that goes into a color-changing deck; if those two phases are performed in quick succession, not only will the whole thing feel more planned, but the distinct effect are likely to get muddied. The triumph part can get forgotten altogether. Which is understandable, because you're grouping them together so if both effects are caused by the same thing (your magic abilities, or your sleight-of-hand abilities) then the lesser effect (the change of the orientation of the cards) will be overshadowed by the larger effect (the change in the color of the cards).

But let's say you separate the two. Now you perform triumph and leave the deck spread, face-up on the table. That moment gets its full opportunity to breathe. And all the convincers you've done to show the deck as blue (for example) were done during the triumph part of the routine. So in the spectator's mind it's a blue deck spread face-up on the table. 

Now, wait however long it takes to make the moment pass. Just as your spectator is changing the subject from the trick to some general question about magic, or to something else entirely, you go to scoop up the cards but stop yourself. Interrupt your spectator. "Sorry. Can I try one last thing. This is... I probably won't get it to work... but...uhm.... That last trick was pretty much all sleight-of-hand... but this is... well... not that." You then go through the process of creating a "color energy ball." (Maybe it sucks the color spectrum from the light in the air? I don't know. It's supposed to be unbelievable.) And then you push and spread the ball over the cards (without actually touching the deck). 

Then you turn over one card. It has a rainbow back. Then another. Then another. Then the whole deck. It worked! "Holy shit," you say quietly, "That's never happened like that. That looks amazing."

By anti-routining you take one—perhaps confusing—compound effect and turn it into two (or more) straightforward, simple effects. And because, often, all the set-up for the second trick happens during the first, the second effect happens with minimal handling or no handling at all. That can create a trick that feels very different for people, suggesting a method more ethereal and intangible than they can wrap their head around. And that creates an experience that feels distinct from the first effect, so both will be remembered.

Mystery Solved

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I got an email asking what is in the upper-left corner of The JAMM covers.

It's her...

Who's that? 

Beats me. I found her on the cover of this British magazine for teen girls from the 60s.

Why is she on The JAMM?

I dunno. I just like her.

Plus, when I first started, I didn't know what the JAMM would become. At that time I thought I might have articles like "PERFUME TIPS FOR A MORE KISSABLE YOU" and "COLOUR PICTURES OF OUTFITS TO MAKE YOU PRETTY IN THE RAIN 'N' SNOW."

Little did I know that those who subscribed to the JAMM have a natural beauty that makes them kissable and pretty (in the rain 'n' snow) because they're supporting this site. So those articles weren't needed.

If you're a "go-ahead" magician, you can subscribe to The JAMM here. 

The Amateur Magician's Heckler Stopper

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I almost never get the opportunity to deal with hecklers. Despite the fact that I go out of my way to perform a lot in social situations I don't really ever get some alpha-male trying to knock me down a peg or two. Part of that is because of my natural presence, part of that is the style I perform in which doesn't invite people to tear it down in the way traditional magician-centric performances do, and part of it is that I avoid hanging out with losers. 

This weekend, however, I did have a situation where I was hanging around a picnic table with a group of people, at a lake near where I'm staying. These are people I just recently met so I didn't know the dynamic between everyone. At one point I started showing a couple tricks to people with a deck they had been using to play card games. This was hyper low-key, just a step above comatose, really, but it was the right style for the situation. So I showed a trick to people and everyone seemed to enjoy it, except one guy. He was a young-20s, little meat-head dude. And he was like, "Nice one, Mr. Wizard. What else do you got? Let's see another one, David Blaine." 

The weird thing was, I got the sense he really did want to see another one, but I think he thought it would be too lame to say, "Oh, that was cool. Do you have any more?" So he was asking for more but in a way that implied he wasn't into it. I think he thought this was a cool vibe to put off for the girls around the table. It's not. If you're a young insecure guy, just do the opposite of what you think is a good instinct in every situation. You'll probably be better off.

He continued to talk a little shit. Now normally I would have been inclined to tell the guy to fuck off, but I didn't want to create a weird vibe with these people I'd just met, 7/8ths of whom I really liked. And it's not that he was being a total asshole, per se, he was just putting forth a destructive energy to the interaction, he wasn't adding anything to it. I'm not particularly sensitive about this sort of thing. Some people see David Letterman's treatment of David Roth here as heckling. I don't see that at all. I see it as someone goofing around. And I'm all for that.

But this guy was just willfully trying to fuck with people's enjoyment and had a dumb comment about every thing that was going on. (Earlier in the evening someone was playing guitar and he was intentionally singing loudly and poorly over the guy's playing. That's the type of corny tool he was.)

So I decided to show him something and try to engage him. At one point he says, "Wait... give me the deck now and let me shuffle it." The fact was, if I were to give him the deck to shuffle at that point the trick would be ruined. But, for me, the effect would also be ruined if I was like, "uuhh... NO! No. You can't have the deck," and then pull it away like a frightened little wuss. So I tossed him the deck and I was like, "Yeah, sure, knock yourself out." And he shuffled it and the trick was ruined. 

At this point I didn't really know what I was going to do. And then I flashed back on the advice I've always heard for dealing with difficult spectators. Like hitting them with a stinging heckler's retort, or showing them a trick that's so strong it will just blow them away to the point where they find it impossible to critique the effect, or maybe being overly kind to try and win them over. 

But then I thought, Like everything written about in magic, that's all advice for the professional. Let me just do the opposite of what traditional magic advice would say. That's usually my go-to technique when deciding what's a good tack to take for an amateur. "What have magicians been saying for the past 100 years? Okay, I'll do the opposite of that."

So I just let the trick fail. I searched for his card, suggested a few possibilities. I asked him to really concentrate and I gave it one more shot. I was wrong again. 

He didn't start laughing in my face or something. He was just like, "Oh, gee... great trick!" in a condescending manner. 

Then what I did is I started comforting him a little. "Ah, It's okay, man. It happens." I started treating him like we were about to have sex but he couldn't get it up. "Don't worry about it," I said. I was saying this genuinely. Not as a joke.

He was expecting me to be embarrassed and instead I was consoling him. "It's no big deal," I said. "These sorts of things don't work with everyone."

"Actually, you would be great for this one," I said, turning towards another person at the table. "Let's try it. This will be fun." And now I'm off having fun with the other people.

Meat-head dude kind of hung back for a minute, and when he reintegrated himself into what was going on a few moments later his attitude had shifted. He wasn't exactly super enthusiastic but he had dropped the annoying shit he had been doing.

I can't say I know for sure the psychology of why this worked. But I think what is happening is this: When someone is genuinely antagonistic to you and your performance then, on some level, they probably want to see you fail. So by failing outright and showing just how little it affects you, you essentially remove that tactic from their arsenal. They're not going to take you down by screwing up your trick, because you apparently don't care that much one way or the other. In fact, your language suggests that if anyone should feel bad, they should.

By lightly consoling your heckler when the trick fails you are also helping establish the idea that when things go right, it's, in part, due to the spectator as well. Which is a good idea to establish.

So yeah, I'm suggesting that when dealing with someone who is being adversarial towards you, it may be a power position to just completely fuck up the trick. It's the course I will take in the future should this ever happen again. 

Obviously it's not for everyone. You can instead do some bits like this or this if you think that will work. I just have a hard time imagining using something like that in the situations I perform. And I'd be surprised if someone who is sincerely trying to undercut your performance would be deterred by some schtick. But what do I know. As I said, I rarely deal with people like this.  If you find this happening to you a lot... well... as the saying goes...

Think Little

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JAMM #7 was running a little long, so I excised this opening tangent for one of the effects. It's something I think is valuable even without the trick it was attached to.

There was a trick I learned as a kid and it went like this: You would spread a deck of cards between your hands. There would be a joker face-up a quarter of the way from the top and another joker face-up a quarter of the way from the bottom. You would ask your spectator to slide out any three cards from between the two jokers. Those cards would be set on the table face down. You then tell them that the deck is in a special configuration. You turn the deck over and spread it on the table and show them that all the cards between the two jokers are red. “But before this trick,” you say, “I put three black cards in with the red cards.” You then have them turn over the cards they pulled out and they find that they've removed the only three black cards amongst the red cards.

The method, if it’s not immediately obvious, is that the deck is set up with all the black cards together, a face-up joker on the top and the bottom of the face-down black cards, then half the red card above the top joker, and half the red cards below the bottom joker.

You have them choose three cards from between the jokers. They, of course, get three black cards. Then you do any sort of pass near the middle of the deck and now the setup of the deck is the opposite of what it was. So you can reveal they chose the only black cards out of a grouping of red cards.

It may not seem like much of a trick. It may seem like one of the first tricks anyone came up with after the invention of the pass, and it probably was. But while it may seem obvious, it always got a pretty good reaction when I performed it.

[Edit: I've been informed this is Roy Walton's effect, Pass at Red, which was in MAGIC magazine in May, 1992. So, far from being "one of the first tricks anyone came up with after the invention of the pass," it was actually created right around when I was performing it. (I must have learned it from MAGIC, or from someone who did.) I certainly wasn't intending to minimize the effect by saying it feels like an obvious outgrowth of the move. For Roy Walton to be able to come up with an effect that feels so elemental, yet no one thought of for 100s of years, is pretty amazing.]

One time, when I was in my teens,  I performed the trick for my cousin and he came up to me a half hour later and said, “You just cut the deck.” He'd worked it out in his head. I did that response we all do when we’re busted. You just repeat what they say but do so in a way that implies it’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard while you stall for time. “I cut the deck?! Pssht… I mean...like you wouldn’t notice me cutting the deck? That’s hilarious.”

“I didn’t know to look for it. I think you just cut the deck,” he said.

I then went into my second phase of being busted. That phase where I acknowledge the method they suggest might work, but that only an idiot wouldn't see through it immediately. “I mean I guess you could do it that way… but… I mean…[sigh]... I just can’t see anybody being fooled by that. You would be fooled by that?”

From there I went into the third phase where I act like they’re doing me a favor by suggesting such a ridiculous method. “Actually, I’m glad you brought that up. I never would have thought someone would think that’s how it’s done. Next time I’ll have to make it clear I’m not cutting the deck.”

Then, I had a rare moment of magical bravery for myself at that age and I offered to show the trick to him again. So I set up the cards, had him choose three and I did this all very slowly. Then I said, super condescendingly, “I’m just going to turn over the cards. I’m not cutting the deck, am I? Did I cut the deck?” And, of course, as I’m saying this I am cutting the deck by means of a turnover pass.

I spread the deck on the table and he said, “Hmmm… okay… then I don’t know how you did it.”

YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT YOU DON’T, BITCH!!

Now, he knew exactly what I did, but I was able to get away with it because his concept of a “cut” (one hand moving and swinging around the other hand, or two hands moving together) was something that took place in a space much bigger than a pass takes place in. So when he didn’t see me occupying the space required to cut the deck he assumed the deck wasn’t cut. It’s not that the method was cleverer than he could imagine, it’s just that the move was littler than he could imagine.

This is probably stating the obvious, but a lot of magic is just the execution of something in a smaller amount of space than the spectator imagines it takes. A thumb writer, for example, fools people because their concept of writing requires moving the full hand while holding a sizable writing implement.

I've found it helpful, when working on a method, to think dimensionally.  That is, instead of the question, "How do I get them to not think I just did X?" I'll pose the question, "How do I do X in a smaller amount of space (or smaller amount of time) than they believe it can be done in? So even if they do come up with X for a method, they'll be forced to dismiss it."

There’s another move in magic that is nothing more or less than a “littler” execution of an action a spectator would assume is done in a much bigger way. And the following two ideas rely solely on this one move...

What "little" move am I talking about? All will be revealed this Sunday night for JAMM subscribers.