Monday Mailbag #45

Last night I met up with some of my friends for a little birthday get-together. As much as I love my friends from my hometown, they aren't the brightest people you'll meet. Once again, I'm going to have to blame the Kentucky public school system. I say this because they started giving me shit about being vaccinated. Long story short, instead of debating with them, I did magic. Specifically with the presentation about becoming magnetic and being able to conduct electricity because of the microchip.

I did the bit where you make butter knives stick to your hands (Apparently it's an old gag that Charlie Miller would do but I learned it from David Ben). and then I charged my phone by placing my tongue in the charging port. This was accomplished by Marc's beautiful app Amalgam. It made it so silly and so ridiculous that they kinda stopped with the conspiracy theories for a bit.

I was inspired by your post about getting people to question their belief systems. Maybe they will see how ridiculous it is.. or maybe you'll see a Facebook post about the vaccine giving you the ability to conduct electricity. Only time will tell. —NW

A few different people have written with similar ideas based upon this notion going around that the vaccine will make magnets stick to you. I like the idea. It’s a pretty good way to capitalize upon something in the zeitgeist to be able to perform what would otherwise be a semi pointless demonstration of a useless power.

Something else you can do in addition to the magnetism bit, or as an alternative, is say how you got the vaccine and you’ve been feeling a bit “off” since you got it. Have them touch your arm near the injection site. “Do you feel a bump there?” As you talk with them, continue to rub your arm in that area and then slowly start pushing your fingers up your arm as if you’re manipulating something under your skin. Mumble, “The fuck is this?…” as you continue pushing along your skin. Up your arm. Up your shoulder. Up your neck. Over your jaw and up your face to your eye. Where you then pull down your eyelid and a little metal ball drops out. Ideally on to a well-placed ceramic plate where it produces a satisfying small clatter.

Pick it up and examine it closely. Let the horror slowly dawn on you. “What are they doing to us? What are they doing to us!!!!???” Run away screaming.

This is just a version of the old seed/bean/popcorn kernel from the eyelid geek stunt, but using a small ball bearing, and giving it some relevance beyond, “Here’s something dumb I can do.” I have no idea how safe/dangerous this trick really is, so consider this just a theoretical idea. You should absolutely not do this unless you would like to go blind in one eye or worse. Don’t come and try to sue me if something bad happens because you did this thing I told you not to do. Sue your parents for making you a moron.

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Based on your writing I’m going to assume you’re not a woman. Despite that, I was curious if you thought there was any difference in the way that men and women should approach social magic. Are there any special considerations you imagine would arise for women performing magic in the style you write about? —MS

First, let me talk about women and magic generally. My introduction into the culture of magic was in the early 90s. At that time I didn’t get the sense that there was any still-lingering codified discrimination against women in magic. I never heard a male magician say anything negative about women in magic. And all the doors were theoretically open to them. But despite that, it was still very rare to see a woman at a convention or lecture. I didn’t think much of it. I just assumed they had better taste than to want to go to a magic convention.

On the rare instance where a woman showed up who wasn’t dragged there by a guy, she wouldn’t be shunned at all. Quite the opposite. Anyone who walked though the door with a touch of mascara and/or at least one distinguishable breast was hounded by a bunch of creeps under the guise of being helpful and encouraging. The amount of infantilizing and fetishizing of women attendees must have made them long for the days when they were excluded from these events. And that’s coming from the perspective a 13-year-old me. I wasn’t cool around women at that time in my life. I would practically cum in my pants if a girl walked by me in the hall and her backpack grazed my junk. But even I was like, “Dudes, chill out. You’re being weird.”

I can only assume things are a little more comfortable for women now, but I don’t really know. I don’t go to places where magicians gather or hang out with many magicians socially. It looks like women are better represented in the world of magic these days, but that comes from a semi-outsider’s perspective. I’d be happy to hear from women about their experiences if they want to reach out directly.

Sadly a lot of the magic I’ve seen coming from female magicians is just as garbage as the stuff I see from men. The worst of them seem to have adopted all the same corny affectations and attitudes of men performing magic. That’s fine. Everyone should have the same opportunity to bore people with bad magic.

But what, specifically, of the social magic style?

Let’s start by focusing on what I consider to be the ideal representation of a social magician:

This is what I’m going for.

This is what I strive to be.

This is, in my opinion, the way that one should present themselves when performing magic socially.

Whoops… hold on…

I screwed up.

I cropped out the wrong part of the photograph.

This is what I consider to be the ideal representation of the social magician:

That is what I’m going for.

I want to be Nani Darnell. I don’t want to be Mark Wilson.

The sentiment I hear frequently when it comes to women in magic is that we need to smash the patriarchy and no longer reduce women to the role of just being shoved in boxes and penetrated, sawed in half, or vanished. But to me that’s backwards. To me the estimable partner has always been the magician’s assistant. That’s the one I want to be like.

Maybe we’re too hung up on the word “assistant.” But I don’t let that get to me. In the magician and the assistant, I just see two different entities, with dramatically different traits.

(I’m not speaking specifically about Mark Wilson and Nani Darnell. Just about the roles of “magician” and “assistant” generally.)

The assistant is the one who faces the danger. She floats in the air, gets pierced with swords and cut in half by scary looking buzzsaws.

She gets abducted by a gorilla and still remembers to satisfy the contractual obligations with the sponsors.

The magician? He waves a stick in the air, “Wheee!!! I’m a wizard!”

Sure, within the story of the show, it’s the magician who is the powerful one. But outside of that narrow perspective, there’s no fucking question who the cooler person is.

If we left a show and you said to me, “You remind me of that assistant,” I would feel flattered. If you said, “You remind me of that magician,” I would feel like I must have some sort of personality disorder.

This is a long way of saying that I think the style of magic I write about here is well suited to performers of either sex. In fact, if anything, when mapping it onto the traditional roles of male magician and female assistant, the role I think works best for the amateur—and the role I go for most often—is the role of the assistant. The “power” isn’t usually something I possess. The power is in: this weird ritual, this strange object, this haunted artifact, this magician friend of mine, this quirk of human psychology, this unusual game, this altered state of mind, etc., etc.

I want to be the assistant who brings the people to these mysteries. I want to be seen as the one helping, the one facilitating, the one who is getting the things together to allow the magic to happen. I want to be seen as the one with the killer legs and cool outfits.

Rarely do I want to be seen as “The Magician!” who is causing the magic to happen. I don’t think that comes across well in casual performing situations. I think it limits the types of “stories” you can tell with your tricks. And given that a modern audience is going to know that what you’re showing them is a trick on some level, I think it’s a much better look to underplay your involvement (i.e., to put yourself in the “assistant” role). From the audience’s perspective you are denying yourself credit you could be taking. But when you say, “I will read your mind,” or, “I have magic powers,” then—from the audience’s perspective—you are someone asking for more credit than you deserve.

So yeah, I don’t know if there are any special considerations for women when performing this style of social magic. But they are probably better equipped for it. Taking a step back and not feeling the need to get credit for everything probably comes easier to women than men.

Dustings #40

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I was talking with someone over email about places to hide a crib. “Ah,” I said, “You smothered your baby to death and now you’re trying to remove any evidence you ever had a kid. Smart. What I like to do in that circumstance is—”

No, he explained, not that kind of crib. Like a crib-sheet that holds information you don’t have memorized or information for which you’re not 100% comfortable relying on your memory. The order of a stacked deck, say, or a progressive anagram. Sometimes you’ll have this sort of information mostly memorized but you’re not completely confident to do a trick with it because you don’t want to find yourself frozen with no option if you just completely blank on what card is at position 36 in the deck. So you might take that information and write it on a tiny piece of paper you can palm, or have it printed in small letters on the barrel of a Sharpie or—most retardedly—on the outside edge of a watch bezel.

But if you’re performing a trick that isn’t magician-centric (i.e. a trick that isn’t focused on your own “powers”), you can often “hide” the crib in the presentation.

What I mean by hiding a crib “in the presentation” is having a presentation that allows you to access a crib in a perfectly logical way where the action doesn’t need to be concealed.

In magician-centric presentations, where the power behind the effect is supposedly concentrated in the performer, it can be difficult to justify openly looking at something else.

But imagine your presentation is related to “something I saw online,” “this weird ritual I read in this book,” “this dream I had where we went through this strange procedure,” or “something this guy I met at a party showed me he could do” or something along those lines. In those cases you can refer back to that thing you read online, open up the book, take a look at the notes you scribbled down after your dream, or text that guy you met at the party. And in the process of any of those things, you can get a good long look at your crib.

You might think people would be quick to assume that you’re looking at something that is helping you for the trick, but that hasn’t been my experience. If your action is motivated by the premise of the trick, then they may believe you’re really doing what you’re saying, or they may feel the action is just “theater.” But I’ve found they’re unlikely to think it’s theater for the purposes of doing something sneaky. (This is not just my experience, but also based on some testing we did years ago that I will post about if/when I can track down the data.)

So they might think I was really texting some magician friend on the phone who told me where their chosen card was in the deck. Or they may think I was just pretending to text my magician friend to find out where their chosen card was in the deck as part of the story of the trick. But they don’t seem to make the leap where they say, “I bet he’s pretending to text his friend so he can reference something else on his phone that helps him with the trick.”

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On a related note, if you’re ever in a position where you can snap a quick picture of a shuffled deck (either in a face-up fan or face-up spread), then you can do some stuff you would normally do with a stacked deck. And using the premise of communicating with “the magician” over text, you can pull off a very strong, simple trick.

So, for example, the person you’re with cuts the deck beneath the table a few times and then pockets, sight unseen, whatever card they cut to. The rest of the cards are put back into the case (where you get a peek of the bottom card). In the process of apparently texting your magician friend, you look at the picture to figure out what card followed the card you peeked from the bottom of the deck (in other words, the card now in the spectator’s pocket). Then you can pretend to have a phone or text conversation with someone to reveal that information. (Or have an actual phone/text conversation if you have someone really helping you out.)

How to get the picture of the deck? Well, that’s going to depend. This is something i don’t do with my own deck. So I’ll do it at a card game when there is a break or when the games have wound down for the evening. If no one else is in the room I’ll spread the deck on the table and take a quick pic. If others are around but people aren’t paying too much attention, I’ll be playing with the deck absentmindedly and at some point I’ll fan the deck and put it under the table edge and then I’ll take the picture. From the perspective of anyone looking over who hasn’t been watching me the whole time, I’m just looking at something on my phone.

From there you have the crib for your “stacked” deck. And any premise that involves using your phone can be used to hide the fact you’re looking at your crib.

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In a recent post I mentioned using spaced repetition to build up your repertoire and keep the tricks fresh in your head.

On this page you can find an incredibly well done explanation of the concept of spaced repetition that goes into it in much more detail.

Even if you have no interest in applying it to your magic pursuits, give that page a read and you’ll see how useful it can be in other areas of interest.

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I guess the most common question I get here at the Jerx is:

Andy, what’s it like to have sex with you?

Great question. But sadly, despite my mastery of the English language, I’ve found it a little difficult to put that experience into words. Some things simply cannot be captured in text. We may need to add a few more letters to the alphabet before you can accurately describe the dance with the divine that is a sexual encounter with me.

Fortunately, I’ve found a video that puts you right into the experience of being opposite me as we engage in rigorous coitus.

Making love to me is just like this clip from Bobby J. Gallo’s promo video from 1996.

• I play that exact song.

• The expressions I make are IDENTICAL (A combination of self-satisfaction and self-amusement, with a little bit of “oops, did I do that?” mixed in.)

• It lasts 26 seconds.

• And at the end I shoot all over your face.

Past-It Notes: The Past-Tense Svengali Force Pad

In the Dustings of Woofle post before I went on my break, I made the point that a Svengali pad made to look like a pad of Post-it notes doesn’t make a ton of sense, because people don’t write on Post-it notes when they’re still in their pad form. In fact, people use Post-it notes for the sole purpose of writing on the top sheet and then discarding it. Therefore it makes it particularly hard to justify why you’re carrying around a “filled out” Post-it pad, unless your performance character is, “Guy Who Doesn’t Know How Pads Work.”

Then Benjamin from ThoughtCast emailed me an interesting idea. What if the Post-it notes weren’t on the pad? What if it was a stack of used Post-its? As Benjamin wrote, “This way it seems like a collection of post it notes you’ve used over time instead of buying a fresh pad and writing on each still stuck note like a psycho.”

So this is a Svengali Post-it “pad” that you will make yourself. But it requires no cutting. Your force sheets will all be set back a millimeter or two, and all your non-force sheets will be forward a little bit. Either straight or at an angle, it doesn’t really matter. This is meant to look like a stack of used Post-it notes. So you’re absolutely not going for something neat looking. It’s supposed to be messy and the Svengali principle is hidden in this messiness rather than in the precision cutting of a professionally made Svengali pad.

For the purposes of illustration, I’ll use blue Post-its to represent a sheet with the force information on it, and pink (salmon?) sheets to represent the sheets with non-force information on them. In practice you would want to use all the same color, or all completely random colors. I’m using the two separate colors here just for clarity.

So first you put down a force sheet, then you stick a non-force sheet on top, but have it jutting forward a little.

Then you will put another force sheet on, pretty much squared with the previous force sheet. Then a non-force sheet sticking out, and so on. It works best if your force sheets are generally in the same position. You can go wild with the non-force sheets, but if they’re too all over the place, it makes it difficult to flip through the stack.

When you’re done you’ll have something that shows only non-force sheets as you casually flip through it.

But will only show force sheets if you direct someone to open up the stack anywhere and get a look at what the Post-It says.

Of course this is much subtler when all the sheets are the same color.

If this is something you think you’ll want to actually use beyond just playing around with the idea, then you may want to do something more permanent than just the standard Post-it adhesive that’s on the pages. Once a page has been peeled and restuck, it doesn’t really maintain it’s stickiness that well. So someone opening up the pad might “break” the pad at that point. Which isn’t necessarily a problem, unless you feel it is for your purposes. If so you’ll probably want to glue the sheets together where the adhesive would be.

Now how might you use such a thing? To force a playing card? No, let’s not do that. Let’s think…in what context might Post-its be used?

Maybe you were using Post-its to identify which items in your garage you wanted your son to bring to the dump.

Okay… that’s my fault. I asked a bad question. I should have asked: In what context might Post-its be used… and there’s a chance a reasonable person would hang onto those used Post-its?

I’ll give you three possible themes. These are probably not quite useable as is, but they may give you an idea of a direction to pursue.

Love

Everyday your wife (or husband/child/significant-other/inconsequential-other) leaves a little love note for you on the bathroom mirror so it’s there when you’re getting ready for work. You’ve held onto a bunch of your favorite ones. People can’t really read minds, you tell your audience, but they can tap into intense emotional frequencies and the items attached to those emotions. And you can use these notes to demonstrate that phenomena.

Someone flips open the stack of notes, reads one, and then tries to imagine themselves saying the sentiment on the note to someone they care about. You’re able to pick up on this.

Hate

You’re standing on stage at the Magic Castle. You toss a stack of used Post-its on the table.

Every day, at your old job, you would come back from lunch and find a whiny, passive-aggressive note from your boss on your computer monitor. At first it was an annoyance. But then it grew to be symbolic of everything you hated about the job: the mindless busywork, constantly having someone looking over your shoulder, having no autonomy. As soon as you got back from lunch you’d take that note, tear it up and toss it in the trash.

But then you changed tactics. You decided to use the notes to finally motivate you to pursue a job you were actually passionate about: a career in magic. You started keeping the notes. Letting them pile up on your desk. You’d read through them over and over, building up your annoyance and anger.

First a few days passed, then weeks. The pile grew larger. You still felt frozen in your career. Then you gave yourself both a challenge and a deadline. And you told yourself the moment you had mastered the trick of knowing which note someone was thinking of, that would be your sign that it was the right time to quit your job and go into magic full-time.

“And here I am today!”
blah-blah-blah
”Take a look at any note in the stack.”
blah-blah-blah.
”You’re thinking of a note that says… it’s something about… oh this is the one where he said I’m only allowed one personal item at my cubicle so I either had to get rid of the picture of my wife or the picture of my daughter. Correct?”
blah-blah-blah
”Pursue your dreams.”
blah-blah-blah

Magic

“See that book on the book shelf. The tall thin one with the white and red lettering on the spine? That was the first magic book I ever bought with my own money. I read it over and over and marked it with Post-its to make a note of everything I found interesting in the book. I would write quotes or ideas from the book on the notes and then stick the note on the page where that quote appeared. I didn’t want to highlight or underline the pages themselves, because I was so protective of this book since it cost me almost all the money I had at the time.

“Some years later I removed the Post-its, but I just found them all stuck together in a box with a bunch of other old junk. I wanted to try something. Peel up a corner anywhere in the stack and take a look at whatever note you open to.”

You try to read their mind, but aren’t getting anything clearly.

You pick up the pad and flip through a few of the options to see if any jump out at you. But again, you’re not having any luck.

“Maybe it will help if I have the book,” you say. You pull the book from the bookshelf and there is a Post-it sticking out from the side. “That’s weird. I thought I removed all of them.” You open the book to the marked page and say, “Uhm, okay, this is a long shot, but are you thinking of the phrase: You will need to obtain two plastic, glue-on eyes?”

Your friend says that yes, they are.

“That son of a bitch! He beat me to it.”

Monday Mailbag #44

Yo, yo. It’s great to be back. I had a nice break and I’m re-energized and ready to kick off this post(ish)-Covid, return of the roaring twenties, white boy summer.

Things here in the northeast U.S. are “more normal than not” almost everywhere. And even though we’re not completely out of the woods quite yet, I’ve found people to be considerably more sociable than they were at any time I can remember. If you’ve been wanting to engage in more social performing, here is your opportunity. Not only are people more open to it, but you have an ideal lead-in as you discuss what kept you occupied over the past year+. “I kind of went back and picked up a lot of hobbies I had been involved in as a kid… origami, magic, juggling…” or, “I ended up getting really interested in reading up on these obscure psychological phenomena,” or, “I started looking into how to read tarot cards, but ended up going down all these weird rabbit holes into other forms of divination and rituals. It’s really sort of fascinating and some of the stuff is weirdly unexplainable.” Or whatever your presentation might be.

Okay, let’s get to your letters…

Oh, Great Jerxy, your wisdom is needed on this Magic Cafe thread. It’s for a trick called Stamp by Joe Deng. A silver ball is placed into a little brass cup and smooshed down and it becomes a quarter. The thread has erupted because some people are concerned that the brass contraption that supposedly “stamps” the coin should have the imprint of heads and tails side backwards or else the trick makes no sense. You couldn’t print a coin from a stamp that looked like this

That would print a backwards coin.

Nate Kranzo comes to the thread and doesn’t do himself any favors by pitching a fit because people are pointing out this inconsistency.

What do you think? Will people notice? Will they care? Is it worth a purchase? Is there a presentation that covers the issue? —FE

First, I agree that Nate doesn’t come off great in this thread. The issue is legitimate and saying, “Put it away and go on to the next trick,” is not really an answer. The nature of the trick is that you’re asking people to show some interest in the prop and what it does. Having to whisk it away at the end is completely incompatible with that type of interaction, which of course will raise suspicion in some people.

If Nate had said, “We did it this way on purpose” and gave a reason, or, “Yeah it was a mistake, we screwed up. But here’s why we don’t think it’s a dealbreaker…,” he could have put the issue to bed, at least to some extent. Flipping out over people pointing out the problem just comes off as defensive and puts more focus on the issue than there would be otherwise.

But it’s also understandable. I’m sure he’s got boxes full of these things to sell. And if you put the time and money into putting out a trick and the first thing that happens is people start pointing out a flaw with it, that’s got to be a huge bummer.

Getting to your questions:

Will people notice? Yes. Especially if they have the quarter and the stamp in their hand at the same time. It will be clear that stamp couldn’t make that quarter (not only is it backwards, but it’s embossed when it should be debossed). So I would try to have them look at the items individually. Some people will still see the problem, but certainly less than if they’re looked at together.

Will they care? I don’t know if “care” is the right word. But it’s not a non-issue.

Is it worth a purchase? I actually think it is. I will probably get one despite the flaw.

And that’s because—while the orientation of the imagery is a discrepancy—with the right presentation, it doesn’t need to be a discrepancy that spoils the trick.

Now, look, if your presentation was, “I have super human strength, and I’m going to squash this silver ball into a quarter with this device,” then yes, the reversed quarter would be an issue because it completely undermines that presentation.

And just saying, “I’m a magician, so it doesn’t have to make sense!” is a pretty bad way to handle it too. Sure, it ends the conversation, but It’s also completely unsatisfying for the audience. If someone asks why something is the way it is, and your justification is “because I’m a magician,” it might as well be, "because fuck you, that’s why.” And I hate to break it to you, but bringing out a little brass gimmick to smoosh a ball doesn’t exactly scream, “I’m a magician!” It screams, “I went to the magic store!”

The easy way to handle all of this is just to take your “powers” (physical or magical) out of the equation altogether.

For example, I might say, “Check this out. It’s a reproduction of an early 20th century counterfeiting machine I picked up at a flea market the other week. I never heard of such a thing, but the guy who showed me how to operate it. You drop a ball bearing in here. Then just by pressing down on it you can make a quarter. Look, you don’t even have to press hard. Just gentle pressure. Isn’t that crazy? I don’t really quite understand how it works. These days, it doesn’t make financial sense to use it because quarters are worth so little and you have to buy the ball bearing. But apparently 100 years ago you could make a lot of money doing it.”

Now, let’s say my spectator says, “That didn’t print the coin. It would be backwards if it did.”

Then I would just act low-key confused and look at the trick and mutter. “Huh… wait… yeah you’re right! But that means… what does it mean? The ball just… disappeared? And was replaced with a quarter somewhere? That can’t be. Well…. shit… now I really don’t get how this works.”

If you introduce the gimmick as an unusual object you’ve come across, then the discrepancy doesn’t have to undermine the experience. You can actually use the discrepancy to make the trick more mysterious, if you play it right.

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With the world opening back up I was thinking of taking an acting class to help improve my presentations. Do you think that’s a good use of my time/money or would you recommend something else? —GC

Hmmm… I feel like if you have a latent acting talent, just waiting to be released, then taking an acting class might be good for you and your performances. But if you don’t have that natural ability and you just think taking a couple acting classes will be good for your magic, I doubt that’s the case. I think it would likely just put you up in your head and cause you to be less present than you would be normally. In a close-up, casual magic setting, the ability to be you and to be present is the most important thing. Acting is playing a role. When I engage in even the most fantastical types of presentations I do, I don’t think of myself as “playing a role.” I just think of myself as lying. But it’s not in a malicious way because everyone knows I’m lying.

I would recommend an improv class rather than an acting class. Improv focuses on getting out of your head and being in the moment and not over-thinking your instincts. I’m sure you get some of that in acting classes too, but it seems like it would be less fun.

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Have you ever stopped yourself from posting something because you were worried it would hurt someone’s feelings? Or do you have any stories about posts that you intended to publish but then thought better of and decided not to? —BR

My initial thought was: “No. There’s nothing like that.” But I’m sure I’m wrong about that. There are likely posts I wrote up but never hit the publish button on and ended up deleting. But I don’t have any memory of them because it’s the sort of thing I’d forget about immediately. (There are 1200 posts on this site, I don’t really remember the stuff that didn’t make it to the site.)

In fact, I can say with certainty there is at least one post I wrote up that I thought better of publishing. But the only reason I remember it is because it happened just a couple of weeks ago.

The new issue of Genii came out with this cover:

I had written something for one of the Friday posts that was an email, purportedly from Joshua Jay, expressing that he was furious about the new cover of Genii magazine. At first it sounded like he was upset that Genii was glorifying this nazi magician. But then the twist was that he was mad at Richard Kaufman for stealing the design of his upcoming book and the performance identity that he was trying to establish for himself: Hitler’s Magician.

I decided against publishing it not for Josh’s sake, but just to spare myself emails from people who don’t quite understand how jokes work who want to lecture me about comedy. I can usually count on one or two of those any time something I write about touches on a taboo subject. And at the time I wasn’t feeling in the mood to deal with that.