Thursday Thailbag

The alliteration in the title of this post made much more sense when I intended to post this on Monday.

Let’s dip into the mailbag and (attempt to) give some quick answers to some questions that have come in recently.

Did you read The Magic Rainbow? [Juan Tamariz’s book, recently released in an English translation.] If so, any thoughts on it? — JA

I haven’t! And I probably won’t. Not because I don’t think it’s valuable. I’ve only heard good things about it, including from many people I really respect. But because, since starting this site, I’ve made an effort to avoid magic theory. I just don’t know how interesting it would be to read someone’s theory based on other people’s theories. This site is an experiment. I want to develop my own magic theory based solely on my own experience and testing. I have the time to do so.

So, yeah, I’m probably hobbling myself in a way by not absorbing the thinking of the magic establishment, but I don’t think people come to this site to hear, “Well, Darwin Ortiz says…,” or “Well, according to Tamariz….”

And I’m still not even sure if Tamariz is really that great when it comes to magic or if people are just entranced by his keen fashion sense and potent sexuality.

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[…] I encountered your "Bazillion Dollar Bill Switch", and it's one of my favorites so far. I look forward to trying it. One thing is bugging me.

Slight detour […] I keep a few cards in my wallet and I'm ready to do Card Warp at the drop of a hat. […] A problem with the trick is that, at the end, it's not uncommon for someone to recover from their less-than-paralyzed astonishment and say, "now put the card back together". {…]

Anyway, I'm wondering if "put it back together" is a comment you've had to navigate after "Bazilion".  — CC

No, I don’t get that sort of challenge with that trick, or any other trick for that matter. And here’s why…None of the presentation styles I employ (Romantic Adventure, Engagement Ceremony, Distracted Artist, Peek Backstage, Wonder Room, among others) suggest, “I am a person with general magic abilities. Feel free to challenge me.” If your presentation is—even nominally—that you’re not taking credit for whatever happens, then it completely blunts the spectator’s inclination to say, “Okay… well… now do this..” That doesn’t make sense if I’m not taking credit for the magic (even if they know I’m responsible for it in reality).

Now, with Bazillion, I am taking credit. I’m saying, “I’m going to transport this half of the bill somewhere else.” But still, my attitude isn’t, “I can do anything!” My attitude is, “I’ve been working on this one specific thing. Let’s see what happens….” So even then it’s not super logical to follow that up with a challenge to do something more.

That’s not to say it will never happen. But I don’t ever need to feel “exposed” if it does, because my style is not the all-powerful magician. My style is someone whose relationship to magic is that he’s learning, and trying, and sharing. If someone said, “Can you put my bill back together?” I’d say, “Hmmm… no. I don’t think so. Is there a way to do that? I’ll do some reading and see if I can figure out how.” Then three weeks later I’d come back and say that I think I had it figured out, and I’d do a torn and restored bill where something goes wrong. The bill is mis-made or something like that. Two more weeks later I’d come back and say, “I think I’ve got it now.” And either do a good torn and restored bill or add some other chapter to the story.

In that way, rather than simply doing a bill switch for a restored bill, I’ve extended the story for weeks and pulled them into an ongoing narrative. That’s a much better outcome for what I want to do than just immediately meeting some challenge.

On a side note I don’t recommend carrying playing cards in your wallet to do a trick. I realize real estate in your wallet is available because you’ll never need that space for a condom, but it’s still not a good look. Do it with business cards.

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Do you have tips for writing a book? […]

I've been working on a book for a few years now and I really want to get to the end of it this year. How do you do it? I assume the fact that you have a lot of people giving you good money to have it done by the end of the year is good motivation […] but I think it's obvious that besides this motivation, you have good work ethic.  — YR

The deadline and obligation I feel to the people who’ve chosen to support the site is obviously a huge factor. You might say, “Well, I don’t have a deadline or obligations tied to this project.” Okay. But you can create your own deadline and then just choose, going forward, to be someone who sticks to the deadlines you set for yourself.

As far as the logistics of scheduling your writing, your plan needs to be malleable enough that it works with your life, but not so malleable that you can weasel your way out of writing all the time. If you just say, “I’ll write when I fee like it,” then you’re at the mercy of your inspiration. If you say, “I’ll write every day, no question,” then a situation will come up where you’re on vacation, or there’s some kind of emergency, or a holiday, or whatever where you don’t want to write and you’ll find yourself in the position of having broken your word to yourself. Even if you say, “I’ll write a little bit every day when I don’t have something important going on,” that’s still a little nebulous because then you have to debate with yourself if what you’re dealing with is “important” enough to keep you from doing your work.

So, if I you want to write a book, here is the deal I would suggest you make with yourself. First, think of the things you do regularly that are your biggest time-wasters: watching tv, playing video games, perusing online porn, etc. Now, the simple rule you make is that before you allow yourself to do any of those things on a given day, you’ll write at least one page of your book. So you don’t have to write every day if other important things are going on. You only have to write one page a day on those days you want to “unlock” the time-waster activities. When a year passes you’ll probably have 300 pages written.

“But I don’t have any time waster activities!” Well, if all your time is occupied with something productive, then you don’t have time to write a book. Sorry.

“But that’s just a trick. I can still just choose to watch tv instead of writing if I want.” Yeah, no shit. Outside of a person holding a gun to your head and making you write, everything is a mental trick. You just need to find the tricks that work for you. The ones that work for me are all about leveraging. Here, you’re leveraging your desire to do pleasurable activities to get you to do a little writing each day.

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Mailbag Questions

If you have a burning question you’d like to receive a likely unsatisfying answer to, you can email me here and it may appear in a future mailbag.

The Unknown Edible

This is an example of the prediction of an “unknown personal” in mentalism.

I met my friend Alissa at a cafe last week. I was already seated when she arrived. She dropped her coat off at the table on her way to get her drink. I asked her to bring me one of the loyalty-stamp cards from near the register after she got her coffee.

She came back and gave me the card. I told her I had something I wanted to try. I asked her to open her mouth and I peeked inside a little. Then I took her chin in my hand, asked her to make her jaw loose, and I raised it up and down a little. “Hmm…,” I said.

I wrote something on the back of the loyalty card and folded it up and set it on the table.

“Okay, I have a question for you. If you could safely eat some item in the world that isn’t edible, what would you eat?”

“Huh?” she said.

“Like, for example, I think I’d like to eat a thick yoga mat. Not the whole thing. But I just feel like that’s a texture I would enjoy a few bites of.”

“Hmmm. A paperback book,” she said.

“Ha, exactly,” I said. “And why?”

“I like books,” she said. “I think it would taste good to take a bite and have the individual pages fall apart in your mouth. It would be like baklava.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I did get the sense you’d be a book eater.”

I slide the card over to her and tell her to unfold it. She does and on the inside it says, “I think you’d eat a book.”

The method here is any sort of prediction system you have at your disposal. I use some personalizations on some classic techniques that will be described more in the 2019 book for subscribers. You could use certain apps as well.

The method isn’t the important thing. I just wanted to present this as an example of an “unknown personal” in action.

There’s nothing particularly interesting about the structure here. It’s a fairly straightforward prediction. But I’ve found that to be the power of the unknown personal: it tends to get a better response out of traditional predictions without the need to restructure the effect. Predicting something about someone that they didn’t even know about themselves is, I think, generally stronger than predicting a “random” word, or something about them you could have found out in some other way.

Even if the prediction itself is no stronger, what you’re predicting makes for a more interesting couple of minutes.

And logistically a question like this can give you more time do what needs to be done to achieve the effect. Sometimes you need to stall a little bit before revealing your prediction which can be awkward when you’re asking someone to explain “Why did you name 63?” after you’ve asked them for a random two-digit number. But with a question like this, it only makes to pause and discuss their answer for a moment.

I’m always keeping my ears open for potentially interesting questions that require someone to ask themselves something they’ve never asked themselves before. If you (or some kind of oracle, or a deck of mysterious letter cards, or a weird guy you met on the bus who won’t stop texting you) can somehow predict that information, it makes for a strong and memorable moment of strangeness. And you don’t have the issue of there being any other way you could have uncovered the information, or them saying something like, “Oh, does everyone say they’d like to eat a lacrosse ball?”

Recalibrating

Every now and again I like to take a post to reset with everyone here what my philosophy/viewpoint/goals are in regards to magic. I do this for a couple reasons. The first is because there is likely a slow evolution of those things going on with me, and it’s good to check-in on where I stand. The second reason is because there is a constant stream of new people coming to this site, and while I suggest reading the whole thing from the beginning, that can be a daunting/time-consuming task for someone who is new here. So a quick summary every year or so is probably a good thing. And finally, whenever someone writes me taking issue with something I’ve said, they almost always have no fucking clue of what my position is in regards to the subject they have a problem with. I think this comes down to some combination of poor reading comprehension and only having looked at a couple posts out of context because the regular readers of the site have very little issue following along.

I

So, the first point to make is that this site is meant to be about one person’s journey. It’s not intended to be prescriptive. That being said, I’m probably performing more social/amateur magic than anyone in the world, so you may want to give some consideration to my thoughts on that subject even if you’re initially skeptical, just as you’d give some weight to Doc Eason’s thoughts on bar magic. But I’m not trying to convince you or give you advice. You do you.

(Although when it comes to the things we’ve put through focus-group testing, I have a high level of confidence in those things. And I think it would be odd to wholly reject those results—some of the only testing of methodological and presentational techniques in magic—just because your instincts tell you to disagree.)

II

The second important concept when reading this site is that I’m talking specifically about amateur magic, and amateur/social magic is a very different thing than a professional performance. At least it should be, in my opinion. The distinction should not be between paid and unpaid. The distinction should be between performance and interaction. Professional shows will feel more like a performance, social magic should feel more like an interaction. You won’t be able to strip all the performance elements out of social magic, but it benefits from doing so as much as you can. These elements include:

• spotlighting the performer

• scripted patter

• planned jokes and bits

• obvious props

These all make perfect sense for a professional performance. But they take away from the feeling of interaction, which is the goal in amateur/social magic. (Unless you want to do things that feel like “performances” but just in casual situations. If that’s your goal, then feel free to take on all the trappings of a performance.)

III

The final “important piece” to understand this site is perhaps the trickiest to explain. A lot of people will read my work and they’ll see the time and effort I’ve put into certain things, and they’ll imagine my goal is to get people to experience “real magic” in some sort of mystical, esoteric way. That’s not my intention at all. My goal is simply to give the people I perform for a better experience by giving them more interesting fictions.

For me, the failing of magic is that most of the time the story comes down to this: “I’m the magician and I’m an incredible guy.” It’s just not that interesting. And it’s certainly not interesting long term, which is something the amateur needs to concern him/herself with because they may be performing to these people for decades.

There’s a difference between the feeling of being fooled and the feeling of experiencing something magical. And, in my opinion, the way to get people to have the “magical” feeling is through stronger narratives. And by that I don’t mean coming up with some horseshit story to accompany your Gypsy Thread routine; that only takes away from the magic. But if you put the trick itself in a narrative where things are unfolding in the real world, then people can get caught up in it. And getting caught up in a magic trick, leaves people open to feeling that magical feeling, just like getting caught up in a horror film leaves someone open to feel terror.

The goal is not to make them “believe” anything is real (just like the goal of the horror film isn’t to pretend it’s a documentary). The goal is just better entertainment. And better entertainment through magic doesn’t come from being fooled harder (we already know how to fool people), it comes via a more engaging narrative (context).

If you buy into that premise, then here is where it gets fun. For the amateur/social magician, the narrative does not need to begin when the trick does, and it does not need to end when the trick ends. You can set up the narrative two weeks before the trick. You can have tricks that take place over the course of a year that all have the same umbrella narrative. You can have callbacks to a narrative you established long ago. You can weave different narratives in and out of your life and your interactions with people. More on that to come.

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Ok, so there we go. Now everyone is caught up. No stragglers. Let’s explore more…

Ahoy Hoy!

I think the trick in my repertoire that has had the most staying power is the Hoy Book Test. I would say a week has rarely passed and certainly a month has never gone by were I have not performed this trick in some form for the past… I don’t know… 20 something years maybe? I learned it from a Tom Mullica videotape, oddly enough. So whenever that came out.

The version I do most frequently these days is called Narrow Your Eyes and it’s in JV1. It justifies the need for a book because it’s not presented as mind reading. (If you have the book, you can use a similar justification in a drawing duplication, or when you have some write down a word they’re thinking of.)

I’ve probably tried a dozen other ungimmicked book tests, but have always come back to Hoy. My conclusion from trying all those other versions is that there are probably no good book test where you have to hold the book while they are looking at the word. I’ve tried a bunch of them. Some seem clever, but when I break it down with people afterwards they almost always say, “Well… I guess you must have got a look at the word at some point. Maybe you put your finger in the book? Or you looked when I looked?” The nice thing about the Hoy Book Test is they peek the word with the book in their hands on the other side of the room. Yes, there are still things that need to be justified with Hoy (why you’re using books at all, why two books, why can’t they just open to a random page, etc.) but I feel I can talk my way around those things. I can’t come up with a good justification for why I—the person we’re trying to keep the word a secret from—needs to hold onto the book other than the fact that it gives me the opportunity to take a quick looksy-poo at the word.

So that’s why I’ve stick with Hoy. I like my book tests like I like my barbecue sauce. Bold.

For the amateur/social magician there are even more benefits to the Hoy book test than many other others because you can do what I think of as the Delayed Hoy.

Traditionally, with the Hoy book test you’re limited to naming the first word or two on the page because you have to pick up that information very quickly. With the Delayed Hoy you can have someone read the page until they get to some imagery they can easily picture in their mind and you can reveal that instead of just a word.

The Delayed Hoy is an amateur magic technique because you’re not doing the method in real time.

I used to do it in the early-mid 2000s on the subway all the time. Back then, so many people were reading books because cell phones were still pretty useless.

So I would see someone, often an attractive female because I’m a typically shallow male, and we’d get to talking and I would be able to read her mind and tell her what she was thinking of from a random page in a book. And I could do this without ever touching her book at all.

How? Well, the day before I saw her reading that book on the train, and I just went to the bookstore after work, looked at a copy of the book and picked out the first compelling visual concept on page 183. The next time I see that person, I’m all set. (If you’ve never lived in a city with mass transit system like NYC, you might not realize that if you have a regular commute you’ll often end up seeing the same people, in the same subway cars, at the same time each day.)

I do something similar today. The last major book chain in the U.S. is Barnes and Noble. Almost all of them have a Starbucks inside of them. I’ll meander though the Starbucks until I see someone interesting. Get a look at the books on their table. Go into the main store, find those books, see what’s on page 183 and memorize the first easily pictured concept on that page. Then I can go back, sit at a table nearby, strike up a conversation, and go into a version of the effect where they can choose any of the books in front of them and I can read their mind. Again, without ever touching the book.

Another thing I used to do is this… I read a lot of shitty horror and mystery paperbacks, because yes, I’m dumb. Go read Dostoyevsky you fucking smarty-pants. Anyway, once a week i would go to the bookstore near where I worked and I would go through the bestsellers and note the first interesting thing on page 183 of each book and make a note of it on the blank pages at the end of the book I was reading. Now, anytime I run into someone reading a best seller, I can look at my crib in the back of my book and go into the trick. I would also trim down the page next to my force page in my book. That way I wouldn’t have to do a miscall. I could flip to the page and legitimately show the page number.

Ultimately that was maybe not worth the investment of time. I’d probably only use my best seller crib a couple times a year just by fate (I mean, just by stumbling across someone with a copy of one of those books). I would sometimes use it more directly, if I was in a bookstore cafe with someone I’d tell them to “grab any book on the best seller shelf.” If they asked why just the best seller shelf, I’d say, “It’s easier if it’s something in the zeitgeist.” But it really didn’t matter either way. If they picked a book that wasn’t in my crib, I’d just do the standard Hoy. I probably wouldn’t recommend someone put the effort into maintaining a best seller crib unless you, like me, would find it soothing to have this little weekly ritual where you go and get a coffee and peruse through the few new books on the bestseller list that week and jot down what’s on page 183 of each. (For anyone not familiar with the Hoy book test, no, there’s nothing special about page 183. I’m just using it as an example here.)

My point is simply that, for the amateur magician, you should keep your eyes open for opportunities where you can find out what someone is reading and do the prep for the Hoy Book Test not in real time.

There is an added bonus to doing it this way. When I would ask people about the trick later on (a week or so later), they almost universally forget about the second book. They would mention taking their book and flipping to a random page and that was the extent of the process in their mind. Which, of course, makes it almost a miracle. With the traditional Hoy book test, an equal amount of weight is put on both books at the beginning, so it’s maybe a little harder to make that page selection part fade into the background. With the Delayed Hoy all the focus is on their one book which I never go near. My book is only in play for less than 10 seconds and is used in a fairly off-handed casual way, so I think it becomes easier to forget.

I’m certainly not suggesting the original Hoy test needs any improving. I still love being able to walk into a huge library with someone and telling them to get me two books from anywhere and let’s try something. But the Delayed Hoy is, I think, a good example of taking advantage of opportunities we have in amateur performing situations that we often overlook just because, historically, magic books haven’t really looked at effects from that perspective.