Until July...

/

Waddup, ding-dongs?

This is the final post for June. Regular posting resumes Monday, July 3rd. The next issue of the subscriber newsletter comes out on July 1st. If you’re a supporter at the $25 level and you have an ad you’d like to get in for this month, try to get it to me within the next week.

One evening, I was standing outside a bar with some friends on the sidewalk in NYC. I borrowed my friend’s cigarette and pushed it through my fist. When it came out the other side, I said that it had gone back in time one puff. It was a little longer now, could he see? Then I pushed it through my other hand and it disappeared completely.

“Now it’s gone back in time five minutes, to the point when it was unsmoked, and it’s now back in your pack. Check it out.”

My friend opened his pack. “No, it’s not,” he said. “I still have three in here.”

Uh-oh, he knew how many cigarettes he had in his pack before I made that one disappear.

The funny thing about cigarettes is they’re not very expensive, but if you take one out of your friend’s mouth and toss it in a puddle, they get really mad at you.

So vanishing my friend’s cigarette without his permission had him annoyed with me. How to rectify this situation?

“I had to do it,” I said. “That cigarette was the one that was going to give you lung cancer. I mean… not that one cigarette will give you cancer. But there’s a certain amount that will. And then there’s one less than that amount which won’t. And I had a vision that in your life you would be right over that line by one cigarette. And so I needed to make one vanish. I did it for you.”

“Oh well,” he said, and borrowed a cigarette from another friend of ours to make up for the one that was lost.

A few months later, he stopped smoking for good. One of the reasons he told me was that I’d poisoned his mind with the notion that there is some dividing line between having lung cancer and not having lung cancer, and one cigarette could push you over that edge. And he would think about that each time he had a cigarette.

This is the story about the time I may have saved someone’s life with a cigarette pull.

In other vice-magic news, a couple of people wrote in to ask how I vanished the condom in the story I mention in my 5 Things To Make Vanish post.

I don’t really know what the technique is called. I think I might have learned it in the Klutz Book of Magic, or something like that, when I was a kid.

You toss the item back and forth between your hands, and then you palm it or hold it back on the last toss.

There are better vanishes in the world. But for a spur of the moment vanishing condom trick, this worked well. The nice thing about this vanish is they’re being taken in by the rhythm of the vanish. This means you can do it with bigger items in low-light situations (e.g., a condom in a candle-lit bedroom) because what they need to pick up on to sense the vanish can still be seen in those situations. And even if the object isn’t hidden fully in your hand, it’s usually fine, so long as you can ditch it before the vanish because they won’t be able to catch a casual glimpse of the object in the dim room.

In this case, in the process of shifting my body positioning on the bed so my girlfriend could put her hands around my fist, I left the condom on top of the headboard.

I’ll see all your asses back here on July 3rd for National Eat Beans Day.

Expansion

/

One of the most reliable ways to increase the impact of a trick is to “expand” the trick by bringing in elements from beyond the room you’re in and the time you’re performing.

I’ll give you a theoretical example.

Imagine a magic show where the magician requests four people to help him. Each person secretly places an item they have on them into a separate small cloth bag. Let’s say they put in a Chapstick, a quarter, a pair of earbuds, and a lighter. Without opening the bags, the magician is able to tell them what’s inside and after that he reveals to whom each item belongs.

Now imagine the trick performed a different way. This time, people are reached out to before the performance and asked to bring a small item of personal importance with them to the show. In this version of the trick, the items placed in the bags are a small teddy bear, a bookmark someone’s first boyfriend made them, a ticket stub to the first movie and man went to with his future wife, and a baby’s pacifier.

Beyond that, the trick is the same.

The trick would probably not be particularly more fooling this way, but you can see how it would likely be significantly stronger. It would be stronger because the process of identifying and bringing with them a personal item is just more interesting than tossing whatever random item they have in their pockets in a bag. And it’s stronger because it’s playing off a connection they have with that object that goes back potentially years or decades. And you’re pulling some of that vitality into the trick itself.

Here’s a different type of example of expanding a trick beyond the boundaries of the performing situation…

In this post, I wrote about a particularly strong reaction I got from the Trick that Fooled Einstein—a version where the prediction was on a fortune from a fortune cookie. After I got such a strong reaction that one time, I tried out the trick a bunch more. It always got a good reaction, and sometimes a great reaction.

I noticed one element that seemed to correlate with the strength of the reaction.

If you don’t know the trick, it’s essentially a prediction of the freely chosen amount of change a spectator has in their hand.

If I had a little bowl of change on the table and asked someone to take a small group of coins, and then I revealed my prediction, it tended to get a good reaction.

But if I called the person earlier in the day and asked them to go to where they keep their loose change, and to grab a few coins for something I wanted to try later, then it tended to get a much stronger response.

Why? Because the trick was no longer about what happened in just these two minutes sitting around the table together.

Unlike the first example, a handful of change has no emotional meaning to it. But having them bring their own change from home still led to a stronger reaction. Probably for two reasons.

First, there is a sense of anticipation created. Why am I asking her to grab some change and bring it with her? This is an unusual request. What’s going to happen later?

Second, it blurs the lines of when the trick starts. “Did the trick start when we sat down together? Or did it somehow start hours ago when I grabbed those coins from my dresser? Or—considering he went straight into the trick when I got here—did something happen between the time I got the coins and now that allowed for the trick to work? Maybe… who knows…maybe he hired someone who followed me into the gas station and he saw the outline of the coins in my pocket? And that’s how he could have this printed prediction? No, no, no. That’s a crazy idea.”

Yes. It’s a crazy idea. But by expanding the boundaries of the effect, you give the person’s mind a chance to consider more crazy ideas. And that’s a good thing.

This isn’t just something you can do with physical objects. You can also do a similar thing with thoughts.

It’s one thing if I read your mind and tell you the “random” word you’re thinking of.

But imagine you’re visiting your parents for Christmas. I send you a text asking you to do me a favor. Go find a book that meant something to you as a kid. Open the book and find any word that jumps out at you and remember that word until the next time I see you. I reach out to you a couple of times in the ensuing weeks to make sure you still remember the word. And then when we meet up, I’m able to tell you the word you’ve been carrying with you from this beloved book from your youth.

Yes. That moment’s going to carry a much different weight than just naming some meaningless word that just came to your mind 6 seconds earlier.

This is why, whenever possible, I try to bring in elements from outside of the current space and time.

The greatest strength of magic is its ability to make everything else fall away and pull the people watching solidly into the present moment. So it may seem antithetical to that idea to be reaching for outside elements during your performance. But when you can give more weight to the props and premises, and more resonance to the concepts used when you perform, you give your magic more impact. And that greater impact is precisely what’s going to jolt them so intensely into the here and now.

Mailbag #93

/

You asked for suggestions for the Virtual Focus Group.

I'd be kind of interested in how audiences perceive various sneak thief performances. I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis that while the standard stage and close up versions "fool" the spectators (in terms of them not seeing the peek) they fail to convince them (as looking back they rightly feel a peek was quite possible).

You already published a close up version (using a switch in the spectators hand) adressing the problem.

Question to be answered:

How much is the enjoyment and decptiveness of the plot increased when using a handling that seems to exclude the possibility of a peek?

(Personally I'm more interested in stage versions, as these tend to introduce more "props" like envelopes or clipboards and more "process", but close-up results are fine, too). —FH

While we haven’t specifically tested sneak thief, we have tested enough other peeks with peek wallets, business cards, and playing cards that I feel confident that the results would be similar.

There are three things that can happen with a peek:

  1. The spectator catches you looking at the information.

  2. The spectator doesn’t catch you looking at the information.

  3. The spectator doesn’t catch you looking at the information and is convinced you couldn’t have seen the information.

Most magicians are happy with #2. But #2 is just about as useless as #1, in my opinion. To me, there’s not much difference in the spectator’s mind between, “I saw him look at the word I wrote down,” and, “He must have somehow seen the word I wrote down.”

It’s not enough that the spectator doesn’t see you look at the information. The spectator has to see that you couldn’t have looked at the information. When the item is being held in your hands, uncovered, the only way you can ensure they feel that you couldn’t have looked at the information is to put them on notice from the start to make sure you don’t get a peek at what they wrote. Only with that forewarning could they feel confident they knew what to look for enough to guard against it.

Could you give that warning and then still to do the sneak thief peek? Probably, and you’d likely still get away with it sometimes. Maybe the majority of the time. But at that point you’d just be hoping that they didn’t notice. Without some other layer of deception on top of the technique, I wouldn’t feel confident using it with the spectator specifically being on the lookout for a peek.

And while we haven’t looked at the sneak thief peek in particular, with every other peek, if the participant is specifically told to be vigilant that the performer doesn’t look at what they wrote down, this always gets higher ratings for enjoyment and impossibility than when that isn’t mentioned. So I don’t see any reason why that peek would be any different.

I loved your 5 Things to Make Vanish post. [See last Wednesday.] In the part about vanishing trash you said that once every couple of months a stranger will walk over to you and say “I’m sorry… what just happened to your cocktail napkin?”

So what do you say at that point? —BA

I’ve never really thought this out too much, but I generally do the same thing every time I vanish some little piece of trash—a napkin, a straw wrapper, a sugar packet—and someone comments on it.

Let’s say I vanish a cocktail napkin.

They say, “I’m sorry… what just happened to your cocktail napkin?”

Step One: Confusion

I don’t want them to feel like I was waiting for this response. So my first reaction is always confusion. I act as if I think they’re asking me for that object. “You need a napkin?” I respond, somewhat confusedly. Like, I don’t understand why they’d be asking me for a napkin.

Step Two: Clarification

After a beat, I understand that they’re talking about my napkin. Apparently they want my napkin for some reason? I look around for it as if I set it down somewhere. “I don’t think I have it actually.”

Step Three: Understanding

“Oh, wait. Did I do something with it? Did I make it go?” I don’t use the word “vanish” at this point. I still want it to sound like I’m not quite understanding what they’re saying.

Step Four: Explanation

“Yeah, that must have seemed weird. I used to have a big interest in magic years ago. And one of the ways I practiced was to make garbage vanish. I’ve done it ever since. It’s just like a muscle-memory reaction.”

Step Five: Obfuscation

That explanation sort of makes sense, but now I want to push it a little further. So I say something like, “At this point, it’s probably just laziness. It’s easier than getting up and throwing it out.” This makes it sound like the item is actually gone in some way, not just secreted out of view somehow. You can tell this kind of throws people off a little. If they ask, “Where did it go,” I will give one of two answers. I’ll either say, “Oh, it’s in the trash,” and point across the room at the trash can; or I’ll just sort of shake my head and shrug my shoulders and be like, “I have no idea.”

Obviously it doesn’t always play out this exact way, but that’s more or less the path in my head that I’m ready to go on. Sometimes, the interaction will end soon after this. But most of the time, the conversation continues. Either they used to be into magic, or they’ve always enjoyed magic, or they want to know if I still study it. If they’re the type of person who’s going to approach you after seeing something strange happen, then they’re usually the sort of person who wants to pursue this conversation.

Dustings #88

/

I have a larger-than-usual Virtual Focus Group planned for this weekend. This is where I distribute videos of magic tricks to groups of non-magicians from across the (English-speaking) world (strangers-—not friends of mine) and get their feedback and first impressions on the tricks.

If there are any effects (new or old) you’d like me to get in front of their faces, let me know. And let me know what question you’re hoping to have answered by this testing. (Something other than, “Did you like the trick?”) We’re usually asking things like what their interpretation of the effect was, or looking to see if the method that is used is one of the first things they consider.

We have a group of 50 people lined up, which is our biggest Virtual Focus Group yet. We have them through the rest of the month. (It’s like a grand jury. They’re available for multiple sessions.) So if you have something you’d like tested, let me know.

Responding to this week’s mailbag and the subject of magic subscription services, I found myself thinking that Penguin should have a weekly Instant Download subscription. Maybe like $20/month and you receive their top new instant download each week.

I don’t have the business sense to know if this would be a good economic move or not, but it seems like it would work out for everyone. Most instant downloads are in the $10 range. So it would be a theoretical $40 value for $20 for the customer. And I’m guessing on average a Penguin customer is probably only buying one or two downloads a month, so it would likely be an increase in revenue for Penguin. It would probably build a little more buzz and reviews for those downloads, and since everyone who wasn’t subscribed would still be paying full price, that should help revenue long term. And as long Penguin was including their best downloads in the subscription, I think customers would be pretty happy with it even if not everything is in their wheelhouse.

Mark S. wrote in with this idea which I think could be a quite intriguing storyline for a trick…

Not sure if this is of interest to you or not, but I read recently about a premonitions bureau that was established in the UK in the 60's to take premonitions from the general public with a view to predicting and averting disasters. Sounds crazy, but it actually existed. It has the makings of an interesting premise for a trick.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Premonitions_Bureau

Dear Jerxy: Too Late For Something New?

/

Dear Jerxy: I’ve been a fan of yours for years, but I rarely bite the bullet and engage in your style of tricks. Last weekend [a friend and fellow jerx-reader] stayed with me and joined me out socially. He performed a few tricks in your style and I finally “got it” when I saw the reactions. As much as I want to explore your style of trick I think it might be too late for me. I’ve been doing mainly card tricks with some coin work for over twenty years and I don’t think people will buy a change from that into the types of presentations you dig into. I’m not sure at this point they’ll go along with stories about rituals and good luck charms and cursed objects and fringe science. What do you think? Am I just being a baby?

Signed,
Transitioning Out Of Traditionalism

Dear TOOT: Yes, you’re being a baby. You have pigeon-holed yourself. That’s not the people you perform for doing that; that’s you.

I did a series on transitioning your style of performance back in 2019. It might be a good time to revisit that if you’re considering doing so.

Don’t worry about getting into tricks that hit on weirder or more “magical” subjects. People aren’t going to say, “Heyyyy… you were doing card tricks for the past 20 years and now you’re ‘tuning our intuition’ and messing with time travel? Who do you think you’re kidding?”

I have probably100s of emails over the years from people who have changed to a more immersive, story-centric style of performing and I’ve never heard of anyone saying they tried it and their audience was bothered or upset and urged them to go back to a regular card trick.

People will definitely “go along” with it.

I just finished a book called, “The Boys Are Back In Town” by Christopher Golden. In the book, it’s this guy’s 10-year high school reunion. But details in his life start to change. His memories don’t line up with his reality. He’s informed that a guy who he was just e-mailing with the other day actually died when he was hit by a car back in high school. Things like that. And he soon realizes that someone is going back and changing things in the past which is changing his present. At first, he suspects his childhood friend. They both had an interest in magic and pursued it when they were kids.

What type of magic stuff were they reading about at that time? Sleight-of-hand. Stage illusions. Time-travel. Spells. “Self-help bullshit." Rituals. Devil worship. And more.

Now, when Christopher Golden was writing this book, he was writing out all of those things as subjects someone with an interest in magic might encounter as they delved into the topic.

And when he submitted his book to his editor, his editor wasn't like, "I don't understand. What do these topics have to do with one another?" They understood that pursuing an interest in magic is something that should draw you into all sorts of variations on the topic from the theatrical to the psychological to the mystical.

Lay people don't draw the distinctions that we do. I've had people who have seen me do nothing but traditional card tricks ask me about tarot and fortune telling. It's all along the same spectrum to them.

So you can always say, "You know, I picked up this weird book a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was just another book on sleight-of-hand. But a few chapters in it started to delve into some stranger concepts. Can I try something out with you? it's a little... different." People won’t think you’re now trying to convince them of some sort of supernatural power. They’ll just be ready for something that goes in a new direction. In fact, the more they've seen you do standard magic, the more on board they will be for something different.


Okay

5 Things to Make Vanish

/

Trash

This is my favorite thing to vanish. Balled-up napkins. Straw wrappers. Coffee stirrer sticks. Receipts.

When people think about what they would do with real magic powers, they think of things like making money appear, or making people fall in love with them, or healing illness. Things like that.

And sure, that’s what you’d do if you had real wizard-like magic powers. But if you had real low-level powers, I think making trash vanish would be something you’d do on the regular.

This is something I pretty much only do on the offbeat. Often when I’m not even with anyone. I’ll get my coffee from the pick-up bar and the receipt is on top. I’ll head to a table. Ball up the receipt, false-transfer it into one hand. Continue to squeeze that hand a bit while my other hand ditches the receipt in my lap or pocket. This whole time I’m looking at my phone or laptop (this is where the Distracted Artist style originated). Then I’ll open my hand and briefly pay attention to it, blow across my palm, and look up as if I’m following something as it floats off into the air. That final action—where I am paying it some attention—takes half a second. Then I’m back focused on my book or phone or whatever.

I’ve vanished trash in the Distracted Artist way probably at least 2000 times in the past 10 years. Maybe 90+% of the time it goes unnoticed (or I don’t notice someone noticing). About 1 in 10 times I can see someone tilt their head or say something to someone they’re with and point to me out of my peripheral vision. And then maybe once every 2 or 3 months, someone will stand up, come over to me and be like, “I’m sorry… what just happened to your cocktail napkin?” (Or whatever.)

Now, 60 of those interactions over 2000 “performances” might not seem like a good batting average. But I’m convinced that I’ve had more of an impact by performing it this way than I would if I said, “Hey, watch this!” And drew attention to the vanish.

Pens

Pens have to be the most satisfying thing to vanish. Do a flip stick vanish.

And from there, it practically sleeves itself with a little flick.

Then you can say, “Oh, shoot. I still need that.” And reach into your bag and pull it out again. Or get up and go over to a drawer and pull it out of there. (Actually, it’s falling out of your sleeve as you reach into the bag or drawer.) So it’s as if you vanish the pen to wherever you normally keep it.

Money

I vanish change like I vanish trash. As if it’s a nuisance and I just want to be rid of it.

But when people notice I say, “Oh, I just don’t like carrying around change. I don’t even know why we have change these days. Just round things to the nearest dollar. It’s not 1950 where a nickel gets you two movies and popcorn. So yeah, I just send it away to a special savings account I have. When that account gets up to $100, I take myself out for a special meal.”

The Rep of having a special little savings account that you treat yourself with once your vanished change reaches a certain total is a fun, stupid little specific that also seems perfectly rational in a slightly magical world.

Cigarettes

The bare-handed vanish of a lit cigarette is probably the strongest close-up vanish you can do. It uses a cigarette pull and I keep one rigged up in one of my jackets during the cold months.

I don’t smoke. But when I’m around smokers it’s something I’ll frequently take the opportunity to do.

I tell them the cigarette has gone back in time and reappeared, unsmoked, back in their pack. Unless they just opened the pack or have only a few left, they usually can’t say for certain this isn’t the case. And they can’t get mad at me for denying them a cigarette. “No, it went back in time and is now back in the pack. And you had already smoked it a little so actually I gave you some extra cigarette-smoking pleasure. You’re welcome.”

Condoms

I’ve only done this once. I vanished a condom (in its package). And made it reappear (on my package).

I was heading to the bedroom with my girlfriend at the time, and she stopped in the bathroom for a moment while I prepped myself (so to speak).

When she got in the room and we were rolling around, I had her grab me a condom. When she was about to open it I said, “No, it’s cool. I got it.” I vanished it, then gestured for her to undo my pants for the big (well… medium-sized) reveal.

Black Holes and Lecture Patter

/

Consider this optical illusion of a black hole which seems to shift and grow as you look at it.

Here’s a New York Times article that explains how the movement people see in this picture is possibly caused by your brain trying to anticipate the near future.

From the article:

One hypothesis, Dr. Laeng said, is that the brain is trying to predict and show us the future.

It takes time for a stimulus, like light, to reach our sensory organs, which need to send it to the brain, which in turn needs to process, make sense of, and do something with that information. And by the time our brain catches up with the present, time has already moved forward, and the world has changed.

To get around this, the brain may be constantly trying to predict a little bit into the future in order to perceive the present.

Seeing the expanding hole illusion is not a flaw, but a feature: It’s the result of your brain’s strategy to navigate an uncertain, ever-changing world, most likely built up from evolutionary history to ultimately help humanity survive. It is adaptive to predict the future by, say, dilating your pupils in anticipation of going somewhere dark.

Knowing that’s what potentially causing the illusion, this image could make a good Imp or Hook for a prediction effect. Or a lead-in to a spectator as mentalist plot where the illusion is used to identify someone with potential prediction capabilities.

But how do you incorporate things like this in a trick in casual situations? The wrong way, in my opinion, is to do something like this:

“Take a look at this image of a black hole. Does it seem to move and expand as you look at it? I’ll tell you why that is. It takes time for light to reach our sensory organs which need to process that information and send it to our brain. And in that time things have already moved forward. So the brain is constantly trying to predict a little bit into the future. In this case, your pupils are dilating in anticipation of going into a dark hole. And it’s this dilation of the pupils that causes the image to seem to grow. If your mind is good at anticipating the future, let’s see if we can exploit that in other ways.”

I call this sort of thing “Lecture Patter.” It sounds like you’re listening to a rehearsed lecture. It’s not the way friends talk when they get together. It says, “I’ve anticipated this moment and prepared for it and you are just the person I decided to unleash this on. Pat attention. Class is in session.” Everything feels pre-planned.

So here’s how I use something like this. One of my favorite summer activities is to meet a friend in the late evening at an ice cream stand. We sit on the hood of my car and catch up and stuff our faces with ice cream. What’s better than that?

This is not the time to give a dissertation on the fucking human retina or something.

But, as often happens, we might scan through some pictures on our phones to show the other person. In that process, I stumble over an image I saved to my phone from something I had been reading.

“Oh hey. Take a look at this. Does that black spot look like it’s moving or growing to you?”

She says yes. I straighten up. “Oh yeah? It’s definitely noticeable? Cool. I’ve shown it to a few people but you’re the first to really see it. I mean, almost everyone sees it a little bit. But you’re the first one to really notice it. Interesting. Hmm… there’s something I want to try with you later.” Later could be later that night, next week, or whenever.

Whenever “later” arrives, I can now give a couple of sentences of exposition. “Remember that picture I showed you with the black spot that seemed to grow? Well, apparently what causes that is that your mind sees the hole and your brain is predicting the immediate future of going into that hole. Because of the perspective of the image, I think. So your mind sees the hole growing as if you’re getting closer because that’s what it expects.”

This isn’t exactly what’s happening, but it’s close enough that even if they were to research it afterward, it would seem like I was in the same ballpark.

“At any rate, one of these weird mentalist guys that I’m friends with online was saying that picture is a good test to sort-of identify people with strong… like… I forget the exact phrase. Hyper-short-term-precognition. Or something like that. Being able to project your mind into the very near future. Because that’s who that image seems to work best with. And he came up with this little test I wanted to try with you.”

You see how this feels like a totally different interaction than the standard Lecture Patter version, yes? It feels like we’re discovering something together, rather than them being sat down for a formal presentation. I set the Hook at an earlier point in time. Very casually. I want them to feel like this is something unusual. Something I wasn’t prepared for. Their ability to really sense this optical illusion has supposedly told me something about them that I didn’t know. If I immediately transition into some trick as if I was prepared for this all along, that suggests the whole optical illusion thing was just a planned pretext.

And even when the time comes later, I’m still not some “expert” on the subject. I use a lot of qualifying words and phrases: “apparently,” “I think,” “I forget,” “something like that.” This is how people talk about subjects they lack certainty on.

Avoiding Lecture Patter is one of the ways we can make magic feel more spontaneous and unpredictable. Even though most people we perform for will understand magic is fake, and practiced, and scripted, you don’t have to perform in such a way that feeds into that feeling.

Thanks to David S. for tipping me off about this illusion last year.