Gardyloo #75

My pal, Marc Kerstein, has released a new ebook called “Tricks With Your Phone.” Which is a really weird title because it’s a collection of thimble magic. What the F? No… it’s not. I’m just pulling your little dingus. Actually, the book looks at a new feature in the most recent iOS for iPhone and its uses for a number of different types of effects (with the potential for countless more). If you have an iPhone and if you’re at all into the idea of doing magic with it, I’m going to recommend you pick this up. My recommendation isn’t based on me having gone out and performed the tricks from the book and receiving great reactions. I haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet. My recommendation is based on the potential I see with this product to truly benefit from the hive mind of a lot of magicians thinking in concert.

The book presents some tricks and also some fundamentals on how this new feature can be used for other effects. And purchasers will gain access to a facebook group which should beget a bunch of new tricks because the possibilities are somewhat endless with this new feature. And Marc has the technical know-how to shepherd any good ideas that come up in the facebook group to fruition.

You can see the description of the effects included on the product page here.

This isn’t an advertisement. I’m posting about this for my benefit. The next month and a half I’m going to be enveloped in the fog of finalizing Book 2, but when I come out of it, I’m hoping to find that the collective wisdom of a bunch of magicians has come up with a lot of fun ideas for me to play around with. (I’m not holding my breath on this. It’s just my hope.)

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Maybe it’s just because I’m a hardcore move-monkey, but for me, the coolest card technique of all time—and I’ve been saying this for years—it’s gotta be the Biddle grip, baby!

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Reader M.K., directed by to Helder Guimaraes’ website and suggested I scroll down to the “past shows” section.

Here’s the info about his show, “Nothing to Hide.”

“In 2012, Helder Guimaraes premiered his show Nothing To Hide at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by Neil Patrick Harris. The show was critically acclaimed and ended up Off-Broadway, at the Signature Theater, playing a sold-out limited run of four months.”

Hmmmm…. I feel like there’s something missing in the description of this show. Like some element that Helder is forgetting to mention. What is it… what is it… what is it…? There’s something, but it’s slipping my mind. I saw the show, I should remember what it was. It wasn’t like… a talking dog or something was it? What am I thinking of?

Wait… let me try and really search my memories of the show…

Nope. I guess I was just misremembering.

Well, one thing I do remember about Helder’s show, Nothing to Hide, is that it was great. I’d put it up there with all of my favorite shows I’ve seen: Teller, Siegfried, Pendragon.

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I was in a coffee shop writing Wednesday’s post when the girl next to me sneezed.

“Bless you,” I said.

But I was premature as she then went *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* in rapid succession.

“Whoa,” I said. “Do you always sneeze like that?”

“Every time!” she said. “It’s always eight.”

“I’m a two sneeze man, myself.” I said. “As was my father and his before him. On our family crest is a man sneezing twice.”

She laughed. “It’s funny how everyone has their set number.”

“There should be a dating site,” I said, “that matches you up based on how much you sneeze.”

She laughed again. “Would we be a good match? Or do we have to have the same number?”

“Oh no, we’re good,” I said, “You’re high and I’m low. So we balance each other out.”

“In-ter-est-ing…,” she said, tapping her pencil against her cheek.

A few minutes later she slid a piece of paper over with her phone number on it. “If you want to get together sometime and sneeze with me or something,” she said.

I said something clever like, “Uhm, ok. Sure!”

I was feeling pretty proud of myself. She was cute. I’m pretty competent at wrangling cute chicks, but I usually have to put in more of an effort. She seemed fun. Maybe she was the one! This was our meet-cute! And we’d have little stories the rest of our life about how if she hadn’t sneezed at that moment we never would have met. And I’d make her a Valentine’s Day card that said “Achoo-se You to Be My Valentine,” and all that sweet stuff.

And then some guy enters the coffee shop, comes over to the table and is like, “Hey, baby.” And he leans down and kisses her. They’re clearly a couple.

I gave her a look and she kind of swatted her hand in the air as if to say, “No, no. This is nothing.” So I’m not sure what to take away from that.

Oh well. I’ll keep you updated should love blossom.

Hey, maybe there’s a trick in there. Like if you perform for larger audiences you could ask if there are any high quantity sneezers in the house, then you could intuit their sneeze number. Or the sum of a small group’s sneeze number.

Ah, who am I kidding. I’m just trying to salvage that interaction.

Anniversary Thoughtz

Did I ever talk about the time we did some testing with Anniversary Waltz in the focus groups? I really thought I had already written this post, but then, in the post I intended to write today, I wanted to reference this post, and I searched and searched, but this post didn’t exist. So now I have to write the dumb thing so I can reference it.

(I may have covered some of this before in some other place, but I don’t think so. This is the problem with writing 100s of blog posts, three books, 15 newsletters, and 12 issues of a magazine over the course of three years.)

Anniversary Waltz is a trick I like to throw in people’s faces a lot. I’ve mentioned it before when I talked about the testing we did on examinability (Part 1 and Part 2). Whenever someone suggests audiences don’t really want to examine magically altered objects, and if you just have some goddamned audience management skills, then you can get the audience to somehow just accept the object has been affected by real magic and move on, I like to bring up Anniversary Waltz. I’ll ask them if they give the card out when the trick is over. Yes. Well, why, if examination doesn’t add anything to the effect?

I’ve had a couple people say, “I don’t hand it out to be examined. I hand it out as a souvenir.” Oh… and they never examine it closely? They don’t hold it so they can eye the edge and see if it’s really one card? They’re just like, “Ah, nothing to see here. It’s as I always assumed… the power of our love can merge playing cards together.”

No. Of course they always want to examine the card because—again, of course—examining an object adds to the impossibility of the effect. The fact that this is even debated in our art is perhaps the dumbest thing about magic. And it’s probably the most damning evidence that a lot of delusional people who have zero idea of how normal people think are drawn to magic. You have to be a special sort of dummy to think: “If I’m a super-duper good magic boy, they’ll never question this deck that changed from red to blue to blank!”

Sure thing, buddy!

Anyway, that was a tangent.

The primary throughline of book two, Magic For Young Lovers, is that for a magic effect to really resonate long-term with people, it needs to have some emotional element to it. It doesn’t have to be something maudlin or dark, there just needs to be some little thing beyond the trick itself that the spectator can latch onto (this can be novelty, humor, romance, nostalgia, fear, love, etc.). Most of the effects in book two are designed to demonstrate this idea.

But people will kind of argue with me about this. Of course they’ll acknowledge that an emotionally engaging presentation is nice to have. But then they’ll pivot and say magic is really about the feeling of being fooled and surprised and that that’s where the focus needs to be. Some will even tell me that the types of presentations I’m championing take away from magic.

Here’s the thing, I agree that the fooling/impossible element of a trick is the unique thing that magic can provide, and it’s probably the primary aspect we should focus on when we start creating. But having a super-strong trick without some emotional element to it is like a having a super deadly toxic gas with no delivery system (if your goal is to kill people, I mean). The emotional element is what allows people to initially engage with the effect and the thing that makes it resonant long after the trick ends. And it’s the thing that makes a trick “magical.” I’ve said it before: People don't use the phrase "that was magical" to mean "I was fooled."

I wish we could hang out in real life so I could prove this to you. You would be so fucking frustrated with me. We’d go to a bar or cafe and you would show some people some hard-hitting trick—a 10 on the “fool them” scale—that you had spent 8 months perfecting and there would be this brief explosion of astonishment. And I’d be clapping and smiling with everyone. Then I’d be like, “That was amazing! Bravo. I wish I could do stuff like that. Hey… [in a low voice] do you guys want to see something really weird?” Then I’m off with our new friends, engaging in some eye-gazing procedure, or making an excursion to the park across the street because, “this really only works when your bare feet are in direct contact with the Earth’s surface electrons.” And I’m just putting a 1000 foot porch—an emotional element—on some piece of self-working junk I learned from the Klutz Book of Magic when I was 12. But it has them oohing and laughing and engaged and it takes 25 minutes and reverberates through the rest of the evening in fun little ways. [No, not everything I do connects with people this well all of the time. I’m trying to make a point.] And all night I’m smiling and waggling my eyebrows at you. “Isn’t this fun?” I seem to be saying. And when things are winding down, I’m exchanging numbers with the coolest girl in the group and saying, “Sure, yeah, I know a whole bunch of other stuff like that. I used to be into magic when I was kid, like him. [I point at you and smile. You shake your head like, “You little asshole.”] I kind of fell away from it, but I did spiral off from there into this whole other world of like weird people, and strange objects, and old rituals. I kind of collect them. It’s just silly stuff, really. But some of it I can’t quite explain. We should definitely get together soon. Having gotten a sense of your vibe… I think I have something you’d find really fascinating.” And you’re grumbling and thinking, I guarantee he’s going to show this bitch some Tenyo garbage with a 20 minute preamble. I promise you, I’ve annoyed too many of my much more talented magic friends in this manner.

[Ah… something funny just happened while I was writing that paragraph about what a little charmer I can be. Remind me to tell you if I don’t on Friday.]

Of course, I want to do the most hard-hitting magic I can. But I’d rather do a mediocre trick with some emotional element than a mindblower without one.

The trick fools them, but the emotional element charms them.

For anyone who still doesn’t believe, here is Exhibit A: Anniversary Waltz.

Would you perform Anniversary Waltz between two strangers with one writing an A on one card and the other writing a B on another? The effect is identical, two cards become one. We just strip every possible emotional element away from the trick.

Well, about five years ago we did that as part of our testing. We performed Anniversary Waltz as one of three tricks we performed for 12 groups of four people. Actually it was 12 groups of six people, but two of the people in the group were actor friends of mine who were in on it.

The effects were ranked on two criteria from 1 to 100. The first was how amazing/impossible the effect seemed. The other was how enjoyable/entertaining the effect was.

Six groups, twenty-four people, saw Anniversary Waltz performed the traditional way, to my friends who were posing as a recently married coupled, who just happened to be members of this focus group.

The other six groups saw it performed to the same two people, but this time they were acting as strangers. The effects were stripped of any bit of emotional resonance other than the magic moment itself. They didn’t write any words of love on the cards, they didn’t even write their names. It was just card A and card B.

You will not be the least bit surprised to hear that the scores for how enjoyable/entertaining that routine is jumped from the high 30s to the mid-80s when the routine involved a “couple.” An over 100% increase. And keep in mind, the people rating the effects didn’t know this couple. They were strangers. But still the version that engaged the emotions was that much stronger.

And you’ll say, “Well, yes, of course.” But here’s the thing, there’s nothing unique about the fusion of two cards that makes it susceptible to a presentation with an emotional element. So, theoretically, any trick you’re doing that is just about the moment of impossibility, could be made significantly more entertaining/enjoyable with a tweak to the presentation. Maybe it’s not always 100% more-so, but even if it’s 20% more entertaining, isn’t it worth it?

And here’s something else we found that you may find surprising. The score for how impossible/amazing the trick was also went up with the emotionally engaging presentation. Not as dramatically, but by about 25%. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the emotional element shut down some of the analytical thinking they were doing. Or maybe the emotional element engaged them more which made them feel more fooled at the conclusion. I don’t care too much what the reason is.

Yeah, that’s the UPDATES graphic from Unsolved Mysteries. Why isn’t that show on anymore? It was the best. It should just be constantly in production. What the hell? Did someone solve all the mysteries or something?

Anyway, here is the update to this post. Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense to “update” a post that I’m writing today. But, as I said, I thought I had written this a while ago.

So a friend of mine who also helps conduct the testing had an idea and did a little experiment of his own a couple weeks ago. He went through his email archives and found the email addresses of the participants who were involved in the testing mentioned above. He wrote them asking if they had any recollection of the tricks they saw that day. He was able to connect with 23 of the 48 people in the testing.

13 of those people saw the “non-emotional” version. Of those 13, one person directly referenced this effect. (Other’s simply referred generically to “card trick.”)

Of the 10 who saw the “emotional” version, five referenced a trick with a man and woman’s card “coming together,” “sticking together,” “becoming one,” or something along those lines. 50%! Even I was pretty amazed at that number. This testing took place five years ago, and they still remembered a trick that they weren’t even the primary spectators for. This wasn’t at a wedding. It wasn’t at a magic show they chose to go to. They didn’t even know what the focus group was for until they were there. Yes, it’s a very small sample size, but I was still impressed by the number.

Harvest Time Part Two: Going Underground

Fall has officially begun and we are in the final third of the The Jerx, Season Three.

Tonight is the harvest moon and, like last year, I’m using this time to take stock of where things are with the site and where things may go next.

(By the way, did you know that the autumnal equinox and the harvest moon falling in the same week makes this a very powerful time on a psychic/soul-level? You didn’t? Really? Crack a science textbook much? It doesn’t sound like you do.

Okay, I’m being a naughty little rascal. Yes, this is nonsense. But it’s the type of nonsense that makes for a fun backdrop to a magic trick. Take a long, procedural card trick and do it around your coffee table and you’ll get a response that is like, “Hey… that was neat.” Do the same trick on a blanket in the backyard under the harvest moon because your “mentor said this was one of the few nights during the year it’s likely to work.” Now you have the same “neat trick,” but you’ve imbued it with a greater mythology. And you’ve made a mini-adventure out of it. And you’ve tied the experience of this little trick to the experience of something else in the world that you’ve made them pause and recognize. Something they probably wouldn’t have taken the time to appreciate otherwise. People enjoy this sort of thing.

And, it’s great for the amateur magician whose audience may see a number of card tricks over the course of a year. But they don’t necessarily appreciate the nuances of every trick. For them it’s a trick where some cards changed or some cards matched and it’s sort of similar to that other trick where the cards changed or the cards matched. But a presentation like this allows them to form distinct memories. “Ah, yes, the harvest moon trick.” The details of the trick may fade, but the experience that surrounds the trick will remain, because that experience is something other than “sitting around a table.” )

That was a long parenthetical. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, see the Sky Imps post.

Anywhoooo…

Oh yeah, the future of this site…

The first question is, will there be another year after this one? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s not easy for me to make those kinds of decisions. In real life I’m very good at coming up with a compelling argument about pretty much anything. And when faced with a decision like that, I find it very easy to argue both options in my head. So instead, I’ve automated the decision.

Here is what I do. I leave it up to the people who support this site. Every year a certain number of people decide to support the existence of this site, and receive some rewards in return for that. When the next year rolls around I ask, “Who wants another year?” If 90% of the people who supported the previous year don’t sign on for the upcoming year, that’s when I shut it down. I realize that’s a wildly high retention rate to shoot for, but it’s the standard I’ve decided on. That way the decision is in the hands of the people who’ve invested in this site. Their judgment will determine if it keeps going.

So that’s how Season 4 will happen, if it does.

And if it does, here is how it will be different…

First big change: What I consider to be the most valuable magic theory, ideas, discoveries, concepts, and tricks I come up with will now be solely available to supporters. That is to say, they will appear in whatever that year’s rewards package is, and not on this site. I’ve already done this with the tricks, for the most part (my favorite tricks from the past 12 months are in the upcoming book, not on this site). But in any future seasons, I’ll be doing the same with some of the concepts and presentation ideas I’ve brought up here. Why? A few reasons.

• Exclusivity for the people who support the site.

• If you are someone who values the more obscure performance styles and concepts I write about here, then you’re probably already supporting the site. And if you don’t like that sort of thing, then they’re kind of wasted posts. So by shifting those sorts of ideas into the publications for supporters only, everyone who wants to see that sort of thing will get to, and it won’t clutter up this site for the casuals.

• I think these concepts are more understandable when seen in the context in a book, rather than on blog posts. I say this because everyday I have people writing me an email to debate or question something I wrote, when their issue has already been addressed in a previous post. It’s dumb, but I write this site as if everyone reading has read every post I’ve written on it. A lot haven’t, but the hardcore fans have, and I’m writing those posts with that audience in mind. So it makes sense to limit that content to that audience.

• Even more-so than the tricks, there are some concepts that I’d rather not have publicly available via a google search.

Second Big Change: I’m going to put a cap on the number of supporters I allow for the site. Does that seem dumb? I know. The thing is, if I were to look at this site as a means for getting as many supporters/subscribers as I could, then that becomes my goal. But my goal is not to make as much money as possible here. As someone who solely works freelance, my goal is to “buy” enough of my time that I can devote a chunk of every day to writing, creating, testing, and performing ideas geared towards the amateur/social performer. And once I’ve reached that goal, I want to put the focus on those things, not bringing in more money.

What is the cap going to be? Well, the option to support Season 4 will be open to those who supported Season 3. If a person doesn’t sign on, then their “spot” will open up for someone else, but there won’t be any more spots created after that point in time.

Another reason I want to change the types of ideas I make publicly available and limit the number of people I eventually release them to is because I don’t want this style of performing to become too common. That may sound narcissistic, like, “Oh, Andy, certainly everybody is going to be falling all over themselves to start performing like you.” I don’t mean it like that. I just don’t want to put too much of these ideas into the zeitgeist. I feel like I’m already seeing bad echoes of these ideas in some magic performances I’ve seen, both amateur and professional. Part of the charm of the style of performance I write about is that it’s uncommon. Every professional magician can do bill in lemon and no one cares. But if there’s another magician in your city performing around socially with a similar style (and you’re not working together) it can undermine the experiences you want to create.

So that’s the plan for a potential Season 4. I’m going to cull the ardent supporters and we’re going underground. The group won’t be called “Jerx supporters” but will have a separate name and identity. I’m already conceptualizing something with a more “secret society” feel behind it. (That seems like half the fun of having a clandestine magic group.) This site will still go on, but the content is going to be more along the lines of commentary and comedy, timely stuff, sillier stuff, shorter stuff, half-formed ideas. Things the casual fans tend to enjoy more anyway.

Gardyloo #74

Thanks to those of you who have written in with ideas for the next round of magic focus-group testing that’s scheduled to happen in November. Whether we end up using the idea or not, it all becomes grist for the mill and leads to more thinking and processing of ideas. So it’s all useful, even if it’s not used.

Here’s a small thing we are going to look at. It’s a very simple idea, but this is my favorite sort of thing to test because it’s binary, so we only have to look at two options. And, going into it, I feel like I could make a compelling argument for each option.

The idea is to test Card to Wallet. There are two main styles of CTW. One where the card is palmed and you reach into your pocket to get the wallet. The other, the card isn’t palmed—so you can show an empty hand when you reach into your pocket—but then the wallet usually has to come in contact with the deck in some way.

Which do you think ultimately produces a more amazing effect? What contributes more (consciously or unconsciously) to the impossibility of the effect: seeing an empty hand go into a pocket, or seeing the wallet never come near the deck? I don’t know. As I said, I could argue for both. It may be that they cancel each other out and are equally strong (or not that strong).

We’ll see. I don’t even do card to wallet. I’m just curious.

Let’s see how accurate our hive mind can be at predicting what the outcome of this testing will be. Vote below [Voting has ended] which you think will be seen as the more powerful effect. (Just to be clear, people will see one version or the other. And then we’ll compare the scores of those separate groups of people. It’s not a situation where people will be seeing both and choosing which was more amazing. That would unfairly bias them towards whichever they saw first.)

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The most amazing Card-to-Wallet I’ve seen was performed by my friend Andrew (who has my favorite ambitious card routine in JAMM #3, the best card to mouth I’ve seen in the upcoming book, and also created the Connect Four trick I wrote about here.)

A group of us were out one night and the subject of card-to-wallet came up (he may, in fact, have been the one to bring it up, that scamp.) He borrowed a deck of cards, had one selected and signed, shuffled the deck, and handed it back to the person it belonged to. His hands were completely empty and the deck was back in the case. He reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet and the card was inside.

We were blown away. What made it more amazing is most of us were magicians and we knew the trick he was about to show us. It wasn’t a surprise.

We quickly realized it must have been a stooge. He must have had a duplicate signed card already in his wallet. A corny, but effective method.

Except he didn’t. There was no stooge. No duplicates.

Here’s the method. The deck is truly borrowed. The card is freely selected and signed, shuffled back into the deck and controlled to the top or bottom. Then, in a gesture when asking for the card case, the card was shot from the deck with the Lennart Green Top Shot (or something similar) into a topit. Then he gives the deck back with empty hands and reaches into his pocket with empty hands where he loads the cards and removes the wallet.

The flicking of the card was invisible. The deck was held (briefly) near the opening of the jacket, as someone handed him the card case, so it’s not like it was traveling through space for a great distance.

I can’t say how useful a method it would be for a normal performing situation, but on that night—when he made it seem like an impromptu demonstration, not something he was literally suited up for—it really killed us.

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Speaking of the testing we do, a few people have asked about the logistics of it and how we go about gathering the people to test on. If you want some of the boring details, they’re here. (If not, scroll to the bottom of this post for a dumb, dirty magic idea.)

When we first started, we used Craigslist exclusively. We would put up an ad stating we were looking for focus group participants. That’s about all the information you need to provide and you’ll get 100s of responses (in NYC, at least). The problem with this method is one of scheduling. The flake-out rate was huge. Sometimes over 50%. You can over schedule to try and account for that, but if everyone does show up, you’re screwed there too. So that was annoying.

Once this site existed and we could use the funds from the reader support to pay for these things, we brought in a company that specializes in focus-group testing. With a professional organization handling the scheduling, we had much more consistent groups in regards to how many people we wanted to test in a given timeframe. The problem with this method is that it’s super expensive. You’re paying the participants for their time and you’re paying this company to organize the people and usually you have to pay them for a room and staff (even if you don’t really feel you need them). We did this a few times but it was cost prohibitive. 

So then we went back to Craigslist, and it was during that testing that we had a revelation. We were once again in a situation where we had a time-slot that was supposed to be used for an audience of four, but only one person showed up. One of my friends who helps out with these projects just went down to the street to see if he could scrounge up some more participants, and he was back up with three more people in a couple minutes. And it dawned on us all, “Why don’t we just do it like this all the time?” We’re usually in Manhattan, there’s no shortage of people. And we can more easily get people from all over the country by grabbing tourists. Also, if we go the Craigslist or pro-Focus Group route, then someone from Brooklyn, for example, has to carve three hours out of their day to go into Manhattan and take part in this group for $40 or whatever. But if they’re already in the area and they have some free time, then we can offer them less money (say $20 for 20 minutes of their time) and its a better deal for them. And we can be more flexible with our time. Instead of trying to schedule groups of four every 30 minutes for a couple days, a week in advance—we can grab four people, work with them for as long or short as we want, then grab another group right after. Just doing it on-the-fly seems to be better for everyone involved.

So now it usually some combination of these techniques (usually we’ll do some form of pre-scheduling for larger groups) but we’re leaning more and more on grabbing people as we need them. (For this reason, we usually book a conference room or rehearsal space near Central Park, where it’s not hard to find people with some time to kill.)

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Testing magic on an overly critical lay-audience is the best thing you can do to create stronger methods. I’ve said it before, but don’t test on magicians. They suck for this sort of thing. Don’t test on people who know you. They have their feelings for you wrapped up in their analysis. And the girlfriend/wife test isn’t all that valuable after a while because they usually become totally burnt out, or almost as knowledgable as any magician.

The critical stranger is your best sounding board. But focus groups are prohibitively expensive, unless you have a bunch of guys splitting the cost.

Here’s your free alternative: Badoo, Omegle, Chatroullette, HOLLA and a bunch of others. These are all sites/apps where you can video chat with strangers. You’ll feel awkward at first, but you’ll find a lot of people are thrilled to find someone who want to show them something other than a hard dong.

Say you’re a magician working on a trick. Ask them to help you by being as critical as possible and calling out anything that doesn’t look fair. You have to ask or you won’t get honest feedback.

I’ve tried to put myself in positions where I have a regularly refreshed group of live humans to perform for. But when my situation doesn’t allow for that, I’m happy to go online and try stuff out on strangers. It’s a fun time.

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Here’s one for the ladies. Or the gay males. Or the easily confused. Or anyone who finds themselves with a penis in their mouth.

It’s an adaptation of this trick, Gumerang.

Be set up for Gumerang with some white gum. Perform fellatio on your new lover. When you sense he’s reaching his climax, stop and say, “I bet you’re wondering if I spit or swallow. You’ll see.” Get back to work and allow him to finish in your mouth. Secretly swallow (sorry, gotta do it) but act like you still have a mouthful. Grab a Kleenex and act like you’re going to spit in it. The gum will go out of your mouth, swing up and come back down. Now make a big show of swallowing what’s in your mouth. Now turn to the guy and in a sexy manner say, “I do both.” And give him a wink and push him down between your legs because fair is fair.

No, white gum doesn’t look like semen under close examination (if his semen does look like white gum, I’m sorry, but he probably just gave you a disease) however it will work for the brief moment it’s in view.

When you’re done, log onto the Magic Cafe and vote for Gumerang to win the award for Trick of the Year 2018.

My #1 Tip for Amateur Mentalism

As the world’s only professional amateur magician, I am also the only professional amateur mentalist. So while no one thinks of me as an authority on mentalism, I have performed a lot of it. And today I want to present what I think is the key to the most compelling amateur mentalism (regardless of what the actual effect may be).

You see, the problem is, many of the role-models in mentalism aren’t great entertainers. They’ll ask you to think about a time of day, they’ll furrow their brow, then they’ll write something on a pad, then they’ll ask you what time you were thinking of, then they’ll turn the pad around. Literally that’s all the thought they’ve put into presentation. And these are people with multi-volume L&L DVD sets.

In a way, the professional mentalist has it easy. If you roll into town and put on your mentalism show and successfully name what animal someone is thinking of, the spectator has to consider a few options. 1. It was a trick. 2. You really did it using some kind of supernatural abilities.  3. You really did it using your intelligence and powers of perception in a way that mimics psychic power.

This triune view in regards to the nature of the performance is baked into mentalism. You can deepen the mystery by being a competent performer, but even a moron with an invisible deck will have people weighing the options. 

But when an amateur performs a feat of mentalism for friends or family, the audience knows you can’t read minds, and they probably know you’re not so off-the-charts brilliant that you can use your vast intelligence to simulate mind-reading. So they don’t have to consider those possibilities. It just becomes a question of figuring out how you did it (rather than the more intriguing question of what was the nature of what just happened). In other words, they don’t have a lot to chew over in their mind other than what the method might be, which is generally not what we want our spectators to be ruminating on after we leave them.

So, does that mean all amateur mentalism is destined to just be a puzzle? No. I have the solution. 

The solution is to add more process to your mentalism. 

Think of last week’s post about naming the color of your spectator’s prom dress. 

If they write down “blue” and then you look at them for a moment and say, “Blue,” and raise an eyebrow like you’re Max Maven, they have two options. They can reassess everything they know about you and your mind powers or they can think “How did he see what I wrote?” And they’re going to do the latter.

For the amateur mentalist, mind-reading can’t come too easy. 

Let’s say you have them write down the color of their prom dress. Then you tell them that with enough other sensory stimuli you can sometimes pick up on details someone is just thinking of. Then you ask them if they remember a song they slow-danced to at their prom. Maybe they do or maybe you check out the music charts from the year they graduated and make an educated guess of a song that might have played. You ask how tall her date was and maybe you crouch a little or stand on your tip-toes to re-enact the height difference. You start to slow dance. After a couple moments you ask her if she thinks you two are moving about the same number of rotations-per-minute as she and her date were all those years ago. She says it was maybe a little slower. You ask her to really concentrate on being back in that moment, dancing, the song, and specifically the color of her dress. 

You look down at her and blink a little as if something is coming into focus. You let go and take a step back. Squint a little. “It’s uhm… it’s a blue dress. I mean… it was a blue dress, right?”

Here’s what happens with this style of amateur presentation.

The best case scenario is that you’ve given them more to consider about the nature of what just happened. Yes, they know you’re not someone who can just look into someone’s eyes and read their mind. But maybe you are someone who can—in a controlled setting with a lot of other sensory clues—pick up on someone’s thoughts (or read some physical clues that give you some insight or whatever).

That’s the best case scenario. That something that was “just a trick” becomes something less easily categorized and more resonant for the spectator. It happens more often that you might think.

But the thing is, even if that best case scenario doesn’t hit, even if they still see it as a “trick,” the experience of the trick is exceedingly more fun and engaging than you rubbing your temples and going, “It was blue!” 

Even if they know it’s all fiction, this fiction:

“I can read your mind by concentrating.”

Is significantly less interesting than this fiction:

“If we go on a little nostalgia trip and set up some things in the present day to put your mind back a couple decades, I can sometimes pluck a small detail from your memory.”

That is, of course, just one example. I’ve come up with a million of these little pre-effect encounters. They’re not hard to create. (I’m sure more will be on this site or in some future release.)

Coming up with an engaging procedure or technique or ritual that leads into the mentalism is a no-lose situation. At the very least it will make the effect more interesting. And ideally it will also make the whole experience a little more enigmatic and intriguing.

[While I haven’t done the prom dress trick above, a very similar effect is a staple of my impromptu repertoire. I ask my friend to think of a dance she went to as a teenager and remember a song she danced to. I have her dance with me to the song in her head. After a few seconds I stop her and say, “No, really do it for real. Really hear the song in your mind.” We start dancing again. This may be a slow dance or she may be swinging my arms around like a maniac. Either way is fun. I tell her I think I may know what it is. Maybe I’m way off. If I am, that will be funny. But I actually have a pretty good idea of what it might be. There was something very evocative in the energy she projected when we were dancing (or whatever). I borrow her phone and bring up a song on youtube and hand the phone back to her. I ask her what the song was. I tell her to raise the volume on her phone and she finds the song she named is the one I was playing on her phone. This is my presentation for Marc Kerstein’s Earworm. And it’s pretty fucking delightful.]

This Isn't Working Like You Think It Is

I had a friend, Jeremy, staying with me this weekend. Many years ago, Jeremy was a part of the group of guys with whom I started the focus group testing of magic effects in NYC. In the early days of that testing, before this site existed, we would often test something, get what we thought was a clear answer about an issue, and then kind of forget about it. What I mean is, the testing started as a hobby for us, and another excuse to perform while hopefully getting some insight into things that you wouldn’t get in a traditional performing situation (that is, a performing situation with a friendlier crowd). So we weren’t taking a bunch of notes and keeping a lot of records. We were just performing or showing people clips and encouraging them to be as critical as possible to see what sorts of things were consistently getting busted.

Because we weren’t doing it for posterity, a lot of the specifics of the things we tested have been lost to time. But usually when I meet up with one of the guys, I’m reminded of somethings we tried back in the day. And this weekend, Jeremy reminded me of some of the things we looked at that magicians do frequently that fool nobody.

Half-Assed Card to Pocket

If you palm a card off the deck and then pull it out of your pocket and you think anyone watching thinks you’ve done anything other than take a card from the deck with your hand and shove it in your pocket, you’re deluding yourself.

This was one of the most clear-cut things we ever tested, with a near unanimity of people fully understanding that the card was in the magician’s hand before it went into the pocket. Why we would expect people to think otherwise is honestly a little strange.

There may still be an effect there. They may wonder how you got it from where it was in the center of the deck (or so they assume) into a position to be removed from the deck. But beyond that there’s no question in regards to what’s going on.

I’m not saying Card to Pocket is inherently a bad trick. I’m just saying that if the audience doesn’t see an empty hand going into a pocket, they will naturally assume you’re placing something in there rather than removing something that was already there. Showing an empty hand is the first thing you would do if you wanted to show people how you can make an object teleport to your pocket. Laypeople understand this.

Fortunately, there are Card to Pocket routines that take this into account. But there are still a ton of magicians who are doing a very basic palm and removal sort of thing and not fooling anybody.

Pulling Coins from your Elbow or Behind Your Knee

This just seems lazy. And it looks like exactly what is going on, that is, that you’re pretending to take a coin out from behind your elbow. I get it, you have to get the coin back in play during the course of your one-coin routine, but why emphasize the face that it was really just hidden in your hand by pulling it from somewhere like your elbow? Wouldn’t it make more sense to pull it from your mouth or under your collar or your butt-crack or shake it out of your shoe or something?

Jeremy reminded me that we once tested a simple coin vanish and appearance (or vice-versa) and compared it to a minute-long one coin routine with multiple vanishes and appearances. We had the people rate the effects based on how entertaining and how amazing they found them (we may not have used those exact words, but that was the general gist). The short routine was not only more entertaining but it destroyed the longer routine as far as “amazement” goes.

Since that time, I always pay attention to the audience during a one-coin routine. They’re frequently pretty zoned out.

I think often the thought process of magicians is, “I’m just going to overwhelm them with so many different moments of magic.” But I’m not even sure that’s possible. It seems to me that for a moment of magic to hit there needs to be some space to breathe. Too many moments together just kind of blur into nothingness.

Switching Small Objects Under Larger Objects

Sometimes you’ll see something like this: The magician is holding a pad of paper. The spectator chooses a card and hands it to the magician. The card is taken under the pad in the process of putting the pad into the other hand, and in that action the card is switched. Or a bill is borrowed, folded into quarters, and in the process of shuttling the wallet from hand to hand, the bill is placed under the wallet and switched for a gimmicked bill.

This is another technique that was widely called out by laypeople in our testing. Understandably so, I think. I believe the technique can work when properly choreographed and done on an offbeat, but that’s hardly ever how it’s done. Usually someone is switching an object that has just been made the focus of attention with no proper justification for why they’re moving the objects around between their hands like they are. If you take something of importance and then even momentarily hide it behind something else, it’s going to create suspicion. So if you’re going to use this type of switch I would say you need to make sure your justification and choreography are really well though out.

This Type of Coins Across

This is a similar situation to the card to pocket mentioned above. The spectator may not know the exact details of how everything got into place, but they certainly know you’re just dropping a coin from your right hand into the spectator’s palms under the cover of pulling their thumb.

If you watch this Coins Across on youtube, you’ll see the first coin to go across gets a polite chuckle from the main participant. The second coin gets zero reaction from anyone. They don’t even blink.

You might think it’s a dead audience, but then the third coin to go (which uses a different method) gets a good response.

You could argue that the first two coins are meant to be a set-up for the final coin. Okay, that’s fine, but why use this structure:

Phase 1 - Nothing moment
Phase 2 - Nothing moment
Phase 3 - Magic moment

When you could use this structure:

Phase 1 - Magic moment
Phase 2 - Magic moment
Phase 3 - Stronger magic moment

(In the autumn issue of X-Communication I will explain the impromptu coins across that I’ve been using for a long time that follows this structure. There’s nothing revolutionary about the handling but it’s got a really nice build to it which is sometimes lacking in coins across.)

The participants in our focus group would say, “He just dropped the coin from his hand.” And when we’d say, “Yes, but how did it get to that hand?” they would just kind of dismiss that question as if it was unimportant. They had figured out the ending of that moment, so the middle didn’t matter. If Ammar had just opened his right hand to reveal the coin (in other words, if he had made the middle of that moment the end), they would have been left with something they didn’t understand. But by going the extra step of “making it appear in the spectator’s hand” they felt like they had figured it out.

(Another trick with almost an identical issue is coins to glass where the magician holds the glass from above like a mutant and then the audience is supposed to be surprised when something appears in the glass. They’re not.)

By the way, in November, when book number two is complete and at the printers, I’ll be back in NYC conducting another day or two of testing. I’m not sure what the focus is going to be right now, but if you have something in mind, let me know. Just make sure it’s something that’s simple and quantifiable.

Gardyloo #73

I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback on my posts on the “Five Causes” from this week and last week. While I appreciate hearing when people find something I’ve written to be valuable, when I get too much positive feedback my mind starts to think, “Time to write something really stupid.”

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This is weird.

So, as you know, I’m a huge fan of erotic fiction. It combines my two greatest loves: masturbating and bad writing.

I was reading an ebook the other day about an erotic detective. He was investigating the murderer of a wealthy business tycoon. The murderer had shot his wad all over the victim’s face after he died. (They know it was post-mortem because there was no semen in the lungs.) But the investigation was complicated because the victim’s lover had also shot his wad on the man’s lower back earlier that evening.

There were two suspects who were paraded pants-less in front of the detective. One was 7 feet tall, the other was a little person. Their bodies were completely different, especially in the genital area. One was the victim’s lover, the other his killer. But nobody knew which suspect was which. The detective knew if he could match up the suspects to the “deposits” they left on the man’s body, he would know who was who. And without even looking at the evidence, the detective just reached back and felt the two puddles of ejaculate and was able to identify the killer.

The detective’s apprentice begged the detective to tell him how he did it. The detective said that due to the size difference in the suspect’s testicles, he just needed to compare the volume of the semen puddles to know which person had left which deposit. “Don’t fret, should you ever face a similar situation in the future, my dear boy. It’s elementary. Due to the unavoidable size difference in the balls, you’ll be able to distinguish the two wads without looking.”

I was really blown away by this beautiful prose, but something felt very… familiar about it.

I rushed to my magic library and began flipping through pages and pages of books and magazines.

Days later I had found it. In a trick called Paper Balls in MAGIC Magazine.

There it was. In the method description as written by MAGIC Magazine trick editor, Joshua Jay…

There it was! Someone was ripping off Joshua Jay’s trick descriptions and using his words to create erotic fiction!

Here’s where it gets really strange.

I looked up the author of the ebook, Professor Harry Dingus (probably a pseudonym, I assumed), and here is the picture that came up.

Look… I’m not seeing things, am I? That’s Joshua Jay, right?

Can you believe he’s recycling his old magic write-ups to get sickos like me off with his erotic ebooks? That’s some crazy shit.

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Reader, D.C. sent me a bunch of screenshots of some guy flipping out in the Digital Force Bag facebook group because they announced they won’t be providing future updates for the Android app. The subject of the email was, “Can I do it with dominoes?” Which is a quote from something I said once: “Honestly, just get an iPhone if you're a magician. It makes things so much easier. iPhone is the phone of magic. Saying, "Can I do it on Android?" is like watching a card trick and saying, "Can I do it with dominoes?”

That’s kind of flippant, I know. And I meant it more as a joke than a proper analogy. But seriously, just get an iPhone. I mean, if your priority is doing magic with your phone, get an iPhone. If your priority is to make a statement about what brand or operating system you use, or you need an Android for some other purpose, I understand, but you can’t get worked up if you get left behind on the magic app scene.

Yes, there will be a learning curve if you switch over. But it’s the same sort of learning curve you face going from Apple to Android. All the phones are pretty easy to use these days, it just takes a couple days to reorient yourself to the operating system.

But Android is 85% of the marketplace and I shouldn’t have to get a new phone and I’ll never buy an Apple product and people who like that company are a cult and-

Ah-buh-buh-buh-buh… stop it, sweetie. Calm down. This is no way to go through life, getting worked up about this stuff. Yes, Android owns a large part of the phone market. But they don’t own such a large part of the “expensive app” market (and magic apps tend to be relatively expensive due to the narrow group of the population they’re aimed at). Use your brain. I can’t say I understand all the nuances of this, but I can assume app developers aren’t avoiding making Android apps because they hate money. They’re doing so because there are, apparently, factors that make it not cost effective. Being a pain in the ass about it is probably not going to help get more apps for Android.

Frankly, I’d rather peel my dick like a banana than be a magic app creator. Having to deal with people complaining about why the app isn’t 99 cents and why isn’t it available for every OS and why haven’t you anticipated every potential way someone might want to use it. And then you have to keep up with the technological changes and updates to the OS to keep it working. I appreciate that anyone even bothers with it, because it seems… not fun.

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But here’s something that is fun. Take your DFB app and make a list called Sex Location Wishlist. And fill it with the most exotic locations you can come up with: On the side of the pyramids in Egypt, On the moon, On top of the Empire State Building.

Now you’re out with your friend at Arby’s, enjoying a large Jamocha Shake. You mention the list you’re creating of places you want to make love before you die. You have her name a number as your next target location. You go to the list and she scrolls down to her number, past entries like, “In zero gravity,” “On top of the Great Wall of China,” “On the 50-yard line during the Super Bowl.”

She gets to her number and it says, “In a booth at Arby’s.”

“Well, no time like the present,” you say, unzipping your pants.