Until October...

It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m watching Luke Jermay, Michael Weber and Max Maven having a discussion about Zoom magic as part of Vanishing Inc’s Masterclass series.

It’s kind of interesting, but as a social performer, it’s nice to no longer have to worry about this stuff. Not that we’re completely past coronavirus concerns, of course. But for the most part, I can find people in real life to show something to when I want to. I’m nowhere near the pace of performing I was at before all of this, but that’s okay. I was a real magic slut then. I’m just being a little less promiscuous for the time being.

Everyone is still pretty well masked up where I am, in the northeast U.S. I would say it seems like 99% of the people have a mask on in public. I tried a mentalism type thing with one of the barista’s at a coffee shop I frequent. I let it fail a couple of times and then I said. “Okay, I’m going to step back a little bit. When I do, would you mind taking off your mask for me? It will just be for a few seconds. But it’s kind of getting in the way of what I’m hoping to pick-up from you.” Without hesitation she was okay with the idea and she took off her mask and it was like the goddamn Dance of the Seven Veils with how exposed she seemed. It was a weirdly intimate moment.

“You’re the first person who has seen my face in here in six months,” she said. “I never thought I’d feel shy about someone seeing my mouth.”

It was fun. As much as the coronavirus situation has been terrible, I’ve been enjoying riding the wave of the shifting dynamics of social interactions as we’ve progressed through it.

I will be curious to see how this plays out for professional magicians. I’ve heard from some who were actually excited by how well things were going for them when everything was locked down hard, but now that things have opened up more, they’re in a kind of limbo state where people aren’t going out to see a show, but they don’t want to be locked in their home seeing a show either when there are some places they could be going.

We’ll see how it goes. My instincts tell me that Zoom magic is not the way of the future for professional performers. That the sort of people who want to see a magic show are the sort of people who want to get out of their house to do so. But who the hell knows.

Someone wrote me saying that Zoom shows were good because you “get to see people’s reactions” more so than you do in a theater. But… do you? Certainly you don’t watch the show with 40 other boxes on the screen, right? You just watch with the magician’s box up (for the most part), unless the magician is doing something for one particular audience member. And while I guess it’s good that you get a good close-up of that person’s reaction, I think it could backfire just as well, making them self-conscious about how they’re reacting with a camera in their face. Plus, you lose a lot of the charm if you’re David Copperfield and you’re floating a paper rose for someone in their living room 500 miles away, as opposed to the amateur model in the mini-skirt that you plucked from the audience.

But those are issues for you professional magicians to concern yourself with. I’m done with that Zoom shit.

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I was planning to email you to let you know that “Dai Vernon” [from last Wed/Thur posts] was wrong. I purchased Ellusionist’s new ringflite effect and performed it a few times last week and got extraordinary reactions.

This weekend I learned that both of the people who had reacted strongest to the effect had googled something like “ring keychain magic trick” and had discovered the trick online. So Dai was right. It sucks. I want to go back with Dai and perform in the 1970s. —CP

Yeah, it sucks. It’s the catch-22 of modern performing. A trick that hits them really hard is going to be a trick that they’ll take steps to understand more in some way.

Sometimes, by manipulating the emotional element of the trick, you can misdirect them away from the instinct to google a trick. But unfortunately putting someone’s ring on a keychain is not a super emotionally resonant effect.

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Is the load on that new ring-flite easy enough that you could load a key onto it?

I’m imagining having someone take out their keychain and remove one of their keys (emphasizing the mildly arduous nature of this task). Have them hold their keychain in the palm of their hand. False transfer the key from your right to left hand. Now “massage” the (non-existent) key with your left-hand against the keychain in their hands. You say you’re going to make the key penetrate onto the keychain. You lift your left hand, and the key is gone. They look through their keychain, but it’s not there. You then go on to reveal that you never said which keychain the key would penetrate onto and you pull out your keychain to show the key is hooked on there.

I don’t know if that’s any good of an idea, or even if it’s doable. But I do think I could come up with a better presentation for their key appearing on my keychain, rather than their ring. I may pursue it if it’s possible.

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Christopher H. wrote in to suggest something that might have some magical presentation uses. I haven’t quite decided how I feel about it just yet. I think there’s a possibility that it would lead to ideas that are a bit too convoluted, but there might be some way to keep it from veering into that territory as well. I’ll just share the idea with you here and maybe you can play around with it.

There’s a website/app called what3words, and it has broken up the world into three-meter squares and each square has a three word code associated with it. So whether you’re at someone’s front door, in the middle of the ocean, or lost in the woods, you can identify precisely where you are with that three word phrase. And if you can communicate that phrase to someone else, they can find you (the three word phrase for a given square of the earth never changes).

The problem is that you’d have to explain this concept to people to get them to understand what the hell you’re talking about.

But you can see how—if this concept was clear to people—you could force words to lead to a specific location. Or force a location (dry marker on map) to lead to certain words.

Almost any three word phrase has been assigned to some location in the word. jerky.magic.blog is in Gayndah, Queensland, Australia.

I think there’s potential here for magic uses. But even if not, I’ve found people to be pretty entertained just by looking up what three words are assigned to exactly where you are at that moment.

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I really like these Secret Lovers playing card images by Mahdieh Farhadkiaei that combine two values into one card. They don’t exist as an actual deck, but it would be cool if they did. Ideally the cards would exist singly as well. So you could force the Jack of Spades and the Queen of Hearts on a couple and then do an Anniversary Waltz type of merging of the cards into one.

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Good god, it’s been hours and these nerds are still talking about Zoom magic. They’re barely listening to each other. Just rambling on and on about nothing. Let me transcribe some of it for you…

Michael Weber: I like doing magic over Zoom because it means that bullies can’t punch me and steal my gimmicked decks.

Luke Jermay: What’s your favorite trick to do on Zoom? My favorite is to turn my laptop towards my television which is playing the performance section from one of Sankey’s old L&L tapes while I go into the next room and try to drink the night away. Why bother anymore?

Max Maven: Sweet Christ, what has my life become? I’m 85 goddamn years old. I was a titan in the world of magic. And now I have to perform for idiots in their pajamas over Skype to make a nickel? I haven’t had a paid gig in months. My best offer was from Ellusionist who wanted me to create a series of downloads aimed at their target demographic called Max Maven’s Tricks with Bubble Gum: Animal Crossing Edition.

Weber: I think we should all say our favorite lines to use against hecklers and bullies. I thought people would be nicer over Zoom because they can’t make fun of my sneakers. But now they’re just making fun of me for how messy my living room is. Do you guys know any good lines to get them to stop being mean?

Jermay: This is—by far—the darkest period of my professional life… and I put out a book with Kenton Knepper!

Maven: Picture it. 1979. Me. Eugene. McBride. Walking—three-across—down Hollywood Boulevard. Bitches be like:

Cut to: Me and the boys in a hotel room. Ice bucket filled with cocaine. Passing around the ladies like party-favors. Wake up, it’s Monday. Go to sleep. Wake up again, it’s Saturday. Go to the Castle. Do 5 minutes of performing and reload on the women and the blow. Party all day. Party all night. Fighting. Fucking. Dancing my little booty off, buck-ass naked with a rainbow coalition of skanks. Go to bed, it’s the 4th of July. Wake up, it’s Christmas. What a time to be alive.

Now what has my life become? Today I was trying to find the right shade of black construction paper to put on the back of my playing cards so they’ll blend into my close-up pad because I had a client tell me they’d only hire me if I can do “what Shin Lim does.”

Earlier this week I got all happy because I realized I could just use a Zoom filter to put on my widow’s peek, rather than draw it in every night. Maybe save myself $28 in mascara cost this year. Whoop-dee-damn-doo.

Weber: I just don’t know why bullies have to be mean to you when all you want to do is show them a trick and have fun and be friends!

***

Holy moley. It’s been four hours of this. Yikes. This is a sad time for magic.

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Okay everyone. I’ll see you back here October 1st. Take care of yourself until then.

How I Made $1000/Week Working 5 Minutes A Day: Part Two

You can read the first part of the story in last Sunday’s post.

So, I was living in NYC and needed to find a way to make some money fast so I could move out of the 24 square foot “hotel room” I was living in.

I was just out of college, with a fairly worthless degree, so the answer wasn’t: go find a good paying job. The jobs available for people my age with my background were all entry-level jobs that didn’t pay much. That type of job might provide me enough to scrape by in the city once I was settled in an apartment somewhere. But it would take way too long to accumulate the lump sum I needed to get into an apartment in the first place.

In a moment, I’ll tell you what I did. But first, think how you would attack the problem. Let’s say asking someone else for money wasn’t on the table and you wanted to make a few thousand dollars quickly without doing anything illegal or risky and you had no marketable skills.

The method I came up with required no skills and was essentially guaranteed money. There was really no risk. It’s not the sort of thing where I scraped together $500 and then placed it all on red at the casino and hoped to win and double it three times in a row. The system I came up with wasn’t risky. And it didn’t take advantage of anybody.

Sorry. I’m dragging this out a little. And the reason I’m doing that is because you’re all people who read a magic blog and thus probably have an interest in magic and puzzles and those sorts of things. So I’m setting this up like a puzzle for you. I’m telling you the conditions to see if you can think of a way to accomplish what I was trying to accomplish.

Okay, here’s what I did.

The first thing that came to mind was street performing. I thought of Penn and Teller and the stories I read about how when Penn was a street performer he was making a fortune passing the hat after juggling.

But Penn was a master juggler and has a street performer’s mentality. I was not and did not.

But thinking about Penn was the first thing that steered me towards coming up with a way to make money from a large group of people, rather than trying to find a job or employer to pony up a large amount of money when I didn’t have much to offer in return.

I never considered doing magic on the street, that wasn’t even an option for me. That time was a lull in my interest in magic. And even if it hadn’t been, performing for large groups of people was never really something I had any interest in. And performing for just a couple random people at a time seemed even worse. I had seen some sad schmucks come up to people on the subway and force a magic trick on them in hopes of getting a buck or two in return. That seemed beyond depressing to me.

I didn’t want to guilt people into giving me money. I wanted them to be happy to give me money. But people are only happy to give money to really talented performers.

Could I come up with a situation where people would be excited about giving an average performer money?

I could, and I did.

Here’s how it worked.

First, I bought a ukulele. This was before the ukulele renaissance and before hipsters picked them up. This was back when they were still something of a novelty instrument. I have an uncle who played ukulele, and I had played around with one enough to know I could pick up enough chords to strum a few songs with just a couple of hours of learning.

But a neophyte ukulele player was not going to make a lot of money. People will tip good musicians playing on the street or in the subway, but for me to be out there with my average singing and below average playing, that wasn’t going to work.

So I thought, what would make me want to tip a ukulele player even if they weren’t that good?

Well, if they were playing a song I really liked, then I’d probably tip them, even if it wasn’t a masterpiece of a performance.

So I spent a lot of time thinking of what would be a song that a lot of people would like. What’s the most widely appealing song? But I couldn’t come up with anything.

So my next idea was that I would learn 100 or so songs that used simple chords and I would be like a human jukebox and I’d have some sort of placard where people could select a song and I’d play it for them. And that way I would pretty much guarantee that at the very least the people who chose the song would tip me.

But that might just be one couple on a subway car. They might be happy to pay, but it wasn’t going to translate into that many more tips from everybody else. Plus I didn’t like the idea of approaching people and coercing them into picking a song and all that. I needed to find a situation that would be the equivalent of walking onto a subway car and playing a song that everyone in the car wanted to hear.

And that’s when my plan came together.

So if you were on the streets in January of my first year in NY, this is what you might have seen: Me, walking down the street strumming my ukulele and gently singing a song.

🎵I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it
God only knows what I'd be without you🎵

I’d sing and walk until I came upon a group of people congregating on the sidewalk. I’d finish up the song for them and get some polite applause and maybe a couple bucks.

I’d notice they were at the end of a line. “What’s this line for?” I’d ask. “A new sneaker being released tonight or something?”

“No,” they’d say, “we’re waiting to buy tickets for a concert.”

“Oh yeah? What concert?” I’d ask.

“Savage Garden,” they’d say. Or some other group of the era.

“Oh, cool. Stay warm… Oh wait… I know a Savage Garden song… I think. Wait.. how does it go….” I’d pluck a few random strings and then stumble my way into “I Knew I Loved You Before I Met You.” And they would freak out. Here was this guy, walking down the street in winter, playing this instrument that most people hadn’t seen in person at that point. And he just happened to know one of their favorite songs!

But it wasn’t just a favorite song of that group of people. That group was standing at the back of a line of 100, 200, maybe 500 people who all loved this song.

I would traverse the line singing the song and the crowd would go bananas for it. You have to keep in mind, it was a different world then. This was 20ish years ago. We were still some time away from being able to see a performance of any song you like any time you want on your phone. So finding a street musician playing a song you know and love—a modern song, not some old standard—was much more impactful at that point than it might be now.

More often than not, the line of people would join in and sing along. There was a truly festive, joyful feeling in the cold winter air. I’d finish the song to raucous applause and bright smiles. And then it was pass the hat time. And I’d strum the song gently and walk down the line again and collect my tips and my appreciation for bringing that moment to them. After five minutes work, I’d walk away with a few hundred dollars, easily. At the very least I’d average $1 per person in line, but often more than that.

Of course you realize this was no accident. I didn’t just stumble across this location and happen to know a song. This was my benevolent scam to get me out of the flop house I was living in.

Because I was seeing so much live music myself, I had learned the venues where lines would develop of people either waiting to get into shows or to purchase tickets. I’d scour Time Out New York to see what concerts were coming up and when they were happening or when the tickets were going on sale. Once I had identified a good option, I’d go to an internet cafe and search for the chords to one of the band’s songs and transcribe them into a spiral notebook. Then I’d spend a little time committing the song to memory.

The big change in my thinking that allowed this to come together was when I went from trying to find a song that a random group of people would like, and instead trying to find a specific group of people who I could be certain would all love a given song.

People waiting in line for tickets or early entry to a show are rabid fans. You don’t have to be an expert singer or instrument player to satisfy them. They’re just happy that you, apparently, like the same thing they do. And they’re going to tip you because you’re “kindred spirits” or because tipping you is a demonstration of their fandom for the music you’re playing.

In a matter of weeks I had made 1000s of dollars running this ploy about 15 times. It was enough money to get myself into an apartment and hold me over for a few weeks while I had time to search for a proper day-job that was a good fit for me and had the potential for growth (as opposed to just jumping on the first opportunity that presented itself).

When I first came up with the ukulele scam I thought, “Hell, I’ll just keep doing this forever!” Unfortunately, two things happened that shut it down much faster than I had expected. First, I got at least one copycat who started doing the same thing, and I realized there would just be more and more of that if people saw me making $200 in a few minutes. And the second thing that happened was one night a person in line recognized me from another time they had been in line a few weeks before. And I could tell they were sort of bummed that what they thought was a spontaneous moment of serendipity was likely something I had planned all along. I realized that too was bound to happen more and more if I continued to pull this ruse. And I felt bad spoiling the memory of this jubilant, communal experience that I had created for them.

So, sadly, other than some rare exceptions when I was in a real bind for money, that was the end of my street performing career.

Second Helpings #2

The Second Helpings feature is one of the forms of free advertising here on the Jerx where authors and magic creators can get word of their work out, simply by offering what they consider the second best thing from their release for me to post here.

This month we have an older release from Bill Cushman called Subliminal Squares. This is a manuscript about the Magic Square effect, but rather than being a demonstration of the magician’s needlessly complex addition abilities (and thus, in turn, his late-onset sexual development), Subliminal Squares presents the magic square as an example of the spectator’s ability to pick up on subliminal messaging. The spectator is flashed the completed magic square then they name a number, and it’s seen that the magic square adds up to that number (in all the various magic square orientations).

This is probably the only way I can ever see myself doing the magic square. The traditional way, where they name a number, and you quickly write up the square, is not a demonstration of any particular skill I’d ever want to express.

The ebook ends with a trick called Crosseyed! I’m not writing it like that because I’m excited about it. Crosseyed! with the exclamation point is the name of the trick. This is sort of a kid-brother version of the magic square. I like it. It doesn’t require any memory work and it’s completely impromptu. It’s still an exhibition of semi-extraordinary math skill, but it’s simpler than the traditional magic square in a way I find appealing.

Here’s how i would present it. I’d draw eight line on a piece of paper like this.

I’d tell the person I’m performing for that I’m going to go and stand in the corner with my back to them. While I can’t see, I want them to write four 2-digit numbers. One in each slot in the vertical column.

As they do this I’d bounce back and forth on my feet. Like I’m prepping myself for something difficult. When they tell me they’re done, I’d ask them to turn over the paper so I can’t see anything.

I’d go to turn around and stop myself. “Sorry. I’m not ready yet.” I’d do a little more deep breathing and then jump back to the table. Quickly sit. Turn over the paper. And immediately write four numbers down in the horizontal row. (I’ve used different colors here just to clarify.)

Then I’d turn the paper back over and slap it down on the table. During this I would probably let out a low groan the whole time. As if I was trying to lift up something heavy.

I’d catch my breath. “Okay… that either worked or this will be profoundly embarrassing. Do you remember the numbers you wrote down?” They may or may not. It doesn’t really matter. “Okay, and off the top of your head do you know the sum of those numbers?” They probably don’t. “Me neither. But I’ve been learning these exercise related to something called IMU—Innate Mathematical Understanding. The concept… and I’m not sure how much I believe it… is that we’re born with a complete understanding of math. And it’s actually the process of breaking down math into steps and processes to learn it that disrupts our innate understanding of it. It sounds kind of crazy, but think of it like this: When you’re shooting a basketball, you’re calculating trajectories. Your’e calculating arcs and parabolas and vectors and power. And you’re doing it all in a split second subconsciously. If you were to put it down on paper and try to run those calculations that’s the type of thinking that would end up screwing up your shot. So perhaps there is a built in instinctive understanding of math that we can tap into.

“Alright, I probably should have checked to see if this worked before explaining all that. But let’s take a look.”

I’d turn over the page. “Let’s add up the numbers you put down. Check my work.”

I would then verbalize the adding of the numbers in the vertical column. Dragging it out as long as I can without sounding idiotic. “67 plus 44. Okay, so 60 plus 40 is 100. Plus 7 and 4 so that’s 111. Yes?” I’d continue on through until getting a full total of 181.

“Okay, so when I first turned the paper over, my goal was to just absorb the numbers you wrote down, somewhat subconsciously, and view them as a whole. I didn’t really consciously understand that they added up to 181 at that point. But I didn’t see them as individual numbers either. I just tried to sense them holistically. So my target number was 181 even though I didn’t realize that yet.

“Now, it’s hard to explain this, because there are a lot of visualization exercises you need to do to get to this point. But I allowed the total of your numbers—which I genuinely did not know—to crumble into four different figures in my mind. And I just wrote down whatever came to me. So if it worked, these numbers I wrote down should add up to the random total you established.”

We’d add up my numbers to see if they totaled 181. And of course they would.

“Okay, now here’s where it goes beyond my rudimentary understanding. So 181 was the target number that you established without even knowing it.”

I’d put 181 in the center of the cross and then draw two circles, creating an actual target-looking thing on the paper.

“So, if you asked me to take four random numbers that you wrote, add them up, and then come up with four other numbers that came to the same total, I could do that using the math I learned in school. It would have taken me a lot longer than doing it instinctually, like I just did. But I could have done it.

“But I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do is this next part. And what I’m talking about is that not only do your numbers add up to 181 , and my numbers add up to 181. But our numbers when put together also add up to 181. Check out this outer ring of numbers… that’s 181. And this inner ring of numbers is also 181. That’s where I become completely lost on not only how I did it, but how I would even go about doing it consciously.”

There you have it. I will give it a go and see how it plays. Is it still a show-offy thing? Sort of. But since I’m playing it off as something I don’t fully understand (just in the same way you don’t fully understand all the calculations you make when shooting a basketball) I don’t think it will come off that way. I think it will be seen as something a little weirder. But we’ll see.

The explanation of Crosseyed! from Bill’s book is in the link below. You can buy the full ebook from Bill by writing to him at wcushman@bellsouth.net or sending him a paypal payment directly to that address. It’s $40 for Jerx readers (down 20% from where you can buy it elsewhere).

A few notes:

1. It’s not a trick I would use on someone who is super strong with math.

2. You’ll understand this more when you read the explanation. But you don’t have to use 3, as Bill does. You can use whatever you want. In the write-up above, I used 14. Doing it with a larger number wouldn’t be hard for me, and it would make my numbers potentially seem even more different than the first participants. It may kick me into 1-digit or 3-digit numbers. But that’s okay. I never said I was going to stick to two-digit numbers.

3. The example Bill uses in the book isn’t great, because the way it works out is that 2 of the 4 numbers are repeated in the horizontal and vertical slots. That obviously makes it look much less deceptive. But that’s just the way it happened to work out with the numbers he chose. Don’t get confused by that. In practice you should usually have 8 different numbers.

Okay, have fun. Here’s the pdf.

If you’re interested in a full magic square routine, consider reaching out to Bill for his ebook.

My Conversation with Dai Vernon: Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I told you how Dai Vernon contacted me via a Ouija board and told me his old saying that “the best effects can be described in one sentence,” is no longer applicable. How—in the 21st century—having an effect that can be described in one sentence is the exact same as having an effect that is easily google-able. And that we have to suspect that anyone who is truly fooled and captured by an effect is likely to google it later.

This was what sent me spiraling. And I asked Dai what the purpose of performing was if people just want to google and figure out the secret? Why bother creating a magical experience for them if their natural inclination was to undermine it?

“Oh, you’re misunderstanding things,” he said. “Think of it like this. Imagine you gave your wife a card for your 20th anniversary. And inside the card you wrote her a little note. Just a couple of sentences. And they were the most romantic, heartwarming words she’d ever read. They were so beautiful that she almost couldn’t believe you wrote them because you usually don’t express yourself like that. Later that evening she thinks, ‘Okay… I just have to know. Is this his own original sentiment or did he get it from somewhere else? Did I really inspire these words?’ So she googles what you wrote to see if it pops up somewhere online. What is it she’s hoping to find?

“Or,” he continued, “let’s make an even simpler comparison and keep it in the magic realm. A woman is lying on a table on stage and the magician makes her vanish. The audience thinks, ‘Hmm.,.. she’s probably under the table, hidden by the tablecloth.’ Right as they’re thinking that, the magician walks around the table, and grabs a corner of the tablecloth. And just at the moment that the Peter Gabriel song reaches its crescendo, he whips the tablecloth away. What do you think the audience wants to see? Do they want to know how it’s done and see the woman crouching beneath the table? Or do they want to see nothing but four bare table legs and the glimmering scrim in the background?”

“So you’re saying….,” I trailed off. Not exactly putting it all together yet.

“You’re asking why you should bother doing magic if you have to concern yourself with the audience googling an effect after it’s done. But the stage magician doesn’t ask himself why he should bother doing the trick if he has to concern himself with the audience wondering what’s under the table. He just creates the trick in such a way that the audience can look under the table. And he does this because he knows the audience will suspect the woman is there but actually they don’t want to find the woman under the table.

“The wife googles the husband’s love note hoping to get no results. Only by doing that can she be certain that what she has is special and unique.

“And it’s my belief that when a spectator googles a trick after you’re done—they may not know it—but this is what they’d really like to find…”

“So they want to be fooled?” I asked.

“That’s probably not the wording I would use,” Dai said. “What I would say is that people—on some level—want to experience a unique, unexplainable mystery in a safe and fun setting. Who wouldn’t want that?

“Sure, if they feel like you’re trying to make them feel stupid or to lord your genius over them, then they may want to figure out your trick in order to take you down a notch. But if you present them with something really enjoyable and fascinating—that isn’t just about your specialness—then I would look at them googling the trick as them trying to discern if what they just experienced was truly as wonderful as it initially seemed.”

“Just like the person looking under the table for the girl,” I said.

“Exactly. They need to look for a potential answer in order to contextualize how to feel about what they saw. If they get 50,000 results—even if they don’t learn the precise method—they may think of it as a cool trick, but probably not much more. It’s just something a bunch of magicians all over the world are doing. It’s nothing to get too worked up about. But if they get no results, then it’s going to fee like a rare, intimate, personal experience.”

“As magicians, we must expect people to try to put in a bare minimum of thought and effort in order to figure a trick out. In 2020, googling something is almost the least amount of effort someone could employ to figure something out.”

It was all clear to me now. “And that’s why you say we should no longer strive to have effects that can be described in one sentence. Because those are the most google-able effects we have.” The Ouija board nodded up and down. “Sooo… but wait… what’s the alternative? Convoluted effects? That doesn’t seem like a good option either.”

“No,” Dai said. “It’s not. I sometimes worry that magic is headed in a direction where magicians will start gravitating towards complicated multi-phase effects, because at least those can’t be unravelled with an obvious google search. But that’s not the answer. I think the answer is to put the effects in simple and compelling contexts that can help camouflage the effect, in a way. If you craft an experience for the person that feels like more than just the trick itself, you can sometimes charm and misdirect the person away from the basic effect. You can’t do it with every trick. Ring-flite, for example, might be one of those tricks that is doomed to forever be a simple google search away from being seen as ‘just a trick’ to the spectators. But a lot of tricks can be expanded on in a way that prevents that sort of thing. Do you know what you should read?”

Me: What’s that?

Dai: There’s this site called The Jerx.

Me: Uhm, Dai…

Dai: It’s great. The best writing on magic in the history of the art, and honestly, second place is not even close.

Me: Here’s the thing…

Dai: You’ll see him do this throughout his work. (You have to become a supporter though, to get the really good stuff. I don’t think he’s taking on any new ones at the moment, however.) You should see how he builds an effect up and how he builds it out. It’s really something. A true genius. I can’t say enough good things about him.

Me: Dai, I’m him.

Dai: You’re him? Him who?

Me: I’m the guy who writes the Jerx. I told you at the beginning I write a magic blog.

Dai: Yeah, but you told me your name was Susan.

Me: That’s when I was trying to coerce you into the Ouija-equivalent of cybersex. I thought you’d be more interested if I was female. But unbeknownst to you, I was going to put my beautiful dong through the hole in the planchette and see if you could move it around enough to get me off phantasmagorically. As I sit here now, spelling out this idea letter by letter, I can almost see how it might sound a little stupid to some people. But you can’t blame me for wanting to get freaky with the spirit of the finest close-up magician of the 20th century. Can you?

Me: Can you, Dai?

Me: Dai?

My Conversation with Dai Vernon: Part 1

Some people don’t like it when I deign to question the wisdom of our magical elders. So let me start this post by saying that is not what I’m doing here. In fact, this is a message that came directly from Dai Vernon himself. I bought a Ouija board and had a conversation with him and I’ve transcribed it below. So take your, “How dare you question the great Dai Vernon” emails and shove them up your asshole. I’m not questioning him at all. I”m doing him a favor. The spirit of Dai Vernon has specifically asked me to update you on a change in his thinking. If you disagree with anything here, take it up with the ghost of Vernon.

Below is our discussion:

Me: Oh, great Ouija board. Bring forth a spirit for me to communicate with. I pray to thee, lord of the Ouija.

Ouija; H-E-L-L-O

Me: Oh shit. Who dis?

Ouija: D-A-I-V-E-R-N-O-N

Me: Da’ Iver Non? Damn, you sound hot, baby. What are you wearing?

Ouija: D-A-I……V-E-R-N-O-N. T-H-E-M-A-G-I-C-I-A-N.

Me: Oh, rats. Okay. Well, still… what are you wearing?

[Some unimportant back and forth.]

Me: By the way, this is a coincidence. I run a magic blog. Is there anything you’d like to get out to the magic community?

Dai: No shit? Yeah, actually there’s something I’m famous for saying that is no longer accurate.

Me: What is it… “A large action covers a small action?” Is it the opposite? Does a small action cover a large action now? I knew it! Ok, I’ll spread the word.

Dai: What? No, you fucking idiot. How would that work?

Me: Oh. I don’t know. Just like… maybe… like, to cover a pass you should wiggle your pinky toe? Actually, you’re right. That doesn’t seem like it would work. Never mind. So what was it you wanted to say?

Dai: Remember how I said, “A good magic effect should easily be described in one sentence.”

Me: Sure.

Dai: Not anymore.

Me. Explain, Dai. Actually, before you do…Is your name pronounced DAY or DIE? I’ve heard both.

Dai: It’s actually, Duh.

[Then he Ouiji’d me this gif]

Duh went on to explain what he meant. In this day and age, an effect that can be “easily described in one sentence” is synonymous with a “an effect that is easily google-able.”

“It’s not that I was wrong then,” Dai said, letter-by-letter. “It’s just that now that isn’t good advice anymore. When secrets were very hard to come by, then it made sense to focus on the simplicity of the effect. But that’s no longer the case, so magic needs to change.

“Think of the version of Ring-flite that Ellusionist just released. Now, back in my day, when I made someone’s ring appear on my keychain, there was no way for them to figure out how that was done without burning a ton of time and calories. The secret was nowhere to be found in your home or even at the library. You would have to make inroads in the world of magic just to even know where to look for such a secret. It was a glorious time.

“These days, it’s a different world. Ring-flite may still get a great reaction in a demo video, but what do you think happened two seconds after the camera turned off. I’ll tell you what happened.

“This is what happens.”

Me: Oh wow, I didn’t know you could hyperlink in a Ouija message.

Dai: Oh gee. You didn’t know? You? Oh wow, the room is spinning. YOU were unaware of something? What a shocker.

Me: I just meant-

Dai: Zip it, bitch.

Dai continued on, “A ring vanishes and appears on a keychain. That’s a one sentence description of an effect. And while that would be good if you were following my advice back in the day, if you follow that same advice now, that means you just got fucked by the ghost of Dai Vernon. The moment you leave the room, anyone who was truly fooled will be on their phone looking for an answer, and will have enough to satisfy them in a matter of moments. If they don’t look it up, that’s even worse. They probably weren’t even fooled or didn’t care about what you did at all.

“Magicians like to imagine there is a huge contingent of people who would be super fooled by a trick AND then would just choose to live with that deep, abiding mystery without doing LITERALLY 10 seconds of research. Those people don’t exist. Or, at the very least, they’re rare enough that we shouldn’t consider them when deciding how to approach our magic.”

Me: What about the magicians who say that if a spectator googles your trick after you show it to them, it means you’re a bad magician?

Dai: Those people are fucking morons who got into magic because they’re socially awkward and they still have no clue how a normal human thinks or reacts to things. People google tricks because that’s the natural step people take these days when trying to figure something out.

Me: Okay… well… then what’s the point? I mean, why am I bothering showing magic to people if their natural reaction is to take steps to figure it out? Why try to fool them if they don’t want to be fooled?

It was at this point that Dai told me something that was a complete paradigm shift for me and the reason behind why someone might decide to search out an explanation for a trick.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you exactly what his response to my question was.

Re-Tweak: Sort of Psychic Part Two

More thoughts on John Bannon’s, Sort of Psychic.

I enjoyed your thoughts about Sort of Psychic -- especially because I completely skipped over the trick when I first watched the DVD. John is very clever (I loved his early books) but tbh, he's a rather dull performer. I'm curious to know what jumped out at you when you saw the trick, and more generally about your thought process when you read/watch new material. —DK

What stood out to me originally when I saw the trick was the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the effect. In essence you test the spectator’s ability to find which pile holds their card a few times. Then they’re able to cut to their card from a shuffled deck. It’s such a pure concept.

Compare that to a trick where…say… the spectator cuts off a small packet of cards. They count the cards secretly in their packet. Now you deal out 12 cards in the shape of a clock face. The spectator thinks of the card at the hour of the number of cards in their hand. Now the cards are assembled and dealt into three columns. The spectator answers three questions—they can lie or tell the truth—and their responses are spelled. At the end, the card they’re on is the card they thought of.

In the broadest of strokes, that trick is like Sort of Psychic; the card is somewhere in the deck and the spectator finds it. But the two processes are polar opposites. One is convoluted. One is pure.

When I read/watch new material, I’m generally not looking for a trick that I’m going to be able to take and pop right into my repertoire as is. There’s not many magicians creating the types of presentations that I enjoy performing.

What I get most excited about is a strong bland effect. Strong, because I want the trick to be fooling, of course. And bland because that means I can dress it up in numerous ways. I call these Blank Slate effects. I talked about them when I wrote this post on the Vanishing Inc blog.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion about “Sort of psychic” and love the idea of using acupuncture as the “cause” of the magic, that I might explore to use on other effects.

Personally, I’ve found, “Sort of psychic” plays well to a certain sort of crowd, but if you have a mathematician present they tend to pick up on part of the winnowing technique. Nothing wrong with that, but you might need to give the maths types a knowing smile. The sort that says "I know you know how this is done". They will get a kick out of feeling they know how its done.

I really have no desire to give people the kick of knowing how things are done (unless they’re playing a wingman role in the presentation).

I will agree that there are some tricks you don’t want to do around mathematically minded people. But this is actually not one of them. You can very much take math out of the equation with a couple more tweaks.

Here’s how.

The spectator is thinking of one of sixteen cards. Either you start this way as Bannon does, or you get to this point as I do in the original Tweak post from Sept. 4th.

You shuffle the cards and deal them into two piles (back and forth). They attempt to intuit where their card is.

After this round you assemble the cards and give them a real shuffle. Well, real enough. You give them a red/black shuffle (aka Ireland shuffle). Now you deal out two piles again.

They intuit. Again the packets are assembled and you give them another real shuffle. Pretty much real, at least. You actually run the top four cards singly and then shuffle off on top.

Deal two piles of 8 for a final round of intuition. Now all the cards are assembled and the full deck is shuffled for real (minus the control of two cards). And you finish as in Bannon’s original.

Notice how unmathematical the process is now. You’re shuffling the cards for real and dealing them in a standard manner throughout the effect. There’s clearly real mixing going on. There’s no questionable anti-faro. You’re just mixing the cards and dealing them into two piles in a way that is similar to what they’ve done themselves in numerous card games.

All the genuine mixing throughout the effect will take it out of the realm of a mathematical solution. Unless they are not only familiar with the underlying mathematics, but also the concept of a red/black shuffle, card controls, cross-cut forces, etc. There’s too much to untangle there. And keep in mind you’re never mentioning the number of cards. It’s just 1/3rd of the deck. Hell, you can use 15 cards if you want to throw them off a little. But it’s not necessary.

Add into that whatever presentational impetus/motivation you’re using for the effect, and you should have a pretty impenetrable effect, and not something that looks like a mathematical effect, regardless of the spectators familiarity with mathematics.

[Update: Some of the changes here (the addition of dealing and shuffling) are similar to ideas that John added to a rewrite of this trick that was published in MAGIC Magazine in August, 2016. Now, I could come here and say it was my own independent invention of these ideas—that they were semi-obvious improvements to be made to the original. But that’s not true. In fact, I totally fucking stole the ideas. I wanted the glory to be gained from mentioning some small tweaks to an old effect. And I wanted that glory to be all MINE, MINE, MINE! My apologies to John Bannon. Am I really sorry? No! I’m just sorry I got caught, you sons of bitches!]

Monday Mailbag #29

Does Daniel Garcia's "Pressure" actually fool anyone?  I feel like the answer is no. 

This direct question leads me to a broader one: when is a trick deceptive enough that it passes your internal test and is allowed into your repertoire? As far as I know (and I don't know a lot), you're the foremost expert on "does it actually fool them" matters. I base this statement on your focus group testing and you're fearless "I'll go test it out" approach. Obviously, what I want is a trick that fools everyone 100% of the time. There are a zillion factors that lead to the success of the trick (like it's execution, convincers, and the knowledge/problem solving abilities of the spectator) but at some point we're all deciding whether we think a trick will or won't work, and that leads to whether we do it or not.  I'm sure even "Pressure" can be saved by removing the easy answers, but sometimes a trick is beyond saving or it's unreasonable to go the extra 10 miles to pump up the fooled 'em quotient. —CC

I can’t speak to Pressure too much. I do understand where your question is coming from because that’s the type of trick where a certain number of people are just going to be able to understand exactly what happened, regardless of how well you perform it.

In general, I try to avoid tricks that can be figured out with just one flash of insight. If a trick fools people 90% of the time, it’s not good enough for me. I perform in the types of situations where—if 1 in 10 people in a group figure it out—then eventually all 10 will know how it’s done. Or if I’m performing one-on-one, I don’t want a 10% chance of the trick failing completely.

Of course, you can’t really speak in exact percentages this way unless you were testing every trick you performed on 100 people or whatever.

So you just have to establish your standard for what it means to fool an audience. My definition of fooling an audience is that they have no answer that satisfies them. They may have things they find questionable or suspicious, that’s fine, it’s almost impossible to get rid of that altogether. But if they’re able to brush off a trick by saying, “Well, it must have been ______” then that’s no good. My tricks need to be un-brush-off-able.

So the first few times I perform a new trick, I will almost always talk about it with people afterwards to get their best guess at how it might be done. If they speak with confidence about any solution, right or wrong, then I re-work the trick (to eliminate that as being a potential solution). And if that doesn’t work I ditch the trick altogether.

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Your idea for the sock routine is brilliant.

I always liked the mis-matched socks finale.

And this is a great use for it. Until now - I wasn't interested in this marketed effect - it felt too much like a dumb card trick. —JM

You hear that, Vanishing Inc.? I want my cut of this sale.

I heard from a number of people who liked the variation I presented last week, but I did get one person who wasn’t a fan.

I found your presentation for Socks to be amusing, but I disagree with the way you structured the effect. The prediction phase only involves two selected socks. The matching phase uses all of the cards. The ability to seemingly control and match up all of the cards is a more impossible effect than just being able to predict the two they selected. —DN

An audience’s enjoyment is not just based on the statistical impossibility of what happened. In fact that is often the least consequential factor in their reaction to an effect. The problem with the structure of the original effect is that the first phase was bigger than the second. Not more impossible, but the sphere in which the magic took place was bigger. It happened on the cards and on the magician’s feet. By having the second phase happen just on the cards, it feels like a step backwards. It feels like just a card trick.

By reversing the phases you have this thing that the spectator will assume is just a type of card trick, and then in the second phase you find that it has broader ramifications. I think that’s the way to play it.

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A quick comment on [last week’s] mailbag.  I love the idea of using acupuncture, but I never would without training (and even then, probably not).  That said, I have been thinking about the practice of moxibustion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxibustion) which is close and much safer, provided you don't let the little burning piles actually burn down.  (The Wiki site also has an old painting of the practice, and because it uses the "principles" of acupuncture, you get to consult those cool acupuncture charts). —DG

Thanks. Moxibustion looks like just the sort of nonsense I like to occasionally include in my tricks.

Even more “Sort of Psychic” talk in tomorrow’s post, since my post on that has generated more feedback. I will give you another tweak you can use on it that eliminates any mathematical explanation. So you can pin the effect purely on moxibustion or whatever the hell you’re using the trick to demonstrate.