My 2022 Focus
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Hey all, The Jerx 2022 has officially commenced. It’s good to be back (although the return may be somewhat short-lived depending on certain factors I’ll discuss later in this post.)
Around the time of the new calendar year, and certainly the time of the new Jerx year, I like to consider what my focus is going to be for the next year when it comes to magic and/or this site. Frequently I don’t have a specific focus, but this year I have a few.
Re-Socializing with Social Magic
Whatever the future of the coronavirus situation is, it seems that the majority of people—at least in the circles I travel in—are ready to get back to normal. I’m not even sure another variant that is more severe would cause the pendulum to swing back the other way. I’ve probably thought this before at other points along the way, but now it definitely feels to me like most everyone is feeling, “Ah, fuck it. Let’s get on with our lives.”
Now, I’ve kind of been in this frame of mind for a while now. Not because I don’t believe in the severity of the virus or anything like that. I just don’t take many precautions with my own safety in general. So it’s pretty common for me to play fast and loose with my health, while still respecting other’s desires to be a bit more cautious. But now it feels like people want to get out there and live and interact. And those that don’t want to… maybe just don’t want to in general. And the pandemic has just been a reasonable excuse for not doing something they never much liked doing in the first place.
But for me, I’m happy that things are loosening up, people are becoming more open, and conversations are flowing more easily between people—even strangers.
I look forward to getting back into the flow of introducing magic into casual situations and interactions more and more. That’s primarily what I’m excited about this year.
Enchantment
In my post on December 10th I wrote that I see tricks generating three types of broad responses in spectators.
They can feel fooled by the trick.
They can feel entertained by the trick.
They can feel enchanted by the trick.
(Thanks to Jack S. for leading me to the correct word for that last category.)
These aren’t either/or propositions. They’re just different potential responses to a trick and any given trick can be ranked somewhere along a spectrum in all categories. Just like if you were online dating and you were ranking your potential options on looks, sense-of-humor, and intelligence. Someone could be smart and funny. Or average in every category. Or beautiful but stupid. Or—like me—a perfect 10 all across the board.
In magic, almost all of our focus is on finding tricks that are more fooling. In our minds we’ve equated a trick being fooling, to a trick being magical. But I’m not sure there’s even any correlation between the two.
In that previous post I wrote, “[H]ardly anyone is talking about the dreamy, romantic, mystifying, ‘magical’ feeling that certain tricks/presentations can generate.”
Starting this year, I want to focus more on what I can do to increase a feeling of enchantment with an effect. The issue is, I don’t know that it’s something that is easy to test and quantify. It’s easy to ask someone how fooled they were, and then find out if they knew exactly what was going on, if they have some ideas, or if they’re completely lost. It’s also simple enough to ask people how entertained they were by something and to get a useful response back.
But I don’t think it’s really that easy to get a sense of how magical or enchanting a trick was for a person. It’s not the sort of thing you can ask about, because asking about it just pulls the rug out from under that feeling. It’s just the sort of thing that you need to try and be perceptive to without deluding yourself into seeing it when it’s not there.
Exploring this feeling more is going to be a personal focus of mine going forward. I don’t know to what extent I’ll be able to capture any ideas here that are useful generally, but if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.
I think the starting point can be found in the Jerx Calamity Sentence, which I’m modifying here to say:
“The feeling of enchantment is created by the gap between what the spectator knows to be true and what feels real to them in the moment.”
This is why a good levitation effect will generally be more “magical” than a similarly strong ACAAN. Spectator’s have a firm, innate understanding that things can’t float. So when something seems to be floating, that gap is very apparent. But people don’t KNOW that a card they name can’t appear at a freely named number. Yes, it’s unlikely, but it doesn’t go against some firmly held belief. So it’s hard to create that gap between “what they know to be true” because “what they know to be true” is kind of a nebulous concept. “It’s unlikely that a freely named card would be at a freely named number,” isn’t the sort of profound truth that leads to an enchanting experience (even if you can generate a fooling trick out of it).
I want to keep working on techniques that help create that gap and broaden that gap with effects that might not otherwise generate those types of feelings with an audience.
The Future of the Jerx
There’s this thing that Howard Stern does every time his contract is about to be up. He starts talking like he wants to retire and that he’s ready to walk away from the gig. He’s been doing it for at least 20 years. He does it as a negotiating tactic.
And every year around this time I say something like, “If the supporters are interested in keeping this going for another year, the next season will start next month. It’s perfectly fine if this has run its course. I’m happy to do other things, so don’t feel the need to support unless you really want to.”
Now, I’m not saying that to make you think, “Oh no. He’ll walk away from this if he doesn’t reach the number of supporters he needs!” I’m saying it because most of the current supporters have been with this site for over 6 years, and some were even readers my old blog that I was doing almost 20 years ago. So I feel a personal relationship to a lot of these people even if they don’t know who I am. And I want everyone to know they’re free to not sign on year after year unless they’re getting something from this.
For the past number of years I’ve been fairly certain that the site, the newsletters, and the books would carry on because I essentially had the same or similar support structure in place, and a long waiting list to grab a support slot.
However I can’t say for certain that things will continue going forward past the time of the next book release in a couple of months. In about 6-8 weeks I’m going to be rolling out a new support structure for the site. And if people aren’t on board for this new structure, then this site will be on an indefinite hiatus, while I devote more time to my non-magic work to pay the bills. Again, this isn’t a threat or a plea. It’s just a mathematical equation that takes into account the size of the audience I want to write for (which is small), the amount of time it takes to generate the content and then write the 100s of thousands words a year that fill the book, newsletters, and site; and the financial support the audience is willing to provide to pay for that time. If the math doesn’t work, then I will happily shift gears to my non-magic opportunities which are also things I enjoy working on. So you’re not fucking me over either way. If my work outside of magic involved tarring rooftops, or cleaning bed sores, or perhaps even tarring bed sores at the world’s worst nursing home, then I would be begging you to sign up under the new support structure. But that’s not the case, so the only concern you need to have is whether you feel it’s worth it to you.
More information regarding that in a month or two.
Hey, while working on the book the past month and half, I was sort of out of the loop. If there’s anything I missed that you want to bring to my attention, go ahead and send me an email.