Sundry Drive No. 2

/

Sometimes I wonder if I want to be associated with a group where, at one point in time, Rudy Coby was unironically calling himself the "coolest" member of said group. Or was he doing this as a goof? Like when you call a fat guy, Slim? Or was it seriously enough just to put on sunglasses to be considered "cool" in the early 90s?

I haven't seen The Supernaturalists which is Criss Angel's new live show with Banachek, Krystyn Lambert, and a bunch of other people I've never heard of. No, I haven't seen it, but I'm just going to guess that maybe it's not the most intriguingly written magic show considering there were precious view quotes that were pulled for this review of the show, and these were three of them:

  • "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. How are you doing this fine afternoon?"
  • "How are you guys doing Foxwoods?"
  • "Are you guys ready for the second half of the show?" 

Sounds like a compelling show!

Do you know anything about creating custom decks of playing cards? If so, drop me a line, I have some ideas. What's the smallest reasonable run I can do, on decent stock, without them costing me like $20 a pop?

As someone who likes watching magicians crash and burn, nothing delighted me more than watching a guy I know try the effect Utsukushii by Fraser Parker on a woman we were hanging out with at a coffee shop. If I was doing one word magic reviews, my review for this would be: Itsukshitty. It was, without hyperbole, one of the worst effects I've ever seen. Anyone associated with it is completely suspect in my book until they come out and say, "You know, my intentions were good, but then I got my head stuck up my ass a little bit and was so wound up in the method that I forgot the effect itself had turned into cat shit."

Wait, is Utsukushii Japanese for cat shit?

Imagine an effect where a spectator does a multi-multi-step mathematical process to come up with a "random" number. Then you "divine" their PIN number by saying. "So... is the first number in your PIN higher or lower than your secret random number? Higher... oh, by how much? Ok... now is the next number in your PIN higher or lower than the previous number? Lower? Lower by like... one or two? Oh... three?" And so on. At this point it's not even magic anymore, it's just arithmetic. Am I exposing the method? Well, I'm telling you exactly what the spectator sees. If that exposes the method then perhaps it's not a very good method?

[Later that evening I was making fun of my friend for fucking up the trick. And he said, he didn't. And I said, there's no way the method is to ask the precise difference between all the numbers. He insisted it was and I bet him $50 he had misread the method. Well, he hadn't.]

Oh! But it's completely billet-less! It's also charmless, pointless, and -- for the person I saw it performed on -- effect-less. She genuinely didn't know what she was supposed to be reacting to at the end because it was so convoluted. When he said "And your PIN is 3979." She said, "Yeahhh...?" And he said, "You don't find that odd that I could know your PIN?" And she said, "But that was after I told you the relationship between all the numbers." And he was all, "Well, but how would I even know where to start?" And she said, "Didn't I tell you the first number I was thinking of?" She was misremembering part of the effect. Because in part of it you DO just ask someone point-blank what number they are thinking of. He tried to clarify this to her, but I stopped him. There was no turning this around. She didn't have the exact method down. But she didn't need to. Sometimes you don't have to connect all the dots to see the picture.

I spared my friend by saying, "Nah, he's just fucking with you. He had to confuse you with that stuff so he could really read your mind." Then I had her write the name of the dog she had in her childhood on a napkin which she rolled into a ball and held onto. Then my friend asked her to bring up a memory of calling out to her dog and replay it in her mind and he told her he would step into that memory and try to hear her calling the dog's name. After a little bit of cold reading to try and establish where this memory took place, he concentrated for a while and said, "I hear you calling for him... you're saying...you're saying 'Shadow.'" She threw the napkin and shrieked, my friend jumped back a little and pushed the table slightly which caused his iced-coffee to spill all over his legs. My head was bouncing all around watching this play out like an OK Go video, howling like a mad man. My friends pants were soaked, the girl had her hands over her mouth and tears in her eyes either from laughing or perhaps some bittersweet dog memories. I was like a combination of both of them, laughing and also nearly soaking my pants, but with piss. It was a great moment.

Ah yes, but not good mentalism because she -- heaven forbid -- had to write something down! It's funny how on the Cafe mentalists are always asking, "How do I justify having them write something down?" But not, "How do I justify them having to calculate the volume of a oblate spheroid in order to sort of tell them their PIN code?"

Audience-centric Magic

/

Hey there. I hope everyone is enjoying their Saturday at FISM. It sounds like a real five-star flop of an event. Don't worry. I'm putting on the Jerx International Society of Magic event later this year. It's going to be nothing but the best of the best. It will have you breathlessly saying, "I love JISM!" It will be loads of fun. Loads. Do you see what I did there, guys? Do you see? Do you get it? Guys, do you see?

I wanted to briefly mention a concept that this site will be looking at from time to time going forward. 

Regular readers of this site know I only have one goal behind writing it: to reintroduce the use of woofle dust into the performances of magicians. That's all that matters.

But a sub-goal of mine is to put an emphasis on something that has had the biggest effect on my style of magic and my performances for other people, and that is recognizing the difference between an audience-centric approach to studying and performing magic, and a magician-centric approach to studying and performing magic.

Let's be honest, the practice of magic -- and certainly the discussion of magic on the internet -- is generally not about entertaining an audience or giving them a positive experience. I can prove this very easily. How many methods for Ace Assemblies are there in magic? 100s? 1000s? Okay, now how many presentations for Ace Assemblies are there? Two? Two and a half? There's the one where you just do it and the one where you pretend it's some sort of gambling demonstration. So what is the main priority of magicians? It certainly doesn't seem to be looking at things from the audience's perspective. Or, to put it another way, if filmmaking websites and books and message boards were all dedicated to recreating pre-existing films, just with different techniques behind the scenes, you would not think those were audience-centric filmmakers. You would think they were people who liked dicking around with cameras and special effects and editing software. 

And don't get me wrong, I love the dicking around aspect of magic. I'm as big a fan of the sleights and techniques and deceptions that magic is built on as anyone is. But the biggest boon to my magic was when I realized that those things are a separate hobby from performing for people. They are as much different hobbies as building guitars is a different hobby from playing the guitar. If your goal is to engage people with magic, then you have to separate these things in your mind because otherwise you will spend all your time working on sleights and technique when really those things only lead to tiny advancements in entertaining an audience.

I'm mentioning this now because it's going to inform some of the things I want to write about in the future. Specifically in regards to the subjects of exposure, practice, and scripting. So this post is just a seed I wanted to plant now that we will explore later. Until that time I hope you at least enjoyed the clever and hilarious JISM joke. Get it? Did you guys get it? Before, in that first paragraph? I hope you got it. If you didn't get it, then for your sake I hope you don't get it in the future. Like when you're driving or something. And you'll just be laughing and laughing and drive into a tree because you're busting up so bad. Do I need to put a disclaimer on my site that I'm not responsible for that sort of thing?

Autocompletion

/

Let's see what google and yahoo's autocompletion suggestions can tell us about what types of things people are thinking and searching for in regards to magicians.

Magicians are...

What are we?

Google:

Yahoo:

I like that we're somewhere on the spectrum from "satanic" to "just dishonest."

Use magic to...

What do people want to use magic to do?

Google:

Yahoo:

These people have to be talking about Black Magic, right? Or is there a Cameron Francis trick where you use magic to kill death?

Why are magicians...

How are we perceived?

Google:

Yahoo

Here's the first big discrepancy between the two search engines, with Yahoo wondering why we're so hot. Yeah. Why are we? I hate having that label smacked on me every time someone finds out I'm a magician. "Oh, you do magic? So you're just another Glenn Bishop/Steve Brooks style Hollywood pretty boy?" Uhm, excuse me, this is an art form I'm practicing here. I'm more than just a chiseled jaw and a swinging cock.

I think "Why are there no female magicians," might be answered in the fact that magicians are also characterized as "so weird" and "so gay."

Why is magic...

How is magic perceived?

Google:

Yahoo:

That didn't quite provide the insight I'd hoped for.

Criss Angel is...

How is one of the brightest stars in the magical firmament perceived?

Google:

Yahoo:

Good lord, people. Google users clearly only care about one thing -- marking time until he's dead. And Yahoo users, PLEASE show Criss some respect. He's one of the biggest magicians in the world. It's spelled douche bag.

The magician touched...

Have we touched their hearts and souls?

Google:

Yahoo:

Nope.

Coming Next Week

/

Next week will be Practical Magic week here at The Jerx. What that means is that the Monday thru Friday posts will all have practical ideas and tips. Yeah, I've got some regular boring ideas too. Not all of my ideas are tricks that take three days to play out. Included in next week's posts will be a video update to one of the most popular posts I did back in the MCJ days about how so many of you do your Elmsley counts wrong. 

"Hey where's the funny, Andy? We don't come here for your dumb thoughts on performance and theory."

Ok, valid question, and my considered response to it is: Lick my balls, dum-dum. I'll write whatever the fuck I want and you will like it. Seriously, if this site is to go on for any length of time, then you are going to be subject to the whims of what I feel like writing about. Sometimes that's going to be critiquing the dopes on the Cafe, sometimes it's going to be trick ideas, sometimes it's going to be theory, and sometimes it will be things so tangentially related to magic that you'll wonder why I'm writing about them on a magic blog. Well, I never promised you a magic blog. Do you think it's easy doing the smartest and funniest and most innovative writing in all of modern magic? No! Well, actually it's pretty easy for me. But not for you. With your little brain and your dumb ideas: "Look at me. I do Color Monte with normal cards!" Stop it! The only good thing about Color Monte is this dude:

Look at that smug sack of garbage with his shit-eating grin, all because he made fourteen fucking dollars. He's straight-up rolling in that shit Indecent Proposal-style and it's fourteen dollars. His poor wife. "Jimmy, I hear the grocery store is hiring in the deli department, do you think maybe.... What's that? Oh, I see, you're going to go out and run your 'hustle' again today. Great. Here's the thing, you do understand that the baby formula alone is twenty-six dollars, correct? Okay. Just wanted to make sure. The way you picked me up and twirled me around when you got home yesterday made it seem like you thought $14 was a big windfall, so.... Are you even listening? Can you smoke that outside, please?"

Multiple Universe Selection

/

Effect

A signed card changes. Or, more exactly, the universe changes around a signature.

Presentation

It's a Friday evening.

"If I tell you something, do you promise not to think I'm crazy?" I ask.

"Too late," she says. 

"I'm serious. This is going to sound weird but I want you to experience it. Do you know about the idea of parallel universes? Okay, well do you know about the idea of a multiverse? It can mean different things but one of the ways of thinking about it is that there isn't just one or a few different universes, but an infinite number of universes. And at each moment, each universe is splitting off into another infinite set of universes, leading to new moments that themselves split into an infinite number of pathways. It's like an infinite number of branches coming off a tree, and an infinite number of branches coming off each branch, and an infinite number of branches coming off of those branches, and so on." As I talk I draw something simple to illustrate the idea. 

"Every possibility for your life is happening somewhere. And that doesn't even begin to address all the universes you don't even exist in, where your parents never met. It's too overwhelming to even begin to grasp."

"So let's just think of this moment and this universe before it splits. Going forward from this moment there are an infinite amount of universes that will split off. Later tonight, in one of these universes, we're going to run off to the justice of the peace and get married. That's sweet. But also, in one of these split universes you're going to kill me. And in one of them I'm going to kill you. That's not so sweet."

"Have you ever had a decision to make, and you know you should go with one option because it's the best for you but you find yourself following a different path? Well, you just happen to be in the universe where you follow that path. Don't beat yourself up about it. There was nothing you could do about it. Well... kind of."

"Let me show you. I'm going to make a decision that's going to split this universe. It's a decision about what I'm going to do this weekend. The options I've given myself are to do something evil or something good. I want you to snap your fingers and at the moment you do I'm going to choose one of those courses, and when I do this universe will split along those two paths. I want you to really remember this moment and everything that happens going forward. Now, take a deep breath then snap your fingers." She does. "And with that, the universe has split again. I've chosen to do something evil this weekend, so we're on that timeline. The other universe, where I chose to do something good, is spiraling away from us somewhere. Here, let's do something to help us keep track of things." I grab a deck of cards. "Is there a card in the deck that seems evil? I mean, like it could represent the dark-timeline that we're on."

"Hmmm.... the ace of spades?" she says.

"Yeah, that will work, let me find it. Okay, here it is, the ace of spades. Sign your name on the back. Also we need one more piece of information. We need a Constant. Something personal to you, but something that would be the same in any of the universes that led to you being here today. Is there a word or a number that has a special meaning to you? Like if I said, 'What's the most important word or number in your life,' is there something that immediately comes to mind?"

"Yes," she says. "The number 26."

"And what does that mean to you? Actually, don't tell me, it's none of my business. But that's not just a random number you're picking, right? And it's not a number that comes to your mind from anything that happened in the past few minutes or anything? The 'you' that woke up this morning would always answer '26' to what's the most important number to you?"

"Yes."

"Great. Write 26 under your name."

She does. I take the card, fold it into quarters and have her put it in her pocket.

"Let's get out of here," I say. We leave my apartment and start walking a couple of blocks to a US Mail box. 

"What's something evil I can do tomorrow?" 

"I don't know," she says. "You could hit someone."

"Huh? That's not really evil. That's just bad."

"Kill someone?"

"Okay, good idea. I'll kill that kid who lives next door to me. Ryan. I'll sneak into his window tomorrow night and slice his neck open from ear to ear. Then I'll cut his head off his body and put it in the toilet tank. I'll take his body back with me and then take a bunch of pictures with it in funny poses and post them to his mom's facebook. Then I'll sell his body to a pedophile on Craigslist."

"Ooooooookay," she says, taking a step away from me.

When we get to the mailbox I pull a piece of paper and an envelope out of my back pocket. I ask her for her mailing address and write it on the envelope. I turn the envelope over and write "26" on the back. Then on the sheet of paper I write the following:

Dear Suzanne,

I am going to kill my neighbor Ryan and desecrate his corpse.

This was all my idea. I take full responsibility for my actions.

Andy

I give her the letter and envelope and don't touch it again. I tell her to read the letter, fold it, and put it in the envelope, and seal it. I give her a stamp to put on the envelope. I say, "Okay, this part might not work, but I want you to put a little tear in the envelope. Just a small one, but somewhere that feels right." She puts a tear in the envelope on the right-hand side, just above the bottom corner. I tell her to drop it in the mailbox. She does and we start walking back.

"After the shit goes down this weekend, it may come out that we were hanging out tonight and I don't want anything to come back to you. So now you'll have that letter as evidence that you had nothing to do with it. And because you won't get it until after I do the deed, it's not like you could have stopped it in any way."

We step inside a corner store on the way home and I buy a box-cutter.

When we get back to my apartment I explain that I'm not kidding. This is really going to happen tomorrow. But not to feel bad because that just happens to be the timeline we're in. Then I explain that there's another universe out there where we are having the inverse evening. Where I'm still talking with her about the multiverse but in that universe I made the decision to do something good this weekend. "What type of thing do you think you would have suggested I do in that universe?" I ask.

"Hmm... maybe volunteer at an animal shelter."

"That's nice," I say. "Too bad for this universe's Ryan that he's not in that universe. This is pretty weird so far, yes?" She agrees. "Okay," I say, "It's about to get a little weirder. Here's the thing I've discovered. I can send my consciousness out from the universe in the timeline I'm on, and into the universe that's on the timeline I want to be on. And I can take you with me. All we need is a Constant, and that's the number 26 on the back of that card. You told me that's the only number that would have come to mind if I asked you to think of the most important number to you. So that's also the same number that would have come to your mind after the split in the good universe. And because there's that overlap, I can send us into that reality. It's really easy. It's just done with visualization. Give me your hands. Close your eyes and don't open them until I tell you."

After a few moments I tell her to open her eyes. I look around a bit and say, "It didn't work. Let's try again. Close your eyes. This time I'll talk you through what I'm doing."

"I start by visualizing the number 26 in your pocket. Then I scan forward along this timeline to see myself killing Ryan. Now I zoom out from that image. Way, way out until it's just a speck, and my consciousness is just floating in the void. Now I zoom in on the image of myself doing something good this weekend instead. And I shift my thoughts back along that timeline to the number 26 in your pocket again. Now open your eyes."

I look around and think a little to myself.

"Yup. It worked. We're in the good timeline."

"How do you know?" she asks.

"Well, I know because when I think about what I'm going to do tomorrow, it's not killing Ryan. So clearly we're no longer on the dark timeline."

"So you just changed your mind," she says.

"Hmmm... no. It's not that. How can I explain this... Remember when you snapped your fingers earlier and we started out along the evil timeline? Well, we did a bunch of stuff after that. You wrote your constant on the back of a card to represent the timeline we were on. We went outside, sent a letter, and so on. Well that all happened in a different universe. I'll show you. I forget, what card is in your pocket?"

"The ace of spades."

"No. I mean, yes, that's true, in the other universe. But we're in the good one now. And in this one you would have chosen a card to represent the good timeline. In the other universe, you chose the ace of spades to represent the bad timeline, so in this one probably the ace of...?"

"Hearts?"

"Yeah, probably. Take a look."

She reaches into her pocket, removes and unfolds her signed card. It's now the ace of hearts. 

"No way. No way! How did you do that?"

"Well, you see, there's a multiverse..."

"No, really, how?"

"I'm serious! We're in a different universe now. There hasn't been time for much to change since the moment you snapped your fingers, but you'll definitely spot a few differences in what has transpired since that time."

As I'm talking I unroll the plastic bag that held the boxcutter I bought. And in it's place I remove a Snickers bar, tossing the obviously empty bag on the table. I unwrap it and take a bite.

"You're looking at me funny," I say. "Do you want a bite?" I offer her the candy bar. She scratches her head.

"The best part is, now that you know how to do this, you can use it. In every possible version of your life that you can imagine going forward you will have had this experience. So in each of those universes you will have that playing card. It's your Constant going forward. Whenever you have a choice between two things, and there's a choice you know is right but you're tempted to take the other path, just shift yourself into the timeline where you make the right choice. It's very easy. You just visualize the card, then visualize the action you don't want to take and zoom out from that action into the void. Then you zoom into the action on the timeline you do want to take. Then scan from that mental picture to this card on that timeline. And you'll find yourself there. I promise it works. And if it doesn't just try it until it does."

She looks at the card. "My head is spinning," she says. 

A few days later she gets home from work and is sorting through her mail. She finds the envelope she mailed that night with the 26 on the back and the tear she made in it. She opens it and inside the letter says:

Dear Suzanne,

I am going to volunteer at the animal shelter this weekend.

This was all your idea. I give you full credit for my actions.

Andy

She texts me a picture of the letter and writes, "I have no words for this..."

I text back. "Oh yeah, I forgot to thank you for the idea, it was a blast." And I attach a picture of me and Maggie the dog from the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition that I volunteered to walk and spend time with that weekend. We're in front of my apartment and Ryan is holding the leash, both have big smiles on their faces.

Method

The card: A cull to bring the "opposite" of whatever card she names as the evil card to the top of the deck, above the card she named. Then a couple double lifts to convince her she's signing the back of a card she really isn't. 

The boxcutter: Nobody knows what's coming. You swap bags in your jacket pocket. It's 20 minutes later before they even know there was anything to suspect.

The letter: You write a second letter after she leaves, putting the same "Constant" on the back and tearing it where she tore it.

Ah, but what happens to the original letter you sent? Do you have to camp out at her apartment and try and intercept it before she gets it? No. The genius part is that that letter disappears.

How?

Okay, let me thank Alvo Stockman/Acar Altinsel. First for inspiring the effect above with his effect, Postmentalism. And second for giving me the okay to briefly describe the method for that effect in this blog post, which he did with no hesitation at all. In the all-too-few releases Acar as Alvo Stockman has made available, he has shown a very similar esthetic to mine. So if you like the stuff I write about, you should check out his effects. If nothing else you should definitely pick up Postmentalism which will give you the main tool you need to perform an effect like the one above, or Alvo's brilliant use of it as part of a mailed prediction.

So here's what happens. You do this effect on a Friday or Saturday night, or whenever you know the mail won't be picked up from the mailbox the following day. Your friend really does put the letter you wrote in an envelope with her address on it and really does drop it in the mailbox. And it really does disappear. You see, the letter, the address, the Constant on the back, all of it is done with a pen that writes with disappearing ink. By the time the mail is picked up on Monday, there is nothing for the postal service to deliver. It's just an empty envelope with a blank sheet of paper inside. 

Two caveats:

1. You want to use paper that the pen doesn't leave a deep impression on. Check out Postmentalism for more tips on this. You don't want some hero postal worker trying to make out the address and delivering it to the person along with your second letter. Or worse yet opening it up and finding the faint impression of someone threatening to murder a little boy.

2. Don't drop the second letter in the same mailbox. Again, just in case there is some curious postal employee who goes out of her way to associate the two pieces of mail together and ends up delivering the blank one along with the written one.

Thanks again, Acar!

The mind: The stuff about using this experience to make better decisions going forward isn't completely jive. I mean, I'm hyper-rational, but it would be hard to deny that if you visualize zooming out from a poor choice of action and zooming in on a positive one, and you continue to do this then you're going to be more likely to choose the positive course than you would have been without that same visualization. And you can you the same logic from the post yesterday to encourage your spectator to take this technique with them and use it. "Look, you can choose not to believe me and not employ the technique and we will be able to say for sure that you definitely aren't capable of hopping into the timelines where you take the action you'd like yourself to take. Or you can go along with what I'm saying and believe you have this capacity, and whenever you're faced with a decision you use this technique to shift into the timeline where you make what you know is the better choice. And if you always do that then, at the end of your life, you will be able to look back on your life and see it as a series of choices where --from this moment onward-- you always picked the most beneficial, least self-destructive option. And then it's completely academic if it's real or not. Either you lived in one universe, always making what seemed to be the best choice at the time, or you skipped from universe to universe ending up in the one where you made the best choices throughout your life. From your perspective, there's no difference."

That's that.

Presentation Week: Addendum 1

/

I wanted to clarify my thoughts on story and presentation because at least a couple of people misunderstood what I was going for with some of the effects I covered in Presentation Week. One person described it as "bizarre magic." And another said I was turning things into "story tricks." Which is essentially the opposite of what I'm advocating. I realize it's human nature to try and put things in pre-established categories, but if that's what you got from my previous posts on presentation then I did a horrible job of explaining how I present effects. 

"Story" is central to both bizarre magic and story tricks. In bizarre magic it's usually some standard effect dressed up with some shit about Nosferatu or Jack the Ripper. That may play on stage, but I find in the real world, in social situations with real people, it just comes off as a "performance," not as an interaction. In informal magic, anything that seems rehearsed is an impediment from the person engaging in the reality you're attempting to establish.

Story tricks have a similar weakness. They're very clearly rehearsed and more often than not the story is obviously a weak justification for showing the trick. That's the wrong relationship. The presentation shouldn't be there to support the effect, the effect should be there to support the presentation.

When you look at things from this perspective you will come up with more interesting and engaging presentations. Instead of saying, "What's a story I can tell that will justify the actions and beats of this trick?" say, "What interesting or magical circumstance about me, my spectator, or the world around us could this trick possibly be evidence of?" Is this making any sense?

When I talk about "story" in regards to my presentations, I'm not talking about the story that accompanies the effect, I'm talking about the story of the experience of the effect.

Let me think of an example...

Okay, let's look at Triumph, because there we have a very standard example of what I would consider to be a bad presentation, i.e. "This one time a drunk guy shuffled my cards face-up and face-down." If you told this story without accompanying it with the trick people would say, "Okay...so... did you fight him or something?" Because where is that story going? Having your cards mixed up is not some huge affront. It takes 30 seconds to rearrange them. For that matter, in your story you just rearrange them by magic. So clearly it's a complete non-issue to you. It would be like you telling a story about a drunk who came in and scribbled with dry-erase marker on your dry-erase board. There are no stakes whatsoever.

So what might I suggest as a better presentation? I have no idea. I'm going to try and think of it now in real time and I will spell-out my thought process. It is now 4:59 PM.

Okay, now it's 5:03. Here is my first thought and it's not very good. What if you say you got your deck as a souvenir from the World Poker Tour. The people who run that thing have always had an issue with cards accidentally getting turned over during the course of shuffling and no one realizing it until someone gets dealt a face-up card during one of the hands of poker. And, of course, in that case the hand has to be abandoned and it's not really fair because that may prevent someone from a obtaining a big pot they would have won, or keep someone in the game who would have been out. So they created this deck with heavier density ink on the face of the card as compared to the back. So no matter which way the card is held, the face of the card will sink to the bottom. To demonstrate this you shuffle the cards face-up and face-down. Wait a beat. Then spread to show them all face down. 

Is this better than a drunk guy shuffling your cards? I think so. A little bit better at least. It's more convoluted but if you imagine it without a trick accompanying it, I think hearing about such a deck of cards is more interesting than a non-event with a drunk guy.

But for me it's too small. I said I think presentations should be about you, about your spectator, or about the world around you. And this is just a presentation about a special deck of cards. Yes, it is about a "world" where such a deck could exist. But I don't think it's too resonant to the average person. So I'll try to think of something else.

It's 5:16 

Okay, it's 5:34, and I've come up with an idea I would actually use which I think would go over well, but of course I don't really know because I just thought of it.

You're sitting with your friend and you open your laptop. "Have you seen gmail's undo feature?" you ask. They either have or haven't. If they haven't you show them when you send a message in gmail you're given an "Undo" option and you have 30 seconds to click it to "unsend" the email. [This is real, by the way.] "Want to see something weird?" you ask. Your friend says she does. She watches you go into your gmail account and write her an email that says, "I mixed up the deck of cards face-up and face-down." You click Send. Then you pick up the deck and shuffle it face up and face down and quickly go back to your laptop and click Undo.

You look at her for a moment and give her a beat to anticipate where this might be going. "Watch," you say. You spread the cards on the table and they are all face down again. You say, "You saw that, right? I'm not crazy?"

I would probably stop there. But you could put a finer point on it and continue. "I think somehow it not only undoes the sending of the email, but also whatever you write in the email gets undone in real life too. How is that possible?" (It's always fun to turn the situation around on the spectator and act like you need them to explain what's going on.)

You could then go on to show one or two more examples of this. It's a structure that would work with any effect where you seemingly change the status of something only for it to change back. So any torn and restored type thing or anything along those lines. You send her an email that says, "I broke the rubber band." You break a rubber band. Put it in her hand. Click Undo. And she opens her hand and the band is restored. The only limitation is that you have to do what you're going to do in under 30 seconds or the Undo button will disappear.

Here are the rules I find helpful to keep in mind when coming up with a presentation:

  1. If there's a story, the story should be in the first person. Save the stories about Norse gods for your parlor show.

  2. The heart of the effect should take place in the present. You can set up the trick with a story from the past ("One time this gypsy cursed me.") But then the effect takes place in this moment. ("And here's how that curse manifests itself now.") Performing effects where you're like, "This is what happened one time when a gambler met a magician," is just too many steps removed from the person you're performing for. 

  3. Nothing ever symbolizes anything in the effects I perform. The cards are cards, the coins are coins. I'm not using them to symbolize something else, but to demonstrate something. 

You can think my style is bullshit. I admit that I only know it works for me and can't say it would work for other people, but I don't really think I'm unique in any way, nor are the people I perform for. You don't need to try and perform things my way to see if it's better. Just tell someone you're working on something and ask them which of these shows they would prefer to see. Let them tell you which style of presentation is more appealing.

Show 1

  • Act 1 - The story of the time a drunk guy shuffled my deck face-up and face-down

  • Act 2 - The story of how red cards and black cards don't mix

  • Act 3 - The story of how the Ace of Spades is the "leader" ace and other aces follow it.

  • Act 4 - The story of an ambitious card

  • Act 5 - The story of how cannibal queens eat other cards

Show 2

  • Act 1 - I stop time

  • Act 2 - You help me practice how I'll take the Sultan of Brunei's money during this weekend's poker game

  • Act 3 - I show you my niece's drawings that predict future events

  • Act 4 - You take a pill that gives you hyper-attuned senses

  • Act 5 - We use gmail to erase 30-second chunks of time

You see the difference, yes? One set is passive, the other is immersive.

For me, magic is not about telling people stories. It's about giving them stories to tell.