Practical Magic Week Part 3: Billets

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This is a simple idea for anyone who uses billets in their magic and mentalism. In fact it's such a simple idea that it must have been mentioned before in some classic mentalism book that I've never read. But if it has been then people clearly missed it because it completely solves one of the issues people have with billets. 

What should you use for a billet?

Some people use their business cards. The argument against this is that you shouldn't fold or tear your business card because you're essentially not respecting your own brand by destroying this thing that is a representation of you. I don't know if I believe that. That seems like some voodoo shit. But I don't completely disagree. Your business card also might not be suited for billet work. It might be too thick or an odd shape. Or you might not even have business cards which is more of an issue for the amateur magician who is my target audience.

Some people use blank pieces of heavy paper, perhaps on a little pad that they carry with them. Do you want to carry a little pad along with you? Are you trying to get beat up? "Where's my little pad! I thought I put it in this pocket with my coin purse." No, the little pad or stack of blank business cards is only acceptable in a formal show where you're expected to have props. For the casual performer these things are a no-no. 

So what do I suggest?

Business cards!

Uhm, Andy, that was the first thing you mentioned, dingleberry.

Oh, right. No, I don't mean your business card. And I don't mean going to the Chinese restaurant near you and grabbing a stack of theirs. I mean going to Vistaprint and spending 10 bucks to print off 500 business cards for a real or fictional third party and then using those when you perform. There are some obvious and not so obvious benefits to this.

1. You're not destroying your own business card.

2. You're not carrying around a little pad of blank paper like a little fancy-boy.

3. It's a normal object that you would expect to find in a wallet.

4. If you use your business card or a blank card then the idea of duplicates is inherent in the prop itself. You don't ever buy just one business card, or one piece of blank paper. These items only exist in multiples. So it's not difficult for a spectator to hazard a guess that there might be a switch involved. Alternatively, if you open your wallet, flip through some stuff, and toss out someone else's business card, this feels much more like it's the only one of these that can possibly be in play. Want to ramp up this singularity even more? Take a pen and write "4:00 Tues." in one of the corners on the business card. Do the same on a pre-folded duplicate. You can now switch these in and out and a duplicate will be so far away from people's thoughts.

5. They can be an unspoken status symbol. Remember, you can create a business card for anyone you like: someone prominent in your area, someone in the entertainment industry, someone in politics. You don't make a big deal about this. Let the other person mention it. For example, maybe I'm about to show someone a trick, I open my wallet looking for something for them to write on and toss Elon Musk's business card onto the table and say to myself, "yeah, I don't need this...." The other person might look at the card before or after the effect and ask why I have it. I'd just be like, "Oh, we were at the same event a couple weeks ago. He wants me to do his Christmas party this year. But that time of year is all about family for me. And as far as I'm concerned, fossil fuels are the future."

6. For me, this is the biggest benefit. Your business cards and blank pieces of paper are presentational dead ends. But you can create a business card to use in one effect that could lead the conversation in any direction you'd like it to go for a follow-up effect. You could have a business card for someone at the FBI, for a parapsychologist, for a futurist, for a casino CEO, for anybody. Why do you have this business card? You've been asked to consult, or give your input on a project, or they want to study you. Whatever, but it's all very fluid. If you're going to perform more than one effect in a casual situation then the transition has to be completely natural, and this gambit allows you to seamlessly flow into any other type of effect. 

Now obviously this isn't the solution for an effect that requires a lot of billets ("Why do you have ten business cards for Alan Thicke?"). But for any center tear, peek, billet switch, or even just an effect where you're writing down a prediction, a sham business card can be a valuable tool. 

Practical Magic Week Part 2: Three Analogies

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Imagine you met someone who was into LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) and he was saying to you, "I'm a 12th level mage and so I only dine on elf meat and I turn invisible at 2am and 2pm or whenever I encounter a princess. My dragon's name is Vincent and we live on the Isle of Valderloo where there has been a fairy uprising for the past 1600 years."

Now imagine you meet someone who is into LARPing and instead he talks to you about trying to track down some period-appropriate buttons for his jacket on ebay, and how there was this big argument at the last gathering because some people wanted a gluten-free menu and others were up in arms that they wouldn't have had such a thing in the Middle Ages, and how at the last weekend-long gathering the two rival kings were caught having sex in a sleeping bag, or whatever. 

In the first scenario you may find it interesting to hear about this fictional life, but you won't connect with that person on any level (unless you're a fellow LARPer) because it's all fantasy. He's not giving you anything to relate to. In the second scenario you can connect with this person because he's expressing his love for this hobby in a manner that allows you to draw correlations to things in your life. 

I mentioned yesterday about breaking down the barriers between you and your audience. Try to put things in a context they understand. Not by anthropomorphizing your props, like you would with a child. But by giving them insights into this notoriously clandestine hobby. You might think that will "break the spell" in some way. But it doesn't. What breaks the spell is saying, "This is the most powerful ace and all the other aces follow it." That's pure fantasy. And worse, it's dull and boring fantasy. I mean at least with the LARPer there was a fairy uprising. By giving people ways to help understand magic and ways to understand you, you are giving them ways to connect to the experience. And I've found that this makes the actual magic effects you do more powerful, because it's harder for them to dismiss the whole thing as weird, or childish, or un-understandable. 

Here are three analogies I've used in the past which help to give insight into magic as a performing art, or justify a process, or explain the limits of your "powers."

1. "Do you come up with these tricks yourself?" 

I would not be surprised if this is a common analogy to use. But I haven't personally read it before and I think it really helps people understand a little about where tricks come from and what your role is in the process.

When someone asks, "Do you come up with these tricks yourself?" 

My answer is, "A lot of them I do, yes. And some of them are like my versions of effects that have been around for years. There can be many different ways of accomplishing the same effects. Some magicians specialize in messing with what your brain processes, some in messing with what your eyes see,  and some in messing with what your mind remembers. So there can be all sorts of ways to achieve the same effect. Think of it like recipes. There are 1000 different recipes for chicken parmesan. A real chef is probably going to have her own particular recipe for that dish. And a truly great chef will have a lot of recipes for things no one else have even thought to create. It's kind of like that in magic too. I would say about half of the things I do are unique to me. 45% are my version -- my recipe -- for an already established effect. And then 5% of those things are just me doing another person's trick. You can be a great chef, but there are times where you come across a perfect recipe and don't want to change a thing. Here, let me show you one of those perfect effects now..."

2.  "If you can read minds, how come you didn't know I put my testicles in your milk?"

I don't do too much traditional mindreading these days. Or effects where I'm picking up body language hints or something like that. But in the past when I did I could sometimes sense a strange energy at the end. If you're performing for friends, family, co-workers, or anyone you might see again in real life, they're often left with one of two thoughts:

"Who the fuck is he kidding. I know he can't read minds."

or

"Can he really do this? I don't want him constantly analyzing me."

Here is an analogy I use to address both situations i.e., those who know I can't read minds or those who are concerned I might be able to. So if someone says, "If you can read minds, how come you didn't know I put my testicles in your milk?" Or if they say, "So are you just always analyzing everything someone says and trying to look into their minds?"

I say, "That's not really how it works. It's not just something you can do all the time. It's something you have to focus your mind to do. Like, try this, I want you to pay attention to how many Ts are in the words in the following sentence. Ready? [Slowly] 'I went to the store and got some toothpaste." Any idea? Six? No it was eight. Reading minds is like tallying the letters when someone speaks. Except not just the Ts, but every letter. It's something you can train yourself to do, but it's so mentally taxing that it's just not something you would go around doing unnecessarily. So don't worry, your thoughts are safe." (Or, "So yeah, I didn't know you put your testicles in my milk. I'm not always 'on.'"

3. "If you're reading my mind, why do I have to write it down?"

This is a question a lot of mentalists worry about a lot. The concern about this question demonstrates a profound lack of creativity in the mentalism community. First a lack of creativity about coming up with rationalizations for writing something down. And second a lack of creativity with coming up with presentations that aren't such direct lines between method and effect. Yes, if you have someone write something down and then you immediately tear it up while kind of obviously looking at it, it's not much of a stretch to figure out that you just read what they wrote down. So much of mentalism is "You write it down, I secretly read it, then I write it down." That's a failure of structure. 

Regardless... if someone were to ask me why they needed to write something down one of the things I might say is, "Do you really want to get into it? It's kind of complicated. Okay, have you seen the studies on how writing something down increases the likelihood of you remembering it? Well, that's because when you write something down you need to link the spatial part of your brain -- the part that you use when making marks on paper -- to the verbal part of your brain. It's like when you take notes during class as opposed to just listening to the teacher. Anyway, it's the link between the spatial and verbal parts of your brain that I'm able to tune into."

"Oh, so it always has to be written down?" they might ask.

"No, not necessarily. It's just a more difficult process. We can try it without writing anything down. It helps if you can see the word in some form even if you don't write it down [then I'd go into a bulletproof version of the Hoy book test I do] or if you just want to think of something I could probably figure it out but it wouldn't come to me as a full word [progressive anagram]."

The beauty of this is that it not only clarifies an effect but it also justifies the process of it and the different processes of the follow-up effects. 

Practical Magic Week Part 1: The Most Impressive Least Impressive Prediction

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One of the best things you can do to connect to people with magic is to talk to them about magic. We tend to do just the opposite. We think we need to humanize the magic or make it more relatable, so we come up with some hokey presentation, "Cards have personalities too! This card changed from red to blue because it's sad." Your best case scenario when delivering patter like that is that your audience ignores it. If they pay attention they're going to feel like you're condescending to them or that you're some weirdo who can't relate to other humans on a real level. In fact, most of this type of patter would be great if you were trying to come off as an anti-social creep. If you're doing a formal close-up show and you want to be some odd Norman Bates type of loser whose deck of cards is your best friend, and the Queen of hearts is your "girlfriend" and there is a ratty, worn-out hole in the bottom of it that you've clearly been sticking your dick through, I think that would be perfectly fine. But if you want to be seen as someone who's not fucking a playing card, then maybe don't go with that type of presentation. Stop humanizing the props, and start humanizing yourself.

Magic is, by its nature, a kind of alienating thing. If you want people to connect with you through magic, then you need to break down those barriers a little bit. More on that tomorrow.

Simon Aronson's Shuffle-Bored is very close to a perfect trick. I assume most of you are familiar with it, but if you're not the effect is that one or two spectators completely shuffle a deck of cards, mixing them face up and face-down, and in the end you can show that you predicted the state the cards would end up in (the number face-up and face-down, the distribution of reds and blacks and the suits). The mixing process feels very legit because in one sense they really are mixing the cards, but certain aspects of the deck aren't being affected. Go learn it, it's a great trick. 

I prefer John Bannon's presentation of the trick where it's not a series of predictions but rather you act as if you're sensing the condition of the deck in real time. Check out "Wait Until Dark" in his book Dear Mr. Fantasy.

What I've added is a different presentation getting into the effect which I think brings up an interesting question to the spectators and allows for the ending of the effect to be a strange, self-referential, recursive moment. 

Here's a typical way it plays out for me.

I talk with my friend about predictions and the different types of predictions there are and how these are all different skills to learn. "Predicting what someone will think or do is different than predicting something random like the spin of a roulette wheel and both those are different than predicting what a headline will be three days from now." I ask her which of these things she thinks would be most difficult to predict, then we talk about that for a little bit and whether I agree or disagree with her. (I usually agree regardless of what she says.) 

Then I ask this question, "What do you think would be the least impressive thing I could predict?"

"Hmmm... I don't know... How about...that there will be violence in the Middle East this year."

"Yes," I say, "that would be pretty unimpressive. But there's still a chance I could be wrong about it. There could be a big peace movement that spontaneously arises tomorrow and sweeps through that area. It's possible. So what would be less impressive than that?"

"Okay... If you predicted the sun will rise tomorrow."

"So you wouldn't be impressed if I predicted the sun will rise tomorrow? That's valid. But still... I think there's some way it might not happen. Like, couldn't we get knocked out of the sun's orbit by some catastrophic something or other? Yes, it wouldn't be very impressive, but it's still something of a prediction because it's not under my control. Do you want to know what I think would be the least impressive thing to predict? "

"Yeah."

"I think the least impressive thing would be to predict something I'm going to say. That's something that's completely in my power. Like it would be one thing to predict that you're going to say, 'foot-long hotdog,' and then have it come true. But if I predict that I'm going to say 'foot-long hotdog' and I do, that has to be the least impressive prediction ever." She agrees. "I was thinking about this the other day, just before we talked about meeting up tonight. And I was thinking that I wanted to try and impress you with the least impressive prediction ever. So I'm going to try and impress you by predicting something I'm going to say. Can I try it?"

I take out a piece of paper or business card and write something on it and set it aside.

She shuffles up the deck of cards, first normally, then face-up into face down. She holds the deck between her hands and I do a Mr. Miyagi-style hand rub and place my hands near hers as if I'm doing this to sense something about the deck. 

"There are 20 face-down cards in the deck," I say.

I turn my head away as she counts them out and finds this to be true. She holds the face down cards between her palms, and I Mr. Miyagi it again. "There are 12 red cards and 8 black cards." I turn away from her while she counts them out and find this to be true. "Hold those 8 black cards in your hand," I say. "I'm going to sense how many are clubs and how many are spades." I hold out my hands in the manner I did before. This time it takes a little longer. I furrow my brow a little like I'm confused. Then it dawns on me, "Oh... actually I think they're all the same suit. I think they're all... clubs. Take a look." She spreads through the cards to find seven of them are clubs, but the eighth card is the 2 of spades.

"I was right. They're all clubs," I say.

She points to the 2 of spades.

"Oh shit... except the 2 of spades."

I wait a moment. Then I point to my prediction from earlier. She turns it over.



Sundry Drive No. 2

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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

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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

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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.