Sundry Drive No. 4

In regards to my post about the song that opens the L&L DVDs, I received this informative and oddly capitalized email from G.S.:

You are damn right with the Music. The Music is from a German Guy called James Last he died This Year. This music was also the Background Music of a German Comedy Show. And After James Last died they thanked him and Said that without His Music the Show would not have Been that funny!

Now I just need to find out the exact name of the song. It would be perfect for my sex-mix. 

---

Speaking of my sex-mix...

---

I used to do a trick where I wore a blue t-shirt and across the front it said, "This Shirt is Red." When someone would say, "No it's not." I'd turn my back to them and say, "Not even on the back?" They'd say no, and when I turned back around my shirt would be red and it would say, "Yes It Is" across the front.

This was how I would do Dresscode by Calen Morelli.

---

I always wish this guy hadn't been videotaping this practice session. I wish he had just spent the rest of his life believing that for one moment in time the laws of the universe were suspended and that manifested itself in the cups and balls becoming real.

---

Working on the casting for my Siegfried and Roy biopic.

---

Here's a pic I thought better of using for one of this week's posts. Can you guess which one? Put on your thinking caps!

Tweak-End: Hide, Keep, and Give Away by Jay Sankey

It's Saturday. I'm debuting two new effects at my friends' place tonight. One involves someone having their mind read by my friend's unborn child. The other is one of the more magical and surreal ideas I think I've ever come up with, so I'm excited to try it out. Both of the effects are pretty practical, so if I decide to share them with you rejects I think you will really like them.

Today i just want to present a small tweak to an effect you may already do. I generally don't like to share every little idea I have for established effects, but this is a small change that vastly improved the level of engagement I received from the people I performed the effect for. 

Since Jay Sankey originally released his 22 Blows to the Head DVD, I have been doing his effect Hide, Keep, and Give Away. Essentially your spectator picks three cards from the deck and shuffles them in their hands, sight unseen. Jay's patter line is then, "You can tell a lot about a person by what they hide, what they keep, and what they give away." The spectator then has a free choice of which card they hide (it gets put into the deck reversed), which card they give to the magician, and which card they keep for themselves. At the end they read your prediction and you've nailed which cards they would choose and how they would distribute them.

I always liked the trick, but I wanted to get into it a little more with the patter. I wanted to ask them a few questions about what they hide, keep, or give away and then make it appear that those answers somehow gave me some insight to allow me to make the prediction. But as I thought about it, I realized those categories don't quite make sense. "Keeping" something or "giving it away" is a logical pairing. But "hiding" something or "keeping" it don't really go together. They're not opposites, they're not even mutually exclusive. Most of the time when you hide something you also keep it. So it was hard for me to come up with examples of these things to suggest to my spectator.

So here is the change I made, and at first it will sound very minor, but it allows you to get into a relatively interesting discussion that leads into the trick. The change is that now I think of the trick as Keep, Give Away, or Throw Away. And here's how that change manifests itself in the patter.

"If you have a relationship that ends badly, do you keep your old love letters or do you get rid of them?... Oh, you burn them? I see. So there's no desire to try and keep mementos of the good times? Ok. Interesting."

"When you have clothes that don't fit or are out of style, do you just toss them out or do you donate them somewhere?"

"Okay, let's say you've just finished a book. And it was fine, but it's not one of your favorites. Do you keep that book or do you give it to a friend or donate it to the library or something?"

I act as if I'm absorbing and making some calculations in my mind based on these responses. Then I spread the deck face-up on the table and scan it back and forth. After a few moments I pick up a pen and paper and start making my prediction.

"You know, psychologists say you can tell a lot about a person by what they keep, what they give away, and what they throw out or just get rid of. I want to see if I can use what you've just told me to try and predict what's going to happen next."

I fold up the prediction and then I go into the trick. The spectator picks three cards. One is "thrown away" by being placed reversed back into the deck with the other "garbage" cards that weren't selected. I then slow things down. "Okay, you've thrown one away. Now, I want you to be very deliberate about this. One of those cards you're going to keep for yourself and one you're going to give to me. Hand me either one." She does. Before I take it I say, "Are you sure? One of these is an old skirt that doesn't fit and the other is the first polaroid of your child. [Or some other examples that came up during the opening discussion.] Are you sure that's the one you want to give away? This is your last chance to reconsider." She doesn't change her mind and you take the card she gives you.

At this point, don't do the DL handling that Sankey does on the DVD (it's much weaker than the top change handling he mentions in passing). Gesture with the "give away" card at your prediction and ask her to open it and read it. As she unfolds it, do a top change. Theres more cover than you'll ever need. Then slowly separate your hands a good couple of feet to imply they were never near each other.

"You will throw away the Ace," she says.

You spread the deck on the table with your left hand to show the Ace is the reversed "thrown away" card in the middle of the deck.

"You will give away the 9."

You slowly turn over the card she "gave" to you. It's the 9.

"And you will keep the jack," she reads. Then she turns over the card she chose to keep and it's the jack.

This is one of my go to effects in an impromptu situation. It takes under 10 seconds to set up. It's technically a five card set-up but you only need to get two into position. The other three you just modify your prediction to roll with whatever is there. The questions are actually somewhat interesting and really do seem like they could give some insight into their character. There's an internal logic to it, but at the same time it's still unbelievable that you could somehow predict those actions based on those questions. 

"Internally logical" yet "unbelievable." I really think this is the strongest combination when presenting magic. 

If you don't have this effect I recommend picking up Sankey's 22 Blows to the Head DVD. There's a handful other effects from there that I've worked on as well and pretty much everything is incredible simple to do.

Bada Da Dadada Da Dadah Da Da Dadada Da Da Dahh Da Dah Dah Dada Da Dah Dah Dada Dahhhhhh

I was thinking today about L&L DVDs. You know, like the 3 or 4 DVD sets from guys like David Regal, Michael Ammar, or John Guastaferro. I used to love those DVD sets so much. And I was wondering today why that was. I mean the obvious answer is that there was a lot of good magic on those sets. And they'd bring in the L&L floozies for the tapings. And John and David for comic relief -- or to show people the dangers of fetal alcohol consumption. I'm not 100% sure.

I was watching some clips from those DVDs online and they didn't have the same resonance for me and I didn't know why. And then it hit me. It's because I didn't hear the jazzy music that used to open those DVDs. There's something about that song... it instills a kind of pavlovian reaction in magicians to make them fawn over whatever it's associated with. That song was the real star. I don't even think I liked most of those DVDs after all. Most I downright loathed, come to think of it. But that damn song makes everything seem great. Lay it over anything and whatever you watch you'll think, "This is wonderful." Well, that was my hypothesis, and I think I proved it with the video below.

UPDATED: Somebody Figure This Shit Out For Me

Follow me here.

I've been having some ideas for effects where the climax doesn't happen at the end. Or, at least where the most surprising moment of the effect isn't the last part of it. I don't know if this makes any sense. But it doesn't need to for the purposes of this post.

So I had this idea. I would call up a friend and ask if I could show them something and let them know it would require some very specific items so it might be a little annoying but I think the trick is pretty good. Then when I get to their house I sit on their couch and pull out my phone. I turn on my phone to look at the list of stuff I'm going to need for the effect. I read off the list.

"Okay, I need a pair of sunglasses, a quarter, a magazine, a remote control, a spoon, a pair of scissors, a pen, and a DVD case."

My friend says, "Wait... what do you need?"

I turn my phone to my friend to show them the instructions for the trick where it says:

Required Items:

• a pair of sunglasses
• a quarter
• a magazine
• a remote control
• a spoon
• a pair of scissors
• a pen
• a dvd case

She looks from the phone to me and says, "Are you kidding me?"

"What do you mean?" I ask.

She points to her coffee table.

I thought this would be a cool, surprising way to get into an effect. As if I just so happened to need whatever items she had immediately on hand. What effect would I go into? Probably some kind of equivoque routine. I have a pretty well honed version I do and I could just say that they recommend these particular items because, in concert, one of them is particularly psychologically attractive and the others are psychologically repellant.

And I thought it would be easy to do as well. Just have a set of instructions on my phone with nothing under the "Required Items" heading. Then, when I go to read out the list of items, I just hit the voice transcription button on my iphone and list off whatever I see on the table in front of me. 

But, as some of you probably know, when you do voice transcription there is a noise when you start and stop it (even if you have your phone on silent and the volume all the way off). And you can't hit enter to create a list because the keyboard vanishes. Does anyone know a way around either of these issues? Is there some kind of setting I can adjust to remove the noise? Or a different app altogether? Probably not. 

Oh well. I'm going to continue to work on this type of idea and so should some of you. I like the idea of having a very particular set of needs for a trick, and then -- by luck or fate -- those needs are exactly what you have before you.

UPDATE 12:00 PM, July 23rd - As I slept, Jerx: Europe got to work on this problem and I woke up to a few emails that had a solution -- at least in part -- to this. And that's simply to do the effect with my headphones plugged in. Which now seems obvious, of course. My mind had been thinking in the direction of some kind of setting to turn off the noise, but this will work just as well, especially given the fact I would have my headphones plugged in in the first place. So thanks to Marc K., Rob S., and Rob D. for writing in with that suggestion.

Guys, I'm Totally a Spencer!

I was emailed a link to this quiz which let's you know which member of Criss Angel's Supernaturalists you are. I know you've been itching to find out. 

It seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to figure out which member you are.

Do you have a vagina? You're Krystyn Lambert!

Are you talented? You're Banachek!

Do you have wildly low self-esteem? You're Criss Angel!

Are you some bland hanger-on who secretly can't stand Criss? You're everyone else!

I took the quiz and got this result.

Yes!! This is convenient because I had already come up with the title for this post.

They got me pegged so good! I'm such a Spencer. We have the same taste in shirts. And I have the identical leather shawl to keep me warm when it's chilly outside. My lipstick is a shade darker, but it's pretty close. 

The Supernaturalists is, of course, Criss Angel's Crissangelfied version of the show The Illusionists.

Before:

After:

It asks the magical question, "What would happen if The Illusionists had a gift certificate to Hot Topic in 1999?" They genuinely look like they were being chased through a garage sale at the pickup artist Mystery's house and that is the stuff that just fell on them in the mayhem. Seriously, at this point making fun of Criss Angel's corny style is itself outdated. I was doing that shit 10 years ago on my old site. But please, you guys, stand up to him. Tell him this shit is hokey. For fuck's sake, Banachek looked better when James Randi was dressing him.

I'm not going to talk any more shit about them. I know they feel embarrassed enough already. 

I'm thinking of doing my own rip-off of The Illusionists. Just trying to get the funding to make it happen. It's going to star the Magic Cafe staff. The Delusionists. Anyone know where I can get leather pants in Steve Brooks' size?

Here's a fun quiz to figure out which member of the Cafe staff you are.

Words With Friends

One time I was showing someone a trick and I was revealing her card to her and I said, "It's a picture card." And she wrinkled her face at me. So I said, "Is it a picture card?" And she said, "They all have pictures on them." And she's right. All cards have pictures on them. 

I no longer say picture cards, spot cards, court cards. If I have to differentiate them I talk about cards with numbers and cards with letters. This may make me sound stupid to someone who knows cards. That's fine. I just don't want to trip up people who don't play cards or handle them regularly. And nobody has any trouble understanding the difference between numbers and letters.

When giving directions, my goal is to constantly streamline things. If two spectators misunderstand the same thing in a trick I perform on two separate occasions, I will rewrite it. I don't care. I'm not precious about the words I use, only about being understood.

I think everyone agrees that saying "riffle" is dumb. "As I riffle through the cards..." No. "As I flip through the cards..." Yes. But I think the reason people are willing to give up on riffle is because it's a stupid sounding word. So is dribble. Unless you're doing a trick with basketballs or where you fix someone's faulty prostate, I wouldn't use the word dribble.

It's easy to forget that people aren't familiar with the names of shuffles, even if they do them. "Can you give these a riffle shuffle?" "Can you give them an overhand shuffle?" Whenever I hear someone say that in a performance I know that they either only perform for other magicians or never perform for anybody. If you perform for real people it becomes immediately clear that if you want them to do a specific type of shuffle you need to mime it. 

Half the time I see a demo of a trick and the performer says, "Sign the face of the card," the person points with the marker and says, "This side?" Yeah, I know "face" should be obvious, but apparently it's not. Just say "front" or "back."

Bob Cassidy suggests that "only magicians" think it's strange to use the word "billets" to describe those little pieces of paper used in mentalism when talking with laymen. Certainly spectators should be familiar with the "billet reading seances" of the mid-19th century? Well, first of all, I don't think that's quite as common a phrase as Mr. Cassidy imagines it to be. So yeah, it is strange to call them billets. Even the dictionary describes that use of the word as "archaic." Now, to be fair, I might introduce that term to an audience, and discuss the etymology of it coming from the French word for "love letters," because that could be interesting. But just to say, "Write a word on this billet," would be dopey as hell.

These aren't just esthetic points. Yes, most spectator's can figure out what you're saying from context, but there's no reason to not make things as straightforward as possible. And the less people have to do any interpreting the easier it is to connect with them/mess with their minds.

I once heard a magician friend tell his spectator to find her card in the deck and then "outjog" it. The person was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" but he was already on to his next point. His spectator had no idea what to do and it completely stalled the trick. Afterwards I said to him, "Just tell her to pull the card out an inch or so." He argued that "outjog" is a normal word that means "to pull something out a little." I was almost convinced that maybe it was, I've been stuck in this magic world too long myself. So we googled it and all the results in the first few pages were magic related except one that said one of the Jonas brothers could outjog them and they wouldn't mind because then they could look at his butt. So that's the public understanding of the term "outjog."

Have you heard worse or are you guilty of anything similar?

The Greatest Trick You Should Never Do

Never do this trick.

This is for entertainment purposes only. If you try and do this and something goes wrong, you're on your own. This is a piece of fiction written up as if it's instructions for a magic trick. Yes, it's probably one of the top 5 magic ideas ever created and yes, it's actually do-able. But don't do it!

Effect

A dollar bill is borrowed. A corner is torn off. The bill is vanished.

It reappears in your spectator's vagina without you ever touching her or even getting near her.

Imagine

Your friend Meg is coming over for the evening. After getting dinner together and watching a movie she asks if there's anything new you're working on magic-wise.

You: Oh, don't even mention it. It's just going to put me in a bad mood.

Meg: Why?

You: There's this convention coming up next week where a bunch of magicians get together. And there's this one woman named Esmerelda who will be there. I'm not even sure if that's her real name. We've had this kind of back-and-forth thing going for a few years.... You know how some people will get in a prank war? Where each person tries to one-up the other with a more devious prank? Well magicians have a similar thing with this trick called "Bill to Impossible Location." The idea is you vanish a bill and make it appear somewhere that seems impossible. And they'll go back and forth over the course of years sometimes, each trying to top the other person, trying to get the bill to reappear in a more impossible location until one of them finally gives up.

Meg: This is the strangest hobby...

You: So maybe you'll have the bill reappear taped to the ceiling. Or in someone's salad at dinner. Or in the cash register at the next store you walk into. These are all the sorts of things we would do. But last time we got together she really blew my mind. She borrowed a bill from me. Made it vanish. And it reappeared back in my wallet. 

Meg: That was the most impossible location?

You: Well, for me it felt that way. Your wallet is so personal, you know? And it's something I had on my body. So it seems unfathomable that she could breach that personal space. And now I'm racking my brain trying to come up with some place that would be even more impossible.

Meg: Hmm...

You: What do you think? I mean....

Meg: What if you had it appear in an egg? That would be impossible.

You: Hmmm... yeah, I guess... I'm trying to think of someplace more personal. Because she kind of raised the stakes when she had it go to my wallet. Can you think of a place on her that would feel like a real violation of her personal space like that? I don't know... maybe in her sock or something?

Meg: Oh, I know.

You: What?

Meg: [laughing]

You: What?!

Meg: Her vagina!

You: haha. Yeah, perfect! "Uhm, excuse me madam, could you please remove your panties? Now, I haven't touched your pussy, have I? I've never met your pussy before? I didn't speak with your pussy before the show? Your pussy isn't a stooge, correct?" Can you imagine? 

[Silence]

You: But you know.... I wonder if.... It could be possible. Do you have a dollar on you? Can I try something?

Meg: No way. What are you thinking?

You: Can I try it with you?

Meg THAT?!? Uhm, I'm not sure this is the best time. You know... time of the month, I mean.

You: What am I? 14? You think I'm scared of your period? It doesn't matter. I don't even need to touch you.

Meg: Aggghhhh... Okay... how can I refuse this. 

You borrow a dollar from her and ask her if she has a pen or marker. When she says no, you say it's not necessary and you rip a corner off the dollar for her to keep. You place the dollar between your hands and close your eyes for about 10 seconds. When you open your eyes you look and the dollar it is still there. You say cryptically, "Hmm... it must be too big to pass," and you fold it up into a smaller package, hold it in your hand, and when you open your hand it's gone.

Meg: No way.

You motion for her to remain still and your eyes look up and dart around like you're trying to sense something in the distance. "I think it might have worked," you say. A look of disappointment crosses your face. "Actually, it might have just gone to your back pocket. Can you check?" She checks and there's nothing there. "Damn, this might actually have worked. Go see. You might have to dig around in there a bit." 

She leaves for the bathroom. A moment later you hear a scream. She comes back in the room holding her tampon string in one hand with a bloody dollar bill dangling from the end. 

You grab the bill and unfold it. "Does the corner match?" you ask. Of course it does.

Method

You're going to gimmick a tampon so your wife/girlfriend/hook-up/close friend ends up loading the bill inside herself without knowing it. 

Being magicians, I know a lot of you are completely unfamiliar with a woman's anatomy. For you a pussy really is an impossible location. You couldn't find the clit with a geocaching app. So you sure as hell aren't familiar with how a tampon works. Here's a quick lesson. The tampon is just a piece of tightly pressed cotton with a string attached. It often comes in a cardboard applicator which is a small tube inside a slightly larger tube. The tampon is inside this and when the small tube gets pressed into the larger tube, the tampon goes inside the woman. 

When the tampon is in the applicator the only part of it that can be seen is the very tip, like the tobacco in a cigarette. What you're going to do is pop the tampon out of the applicator, remove 80% of the cotton, and replace it with a dollar bill set up with the torn corner. Then you're going to reinsert the tampon into the applicator and put it back in its original wrapper and seal it up. The details vary from brand to brand and you're just going to want to pick whatever brand your spectator uses (and "spectator" was never a more inadequate word to use than in this trick.). The ones I have spread all over my coffee table at the moment are Tampax. These are easy to work with and come in a paper wrapper that is easy to secretly open and reseal.

I'm not going to get into more specifics because you're not really going to do this.

Now you just have to get this tampon in play somehow. I think the easiest way to do that would be to invite your friend over, swap this with the tampon in her purse without her knowing, and then just spend enough time together until she needs to make a change down there. Or if you live with the person you could mark the wrapper in some way and put it in her box of tampons and just pay attention until it gets used. Or you could set up a whole box with Joshua Jay's torn corner technique. And then no matter which one she chooses, you'd be ready to go and you don't need to track which is the right corner to have on you. (You can find Joshua Jay's torn corner method in a number of places including at least one of his online lectures and DVDs. You don't have to buy it individually. It's really good. And I'm sure he's super happy I'm mentioning it in association with this atrocity of an effect.)

Of course this all is predicated on a certain level of intimacy because you would need to know when this person is on her period. But if you're not close enough to figure that information out, you shouldn't be contemplating an effect where something goes into someone's vagina. This is not a tablehopping effect.

You might wonder if the bill can be felt. I think the answer is "probably not." I had a willing friend test this for me. I gave her one of the gimmicked ones and she thought she could feel it at first. But then we did a double-blind, russian roulette style test where 1 of 3 tampons that I gave her were gimmicked. She tried each one in turn and she decided that she couldn't really tell which was which. Of course, some women may be more sensitive down there than others. If she notices it before the trick -- if she comes out the bathroom saying "There was a dollar in my tampon." --you just play dumb. Say something like, "That's a strange way to give a rebate."

The rest is just a traditional torn-corner bill effect. ("Traditional" other than the whole vagina part.) Your spectator will do the loading of the bill herself. See below:

And now you're set for a bloody miracle!