Book Report - 2/16

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  • Revised and updated the headline prediction (aka Preemptive Headline Prediction or Eerily Edition or I Wrote the News Today, Oh Boy), including a variation which flips the given presentation around in a way that strikes me as funny.
  • Worked on the handling for Talisman aka The Shadow of the Shallow End. Part of the challenge of writing the book is to come up with handlings that are strong and will work in any given situation. This is in contrast to a lot of the methods I use in casual performances which are like, "Drop it behind the couch when no one is looking."
  • Reached out to the publishing company to talk about some different options in regards to materials used for the book itself and for some formatting assistance. It's funny the way that -- when they're unformatted -- the contents can look like a high school book report. But then when you get the proper size and fonts and margins and all that, it looks like On the Origin of the Species or some legit book. A legit book with a dollar bill to vagina trick in it (now with illustrations).

The Contents of the Empty Purse

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I was sent a video of Max Maven performing on television in Taiwan by someone who wants to remain anonymous. Apparently there is a bit of a cult following surrounding this video, and I can understand why. First, the Taiwanese people are a trip. Their reactions to things -- even things that aren't magical in the slightest -- are fantastic. I'm not quite smart enough to understand the relationship between Taiwan and China, but there definitely seems to be a noticeable difference in the spirit of the two countries. Perhaps I'm just being overly influenced by Western views of the Chinese government which is often seen as oppressively cruel and brutally Orwellian. Which is in distinct contrast with the Taiwanese magic audience which is aggressively cool and practically L&L'ian

I went a long way for that one. I'm going to enjoy it for a moment.

Okay, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about screwing up. Let's watch Max screw up (part of) a trick and see what we can learn from it. (I've cued it up to the start of the trick for you.)

Let's take a real detailed look at this web of bullshit that Max weaves.

Maven: At this moment... this purse is empty. I know this purse is empty. Can you open that purse please? Is it empty?

Woman: No, it’s not empty.

Maven: Because inside is one piece of evidence. But do you know why it feels empty? Because nobody knows what’s inside. Only you do, right? So for everyone else and for me also, it’s nothing. It’s a mystery.

Seriously, that is an amazing pivot by Max. His original statement was about whether a piece of paper was in the purse, and when that didn't work out he turned it into a proclamation on the nature of existence and the persistence of object permanence and some type of Schrodinger's Doodle or something.

And at worst it comes across as a hiccup, but nothing much more than that. He just keeps rolling. There isn't time for the audience to really consider if he screwed up or not. 

This should be empowering to you. Your fear of screwing up is directly related to the derision you feel you might incur from it. But the truth is, everyone is taking their cues from you to see how much your mistake should matter, and no one will care about your screw-up any more than you care about it. (This is as much a life lesson as it is a magic lesson.)

The Valentine's Day Mailbag

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Happy Valentine's Day, my lovers. I can't wait to spend an evening with you filled with sexual d'lites. (By that I mean I'm going to stick my thumb in you until you turn red.)

Joe Mckay wrote in to suggest this idea regarding headline predictions and the potential of delivering one on a day when something tragic happens.

If your pre-set prediction is that there will NOT be a terrible terrorist attack today. And there is - you can say "I guess I really am terrible at this".

This leaves the spectator thinking you kinda' did predict it. Since predicting there won't be a terrible terrorist attack would ordinarily be a prediction that would not very impressive.

That gave me a good idea for a good, ungimmicked, self-working headline prediction. You just mail your spectator an envelope and inside the envelope is your prediction which says, "There were no massive terrorist attacks today." But what if there is one, you might ask. Don't worry, because on the back of the prediction it says, "Off by one," a la Kolossal Killer.

Noel Qualter wrote in to direct me to this hard-hitting piece on the "15 Hottest Female Magicians In the World." I'm sorry, the "15 Hottest Female Magicians in the World (with pictures)." Lest you thought that would make a good text-only article. 

I may have made some different choices but it's hard to argue too much with the author's selections. Those are females. And they're hot. And they're magicians. Clearly his google search worked. 

It's actually nice that there are enough women in magic that a whole article (with pictures) can be devoted to objectifying and marginalizing 15 of them.

In my day if you wanted to masturbate to a female magician you were stuck with Eusapia Palladino. And we didn't complain. We shot endless ropes of ejaculate across her image because that's all we had and we liked it. 

We've come a long way. Sure, when I was getting into magic in the 90s, you'd go to a magic convention and be surrounded by ample, heaving, beautifully round breasts, but none of them were attached to women.

Noel also sent along this video. It's a few years old, but I hadn't seen it.

If you like that type of raw, take-no-prisoners, street-wise, hard-core, gritty, gangsta shit like I do, then you might like a couple of my other favorite rappings.  

Did You Hear About the Corduroy Pillows?

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They're making headlines.

In one of my earliest posts I wrote about my version of the headline prediction. In my version your prediction is only half-accurate and the implication is that you did something to make the other half of your prediction (some awful event) not occur. This is, of course, exactly what you would do if you had the ability to predict future headlines and you were at all a decent human being. 

My suggestion of what you should do if some truly horrendous thing happened (a huge terror attack or something) was this:

If that happened I wouldn't switch the prediction at all. I'd let her open the envelope and reveal the actual prediction I wrote and sealed in the envelope which says:

Pony rescues puppy from river.

Then I would look at her and say, "Fuck. I'm terrible at this."

A couple people wrote me at the time to say that approach doesn't really solve the problem. But I think it precisely solves the problem. No, it might not solve the problem of how it appears in your fake world of magical powers. But it solves the problem of how to approach the issue in the real world that you're inhabiting with your spectator. 

It's such a magician/mentalist thing to think, "What if a dirty bomb kills 40,000 people in downtown Seattle... how is this going to affect me." I think you'll manage. I don't think your target audience is going to mind. They're not going to be like, "What a day! First my aunt and uncle get crushed under the Space Needle. And now it turns out Pete can't really predict the future!"

I'm mentioning this now for two reasons. The first is because I have some posts coming up about failure and screwing up tricks. The second is because I've come across another perfect headline to start with in your prediction envelope in case you can't switch it out.


Waiting By the Telephone (and Book Report 2/9)

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In recent years I have been getting more and more into effects that use a cell phone. And the reason for that is this: If I invite a friend over to my apartment, or meet up with someone at a coffee shop, I don't know if they'll have a bill on them, or a quarter, or a pen, or a watch, or a ring. They sure as shit don't have a half dollar or a handkerchief. But I can know with almost 100% certainty that they will have a phone with them.

If you're not doing magic with cell phones, you're not doing magic with one of the most ubiquitous, normal, everyday objects that exists. Forget the fact that it's "electronic" and just remember that one of the best things you can do as an amateur magician is a trick with an object that is in your environment and cell phones almost always are. 

"But everyone will just think it's an app."

A few years ago I would agree with you. The first wave of magic apps were piping hot turds. In a classic example of magician creativity, they put out app-based versions of card tricks. It would be, like, an animated picture of a deck of cards, and when you shook it a card would rise out or other tricks that seemed like a step backwards from things you can do with an actual deck of cards.

But in recent years the apps have gotten so much better and so much more clever. They are, often times, invisible and the magician's phone might not be used in the effect at all (or seemingly so).

Two of the best iPhone magic apps are Earworm and MagicWebFX. What they have in common is that both of these effects happen on the spectator's cell phone.

The way I perform Earworm is this. I say, "I'm going to walk over there and dance to a song as I hear it in my mind, and just by the sheer power of my dancing, and the poetry of my movement, you'll be able to tell what the song is." I then walk a few feet away, take a deep breath, and start my dance routine. It's kind of a combination of Elaine from Seinfeld meets the Carlton meets Sparkle Motion meets Zumba meets the Bartman meets Lambada: The forbidden dance (I ooze sexuality) meets the guys from the rap song in Teen Witch.

Essentially I spazz out for 20 seconds then come back breathing heavy, look in her eyes and give an upward nod of my head as if to say, "Top that." I then ask her to guess what song I was dancing to but before she can give an answer I borrow her cellphone so I can bring up the song as proof. She gives me her phone, I go into youtube and start up a song (with the volume down, for the moment) and hand her the phone back to hold between her hands. 

I have her guess what song I was dancing to. She has no idea. I press her until she finally names something.

"We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off by Jermaine Stewart," she finally guesses.

I smile big. "You got it," I say. Then I do a mini-replay of my dance, and emphasize a couple moves I may or may not have done and how they go with the song. 

"I'm just glad you were receptive enough to my dancing that you were able to pick up on that. Some women are intimidated by it," I tell her. "My talent is a gift from god," I say. "What I do with it is my gift back to him." I nod sagely.

"Go ahead and turn up the volume," I say.

She does and the song she named comes spilling out.

We don't have to take our clothes off
To have a good time, oh no

"That song is right, you know," I say, pulling her in close. "We can just dryhump or something."

Another thing Earworm and MagicWebFX have in common is that they were both created by Marc Kerstein. And I'm pretty excited to announce that he is also creating an app for me to coincide with the book release.

The app is very different from anything I've seen in magic apps. As of now, I don't even think Marc knows exactly how it will be used, and he's building the thing. I don't want to give away too many details yet, but it does one very simple thing, and that simple thing is going to allow you to alter memories and change history for your spectator. The app is used in a particular trick in the book but it has a bunch of other potential uses as well; not only for the amateur, but for the professional too, I even have stage ideas for it. And my favorite thing about the app is that it won't seem like a trick with a phone or a trick on a phone. The app is invisible to the audience, and the phone is just used in a way that helps establish a reality for the spectator that you will go on to dismantle at the end of the effect. Because of the structure of the effects that you can do with this app -- specifically the one in the book -- the spectator won't perceive it as an effect with a phone, but one with their mind. Don't believe me? It's true, you'll see. I've done a version of this effect for years and it's one of the most mind-fucky things I do.

The app is going to be super-unreasonably expensive. But there's a reason for that. As I wrote in an email to Marc:

"The thing about the book is, the smaller the percentage is of people who read my site who shelled out money to support it, the more I want to reward the people who did by giving them a great book with a few extras."

And one of the extras is going to be this app. Everyone who buys the book will get it for free. And by putting a super-high price on it for everyone else, it means it will essentially be exclusive for you.

(Sorry, but it will only be an iPhone app. And yes, I know Android is a bigger part of the market, and they allow you to do things Apple doesn't, and all that. But, unfortunately, for whatever reason, the iPhone is the default phone for magic apps. You're in a situation where you're trying to get gimmicked cards for a bridge-sized deck. You still have a few months at least. Call it a business expense. I'll speak to your wife if you need to justify it.)

So today's book report is that it was mostly a non-writing day. I communicated some with Marc on the app and worked on some ideas with it. Then I took reference photos for the trick, From the Shadow of the Shallow End, and worked on setting up a system with Stasia, our illustrator, where we can easily exchange and track photos and illustrations. 

And now I'm up until 4am writing this junk.  

(Today's post title was inspired by Bleached. They put out one of my favorite albums of 2013 and their new one comes out April 1st. I know I can't talk you out of your love of whatever awful thing you listen to --Hoobastank or whatever-- but I feel compelled to spread the word on things I like.)