Slay-Them Finalé

Coming in the JAMM #1

Last year I ran a series called Project Slay-Them that was devoted to trying to get people to perform more. In the premiere issue of the JAMM (which comes out the first week of February, btw), I will be running the last article in that series. This article covers the best technique I've found to induce people to ask you to perform. It's a technique stolen from the pick-up artist community where it undoubtedly didn't lead to gallons of poon-tang for anyone, but I've found it very useful in reversing the weirdness inherent in saying, "Hey, can I show you a magic trick?"

It involves wearing this vest and casually opening it every 3 minutes to scratch the side of your torso.

No, it's a little subtler than that. 

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Rest In Pieces

Imagine

A friend is visiting your place.

"Oh, would you do me a favor?" you ask. You bring out a small box the size of a bible, wrapped in brown paper. "Would you hold onto this for me until Sunday?"

She agrees and asks what it is.

"Uhh... this is going to sound lame," you say. "So I joined this secret game and puzzle club. Yeah... I know. There's this guy called The Puzzlemaster and no one knows who he is, but apparently he's this crazy genius. And if you know the right people you can get on his mailing list and sign up for this interactive challenge he has where every few weeks you get a puzzle of some sort in the mail and if you solve it correctly you get to keep on in the challenge. It's kind of weird. You never get to meet The Puzzlemaster but he holds meet-ups for the members a couple times a year. I mean, ultimately, it's just like this somewhat exclusive secret society and the puzzle thing is the gimmick that keeps it interesting."

"When you finish one of the puzzles you take a picture of it and text it to The Puzzlemaster. If you're the slowest person to complete a puzzle twice in a row you're eliminated from the club or something. They don't talk about what happens if you get booted out. It's some big secret."

"You're into some real weird shit," she says.

"Anyway," you continue, "we're not allowed to start on this one until Sunday and I'm so tempted to open it and work on it that I don't trust myself. He says if we open it early, he'll know. Will you hold onto it for me until then? I thought I could come over on Sunday and we could work on it together."

You shake the box near your ear and tumbling pieces are heard.

"This one sounds like an actual jigsaw puzzle. Usually it's something more cerebral than that, like complex logic puzzles. At any rate I thought maybe we could get together Sunday and put it together and then see a movie or something."

She agrees and takes the box home with her. 

Five days later you show up at her place with some doughnuts. She grabs the box from where she's kept it and brings it over to the coffee table. You ask her to open it (as you finish up your doughnut) and dump out what's inside. Out falls a few hundred puzzle pieces and an envelope with the words "Your Next Puzzle" written on it. 

You open up the envelope and pull out two folded pieces of paper. The first is a short note that says, "I hope you find this to be a really interesting puzzle!" You unfold the other paper and it's a grid of little images.

You notice that all the puzzle pieces are identical in shape, but each has a colored side and a brown side, and on both sides is a little icon that matches one of the images in the grid.

"I guess we just follow this grid," you say. "That seems pretty straightforward. Should we do it colored-side or brown-side up?"

You eventually decide you'll do it brown-side up because the colored side would obviously just look like the image on the instructions. 

So you go through, square-by-square on the grid, placing each individually marked puzzle piece in the location and orientation indicated by the directions.

"This is fun but it's way too easy," you say. "This might just be the first step in a bigger puzzle or something. Who knows."

You continue to put the puzzle together as you watch tv. After an hour or so, you're finished.

You step back from the puzzle and see that it's an image of a woman's face. It's pixelated, but the further you step back, the more the face emerges. What looked like a jumbled mass of nothing up close becomes very clear from across the room. This itself is already kind of magical.

"Huh... " you say. "Wait... I think I know her. I think she's part of the puzzle group. I met her last spring. Her name is...Margaret...I think. She's an older woman now, but I believe she used to be a semi-famous singer or something in the 70s. Maybe that's part of the challenge. To figure out who it is. Hmm...."

You look again at the instructions and the envelope they came in and check out the box to make sure nothing is missing.

"I guess that's it," you say. "That's all there was to it." You shrug. She shrugs.

You take a photo of the completed puzzle and text it to The Puzzlemaster.

A couple of minutes later you get a return text. It's a URL. You click it.

"Holy shit," you say. "She just died yesterday. That's awful."

You let it sit a moment.

You pick up the letter that came with the puzzle and read it again. As you go to fold it back up you stop. "What the fuck..." you say. "This might not be a coincidence."

Your friend looks at you. You show her the letter then fold it part way up.

"That obituary is 16 hours old. He couldn't have had that puzzle made in such a short period of time, right?"

"Andy," she says [or whatever your name is], "I've had that box in my house for five days."

You both stare at each other.

Your phone buzzes.

It's two more texts from The Puzzlemaster. The first is a cropped and modified version of the picture you just sent. The second is just two letters repeated that send chills down your spine.

---

Method

First, I want to thank Leo Reed for sending along the idea that formed the basis for this trick. 

Leo informed me about a puzzle called Jigazo. I'd never heard of this thing. Maybe it was the most popular thing outside of the US, but as far as I know, it wasn't here. Or maybe it was a big deal in the US. If you're like me and you have a DVR and you never watch a single commercial, you'll often miss out on things entirely. "The McRib is back? How did I miss that?"

Anyway, Jigazo is a puzzle you put together that can be put together to be anything you want. It's a pixelated image, but it's definitely the thing you intend it to be. How this works, I have no idea. I mean, I guess I understand how it works (you put a picture into the software that comes with the puzzle and it spits out the instructions on how to assemble it to make that picture). But the fact that it works at all is amazing to me. And you can find it on Amazon for, like, $6. It was created, at least in part, by magician Mark Setteducati—a name I had heard but not someone whose work I was familiar with. 

So Leo wrote and clued me in about the existence of this puzzle and included a really nice "Jerx inspired idea," as he put it, for a presentation. 

His idea was to invite someone over, have them write down any friend or relative of theirs and you would attempt to read their mind. You get the information via a center tear, but then act like you've failed to figure it out. "Don't tell me who it is. Maybe it will come to me later," you say. 

Instead you suggest working on this weird puzzle you got at the thrift store and you dump out the pieces on the table out of a plain brown box. Noticing the instructions are missing you run upstairs to get them. While you're upstairs you find a picture via facebook of that person's friend or relative and print out the instructions to make that person's face. Then you go downstairs and construct the puzzle and they find it's their aunt or whomever they had thought of.

I thought it was a great idea, but there were a few issues I had with it.

1. If the person is familiar with this puzzle (it was at least publicized enough to have a commercial for it) or they google around about a pixelated puzzle or they tell someone the story and that person is familiar with the puzzle, then it all falls apart. They would say, "Oh, he must have went upstairs, found a picture of my aunt via facebook and printed out the instructions." I don't necessarily mind when things fall apart later, but if I can prevent it, that's great.

2. The other problem was that it might become clear to the person what the puzzle is going to be halfway through. And then it becomes a mildly awkward situation where it's like... are we going to complete the puzzle or stop now because we already see where this is going? I wanted more control over when the climax of the experience is.

3. While I love the personal nature of having one of their friends/relatives be the subject of the puzzle, as a narrative, it doesn't really make sense. It too quickly suggest that the whole thing was a trick that I'm behind. (As there's no rational reason a thrift store would have a puzzle of her aunt.) Doing it with a celebrity (an idea Leo mentioned as well) might make it a little more possible that it was a magical coincidence, rather than a "trick." But you'd still have the other issues.

The way I addressed the first issue is that I decided the instructions couldn't be something I went and got. They needed to be in with the puzzle pieces from the start. But how do we do that? Well, the instructions are going to be in an envelope, and then you are just going to use any headline prediction technique to load the instructions or switch the instructions. There are undoubtedly techniques you can use that would let the spectator open up a sealed envelope and remove the instructions herself. There are a lot of ways to go with this. I'll be honest and say the time I performed this (like 4 hours ago). I simply had the instructions folded and palmed and just "dumped" them out of the envelope with the other piece of paper (the note) that was pre-loaded in there. This is not a technique that's strong enough for a headline prediction, of course, but in this type of situation, where they don't even know a trick has started, it flew by.

And now it doesn't matter if she knows about this puzzle or learns about it later. The question becomes, "Yeah, that's a puzzle that can make any person's face... but how could he have known to have the instructions for that particular person in there?" Either way, they're fooled.

Well, then you can't use a freely selected person for the puzzle. Yes, that's true, for the most part. So that's when I had the idea that I would leave the puzzle with the person for some time and let nature "freely select" the subject. I would give a sealed box of puzzle pieces to someone and say, "Hey, next time a celebrity dies, give me a call." Two weeks later, Queen Latifah dies, I go over to my friend's house and we assemble the puzzle and it's Latifah. 

While I liked that idea a lot, it didn't solve issue 2. After half the puzzle, they'd know who it was. I really wanted the mystery of putting together a puzzle that, supposedly, neither of you knows who it is, or what it will be.

And that version wouldn't really make sense. If I'm saying I can predict who will die, then I'd just write that information down and seal it in an envelope. I wouldn't do the whole puzzle thing. 

So that's when I came up with the presentation above. It simply involves looking in that morning's obituaries on the day you plan to perform it and picking out someone who died. Then you use the software that comes with the Jizago puzzle to create the instructions to build their face from the puzzle pieces. 

If you have a friend to help you out, you can do the texting business like I did.

If not you just say, "This person looks so familiar." It dawns on you that the person is one of your puzzle group members and you google their name to show your friend a picture. It's at that point you learn they died just the past day. And yet your spectator was holding on to this puzzle and the instructions for days. 

Is it morbid or profane to "use" someone who just died for such a thing? You know, that's a question you have to answer for yourself. Not in my world, it's not. If I was dead I would have no problem with someone I didn't know using my likeness to entertain another person I didn't know. Nor would I have an issue as a living person if someone used a recently deceased relative for such a thing. But maybe I'm weird.

All in all, I really enjoyed working on this and performing it. Putting together a mystery puzzle is a very compelling lazy Sunday activity. And the idea of The Puzzlemaster, and some secret club, and the notion that maybe he comes and kills you if you suck at the puzzles too much—that all has a freaky, Outer Limits style weirdness that I appreciate.

---

If you haven't tried something in this style you might wonder what happens next. "What.. do they call the police or something? Tell them a mad Puzzlemaster has killed someone."

No. I mean, maybe if I had performed this for someone I just met who knew nothing about my interests they'd think something truly sinister had happened. But I'm performing for people who know me and know I enjoy sharing unusual experiences with them. The woman I performed this for today hadn't witnessed any similar long-form effects from me, but I had shown her other things in the past and she knew I dabbled in magic. For her, the whole thing was believable. She believed I was part of some puzzle and games club, she believed there was someone who curated all these games for people, she believed I wanted her to hold onto the puzzle so I didn't succumb to my curiosity. All of that was unusual, but not out of line with my personality, and not inconceivable. 

At the end she realized this was a trick of some sort and something done for her enjoyment. Like a spooky story told around a fire, but in real time and involving her. She didn't quite know what, if anything, was real. She knows no one was killed, of course, but there is still a pretty deep mystery there and a fascinating story to tell.

In Jamy Ian Swiss' review of The Jerx, Volume One, he wondered if these sorts of immersive effects could come off as a practical joke. Like maybe the person would feel manipulated or "duped" at the end. They don't. And I'll explain why in my Friday post.

---

Once again, thanks to Leo Reed for suggesting the idea to me in the first place. And Leo would like to thank his friends Tomas B. and Justin W. 

Thanks to Mark Setteducati for creating this dope puzzle.

In researching Mark, I found this brief thread at the Genii forum where friend of the site, Jonathan Townsend suggested using the puzzle as a prediction. As with most of Jonathan's posts, this was completely ignored. Due to the time it takes to put together the puzzle, it couldn't be used in a professional show, most likely, but Jonathan certainly gets credit for having essentially the same idea.

And finally, rest in peace Maggie Roche.

The One Step Process for More Engaging Performances

Wait... can a single step be considered a process? 

I don't think it can. Well, whatever, I'll just add another step. Now it's the two step process for more engaging performances.

Step One: Uhm... wash your hands. 

Step Two: Eliminate confidence.

In the world of amateur magic, I've found the more confident you are in what you're showing someone, the less interested they are in seeing it. When people see a magic trick, we'd like to think they're thinking, "This is impossible!" But it's more likely that they're thinking, "This is fake." You can't blame people for thinking that way, because it's completely true. And confidence actually emphasizes the fake aspect rather than the impossible aspect. 

Not only that, but confidence makes things look easy. 

When you're on a date or a job interview, you want to speak confidently. You want your conversation with this other person to seem easy to you. You don't want interacting with someone to seem like a struggle.

But what if you're walking a high-wire?

Person A walks the high-wire and he eases himself onto it and throughout his journey he pauses and wobbles and has to repeatedly center himself and seems to be on the verge of falling off once or twice.

Person B walks confidently across the rope to the other side with no more difficulty than you or I would walk down the sidewalk.

Most tight-rope walkers could walk across the rope as Person B does, but instead they choose to do it as Person A does. 

That's because an audience member seeing Person B doesn't think, "She's really good at that!" What they think is, "I guess that's easier than I thought."

You might think, "Ah, but I want it to look easy. I want to be the guy who makes the impossible look easy." But you won't make the impossible look easy. As I mentioned above, people's default reaction to a magic trick isn't that it's impossible, it's that it's fake. So you'll make the fake look easy. When things seem easy and fake they're essentially pointless.  

So how do you apply this idea practically? 

Well, this whole site is essentially an exercise on the principle of removing confidence from your presentations.  

The Distracted Artist style involves the magic happening with no preamble. The spectators never get a sense of your confidence because there is no build-up to the trick.

The Peek Backstage style is lack-of-confidence as presentation. It's simply you saying, "I need your help with this because I don't know if it's working right."

When I talk about removing yourself from the role of the "magician" behind what you're presenting, it's because that puts the magic outside of your control. And you can't be confident about something that's outside of your control. 

When I say "remove confidence" I don't mean you should be an awkward, mumbling, sweaty mess. It's not your personal confidence that I think you should eliminate. It's your confidence in what's about to take place. Eliminate certainty. Certainty doesn't make for compelling experiences.

This is why overly-scripted patter tends to be a turn-off to people in a casual performance. "He's so certain of what's going to happen he made up a dumb little story about it!" This doesn't feel organic or personal to them. It feels like you might as well be replaying a video of the trick as you did it for someone else. 

A lack of certainty suggests that you and your spectator are going to discover what happens together, in the moment. What happens when we try this gypsy good-fortune ritual? What happens when we follow these weird instructions I found crammed in the seat crack of the bus? Does this new technique for cheating at cards really work? Why is there this big warning on this website not to view this optical illusion three times in a row, what could be the harm?

Presenting without certainty pushes you to come up with alternative contexts for tricks. It removes the one big weak justification magicians use most often: "I'm going to do this because I can." 

How to Remain Anonymous

I received an email from someone who was considering starting a magic blog and wanted to know how to remain anonymous. 

The thing is, I don't know that it's really possible to be a one-man operation and remain completely anonymous. Just for logistics you need a couple of people who will assist you under their own name (especially if you're going to be selling anything). I had help when I wrote my old blog and I have more help now. Ideally you want people who will be willing to take credit for the site if someone suggests they're the person behind it. 

That's the key.

How do you keep the method to a magic trick secret? You can try and make it so clever and impossible to guess that no one ever figures it out, but that's pretty unlikely. Instead, lead people to think it's another method. They'll be satisfied they have the answer and your secret is still safe.

But if you're considering starting a blog and want to remain anonymous, my real advice is "don't bother." If you get big enough that anyone actually cares who you are, it will require way too much work to remain anonymous (having stuff mailed to a third party, doing your communication through a proxy, etc). I only do it now because I've had systems in place for so long to deal with it. But I don't really care. As I've said before, I'm not trying to remain anonymous to keep magicians from knowing who I am in real life, but to keep people who know me in real life from knowing who I am in the magic world. 

Coming in the JAMM #1

I review the OX Bender by Menny Lindenfeld.

Is this the best way to bend an ox? We'll find out.

Subscribe here.

Old School Street Magic

Who do you model your street magic style after?

Is it the casual, enigmatic style of David Blaine?

Is it the approachable, hip-hop influenced style of Dynamo?

Is it whatever this style would be considered?

Well, for me, there is only one name that is synonymous with hard-core street magic. And when I pop on my freshest pair of kicks and head out to amaze the locals with my vital, exciting brand of live, in-your-face, miracles, there is just one man I'm trying to emulate.

You KNOW I'm talking about my main mofo Jim Stott.

And here's a guarantee you can take to the bank when you buy Jim Stott's Ultimate Street Magic Kit.

This ain't yo daddy's street magic kit!

It's your granddad's!

You can get a taste of Jim's street style in this video for his kit.

Oooohhh baby! Now just imagine that understated midwestern pleasantness... taken to the streets!

The Street Magic Kit, by the way, is incredible. It has all the standard stuff, but also some hard candy and a little container of Metamucil. And an essay on why proper penmanship is still important. "A nice young lady isn't going to be won over by a love letter sent over one of those damned e-computers." He's got a point.

The tricks are fine, but it's the tips he gives that offer the most value. Things like how to deliver the proper bone-crushing handshake and what you should wear when you perform. (A sweater, in case it gets chilly out there. And for the love of Pete, tuck in your darn shirt!)

And yeah, like most street magicians, Jim's a bit of dog. He loves the ladies. And you know he doesn't turn a blind eye to the seductive powers of magic. Many of these tricks can be used to get into them panties.

I give the Ultimate Street Magic Kit 5 stars.

Ok, but did you really buy it, Andy?

Uh...hell yeah I did. I'm the guy who was trying to put coins under the shells for the shell game.

You might think that makes me an idiot, but my Pop-Pop thinks otherwise.

Thanks to Jim Stott for releasing this product and providing us with his insights on working the unforgiving urban areas, the ghettos, the projects, the hardscrabble streets of this wonderful country.

I'll close with this inspiring pic of Jim bringing some raw street magic to a violent gangbanger in Compton, California.

Mind-Reading, My Sweet

Coming in the JAMM #1

You give your friend an envelope to hold.

"I want you to go back in your mind and think of a really resonant memory from your childhood or a secret from your childhood or any memorable occurrence from your youth that I could never know. The fewer people who know about this incident the better, but just make sure it's something that stands out in your mind. And don't make it anything too dark. I'm not going to ask you specifically what this memory is, but I don't want to get into anything too unpleasant. Do you have something in mind?"

"Okay now boil that memory down to one word. So if you were thinking of shoplifting a lipstick when your were a kid, you might just think of the word 'lipstick.' Got it?"

"You asked me the other day how I read minds. The answer is, I don't. If I could read your mind I could tell you what word you're thinking of. But I can't do that."

"What I could do is hire a former CIA spy who now runs a private detective agency. Someone who knows all about secret communication and clandestine information retrieval. And I could have him follow you for months, digging through your garbage and sneaking into your house when you're out. And I could have him speak to your old friends, family, former employers, and even old school teachers. He could piece together documents—old yearbooks, timecards, journals, tax records, your Blockbuster rental history from 1998—to create a complete record of your youth. A day-by-day, hour-by-hour account of where you were and what you were doing since you learned to walk and talk. And then by analyzing this mountain of data he could identify a particular memory from your youth that you would summon up when asked to think of something memorable, but not too obvious. Something very few people, if anyone else, would know, but something that stuck with you throughout the years."

"I know, you're thinking that's impossible. I'll prove to you that it's not. What word are you thinking of?"

She says, "Goldfish."

You tell her to take out the envelope you handed her earlier. It's a piece of mail addressed to you with no return address. "A couple days ago, my private investigator sent me that letter. In it is a sheet of paper with one word on it. The word his investigations suggested you would think of."

The spectator opens the sealed envelope they have been holding since the start of the effect.

The spectator unfolds the paper inside.

Written on the paper in large letters is the word she was thinking of.

• Works 100% of the time
• No nail-writing or pocket-writing
• No pre-show of any kind. You could perform it for anyone off the street.
• No confederates
• A genuine free choice of any word at all.
• The spectator can keep the envelope and prediction at the end of the effect.

Am I leaving something out? Yes, of course! But all of the above is true. And the part I'm leaving out is actually my favorite part of the trick. It's a twist in the presentation that only makes the trick more interesting. 

Mind-Reading, My Sweet is designed for casual situations and wouldn't work table-hopping, or something like that. (Although a variation that could work for parlor or stage is hinted at as well. I don't give a full description of the stage-method (as I've never performed it), but I get you about 80% of the way there.)

For this effect and much more, subscribe to the JAMM.

Magician as Spectator

Imagine someone comes up to you at a the bus stop. 

"You'll never believe what I can do," the guy says.

Then he starts putting pressure on his finger until it pops and then bending it back and forth in a way that suggests incredible flexibility or some kind of double-jointed situation.

You would probably say, "Oh, wow... look at that."

And then when he left you'd turn to the person next to you and say, "What a total fucking goon. I mean, what kind of loser is compelled to show people their bendy finger?"

And yet, there was a trick released last year that let you become that socially dysfunctional weirdo.

It's called Breaking Point by Johannes Mengel.

Here's the unnecessarily long trailer.

In the advertising for this effect they mention how believable it is, as if that's a postive. Some performers are so far up their own ass that they think it's a good thing to bend your finger in a "believable" way (rather than bending it at an unbelievable angle or removing it entirely or something like that). 

But you have to admit, Andy, that trick got a reaction.

You would get an identical reaction by dipping your finger in an oozing bedsore. Getting a reaction is easy. Pick your nose and eat a booger if your only goal is to make people squirm. (You don't have to really eat a booger. You can pretend to. People will still squirm. Should I release that as a download?)

There is a danger in magic of getting caught up in the deception of it all. This is a magician-centric approach to what good magic is. "It looks like I'm doing something that I'm not really doing, so this is a good trick." 

At some point you have to consider the effect from the spectator's perspective. 

Magician as Spectator

Usually when you read the description of a trick, you think about what it might be like to perform it yourself. And it seems pretty good in your mind because... well, that's how our mind works. We're the hero of our own story. 

I can't talk you out of being the hero in order to give yourself a more balanced perspective on how a trick will be perceived. But instead of being the hero magician, imagine yourself as the hero spectator. Now it's someone else performing the trick. You're just watching it. When you imagine some other schlub performing it directly to you, its weaknesses may be more apparent. 

Is that clever propless mentalism routine something you as a spectator would be interested in, or are the machinations just interesting to you as a performer?

As a spectator, watching this 5-phase routine, does each phase become more impossible? Or do they dilute the effect? Would it be stronger to concentrate everyone's focus on one magical moment?

Richard Osterlind has an effect where a coin goes into a bottle and then he says, "The only way to get the coin out of the bottle is to break it." And he breaks the bottle. If you think of yourself as the spectator, is that what you want to see? Someone destroy this impossible object so you can have your 25 cents back? 

Do you want to watch someone bend their finger in an unsettling but believable manner? More importantly, what would you think of someone who came up to you and did that, especially if you thought there was no trick involved?

Is there any body part you'd be interested in watching someone bend around in front of you? 

Well, maybe one.

Just be honest.

Be honest, dude. We all know what you want to see.

You little sicko.