Bedrock: Suspension of Disbelief

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Today I want to go over a fundamental idea behind the style of amateur performance I write about on this blog. 

I got this email from reader ML after the release of the JAMM #6 which included the effect Panther Across the Sky.

So when does suspension of disbelief tip you over?

I can see how Panther Across the Sky can be exactly the mind fuck you describe but the context of the back story is important.  So if a "civilian" did this: Mind Fuck.  A "magician": Wow.  "Andy": I've no idea.  That's my question; and it broader than PATS. It's about the styles you advocate.

The people you perform for must be sensitized to your style by now.  That is, how many times can you produce exact change, or start some expository back story before they realize you're doing a schtick?  I imagine it's a direct ratio to how well they know you or how often they have seen you perform?

Don't get me wrong I think your stuff is brilliant.  I just wonder how you deal with what I imagine must be diminishing impact through repetition.  Not repetition of tricks but the style itself.

Oh look, Andy has exact change.

Oh look, Andy has a nosebleed.

Oh look, Andy has an old diary his crazy aunt left him.

At some point people cotton on to this, right?  There might even by a cry wolf effect:

Oh look, Andy has projectile vomiting.  Awesome!  When does it coagulate into a written message from the extra terrestrial that anally probed him?

I've read your stuff about picking audiences who are agreeable to the style and I get that.  But even spectators who are good sports about it all catch on after a while.

Don't they?

 

So the question is, do spectators catch on after a while?

And the answer is, no, they don't.

And the reason they don't catch on after a while is because... they catch on immediately. 

Because of my attitude, personality, and my reputation, when I bring up some unusual subject, people know that they are about to take part in a short bit of interactive fiction. (And I'll discuss next week how to acclimate someone to this sort of experience because it's not something people are used to.)

So when I say, "Check out this weird box I picked up at a garage sale last weekend," everyone I perform for understands that I'm establishing a premise and we're about to go on a journey. And they trust me based on past experience that this is going to be something fun and potentially amazing. Do they really believe I got this box from a garage sale? Some do, some don't. It doesn't really matter. No one is 100% sure either way. 

Then I add some layers to this in a push and pull with reality. I give more of a backstory to the box. I say the garage sale was conducted by the children of an elderly man who recently passed away. But before he died he went slowly insane and started carrying this box everywhere he went for the last 18 months of his life, talking into it when no one is looking. Okay... now this feels like we're getting into some kind of ghost story territory. So this is totally fiction and I'm setting you up for something right? But then maybe the box just sits on a shelf for the next six weeks. I let the back story fester in your mind. This creepy old box. Then maybe some day I tell you I can't find my watch. "I put it in this box last night and today it was gone. You didn't take it, did you?" And the box now smells really strange. You take a whiff and it's got a decrepit rotting smell to it. That night you clearly see me put something in the box. Moments later I open it and the thing is gone. "What the fuck?" I say. Aha, you think, that was definitely some kind of magic trick. It must have been. Did he decide to do a trick with this weird old box? Or is this not even a weird old box at all? Maybe he got it at Pier 1 Imports. "Nice trick," you say. "Oh, I wish it was a trick," I say. "Then I'd still have my goddamn watch." I place the box on the kitchen table. The next morning the flowers on the kitchen table have shriveled up and died. "This box is freaking me out," I say. That night we burn it in the fireplace. The next morning you wake up and the box is back on the shelf, unburnt, and with something sticky oozing from it.

This is an extreme example of the immersive style of magic and the Smear Technique. (And an example of me starting a trick before I had any idea what I was going to do with it. In truth it went on a little longer. It all started when I found two identical boxes at a Hobby Lobby that looked genuinely old. Any time you can get a duplicate of an item that is seemingly unique, jump on that. The day the box started reeking was due to this stuff. The flowers shriveled up and died because I baked them in the oven for a few minutes in the middle of the night.)

The point being, during the whole time that "trick" unfolded, I never once concerned myself with whether or not my friend believed the story behind any of it. The "suspension of disbelief" is a non issue.

I said this a long time ago on this site: I want to perform magic with fantastic, unbelievable premises and then have the effects be so strong that the spectators almost have to fight themselves not to believe this unbelievable premise. For me, that's the whole goal, to make the impossible and unbelievable feel real even when they know it's not. 

With that in mind, you can see that having spectators who are skeptical or dubious isn't something I'm trying to avoid. That's the attitude I want them to come in with. You can only get that dichotomy of belief when they come in as unbelievers. If they somewhat believe what you're telling them at the start—if you say you're going to tell them what number is face-up on the die based on vocal cues as they count 1 to 6, for example—they may find the experience interesting and thought-provoking, but they're not going to find the experience genuinely thrilling.

I'm courting disbelief with these premises. And when people "play along" with me, it's not because they believe the story I'm telling, or even that they're suspending their disbelief. They're playing along because they don't believe it and they want to see if I can find some way to make it feel real. 

Update: Next Week - I received a good question over email about what I do (how I act) after the effect is over. I'm going to continue this Bedrock series next week and talk about getting in and getting out of this style of performance. 

 

NMBAC

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As mentioned Tuesday, here is a short bonus pdf for those of you with the JAMM #5.

The password is the last word on page 6 of that issue.

Thanks to Alex Schoof for building the tool utilized in the trick. (The tool has worked and not worked for some people outside the U.S. Not sure why that is at this point but, obviously, just test it out before you go ahead with it if you're outside of the U.S. If it doesn't work for you you'll have to make a friend so you can use the original version.)

Car to Tom.

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When we conducted focus-group style research a few years ago (looking into audience reactions to magic effects and presentations) going through the results was always a positive experience. What I mean by that is, it was always good to have empirical data that supported some idea about performance that we had, and it was always good when the response to a performance would be something completely out of the blue and surprising. But the most interesting thing would be when the results of our research would present something counterintuitive to what we thought the response would be. We would then try and dig into those results and try and figure out why things played out the way they did.

I was reminded of one such counterintuitive result recently when I was flipping through my notebooks that I kept during these tests and I found this hastily scribbled phrase:

"car to tom."

The words seemed familiar to me, but at first I didn't remember exactly what it meant. After reading the surrounding notes it all came back to me. 

I've often felt that an under-utilized presentational possibility for magicians is to talk in a meta sense about learning magic and the magic sub-culture. Laypeople really have no concept of magic lectures and conventions and the way magicians interact with each other or how one really learns magic. And a lot of magicians don't want to get into this because they'd prefer people believe they were just born with the ability to bend a spoon or whatever. If that's your schtick, that's fine. But I really want none of that. I don't even like claiming abilities I actually have, much less one I don't. I'd much prefer to paint a portrait of a world where I know other people who have put in the work to acquire some arcane skills, and other people who have put in work to accomplish things which mimic the supernatural, and other people who have shared with me some obscure rituals to make strange things happen. That, to me, is a story that's much more interesting.

To be clear, I don't think the way magic is actually taught and learned and shared is all that interesting. I would never bother describing to someone a real magic convention. But I do think the notion of one is an interesting thing and so unknown to the layperson that you can create a fiction of what these things are like that would absolutely capture their imagination. Amplify the elements of the magic world that deal with secrecy and mystery and then eliminate all the stuff about anti-social nerds smelling up a hotel conference room.

Returning to what I was talking about up top, during one of these focus-groups I decided I wanted to see how much better the response to a trick would be if it was performed with a "behind-the-scenes" style as opposed to just with a standard descriptive patter.

So we performed the same trick two ways for different groups of spectators. The trick was a strong, but perhaps dull, "magician fooler" type of card location effect. I don't remember exactly what effect it was.

In performance A the trick was done with no real presentation, just a description of the actions as they took place.

In performance B the trick was introduced with a patter line I've seen used quite frequently and one that I think usually generates some interest. And that is to talk about the concept of "magician foolers." To tell people that the greatest minds in magic will create effects that are designed to fool the other greatest minds in magic. And these people get together at magic conventions and stay up all night unleashing these effects on one another. And what you're about to see is an effect that has fooled every magician who has seen it.

Now, we had two ways we were quantifying the reactions to the effect. First, they were able to measure their interest in the effect as it occurred in real time via an app. Second, we had them rate their overall enjoyment of the effect on a scale of 1 to 10 after the trick was completed.

As you might guess, performance B generated significantly more interest from the spectators during the trick itself.

But the strange thing was, the average "overall enjoyment" score for performance B was about 25% less than the score given to performance A.

Why would this be? Two groups were shown the exact same effect. One group was much more interested in the performance but ended up rating the overall experience as less enjoyable. 

It doesn't seem to make sense.

And then we asked the people who saw performance B about their experience and everything was cleared up. 

The general reaction of the group can be summed up by one woman who said, "I liked the trick, but when you were telling us about it you were saying how this was a trick that fooled other magicians, so I thought it would be something crazy. I thought you were going to turn a car into a tomato or something." (Hence the note "car to tom.")

In that sense, it doesn't seem counterintuitive at all. Group A had no expectations and then saw an okay trick. Group B got drawn in by a story of an effect that fooled the best minds in magic... and then saw an okay trick. The thing is, laypeople don't have the knowledge to appreciate the distinctions in the conditions of effects that are "magician foolers" so for them you end up building up an effect that may be the dullest trick you perform all night. The trajectory of expectations is all wrong. 

But here's the thing, I'm not saying you shouldn't use that presentation. As I said, people were intrigued by it. If I tell you that this is the cake that bakers try to impress other bakers with, or this is the joke that makes comedians laugh the most, or this is the fellatio technique male prostitutes use on each other, you're definitely going to think, "I want that piece of cake," or, "I want to hear that joke," or "I want that blowy." But if what follows that build-up doesn't live up to the hype, it tends to undermine the whole experience.

So definitely use the "magician foolers" presentation, but don't do it support a dull "magician fooler" trick. See it as a universal presentation that you can slap on to any strong trick you know that maybe you don't have a good presentation for. (Car to tomato, for example.)

Bonus for JAMM #5

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On Thursday I'll be putting up some bonus instructions for owners of the JAMM #5. That issue featured an effect that requires something a lot of you don't have access to: a friend.

Fortunately now you can perform the identical effect all by your lonesome. The "Table for One" Lonely Man's Special version of the effect will be released on Thursday to the JAMMketeers.

 

 

Failed Experiments

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I tend to write about the effects and ideas that work out in some way. But I have a whole lot of ideas that don't work. Things I try that just never come together, don't end up fooling people or just completely fall apart. For the most part, these are not very interesting or entertaining things to write about. It's not that exciting when you come up with a presentation that you think might hide a mathematical procedure, then you perform it and afterwards you talk with your spectator about it and they say, "It seems like it was somehow mathematical." I don't feel like, "Oh, I need to tell everyone about this!" It's more just like, "back to the drawing board."

However, here are some recent failures that have stuck with me for one reason or another. 

Brown Rainbow

My friend has one of these motion-sensitive glowing toilet lights.

You can set it to glow any color you want. (Well, not like "Country Eggshell" or something, I mean, like, the main colors.)

I thought it would be fun to have someone name a color and then they go in the bathroom and the toilet is glowing that color. I couldn't think of a way to do it with a free choice (without having an accomplice setting things up in the bathroom), so I decided to go with a force of the color via equivoque.

I had a decently clever second-wave style equivoque for the color choice. It would begin with an "imagination game" where the other person would picture a rainbow coming in through the bathroom window and landing in the toilet. "Now we're going to flush some color down the toilet. What color should we flush?" I'd say. That had the dual meaning I was looking for. For example, if my force color is red, and you say "Red," then the procedure is over. The toilet is now glowing the color you chose to flush down the toilet. However, if you say something other than red, then "flushing a color down the toilet" means to get rid of that color. So eventually (via a combination of equivoque and a PATEO style force) we've flushed all the colors except the force color. "Now we just have a red rainbow shining into the toilet, right?"

When I performed it, the person named the force color straight away. I had her go into the bathroom and see what was there.

"Oh, that's funny," she said.

"See? It's glowing the color you chose," I said.

"This one little light lights up the whole toilet like that? That's neat." 

"Yeah, and it lights it up the one color you chose."

"Oh yeah. Do you change the color with your phone or something?"

"What? No."

"Or is it voice activated or something?"

"A voice activated toilet light? What the f....why would such a thing exist? No, it's just... it's glowing the color you chose. Look it up online, you can't change the color without adjusting the light itself manually."

"If you say so," she said. 

(I would later go on to perform Faith, from JAMM #6 for her. So I brought her back around to the idea that I'm a catalyst for incredible experiences and not just some weirdo with a glowing toilet.)

I did try the trick again with someone else. This time I used food coloring to color the water instead of the light. So there could be no suggestion that I manipulated things technologically. Once again, she named the target color right off the bat and then went in to look at the toilet. She was more impressed than the first person but not in any significant way. So I abandoned the idea. I think any toilet related trick will seem like a joke, even if it's an okay effect. This hasn't stopped me from toying around with the idea in my mind more. (What if you dyed the water in the bowl one color and the water in the tank a different color. Then it's almost like a two-way out. Or what if you had red in the bowl, blue in the tank, and a bladder full of yellow pee. You could mix and match to make any color called for.)

The Vanishing Icicle

Icicles have a certain inherent "magical-ness" and during winter I'm always intrigued by the idea of using them in a magic effect.

What follows isn't an effect I put any thought into. I just thought it would be funny to say I was going to make an icicle vanish, then break one off from the house and start jacking it off like I was trying to get it to melt and therefore "vanish." 

After the joke I would say I was going to do it for real, break another icicle off and do a flip-stick vanish, bring it back, then do another flip-stick vanish and just let it fly off into the snow behind me where it would be gone for for good. Just a little trick. Nothing earth shattering.

While it wasn't earth shattering, it did turn out to be side-view mirror shattering. As I went to do the first flip-stick vanish with the icicle it just flew out of my hands and cracked my friend's car's side-view mirror. 

Apparently icicles are slippery and not great for manipulation.

The Magic Flute

One of my favorite experiences ever was performing the Talent Swap as written up in this post.

Earlier this year I had an idea for a much simpler variation that I thought would make another good Christmas party trick. This time the person would be picked genuinely at random. They would be sent to a back bedroom and I would explain to everyone that I was going to back into that room for one or two minutes and in that time I would use a combination of accelerated learning and hypnotism and when we returned that person would be able to play any song on the flute by ear.

Truly a random person and truly any song named they would be able to play on the flute.

That was the idea. This was the method.

My friend showed me a bluetooth speaker that was built into a pen. My idea was we could shove that into a flute and then have someone who could actually play the flute by ear broadcast to that speaker. 

The two minutes I spend "hypnotizing" the person is really just two minutes spent informing them how this is going to work and having them practice fake-playing the flute. Unlike most instruments, the flute is one I think you can get away with pretending to play. You just make that flute pucker but don't actually blow out. 

Then you have your real flute player able to listen in on the party so when someone names a song to play, she can start playing it from her location. 

I still really like the idea, but when we tried it out, the sound of the flute just wasn't right. It sounded... well... it sounded like a flute playing out of a tiny speaker in another flute. 

It's something I want to try again with a better mini speaker in the future. I just think it would be a fascinating and amazing thing to see—this randomly chosen spectator can all of a sudden play the flute.

And it's better than the first idea I had when I saw the pen which was to shove it up someone's asshole and then tell people that his butt was like the oracle at Delphi. Then I'd have someone doing cold-reading and mentalism from another room and broadcast it out of this guy's butthole. So people hear a voice coming from this guy's ass that is telling them personal things about themselves and what card they picked, etc.

The Board Room

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While I was in central New York for David Blaine's show a couple weeks ago, I stayed with my friend AC who is someone who has helped this site in numerous ways since its inception. He handles the audio and visual elements of the blog and the magazine, he helps with the mailing and the paypal aspects of the site, and he created the best presentation for the ambitious card ever which is in the JAMM #3. And, in general, he has just had a big influence on my thinking regarding magic because I've known him for 20+ years.

He recently moved into a new apartment and this was my first opportunity to see his version of the Wonder-Room concept. And I liked it so much that I thought it deserved its own post here.

Here it is...

There are a couple things going on here.

First, every unwrapped deck on that shelf is stacked for a particular trick. So when people come over and they check out the decks he can ask them to grab any one they like and he's prepared to go into something that has an elaborate set-up. While I think people understand the idea that you can stack a deck for a particular trick, I think they're less likely to believe you stacked 50 decks for different tricks. So when they freely select a deck, I think there's less heat on it being pre-arranged. In addition, this makes it a little easier to keep those stack-heavy tricks in your repertoire because you don't have to continually build them up from scratch to practice them, you just rotate in the correct deck.

But the more interesting thing to me are the games he has stacked up on the shelf.

These are all 40-50 year old vintage games, so they're intrinsically more interesting than perhaps a stack of modern board games.

But there's something special about these games beyond just their age. AC (who is one of the "Andys" mentioned early on in this board game related post) has chosen each game for a very specific reason.

Each game is:

  1. Easy to learn if you've never played it before.
  2. A kind of "lightweight" social game. That is to say, these aren't heavy Dungeons and Dragons type games where you are immersed in the gameplay the whole time. These are just casual games you play while enjoying people's company and conversation.
  3. Chosen to give him the opportunity to seamlessly transition into all sorts of magic effects.

The most obvious examples of the last point are the two Kreskin "games" in the stack.

First there is Kreskin's ESP game (with the dope-ass ESP font which really looks like it's vibrating with psychic energy).

It's one of the few games even a true sad-sack like you can enjoy, as it's made for "1 or more players."

It comes with a pendulum, cards with all sorts of different shapes and colors, a testing screen and more. You don't even need to transition from a game into a trick with this one. It's all there for you. 

Then you have Kreskin's Krystal. I think that second K isn't just for alliteration. I think it's there because it's probably illegal to sell a block of plastic as a "crystal."

This is just a big hunk of plastic with "yes" and "no" on it and a pendulum you swing over it. (Or you can flip it over where it says "buy" and "sell," in case you're fucking insane enough to make financial decisions based on "Kreskin's Krystal.")

Both of these games can be used themselves as props for a performance, or just as a way to get people to bring up the topic of ESP or mind control or whatever allowing you to steer the conversation towards some other demonstration of these ideas.

The other games in the stack are these...

Besides the fact they're all old, these games have something else in common.

Probe is a game that uses cards with letters on them.

Racko is a game that uses cards with numbers on them.

Clue uses cards with different objects on them. Cards that are put in an envelope and kept secret which you are supposed to discern over the course of the game.

Yahtzee is a game that uses dice.

Password is a game where you're trying to transmit a word to your partner.

You see? Everything uses props that are used in magic, or concepts that are used in magic, but it's all in a completely different context. So he can transition from any of these games into numerous effects in a way that is naturally congruent for him.

AC enjoys these types of games and his apartment contains numerous nods to mid-century style and entertainment so this set-up makes complete sense for him. It might not for you or me if that's not our style (although if it is, he said he picked up all of this off ebay for probably $100 total). 

The point of this was not to say that you should create something identical to this, but to give what I consider to be a really good example of a variation on the Wonder-Room concept. Initially I imagined it as a room (or a shelf somewhere) devoted to weird objects that could lead into magic tricks. In this variation it's a display of normal (but still interesting) objects that can allow you to transition into all sorts of different effects. Board games may be the perfect "normal" objects because there is so much overlap in props and presentations. But I also think it's possible, with some thought, to build a series of effects into anything you have on display.