Sky Imps

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This is a strange post for me because I'm writing it just after midnight on Friday night (morning? whatever), just hours before I'll post it. That's why this is likely late showing up for you. Usually the posts that aren't directly related to something happening in the world of magic are things I've considered for quite a while. But in this case, about 5 minutes ago I thought to myself, "Oh, I should write a post on that." And when I was figuring out when I should write it, I realized it pretty much had to be for today's post to be of most use.

On Monday, in much of North America, people will see a total eclipse, or a significant partial eclipse, of the sun. (Or so they say. (I'm a flat-earther.))

This is an excellent opportunity to do something.

Now, look, if you're with someone who is already psyched about the eclipse, then maybe you don't need to interject yourself and your nonsense into their experience. But the nice thing about an eclipse is that it goes on for hours, so even with a real eclipse-nut, you're bound to have some downtime where you might be able to squeeze something in.

But in these types of situations I actually prefer to perform for people who are only casually interested in what's happening. That way you can elevate something that might not have had much meaning to them into a more interesting experience. 

Cosmic, celestial, sky-based imps (see the glossary if you're new here) are some of my favorite ways to get into tricks. The sky, in all its vastness, is already a kind magical/mysterious entity. It's where Jesus and the Jetsons live. And space just stretches on and on in a way we can't wrap our heads around. So it feels almost natural that these things might lead to some strange or magical experiences.

Here are some of the Sky Imps I've used:

  • Full moons
  • New moons
  • Blue moons
  • Solstices
  • Equinoxes
  • When planets reach their greatest eastern elongation (when they're at the highest point the reach in the night sky)
  • Supermoons
  • Manhattanhenge
  • When the moon occults a planet (that is, the planet gets blocked from view by the moon)

Essentially anything that happens in the sky I can co-opt as the impetus behind some magic trick.

Just google skywatching events and you'll find plenty of opportunities. Obviously the rarer the event is, the more "weight" it will have as a magical impetus. And that's why the eclipse is such a great opportunity. The last full eclipse we had in the US was almost 40 years ago. 

But it doesn't have to be Halley's comet or something to be interesting to people. 

You get a full moon every month. But there's only one October full moon a year (usually). So maybe it's just the October full moon that possesses the trait you need (hence it's more rare than just any full moon). "Native Americans used to call this the Full Hunter's Moon. They also called it the Blood Moon. And there's this old ceremony they used to conduct...." People eat this up. I eat it up too. I love the Native American names for the full moons. Or anything else named in the sky. Spend an hour of your life learning some constellations and star names. I find people are more interested in these things than you or they would think they'd be. 

That's maybe another post for another day.

So what tricks do I tie these Imps to?

Well, you have to be smart about it. You want some ethereal connection to make sense. You don't want to be like, "You know, every time there's a blue moon... I can do a perfect center deal!" 

I have something planned for the eclipse, but it's a more personal sort of thing. I may write it up after it happens, but it all depends.

In general, though, these are the types of tricks I like to connect to the skies above.

1. Levitations - The idea that there might be some gravitational or energy weirdness during some celestial event makes sense. ("Makes sense" in the storybook world of magic, I mean.)

2. Extreme Balance - Something like Patrick Snowden's Tensegrity, Joshua Jay's Balance, or Eric Ross' Balanced. You may have heard the idea that on the equinoxes you can balance an egg on its end. This is just taking that idea to the extreme.

3. Spectator as magician - For example, "There are people who believe that when Mercury is at its peak, people have stronger intuitive abilities than usual."

4. Tricks with a fortune telling element - Lots of dumb people already think that the stars have some effect on their life so to imply that during some star/planet configurations you can get some extra insight into someone's life, I think that makes sense. One of my favorite things to do is the Spectator Cuts Their Future effect from JV1. This is one of the effects that uses the book itself as a prop. It's especially fun for me because I wrote the damn book and my friends have no clue about that (or that this site even exists, for that matter).

A couple final tips about Sky Imps. 

First, I like to give the person or people I'm performing for a heads-up a week or two in advance. So I'll be like, "Hey, I want to stop by next Monday. There's something I want to try." I may even mention the event in advance. ("There's a new moon on Monday. And a fire dance through the night. Just like Duran Duran predicted!") Establishing you want to try something well in advance gives credence to the idea it had to be done during that specific event. Or else why would you have waited?

Second, it's a good idea to have it fail once. So, if you're trying to balance something, give it a shot and have it fail and then be like, "Hmm... l'll try again in 20 minutes or so. The alignment between earth and Jupiter might be more symmetrical then." (Or whatever BS you're peddling.)

These are both basic Smear Technique type things to push the experience of the effect beyond the boundaries of the trick itself.

It's well past my bedtime. Lights out.

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Cluster-F at MAGIC Live

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Can't believe I once called him "the platonic ideal of a magic lecturer." I still feel sick about this whole thing. It ruined MAGIC Live for me, to be honest.

Live-Tweeting

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No post today. Instead I will be live-tweeting a secret lecture that Joshua Jay will be conducting at MAGIC Live. It starts at 2pm Vegas time, 5pm New York time. I've finagled a seat for myself at this ultra-secret lecture and I look forward to letting you know all the juicy tidbits he shares.

And if you're thinking this is just some way for me to make a series of jokes at Josh's expense, and imply he's secretly in a romantic relationship with Andi Gladwin, how dare you suggest such a thing. Now, look, if that's the sort of information that comes out of this lecture, then so be it. But to imply that's my intention?! Wow...that's actually kind of offensive.

twitter.com/thejerx

Embedding Secrets in Secrets

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Flashback 1000 years ago. It's August 14th, 1017.

You claim to have real magic powers and you perform a trick for people. Afterwards, the audience weighs their two choices:

"Either he is a clever charlatan and we must stone him to death, or he is a warlock and we must set him on fire."

Flash-forward to today. It's August 14th, 2017

You claim to have real magic powers and you perform a trick for people. Afterwards, the audience weighs their two choices:

"Either we look up how he did that on youtube, or we give him a wedgie."

My point is, playing it "for real" is a losing proposition, particularly for the amateur performer. Perhaps you could convince some people you have extraordinary memory skills, or gambling skills, or even some sort of low level psychic powers, but what's the long-game there? You're just going to pretend for the rest of your life that you're an expert at cheating at cards or you have psychic abilities? Instead of using this hobby to entertain people, you're going to do it to try and make yourself feel special? How many gambling routines do you think your friends and family want to sit through the rest of their lives?

A lot of amateurs get this concept but then swing too far the other way. "If people aren't going to believe it's real, then why bother?" And their tricks become meaningless demonstrations that are technically magic in the sense that they fool people, but there's nothing thrilling or romantic or mysterious about it. 

I believe you can have it both ways. I think you can acknowledge that yes, of course, this is not "real" magic. But the experience can still have thrilling, romantic, and mysterious moments. Or, to put it another way, magical moments. 

This entire blog is an exploration of that idea. 

One way of imbuing your performance with a greater sense of the unknown is to mess with people's understanding of magic secrets (see the glossary in the sidebar for similar concepts: imps, reps, distracted artist).

When people think of magic secrets, they think of a series of steps that one follows which allows them to apparently do something incredible or impossible. And most people's understanding of magic is that if they followed those same steps they could do the same thing, at least with enough practice.

But I like to imply that there's something more going on behind the scenes. Not something supernatural, per se. Just something they can't wrap their heads around. So when people ask me, "How do you learn this stuff?" I'll say something like, "Oh, well, there's books and dvds that teach, like, beginner's stuff. But once you get past that, it's all just passed on person to person. You can find tutorials on the internet, but that's all basic type stuff. You know, you follow some steps and do the trick. But this sort of thing we're about to do is a few levels beyond that."

Fucking with people's perception of the nature of magic secrets can become an addictive little sub-hobby.

One time I was doing a somewhat involved, process-heavy card trick for a couple friends. Because this was my first time performing it (or so I told them), I had the magic book in front of me and was reading out the process step-by-step. The trick worked. It was a decent enough card matching type effect. I set the book aside and we went on with our evening. 

Later that night one of my friend's said, "I looked at your magic book while you were in the bathroom."

"Okay," I said. 

"The pages are blank," she said.

"Huh?" I replied. "Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not made to be read by everyone. It's not that type of book. It's for a specific reader." I didn't explain beyond that because I'd already "said too much."

If that seems to fantastical for you, you can try this other variation. Same set-up, I'm reading the instructions from an old looking magic book. Later, when I'm out of the room, someone's curiosity gets the better of them and they take a peek at the book and find... it's The Count of Monte Cristo (or whatever). When they mention this I say, "Oh, yeah... they don't just write up these secrets, they always code it into another text." They'll start looking at the book wondering how the hell it could be a magic book in code. 

You may think they'd obviously see through this as just another part of the deception, but because you don't present it that way (it's just something they stumble on, apparently) it doesn't necessarily feel that way.

Here's another idea. Send yourself a deck of cards (minus the four aces) and a sheet of instructions in the mail. You don't open this envelope until someone else is in the house and you want to perform for them.

You grab the envelope off the table. "Oh, I think I know what this is."

You open up the envelope, dump out the deck, and open up the instructions. 

"Interesting...," you say, "Can we try something. I want to see if this works."

You spread the deck towards you and rearrange the order a little. Then you give the deck to your friend and ask her to shuffle it four times. 

Then you take the cards and cut and shuffle them a little yourself. 

You have your spectator cut the deck into four piles. She turns over the top card of each and it's an ace. 

Now, this is just John Bannon's Directed Verdict, which is described in a lot of places. Including The Jerx, Volume One (with John's permission). 

In this version, the aces aren't in the deck at the beginning. So you don't have to palm them out. You just have to palm them in after her shuffling. Which is not overly difficult. You could even have them under the instructions at some point and get them on the deck while readjusting the items in your hands. 

But what takes this from an impressive trick to something truly strange and mysterious is when, at some point later in the evening, your friend picks up the instructions you left on the table and reads them to herself.

The Four Ace Cutting Trick

Step One - Situate the sitter so he/she is facing the largest window in the room.

Step Two - Place the aces at the following positions. 1st ace - 43rd card in the deck. 2nd ace - 45th card in the deck. 3rd ace - at the numerical position in the deck that corresponds with the day of the month the sitter was born in. 4th ace - anywhere in the top half of the deck.

Step Three - Allow the sitter to shuffle the deck. Three times if the sitter is male. Four times if the sitter is female.

Step Four - Cut and shuffle the deck yourself. Set it on the table, untouched by anyone for at least 5 seconds. 

Step Five - Allow the sitter to cut off three packs of cards. 

Step Six - Allow at least 15 seconds to pass before the sitter cuts a final packet. (You may shuffle at this point.)

Step Seven - Have the sitter cut off the final packet. 

Step Eight - If the sitter is male, have him turn over the top card of each packet from right to left. If the sitter is female, have her turn over the top card of each packet from left to right.

Step Nine - The first three cards turned over will be aces. The fourth card will appear to be an ace to the sitter as well. (Be sure not to mention what the actual card is or the illusion will be broken.)

***

Now, to be clear, you're not reading these instructions out loud as you do the trick. You're just reading them to yourself. Then you leave them out, folded up on the table. Then go take a long shit at some point. Your friend will read them.

And when they do...?

It's not what they expected. It gives them no answers. Instead it brings up a bunch of different mysteries. Why do they need to face a window. Why have you put the cards at specific locations only to have the deck shuffled? And how could the person's birthday matter to this specific placement. Why does the deck need to be left untouched for a period of time? Why the gap in time before the last cut? Why do men and women need to do the procedure differently? And what's this about the last card appearing to be an ace? 

You return to the room. "I'm back. Just parked the submarine," you say, referring to the fresh dump you just unloaded. 

She'll ask you about the instructions. You admonish her for not respecting your things. She presses further.

You say, "Look, I don't know, really. It's not that kind of trick. This isn't like something you find on youtube or even at a magic store. Remember once I told you this sort of thing is passed from person to person? Well, to ingratiate yourself into that inner circle of secret caretakers, you can't ask too many questions. I mean, ultimately, they're just tricks. But honestly, half the time, I have no clue how they work."

This is a mind-bending notion. And if you consider the whole thing a performance, it's interesting to think of structurally. The trick itself is part of the set-up. The magic really happens when they learn the "secret."

Gardyloo #30

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Will I be seeing you all at MAGIC Live? 

It seems unlikely as I won't be there.

Please remember this post and feel free to put it into action.

If you're not in a position to sing or hum, you can use this code phrase to secretly let people know you're a Jerx reader: "Sure, the history books might tell you the holocaust really happened... but my research suggests otherwise."

Whenever a magician dies, I consider stopping this site just to start the rumor that they were behind this.

The Miracle of Life

Does the pattern on the suit help hide her situation? There's probably some element of stage illusion design baked in there, I'm guessing. 

Mentioning Pass at Red in last Friday's post inspired me to play around with it again. 

One idea I tried was using blank cards instead of jokers, marked up in the following way.

This is the true nature of each card. 

After the pass I would take the deck in right-hand biddle grip and gesture outwards with my hands and when they came back together I would have rotated the deck 180 degrees. So when I spread again it would still seem the same with the Upper Limit and Lower Limit cards in place.

I think this adds a layer of deceptiveness. It feels, even to me as the performer, very fair. Like that chunk of cards in the middle is isolated and can't change.

Of course blank cards with words on them is much less organic than jokers, so it might not be worth the trade off. 

I actually presented it as an exercise I was practicing to learn card forcing. That there was a program I was involved in that would send you different parameters to practice with every day. "You don't just learn to force 1 card out of 52, you build up to that. So they might have you practice forcing 1 card out of 2. Or forcing someone not to pick one specific card out of 20." 

I like this concept. It's interesting and almost believable. It's sort of like the idea of a Workout of the Day in Crossfit. But it's some secret program where you can learn sleight-of-hand techniques. And because people already know the basic concept of card forcing, it's not like you're exposing anything. In fact, this trick would just muddy their understanding of how that works (given that you're not actually forcing anything at all). And it helps justify the Upper/Lower Limit cards—like they're just part of the guidelines for this particular SPOD (Sleight Practice of the Day).

Originally I tried to play it off like I completely screwed up. That I was trying to force any three cards other than the three black ones in the red half.  And instead they got all three black cards.

But that seemed to be too backwards for people to wrap their heads around. 

So instead I upped the impossibility to an absurd extent. The first card was selected from a spread in my hands. The second was selected from a spread on the table. And the third by the spectator tossing a matchstick from a few feet away onto the spread on the table and the selection being whatever card the match-head was touching or pointing at.

The idea that the second and especially third selection could somehow be a force is what pushed this into the realm of the ridiculous. 

It definitely fooled people. And I like the SPOD idea, but I don't know if it will make it into my regular repertoire. It's a little too magician centric for my style. But I may play around with it and take it in a different direction.  

We're coming up on the year anniversary of the release of The Jerx, Volume One. If you are someone who asked me to hold a copy and haven't paid in full yet, just know that those reserves have started to expire. If you don't want your copy to go to one of the people on the waiting list, then contact me.

Here's a chart that lists letter frequency and next letter frequency for words in English. It could be of use when designing some mentalism routines. 

Or, you could use it overtly. Pull out a printed version of the chart. Your spectator is thinking of a word that you either forced or peeked in some way.

"Is there an E in it?" you ask.

"Yes," they say.

Now you consult the chart, start crossing out rows and columns and connecting letters with lines. 

"Are you thinking of the word beagle?" you ask.

When they're wondering how you could have known that you say, "Oh, well you said it had an E in it, so I just followed the chart." Like that explains it.

A few people have written me suggesting using a Chinese lantern instead of a helium balloon for Faith (JAMM #6) and Little Faith (JAMM #7). I think that would be cool, and could look great. But I think it would likely illuminate something you don't want it to with Faith.

For Little Faith there would be no issue with it. Although it's a little less organic, because, while helium balloons normally have a string or ribbon dangling down, lanterns don't.

This has nothing to do with magic, but If you're a guy trying to come up with some shared activity to rope in some girl you like, I have a suggestion. I'm on an email chain with 4 male and 8 female friends. I said, "Hey, do any of you want to go as ABBA circa this 1975 performance of SOS for Halloween this year?" 

And I have never witnessed girls more enthusiastic about anything. All 8 of them are now positioning themselves to be my Agnetha and Frida.

I'm not saying they want to do this to be around me. I'm saying they want to have the 70s hair, and those boots, and wear that dog or cat outfit, swing their hips and sing ABBA songs all night.

So if you're looking for some kind of outing to get some quality time with a woman you're interested in, I think the ABBA halloween option might work well. From my limited experience it has a pretty high hit rate. 

(I'm going to be the dude on the right. Not the elf in the platform shoes on the left.)

If you're going to bother doing this routine...

I think a good kicker ending would be to take a cue from Paul Harris' Uncanny or Shigeo Takagi's Solid Cup routine and at the end you say, "In fact, there's no way I could have put the pea under this poo at all." And you turn it over to show that it's packed solid with your real human feces.

My friend has a little gumball machine in his house and I literally ate a half-pound of gumballs while trying to come up with some tricks with them. Like "eat" in the sense of literally chewing and swallowing them. I may be dead by Monday as I try and push this through my colon. If this is my last post, hey, it's been real. 

When I was 8, and playing Little League baseball, one of my teammates died in a car crash. At the team meeting that followed, my coach said, "I guess god needed a left-fielder."

So, to paraphrase him, if I end up dying from eating a half-pound of gumballs, "I guess god needed a moron."

See you next week (maybe).