Harvest Time

As we were conducting our testing on forces last weekend in New York City, one of my friends who was helping out with it turned to me with a quizzical look on his face after looking at the data we had collected. "So... wait...," he said, "are we the first people to ever ask these questions?" The results were so counterintuitive that after the first few subjects we thought we were doing something wrong. But after digging deeper with some of the people in our test, it all made perfect sense. The results, which will be in a post next week, are completely at odds with almost everything you've ever heard about card forcing and magic. You'll want to check out that post.

Today's post will only be of interest to the hardcore fans of this site and it will cover what's to come with The Jerx in the future.

I write this post during the first October Harvest Moon in almost a decade. The Harvest Moon is the full moon that's closest to the start of fall. It's called the Harvest Moon because, in pre-electricity days, farmers working late into the evening to collect the fall harvest would do so by the light of the bright full moon.

It's Harvest Time at the Jerx as well. When we start getting to the end of the year I need to make a decision about the future of this site. And I think I have a general idea of what that future will hold. 

When I was in NYC last weekend, I met up with someone who is kind of considered a guru in the business world. I mentioned The JAMM and how I had been working on this digital magazine all year. He asked me what my retention rates were. I told him that over the course of the past nine months three people who were on a month-to-month plan cancelled their subscription, but one signed back up. So two people, altogether. He was flabbergasted by this. He thought that figure was insane. And he's right! That figure is pretty insane, now that I think of it. 

But it never hit me like it should, because I already just considered everyone who supported this site to be part of the cohort of the best people on earth, and screw everyone else. So it didn't surprise me they would continue to support the site. They were the best.

And I tried to explain to this guy that it's not that people were subscribing to the magazine so much as it was they were supporting the site and getting the magazine in return. This is a point I made with JV1 early on. No one was paying $260 for a book. They were supporting the work I was doing throughout the year and getting a book as a bonus.

It's not that I'm doing something with the site better than someone else is with theirs, I explained to this guy. I was doing something that no one else was really doing. People who like this site want to see it continue because it offers a perspective that is hard, if not impossible to find in magic. That is the presentation of magic outside of a professional performance.

And as I was explaining this to him, something occurred to me that never had before: I am the world's first professional amateur magician.

I'm being paid to perform magic non-professionally. That seems like an oxymoron, but it's what's happening. 

The guy I was meeting with paused me and said, "I get it. You're like a consultant. But where a normal consultant might be paid 10s of thousands of dollars by one entity, you're paid $10 a month by a larger group of people."

Yes, that's the perfect way to think of it. I'm not interested in being a publisher of magic books or magazines. I'm interested in trying new stuff and coming up with new ideas and then testing them out in the real world. Most of you, as amateurs, don't have the time to try out a dozen different ideas with a dozen different groups of people to see which sort of things hit and which don't. I wouldn't either except for the fact that I have people who are essentially paying me to do that for them. What I bring to the table is a decent writing ability, sense of humor, and a wide circle of people to try out material on. But what allows me to be so prolific is that I have people backing the site so I can put in the time to try out these ideas. I'm testing out concepts almost daily with real people. And most of my insights come from those real performances. 

This year alone, between the blog and the magazine, I will have published 200-250 articles and effects. That's bonkers. And yet the list of ideas I have and want to work on is only getting longer.

There are still people who think I should do this site for free. That I should invest 1000s of hours of work every year just for the "love of the art" or some horse-shit. If that's you, suck my balls. 

I'm calling it Harvest Time because I want to harvest the genuine supporters of this site from those who have just a passing interest in the type of stuff that I'm writing about here. 

That's why next year this site will go private and you can only get access for $1000.

No. I'm kidding. But if this site continues, there will be changes to how this it's supported in the future.

2018: No Casuals

In 2016, supporters of this site got JV1. In 2017 they got the JAMM.

The JAMM will be a one-year wonder and will end after issue 12. I will have written a year of the greatest magic magazine ever. I have nothing more to prove there. 

In 2018 (and going forward) this is likely how the site will be funded. There will be three levels:
- Level One will be a small token monthly donation with no further rewards.
- Level Two will be a slightly larger monthly donation, which will get a quarterly digital review magazine (similar to the X-Communications I did during the first year). This level is primarily for minimalists who don't want a physical reward.
- Level Three will be the equivalent of $5/week which will get the digital review magazine as well as a physical reward similar to The Jerx, Volume One.

If five dollars a week seems too expensive, then you certainly aren't getting the value/enjoyment I would hope you would from reading this site so I wouldn't want you to donate anyway. See? It's a problem that solves itself.

I want to go with the top reward being something physical, rather than something digital like this year, because I want the supporters to have something that they know is limited to them. With the magazine it was just too easy for one person to order it and then just share it with all his magic friends. And that was wildly disheartening. You might say, "What, Andy, you never shared an ebook with your friends?" I have, yes. But not when the author had already shared so much content for free. 

Here's the thing, Penguin and Ellusionist can factor piracy in and raise the price of other goods to account for it. It's still wrong, but at least they have some way to combat it. But when you're just a single person selling one thing, if people rip it off, they just rip it off. It would be like if I baked bread to give away for free to my community and to support that effort I sold pies on the weekend. That's all I had to sustain the bread business, my weekend pie sales. And then you take the pies and are like, "It's okay. I don't want to pay for this so I'm just going to eat it and not pay."  Gee, thanks. Hey, remind me again why I'm spending $1200 out of my pocket to rent a space and pay participants for a focus group on card forces?

So that's why it will be physical products going forward. People can still make some ghetto ass bootleg pdf where they take pictures of every page, but those people won't have the physical product in their hands, and a little bit of their soul will leave every time they scroll through the "book" and realize what a loser they are.

The thing is, I don't want anyone's money who isn't solidly "hell yes" in favor of backing this site. I'm not looking to take people's money so I can get a yacht made of cocaine. I'm looking for people's support so I can continue to devote a big chunk of time to this site. So I can guinea pig myself and try out ideas and techniques that present magic to people in different ways. And then I can report back on what does or doesn't work. And then you take some of that and apply it to your own performances an we all get to have more fun.

It's like this old Nancy comic: 

I don't want your money so I can go to the circus without you. I want it so we can go together.

If you're a supporter of this site then you'll be notified in January of how to donate for another year. 

That's something else I should point out. Only previous supporters of the site will automatically receive the info on how to support for 2018. Is this bad business sense? Yes, of course it is. I don't care. 2018 is the year of No Casuals, meaning I'm not doing this site for the casual fan. Just the hardcores. And if there aren't enough hardcore fans to support the site, then that's fine too. I have long-term plans for this site if there is the support for it. And if not, I'm fortunate enough to have other life plans for the time it would free up. I've set up my life so it's a series of win-win propositions. Whatever happens going forward will be good for me.

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Coming tomorrow night: The JAMM #9 where you will determine the day someone will die, open a line of communication with the dead, and turn someone invisible.

We had a good time with the JAMM Muse for October, Jerri. Below you can see her pondering one of the illustrations of herself in The Jerx, Volume One; demonstrating her scratching skills on the turntable; and either successfully executing a multi-card card-stab routine or totally botching Triumph. I forget when that picture was taken.

You're Only A Day Away

Tomorrow morning this site returns, back on the usual publishing schedule.

Tomorrow night, just before midnight New York time, the JAMM #9 will be released to all subscribers.

This is the Halloween issue featuring a few tricks to make people's skin crawl. Legit spooky stuff. Not like, "I drew a vampire bat on this card and no matter how many times you put him in the middle, he always flies to the top of the deck!" 

And I'm very happy that Issue #9 will mark the return of Jerri, our original GLOMM muse, JV1 illustration model, and now JAMM Muse for October. 

She will be doing her best Fred Kaps for the cover.

But since it's the super spooktacular Halloween issue, she will actually be doing Freddy Kaps.

The 88th Parallel

This is going to be one of those posts that won't resonate with a lot of you. And it's kind of a dick move for me to leave you with this before my week off, but oh well. It's one of the ideas that's defined my current outlook on the performance of amateur magic. And it's a lot less crazy than it might initially seem. 

I think, for the amateur magician, it's better to think of every trick you do as as being part of one extended performance. At least if you're performing for people you'll see again (which is generally true for the amateur). I think your performances are much more interesting to the cohort of people who make up your repeat audiences if there is a sense of continuity to things. 

Very few people have written from the perspective of what might be good for the amateur magician. And nobody, besides me, has given any thought about what might be good for the amateur magician's audience. And, as it turns out, I think what amateur magicians have subjected their audiences to for at least the past 100 years or so—a bunch of disconnected tricks that put the focus on the magician's incredible skills or abilities—is perhaps the least satisfying type of performance for the amateur magician's audience to sit through. 

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I've made this analogy before, but how do we approach comedy with our friends? We don't block off a set portion of time, tell a joke, and then be done with it. We don't treat it like a 3 minute open-mic set. Humor with our friends and family is something that permeates our interaction and it's made up of long-running jokes, callbacks, variations on themes we've joked about before. There's a cohesion to it and it builds over time and over our relationship.

And yet, when we perform magic for friends and family, we tend to do so in a way that's no different than the way we'd do so for a stranger at a table-hopping gig. Doesn't that seem sort of bizarre? We introduce a premise that is unrelated to anything in the real world or our shared existence. We demonstrate it. And then it's over and it's never brought up again. And then we leave and they eat some mozzarella sticks. 

My contention is that we have hobbled ourselves by presenting amateur magic that way. And that we can create a different vibe for our performances by presenting magic with the same sense of continuity that we do any other thing (like humor) when dealing with others. It doesn't need to be this weird thing that exists out on an island. It can be something that's woven into the fabric of your interactions with people and it can build over time. 

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Here's an example of how giving something continuity and context can increase engagement.

I have a friend who's really into beer. In the past, when we would go out, he would always be drinking some weird microbrew and it was always something new. I'm not into beer. I don't care about it at all, and so I never engaged in the topic with him.

And then one day he started this program one of the bars we used to go to was having where you would attempt to drink a beer from every beer producing nation in the world. (Like... not in one night. You'd be dead. This was something you did over time.) And there was the card you got with a map on one side and a list of the countries on the other. There were around 100 countries/beers I think. But it wasn't just that you had to buy 100 beers. You had to be there when they had these beers in stock and sometimes, depending on the country, their stock would consist of a six-pack every few months or something like that. 

I think the whole challenge took my friend a little over a year, and I was with him a handful of times as he was going through this. I remember being there when he tried the North Korea beer, the Fiji beer, and the Congo beer, among others. I still didn't give a shit about beer, but now there was a greater context to it all. It wasn't just a random beer. There was a narrative to the beer drinking now. And despite my disinterest in beer, even I became curious about the whole thing. Which country had the worst beer? Which one was good but the most different from traditional "beer." Which one had the coolest label? The weirdest name? How many countries had he knocked off since we last saw each other?

And when he finally got down to the last country, a bunch of us came out to join him in his final beer. Most of us with no interest in beer, but this dumb quest which had gone on for over a year couldn't help but draw us in on some level. 

I've found this sort of thing works with magic too. Whether people like magic or not they will become much more absorbed in it if you can give them some context and continuity to hold onto.

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Here are some actual magic examples of this in action.

1. I have a friend for whom I perform a variation on the 10 Card Poker Deal almost every time I see him. This was Michael Weber's idea in his treatise on the 10 Card Poker Deal, TEN. Normally people do a multi-phase routine when they do the 10 Card Poker Deal. Michael's idea was to do multi-phases, but over time. Not all in the same interaction. 

I've since broken up other multi-phase routines this way as well. It works surprisingly well. Traditionally, the climax of a multi-phase routine can sometimes overshadow everything that came before, or, worse, it can be less compelling than it would have been if presented on its own.

Broken up over time the trick becomes much more resonant than a 6-phase routine done in one night and left to fade into history. 

2. I'll call someone up or text them a few days before I see them. "Can you go through your jewelry and bring the ring that you've owned for the longest amount of time with you on Wednesday? If you had it when you were a kid, all the better." Now the anticipation and the intrigue about the trick starts days before the actual trick starts.

3. A friend of mine works in an office and performs for his co-workers pretty regularly. Earlier this year he sent himself a shoebox full of magic props. The kind of props you wouldn't automatically assume were magic props. He set the box on his desk. When one of his co-workers asked about it he said, "Oh, it's this magic organization I'm in. I have to come up with a trick for each of these items over the next year. I'm not supposed to talk about it."

Of course, tricks for these props were already figured out by other magicians over the past 100 years. But now he has this ongoing "story" he's telling of working his way through the box as it sat on his desk all year. And every time he's like "Hey, let's get lunch together today. I think I have an idea for this thing...," it's more interesting than if he had just brought that item in with him that day from home.

3. Reps, Imps, and The Cast (as mentioned last week) are all ways of extending magic beyond the performance of the trick itself and therefore can all be used to create some kind of continuity. The Cast is especially good for this. If you have someone you bring up again and again over time or a "secret club" you mention (like my friend in the above example) then you're creating a world that your effects take place in. And when you bring those details up again in the future you're building off the past performances.

4. Similar to breaking up the phases of a trick over time, you can also break up the performance of a single effect over time. Maybe one night you have the idea. The second night you try and fail (or only partially succeed). And the third night you pull it off. 

You can do this with any trick. For example, sponge balls. Night 1: I say, "I wonder if I could get one of these balls to go from my hand to yours." Night 2: I give you a sponge ball to hold and I hold one too. I open my hand and the sponge ball is still there. "Oh wait," I say, "A little bit of it is gone." I show you my sponge ball is missing a chunk. You open your hand and find it there. Night 3: We both hold a sponge ball, when I open my hand, mine is gone and it appears in your hand.

It may seem ridiculous to you to take three nights to build up to what is often the first moment in other people's sponge ball routine. But while I can't say I've ever tried it that way myself (with sponge balls, that is) I have broken it down like this with other tricks. And I do think it could prove to be pretty interesting for someone who's never seen sponge balls performed before—the idea that this is some skill they're watching you develop in real time. 

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Okay, now I want to take this all a step further and tell you about a contextual concept I've been using. It's not something I explain to my audiences. It just exists in my mind. I'm not sure this is going to make sense to anyone. So if I lose you here, I'm sure you're not alone.

Late last year I was at a restaurant with a few friends. We were sitting on bar stools around a high table. There was a machine called Madame Esmerelda in the lobby that claimed to read your fortune. "Give me a quarter I'll tell you your fortune. Fortune for a quarter, I love quarters," it said.

So I kept asking to borrow a quarter to use he machine and then I was making it disappear. Actually, at first I wasn't making it disappear. I would just ask to borrow a quarter, set it on the table, and when no one was paying attention I would lap it and pocket it. After a couple times it became clear I hadn't just misplaced them and my friends realized I was doing some kind of bit.

When I asked for the third time to borrow a quarter, my friend Sarah started turning around on her bar stool "Heeeere we gooooo!" she said. I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I was in a tornado. Whenever you start in on something like this, it feels like we get to go to Oz for a little bit." 

That, to me, was a huge compliment, and it became my goal going forward. I didn't want to subject people to nearly indistinguishable card tricks for the rest our lives. I wanted it to feel like there was an alternate universe running alongside ours, like the Twilight Zone, or the Upside-Down or something. And when I was doing a trick they were temporarily sliding into that reality. One where karma exists, and you can test for luck, and items can be cursed, and true love can be gauged with playing cards, and objects can be haunted by their former owners, and prayers are answered directly, and fairies exist, and my spectators themselves can temporarily gain crazy powers. 

To be clear, I don't tell people this. I don't say, "Now we're going to go to a magical world where anything is possible!" This is just something I think in my head. I imagine the room getting fuzzy and starting to skip like an old reel to reel film in school. And then I think, "Ah! We've entered the 88th Parallel." 

(The 88th Parallel is the name for my alternate universe, based on a strange and somewhat "magical" series of events in my own life.)

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Now, maybe it's because I grew up as a fan of the Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits, and Tales from the Darkside, but I've found imagining that most of what I perform exists in this alternate reality is surprisingly helpful.

First, it helps establish the continuity that I've been talking about throughout this post (even if only in my mind) because everything takes place in the same "world."

And second, it keeps me focused on the intriguingly impossible. As magicians, I think we often make the mistake that if something's impossible, then it's worth showing people. But I'm not sure that's always the case. So when I think about the 88th Parallel and some trick I might want to show someone, I think, "Do I want to create a world where... a sponge ball changes from one color to another?" No. That's impossible, but not intriguing. So what might be true in this world that could make that change more interesting? And I take it from there.

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Let me clarify something so I don't have to answer it in an email. As I said, this isn't something I express to people. It's just a metaphorical way of thinking about things. Instead of, "I do random tricks for people." It's, "I'm building a weird little universe for people." And since I've started thinking about things this way it has manifested in the experience feeling different for people. Where I used to hear, "How did you do that?" a lot, now I more frequently hear things like, "What is going on here?" Suggesting the focus is less on what I did and more on the "happening" itself.  (And, as I've mentioned, I'm building to the more intense performances as described in this post. Not just constantly doing the same types of effects big or small.)

As far as belief goes, there are really only two things I try to put out to the people I perform for that I want them to believe on any level.

1. Premise: Andy has an interest in magic and shows us tricks from time to time.
Belief Level: 100% - I'm not interested in hiding that magic is my hobby or suggesting these aren't tricks.

2. Premise: Due to his interest in magic, Andy has learned some arcane skills, met some weird people, and collected some odd objects.
Belief Level: 50% - Some of this is true and some isn't. I like to make people unsure of which is which.

Everything else is just about feeling, not belief. I want them to feel like they're momentarily in some cockeyed version of our world. But obviously I'm not asking them to believe that.

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I find this to be a very satisfying way to think of amateur magic. This is the hobby of magic as world-building. You're building an alternate reality that seems like ours in most respects but where strange and mysterious things regularly take place. 

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And just to close the loop on a couple thing above...

Originally I introduced the 10 Card Poker Deal to my friend as a game I played with my friends when I was a kid. It was a favorite of mine and we would always come up with different rules and ways to play. I claim a misguided birthday wish I made when I was 9 to never lose a game of 10 Card Poker seems to have come true because I haven't lost since (as long as the other person is trying to win). I'm not happy about this. It's like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the gambler thinks he's in heaven because he never loses, but that's the twist; it turns out always winning is actually a gambler's hell. I say this all very matter of factly. (The more absurd the thing I'm saying is, the more I talk about it like it's the most normal thing in the world.) 

So we play a couple of times and no matter how we adjust the rules, I just can't lose.

This goes on for months to come. We try it over the phone. We try it using little scratch-off cards with playing cards on them (this all comes from Michael Weber's work). I always win. I'll see him and say, "I've just come up with a way I'll definitely lose. The cards will be face up and you'll make all the choices." And then I still win. This makes me furious and I start punching the Doritos in a bowl on the table in front of us, sending Doritos shards flying everywhere., much to the delight of my friend. This is like an ongoing bit. We see each other once every month or two. I present him with some new way to play the game with a new set of conditions that seem to make it difficult or impossible for me to win, and yet I still win. Then I act pissed and break something or make a mess in a goofy way.

The 88th Parallel isn't a world where I always win this game because I'm so skilled. It's a world where a 9-year old's birthday wish comes true and tortures him for the rest of his life by ruining his favorite game.

In regards to the the quarter trick I was doing for my friends, it wasn't much of a trick at all, just a dumb idea I had. I made the first few coins "vanish" by just stealing them off the table when they weren't looking. I did the same thing with the next two coins, but now they were paying attention so I just had to wait them out. With the last two quarters I borrowed, I made them disappear with legitimate sleight of hand coin vanishes. All the while I'm saying that I'm not doing anything with their quarters. I don't know where they're going, I swear. I borrow one final quarter and say that nothing will happen to it because I'm going to immediately go over and put it into the Madame Esmerelda machine.

I took that final coin and went to the lobby to use the machine. A minute later I came back and said, "She says I will soon be coming into some money!" And I gestured outwards with my hands and a bunch of quarters flew out of my sleeve all over the floor. So that was more of a dumb joke than a trick, although there were trick elements in it.

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See you next week.

Scheduling Note

Tomorrow's post will be my final full post for this week, then I will be taking my Autumn break from the site and will return on October 6th. 

The JAMM #9 also comes out on the 6th. And then I'll work on that Quinta pdf I mentioned last week which will go up soon after that. As well as the results of the force testing we're doing this weekend. And there's going to be a new little effect added to the Jerx app soon. So that's some of the stuff coming up.

And, apropos of nothing other than the fact that I'm listening to this at the moment and blissing out on it, here's a track from my favorite album of last year, In Excelsis Stereo by Gloria. They're a french band (that sings in English) fronted by three female lead singers, heavily influenced by late 60s garage and psychedelia. This song is called Beam Me Up. The live version is below, here's the studio version. Guys...it's a stone groove! (Be grateful I'm just a music fanatic and don't have the knowledge or vocabulary to critique it beyond saying things like, "It's a stone groove," or this site would have morphed into a music blog a long time ago.)

Gardyloo #35

This coming weekend, in New York City, I will be helping conduct some focus-group style testing on card forces. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time but didn't know quite the best way to do it. But after speaking with a couple of friends I think we've come up with something that will work. We'll have time to test maybe 8 forces. A couple of them will be ones I'm working on. Then we intend to test the classic force, a touch/cull force, the cross cut force, riffle force, and maybe a couple more. If you have a suggestion on something you'd like us to test, let me know.

These will all be mechanical forces, not psychological forces. We actually tested psychological forces many years ago with someone who was a big proponent of them. They don't work. The only ones that did work (that is, the person named the card we wanted them to name) were ones that were transparent to the spectator. If anyone believes they have a psychological card force that works reliably and is invisible to the spectator (in other words, they're not able to unpack what happened immediately after the force), then let me know. 

Recently I came up with what I think is a really powerful new force. Actually it's a new technique you can add to existing forces which almost "proves" the card couldn't have been forced. Depending on how the testing goes on that, you'll likely hear about it next year (if this site is still around.)

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Scott Douglas from Dark Foundry put together this great set of faux-instructions for Panther Across The Sky from The JAMM #6.

There are a couple ways you can go with this. You could print them off on some specialty craft paper, age it up some, and then claim it's something that was torn from an actual book. (The church demanded that page be removed from all copies of the book and burned. This is one of the ones that was smuggled out.)

Or you can print it up on normal paper, tape that into a book of the same size, then go photocopy the book. So you'll end up with something that looks like it was photocopied from some actual book somewhere.

The file for this document is here. It contains both sets of instructions (both hands). The password is the first word on page 18 of JAMM #6.

Sadly, the technology used in this effect is being phased out. You might be able to use the ISS for the final version of Panther Across the Sky in JAMM #6 (the strongest version). But I’m not sure.

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Found this old footage of a young Gregory Wilson picking pockets.

Apparently it was the humiliation of being put in this headlock which inspired him to commence his dojo training

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I miss the days when the Magic Cafe was the only place to go to talk magic. Back then it made sense to have a passionate distaste for the site because you had very few other options. Certainly nothing that was anywhere near as popular. These days, if you don't like the Cafe and you still stick around and use it, that's on you. Now there are a number of other outlets to talk about magic. Go hang out there. 

I was thinking about the Cafe because I stumbled on an old thread there that was clearly an entry in a contest I had for who could create the most boring/least interesting thread at the Cafe. That all went down 12 years ago!

If you ever have nothing to do, go search around for posts that were made in mid-September of 2005. You'll find a lot of overwhelmingly dull posts which were then replied to with enthusiasm by other people who were playing the game. (Responding to a post was a way to sabotage other players in the game. Making their thread (theoretically) more interesting.)

Here's the thread I found. It's a short example of what was going on at the time. Here Steve V let's us know some completely inessential information, that the 9/15 episode of Mindfreak is a re-run.

The Clips and The Cast

This post goes on a couple diversions before introducing a concept I plan to talk about in future posts. If the initial details of the trick I'm about to describe seem confusing, just power through, it will make sense enough in the end.

It all began with a kind of a half-baked idea for a trick that evolved over email in a brainstorming session with JM Beckers and Tomas Blomberg. You may decide there's something interesting here that you want to fully bake. Feel free.

It started when JM brought nitinol paperclips to our attention. These are made of a metal that "remembers" its previous shape. So you can deform the paperclip, then heat it up, and it will go back to its original condition.

Here's a video where a guy demonstrates this. (He also claims that magicians use nitinol spoons when they do spoon bending. I know such things exist, but if that's how you're doing your spoon bending I have a feeling it's not the most convincing thing in the world. "Hold on, everybody! I'm going to go get my special spoon to bend!")

JM wrote about the paperclips:

"Nice little tool for the distracted artist approach while working on papers and drinking tea from a glass.

You can deform the paperclip as one does when working on something else and once you realize what you did with it, instead of throwing it away, you put it into your hot water and it comes back into form."

I liked that idea. It's nice and simple. I think the problem is you would need particularly hot water, so you'd have to do it right when you got your tea. And when doing a super casual effect, I don't love being tied to something so fleeting as the heat of my beverage.

Then Tomas came up with an interesting idea using a few of these clips. And it's based on the notion that you can re-set the set-point for this metal. So instead of having them revert to the paperclip form, you can have them revert to whatever form you've "baked" into the metal.

Here was how Tomas explained his idea, briefly.

"Ok, now I know what would be cool: three paperclips needed. One works in reverse so it gets deformed by heat. One is ordinary. Show them all in the shape of clips and deform one that will turn back when heated to "provide the energy needed" and drop in an empty cup. Cleanly drop the real clip inside so it hooks a leg of the first one. Let someone drop the last clip inside. When heated, two will link and one turns into looking like the first one you dropped inside."

So what he's suggesting is you take one of these paper-clips and change it's set-point so it looks like this when heated.

Then you bend it back into the normal clip shape.

So in performance you'd see three paperclips on the table. In reality you have two of the clips that will return to the normal clip shape when heated (we'll call those the A-clips), and one that will go to the deformed shape when heated (we'll call that the B-clip).

In presentation, you take one of the A-clips and openly bend it into the shape the B-clip forms after heating. You drop that in a bowl, then you put a normal clip in the bowl in such a way that it hooks onto a leg of the deformed clip already in the bowl. (You don't let your spectator look directly into the bowl to see this.)

Then you have your spectator drop the B-clip in the bowl. Now you heat them in some way and dump the clips out of the bowl. It looks like the 2nd and 3rd paperclip that were dropped in the bowl have linked. But really the 1st re-formed into the normal clip shape and linked with #2, and then #3 de-formed itself and now seems to be the first clip that was dropped in. So from the spectator's perspective, two normal clips and a deformed clip are dropped into a bowl, and then the two normal clips come out linked, along with the deformed clip.

Does that make sense? That's kind of the problem, it's clever but it doesn't really mean anything. And the bent clip isn't really too justified. 

Then I noticed the bent clip kind of looks like a heart. If you squint enough. Hell, just go ahead and close your eyes altogether. See? It kind of looks like a heart. So that gave me this idea which I wrote to Tomas and JM.

Maybe call it an office supply love ritual (because paper clips are designed to hold things together). One paperclip is bent into the rough shape of a heart and tossed in the bowl. The other represents your spectator, that goes in the bowl. They hold the third clip and imagine someone they'd like to be with and toss that in the bowl. Then "if it works" the paperclips will be brought together. (And it would, of course, with the two paperclips coming out linked.)

Then Tomas made it even simpler. No need for a bowl or any weird heating elements. If this is an office love ritual you just use a coffee cup. The heart gets formed and dropped in the cup, then the paperclip that represents the spectator. Coffee is poured over them, and then the spectator gets to toss the final paperclip in. 

And that's perfect, of course, because coffee plays right into a ritual with things you would find in an office. 

I fleshed out the backstory. I would tell people I used to work in an office with this guy who considered himself a "male witch." For much of his life he had a little shop in Salem, Massachusetts where he would read palms and help people cast spells for good fortune. When he was in his late 40s, he met a woman and fell in love with her, but she would only consent to marry him if he got a "real" job. So he closed up his shop and ended up working in accounting at the company I worked at (which was what his parents had made him go to school for when he was younger). He tried to stay on the straight and narrow, but over time he slipped back into his rituals using stuff that was around the office. And this love ritual is one of the ones he taught me. Back in Salem he did it with a little cauldron and some voodoo doll type things. But once he was in the office he was just using a cup of coffee and some paperclips. He claimed it still worked.

So the "heart" clip, and the first normal clip are dropped in the cup. Coffee is poured on top (representing the murky darkness their heart currently reside in, or whatever the hell you want to say). The spectator then drops her clip in the cup (the one that represents the person she's interested in). A plastic lid is placed on top and the coffee is poured out. I tell the spectator to remove the lid and dump the paperclips on the table. "It's like tea leaves," I tell them. "Depending on how close the two clips are to each other and the heart, that tells us how good a match you are with the person." They dump them out and somehow the clips are now linked. "Oh wow," I say. "I hope you weren't just hoping for a quick booty call with this person. This suggest you two are soulmates."

I thought that would be a fun presentation. And it's a pretty good trick too. The spectator drops the final clip into coffee while it's in their hands. Moments later, without you coming near it, the clip is now linked on to another clip.

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Okay... Here's a little aside for a variation on another idea JM Beckers thought up using these clips. You give your friend a paperclip and ask him to bend it into any one of 8 "power shapes" that you've drawn on a card. You take out a clip for yourself and bend it into another one of the shapes. You both stir your coffees, creating a vortex, and you each drop your paperclip in your cup of coffee while standing a few feet apart. When the coffee settles you spoon your clip out and find you are now holding the other person's clip. You've created a worm-hole and the paperclips somehow passed through the vortex from cup to cup. Cool, yeah? 

The method: You give him a clip that will turn into, say, a square, once dumped in the coffee. You ask him to bend it into any of the "power shapes" you've drawn on a card. Once he starts you remove an index card with other paperclips on it (each one that will form one of the power shapes when heated) and you remove the correct one that will form the shape he chose for his paperclip. (An index drawn on the back of the card will point you to which one to choose. Or you could do this all more covertly and have a hidden index which you use to pull the proper clip and switch for one already in view.) And you form that clip into a square. The rest happens by itself. Once dropped into the coffee, his clip in his chosen shape transforms into a square, and your square clip transforms into his chosen shape.

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Now, both these ideas are—as I mentioned up top—somewhat half baked. And that's because I was never able to get my hands on these nitinol paperclips to play around with them. I ordered them from a couple places but they flaked out and they never showed up. Tomas had some and experimented with them, but I think he found them to be a bit finicky. Sometimes not going back fully to the shape they're supposed to, or losing their memory altogether after being manipulated. So if someone wants to try one of these ideas, you're going to have to put in some work on your end to make sure it works consistently. I think it would be worth it because I like both effects.

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Now, there is an idea in here that I ended up using a bunch of times since this exchange with JM and Tomas. And that's the idea of a former male witch who now works in the accounting department of my company (or former company, as I no longer have a regular day job). I find this idea pretty delightful. And I find other people like it too. You can almost picture him, can't you? This guy who has taken this dull day job to appease his overbearing wife, but he keeps finding himself backsliding into his old role and conducting some little rituals or fortune telling ceremonies for the fat secretaries during coffee breaks, using office supplies or things you might find in the break room in place of his old tools.

That's such a well-defined character that I found myself searching out tricks with office supplies (paper clips, Post-Its, pens) or coffee accoutrements that I could claim he taught me or demonstrated for me. 

And then I realized that ever since adopting a style that was less focused on me, I had been creating a cast of characters—some real people, some imaginary—that I was using as inroads into performing. People like Glenn (the male witch), Mr. Yento, or my magician friend in Any Man Behind Any Curtain from The JAMM #5.

The Cast is another tool, like Imps and Reps, that is available to the amateur performer and not so much to the professional. It can be used as both a way to get into effects, and also a way to make the magic bigger than the current moment by attaching it to some outside person who may or may not exist in the real world. When I show you something Glenn the male witch showed me once at work and then two months later I show you something new he demonstrated for me, it doesn't matter if you believe the person really exists or not, you still get that sense of continuity which is much more interesting than an isolated effect, completely detached from the world around it.

This concept has served me very well in performance. I find it very natural to go from talking about this interesting person I know into this weird thing they showed me or taught me.

In a future post I'll talk more about creating your Cast and different ways to utilize it. 

My Get Rich Slow Scheme

[UPDATE 2021: This scheme didn’t work. I couldn’t refuse to sell a book to someone just to hold onto it for a bigger payday later, so the whole thing fell apart. There are no books remaining.]

I mentioned a few weeks ago that there were a handful of copies of the Jerx Volume One available due to people reserving a copy and then never following through. Those are now gone. 

So now it's sold out. Kind of.

As I've mentioned before, I had a get rich slow scheme planned for this book.

Step One: Write the best magic book ever. Status: Done

Step Two: Sell a relatively small amount of them. Status: Done

Step Three: Hang onto some copies. Status: Done

Step Four: Wait forty years for the magic world to recognize my genius. Status: Pending

And then, when I'm an old man, I will just sell a book every year from the ones I held onto and that's my retirement plan to support myself in my dotage. 

So, yes, there are some more copies of the book, but they're in the vault (also known as a box in a closet in my friend's house) and my intention is to hang onto them as long as I can. At the same time, I'm empathetic to the feeling of finding something you really like but being late to the game and missing out on some aspect of it. So I would consider cracking the vault for someone in that situation. It was never my intention to be a book publisher or a magic distributor. I'm really only interested in sharing ideas with others who are on a similar wavelength. So, at this point you can't just click a paypal button and purchase a book anymore. However, if you find the site speaks to you, and you really want a copy of the book, your best bet is to email me and let me know.