A Critical Examination of Pens that Shoot Little Balls of Fire

Uh-oh, looks like we’ve got a little controversy brewing. SansMinds is releasing a sharpie that shoots a little ball of fire. And Ellusionist is also releasing a Sharpie that shoots a little ball of fire. And, apparently another guy who runs a place called House of Fire has been selling a Sharpie that shoots a little ball of fire for a while now.

It’s certainly a problem trying to sort all this out. By that I mean the legal or ethical issues in regards to intellectual property and which of these companies you support.

But I’m not here to talk about those problems.

I’m here to talk about the bigger problem which is the fact that this sort of thing looks fucking ridiculous.

I know that’s just a gif and there’s no sound so if you really want to enjoy the real-world experience of this, make a gentle “pffft” sound between your teeth and lips to really experience the savage power of this fireball!

What exactly is the reaction you expect this to garner other than an incredulous, “You spent money on a Sharpie that shoots a little ball of fire? Isn’t there a foodbank in your area you could have donated to?” There’s nothing magical about this. The best response you could hope for is, “Neat. Do it again.” To which you’d have to reply, “Uh.. yeah sure, okay. Uhm… can you be a dear and hold on for a minute while I cram some flash cotton and flash paper into this hole in my Sharpie?”

Ellusionist is much smarter than SansMinds. In their trailer, which is over a minute, they don’t show a single unedited clip of their Pyro Pen in action. They don’t want you to see how underwhelming it is in real life. Instead, every clip is slowed down to the point where it seems you’re going to be shooting an impressive stream of fire. You’re not. Ellusionist is on a big pre-sale kick for this right now. They have to be. They know that once this is out in the wild and people see what it actually looks like, their sales will pop and fizzle like… well, like the little nugget of fire this marker ejects.

Here’s the thing, when you perform magic you can choose to come off as someone with supernatural powers, or you can try to come off as just a normal person who has learned some interesting or mysterious things. Whether you’re going for all-powerful entity or normal guy who knows some cool stuff, a sharpie that shoots a dollop of fire is not helping you. Instead of “powerful” or “normal’ you come off as “a guy who’s desperate for people to acknowledge his presence so he bought a little trick marker.”

“Ah, but Andy, fire gets people’s attention.” Yeah, so does screaming the N-word or taking a shit on the floor. Getting people’s attention isn’t difficult. Doing it in a way that doesn’t make you look desperate is the key. Look, if at any moment you could casually look around and shoot a stream of fire from the palm of your empty hand, that would be cool. It would seem incredible. But these sort of half-measures—where you have a big bulky wristband or a gimmicked marker shooting off little pops of fire—they’re not going to get you the reaction you’re hoping for.

That being said, I do appreciate that Ellusionist has their typical sterling ad copy to go along with this…

If James Bond were real, this is the kind of pen he'd have stuffed in the top pocket of his bulletproof suit.

Ah yes, in fact I hear he actually does carry around this pen in the next Bond movie… James Bond: Involuntary Celibate. Seriously, Ellusionist, have you never seen a James Bond movie? He doesn’t use joy-buzzers and a squirting corsage to take down the enemy. Admittedly, that would make a cool movie. An owner of a prank shop who has to use the items in his store to take on the men who have kidnapped his daughter or something? I may have to write that.

In response to SansMinds pen, Ellusionist writes this in their ad:

“Many will imitate Pyro, some will even try to sell off our back through their product naming tactics... but there's no mistaking originality, quality or presence. [Ed. Note: Presence? WTF?]

Coca-cola needs store brand cola to show people why it's #1. [It does?] In that same vein, Ellusionist vows to pursue the quality and safety of it's [its] innovations for decades to come... no expense spared.

As the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

Yeah, that’s not what that “old saying” means. If it was about the quality of goods you receive, then paying peanuts and getting monkeys would be a great deal for the guy who gets monkeys. The saying applies to employers (not customers). It means that if you don’t offer a good salary, you’ll get poor workers. It has nothing to do with what the person is writing about in the ad. (Other than the fact that Ellusionist is unwilling to pay someone to write their ad-copy and, in turn, they get this junk cranked out by one of their in-house monkeys.)

They also write:

The PYRO Pen itself has been designed to contour to your palm like any other marker…

Ah, yes, just what I look for in a marker: that it contours to my palm. “Like any other marker”? Hey, Ellusionist, you know how markers work, right? Your palm shouldn’t be involved. Although that does explain something about who is writing their ad copy. I’ve always thought, “This seems like it was written by a dumb child or a smart gorilla.” And those are the only groups that hold writing implements in the palms of their hands.

Gardyloo #76

An update about the next testing session in November. We’ve decided that the bulk of our next session is going to look at controls. I think this will be a good companion to the testing on forcing we did last year. As of now, I’m not sure what controls we’ll test, and I’m really not sure how we’re going to test them. By that I mean, I don’t know in what context the focus groups will see the controls and then what the question(s) we will ask will be in order to quantify the strength of a control. We’ve got some time to figure it out.

It’s probably going to have to be something that’s done in a fairly open way. Meaning we’ll probably need to tell people what we’re looking at. Here’s why. If there were only two controls in the world, then we could do a trick for 25 people using one control, and the same trick for 25 different people using the other control. Then we could see if there’s any significant difference in the way the two groups rated the trick. In that way we could hide what we are testing in a trick.

But if we wanted to test 6 different controls that way, we’d either need a lot more people (and a lot more time and money) or each group that saw the trick with a specific control we’re testing would have to be much smaller. And with a smaller group, 1 or 2 outliers can throw things off to the point where the data is meaningless.

So we’ll probably have to say something like, “People often assume a magician can control their card in some way once it’s been returned to the deck. We’re going to have you take a card and return it to the deck in a few different ways and we want you to rate on a scale of 1-100 how fair it seems and how confident you are that the card is truly lost.” Or words to that effect. Now that I think of it, there may end up being no control that makes them feel particularly confident the magician doesn’t know where the card is. We’ll see.

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From an email I received from reader E.C.,

“As a full-time pro I feel like I need to establish my expertise with my tools (cards, coins, etc.) early on when I perform. However, I also perform quite a bit socially and I had a chance put what you wrote about in your Inexpert Card Technique post to the test recently. I was performing Chad Long’s Now Look Here at a gathering with some of my brother’s friends. I’ve performed this trick literally 1000s of times as it’s a mainstay in my professional performing repertoire. With that many repetitions I could do the trick in my sleep and my handling of the deck is very ‘smooth.’ I decided for this performance to take a page from your playbook and handle the deck as if I was a neophyte. I’ve always had really good reactions to that trick, but this time they were so far beyond the typical response I get. While I probably won’t incorporate that handling in my professional work, I plan to keep it up in future social performances. I just wanted to chime in with another data point to support your theory.”

This doesn’t surprise me. Now Look Here is a trick where cards are bouncing all around and changing to different cards. If your handling going into the trick is very slick, that gives them a partial explanation for what is happening. But if you handle cards like a normal doofus they have no good explanation for what is going on.

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A little over a year ago, I created a fake blog and had it populated with material by friend-of-the site, Joe Mckay. The idea was to use this as a resource so I could plant fake stories in there when I needed them for specific presentational purposes. There are a couple that remain there permanently, like this one which is pretty much perfect justification for the “why do I have to write something down” question relating to mind-reading. And this one which sets the table for the trick at the bottom of this post.

There are also many other potential premises in the real stories that are posted on that site.

A couple people have written to ask why that site isn’t being updated. Well, the answer is that it doesn’t need to be. Any new fake stories I have to add (and I have a few) can be back-dated so they appear in the midst of the run. And the truth is, there is nothing more normal in the world than an abandoned blog.

The only thing more normal is a blog that was abandoned for 8 months, then there’s a post that says “I haven’t forgotten you! Life has been busy with other stuff, but I’m back to regular posting here!” And then there’s nothing after that post in the subsequent two years.

But yeah, as a resource, an abandoned blog is just as good as an active one. And if any supporters of this site want a story planted for something they’re working, they just need to write it up and send it to me.

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There’s a site called Cameo where you can get celebrities to record personalized videos for you and your loved ones. And by “celebrities” I mean, like, Bret the Hitman Hart and Chumlee from Pawn Stars.

There’s also a section for Magicians. So if you want Patrick Kun, Morgan Strebler, or Murray Sawchuck to say something to you, well your prayers have been answered.

Morgan Strebler’s page is odd. In one of his promo videos he says he’ll do a trick for you in the videos you purchase, then in the description at the top of his page he says, “I can’t perform magic tricks in the videos. Sorry.” Uh, what? Why would I buy a video from a magician if he can’t do a little magic in the video? What am I paying for then? I can’t jack-off to it (I promise, I tried). So what am I going to do with a video of Morgan not doing a trick?

Murray Sawchuck will actually teach you a trick, as you can see from the example videos on his page. It won’t be a good trick, but it’s something. Perhaps we can pay Murray to do a follow-up to the video where he pretends to do a trick for a homeless guy.

What should we do with Patrick Kun? I feel like we should make a series of video requests, and each one is just slightly more debauched than the last. Like first we’re just getting him to undo his shirt buttons a little more each time. Then we’re like, “You should drink a beer before you shoot the video, loosen yourself up.” And we do, like, 100 video requests. And each one just makes him slightly uncomfortable, but nothing too significant. But by video 100 he’s high on amyl nitrate poppers and engaging in hardcore gay sex on camera. And we’ve got enough footage to make a film! Cut to, 5 years later, he’s sobered up and he’s walking down the street in Greenwich Village and he passes a sex shop and sees a porn DVD in the window with his image on it that he has zero recollection of ever filming. Yeah, let’s do that. It’ll be funny!

Rock the Sure Shot

This isn’t the type of trick I do anymore, and it likely would have rotted in my notebooks from 5-10 years ago if I hadn’t been reminded of it by a recent email. It’s a little too “look what I can do,” for my current style. But it may fit your style. And I think it could probably work well in a formal show. “Look what I can do” is appropriate for a professional performance, because presumably that’s what they’re there for: to see what you can do.

So, while I’ve only ever done this at home or at work, in a casual situation, I’ll describe it as a stage piece. I’m just making up this “script” as I write. When I performed the effect in real life there wasn’t much of a script.

On stage there is a small table with a stack of printer paper and a cloth bag.

You pick up one of the sheets of paper and give it a glance. “These are some of the TPS reports from my old day-job.” You look over the paper a little bit and cluck your tongue against the roof of your mouth. “This is not… looking… too…good,” you mumble, essentially to yourself. “Well, screw it,” you say, snapping into presentation mode. You crumple up the piece of paper and toss it into the crowd and maybe have it tossed to a few more people.

“I spent years looking over those reports. Years of my life. Years of my life at a job that… well… I can’t say I hated it. It was a job I had no feelings about whatsoever. If I hated it, maybe I’d have left much sooner than I did. Or at the very least, I’d have some memories of the time I spent there. Instead it’s just like, ‘Huh? I worked where? Oh yeah, that’s right. For like a decade. I vaguely remember.’”

You ask the person who now has the paper ball to come on stage.

“I knew it was time to leave and pursue my dream of becoming a performer because I was getting too good at work. Let me clarify. I wasn’t too good at my job. I was getting too good at something I was doing to avoid my job while I was at work. I was getting too good… at waste paper basketball,” you say, and mime a jump-shot. As you do, a small metal trash can slides in from off-stage.

“I was a prodigy. I was an office sensation. I organized tournaments with cash prizes that 100s of people participated in. That company may have taken years from me, but I took 1000s of man-hours from it.”

“I’ll tell you my secret. What made me so good wasn’t because I could always hit the shot. What made me the best was I got good at reading everyone else’s abilities. Abnormally good at it. And if I sensed I found a good player who was bound to have a hot hand that day, I’d just avoid playing him or her until I sensed they had cooled off a bit. The cowards way out. But it worked.”

“I feel like I’ve got you sized up,” you say. “I’m going to make a quick prediction.” You turn your back briefly and write something on one of the sheets of paper, fold it and place it somewhere. You also do something with the contents of the small bag that’s on the table. As you do this, you say: “I’m going to have you take 5 shots at the basket. I’m going to tilt things in my favor a bit by having you wear this around your neck, which should throw off your balance just a little in a way I think will help me.”

The audience sees that the cloth bag is actually hanging on a loop of thin rope which you put around the spectator’s head, like a necklace. The bag is about the size of a baseball and there is something of some weight in it.

The audience member takes five shots with five different paper balls. You make a big deal of letting them choose the order in which they take the balls and shoot them. Let’s say they make two of the shots.

You open your prediction and reveal that it says, “You will make two out of five shots.”

“See?” you say. “I knew it the moment I saw you. You’re clearly no athlete. More of a book guy, I’m guessing. Two out of five. It was clear as day.”

“But maybe it was a lucky guess. It wasn’t, but maybe it seems like it could have been. I’ll show you something that couldn’t be a guess on my part. Something that could only be emblematic of my mastery of this game down to the inch.”

You ask the audience member to take any two of the three paper balls remaining on the floor and toss them in the trash can, leaving just one final ball on the floor. You hand a fabric measuring tape to the spectator and have them measure how many inches the ball is from the can. It’s 16 inches.

“I couldn’t have known you’d get two out of five in the basket. I couldn’t have known which two of the three that you missed you’d toss in the basket when given the choice. I couldn’t have known that particular ball would remain on the floor. And I certainly couldn’t have known how far one random ball out of five would end up from a trash can after you threw it. But… [pause] but you see, I had this job once. A job that didn’t really suck my soul, but it did suck away a lot of the years of my life. Which may be just as bad. And I became very good at this game as a byproduct of avoiding that job. So good, in fact, I could foresee any matter of chance or decision related to the game. Can you remove the bag from around your neck and dump the contents into my hands?”

The audience member does that, and into your hands falls a retractable metal tape measure.

“Before you even took your shots I made a prediction on this tape measure. [You show a marker and put it back in your pocket.] On a specific portion of the tape that is now safely wound up inside.”

You slide out the measuring tape and right on the 16 inch mark is a big black X written in marker.

You grab a paper ball and walk the audience member part-way back to his seat. “Thanks for your help. Everyone give Chris a big round of applause,” you say and toss the paper ball in your hands behind you and over your head where it travels 25 feet, right into the trash can.

Method

The primary method I was using when doing this informally is a trick called Heightened Senses by Joshua Jay. It’s on a couple of his DVDs including his Methods in Magic DVD which seems to be sold out in most places, but you can get the download here for $20 (it’s well worth it, everything on the DVD is good). If I remember correctly, Josh uses it to predict a random spectator’s height. Since I perform for people I know, I realized that would be somewhat less than impressive.

But I still loved the method and would use it as a way to predict the length of—or distance between—other things. I started using it with backyard games like horseshoes and bocce ball. And that morphed into doing it with paper balls and a wastepaper basket.

When doing it with paper balls and a trash can, I think the sweet spot is to be about 15-20 feet from the can. You don’t want them to easily make every shot, but you don’t want them to have misses that are 20 feet away from the can either.

The initial prediction—how many they get in the basket—is any kind of one in six out you want to use. I just used an index and a switch when I was doing it close-up. If you’re doing it on stage, obviously you’ll want something bigger. You could do something more complicated and predict which shots they hit, but I never bothered with that. I don’t mind if that first prediction is underwhelming.

Something appeals to me about predicting the layout of missed waste paper basketball shots. It’s fun but also clearly impossible. And it’s an example of an Unknown Personal, which I feel make for the strongest types of prediction effects.

I think Joshua Jay’s effect is good for a parlor type setting or a small stage show where the audience is pretty close. For a larger-scale show (something big enough to have a projection screen) you could have the person toss five different colored paper balls. Maybe have them do it over their head, facing away from the can, so they’re more spread out. Then an overhead camera shot shows the distribution of the different colored balls around the basket. And then you could reveal you predicted the exact layout of the balls with a clear prediction case or a letter you mailed to the CEO of the company or whatever.

The last part of the effect I’ve never actually done. I just thought it would be cool to end the trick with an impossible seeming shot. There has to be some way to rig that up to make it work. In an actual proper show, I mean. Maybe with some kind of reel, or some variation on the type of set-up you use to make a handkerchief fly across the stage. The difficult thing would be getting the trajectory to look natural. But if you’re more of a magician than a mentalist it wouldn’t be an issue if the ball looked like it was “magically” floating into the can. In fact, if you’re a magician and don’t do strict mentalism, the better way to go with it might be to legitimately toss the ball over your shoulder and try and get as close to the can as possible. Then, when you (likely) miss, you point at the ball with the index and middle finger of one hand and give a gesture like, “get in there,” and the ball jumps from where it is into the can.

A Love Letter to the Best Deal In Magic

If you’re looking for value for your money, there is one purchase that is far and away the best deal in magic today. And that is a digital subscription to Genii magazine for $35.

I know your first thought is: Ah, I never thought I’d see it. Andy sold out. Branded content on the Jerx Blog. Sad.

No, this is a genuine recommendation, not an ad. Richard Kaufman doesn’t even like me. He once talked about suing me when I had my old blog because I repurposed some of his old disco-daddy illustrations of himself from the first year of Apocalypse to make a comic strip about how to seduce women. (“Scrub your dong with an anti-microbial soap to make it palatable to even the pickiest of ladies.” “Be generous when portioning out cocaine for your partner.” “Offer her a choice of cock-rings so the lovemaking experience feels personalized to her.” “If none of that works, smack a bitch upside the head.”)

You might say: Well, $35 for 12 issues of a magazine seems like a good deal, but not quite “the best deal in magic.”

But here’s the thing, you don’t just get the next 12 issues, you get all the back issues too. All 80+ years of them. And you get all the 300 back issues of MAGIC magazine as well. It’s a goldmine. Or, at the very least, a mine with some gold in it.

Do the math. Just looking at the tricks alone. Let’s say we have 1200 issues here. We’ll underestimate it at 5 tricks per issue. That’s 6000 tricks. Even if we say half are garbage. 30% are okay. 15% are good. And only 5% are great. That’s 300 great tricks for $35.00. That’s 12 cents a trick!

Of course, it’s only a good deal if you enjoy the process of digging through those 1200 back issues. Obviously if that doesn’t appeal to you then it’s not a good deal at any price.

You might wonder why I’m telling you about Genii. Surely everyone already knows about it. Well, no. My audience is about 60% hardcore magic guys, and probably 40% younger people, or people who’ve always had an interest in magic but didn’t get into the more traditional style. These people, oftentimes, are too young or removed from the magic scene to have gone to a magic store and come across a magic magazine. And it’s for them I’m trying to highlight what a good deal this is.

My friend gets me a subscription every year for my birthday and it’s truly almost overwhelming how much content there is. At one point I had this brief notion that I would start-up a small sister-site where we’d go through the entire run of Genii magazine, looking at a different issue each week and discussing it, like a mini-book club. Then I realized it would take 20 years to do that. (And another 4 years after that to do the issues that had come out during those 20 years.)

So where do you start with all this if you’re new to it? I don’t know. Next year, my plan is to start with issue one and work my way through. It will take a few years even if I go through one issue a day. That’s probably a little too much if you’re not really interested in this sort of thing.

I’m not suggesting anyone go in and read every word. A lot of it doesn’t hold up and, in fact, wasn’t very interesting at the time. Recaps of magic conventions are only worth it when there’s some controversy that accompanies them. A lot of the profiles on magicians are kind of dull. My favorite parts are essentially everything outside of the main articles. I like the ads, the letters to the editor, the reviews, and the trick sections.

The columnists can be hit and miss, but finding the ones that speak to you is part of the fun. I remember enjoying the Gary Ouellet column that used to be on the last page in Genii. I was a big fan of the Harkey For A Year column (and, frankly, any of Harkey’s ideas that were put into print I found interesting to think about, even if I didn’t perform a ton of them). Michael Close’s reviews in MAGIC set the standard for reviews in a magic magazine. Bob Farmer’s columns in both MAGIC and Genii were always worthwhile. And Max Maven’s column in MAGIC was another favorite of mine. (I still fondly remember when he openly questioned why professionals are expected to hang out with amateurs at magic conventions, or just in magic in general. Oh, sweet, beautiful, stupid, Max… what was the response you thought you’d get with this column? Actually he probably got the exact response he was expecting: a bunch of angry magic nerds. You can follow that whole ordeal here. As an amateur myself, and someone who would generally prefer to spend time with an assistant manager at Long John Silvers than a professional magician, I have zero issue with the point Max was making. The only disagreement I have with his column is the notion that, “this is how things are done in the circus” is a compelling argument for anything. Ah, yes… what could be more vibrant and thriving than circus culture! Let’s emulate that.)

Now, younger guys will undoubtedly find a lot of what they read in the magazine confusing. “Why does it look like some of Genii was being written on a typewriter well into the late 80s?” “Why was a single magic VHS $90?” “Are these people genuinely pissed off because Genii had a cartoon image of the devil on the 666th issue?” Spoiler: They were. 

One of the fun things about going back and reading the magazines is to watch the trends come and go, both the trends within magic and general societal trends (of which magicians are consistently about 10 years behind).

“Wow, sweet! Totally 80s, my man! Looks like we got ourselves a Motley Crue fan here! Take that, Reagan!”

No, no. This is an ad from 1992.

For me, peek-magic-magazine time was the early to mid 90s. That’s when MAGIC Magazine had arrived on the scene, so Genii had to step up their game. They were like, “Huh? We actually have to create a cover for each issue? We can’t just use that same depressing graphic in a different color with a black and white promo shot slotted in there?”

The quality of MAGIC Magazine was immediately so much better and it took a long time for Genii to catch up. They didn’t really even get close until Kaufman took over in the late 90s. 

If you’re under 35 it will probably be hard to wrap your head around the importance of a magic magazine in the early-mid 90s. If you wanted to know what the current goings-on were in magic, that was really your only option. Email and the Internet were still in their nascent stages. So you would just sit with that magazine for four full weeks, digesting every page multiple times (at least, that was true for me). What was your other option? Go to the library and check out that one Bill Tarr book for the 40th time? It was a different world. We jacked off to aerobics shows. We were starved for content. 

And yet, I definitely have a warm feeling for those days. The effects I write about here are often about slowing down the pace of an interaction. And part of me likes the slow pace of those days with just a monthly magazine to connect you to the modern magic world. I suspect something that will seem ridiculous to the younger generation is that an article would come out and a reader would have something to say about it, and he’d write a fucking letter on paper and send it into the magazine. They’d run that letter 2-3 months after the original article had come out. Then someone would respond to that letter and that would run another 2 months later. An interaction that would have happened in 8 minutes over twitter took half a year.

Now, I understand a lot of people won’t find reading 20 years of Hank Lee ads all that compelling. For them it will all come down to the tricks. And, as I said earlier, there is enough value in the tricks alone to make this worth your while. You’ll have to do some digging for them, but you can find tricks that are just as good as an instant download you’d pay $15 for on its own. In fact, a lot of the tricks that were originally printed in Genii and MAGIC did go on to be proper releases on their own. Again, for the younger guys, keep this in mind: It’s 1992 and you’ve come up with this great trick. What are you going to do with it? Wait 30 years until you have enough material to write a book? You can’t film a video of it on your phone and send it to Penguin to market it for you. Putting an ad in the magazines and selling it yourself is a gigantic pain in the ass. So you send it off to one of the magazines to publish and you get your 15 minutes of fame. Ok, it’s more like 4 minutes of mild notoriety, but still, it’s something. So don’t feel like you’re getting the dregs, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. (My favorite trick “section” is Joshua Jay’s 12-year run in MAGIC Magazine, which is, admittedly, a pretty basic bitch opinion to have, but there really is a lot of good stuff there.)

Here’s where you can purchase a digital subscription.

I would say, “Tell them Andy at The Jerx sent you,” but that’s probably a bad idea. I don’t want Kaufman to get all bugged out that I misappropriated his illustrations again. So let’s just keep it between us.

“Byeeeeeee!”

Gardyloo #75

My pal, Marc Kerstein, has released a new ebook called “Tricks With Your Phone.” Which is a really weird title because it’s a collection of thimble magic. What the F? No… it’s not. I’m just pulling your little dingus. Actually, the book looks at a new feature in the most recent iOS for iPhone and its uses for a number of different types of effects (with the potential for countless more). If you have an iPhone and if you’re at all into the idea of doing magic with it, I’m going to recommend you pick this up. My recommendation isn’t based on me having gone out and performed the tricks from the book and receiving great reactions. I haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet. My recommendation is based on the potential I see with this product to truly benefit from the hive mind of a lot of magicians thinking in concert.

The book presents some tricks and also some fundamentals on how this new feature can be used for other effects. And purchasers will gain access to a facebook group which should beget a bunch of new tricks because the possibilities are somewhat endless with this new feature. And Marc has the technical know-how to shepherd any good ideas that come up in the facebook group to fruition.

You can see the description of the effects included on the product page here.

This isn’t an advertisement. I’m posting about this for my benefit. The next month and a half I’m going to be enveloped in the fog of finalizing Book 2, but when I come out of it, I’m hoping to find that the collective wisdom of a bunch of magicians has come up with a lot of fun ideas for me to play around with. (I’m not holding my breath on this. It’s just my hope.)

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Maybe it’s just because I’m a hardcore move-monkey, but for me, the coolest card technique of all time—and I’ve been saying this for years—it’s gotta be the Biddle grip, baby!

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Reader M.K., directed by to Helder Guimaraes’ website and suggested I scroll down to the “past shows” section.

Here’s the info about his show, “Nothing to Hide.”

“In 2012, Helder Guimaraes premiered his show Nothing To Hide at the Geffen Playhouse, directed by Neil Patrick Harris. The show was critically acclaimed and ended up Off-Broadway, at the Signature Theater, playing a sold-out limited run of four months.”

Hmmmm…. I feel like there’s something missing in the description of this show. Like some element that Helder is forgetting to mention. What is it… what is it… what is it…? There’s something, but it’s slipping my mind. I saw the show, I should remember what it was. It wasn’t like… a talking dog or something was it? What am I thinking of?

Wait… let me try and really search my memories of the show…

Nope. I guess I was just misremembering.

Well, one thing I do remember about Helder’s show, Nothing to Hide, is that it was great. I’d put it up there with all of my favorite shows I’ve seen: Teller, Siegfried, Pendragon.

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I was in a coffee shop writing Wednesday’s post when the girl next to me sneezed.

“Bless you,” I said.

But I was premature as she then went *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* in rapid succession.

“Whoa,” I said. “Do you always sneeze like that?”

“Every time!” she said. “It’s always eight.”

“I’m a two sneeze man, myself.” I said. “As was my father and his before him. On our family crest is a man sneezing twice.”

She laughed. “It’s funny how everyone has their set number.”

“There should be a dating site,” I said, “that matches you up based on how much you sneeze.”

She laughed again. “Would we be a good match? Or do we have to have the same number?”

“Oh no, we’re good,” I said, “You’re high and I’m low. So we balance each other out.”

“In-ter-est-ing…,” she said, tapping her pencil against her cheek.

A few minutes later she slid a piece of paper over with her phone number on it. “If you want to get together sometime and sneeze with me or something,” she said.

I said something clever like, “Uhm, ok. Sure!”

I was feeling pretty proud of myself. She was cute. I’m pretty competent at wrangling cute chicks, but I usually have to put in more of an effort. She seemed fun. Maybe she was the one! This was our meet-cute! And we’d have little stories the rest of our life about how if she hadn’t sneezed at that moment we never would have met. And I’d make her a Valentine’s Day card that said “Achoo-se You to Be My Valentine,” and all that sweet stuff.

And then some guy enters the coffee shop, comes over to the table and is like, “Hey, baby.” And he leans down and kisses her. They’re clearly a couple.

I gave her a look and she kind of swatted her hand in the air as if to say, “No, no. This is nothing.” So I’m not sure what to take away from that.

Oh well. I’ll keep you updated should love blossom.

Hey, maybe there’s a trick in there. Like if you perform for larger audiences you could ask if there are any high quantity sneezers in the house, then you could intuit their sneeze number. Or the sum of a small group’s sneeze number.

Ah, who am I kidding. I’m just trying to salvage that interaction.

Anniversary Thoughtz

Did I ever talk about the time we did some testing with Anniversary Waltz in the focus groups? I really thought I had already written this post, but then, in the post I intended to write today, I wanted to reference this post, and I searched and searched, but this post didn’t exist. So now I have to write the dumb thing so I can reference it.

(I may have covered some of this before in some other place, but I don’t think so. This is the problem with writing 100s of blog posts, three books, 15 newsletters, and 12 issues of a magazine over the course of three years.)

Anniversary Waltz is a trick I like to throw in people’s faces a lot. I’ve mentioned it before when I talked about the testing we did on examinability (Part 1 and Part 2). Whenever someone suggests audiences don’t really want to examine magically altered objects, and if you just have some goddamned audience management skills, then you can get the audience to somehow just accept the object has been affected by real magic and move on, I like to bring up Anniversary Waltz. I’ll ask them if they give the card out when the trick is over. Yes. Well, why, if examination doesn’t add anything to the effect?

I’ve had a couple people say, “I don’t hand it out to be examined. I hand it out as a souvenir.” Oh… and they never examine it closely? They don’t hold it so they can eye the edge and see if it’s really one card? They’re just like, “Ah, nothing to see here. It’s as I always assumed… the power of our love can merge playing cards together.”

No. Of course they always want to examine the card because—again, of course—examining an object adds to the impossibility of the effect. The fact that this is even debated in our art is perhaps the dumbest thing about magic. And it’s probably the most damning evidence that a lot of delusional people who have zero idea of how normal people think are drawn to magic. You have to be a special sort of dummy to think: “If I’m a super-duper good magic boy, they’ll never question this deck that changed from red to blue to blank!”

Sure thing, buddy!

Anyway, that was a tangent.

The primary throughline of book two, Magic For Young Lovers, is that for a magic effect to really resonate long-term with people, it needs to have some emotional element to it. It doesn’t have to be something maudlin or dark, there just needs to be some little thing beyond the trick itself that the spectator can latch onto (this can be novelty, humor, romance, nostalgia, fear, love, etc.). Most of the effects in book two are designed to demonstrate this idea.

But people will kind of argue with me about this. Of course they’ll acknowledge that an emotionally engaging presentation is nice to have. But then they’ll pivot and say magic is really about the feeling of being fooled and surprised and that that’s where the focus needs to be. Some will even tell me that the types of presentations I’m championing take away from magic.

Here’s the thing, I agree that the fooling/impossible element of a trick is the unique thing that magic can provide, and it’s probably the primary aspect we should focus on when we start creating. But having a super-strong trick without some emotional element to it is like a having a super deadly toxic gas with no delivery system (if your goal is to kill people, I mean). The emotional element is what allows people to initially engage with the effect and the thing that makes it resonant long after the trick ends. And it’s the thing that makes a trick “magical.” I’ve said it before: People don't use the phrase "that was magical" to mean "I was fooled."

I wish we could hang out in real life so I could prove this to you. You would be so fucking frustrated with me. We’d go to a bar or cafe and you would show some people some hard-hitting trick—a 10 on the “fool them” scale—that you had spent 8 months perfecting and there would be this brief explosion of astonishment. And I’d be clapping and smiling with everyone. Then I’d be like, “That was amazing! Bravo. I wish I could do stuff like that. Hey… [in a low voice] do you guys want to see something really weird?” Then I’m off with our new friends, engaging in some eye-gazing procedure, or making an excursion to the park across the street because, “this really only works when your bare feet are in direct contact with the Earth’s surface electrons.” And I’m just putting a 1000 foot porch—an emotional element—on some piece of self-working junk I learned from the Klutz Book of Magic when I was 12. But it has them oohing and laughing and engaged and it takes 25 minutes and reverberates through the rest of the evening in fun little ways. [No, not everything I do connects with people this well all of the time. I’m trying to make a point.] And all night I’m smiling and waggling my eyebrows at you. “Isn’t this fun?” I seem to be saying. And when things are winding down, I’m exchanging numbers with the coolest girl in the group and saying, “Sure, yeah, I know a whole bunch of other stuff like that. I used to be into magic when I was kid, like him. [I point at you and smile. You shake your head like, “You little asshole.”] I kind of fell away from it, but I did spiral off from there into this whole other world of like weird people, and strange objects, and old rituals. I kind of collect them. It’s just silly stuff, really. But some of it I can’t quite explain. We should definitely get together soon. Having gotten a sense of your vibe… I think I have something you’d find really fascinating.” And you’re grumbling and thinking, I guarantee he’s going to show this bitch some Tenyo garbage with a 20 minute preamble. I promise you, I’ve annoyed too many of my much more talented magic friends in this manner.

[Ah… something funny just happened while I was writing that paragraph about what a little charmer I can be. Remind me to tell you if I don’t on Friday.]

Of course, I want to do the most hard-hitting magic I can. But I’d rather do a mediocre trick with some emotional element than a mindblower without one.

The trick fools them, but the emotional element charms them.

For anyone who still doesn’t believe, here is Exhibit A: Anniversary Waltz.

Would you perform Anniversary Waltz between two strangers with one writing an A on one card and the other writing a B on another? The effect is identical, two cards become one. We just strip every possible emotional element away from the trick.

Well, about five years ago we did that as part of our testing. We performed Anniversary Waltz as one of three tricks we performed for 12 groups of four people. Actually it was 12 groups of six people, but two of the people in the group were actor friends of mine who were in on it.

The effects were ranked on two criteria from 1 to 100. The first was how amazing/impossible the effect seemed. The other was how enjoyable/entertaining the effect was.

Six groups, twenty-four people, saw Anniversary Waltz performed the traditional way, to my friends who were posing as a recently married coupled, who just happened to be members of this focus group.

The other six groups saw it performed to the same two people, but this time they were acting as strangers. The effects were stripped of any bit of emotional resonance other than the magic moment itself. They didn’t write any words of love on the cards, they didn’t even write their names. It was just card A and card B.

You will not be the least bit surprised to hear that the scores for how enjoyable/entertaining that routine is jumped from the high 30s to the mid-80s when the routine involved a “couple.” An over 100% increase. And keep in mind, the people rating the effects didn’t know this couple. They were strangers. But still the version that engaged the emotions was that much stronger.

And you’ll say, “Well, yes, of course.” But here’s the thing, there’s nothing unique about the fusion of two cards that makes it susceptible to a presentation with an emotional element. So, theoretically, any trick you’re doing that is just about the moment of impossibility, could be made significantly more entertaining/enjoyable with a tweak to the presentation. Maybe it’s not always 100% more-so, but even if it’s 20% more entertaining, isn’t it worth it?

And here’s something else we found that you may find surprising. The score for how impossible/amazing the trick was also went up with the emotionally engaging presentation. Not as dramatically, but by about 25%. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the emotional element shut down some of the analytical thinking they were doing. Or maybe the emotional element engaged them more which made them feel more fooled at the conclusion. I don’t care too much what the reason is.

Yeah, that’s the UPDATES graphic from Unsolved Mysteries. Why isn’t that show on anymore? It was the best. It should just be constantly in production. What the hell? Did someone solve all the mysteries or something?

Anyway, here is the update to this post. Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense to “update” a post that I’m writing today. But, as I said, I thought I had written this a while ago.

So a friend of mine who also helps conduct the testing had an idea and did a little experiment of his own a couple weeks ago. He went through his email archives and found the email addresses of the participants who were involved in the testing mentioned above. He wrote them asking if they had any recollection of the tricks they saw that day. He was able to connect with 23 of the 48 people in the testing.

13 of those people saw the “non-emotional” version. Of those 13, one person directly referenced this effect. (Other’s simply referred generically to “card trick.”)

Of the 10 who saw the “emotional” version, five referenced a trick with a man and woman’s card “coming together,” “sticking together,” “becoming one,” or something along those lines. 50%! Even I was pretty amazed at that number. This testing took place five years ago, and they still remembered a trick that they weren’t even the primary spectators for. This wasn’t at a wedding. It wasn’t at a magic show they chose to go to. They didn’t even know what the focus group was for until they were there. Yes, it’s a very small sample size, but I was still impressed by the number.

Harvest Time Part Two: Going Underground

Fall has officially begun and we are in the final third of the The Jerx, Season Three.

Tonight is the harvest moon and, like last year, I’m using this time to take stock of where things are with the site and where things may go next.

(By the way, did you know that the autumnal equinox and the harvest moon falling in the same week makes this a very powerful time on a psychic/soul-level? You didn’t? Really? Crack a science textbook much? It doesn’t sound like you do.

Okay, I’m being a naughty little rascal. Yes, this is nonsense. But it’s the type of nonsense that makes for a fun backdrop to a magic trick. Take a long, procedural card trick and do it around your coffee table and you’ll get a response that is like, “Hey… that was neat.” Do the same trick on a blanket in the backyard under the harvest moon because your “mentor said this was one of the few nights during the year it’s likely to work.” Now you have the same “neat trick,” but you’ve imbued it with a greater mythology. And you’ve made a mini-adventure out of it. And you’ve tied the experience of this little trick to the experience of something else in the world that you’ve made them pause and recognize. Something they probably wouldn’t have taken the time to appreciate otherwise. People enjoy this sort of thing.

And, it’s great for the amateur magician whose audience may see a number of card tricks over the course of a year. But they don’t necessarily appreciate the nuances of every trick. For them it’s a trick where some cards changed or some cards matched and it’s sort of similar to that other trick where the cards changed or the cards matched. But a presentation like this allows them to form distinct memories. “Ah, yes, the harvest moon trick.” The details of the trick may fade, but the experience that surrounds the trick will remain, because that experience is something other than “sitting around a table.” )

That was a long parenthetical. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, see the Sky Imps post.

Anywhoooo…

Oh yeah, the future of this site…

The first question is, will there be another year after this one? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s not easy for me to make those kinds of decisions. In real life I’m very good at coming up with a compelling argument about pretty much anything. And when faced with a decision like that, I find it very easy to argue both options in my head. So instead, I’ve automated the decision.

Here is what I do. I leave it up to the people who support this site. Every year a certain number of people decide to support the existence of this site, and receive some rewards in return for that. When the next year rolls around I ask, “Who wants another year?” If 90% of the people who supported the previous year don’t sign on for the upcoming year, that’s when I shut it down. I realize that’s a wildly high retention rate to shoot for, but it’s the standard I’ve decided on. That way the decision is in the hands of the people who’ve invested in this site. Their judgment will determine if it keeps going.

So that’s how Season 4 will happen, if it does.

And if it does, here is how it will be different…

First big change: What I consider to be the most valuable magic theory, ideas, discoveries, concepts, and tricks I come up with will now be solely available to supporters. That is to say, they will appear in whatever that year’s rewards package is, and not on this site. I’ve already done this with the tricks, for the most part (my favorite tricks from the past 12 months are in the upcoming book, not on this site). But in any future seasons, I’ll be doing the same with some of the concepts and presentation ideas I’ve brought up here. Why? A few reasons.

• Exclusivity for the people who support the site.

• If you are someone who values the more obscure performance styles and concepts I write about here, then you’re probably already supporting the site. And if you don’t like that sort of thing, then they’re kind of wasted posts. So by shifting those sorts of ideas into the publications for supporters only, everyone who wants to see that sort of thing will get to, and it won’t clutter up this site for the casuals.

• I think these concepts are more understandable when seen in the context in a book, rather than on blog posts. I say this because everyday I have people writing me an email to debate or question something I wrote, when their issue has already been addressed in a previous post. It’s dumb, but I write this site as if everyone reading has read every post I’ve written on it. A lot haven’t, but the hardcore fans have, and I’m writing those posts with that audience in mind. So it makes sense to limit that content to that audience.

• Even more-so than the tricks, there are some concepts that I’d rather not have publicly available via a google search.

Second Big Change: I’m going to put a cap on the number of supporters I allow for the site. Does that seem dumb? I know. The thing is, if I were to look at this site as a means for getting as many supporters/subscribers as I could, then that becomes my goal. But my goal is not to make as much money as possible here. As someone who solely works freelance, my goal is to “buy” enough of my time that I can devote a chunk of every day to writing, creating, testing, and performing ideas geared towards the amateur/social performer. And once I’ve reached that goal, I want to put the focus on those things, not bringing in more money.

What is the cap going to be? Well, the option to support Season 4 will be open to those who supported Season 3. If a person doesn’t sign on, then their “spot” will open up for someone else, but there won’t be any more spots created after that point in time.

Another reason I want to change the types of ideas I make publicly available and limit the number of people I eventually release them to is because I don’t want this style of performing to become too common. That may sound narcissistic, like, “Oh, Andy, certainly everybody is going to be falling all over themselves to start performing like you.” I don’t mean it like that. I just don’t want to put too much of these ideas into the zeitgeist. I feel like I’m already seeing bad echoes of these ideas in some magic performances I’ve seen, both amateur and professional. Part of the charm of the style of performance I write about is that it’s uncommon. Every professional magician can do bill in lemon and no one cares. But if there’s another magician in your city performing around socially with a similar style (and you’re not working together) it can undermine the experiences you want to create.

So that’s the plan for a potential Season 4. I’m going to cull the ardent supporters and we’re going underground. The group won’t be called “Jerx supporters” but will have a separate name and identity. I’m already conceptualizing something with a more “secret society” feel behind it. (That seems like half the fun of having a clandestine magic group.) This site will still go on, but the content is going to be more along the lines of commentary and comedy, timely stuff, sillier stuff, shorter stuff, half-formed ideas. Things the casual fans tend to enjoy more anyway.