Recalibrating

Every now and again I like to take a post to reset with everyone here what my philosophy/viewpoint/goals are in regards to magic. I do this for a couple reasons. The first is because there is likely a slow evolution of those things going on with me, and it’s good to check-in on where I stand. The second reason is because there is a constant stream of new people coming to this site, and while I suggest reading the whole thing from the beginning, that can be a daunting/time-consuming task for someone who is new here. So a quick summary every year or so is probably a good thing. And finally, whenever someone writes me taking issue with something I’ve said, they almost always have no fucking clue of what my position is in regards to the subject they have a problem with. I think this comes down to some combination of poor reading comprehension and only having looked at a couple posts out of context because the regular readers of the site have very little issue following along.

I

So, the first point to make is that this site is meant to be about one person’s journey. It’s not intended to be prescriptive. That being said, I’m probably performing more social/amateur magic than anyone in the world, so you may want to give some consideration to my thoughts on that subject even if you’re initially skeptical, just as you’d give some weight to Doc Eason’s thoughts on bar magic. But I’m not trying to convince you or give you advice. You do you.

(Although when it comes to the things we’ve put through focus-group testing, I have a high level of confidence in those things. And I think it would be odd to wholly reject those results—some of the only testing of methodological and presentational techniques in magic—just because your instincts tell you to disagree.)

II

The second important concept when reading this site is that I’m talking specifically about amateur magic, and amateur/social magic is a very different thing than a professional performance. At least it should be, in my opinion. The distinction should not be between paid and unpaid. The distinction should be between performance and interaction. Professional shows will feel more like a performance, social magic should feel more like an interaction. You won’t be able to strip all the performance elements out of social magic, but it benefits from doing so as much as you can. These elements include:

• spotlighting the performer

• scripted patter

• planned jokes and bits

• obvious props

These all make perfect sense for a professional performance. But they take away from the feeling of interaction, which is the goal in amateur/social magic. (Unless you want to do things that feel like “performances” but just in casual situations. If that’s your goal, then feel free to take on all the trappings of a performance.)

III

The final “important piece” to understand this site is perhaps the trickiest to explain. A lot of people will read my work and they’ll see the time and effort I’ve put into certain things, and they’ll imagine my goal is to get people to experience “real magic” in some sort of mystical, esoteric way. That’s not my intention at all. My goal is simply to give the people I perform for a better experience by giving them more interesting fictions.

For me, the failing of magic is that most of the time the story comes down to this: “I’m the magician and I’m an incredible guy.” It’s just not that interesting. And it’s certainly not interesting long term, which is something the amateur needs to concern him/herself with because they may be performing to these people for decades.

There’s a difference between the feeling of being fooled and the feeling of experiencing something magical. And, in my opinion, the way to get people to have the “magical” feeling is through stronger narratives. And by that I don’t mean coming up with some horseshit story to accompany your Gypsy Thread routine; that only takes away from the magic. But if you put the trick itself in a narrative where things are unfolding in the real world, then people can get caught up in it. And getting caught up in a magic trick, leaves people open to feeling that magical feeling, just like getting caught up in a horror film leaves someone open to feel terror.

The goal is not to make them “believe” anything is real (just like the goal of the horror film isn’t to pretend it’s a documentary). The goal is just better entertainment. And better entertainment through magic doesn’t come from being fooled harder (we already know how to fool people), it comes via a more engaging narrative (context).

If you buy into that premise, then here is where it gets fun. For the amateur/social magician, the narrative does not need to begin when the trick does, and it does not need to end when the trick ends. You can set up the narrative two weeks before the trick. You can have tricks that take place over the course of a year that all have the same umbrella narrative. You can have callbacks to a narrative you established long ago. You can weave different narratives in and out of your life and your interactions with people. More on that to come.

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Ok, so there we go. Now everyone is caught up. No stragglers. Let’s explore more…

Ahoy Hoy!

I think the trick in my repertoire that has had the most staying power is the Hoy Book Test. I would say a week has rarely passed and certainly a month has never gone by were I have not performed this trick in some form for the past… I don’t know… 20 something years maybe? I learned it from a Tom Mullica videotape, oddly enough. So whenever that came out.

The version I do most frequently these days is called Narrow Your Eyes and it’s in JV1. It justifies the need for a book because it’s not presented as mind reading. (If you have the book, you can use a similar justification in a drawing duplication, or when you have some write down a word they’re thinking of.)

I’ve probably tried a dozen other ungimmicked book tests, but have always come back to Hoy. My conclusion from trying all those other versions is that there are probably no good book test where you have to hold the book while they are looking at the word. I’ve tried a bunch of them. Some seem clever, but when I break it down with people afterwards they almost always say, “Well… I guess you must have got a look at the word at some point. Maybe you put your finger in the book? Or you looked when I looked?” The nice thing about the Hoy Book Test is they peek the word with the book in their hands on the other side of the room. Yes, there are still things that need to be justified with Hoy (why you’re using books at all, why two books, why can’t they just open to a random page, etc.) but I feel I can talk my way around those things. I can’t come up with a good justification for why I—the person we’re trying to keep the word a secret from—needs to hold onto the book other than the fact that it gives me the opportunity to take a quick looksy-poo at the word.

So that’s why I’ve stick with Hoy. I like my book tests like I like my barbecue sauce. Bold.

For the amateur/social magician there are even more benefits to the Hoy book test than many other others because you can do what I think of as the Delayed Hoy.

Traditionally, with the Hoy book test you’re limited to naming the first word or two on the page because you have to pick up that information very quickly. With the Delayed Hoy you can have someone read the page until they get to some imagery they can easily picture in their mind and you can reveal that instead of just a word.

The Delayed Hoy is an amateur magic technique because you’re not doing the method in real time.

I used to do it in the early-mid 2000s on the subway all the time. Back then, so many people were reading books because cell phones were still pretty useless.

So I would see someone, often an attractive female because I’m a typically shallow male, and we’d get to talking and I would be able to read her mind and tell her what she was thinking of from a random page in a book. And I could do this without ever touching her book at all.

How? Well, the day before I saw her reading that book on the train, and I just went to the bookstore after work, looked at a copy of the book and picked out the first compelling visual concept on page 183. The next time I see that person, I’m all set. (If you’ve never lived in a city with mass transit system like NYC, you might not realize that if you have a regular commute you’ll often end up seeing the same people, in the same subway cars, at the same time each day.)

I do something similar today. The last major book chain in the U.S. is Barnes and Noble. Almost all of them have a Starbucks inside of them. I’ll meander though the Starbucks until I see someone interesting. Get a look at the books on their table. Go into the main store, find those books, see what’s on page 183 and memorize the first easily pictured concept on that page. Then I can go back, sit at a table nearby, strike up a conversation, and go into a version of the effect where they can choose any of the books in front of them and I can read their mind. Again, without ever touching the book.

Another thing I used to do is this… I read a lot of shitty horror and mystery paperbacks, because yes, I’m dumb. Go read Dostoyevsky you fucking smarty-pants. Anyway, once a week i would go to the bookstore near where I worked and I would go through the bestsellers and note the first interesting thing on page 183 of each book and make a note of it on the blank pages at the end of the book I was reading. Now, anytime I run into someone reading a best seller, I can look at my crib in the back of my book and go into the trick. I would also trim down the page next to my force page in my book. That way I wouldn’t have to do a miscall. I could flip to the page and legitimately show the page number.

Ultimately that was maybe not worth the investment of time. I’d probably only use my best seller crib a couple times a year just by fate (I mean, just by stumbling across someone with a copy of one of those books). I would sometimes use it more directly, if I was in a bookstore cafe with someone I’d tell them to “grab any book on the best seller shelf.” If they asked why just the best seller shelf, I’d say, “It’s easier if it’s something in the zeitgeist.” But it really didn’t matter either way. If they picked a book that wasn’t in my crib, I’d just do the standard Hoy. I probably wouldn’t recommend someone put the effort into maintaining a best seller crib unless you, like me, would find it soothing to have this little weekly ritual where you go and get a coffee and peruse through the few new books on the bestseller list that week and jot down what’s on page 183 of each. (For anyone not familiar with the Hoy book test, no, there’s nothing special about page 183. I’m just using it as an example here.)

My point is simply that, for the amateur magician, you should keep your eyes open for opportunities where you can find out what someone is reading and do the prep for the Hoy Book Test not in real time.

There is an added bonus to doing it this way. When I would ask people about the trick later on (a week or so later), they almost universally forget about the second book. They would mention taking their book and flipping to a random page and that was the extent of the process in their mind. Which, of course, makes it almost a miracle. With the traditional Hoy book test, an equal amount of weight is put on both books at the beginning, so it’s maybe a little harder to make that page selection part fade into the background. With the Delayed Hoy all the focus is on their one book which I never go near. My book is only in play for less than 10 seconds and is used in a fairly off-handed casual way, so I think it becomes easier to forget.

I’m certainly not suggesting the original Hoy test needs any improving. I still love being able to walk into a huge library with someone and telling them to get me two books from anywhere and let’s try something. But the Delayed Hoy is, I think, a good example of taking advantage of opportunities we have in amateur performing situations that we often overlook just because, historically, magic books haven’t really looked at effects from that perspective.

Magic Blogging for Fun and Profit

The window to support Season 4 closed last week. If your payment was processed by paypal, then you’re in. There is no other confirmation coming from me.

I want to again thank everyone who supports this site. We’re at the beginning of the fourth year of this site being fully reader-supported. I realize this is a unique business model in the world of magic, but it seems to be working well. And I’m comfortable saying that because:

1. The people who don’t like this site, don’t need to read it.

2. The people who like it but can’t afford to support it still get regular content.

3. The people who do like it and want to support it seem to be pretty happy with their choice to do so as almost everyone who signed up for Season 3 signed up again for Season 4. I have a higher retention rate than Costco or Netflix, which are considered the gold standard for that sort of thing.

So everyone’s happy! Yes, there are still some people who get their dick all twisted that anyone would deign to pay to support this site. But they don’t mean it. When they say, “I can’t believe people pay to support a magic blog.” What they’re really saying is, “Why won’t anyone pay attention to what I have to say about magic?”

The answer is this: Ya dull.

You couldn’t write a compelling sentence if your (undoubtedly estranged) daughter’s life depended on it. And your ideas aren’t interesting.

“That’s not true! I’m a good writer! Really, really good. So goodly I write you wouldn’t believe it! And I have good and interesting things to say too. Oh boy, I do.”

Alright then, I encourage you to follow my path. I laid out the blueprint for you. Write everyday for six months. Then, if people want you to keep going, give them the opportunity to support the site in order to do so. Continue writing 100s of posts a year. Write a regular newsletter. And write a book with new material every year. Simple.

“I don’t have time for all that!”

No shit, dummy, neither do I. I only have the time because of the people who support the site. Now you see how it works?

I don’t know if what I’m doing is replicable, but when I occasionally get an email from someone who wants to do something similar, I give them this simple two-step process.

1. Come up with a focus/POV that other people don’t have. If your focus is “amateur magic” or your focus is “testing magic” then people are just going to compare you to this site.

2. Come up with 150 posts you want to write. The subject can’t just be, like, “Magician’s Choice.” You need to have something unique you bring to the subject. I mean, it doesn’t have to be brilliant. It can be stupid. But it has to be uniquely stupid. You can’t just have three things you want to write about and you’ll wing it after that.

Finally, keep your expectations in check. Magic blogging is probably not going to be your “career.” A good bellwether to know if being paid to write is in your future is if it was in your past. I was being paid to write before this site, it’s my only other source of income now, and I’m sure it’s what I’ll go back go full-time when this site is over.

Again, you only need those steps if you want to follow a path similar to mine. If you just want to write a post occasionally for fun, then it matters much less if you have a unique viewpoint or if you’re a good writer or whatever.

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Now that the support window has closed, I can give you my regular lecture about supporting the things that make you happy without it seeming self-serving.

If there is some commercial enterprise that you take pleasure from—especially if it’s a small commercial enterprise—then I think you’ll find you’ll get measurably more happiness from that thing if you actively (financially) support it.

If there is a podcaster, youtube creator, blogger, musician, artist, or whatever, that brings you joy, it’s good for you to back their projects. What you’re saying is, “My happiness is important, so I’m going to reward the people who make me happy.”

You might say, “Ah, but wouldn’t I be happier if I didn’t pay $5/month for this podcast and instead downloaded a bootleg copy? Then I get both. I get to hear the podcast and I get my 5 bucks.” No. I’ve found that’s not how it works. If someone gives you the opportunity to support something you love at a fair price, you’re always better off doing that than trying to skirt your way around it. I don’t think this is just my own personal psychology. I think it’s true for most people. If you don’t believe me, consider supporting one of the content creators whose work you currently follow. I can almost guarantee you that you will find yourself taking more pleasure from that person’s work going forward.

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People will write me and say, “This has to be the best gig in the world. You just write and talk shit about people. You perform a bunch of magic. It sounds like you’re having a blast. I want to do this.”

Well, yes, it’s pretty sweet. I may not be a great judge of these things because I’ve enjoyed every job I ever had. But I will give you my honest assessment of this sort of work. I’ll be speaking specifically to my situation, but much of this will hold true for anyone self-employed in a creative field.

First the negatives…

• Just because you like to do something for five hours a week, that doesn’t mean you’d love to do that thing for 50 hours a week. So if you look at someone and think, “Aw, that guy gets paid to have fun!” It’s probably not that simple

• In most jobs, you have that period of time where you’re not really working at all; you’re screwing around. Then you have that period of time where you’re working but you’re just kind of sleepwalking through the work. Then you have the time where you’re actively engaged in your work. If you’re self-employed in a creative field, you only have that last category. You’re either actively focused on the work or you’re just not being productive. I sometimes wish I could slack off and still get work done.

• Screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.” Having that looming feeling isn’t a ton of fun. When I had a normal job (before moving to 100% freelance work) I would leave the office at the end of the day and not a single neuron would fire the rest of the evening in regards to thinking about work. Now, because of the type of work I do here and in my other endeavors, I never feel like I’m “off the clock.”

Those are the negatives, and as I said, they’re probably true for most self-employed people.

The positives are perhaps more specific to me and this situation.

The initial positive would be this… while I’m not enamored with the act of writing itself, the subject I get to write about is about as much fun as one could hope for. I’m not writing instructions for putting together an end table.

And everything I do for this site outside of the writing part is super enjoyable. Trying to come up with tricks, testing them out, and attempting to create special moments for people so that I can report back to others who want to do something similar is a hell of a nice “job” to have.

Writing this site has also put me in touch with a lot of people I’ve long admired in magic, and people I’ve never heard of but who are on a similar wavelength to me. So that’s another huge positive.

And the flip side of always feeling like I’m “on the clock,” is the fact that I almost never truly am. I have some self-imposed deadlines to meet, but beyond that I have the freedom to make the choice of what I want to do each day. Do I want to write a couple posts? Do I want to do some brainstorming? Do I want to to go cafe hopping and find a dozen people to try something out on? Or do I not want to do anything magic-related at all? Maybe I want to go hiking or snowboarding or sit on my ass and watch tv all day.

That freedom is the part of all this I appreciate the most. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think “What should I do today?” And a quote from Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday comes to mind…

And I pretty much do. It’s a good life.

Dustings of Woofle #2

I’m in NYC for the next few days doing focus-group testing. Most of it is related to misdirection. We’re also testing if using a torn-corner to mark a card (or bill) is significantly better or worse than having it signed. It seems to me most people think the torn corner is the “weaker” option, and I always just assumed that as well, but I don’t know why it seems that way. And we’re finishing up some of the card-to-wallet stuff (palm vs. no palm) we started last year. All the results of this stuff will be relayed to supporters in some manner over the next year.

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Good news, everyone. Your dad got a job writing for Pete Firman.

I think I might be addicted to card tricks.

I’m getting through two packs a day.

— Pete Firman (@petefirman) February 20, 2019

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If you had the opportunity to create your own TV show involving magic, what would it be about? pic.twitter.com/c2VhNKtbYj

— Chris Ramsay (@chrisramsay52) February 25, 2019

Sure, I’ve got a concept for you. It’s called Chris Ramsay Presents… Crowdsource My Show: I’m Out of Ideas, The Chris Ramsay Story, Season One “The Fuck Do I Do Now?”

Alternatively you should remake Bewitched, but as a reality show. And she’s trans.

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Look at this beautiful post from Joshua Jay’s wife, Anna. What a thoughtful, lovely post that certainly doesn’t make me feel guilty about anything at all.

View this post on Instagram

Our love story isn’t perfect. It’s not always the fairytale that our photos make it appear. We had to fight for it over the last ten years. We broke up, and disagreed, and moved away…but eventually we found our way back together because nothing else, and no one else, made sense. It started with bad timing. I was a college student about to move to France, and he was a professional magician, leaving for a month-long tour through Japan. But we found ourselves huddled on his couch in Manhattan, in the midst of a party, unable to stop talking and sharing our dreams. I’d later learn he’d orchestrated the whole evening just to meet me. A gathering of his friends: sword swallowers, fire eaters, mind-readers and contortionists. My own personal circus, and that night I decided to join. We had a week and spent every minute of it together; exploring art museums, sipping cocktails from teacups in speakeasys, stealing kisses in the back of taxis, and staying up ‘til dawn talking about the places we wanted to go together. But we had to spend months a year apart while he toured performing magic, and my job moved me to London. The distance was detrimental, so we did something crazy. I quit my job. I moved out of my apartment. I gave up everything I’d worked for because I found a new dream. We decided to work & travel together, a giant leap of faith we took and never looked back. We left for a four-month tour of the world, every day a different city, a new hotel, another train ride. We lived in a state of jet lag, exhaustion, and complete exhilaration. Four months turned to eight, and then a year, and now ten years into our love story, the only way to tell it is to say that we fell in love sharing magic all over the world. Travel is what brings us closer: Driving across America for months in a Honda Civic, hiking through Tikal in the rain, tracking tigers in India, sharing a card trick with the Masai. But our greatest adventure is each other. We’ve become partners in everything, and when you live and work and love together, you can’t break a bond that strong ❤️ @qatarairways @passionpassport this flight would be a new chapter in our never-ending love story #pploveintheair

A post shared by Anna Kloots | inspiring travel (@traveloutsidethebox) on Feb 24, 2019 at 6:44pm PST

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My first presentational idea for the Make It Rain effect posted on Monday was this…

“I come from a long line of strippers. My mother was a stripper, her mother, and her mother’s mother. The same goes for my father’s mother and grandmother. Our family crest is a boobie and a c-section scar. One of the skills that all great strippers have is the ability to identify the amount and denomination of bills that are being tossed on the stage. You don’t want to waste time rubbing your vulva in the face of a guy who is just giving up a single. But at the same time you don’t want to pause your act to carefully examine all the money coming in. It’s a valuable skill to be able to identify the most lucrative area of the crowd to focus your attention on. And, via evolution, natural selection, or whatever, I have this skill as well. In fact, I’m something of a savant at it. Anyone can learn to identify one bill coming at them. I can identify them en masse. Here’s what I want you to do. I’m going to strip over on this side of the stage, and I’d like you to tip me in that box over there. 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s. Whatever you’ve got. And at the end I want this person there to open the box and toss all the money at me my naked body.”

Etc.

In fact—and I’m being 100% serious now—if there’s a stripper out there who includes magic in their act, I think this would make a great, and profitable routine.

Make It Rain

Here is a stage or parlor idea inspired by an email from friend-of-the-site, Maarten Bosmans.

I’ve never done this trick. I’ll likely never do this trick because I don’t perform in those environments. I can’t say for sure how it would play and it would likely take some tweaking for it to work perfectly. But I’m smart as shit so I can recognize a fundamentally sound idea, and I think this is one.

You come out on stage with a box that says “TIPS” on it, and you set that on a stool.

You tell the audience how happy you are to be performing here at Chuckle’s Magic Cabin (or whatever). You started your performing career busking on the mean streets of Provo, Utah and you’re delighted to have made it this far in your career.

In recognition of those early days, you want to try something. “In the programs you received when you came in [or on their seat when they entered] you were given some Monopoly money. A 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, and 500 dollar bill. In a moment, I’m going to start my old street-performing routine on this side of the stage. As I do I’d like you to do the following… Take those bills and mix them up without looking at them. And I want you to blindly remove one or two of the bills. Take the rest of the bills and put them in your pocket or your purse. And then come up on stage and put the one or two bills you removed in my box for tips over here. Fold the money in half and sort of hide it behind your hand so no one else can see what you’re dropping in the box. I’d like you to come up row by row and do that and then return to your seats while I’m doing my act over here.”

I’m guessing you’d probably want in the neighborhood of 40 people to take part in this. Maybe less. So if it’s a small audience it might be everyone, if it’s a bigger audience it might be just a portion of the group who takes part in this.

So now you’re going to split focus. On one side of the stage you will be doing your “old street performing act.” And on the other people will be dropping their tips in the box.

This is a good chance to add some variety to the type of material you perform. Whatever your “old act” consists of, you want it to feel different from the other things you’re performing that evening. So if you do mentalism, maybe you used to do more traditional magic so you’re doing cups and balls or something. Alternatively, maybe your old act wasn’t magic related at all. Maybe you play guitar or juggle. Or your old act could just be awful. That’s probably what I’d do. I’d put on some big clown-y hat and do shitty magic with terrible jokes. Maybe some bad ventriloquism too.

At the end you thank them for indulging you and you point out how your style has changed since those early days.

You ask for someone to help you from the audience. Someone who is in good health and wearing something comfortable as they’re going to be picking up stuff from the floor. Let’s say his name is Jack.

“You’ve seen my old style of performance, now I want to show you the newest thing I’m working on. It’s called flash-perception. And I’m going to demonstrate it with the ‘money’ you all tipped me.” You could then elaborate on what “flash-perception” is, or come up with whatever other explanation/background you want to apply to the coming demonstration.

You pick up a white board and a dry-erase marker. You tell Jack to open the tip box and get ready to dump the contents on the floor (maybe he climbs a ladder to give some additional float-time).

“Now, I don’t know if each of you put in one bill or two, but using this technique of ‘flash-perception’ I will be able to count the bills in the air before they hit the floor.”

You have Jack dump the money out.

Before the last piece even hits the floor you shout, “5708” and write it on the board. “No. That’s way too many,” you say and scribble it out.

You take a step forward so the “bills” are on the floor behind you. You look up as if you’re picturing the money falling. You close your eyes tight then open them. “Okay, there were 66 bills total. “ You ask Jack to pick the money off the floor and put it on a table. Your back is to him so you’re clearly not looking.

You write something on the board. You ask Jack to count how many white bills there are (the $1 bill in Monopoly money). He counts eight. You turn the board around and show it says 8 - $1 bills. You quickly do this with the other values as well. (It would probably make sense to do this with less denominations, just to make it go faster.)

At the end your board looks like this.

You then count off. “Eight 1s, plus ten 5s, plus… [etc, etc] 66 bills total. As I said.”

For the finale you calculate how much money in total is represented there, “$8 in ones, $50 in fives, [etc, etc].. $4000 in 500 dollar bills for a total of $5708… the number that first came to me as the bills were still falling.”

Then you pull your dick out for the celebratory fellating.

Method

The method is simply Mark Shortland’s AmazeBox from our boys Josh and Andi at VanishingInc.

As I said, I think the structure of the routine is pretty sound, and I really love the idea of a performance that involves a different style of sub-performance inside of it.

The one aspect that you would have to figure out with this is the pacing of it all. 40 people might be too many. Maybe it would be better with 20 people. Or, a I mentioned, you may want to not use a couple of the denominations of bills in order to cut down on the categories that need to be counted. The pacing of the reveals would also have to be workshopped. (In my mind, it would sort of build in pace like a Magic Square presentation.) In the write-up above you proclaim the amounts in the reverse order of which you verify them (first you shout out the total dollar amount (although you don’t say that’s what it is yet), then the total number of bills, then the individual number of each bill) it would probably make sense to play around with that and figure out what works best.

I think a lot of performers would be tempted to then say, “And I predicted this all along!” And show that they predicted the number of bills or the total dollar amount or whatever. I don’t think that would be a great idea. If you wanted to drop the “flash-perception” element and make the trick solely a prediction, I think that would be fine. I just don’t think it’s great to mix the two.

As I mentioned, this idea was inspired by an email from Maarten Bosmans. He, in turn, was inspired by this Derren Brown effect where he determines the number of buttons someone has put on a tray. That version uses something pretty sophisticated, but Maarten thought maybe you could do something similar with M&Ms and an AmazeBox. I don’t think that would work, because I’m pretty sure the switched items have to be 2-dimensional, for the AmazeBox. And even if not, you’d almost definitely have a rattling issue. But Maarten’s also mentioned doing it with “fake $100 bills.” That got me thinking in the money direction, which led to the Monopoly money idea which, of course, blows up the impossibility even more because instead of just naming a number of items you can seemingly “perceive” multiple different variations of an item in just a glance. And then you have the “total dollar amount” as a kicker, which you wouldn’t have with just one denomination.

From there I thought of the idea of the audience “tipping” you. Originally I imagined this happening during an intermission of a show. But most small-stage/parlor magic shows aren’t going to have an intermission and I realized it would be so much better if this happened in the context of you doing another type of performance.

I also think that leads to a fairly simple and straightforward transition. “What you saw there was the sort of thing I was doing in my earliest performances. Now I want to show you the newest skill I’ve been working on.”

Thanks again to Maarten for sending me along this path.

Jerx Mailbag

After watching Shin Lim win America’s Got Talent: The Champions last night, I began wondering if all the magic on tv these days is a good or bad thing. Your thoughts?

Excerpted from an email from reader, A.C.

I think it’s probably a bad thing for most magicians, but it need not be bad for you, the person reading this.

Let me start by saying this… It’s shocking to me how popular magic is on t.v. at this time. There’s a bunch of shows devoted to magic, you have talent shows where magicians routinely do very well, and magicians are all over daytime and night time talk shows. If you’re under the age of thirty it may be hard for you to believe that there was a time when there was almost no magic on television. If you had come up to me as a kid and asked me what the “magic scene” on tv was, my response would be, “Well, David Copperfield had a special eight months ago. And then… let’s see… what else. Oh yes, Bill Bixby had a show where he played a magician five years before I was born.” And that’s not me exaggerating for comic effect. It’s pretty much the truth. Okay, maybe once every three years a magician would be on a talk-show, but if you weren’t watching it in the moment, you were fucked. That thing was lost to history.

So i’m genuinely amazed by all the magic content that exists out there on TV and online. And, honestly, I watch about zero minutes of it, on average. I have no real interest in that style of magic. I’m burnt out on it. When I had my old blog, in the early-mid 2000s, I felt obliged to comment on any magic that would show up on tv. But if I did that now, with this site, that’s all I’d ever do.

So, is all that magic on TV a good or bad thing? In my opinion it’s good for magic, but it’s probably not great for the average magic performer. In the 80s you could get away with doing some standard card magic as an amateur magician. Magic wasn’t as fucked-out as it is now, and the magic that was on tv wasn’t usually of the close-up card variety. So it was still pretty novel. Magic slid by for a long time because it was novel.

Now if you perform some typical close-up magic, your audience can often compare it to something similar they saw online a few days ago. And you’re just not going to compare to Shin Lim and his black-art and wind machine nonsense.

But the good news is this… you’re reading this site. And if you’re reading it regularly, you’re getting a consistent dose of me telling you that amateur/social magic needs to evolve. I’m pretty well convinced that amateur magic is going to develop into its own separate thing. You may say that’s a self-serving statement because I’ve spent years saying we need to treat amateur magic differently than professional magic. So essentially I’m just saying, “Yeah, I’ve been right all along.” But I just don’t see how amateur magic can continue to be the same as it has been traditionally. 20 years ago, the only way to see a card trick was for someone you knew to show you one. Now anyone, anywhere can see a card trick at anytime. And while magic in person is generally more powerful than magic online, if you’re just demonstrating the impossible (with no interactive element) then it doesn’t make much of a difference either way. (And no, interactive does not mean "have them hold the cards” or “have them name a random number.”)

For amateur magic to thrive in a world where people can watch the greatest magicians of all time whenever they want, then it needs to be something you do with people, rather than for them. It needs to be as distinct from watching magic online, as having sex is distinct from watching porn online. That’s my goal and where I’m trying to push things. So the success of Shin Lim or anyone else is really no issue for me because I’m trying to give people the experience of what I think amateur magic should be and this is something that can not be replicated by seeing it on tv

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