Luck and Four Levels of Presentation

In last Friday’s post I mentioned the idea of an Imp using a “luck absorbing crystal,” after which I received the following email.

Of course, the converse with the stone is that some people are vulnerable to having their luck drained, so maybe I have my luck drained and then somehow give it to you?

Could I give someone else my bad luck, too? —AB

Definitely. I like any premise that treats “luck” like an actual natural resource that can be collected, manipulated, re-routed etc.

I would definitely routine it in a way that any trick ends with the spectator feeling like they’re leaving with more luck than they came in with. Not because the audience is really believing any of this, but just because… why not?

This is a good opportunity to look at four different levels of presentation, using “luck” as the subject of the presentation.

Level One - No presentation

Maybe the spectator deals out some cards and they mysteriously are able to match up cards of the same value. There is no stated presentation here.

In my experience, people will often enjoy tricks like this as they are happening, but they will remember very little about the tricks the next day. And if they’ve seen a few different card tricks from you, it doesn’t take long at all for this to blend in with all the others.

Level Two - The Bookends

This is what I see a lot of magicians doing, and frankly I think it’s probably worse than no presentation at all.

They’ll pull out a deck of cards and say, “Do you believe in the power of luck? I think you’re probably a lucky person.”

Then at the end when the cards match they’ll say, “See! I told you. You’re lucky!”

I hate this kind of thing. There’s something I find displeasing about “the least possible amount of effort” even more-so than “no effort at all.”

If you’re not going to put any effort into the presentation then just do the trick without a presentation. Adding a couple of lines to the beginning and end of a trick don’t make it any more enjoyable or memorable.

Level Three - Context

Context is a story within which the trick exists. If you do a ctrl+F for “context” you’ll find a bunch of posts with titles that start with “Presentation vs Context,” where this idea is explored more fully.

In this instance the “context” might involve me removing the stone, telling the story of how I acquired it, explaining how it supposedly works, going through the process to “invoke” the power of the stone, and then finally testing it with “a simple game.” The trick now really only makes complete sense in relation to the context. The cards matching up is a demonstration of the luck generated by this stone. (I’m not suggesting this is a brilliant context, just using it as an example.)

A context immediately ups the memorability of the experience of a trick. It’s like taking random notes and putting them into a melody.

Level Four - Immersion

Immersion happens when the context and real life start to overlap and blur a little bit, using the extra-presentational techniques I’ve written about over the course of this site.

Imagine a trick where I transfer some of my luck over to you via some sort of process. At the end of the trick—as a demonstration of this luck—you’re able to match up cards in a game we play. So you’ve absorbed my luck.

Now, the trick is over. But think of what could happen afterwards in terms of Reps. How can we extend the absurd premise as if it’s real? Since I’ve given away a bunch of my good luck I should have an excess of bad luck in my system. I’m unbalanced. So when I go to put the cards away I knock them off the table and all over the floor. As I pick them up, I smack my head against the underside of the table. I get up and stub my toe. I break a glass. Etc.

Perhaps I tell you there’s one way to “burn off” the bad luck and to do that I place a bunch of low-dollar wagers on some baseball games happening that night. At the end of the night we look and see that all my teams lost. (So this would just be some type of headline/sports prediction. But I would be picking all the losers rather than all the winners.) In reality this is an unrelated trick, but it gets wrapped up in the same premise (earlier I transferred some of my luck to my friend) extending that premise beyond the trick.

Immersive presentations aren’t things you can or would necessarily want to do all the time. But if you’re looking to create a lasting memory with a particular trick, this is the best way I’ve found to do so consistently.

Monday Mailbag #48

When I first read the Force Unleashed, I felt that it was a good study and agreed with the findings for strong, direct prediction tricks, but thought it had some limitations on other uses of forcing. Your more recent post on Casualness and Clarity has highlighted what I think is a potential flaw: The Force Unleashed was a study on what forces are best from a clarity perspective only.

[L]et's take a standard cards across plot and let's say that after having done the set up in their hands, you now need to force the number three to have three cards go across (and let's stick to card forces here). In this situation, I think it would completely reverse the Force Unleashed findings, because going for extreme clarity draws undue attention to something that should be trivial and forgettable. Saying "just grab a card - what have you got?" is a much more casual event than "Say stop as I deal these cards down. Do you want to keep going?".

Another example of card forcing where I think casual would be better is if the force is just there to show that you could do something with any card, rather than the importance of a specific card. So for example, Gary Kurtz's ambitious card forces the card, so that later he can have time reverse to before the card was signed. Having a very fair selection procedure would draw extra attention to something that should be completely trivial before the trick has even begun.

So to sum up, I would say that Clarity forces would be best for predictions, but Casual forces would be better for incidental parts of routines or anywhere where the choice of cards doesn't play a major part in the plot (from the audience perspective). —DF

Yeah, I think we’re pretty much on the same page here. The Force Unleashed testing was about which selection procedures felt the most free and the most fair to the participants. So the results there are valuable in the instances where it’s important to emphasize the fairness of the selection.

There are certainly other routines where you want a particular card in play without focusing too much on how it’s selected—primarily because it would slow down the routine. In those cases I might use a dribble force or riffle force or a gimmicked deck.

I still wouldn’t use a classic force though. The eye-opening thing about the force testing for me was that the action of the classic force is something that’s really only associated with deception. It’s associated with magic tricks and forcing. In fact, the act of spreading something between the hands for a selection is so associated with something being a “trick” that people will make that joke whenever that action happens in another context. If they’re offering you your choice of Kool-Aid packets, or something like that, they’ll say, “Pick a Kook-Aid packet, any Kool-Aid packet,” as if it’s a card trick. So whether I’m going for the most fair choice I can or the most casual, I’d avoid the classic force altogether.

On a separate note, the only thing I’d really disagree with here is the contention that choosing a card to select a number for Cards Across should be “trivial and forgettable.” Cards Across is significantly stronger when they feel the number of cards that went across was:

A) Of their choosing
and
B) Determined after their cards had been isolated

So personally I wouldn’t feel the need to rush that moment. I would want them thinking, “Wait… I picked the three myself… if I had changed it for another card—like he offered—then a different number of cards would have had to come into my packet. But that packet was already in my hands!”

Might as well make it seem like a really fair choice. If you’re having them choose a card to choose a number you’ve already given up on casualness at that point.

I’m still using the technique in this post to allow them (most of the time) to determine how many cards go across. It continues to work very well for me.

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Hi Andy, I have some questions for you.

1) What does Pre-Show look like for the Amateur?

2) How do you practices sleight of hand and routines?

3) What is your opinion of doing coin rolls in routines?

—CE

What does Pre-Show look like for the Amateur?

There’s a sort of weird state-of-mind you go into if you ever leave a traditional job and start working for yourself. At first it’s really freeing and exhilarating. You think, “This is great! I never have to go to work!” Then it dawns on you that while you never really go to work, you’re in a sense always at work.

Being an amateur magician is sort of like that. You can look at it as there’s no “pre-show” because there’s no set “show.” Or you can look at it like everything is pre-show, because a magic performance may happen whenever.

I would consider “pre-show” for the amateur to be the act of always keeping a small part of your mind attuned for things that are said or done that you might be able to take advantage of at a later date in a trick. (Even though it didn’t work out as I planned, the section in this post titled “Magically Delicious” is a good example of that.)

How do you practice sleight of hand and routines?

I practice sleight-of-hand very half-assedly. Learning new sleights is not a part of magic that I enjoy. I don’t feel a great sense of accomplishment when I finally nail something. It just doesn’t do it for me. If I can’t practice it with half my brain while watching tv, I’ll never practice it at all. So don’t look to me for tips on that.

As far as practicing routines go, I wrote my current system up in this post. (Which came out after I was sent these questions.)

What is your opinion of doing coin rolls in routines?

Well, I avoid any type of flourish because I want to do my best to get them to forget they’re seeing a “performance.” And flourishes say “this is a performance” and also, “I’m skilled.” I don’t want to emphasize either of those points.

If I had a different viewpoint on flourishes, then coin rolls still might be one of the flourishes I avoided in performance. The reason why I’d avoid them is because they’re extended flourishes and they serve no purpose. A one-handed shuffle shuffles the deck. A fancy cut cuts the deck. A wand spin takes a split-second and can be seen as part of a magical gesture. So these are all little moments of “beauty” that enhance something that needed to happen in the effect. But a coin roll takes multiple seconds to sink in and serves no purpose. Coin rolls have a real dorky, “Look at me!” vibe to them. This is why many (most?) performers feel the need to undercut them with a line like, “And this is why I didn’t get laid until I was 36.”

However!

Coin rolls are one of the most useful flourishes for the amateur magician.

How so?

Don’t use them in a routine. Use them as a Hook. Let’s say you’re at a bar or somewhere where change might be in play. You’re in conversation with someone and you’re absentmindedly tapping a coin on the bar. Tap-tap-tap. Without breaking eye-contact you start to roll the coin along your knuckles. It’s not a “flourish” it’s just a kind of nervous-tic. It’s “flourishing” in the “Distracted Artist” style. If they notice it and comment on it, then you can use it to steer into some kind of trick. “Oh, yeah. It’s something I learned as a kid. There was this guy in my neighborhood who knew magic and he’d teach kids tricks if they could master this move. It was like his barrier to entry. I practiced it for months before getting it down to the point that he would teach me other stuff. Now it just happens automatically when there’s a coin nearby. Anyway….” If the person is interested and likes magic, they’re going to hop on that and pursue it further.

Dustings #43

I was reminded of the layman experience the other day after watching this video.

I’ll be honest—and this may make me sound dumb—but this fooled me when I first watched it, which was right before going to sleep the other night. Then, the next day, I did 15 seconds of research and realized what was going on.

Now, here’s the thing, I wanted to search for an answer, but once I found one, I wished that I hadn’t found one.

One of the notions I’ve fought against since the beginning of this site is the idiotic idea that people only try to figure out your tricks if you’re a bad magician. That’s nonsense. Magic only exists when people watch your tricks with a critical eye. To get the feeling of an “impossibility” people need to test what they’re seeing against what they know is possible. Googling a trick is just an extension of the same thought process you want them to engage in when they’re watching.

The better you are as a magician—the stronger your tricks are—the more you’re going to have to deal with that.

If you become very good at crafting hard to penetrate mysteries, and the people you’re performing for understand you’re not trying to make them look stupid or make yourself look cool with your tricks, then you can—over time—get them to realize that they’re just wasting their time trying to search for answers, and they might as well just enjoy the ride. But that takes time. If you think you’re just going to immediately charm someone into that type of response with your incredible magic, you’re just fooling yourself.

But, to reiterate something I’ve said before, just because they might feel compelled to search for an answer, that doesn’t mean they want to find one. I’ve seen people search for an answer online and immediately find an explanation or a link to where to buy a trick, and I’ve also seen people search and find absolutely nothing to explain this mystery they’ve just seen. And almost universally—even though people may think what they want is an answer—people seem more excited when they can’t seem to find any explanation for what they witnessed.

Do I wish that guy had some secret way to scoot his glutes across the floor to drive away rather than the boring reality of what was really going on? Of course!

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Here’s an Imp I used earlier this week. It was inspired by Monday’s mailbag question about how I handle being asked to repeat a trick, and my response which offhandedly mentioned a “lucky crystal.” While I don’t think the “lucky crystal” idea is all that interesting, for some reason this expansion of the concept seemed to really capture the imagination of the person I was performing for.

I gave my friend a crystal to hold onto and explained to her that supposedly it was a good luck charm. “I don’t necessarily believe in that sort of thing,” I said, “but I thought this was kind of interesting. Usually you think of a lucky charm and it’s just the sort of thing that is apparently lucky because people have deemed it so. There’s not too much rationale behind it. But what’s different about this is that it’s the first time I’ve heard of one of these charms having some sort of ‘mechanism’ behind how it works. I don’t know that I fully understand it. But what they say is that this crystal can absorb excess luck. Like, supposedly, there’s extra luck around us all the time that we’re not taking advantage of, because you don’t need luck for a lot of what you do throughout the day. So it just goes to waste. But this crystal can consume it and store it until you need it. It’s like when you have a glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton. It doesn’t naturally glow. But if it’s exposed to light it can absorb it and then reflect it back later when it’s dark. Apparently this crystal does the same thing with luck.”

From there I went on to demonstrate the “luck” in the crystal.

I hadn’t thought too much of the idea originally, but the person I was performing for was really taken with the idea of this crystal that could “absorb excess luck” for when you needed it later. I left the crystal with her at the end, of course.

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So there’s a new wallet out called the Climax Wallet.

I was going to make the obvious cum-related jokes about and be like, “Hey they stole my idea. I can prove it. Here’s my prototype…”

Blah, blah, blah. Admittedly, not the funniest shit in the world, but sometimes you’ve got to pick the low-hanging fruit.

But anyways, while googling semen wallet I came across a whole page of cum related wallets on Cafe Press.

It’s really strange. They’re selling this garbage for SEVENTY FIVE GODDAMN DOLLARS a piece!

You have your basic stuff like:

And then, for people with a more refined palate…

In general it looks like these were all designed originally to be put on t-shirts with no thought at all given to the proper cropping required to put these images on wallets. Or even if it would make any sense at all…

When your wallet is the only shirt you have with no cum on it, your life has really spun out of control.

However the most bizarre design on the “Cum Wallets” page was probably this one…

Uhm… congratulations?

The Magic of Expectations

Years ago, before this site even existed, we tested a rather simple idea in one of our magic focus groups. We showed people a basic coin vanish using a Raven gimmick. There was nothing more to the trick other than the coin vanish which—due to the nature of the gimmick—is very clean and visual.

We then had them rate the trick on a scale of 1 to 10. I don’t know the exact language we used at that time because we didn’t record much for posterity other than the actual final results. But it’s likely we asked them to rate how impossible the trick seemed on a scale of 1 to 10, where a rating of 5 would be what they considered an “average” trick.

The trick had an average rating of 6.0. So they felt the trick was a little better than your typical magic trick.

We showed another group the same coin vanish and their average rating was a 8.8. So they felt the trick was really great.

The performances of the coin vanish were identical. So what caused the second group to rate it so much higher?

For the second group, we first taught them a bad french drop. That was the only difference. That was the difference that caused their appreciation for the vanishing coin using a Raven to be almost 50% higher than the other group.

Setting expectations in some manner and then exceeding them with an effect allows the audience to appreciate things in a way they can’t if you simply perform the effect on its own. The expectations inform them what to appreciate and what to remember. And the expectations provide contrast that make the effect seem stronger.

When they just saw the coin vanish on its own, there wasn’t much for them to acknowledge other than the fact that it was a trick and it fooled them. They didn’t know what to pay attention to, so it becomes kind of a binary thing. “I saw the coin vanish and it fooled me.”

But when preceded by the lesson in the French Drop, they now had expectations. How does a coin vanish? Well, it vanishes when you mime an action that makes people think it’s in one hand when really it’s in another. So, for the coin to vanish, the hands need to come together. And at the end one of the hands will have to hide the coin.

If that’s your expectation and your understanding and someone says, “Yeah, I’ll show you a slightly more advanced version of that.” And you see a vanish where the hands don’t touch. There is no “miming.” And the coin is truly gone. Then you will find the vanish much stronger.

But you only really knew to make note of those things because of the expectations that were established.

Those of you who are familiar with my work will see that I use this all the time. I’ve written up a number of presentations that involve seeing the same trick multiple times. Or telling people about a trick (in which the expectations are established) and then performing it in a more impressive manner. Once you start using this technique, you’ll try to find ways to use it a lot too, because it’s a very simple, yet powerful way to increase the strength of an effect.

Monday Mailbag #47

Just had my first full gig in over a year. […]

Just thought this might be of interest - I decided to try your 'Unkown Edible' idea and I decided to use it as a pre-show item. It was really good that I did, because the guy took a really long time to think of something and ended up pulling out his phone to look something up. I was setting up anyway so no biggie, but I guess I wasn't expecting that to be such a hard question. Maybe it was just unique to this guy, but I could see this being hard for some people in retrospect.

I'm not super into pre-show in general, but occasionally use it when I want to try out a new imp device or something. Well, in this case - I'll be doing it again and specifically saying something along the lines of "I want to set this up now so that you have time to think, so I don't put you on the spot later".

I'm not sure if that's a 'normal' excuse for preshow, but in this case it ended up making a lot of sense. Just raised the idea of choosing things that might inherently take a little thinking or reflection as a 'reason' for preshow.

Obviously you don't do preshow exactly, but I imagine there is an analogy in the social performing world. —MP

Yeah, that’s smart. One of the benefits of using “unknown personals” in social performing is because it can take a bit of thought and energy to come up with an answer. The longer it takes them to formulate an answer, the less they can think, “That must the obvious response,” or, “I guess everyone says that.” So using that as part of the rationale for pre-show work makes sense to me. And that’s the case whether it’s the type of pre-show where it’s obvious to the rest of the audience that you spoke to the person before the show or not.

The absolute dumbest thing I’ve seen done with pre-show is when the mentalist will say, “Before the show I asked you to think of a card.” Or “think of a celebrity” or “think of the name of someone close to you.” There’s (usually) no reason given why this was done pre-show. (As I wrote in an early post on pre-show work.)

But using a particularly meaty “Unknown Personal” question completely justifies the process. “Often people accuse me of doing research on the people in my audience. If I tell you your zodiac sign or you mother’s first name, you’re much more likely to think I have rudimentary web search skills than that I have extraordinary mind reading skills. That’s why, before the show, I asked Josh to think of something that I couldn’t find online. Something he didn’t even know himself before I asked him. Now, Josh, this took you a while to think of, yes? And you’d never thought of it before? And since you thought of it, you’ve never told another soul, correct?”

That makes a lot more sense than, “Before the show I asked Josh to think of an important person in his life.” People don’t generally need ample warning to think of the name of their loved ones.

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Will you be releasing the information from your, “How Much Money Do You Make” question which you posed a little while ago? —DE

Probably not. The answers I got were really kind of interesting. But I didn’t really get enough responses for the answers to be meaningful in any broader way. That’s probably because the majority of my audience doesn’t perform professionally. But I’ll leave the question up a little while longer. If there is an influx of new responses then maybe I’ll do a post on it at some point.

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How do you handle people asking you to do a trick again? You’ve said you try not to “break the spell” even after the trick is over, but if they ask you to do it again and you refuse, isn’t that a big flashing light that what they’re seeing is a trick? —BE

One of the benefits of non-magician-centric premises, is that you can usually build in a rationale why what you’re showing them can’t be repeated. If it’s a ritual, then it’s a ritual that can only be done once. If it’s a psychological game, then it’s one that only works once, because after you see it your mind blocks the psychological mechanism by which it works. If it’s a crazy coincidence, then yes, it just happens that one time. That’s how coincidences work. If it’s something that depends on the positioning of the stars in the sky, then we only have this brief window to do this—our next opportunity will be in 2034. If it’s a manifestation of spirit-energy, then the spirit energy gets “burned off” after being manifested and that spirit can’t be contacted for usually 60-90 days (well, that’s what all the books about spiritualism tell us).

So if it’s the sort of trick they’ll want to see repeated, and I can’t repeat it, then I’ll try and build that into the story.

But even if I have an excuse why it won’t work again, I will often try to do it again. What I mean is, let’s say we manifest a spirit that moves an object across the table. If someone says, “Do it again,” I don’t just say, “No. We can’t. The spirit energy has dissipated.” That feels too much like an excuse.

Instead I’ll say, “Hmmm… okay, yeah, let’s try. I think they say it probably won’t work without some sort of spiritual refractory period, but I don’t know if I really believe that.” Then we’ll go through the manifestation procedure again and… nothing happens. “Huh… I guess maybe it does need that waiting period before trying again.”

The thing is, I don’t want it to feel like I’m brushing them off. “No. We can’t do it again because [reason].” Instead, if someone asks to see something again, my attitude is, “Yeah, let’s try that again. They say it probably won’t work, but who knows….”

The traditional recommendation when people ask to see something for a second time is to “put the trick away and go on to another effect.” I’m not sure that’s good advice in any situation, but it’s especially bad advice when performing socially. Put yourself in the spectator’s shoes. You asked me to pay attention to this thing you wanted to show me, and now that I’m expressing interest in it you’re going to put it away and move on to something else? That’s a very bizarre way to interact with someone and it undercuts the notion that this thing you were showing them was interesting or special in some way. It’s almost like fucking someone and then walking out the door after you shoot your load. Stick around and cuddle for a while.

Now, you might say, “Okay, but I don’t want to end on the trick not working. I want to stop after it’s a success.” That makes sense, but in social magic you have to try and look at it as a holistic experience. How you get into an effect and out of an effect are part of the experience.

So if I show you a trick with my lucky crystal and afterwards you ask me to do it again, and I say, “Hey, get your own lucky crystal!” and put it away in my pocket, or I say, “If you think that’s good, wait until I tell you about this time I played 3 Card Monte.” Then the trick is ending in an awkward way. The trick itself was a success but then the interaction took a weird turn, and that likely undercuts the experience of the trick.

But if I show you a trick with my lucky crystal and afterwards you ask me to repeat it, and my attitude is, “Sure, let’s give it a shot.” But I give some caveat on why it might not work again, and it turns out that it doesn’t work again, I don’t think that takes away from the trick’s initial success. And it can, in some cases, even reinforce the story you’re telling. If it was “just a trick” then of course it could be repeated over and over… but if it really somehow relies on this crystal that can be drained of its energy… well then I guess maybe you could only do it occasionally.

The point being, I think it’s much easier to come up with a reasonable rationale for why something didn’t work a second time, than it is to come up with a reasonable rationale for why you wouldn’t want to try, or a reasonable rationale for why you’re moving on to something else.

Dustings #42

As June winds down, I want to sincerely wish a happy Pride Month to all the LGBTQ+ magicians in our midst. I hope we’re at a point in time where you feel welcomed and accepted in every aspect of the world of magic. If nothing else, you’re always welcome at this site.

So Happy Pride Month to all of you who fall under that rainbow umbrella, including great performers such as Michael Carbonaro, Neil Patrick Harris, Derek DelGaudio, Chris Ramsay, any anyone else who shows up in the Google image search results for: super gay magician.

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A few months ago, I had this to say about the upcoming (at the time) television show, Big Trick Energy…

I think what people love about prank shows, or things like the Carbonaro Effect, or even just a David Blaine special is that they have this fake thing—the prank or the magic trick—but we get to see people’s genuine reactions to that fake thing. If the reactions to Blaine’s tricks didn’t feel legitimate, he never would have had a special in the first place.

But from the clips I’ve seen, when it comes to this show, everything seems fake. The tricks, the reactions, even their reactions to the reactions.

So it’s this weird situation where you have a phony reaction to a phony scenario. My gut tells me that’s going to make it difficult for people to connect to the show in any real way. But what the hell do I know?

Well, even a dumb bitch like me can be right occasionally, and in this case it looks like I pegged what the issue with the show would be. To call this show an abortion would not be accurate, because abortion actually has some proponents.

I haven’t watched the show (nothing against it, I just don’t watch much magic generally), but I searched reddit to find what the non-magician consensus was. It’s… not good.

Ouch. Those weren’t bad comments that I cherry-picked from good comments. Those comments were representative of the consensus. (On reddit, at least. But similarly on IMDB it has one of the lowest scores for a tv show I’ve ever seen.)

I usually feel bad for people when something flops. Like if there is a new restaurant that opens in the neighborhood and it’s always mostly empty, I feel miserable for them. Which is strange because I’m pretty indifferent to my own failures. I just have a lot of sympathy for others.

But here I don’t really feel too bad for the guys behind the show. It doesn’t seem like this was a passion project where we were getting a glimpse of their true personalities. In that case I would feel for them if it turned out to be hot garbage. But this just seems like they were trying to be something they’re not, the filming was rushed, and it was shot during a pandemic. That’s a bad mix.

I don’t know if a second season is on the horizon, but if so, here is what they should do. They should take the Dominos Pizza tactic from 10 years ago where they came out and said, “Yeah, our pizza sucks. Now we’re going to make it good.” Don’t hide from the fact that the show didn’t work. Address the issues head on. And make it a show that is, in part, about rebuilding the show into something better. Sure, that might be a flop as well, but at least it would be interesting.

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Congratulations to Joshua Jay who recently graced the cover of Ohio State’s alumni magazine.

Those of you outside the the United States might be wondering why any university would feature Josh on the cover of their alumni magazine. “Ohio State must be a very small school,” you’re thinking. “Very few alumni? Maybe a plane crash took out a whole class at some point leaving slim pickings?” No, actually Ohio State is one of the largest schools in the country and has a huge alumni pool to pick from. So making the cover is a great achievement.

The phrases “Joshua Jay” and “cover boy” remind me of a funny misunderstanding I had once with Andi Gladwin. This was years ago. We were supposed to have a meeting about them buying out the Jerx and turning it into a showcase for Josh and Andi’s humor writing. But when I got to their offices, Josh wasn’t there. Andi mentioned he would be about 20 minutes late because he was at a cover shoot for a magazine. At the time, Josh had just been in the New York Times and on the cover of a couple magic periodicals, so his face was really getting out there. And I was like, “Damn, this guy is all over the place. What magazine is he going to be on now?” And Andi said that it was a photo shoot for Bon Appétit magazine.

“Is there anything this guy can’t do?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Andi replied.

“Well, he does the writing and the lecturing and the books and the shows. It’s just a lot of different stuff. I didn’t realize he could cook too.”

“Huh?” Andi said.

“Well, you don’t get on the cover of Bon Appétit if you can’t cook.”

Andi waved away what I was saying. “I’m sorry, my bad,” he said. “I should have enunciated better. He is on the cover of Boner Petite, The Quarterly Journal for Men Who Suffer With Micro-Penis.”

Just one of those funny misunderstandings!

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For those of you who are following along with my transformation from magic blogger to bible scholar, I would like to share with you my new favorite passage from the good book. Before I started reading the bible this year, I didn’t consider myself a “religious” person. But that book contains passages that are full of such truth and beauty that it’s very hard not to feel yourself drawn into its belief system.

Recently, I’ve found myself in moments of quiet contemplation, reflecting on the awesome power and universal truth of Psalm 137:9

51 Cases South

Here is a theoretical idea for a parlor or stage routine. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I think it’s kind of interesting and there are a couple moments in the piece that I like.

The magician says, “One time I saw this guy perform a trick. He had a deck of cards. He told me to name any card in the deck. I named the 5 of Hearts. Very slowly, without doing anything sneaky, he slid the deck from the card case, spread the cards between his hands, and there was one card reversed in the deck. It was the 5 of Hearts.

“Do you want to know how he did it? Well, the truth is, I don’t know. And the reason I don’t isn’t because I can’t think of a way it can be done. It’s because I know of so many ways it could be done that I don’t know which method he used.

“One thing people don’t understand about magicians is how much they’re specialists. There are performers who can make things appear. There are performers who can make objects change color. There are performers who can make things float. Some can do all these things. But not many. It’s like playing an instrument. There are some guys who can play a lot of instruments well. But usually if you play a bunch of instruments you’re really only particularly good at one and just okay at the others. Magic is like that too. Most everyone has their speciality.

“So if you want to do the trick where the one card the person names is found reversed in the deck, you’re going to use the method that’s in line with your specialty. Some guys know what people will say, so they just reverse the card they know will be named. Some guys can make you say something without you knowing it. So they just reverse any random card and make sure that’s the one you name. Some guys don’t know what you’ll say, and they can’t make you say anything, but they can make things appear. So they just wait for you to name a card and then make it appear face-up in the deck. Other performers can change an object’s orientation, so for them it’s simply a matter of magically reversing the card. And still others can cloud people’s minds. They’ll tell you that your card is reversed in the deck, and you’ll swear you see that it is, but it’s not really there.

“Tonight I’ll show you how I would do the trick.”

The curtain behind the performer opens and there is a sawhorse on either end of the stage with a piece of wood resting across the two. The wood is just a few inches in width, but it extends across the entire stage. The wood is acting as a shelf that is about hip height to the performer. On top of the “shelf” are 52 decks of cards in their cases, standing on their bottom edge.

The performer has a few members of the audience work together to name a card. They come up with the 3 of Diamonds.

“The 3 of Diamonds? Okay, okay.”

The magician steps back so he’s standing behind the shelf of cards that goes all the way across the stage.

“3 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds,” he mumbles as he slowly walks down the row of decks. “It should be here, I think.” He picks up one of the cases. Opens it up and thumbs through the cards a bit. “Nope, one off,” he says. And puts that case back down.

He takes the next case in the row and removes the deck of cards from it.

“Look. Pay close attention. All I do is spread this deck, very cleanly. And… miraculously… the one card you named is the one card that’s reversed in this deck.”

The magician spreads to one reversed card. He pulls it out, and it’s the 3 of Diamonds. The audience is unimpressed.

“When I said I could make your freely named card be the one card that was reversed in the deck, you probably didn’t imagine me having 51 other decks in play. That is a little underwhelming, I suppose. As you probably guessed, there is a different card reversed in each of these decks.”

The magician puts the deck of cards back in its case and replaces the case on the shelf where it was originally.

He then walks over to one edge of the shelf, still standing behind it.

“It’s not impressive when you see it like that. But that’s the method I need to use. I’m not good at making things appear. And I’m not good at making predictions.

“What I am… is a vanisher.”

The magician removes a magic wand from his inside coat pocket and begins to walk behind the row of decks. He makes a tapping motion above the cards on the near end of of the row. “Bippity,” he says, and continues walking. When he gets to the middle of the row he makes another tapping motion with the wand. “Boppity,” he says. As he gets to the far end of the row he makes a final tapping motion above the cards on that end. “Boo,” he says.

Then he flicks his wrist of the hand holding the wand and the “wand” unfolds. It’s actually a black folding fan with white tips.

The magician once agains walks behind the shelf. This time he holds the fan at hip height and flutters it in short, rapid movements at the decks. As he walks, the breeze from the fan causes the card cases to fall off the plank of wood, tumbling to the floor where they clatter emptily, following the magicians path across the stage. When he reaches the other side, only one case is still standing, the one from which he had spread to the named card earlier.

Method

Well, you know, it’s just an invisible deck and a bunch of empty cases, of course.

The trick was inspired by some emails from Joe Mckay in which he suggested a few different sucker tricks using an invisible deck and a number of empty card cases where the spectators would assume you had access to a bunch of decks in order to do your trick, but then you reveal that all the cases are empty. (The original idea here seems to belong to Dr. Sawa. Although similar concepts have been explored by a few other magicians, including Asi Wind on his Fool Us appearance.)

What I wanted to do was remove the “sucker trick” element of the effect. Rather than say, “Ah-ha! I fooled you. You thought all these other cases contained decks too, but they’re actually empty!” I decided to go with the idea that yes, these other cases did in fact have decks in them, but I’ve caused them to vanish. If one was ever to perform this for real, I would recommend adding a couple convincers at the start to reinforce the idea that there are 52 actual decks on stage. For example, you could “accidentally” knock one of the decks off the wooden shelf, causing its cards to spill out on the floor. In the process of gathering up the cards and returning the deck back to its original position, you would switch the cased deck for an empty one at some moment where your body is blocking the view of the audience.

I think it’s kind of an interesting effect. I like the premise, and the idea of giving them a peek behind the curtain of how different magic specialists would accomplish the same trick. I like using an Invisible Deck as the method for a vanish. And I like the fact that it sort of jerks people around with what they’re seeing. I would assume that after the decks “vanish” a good portion of the audience will come to the conclusion that those decks never were there. But if that’s true, they have to reassess the moment where the magician spread the cards to show their reversed card. This moment—that originally meant nothing—is now the moment of impossibility (if it’s true the other cases were empty all along).

My original idea was to turn on an oscillating fan behind the cases, so it would blow them all off in sequence except the one that held the Invisible Deck. But I like the folding fan idea a little better. Mainly because I like the idea of the thing they assume is an “ordinary” wand, unfolding into a handheld fan. (Which seems like a prop that should already exist, but I did some searching and couldn’t find anything.)