Wednesday Whalebag

The spectators who google something: How long do you think they spend on it? My theory is that if they don’t find an obvious answer in 30 seconds, they’re going to be frustrated and stop. But you know people who have done it. How long did they spend? —PM

From my observation, and from talking to spectators and from talking to other performers, I think your estimate is just about right.

This is probably a point I should have made earlier. When it comes to googling information about a trick, people will search for information, but most won’t research something. If there isn’t an explanation of the trick or a link to where they can find it for sale in the first couple of pages of search results, then you’re generally good. Sure, some people will be more persistent, but for the amateur, you’re likely to know if that’s their personality type. So you would know to show that person things that would be much more difficult to track down.

If this is something you care about, it’s probably good to have some rule in place so the decision is made automatically for your if something is too searchable online. My general rule would be something like this…

The Jerx Rule for What’s Too Googleable

If a search of the main items used in the trick, plus the word “magic,” leads to an explanation of the trick (or where it can be found for sale) within the first couple of pages of google results, then the trick is too googleable.

For example: bill lemon magic

or

Rubik’s cube bottle magic

“Too googleable” doesn’t necessarily mean “completely undoable” for me (and certainly not for anyone else). But it does put a limit on the longevity of the response I would expect from such a trick. And it suggests that trick is not something you would want to build a “big” presentation around.

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From the same email…

If I do my version of the cut and restored rope, students can google Cut and Restored rope and they will find the basic technique I use, but they will also find many other methods I did not use, and they have no idea what if any of it is related to anything I did. —PM

True. And that becomes kind of a grey area. There are some general trick descriptions that produce so many results that searching for it is pretty useless for the spectator. If they search predict chosen card trick, that’s not going to give them anything valuable.

Cut and restored rope is a little different. A search on that might provide them an explanation that satisfies them, even if it’s a different method. In most cases they won’t be savvy enough to realize it’s not the method you used. They’re not going to say, “Oh, wait. But he didn’t hold the rope in this exact specific way, so I guess I have no clue what he did.” They’ll just look at it and think, “Oh, I see. He didn’t actually cut the middle of the rope.”

So they might not have an explanation they would bet their life on, but it’s likely something that would satisfy them. And honestly, I just don’t want people to be satisfied. I want the effect to gnaw at them somewhat.

So in that situation I might do some sort of meta commentary on this trick and the secret. “Cut and restored rope is a classic of magic. It’s practically a beginner’s trick. If you search for how it’s done you wouldn’t find one method, you’d find hundreds. But you could read through all of those explanations and you’d never find a way to do what I’m going to show you today.” And then I’d need to come up with some supposed or legitimate rationale for what makes this different.

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You may have never been proven so correct as I proved you recently. I’m a long time reader of the site. I agree with much of what you write and disagree with some of it too. In the “disagree” column would be your recent writing about trick “google-ability.” I just didn’t think it was an issue. I’d never seen someone google a trick of mine and no one had ever come up to me to say, “I found out how that trick was done.”

But in the spirit of your site I thought I would ask a few of the people I regularly perform for if they had ever tried to find the secret of a trick I’d shown them. I went to my friend and coworker Mike and asked if he’d ever searched for a secret. He said “Sure, a bunch of times.” When I asked him which tricks he said “Well… the good ones.” That was incredibly eye-opening for me.

I asked a few other people as well and they all admitted they had. And all the tricks they had searched out were ones that had gone over really well. Some secrets they had found out but they never mentioned that to me. —NN

Yeah, that’s just reality, unfortunately.

A good point made in your last line is that you shouldn’t expect people to tell you they learned the secret. Not unless there was something adversarial going on during the trick. I would guess that most of the time if they search and find the secret, they keep it to themselves. They found out what they wanted to know. They’re not looking to make you feel bad, unless you come across as a true dipshit.

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I answered “Choice 3” in your original survey and I think your breakdown of why people might choose that option was a good encapsulation of my opinion. Magicians are entertainers, if the people are entertained during our performance, then we’ve done our job. What they choose to do afterwards isn’t really our issue or our business. —MK

Okay. My goal isn’t to try and change your mind, but only to offer my perspective.

Yes, a magician falls under the heading of “entertainer.” But if you went on stage, got all nervous, shit your pants, and everyone laughed at you for 20 minutes, it’s unlikely you’d walk of the stage saying, “Well, I entertained them. I did my job.” You’re an entertainer, but you’re one who entertains by creating something magical. That’s the specific thing you do.

If you give someone a profound magic experience with a fascinating mystery at the heart of it, I’m sure if you had your druthers you’d rather the trick not be exposed 5 seconds after you perform it, yes? 30 seconds would be better. And one hour would be better than that. And one week would be better still. Even if you say keeping the secret isn’t important to you, I think you’d agree to that. So it’s not that you don’t see the benefit of keeping the secret, you just don’t think the trade-off is worth the effort it requires. I get that opinion, I just disagree.

For me, the cat and mouse game of making something ungoogleable has added a lot to the impact of my magic. In the 1980s, if you showed someone a trick and you fooled them, they might think, “This guy is more clever than I am. This guy knows how to do something I don’t know how to do.” But in this age, if you show someone a trick and they’re fooled and they cant find an answers via the internet, they might think, “He fooled me. But I also can’t find any example of anything like this online. What he did… it’s not a thing that exists.” It makes the experience seem much more special.

It’s really about your perspective. As a professional it might make sense to say, “I’m here to entertain people for 45 minutes.” But as an amateur, it would be weird to come off as “the entertainment” for the evening.

I feel like the goal with magic is to create mystery and memories. That’s something magic is uniquely well suited for. Unfortunately, both mystery and memories are greatly diminished once the spectator feels they have an answer to the “how” of it all. Very regularly I have people recount tricks they’ve seen me perform. Sometimes the trick has just occurred recently, and sometimes it’s a trick from literally decades ago. And they’re still excited by the trick. But they’re never excited about a trick if they think they know how it was done. No one brings up tricks to me that they figured out a few years ago. I’ve written before that I don’t consider the trick over until the spectator has some clue of how it might be done. So that’s why making something ungoogleable is a worthwhile pursuit to me. It can turn a two minute effect into a life-long one.

Is He Still Talking About Google-ability? He Is.

The subject of the “google-ability” of tricks has taken over my email box, so I want to do a post on that today and a mailbag post on Wednesday to sort of wind down on the subject for now.

A bunch of people wrote me over the past few days to explain their rationale for why they chose this answer in the survey I ran a week or so ago.

The question was: “When it comes to the google-ability of a trick, which statement best represents your feelings…”

And I wanted to hear more from the people who said,

“As long as they enjoy the trick in the moment, I don’t really care what they search or learn about it afterwards.”

Now, because the categories in my question were broad, I will say that most of the explanations didn’t match up perfectly with what I imagined people selecting that response would be thinking. I was more expecting to hear, “I don’t care if people search out the secrets afterwards because information shouldn’t be kept secret,” or some goofball shit like that.

But I didn’t hear that sort of thing too often. Most of the responses fell into two categories:

1. “I don’t worry about it because of the type of material I perform.” (i.e. tricks from books rather than effects that were marketed individually.) Which doesn’t exactly suggest that they’re ok with people googling, just that they don’t feel it’s an issue for them.

Or

2. “I don’t worry about it because I don’t think people really google tricks.”

I have bad news for you… they do. The big mitigating factor here is age. If you’re performing for an over-50 crowd, primarily, you’ll find less of this. But otherwise, if you present a very clear, direct mystery to people, then there is a very good chance they’ll run it through google.

Tricks People Won’t Google

I think it’s true that there are a good number of tricks that someone would never google.

People don’t bother googling bad or boring tricks.

And they don’t bother googling longer routines where a bunch of stuff happens because:

• It might be boring, as just mentioned.

• There might be so much going on they wouldn’t know where to start with a google search.

• For a lot of longer routines like that, they think they already know how it’s done: “Sleight of hand.”

In our testing, sleight-of-hand (often paired with misdirection) is the most common response people give when asked if they know how a trick is done. They will give that answer as if it’s a full explanation. And they seem content with that answer. The don’t need more information. So in the case that they think what you did was sleight-of-hand, they probably wouldn’t end up googling the trick. In their mind they don’t need to.

It’s like if I asked you, “I wonder how Ted cut these pieces for the construction of the birdhouse?” And you said, “He used woodworking tools.” You don’t actually know the names of the tools or how they work or what they do. But you don’t need to. You have the general idea and that’s enough. You don’t feel a sense of “mystery” in regards to how those pieces got there. You just realize there are some specific details you don’t understand because you’re not immersed in that world.

This is one of the reasons I personally avoid long sleight-of-hand pieces. With rare exceptions, they don’t seem to capture people’s imaginations because they have the Easy Answer of “sleight-of-hand” to fall back on. That’s not a problem if you want people to think of you as a sleight-of-hand technician. But generally I try to avoid being associated with that.

Don’t Fear the Google

Imagine two magicians, Magician A and Magician B, and they have both just performed a trick for some strangers. Magician A’s audience gives a warm response and some puzzled looks before declaring, “I guess it’s magic!” Magician B’s audience gives a warm response and some puzzled looks and, when the magician is gone, they’re on their cell phones trying to figure out how it’s done.

Based just on this information, I would assume that Magician B is the better magician with the stronger trick. We at least know that Magician B’s audience is fooled by the trick and still thinking about it after he left. While it’s true that if you’re a dick people might want to undermine what you did and search for an answer, they will usually have that impulse too even if they adore you. So we can’t say anything about the power of B’s performance skills one way or the other.

An important realization for me about audience reactions was this: Wanting to know the answer is part of being mystified. You can entertain people or fool people, and maybe they won’t make an effort to discover the secret. But to be mystified, they have to have some desire to know what really happened. That desire to know is inherent in the feeling of mystery. You don’t know your mailman’s mom’s maiden name. But you have no desire to know it, so it’s not a mystery. But if I say, “I can’t tell you… but you would never believe what your mailman’s mom’s maiden name is. Oh my god….” All of a sudden, it’s a mystery. The only thing that changed was your desire to know the information. If you’re reading a mystery book and you don’t care about finding out what happened, then you’re not really reading a mystery book. You’re just reading an account of someone who was bludgeoned with a statuette in the grand foyer of Tuttlesworth Manor in Shropshire.

So instilling that desire to know the secret is not a fault in your attempt to generate mystery. It’s exactly what one would expect from a successful performance.

The Power of Charm

Now, it’s also true that people can be so charmed and delighted by a trick that they have no interest in googling it. But this is much more rare and requires a pretty special presentation. A lot of magicians delude themselves into thinking they’re such brilliant performers and that’s why no one ever googles a trick or no one ever asks to see the deck or whatever. Nope. 1000 to 1 the odds are that they just didn’t care that much about what you showed them.

Not wanting to seek out the answer is usually a learned response for people. Their natural inclination is to figure it out. But if you’re good, over time, they may come to value the experience of just being overwhelmed by the magical encounter.

One of the ways of identifying someone with that mindset is if they’re seeking out a performance from you. The person who goes to Copperfield to be amazed is going to have a different appreciation for being fooled than the person who has a trick sprung on them by an acquaintance.

As an amateur you can plant the seeds with quick, lower-stakes tricks and then cultivate an audience with the people who come back and ask for more and seem to enjoy the wonder of the moment. The people who seek this sort of thing out tend to be he people who are more easily charmed by the magical experience and see the value of an unanswered mystery

The Power of Presentation

A good presentation can positively affect the google situation as well.

First, a good presentation can add to the charm factor to make the spectator not want to undermine what just occurred.

But more importantly, a good presentation can just disrupt the logic flow in a person’s mind so searching for the answer isn’t the sole, obvious next step.

If I’m showing you the color-changing knives and my presentation is, “Watch, I’m going to make this knife change color,” and you’re fooled, there isn’t much for you to think of or do afterwards other than say to yourself, “Hmmm… I wonder if I can figure out how that was done. Let’s see. “ [Typing] knife change color magic. “Okay, well, here we go.”

A straightforward trick with no presentation to speak of doesn’t give the spectator many options other than trying to figure the trick out. It’s like giving them a button and saying, “Don’t press the button.” Well… what else is there to do?

But if your presentation wraps the spectator in a story then you can give them much more to occupy their thoughts with other than just, “What’s the secret?” If a knife changes color and your presentation is about hypnotizing them to see the different color or transferring objects through mirror dimensions that are the inverse of ours, then at least there is something more to consider at the end of the effect. Regardless of their belief-level in the presentation itself. They don’t have to believe you’re swapping items between dimensions to imagine the ramification of the idea.

Sometimes a presentation will completely camouflage the effect, making it ungoogleable by causing them to google something else entirely.

Sometimes a presentation can occupy their thoughts enough that they don’t immediately think to google the trick at the heart of the presentation.

But even with a commercially available, easily figured out effect like the color-changing-knives, a strong presentation can maintain some of the value of the encounter even if the trick is figured out. In the same way a mystery novel can still be a good read if the ending was spoiled for you by someone—so long as the rest of the book is written artfully. I still tend to avoid such tricks, but there’s no doubt a great presentation can salvage them to a certain extent.

Revising Vernon

Vernon said that a good effect is one that can be described in a single sentence. That statement was accurate 50 years ago or whenever he uttered it. But it’s not as true today. The tricks that can be described so simply can also be searched so simply. So I guess it still describes a good effect in theory, but not necessarily a good one to perform.

I would say a good trick is one that seems to the audience like it should be google-able, but when searched, it produces no informative results. Similar to Vernon’s definition, I believe the best effects are ones that an audience could describe in one sentence. But in this modern day, that simple description should lead to no answers.

Dustings #48

One time I was poking around a used magic book shop and I came across a pamphlet called Smoke by Ted Annemann. I’ve looked for it since, but haven’t been able to track it down. This might be because “Smoke” is such a generic name, which makes it hard to search for. Or it might have been re-released under a different name. Or maybe Annemann never wrote it at all. If someone told you that after Annemann died, people would put out stuff under his name just to increase sales, you’d probably say, “That sounds about right.” It was the 1940s, it would be difficult to check if he really wrote something. And we’re talking about magicians, who are notorious scumbags.

Anyway, if I’m remembering correctly from my brief flip through the manuscript, it was a pretty basic idea. It was just a matter of doing a center tear and dropping the pieces into a fire and “reading” the word from the smoke. While it’s very simple, it does address two issues with the center tear:

Why do they have to write the word down?

Why do you tear it up?

They write it down because you need to burn it. And you tear it up because that’s what people often do when they burn something.

Anyway, it’s a perfectly fine motivation. And it works nicely, especially l if there’s already a fire nearby that you can utilize to burn the pieces.

But the reason I mention the idea today is because I found this quote from The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes, which goes along nicely with this premise…

“In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.”

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This post on the WYW Book Club was a pretty big hit in my email box, so some of you might benefit from this item, courtesy of Chris Rawlins. It’s a bookmark that purportedly comes from a similar type of service as mentioned in that post. You could have them printed up professionally or probably print out a serviceable one yourself on some card stock. This could either be something you leave around casually as a potential Hook for a future performance. Or it could come in the package with the book, just adding to the idea that this is truly coming from a special service.

You can find the file here.

If you’re really lazy, you could order Chris’ effect, Rudiment, which comes with some of these bookmarks as part of the package. Rudiment isn’t the same premise or effect as I wrote about in the WYW post, but he needed some bookmarks for the sake of the routine and decided to go with this idea as a way to kill two birds with one bookmark. Thanks to Chris for sharing.

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And thanks to those of you who wrote in with your explanation for choosing Option 3 in last Friday’s Dustings (as discussed in the post right before this one). I won’t be able to respond to everyone individually because there were quite a few responses and most were fairly long. So I’m offering a generic “thanks” now and if there’s anything in particular I want to follow up on with you more individually, I’ll be in touch.

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If you want to go down a not-exactly-magic, but somewhat-adjacent rabbit hole, I recommend the story of Velocity Gnome that reader, David S. recently informed me of. As I said, it’s not magic, but it is the story of a long-form immersive fiction, somewhat similar to (but much longer than) some of the stuff I’ve written about here. It happened to a kid named Kolin in the early 2000s.

Here’s a podcast episode about the story.

And here’s an article by comedian Chris Gethard that doesn’t give away too much (but does link to a first-hand account of the story) and does a good job of explaining the potential greater significance of the incident.

To set the stage, here are the basics of the story (taken from Gethard’s article).

• Everything started when a complete stranger knocked on Kolin’s door, claimed he was from the future, and handed him a package.

• For the next few years, Kolin wound up interacting with these people intermittently. Some of these dealings happened online, but most of them involved Kolin traveling to a number of different states while meeting many people who were in on the conspiracy, which he was sometimes aware of and sometimes not.

• After a few years of these strange interactions, they stuck the landing

It’s a pretty interesting story. And it’s a good example of someone being immersed in a fictional situation, but in a way where they know it’s fiction (as opposed to, like, a practical joke).

Google-ability Survey Results, Feedback Request and The Jerx Tank

In last Friday’s post, I asked this question:

When it comes to the google-ability of a trick, which statement best represents your feelings:

1. I make an effort to perform tricks that would be very difficult to find information about online.

2. While I don’t want people to be able to find the SECRET to an effect that I do, I don’t mind if they search and find that it’s a trick you can buy and that others are doing the same trick.

3. As long as they enjoy the trick in the moment, I don’t really care what they search or learn about it afterwards.

Here are how the results broke down…

59% chose option 1

10% chose option 2

31% chose option 3

I was happy to see that 59% of the readers of this site have concerns about making their magic ungoogleable. It’s not something I see discussed too much in other places so I was wondering if maybe this was some weird quixotic battle that no one else really cared about. I’m glad I’m not wasting my time discussing it here. I’m sure that 60% is probable skewed due to the nature of this site and the sort of magic I write about. With the general magician population it might be closer to 40%, I would guess. Maybe less.

If I had to argue for the third option—the “who cares what happens after the trick” option—I guess my rationale would be along these lines:

• Everyone knows it’s a trick anyway, so figuring out the secret doesn’t change that fact.

• If they put in the effort to track down the secret, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to know it. I learned the secret myself and I’m not some special individual.

• There’s no winning this battle of keeping a secret if a spectator is determined enough, so it’s not worth worrying about.

• If you’re too concerned about google-ability, your options for the material you can perform are very limited. You essentially can’t do any classics of magic because information about all of them are available online. Nor can you do many of the big releases from the major magic producers because often it’s very easy to find where you can buy the trick. In fact, the magic companies are going out of their way to make the tricks easy to find by anyone searching them. So to avoid google-ability you have to avoid a lot of classics and new releases.

• The goal is to entertain. If they’re entertained for 5, or 10, or 20 minutes or whatever, then the goal has been achieved. What they do afterwards is not really any of my concern.

I’m sure there are elements of this position that I haven’t covered here. And I’m looking for some feedback from people who voted for #3. Is there part of your thinking that isn’t mentioned above? If so, send me an email.

I’m working on something that may be used for some potential testing later on and I want to get a better grasp on this particular way of thinking. It’s a mindset that I too had many years ago (when finding out tricks required a significant amount of effort on the part of a spectator), but I am firmly in the “Option 1” camp these days.

The Jerx Tank

One thing the response to this question showed me is that there is a somewhat significant market out there for magic tricks that don’t have an online footprint and can’t be googled. Such tricks could demand a premium price so long as the buyer’s could be reasonably certain the trick wasn’t going to show up on Vanishing Inc. 18 months from now.

Now, I actually have the infrastructure in place to sell a product without ever having to advertise it online. And I have the faith of my supporters that I’m not going to go back on my word about releasing something widely that I indicated wouldn’t be.

So if you have a product you’d like to pitch to me to be release in such a manner, just reach out to me over email. If it’s a good idea that’s in line with the work I’ve put out, then I’d be happy to collaborate on the project with you and either buy the rights off you or work out some other type of deal. This isn’t something I’m like desperate to do. I have enough on my plate. But if it would mean bringing some cool products to a discerning group of magic buyers, all on the down-low, I’d definitely be interested in helping that process along.

Let me be your Lori Grenier.

Dear Jerxy: Diminishing Magician-Centrism

Dear Jerxy: How do I add more “audience-centric” elements to a routine? Since magic books (besides yours) weren’t written with this concept in mind, is there a process you use to take a standard trick that’s intended to be a demonstration of a magic ability and make it more audience-centric?

Signed,
Seeking Audience-Centric Knowledge

Dear SACK: I will get to your question in a moment with three techniques I use to make a magician-centric trick less so. But you’re giving me a good opportunity to address the “audience-centric” term that I first threw out on this site six years ago.

I’ve used this term in two different ways, and I think it will help for me to clarify those two ways, at least until I come up with a different term to differentiate them.

Sometimes I use “audience-centric” to describe one’s approach to magic as a hobby. And sometimes I use the term to describe a type of presentation.

Approach

The audience-centric approach to magic as a hobby involves showing magic to other people as the end goal. It’s concerned more with presentational elements than methodological elements. The question at the heart of audience-centric performing for the hobbyist is, “How do I best find opportunities to give people as many different types of positive experiences with magic as possible without overwhelming them, coming off weird, or showing them so much that it takes away from the specialness of the interaction?”

The magician-centric approach to magic as a hobby involves a focus on anything the spectators don’t experience directly: creating new sleights, practicing incredibly difficult techniques for hours, learning magic history, building gimmicks, watching magic, etc. This approach prioritizes one’s interest in magic itself and its inner workings, rather than one’s interest in performing for other people.

People assume a value judgment when I use these terms, like, “Ah… I am the noble audience-centric performer, sharing the joy of magic with the people! And you are the lowly, self-centered, magician-centric hobbyist.” But that’s not what I mean. Most people with an interest in magic are some measure of both of these things. And both of these approaches can be done lazily or in a way that they contribute something to the art.

The only mistake I think people make is when they are the sort of person who is solely interested in just one of these approaches, but they feel obligated to engage in the other approach as well. If your focus is solely performing for others, you shouldn’t force yourself to spend hundreds of hours on a pass because they say it’s an important sleight. It’s just not worth the time investment for your priority. And if you just like reading up on the techniques and practicing tricks for your own amusement, you shouldn’t feel obligated to go out and perform for others. If you don’t have that inclination naturally, you’ll probably be doing more harm than good by forcing yourself to perform.

Presentation

This is what the original email was referring to.

In Magician-Centric presentations, the magician is the one who is causing the magic through his skill or ability (this ability/skill may be played as a “real” or supernatural). A magic trick with no presentation is implicitly magician-centric. If I take a sponge ball and split it into two, barring any other explanation, the implied power behind that is coming from me.

In Audience-Centric presentations (aka Story-Centric, or Experience-Centric) the magician is not exhibiting a power, so a story needs to be generated that explains the phenomenon we’re witnessing. And in the process of crafting that story, the audience’s role should change from just watching a demonstration or a “show,” to one where they’re playing a more active role, even if the magician is still guiding the experience along.

Now, again, I’m not putting a value judgment on either of these things. But audiences sometimes do. A magician-centric presentation can appear—from the spectator’s perspective—as a way to boost your own ego, regardless of whether that’s your motivation or not. This is especially so if they think you’re trying to claim you really have whatever particular skill you’re demonstrating. Coming off cocky in life is not a great look generally and it’s particularly bad if they think you’re trying to come off as cool or powerful by acting like you have a skill you don’t really possess. So the magician-centric thing can be a bit of a minefield.

But for me, the bigger issue with magician-centric presentations is that they’re sort of limiting. It can feel like the same story told over and over again. “People can’t make bills float. But I can make bills float. Watch as I make this bill float.” “People can’t read minds. But I can read minds. Watch as I read minds.” “People can’t ____. But I can ____. Watch as I ____.” At its heart, that is the basic magician-centric story. If you have a constant stream of new audiences, that might not be an issue. For an amateur who performs for the same people frequently, their audience can get quickly tired of that. I’ve found that audience-centric presentations keep them engaged far longer.

But as the writer points out, most magic books are written, and tricks explained, as if—of course—you’re going to want to take credit for the magic. So most effects are built on that premise. SACK asks if there are audience-centric elements that can be added to a trick. But that’s not really how I think of it. You can either shift the presentation so it’s audience-centric or not. I don’t really have a process for that. It’s more of just an intuitive leap I make with a different story for the effect. But often tricks don’t immediately lend themselves to an obvious audience-centric presentation.

That’s fine. I still use magician-centric presentations all the time. I just don’t do too much that are really a straightforward demonstrations of my “abilities.”

The three most frequent techniques I use to tamp down the “ain’t I hot shit?” aspect of a lot of magician-centric presentations are these.

Magician-Centric Diminishers

Remove Certainty

Compare, “I’m going to read your mind. Think of a two-digit number.”

to

“Can I try something with you? This may be a giant waste of time. But I’ve been trying to learn this way of transmitting numbers ‘telepathically’ that I read about in this old book at my grandfather’s place. I think I have the idea down. And I’ve been getting pretty close. But I haven’t quite nailed it yet. Can I try it with you? It seems to work better with certain people.”

You “sense” their number, but you’re three off.

“Shoot. One more time?” And this time you nail it.

In my experience, the second way will get people much more interested, much more on your side, and much less likely to ask themselves, “Did he see the number I wrote down?”

Certainty is generally not that interesting. “They were the best baseball team the world has ever known…. and they won the championship!” is not a tagline you will find on any movie poster.

You can read more about the concept of removing certainty in this post.

Don’t Call Attention To It

The other week I was showering with a lady friend of mine. At one point during the shower the soap fell out of my hands and onto the tub floor. Without much thought I kicked the bar of soap. It traveled across the bottom of the tub, hit the curve up the side, and then shot up a few feet where I snagged it out of the air with one hand and went back to lathering myself up. The woman I was with was astonished by this little feat.

In the moment, it seemed like the most casual off-hand stunt. Now, the truth is I’ve been doing this for years, any time I drop the soap and I’m too lazy to bend over. I hit it now more often than not, but nowhere near 100%. I didn’t do it thinking, “This will impress her!” It was just a reflex.

Now, imagine it hadn’t happened in that way. Imagine I said, “Hey, watch this!” And I set the soap down. “How amazed would you be if I kicked the soap, it went across the tub, up the side, and I caught it in my hand?” Then after making sure all her attention was on me, I did it and took a bow. Suddenly this nonchalant cool moment becomes a desperate attempt to be acknowledged. This is what so much of magic feels like.

Just doing the thing without shining the spotlight on yourself beforehand is a solid way to come off as someone who doesn’t need the validation.

This sort of thing really only works for quick moments of magic. If you want more information search for posts about the Distracted Artist style on this site.

Go Absurd

The final way to take the sting out of a magician-centric presentation is to choose absurd material. If I tell you I can read your mind, or I have an incredible memory, or I can cheat at gambling and you won’t be able to catch me…. the audience may wonder, “Am I supposed to believe this? Is he really doing it? Is he pretending to do it? And if so, why is he pretending to have these skills? Is it just for fun? Or does he want me to be impressed? Do I need to pretend to be impressed?”

If your skill or ability is useless or absurd then that softens a lot of the negatives of a magician-centric presentation. (You do lose the benefit of a relatable “power” to demonstrate. But that’s just the particular trade-off of that comes with this technique. In some situations the trade-off will be worth it.)

In Manuel Llaser’s Penguin Live lecture, he does a trick where a card is selected and lost in the deck. The deck is placed on the table. He then spins a yo-yo on it’s string, and when it’s at the bottom of its descent he lets the yo-yo roll across the table, where it hits the deck and cuts the deck right at the spectator’s card.

This is a magician-centric demonstration of skill, but it’s a pretty useless one. And, in fact, the sting is taken out of it even more if you try to play it up as being something super impressive. “Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. And that’s why, for three hours a day, every day, for the last 10 years, I’ve been hitting decks of cards with a yo-yo to get it to cut at exactly the card I want it to. Some might say that’s a lot of time, but is it really? When the outcome is something so useful? To me it seems like time well spent. But here’s the deal, if I show you this, you have to promise you won’t fall in love with me. Okay? Yes, it’s very cool. Yes it’s impressive. Yes, it’s wildly sexy. But that’s not why I do it. This is about the art for me. Not pussy.”

Now, of course, any one of these approaches done consistently for the same audience would be weird and tiring. The idea is to mix it up with different variations on these themes and (for me) to focus on audience-centric presentations the majority of the time. That’s a solid way to keep your performances fresh long-term.

Dustings #47

If I had to guess what the darkest period in magic history was, I would guess that it would be the time between June 1920 and November 1923.

You see in the June 1920 issue of The Magical Bulletin…

There appeared a trick called…

But it wasn’t until three years later, in the November 1923 issue, that we finally got some patter for the trick, thanks to the ever-reliable, “Mystic Eugene.”

Just picture yourself. It’s 1920. Ya hoe’s got a bunch of wands and you finally found a trick that would allow you to exhibit them, but you don’t have any good patter for the trick for three years!

It must have been a troubling time. Magicians all over the country just dumping a pile of “they hoe’s” wands on a folding table, poking through them and stumbling their way through a presentation with nothing much to say. “Uh yeah… so these are the Wands of Mah Hoe. She’s got… well… it has to be said… she’s got a lot of wands. I guess I thought most women would have one… at most. But she’s got… [counting under his breath before he gives it up] yeah… it’s quite the collection. Mah hoe seems to particularly like these thick black ones. Which is kind of intimidating honestly. And I don’t know what mah hoe did with this one, but it fucking smells like shit!”

Does anyone know how to get me a speaking gig at the next Conference on Magic History?

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I do like “Mystic Eugene’s” patter as indicated in the image above. It must have been nice coming up with magic patter in the 1920s. Any magic trick with a strange object? “Uhm… I guess it came from that weird and mysterious land of India. The fuck do I know?”

Everybody everywhere who wasn’t snowy white was some exotic source of potential patter material. “Once, whilst exploring a bizarre and inscrutable land at the furthest reaches of the globe, I encountered a marvelous little creature called a Jew. And he gave me this bag to keep an egg in!”

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I’m curious how much people care about the issue of “google-ability” of a trick. It’s something I think about quite a bit, but I can’t really tell how much of an issue it is to others. If you get a chance, please submit a response to this survey.

When it comes to the google-ability of a trick, which statement best represents your feelings.

[Update: Survey is now closed]

1. I make an effort to perform tricks that would be very difficult to find information about online.

2. While I don’t want people to be able to find the SECRET to an effect that I do, I don’t mind if they search and find that it’s a trick you can buy and that others are doing the same trick.

3. As long as they enjoy the trick in the moment, I don’t really care what they search or learn about it afterwards.

I realize these are pretty broad categories, so just pick whichever seems closest to your feelings on the issue.

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I will happily pimp any half-way reputable, non-magic product or project that includes some kind of covert tip of the hat to this site.

For example, reader John M. Green has a new book coming out…

Which includes this passage…

He cleverly made my pseudonym inconspicuous by adding one other completely unknown magician—Joshua Jay—to the list too. That way it doesn’t stand out as the one people have never heard of. Instead they get to Joshua Jay and think, “Oh, okay, so this list is going to contain some nobodies too. Got it.”

Certified Organic

The shame of the downfall of the Magic Cafe is that it’s very rare for people to forward me a post suggesting I talk some shit about it. This used to happen all the time back in the mid-2000s. It was really the foundation of my old blog. Sadly, it doesn’t happen much these days. People sometimes ask, “Why don’t you bag on the Cafe like you used to?” It’s sort of like asking, “Why don’t you go to roller rink anymore to meet girls?” Because it’s dead, dude. The girls are elsewhere.

So I was happy recently to receive a link to a single post from three different people. It felt like old times.

The post comes from Cameron Francis, who was writing in a thread about a trick called, Thy Will Be Done. That trick is a variation and expansion of the Free Will effect. The spectator places three items in three different locations and that information (in this version) is (for some reason) predicted on a tarot card.

One person said this seemed very “organic.” Another person said it seemed that a custom printed Tarot card seemed the “opposite of organic.”

And that’s when Cameron chimed in

I like Cameron as a person, but this is indeed one of the dumbest takes on the Cafe in a while. He’s not alone though. I’ve heard other people rail against the word “organic” being used in magic. And, similar to this post, they don’t seem to have the foggiest idea what is meant by the word in a magic context. If you’re equating a sharpie, a deck of cards, a Ball and Vase, and a specially printed tarot card as all being more or less the same because they’re “friggin props,” you don’t quite have the understanding to be talking about this.

However, I will cut Cameron some slack here for one reason. The word is overused and abused. Like “impromptu” before it, the word is beginning to lose its meaning. When people were saying things like, “Yes, it’s impromptu, so long as you have the gimmick on you,” it was clear we needed to re-establish what the word meant. “Organic” could stand to be defined more clearly as well, because it is a useful label when accurately used to talk about magic.

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Cameron seems to be suggesting that all props are the same. That because people don’t carry Sharpie markers with them every day, then they are pretty much viewed the same way as a Finger Chopper.

But, of course, spectators don’t view these sorts of things the same way. One they see as an everyday object, and one they see as an obvious magic prop. Unless this is your spectator’s first day on the planet earth they are going to have different expectations for these two objects. The thing they’re completely unfamiliar with is going to be fairly suspect. And the thing that looks like something they have in their junk-drawer at home will be much less suspect. This is not some crazy theory of mine. This is understood by anyone who performs for normal humans outside of a professional performing environment.

So there are objects used in performance. Some of them are clearly Magic Props. Some of them are Normal Objects.

What makes a prop “organic” is when a Normal Object is used in the environment in which it’s typically found.

Organic Prop - A normal object in the environment in which it’s typically found.

If I make a can of tuna vanish in my kitchen that would be a trick using an organic prop. If I bring the can of tuna to the coffee shop and vanish it there, then I’ve done a trick with an (apparently) normal object, but it’s not an organic prop in that situation.

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Ah! But here’s where we get to another important concept.

A magic trick can use organic props, but it can also have an organic premise. And those two factors aren’t necessarily related.

Organic Premise - A premise which naturally flows from the real-world situation in which the trick occurs.

If we order a pizza and I notice I only have a one dollar bill, not the $20 that I thought I had, and so I use magic to transform that $1 into a $20, that is an “Organic Premise.” We needed a certain amount of money, so I took the money that we had and transformed it into what we needed.

As regular readers can probably imagine, I love effects with organic premises, because they don’t have the boundaries of a typical magic trick. It’s not: “Here’s where the magic trick starts. Here’s where it stops.” And that causes these tricks to have a different affect on people. It captures their imagination differently. And not because the trick feels more “real” but because it feels more vital.

Now, to be clear, a trick can have “organic” props and inorganic premises and vice-versa.

If I do the Cups and Balls at a coffee shop with a bunch of coffee shop items for the props, those are organic props used for an inorganic premise.

If we walk into the coffee shop and you say, “Shoot, they don’t have the sweetener I like.” And I say, “Hold on. I think I can help.” And I reach into my computer bag and pull out a strange little plastic box with a bunny on the top and I show it empty and then tap it with a magic wand I carry with me, and then I open it again to reveal packets of your favorite artificial sweetener, then I would have used inorganic props (obvious magic props) to achieve an organic premise (satisfying your need for something that’s not present).

So the word “organic” can be applied to a trick in a couple different ways.

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“Organic” in the magic context simply means “emerging naturally.”

Organic Props come naturally from the physical environment.

Organic Premises come naturally from the situation you’re in.

In my experience, the hardest hitting magic is organic in both senses. It uses normal objects, in their environment, in service of a premise that seems to arise naturally.

Obviously it would be very difficult to construct everything you do so it meets this standard, but it’s definitely an ideal worth striving towards (for the social performer). In fact, making your magic feel more organic is about the single most important thing you can do to allow people to connect to your magic. So the attitude of “I wish we didn’t talk about organic! We should all just do Ball and Vase like R. Paul Wilson does!!” is one of the more bizarre ones that I’ve heard.

Cameron Francis is not the only person I’ve heard pushing the “Let’s do away with the concept of organic magic” notion. But it never seems well reasoned. It always just seems like an excuse for meaningless card tricks or 6-phase Okito box routines.

Here are the situations where “organic” magic doesn’t matter as much:

1. If you only perform for other magicians.

2. If you only perform professionally. (The professional performance is already a non-organic experience. So it doesn’t matter at all if your premises are organic. And doesn’t matter as much about your props either.)

3. If your personality/presence is already so awkward and artificial then yes, it might make no difference whether you pull out a Sharpie or a Finger Cutter.

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If you’re paying close attention, you may see that I’m hitting on some similar themes as I have recently. And that’s because the concept of “organic-ness” is the inverse of the Hitch concept I’ve been talking about recently. Organic premises, organic props, and organic movements all arise naturally, they don’t cause the Hitch sensation in spectators that will happen when those things are questionable in some way.

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Let’s loop back around. Is having the reveal for a Free Will-style effect on a tarot card organic in any meaning of the word?

No, not at all.

It’s not an organic premise (the placement of random items has nothing to do with tarot cards) and a specially printed Tarot card is not an organic prop. You might say, “They don’t know it’s specially printed,” but I think the fact the ancient magician is holding a pen in his hand might tip them off a little. (I haven’t seen the actual gimmicked card though, so perhaps it’s not so obviously a pen? Could it be a quill or some shit?)

But, similar to what I said in the Hitch posts, a trick that’s not “organic” in any way isn’t necessarily a bad trick. It just a trick that doesn’t have that particular quality.

Without trying it out, I can’t really tell how this trick—Thy Will Be Done— would go over with people. I think it will likely fool them. I think the reveal is “cute” (which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your sensibilities). And I think it could easily be an entertaining trick. I can certainly understand why people would want to perform this. So I’m not saying it’s a bad trick.

The point of this post is not to say every trick has to be “organic” in some way. My point is only that “organic” is a valuable designation when talking about the qualities of a trick. And while it’s perfectly fine to not be concerned about it for yourself and your performances, it’s mistaken to think that somehow audiences don’t register this quality. (I’ll have some old testing results to share on this sometime soon if I can track them down.) While it may be true that audiences assume a magician is going to do something random with some unusual objects, that doesn’t mean they don’t notice and appreciate it when the props and premises are organic.