My 2022 Focus

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Hey all, The Jerx 2022 has officially commenced. It’s good to be back (although the return may be somewhat short-lived depending on certain factors I’ll discuss later in this post.)

Around the time of the new calendar year, and certainly the time of the new Jerx year, I like to consider what my focus is going to be for the next year when it comes to magic and/or this site. Frequently I don’t have a specific focus, but this year I have a few.

Re-Socializing with Social Magic

Whatever the future of the coronavirus situation is, it seems that the majority of people—at least in the circles I travel in—are ready to get back to normal. I’m not even sure another variant that is more severe would cause the pendulum to swing back the other way. I’ve probably thought this before at other points along the way, but now it definitely feels to me like most everyone is feeling, “Ah, fuck it. Let’s get on with our lives.”

Now, I’ve kind of been in this frame of mind for a while now. Not because I don’t believe in the severity of the virus or anything like that. I just don’t take many precautions with my own safety in general. So it’s pretty common for me to play fast and loose with my health, while still respecting other’s desires to be a bit more cautious. But now it feels like people want to get out there and live and interact. And those that don’t want to… maybe just don’t want to in general. And the pandemic has just been a reasonable excuse for not doing something they never much liked doing in the first place.

But for me, I’m happy that things are loosening up, people are becoming more open, and conversations are flowing more easily between people—even strangers.

I look forward to getting back into the flow of introducing magic into casual situations and interactions more and more. That’s primarily what I’m excited about this year.

Enchantment

In my post on December 10th I wrote that I see tricks generating three types of broad responses in spectators.

They can feel fooled by the trick.

They can feel entertained by the trick.

They can feel enchanted by the trick.

(Thanks to Jack S. for leading me to the correct word for that last category.)

These aren’t either/or propositions. They’re just different potential responses to a trick and any given trick can be ranked somewhere along a spectrum in all categories. Just like if you were online dating and you were ranking your potential options on looks, sense-of-humor, and intelligence. Someone could be smart and funny. Or average in every category. Or beautiful but stupid. Or—like me—a perfect 10 all across the board.

In magic, almost all of our focus is on finding tricks that are more fooling. In our minds we’ve equated a trick being fooling, to a trick being magical. But I’m not sure there’s even any correlation between the two.

In that previous post I wrote, “[H]ardly anyone is talking about the dreamy, romantic, mystifying, ‘magical’ feeling that certain tricks/presentations can generate.”

Starting this year, I want to focus more on what I can do to increase a feeling of enchantment with an effect. The issue is, I don’t know that it’s something that is easy to test and quantify. It’s easy to ask someone how fooled they were, and then find out if they knew exactly what was going on, if they have some ideas, or if they’re completely lost. It’s also simple enough to ask people how entertained they were by something and to get a useful response back.

But I don’t think it’s really that easy to get a sense of how magical or enchanting a trick was for a person. It’s not the sort of thing you can ask about, because asking about it just pulls the rug out from under that feeling. It’s just the sort of thing that you need to try and be perceptive to without deluding yourself into seeing it when it’s not there.

Exploring this feeling more is going to be a personal focus of mine going forward. I don’t know to what extent I’ll be able to capture any ideas here that are useful generally, but if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.

I think the starting point can be found in the Jerx Calamity Sentence, which I’m modifying here to say:

“The feeling of enchantment is created by the gap between what the spectator knows to be true and what feels real to them in the moment.”

This is why a good levitation effect will generally be more “magical” than a similarly strong ACAAN. Spectator’s have a firm, innate understanding that things can’t float. So when something seems to be floating, that gap is very apparent. But people don’t KNOW that a card they name can’t appear at a freely named number. Yes, it’s unlikely, but it doesn’t go against some firmly held belief. So it’s hard to create that gap between “what they know to be true” because “what they know to be true” is kind of a nebulous concept. “It’s unlikely that a freely named card would be at a freely named number,” isn’t the sort of profound truth that leads to an enchanting experience (even if you can generate a fooling trick out of it).

I want to keep working on techniques that help create that gap and broaden that gap with effects that might not otherwise generate those types of feelings with an audience.

The Future of the Jerx

There’s this thing that Howard Stern does every time his contract is about to be up. He starts talking like he wants to retire and that he’s ready to walk away from the gig. He’s been doing it for at least 20 years. He does it as a negotiating tactic.

And every year around this time I say something like, “If the supporters are interested in keeping this going for another year, the next season will start next month. It’s perfectly fine if this has run its course. I’m happy to do other things, so don’t feel the need to support unless you really want to.”

Now, I’m not saying that to make you think, “Oh no. He’ll walk away from this if he doesn’t reach the number of supporters he needs!” I’m saying it because most of the current supporters have been with this site for over 6 years, and some were even readers my old blog that I was doing almost 20 years ago. So I feel a personal relationship to a lot of these people even if they don’t know who I am. And I want everyone to know they’re free to not sign on year after year unless they’re getting something from this.

For the past number of years I’ve been fairly certain that the site, the newsletters, and the books would carry on because I essentially had the same or similar support structure in place, and a long waiting list to grab a support slot.

However I can’t say for certain that things will continue going forward past the time of the next book release in a couple of months. In about 6-8 weeks I’m going to be rolling out a new support structure for the site. And if people aren’t on board for this new structure, then this site will be on an indefinite hiatus, while I devote more time to my non-magic work to pay the bills. Again, this isn’t a threat or a plea. It’s just a mathematical equation that takes into account the size of the audience I want to write for (which is small), the amount of time it takes to generate the content and then write the 100s of thousands words a year that fill the book, newsletters, and site; and the financial support the audience is willing to provide to pay for that time. If the math doesn’t work, then I will happily shift gears to my non-magic opportunities which are also things I enjoy working on. So you’re not fucking me over either way. If my work outside of magic involved tarring rooftops, or cleaning bed sores, or perhaps even tarring bed sores at the world’s worst nursing home, then I would be begging you to sign up under the new support structure. But that’s not the case, so the only concern you need to have is whether you feel it’s worth it to you.

More information regarding that in a month or two.

Hey, while working on the book the past month and half, I was sort of out of the loop. If there’s anything I missed that you want to bring to my attention, go ahead and send me an email.

My New Project

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Watches…

You can print a memorized deck on the bezel of them.

You can stick a gimmicked coin to them to make it vanish.

But can we do anything else with them? Well… maybe I’m just a crazy dreamer, but I submit that we can!

That’s why I’m so psyched to talk about my next project with Ellusionist.

When they put the Aronson Stack around the edge of a watch, and then decided the best way to not draw attention to it would be to model the watch after a $12,000 Rolex, we all said the same thing: “Genius.”

When they suggested a good idea to vanish a coin would be to stick it to a “generic, non-functioning smart watch,” well, frankly, most of us just stood and applauded.

Sometimes brilliance like this stifles our creativity. It makes us feel “lesser than” because we don’t see ourselves as the type of people who could come up with such things. But what if, instead of feeling diminished by greatness, we were inspired by it?

That’s the road I took when I recently came up with a new project that brings this outside of the box thinking and sexy style to a different genre of magic—the gentleman conjuror’s genre: Sponge Ball magic.

Let’s break it down for you.

It all started with this simple, yet powerful, sketch.

Six months and $18,000 later, we had this professionally made blueprint.

After dozens of prototypes, we now have the working final product.

“Okay, I don’t get it, Andy. What are we looking at? Just some great looking watch?”

Actually… there’s a hidden secret that’s going to blow your goddam brains out the back of your head.

You see, the face of this watch is actually a sponge ball. The minute and hour hands are drawn on by artists to mimic real watch hands.

The ball sticks to the watch via a piece of genuine Velcro. That’s right, the material that was created by a Swiss electrical engineer. No expense was spared when making this product.

It’s brilliantly simple to get the ball into play in your magic routine. Simple show your hands empty. Point to something in the distance. And remove the ball when everyone’s heads turn.

And now you’re ready for your favorite sponge ball routine. (Personally, I like the one where the balls disappear and go from hand to hand.)

But, Andy, theres a giant flaw in your product. When the sponge ball is removed, the watch face changes color from red to white.

And that’s where things go from good to great. Your package doesn’t come simply with the watch and the hand-crafted sponge ball gimmick. It also comes with a 22 ounce container of Hershey’s Strawberry syrup.

Before your performance, simply apply a healthy amount of the syrup to the watch and wrist. Now, when people look at the watch face before or after the gimmick has been removed, they’ll simply say to themselves, “Oh, I guess he spilled some strawberry syrup on his arm. These things happen. Let me not be distracted by this common occurrence and instead give my attention to his magic effect.”

That’s right. We’re actually hiding this ingenious gimmick in the everyday situation of spilling strawberry syrup on your arm. The Hershey company has formulated an extra sticky syrup for us that will dissuade anyone from poking around your arm too much.

There you have it!

Looks cool? It is cool. Coming soon from The Jerx, Ellusionist, and Hershey’s.

A Sincere Apology

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January has been my month off for the past few years. And this year it’s not really time “off,” it’s time where I’m writing the next book which is coming out in a few months.

But had I known Ellusionist would be releasing a non-functioning watch that you stick special coins to in order to make them disappear, I would have put the next book off for another year, so I could devote this month to making fun of this goofball product.

So I owe you all a sincere apology for not being here for you as I should be during this time.

Walking around with a non-working “generic smart watch” for the purpose of vanishing a special coin is not a healthy, robust approach to performing magic. It feels more like a cry for help. Personally, I would be depressed every time I looked at my fake watch. “What am I doing with myself?” I’d ask. In general it’s a bad idea to have a physical reminder of your own inadequacies that you see frequently.

It’s like owning a fake-vagina, “male masturbator.”

Does it feel better than just using you hand? I don’t know, maybe. But at least when you’re done with your hand, you can go and get on with your life. You don’t have to wash, disinfect, and store a giant set of silicone hips for your loved ones to discover when they organize your possessions for the estate sale. When you’re done using your hand you don’t have to end up looking at this monstrosity (as you would look at the phony smartwatch) and think, “Is this what I’ve been reduced to?”

My point is, if you want to vanish a coin, just use your goddamn hands.

The truth is, the vanishes with this watch just don’t look that good. That’s why they don’t show you them in the trailer. It looks like something sketchy happens with the coin and your watch. Then you have to point out that the coin isn’t under your watch. So from the spectator’s perspective what is supposed to be happening here? “He said he was going to vanish the coin, and then he did something a little odd. I thought it was under his watch. But then he removed his El Fako Brand, non-working watch and I didn’t see the coin there. Maybe I missed something? At any rate, then I ended up finding a coin in my pocket.” Like I just don’t think that structure has anywhere near the cleanliness and beauty of a coin vanish that you can get with sleight-of-hand or something like the Raven.

But hey, it’s $30. Ellusionist is usually pretty fair on their pricing when they think they have something that’s not quite a home-run. Look, if there was a way to cleanly vanish a coin, away from the body, without sleeves, and without skill, in a manner that wasn’t inherently weak or suspicious, I guarantee you it would cost more than $30, because that would be the holy grail of coin magic.

You already bought this? Okay, I think your best bet here is to lean into the weaknesses. This isn’t going to be a great tool for a super clean coin vanish. Since it looks like your watch is involved, it makes sense to make that the focus of your presentation. You’re going to “teach” them how you first learned to vanish a coin. “You take the coin, and when people aren’t looking, it goes under your hand and is secretly placed under your watch.” You flash both sides of your hands to show the coin is “gone.” You can even admit, “This isn’t even a real watch. It’s just a cheap hunk of shit I picked up to practice with.” You go on, “Of course, some people know this secret, so with them you have to use a more advanced technique.” And you remove the watch and show the coin is gone completely. They now ask—or you goad them into asking—where the coin is. “Under the watch” you say. They look back to the watch to figure out what you’re talking about, “Oh, no. Sorry. Not my watch.” And the coin has reappeared under the spectator’s watch. So the vanish would just be a part of a coin under spectator’s watch type of routine. (You can find at least a couple versions of this plot on Penguin for $5).

I would guess others have probably already suggested combining these two things. I’m not saying it’s the greatest idea in the world, but it is a nice full-circle sort of effect. So you don’t have an awkward vanish, followed by the weak “no it’s not under my watch” moment, followed by a reappearance in a random place. Instead you have this thing that starts off as a kind of “exposure,” which gets ramped up with a magical moment, and then a climax that is surprising but in its own way “logical” within the presentation. And you wouldn’t even have to wear this gross looking thing on your wrist all night. You could openly put it on before going into the trick as part of your explanation on this “method to vanish a coin.”

While I think that’s a reasonable use for this prop, I don’t think I’ll be picking one up. The question I—and all serious magicians—will now have to ask ourselves is, “Do I want to be able to vanish a coin or do stack work with cards?” Because, brother, until they combine these two awesome tools into one, you simply can’t do both.

Checking-In

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Whaddup, whaddup, friends? It’s 2022. The double-deuce. Is everyone’s year as sweet as mine is so far? The first week of my year has been spent… working on writing a magic book. If you’ve never written a magic book, or any book, and you think you’d like to, here’s a little inside tip for you: It’s not fun! You know that magic book you heard about five years ago and it still hasn’t come out? That’s because writing books sucks balls. I spent a year creating material, performing material, testing different variations, and outlining and drafting stuff for the upcoming book—none of that is easy. But the real hard part is sitting down at that desk and trying focus and get everything down on the page. Yes, yes, I know your job sucks too. Give me a paragraph once a year to moan a bit. Jeez.

Do you build stuff, craft stuff, design stuff, or have any other skill that might be useful to someone like me? In the past I’ve tried to make note whenever someone says something like, “Hey, I could make a gimmicked wallet for you if you ever have an idea you want to try,” or things like that. But I never had a good system to keep track of such offers, and most are lost somewhere in my email. So if you’ve offered something in the past, or have some skill you think I might find useful in the future, go ahead and send me an email and let me know (again or for the first time). And if you can link to some examples of your work, whatever that may be, that might help inspire some ideas as well. I’m going to try to do better at keeping track of the resources I have amongst the people who regularly read this site. (Of course, you’d be paid for any work you did on a project. I’m not asking for free work or anything like that. I’m not a creep.) Thanks.

If you’re a supporter of the site, the next issue of the newsletter should be in your email this weekend.

If you’ve got a Grindr date with either of these two, I have a good idea how it’s going to end.

“Nope.”

Really?

Well now I’m kind of fascinated to find out what things this guy does know.

A Dusting of Christmas Snow

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This is the final post (most likely) for this year at the Jerx. In January I will be completing the next book, so there will just be a few posts here and there on this site. Then I’ll be back to regular posting sometime in February. Soon after that I will be introducing a new support structure for the site which may or may not work. We’ll see how that goes.

William Daly Harrington has been kicked out of the GLOMM for being convicted of distributing child pornography. Harrington was a former police chief and part-time magician, as per this news report:

In September 2020, Harrington came under scrutiny after a deputy for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Offices followed up on a tip that a Facebook Messenger account associated with the police chief had disseminated child porn in correspondence with another account.

Harrington, who used a “fictitious” Facebook profile — and the pseudonym “Stella Carlson” — to send images of minors engaged in sexual acts, was caught after investigators linked the email associated with the fake account to an entertainment company Harrington owned. At the time, Harrington, who served as East Helena’s Police Chief, and also performed at events as a stage magician, owned “Magic Man’s Mobile Dj,” charging documents show.

As of now, this website still lists his entertainment services. It states: All shows are considered "G" or “PG” rated and are suitable, or customizable, for all age groups.

So, unlike his computer hard-drive, all his shows are PG at worst. And can be customized for all age groups. The ad is written in such a way that he desperately wants you to know that you CAN bring your pre-teens to the show. This was our first clue the guy was a creep. You know what magician I’d trust around my kids? The one who’s like, “Nah, my shows are for adults only. I’m not a fucking clown.”

I like this bit of info too:

Wow. 10 whole miles? That’s some real commitment to the job. You know for a fact this guy would drive 12 hours to install a hidden camera in the bathroom of a cub scout jamboree, but if your gig requires more than a half a gallon of gas to get there, he’s not interested.

The best way to force something on any site is to use the Inertia app by Marc Kerstein. It’s so simple and so straightforward. It exactly matches the way you might “randomly” select a something on a website if you were doing it for real. With no preparation you can go to any site on your phone (as long as that site involves some scrolling) and force a line of text or a picture or whatever. (Check out this video to get an idea of how it works.)

I don’t know if Marc has launched this officially, but you can now get Inertia Pro in the app store which adds a bunch of new features, including an integration with his app Xeno that allows you to do the Inertia force on Xeno sites on the spectator’s phone (either remotely or in person).

You’ll need the Xeno app to do a spectator’s phone version. But Xeno is absolutely another app of Marc’s worth having. While Inertia is a forcing app, Xeno is an app that allows you to know a spectator’s free choice. In recent months, a user named Dan R. has added a bunch of interesting lists to the Xeno app which give you a number of intriguing subjects to “mind read” (including one related to the What3Words site I mention in this post). If you have Xeno and haven’t checked the additional lists out recently, you should do so.

If this sounds like a commercial, it’s not. Just a heads up. I believe Inertia Pro will be going up $15 in the near future. So if you’re interested in it, hop on it now.

I really like the look of The Giraffe Switch by Kyle Littleton.

I doubt I’ll get it because I hate learning hard shit, and this is apparently at least somewhat difficult. But I thought it deserved a shout-out because it looks really good.

Speaking of that, I made a decision a few years ago not to bother with any sleight that requires more than 10% of my concentration. While this cuts a lot of sleights and tricks out of my repertoire, it doesn’t make a dent in the thousands of tricks I can still choose to do. I think the worst thing that can happen when showing someone a tricks is when they realize that for a brief moment you’re not present—that you’re focusing on something else. So I try to eliminate that possibility from my performances by not having sleights or moves that will take me out of the moment.

This is not a cool thing to admit in magic. You’re supposed to get off on mastering hard moves. But I hate practicing. I like performing. You don’t need to apologize for that if you feel the same.

And speaking of sleights. I had mentioned many years ago that I was looking for a good lotion to give my hands a bit more tackiness when executing card sleights. My hands have very little moisture to them, and sleights that used to be simple when I was younger (and, apparently, dewier) can be damn near impossible. For the first time this year I tried Chamberlain Golden Touch. This was apparently Dai Vernon’s recommendation for the dry hand issue, and that guy was pretty much made of crepe paper by the time he passed away, so if it’s good enough for him, I figured it was worth a shot. And I have to say that it’s probably the best thing I’ve found so far for the issue. It doesn’t work as well as I would hope, but it works better than anything else I’ve tried so far. I think it all comes down to your own personal chemistry, so it might not work for you, but if you have dry hands you may want to give it a shot.

Sometimes if I’m watching a lecture by a left-handed performer on my computer, my brain doesn’t feel like flipping everything around in my head. I know left-handers have to do this all the time with right-handed performers, but I don’t, so I’m not used to it. So when this happens, I just flip the video instead.

Here’s how you do that using the VLC media player (which is really the only media player you need to have).

From the menu bar go to Window

Then:

Video Effects
Geometry
Transform
Flip Horizontally

And you’re all set.

Obviously this reverses everything on the screen, so it’s not ideal for learning certain effects. But for card tricks I find it to be helpful.

I’m not someone who “believes” in mystical or occult subjects. But they’re fun to use in performance because concepts such as “fortune telling” or contacting the spirits or whatever are so well understood by the general public. So you don’t have to really lay any groundwork. You’re playing with ideas they’re already familiar with.

Here are a couple products I’ve had some fun using in performance since I purchased them earlier this year.

Blue Bird Lenormand Fortune Telling Cards

38 Cards that combine fortune telling, numerology, an oracle deck, and some standard playing card elements as well. That’s a lot of types of information, and a lot of options on each card. And I like that they’re standard poker size.

Tabula Mortem

This combines a Ouija board/spirit board with pendulum work. And it adds some additional symbolism you may find a use for as well.

Just be careful. These boards are nothing to play with. If you don’t know what you’re doing you might unleash a lot of negative spirit energy.

Just kidding. Do whatever you want with them. If fucking around with these things without knowing what you’re doing was really dangerous, my ass would have been possessed about a dozen times already.

Both these items can be found on Amazon.

This is going to sound psychopathic, but it’s something I’ve been doing this year and enjoying in a way I hadn’t expected. This has nothing to do with magic, but you may get something out of this idea regardless. What I’ll do is I take a movie and—instead of watching it all at once—I watch it over the course of a couple weeks. The first day I watch one minute, then next day I watch the next two minutes, the day after that I watch the following three minutes. And so on, adding a minute each day. Most movies can be finished within 15 days at this pace.

If you say this sounds insane, I wouldn’t disagree with you. And it’s certainly not how the person who made the movie intended it to be watched. But it gives you a lot of time to process and think about the movie. And the movies I’ve watched this way have stuck in my mind much more completely than the ones I’ve watched straight through. I don’t know that that’s really any justification to do this, but I thought I’d mention it as maybe one of you will find some pleasure in this as well.

Hey everyone. Have a great Christmas and New Years! Holy hell, 2022 is almost here. I hope for all of us it’s our best year ever.