Dustings #75

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Here’s a good idea from supporter JFC. It’s a place to keep invisible elastic thread Loops or TIES or whatever the hell you’re using.

Yigal Mesika has a good system available for keeping them on a special card inside your wallet.

But some modern wallets might not accept the card, or you might not carry a wallet.

You can, of course, just wear it on your wrist all day. That’s fine, but it can be hard on the gimmick and you might end up snagging it or forgetting it. And regardless you’ll probably want to have back-ups on you.

JFC’s idea is this.

Obviously, with an opaque case you wouldn’t see the thread cards. But I didn’t use an opaque case for demonstration purposes because then I’d just be taking pictures of a phone case.

It’s both convenient and very safe for the thread as well. It’s a good practical idea for the casual performer. Thanks, JFC.

Paul Voodini’s Penguin Live lecture has 33 ratings, and 79% of them are five stars. Sounds pretty good.

I know what you’re thinking…

But can I jack off to it?

Probably not.

Fortunately, Paul has something that will help you out. If you watch that lecture and get all worked up from Paul’s raw sensuality, you can hop over to Lybrary.com and pick up his book, The Erotic Adventures of Vampire Kate.

According to the blurb, the book is “high end erotica” full of “carnal lusts and forbidden pleasures.”

So whether you want to read someone else’s palm, or wrap your dick in your own, Voodini has you covered.

Below is a gallery of potential covers I generated for the November Love Letters newsletter using an AI art program. The prompt I gave it was“Lovers in Autumn.” These were the results…

To be clear, all the options the AI art generated were shitty. These were just the ones that happen to be shitty and struck me as funny. My goal of handing over everything I do to artificial intelligence (as explored in a week’s worth of posts last year) seems to be some time off.

A few people wrote in asking about any highlights in the second half of my horror movie watching last month. I know October is over, but a good horror movie can be enjoyed all year. I won’t go through everything I watched, but these ones were the best of the second half:

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair - I think this movie is polarizing with horror fans, but I dug it. It’s mostly “found footage” and it’s almost painfully slow in parts, but I think that adds to verisimilitude of the footage. It’s got a very creepy vibe. It’s about an online challenge called the World’s Fair Challenge which, supposedly, causes some indeterminate changes in those who participate in it. Like, imagine if after you did the Ice Bucket Challenge your hair started falling out and you had a sudden craving for menstrual blood. (That’s not the story of the movie. I’m just using that as an example.)

The Night House - An interesting take on the traditional haunted house story. Had me on edge through much of it. The story is not a retread of anything you’ve seen before and there are a couple very clever scares in it.

Wrong Turn (2020) - I’ve never really been into any of the other movies in this franchise, but I really liked this one. Any movie that begins with a bunch of young people going off into the woods is off to a strong start. This one goes off into a weird direction, which some people didn’t like, but I enjoyed it. It also has the most satisfying end credit scene in movie history.

Barbarian - This is another one that doesn’t go where you expect it might. The story and tone shift a couple of times in a way I found very enjoyable. Scary in spots, funny in spots. But never a corny “horror comedy.” I didn’t link the trailer for this one because it gives too much away. Just watch it if you’re into horror movies.

Mailbag: Reader Feedback

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Here are some recent emails in reaction to posts from earlier this week:

Regarding yesterday’s post about the way in which time affects memorability when it comes to magic tricks, JH writes:

Counterpoint to your argument about 2-3 minute tricks not being memorable...most rock songs are about 3 minutes. I read somewhere that The Beatles had perfected the form. Of course, part of that length is due to the format of radio back then. —JH

But how many times do you listen to a song, compared to how many times you see a trick?

I don’t think it’s a counterpoint, I think it reinforces what I was saying.

When a song becomes vital to you, it’s usually because you’ve heard it multiple times over the course of days or weeks. (Or, if you get super obsessed, maybe over and over again in one sitting.) In other words, you have more time with that song.

If you just heard a 3 minute song once, it’s likely you wouldn’t remember much about it a week or two later. Even if you really enjoyed it when you heard it. (That’s not always true. Sometimes it’s like, “I heard this song once walking through the mall in 1987 and I finally tracked it down 30 years later.” Those situations exist, but what makes them notable is how rare they are.)

Time is just one variable when it comes to memorability. (Those who have my previous books can read more on the subject.) But it’s probably the easiest one to manipulate, so it’s worth focusing on.

Returning to your thoughts on the Pro Caps effect, did you see Craig Petty’s weird 40 minute video defending the trick? I thought it was a joke at first. He performs a few different effects for the same person. All of them are tricks where coins are vanishing and reappearing under soda bottle caps. When the tricks are over Craig asks him if he knows which items are gimmicked and the guy starts saying things like, “Is it the deck of cards? Is it the table?” He dismisses the bottle cap even though Craig whisks it away every time coins vanish from under it. It almost seems like a parody video you would make about how people WISH spectators would react. The spectator is clearly totally coached up. I was curious if you had thoughts on it. I’m a Craig fan, and own this trick too, but this video is so desperate I feel it undermines what he was going for.—CA

Look, there’s no way I’m going to watch a 38 minute video about a trick I’m not interested in. I did watch the first performance on the video and it told me everything I needed to know, even before any magic happened.

The first trick is a coins through table effect. At 5:45 in the video, the first coin goes through the table. You don’t see it go through the table. Nor does it visually appear in the glass under the table. The only evidence you have that the coin has gone through is the sound of a coin landing in a glass. But that glass is under the table, completely blocked from view. So all a spectator knows watching this is that a coin was dropped in the glass under the table. Nothing magical has happened yet. And yet the spectator’s reaction is, “What the fuck!?” Again, nothing has happened but the sound of a coin hitting a glass under a table where 5000 coins could be hidden at the moment.

So, I’ll take Craig at his word that this guy’s reactions are real. But if that’s the case, he’s the most undiscriminating magic spectator that has ever existed. He gave a WTF reaction before anything magical even happened. While that makes him a wonderful spectator in general, it makes him a bad surrogate spectator to demonstrate these tricks on, because he’s reacting in a way that is atypical. You do come across people who react like this from time to time. And if you have a person in your life who reacts like this, hang onto that big dumb dope with both hands. They’ll make you feel like a million bucks.

With that said, scanning through the video I can see that Craig is routining these tricks in a way to do his best to take the heat off the cap, which is a good thing. I just don’t really see that as a substitute for the traditional version where you don’t have to direct their attention so much. With the brass caps you can have the spectator cover the stack of coins while you’re across the room. Then, when they say go, the coins can transport to your hand while you are far away and they can turn over the cap themselves to find nothing underneath.

Ultimately it’s going to come down to what you prioritize with this effect. Do you want to do a version that’s more hands off and examinable? If so, do the traditional version. Do you want to do one that looks more like a recognizable object? Then Pro Caps might work for you.

I would definitely avoid any routines that use this part of the gimmick though…

The part that’s supposed to look like the plastic ring on the bottle the cap is attached to.

While carrying around plastic bottle caps is odd on its own. It’s hyper odd to also be carrying around that part of the cap. The whole purpose of that piece is that it doesn’t come off the bottle. That’s its function. So to just casually have that bit of trash on you that you WRENCHED off a bottle for some reason seems a bit harder to justify.

Regarding Tuesday’s Trick-Shot post, PM writes:

For some time now I've struggled to present mentalism seriously. I don't think there's a purer form of "Look how amazing I am" than with most mentalism presentations.

But the frustration of not being able to be wrong speaks to me. I've considered for a while now to present mentalism modestly, even apologetically. But I'm just not quite there.

I imagine if you could learn to read minds, it would be horrific. I can't imagine how rough life would be if nobody lied to me successfully ever again. Never being surprised by a gift, ever. Birthday, Christmas. No need even wrapping them.

But I'm not sure where this takes me for a presentation. I'd love a sentence or two of guidance if you can spare it. -PM

Yeah, that’s going to be tough to pull off as a premise, I think. The problem is this… almost all mind-reading has some process involved. So how would you justify engaging in that process in the first place if your goal was not to do what that process was designed for? You know what I mean? Like why would you have them write the word down and put it in your wallet if you didn’t want to read their mind of that word? It doesn’t quite make sense.

That’s why, with mentalism, if I’m trying to take a backseat role, I transfer the “power” to some third person or object. Then it’s my “psychic friend” reading their mind. Or, this “weird fortune telling game” that I learned about. That way we can follow some sort of process but it’s not my idea, and it’s not me gaining the accolades.

That being said, I’m sure there’s some way to read someone’s mind in the context of not wanting to read their mind. I’ll give it some thought. And if anyone has any ideas, feel free to pass them along to share with the class.

My Takeaway From Five Years of Tracking Trick Memorability

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Starting back in 2017 I started tracking how “memorable” a trick was. That may seem like a hard thing to quantify. That’s because it is. I mean, if you go up to someone and say, “Remember when I vanished your bill and it appeared in a lemon?” They might say, “Uhm, yeah.” But just acknowledging something after being reminded that it happened doesn’t mean that thing was “memorable.” So I used a different metric, as I wrote about on New Year’s day of 2018.

[O]ne thing I could track, to a certain extent, was resonance. When someone talks to me, or texts me, or calls me long after the trick and mentions it, I can make note of it. When 6 months after a performance someone tells me they had a dream about it, that can be seen as a data point. Even on a shorter time scale, if someone brings up a trick later that same night, that's obviously a more enduring trick for them than something they never think of or mention again.

And the idea behind tracking this was to identify what aspects of a trick might make that magic feeling linger. Would something visual endure more than something cerebral? Is something mildly magical that happens in their hands remembered longer than something incredibly magical that happens in mine? Or is it the other way around? Is a card trick more memorable than a coin trick? Or are they equally forgettable?

So, for over five years, I’ve tracked in the databases that housed my repertoire of tricks, how frequently someone would mention a trick after it was performed.

Not every trick got mentioned, of course. It broke down into about thirds. 1/3rd of the tricks wouldn’t come up again after the interaction. 1/3rd would come up later that day.. And then another 1/3 would be mentioned at some other interaction down the road, days, months or even years later.

I decided to look at Resonance (Memorability) vs Time (How long the trick takes to perform). I went into my database and added a column for approximately how long each trick takes. When I compared the two variables, I ended up with a correlation that looks like this…

The lowest part of that dip (the lowest “Memorability”) were for tricks in the range of 30 seconds to three minutes.

The effect of the length of the trick on Memorability was most pronounced when tricks that were under 5 seconds (essentially instantaneous tricks) or tricks that were greater than 5 minutes.

A couple things were interesting about this to me.

First, I would guess that most tricks magicians perform fall into that 30 second to 3 minute deadzone. We’re not doing ourselves any favors with the pacing of our tricks.

Second, even when I had a trick with with a very strong, or interesting, or funny story to go along with it—if it was too short—it often wouldn’t “stick” with spectators. As good as the presentation may be, it needs some time to germinate.

Third, even if a trick was mostly dead time, as long as there was enough time between the start of the trick and the end, it still had increased resonance. You don’t need to do a 45 minute continuous one-act-play for your spectator. When performing casually, you can introduce the concept of a trick, let that sit for a while. Come back at a later time to demonstrate the trick and maybe it doesn’t quite go right. Then come back a final time and fulfill the premise of your trick. And even if the total length of those interactions was a couple of minutes total, it will be considerably more memorable than a trick that takes 2 minutes in real time.

As the graph suggests, there was also a spike in Memorability for tricks that were over very quick. A bill change with little to no preamble. Changing the color of an object. Vanishing something you no longer need. Essentially the sort of thing I do in the Distracted Artist style.

From my experience, what people remember are quick, laser-focused moments of magic, or extended immersive experiences. With the immersive experiences ultimately providing the greatest memorability.

Does this mean I don’t do any 45 second or 2 minute tricks?

No. But I do ask myself, “Can we concentrate this effect down to something punchier? Or can we broaden the experience to something more engrossing for a longer period of time?” Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. Some tricks really aren’t intended to be anything more than a sort of brief moment of entertainment. But if you’re hoping to do something particularly affecting, you may want to play around with the time element.

Think about it. Does anything really good take 2 minutes? (“Yes, sex with me takes two minutes,” you say. Okay. But I meant really good for everyone involved.)

Jerxian Trick Shots

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Look, no one is more disgusted than I am that I’m using the adjective “jerxian.” I just don’t quite know another way to succinctly describe something that is reminiscent of the ideas on this blog (other than “brilliant,” I mean).

Madison H., sent along this email recently…

I was on Facebook this morning and saw a video that I think does a good job of demonstrating your style outside of a magic context. 

It’s a guy who is acting like he’s cursed to nail every basketball shot he takes. 

Clearly, we all know it’s fiction, but he plays it as real. Clearly he doesn’t want us to REALLY believe in the fiction, but it doesn’t take a *wink wink* or *nudge nudge* for the audience to understand that he’s only saying that to make it entertaining. It’s impressive the shots he’s making, but it’s much more intriguing to watch than other “trick shot” videos because there’s a narrative of trying to miss woven in. This narrative allows him to get creative with his shots and do things that would never be considered the “normal” way to shoot a basketball, but we don’t bat an eye at it because it fits into the narrative.

I love that video. It’s genuinely both amazing and funny. I don’t know if he was the first person to hit on this framing for a trick-shot video, but it’s genius.

As a trick-shot artist he’s fairly limited in the number of contexts in which he can present his shots. In magic we have so many potential contexts for a trick but we so often limit it to, “I have this skill/power and now I’m gong to demonstrate it.” It’s funny to see someone shy away from that framing even when he’s legitimately demonstrating a skill.

I think I mentioned in a post or newsletter recently that I’ve been doing a long-form (month’s long) performance piece with a friend of mine where I can’t lose any game I play. This started with variations on the 10-Card Poker Deal but has evolved into all sorts of games where I can control the outcome. Instead of presenting this as, “I have magical powers that allow me to win any game I play,” I present it like I’m so bothered by the fact that I never lose anymore.

It’s like that Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place To Visit” where the guy “wins” at everything he tries and therefore can take no pleasure at anything he attempts anymore.

This is a great way to “batch” together a number of similar effects to create one ongoing story-line.

Many years ago I wrote a presentation for Paul Harris’ trick The Perfectionist (#4 in this post), where I talk about being cursed by an old gypsy woman to not be able to shuffle cards. This was some of my earliest writing about presentation.

I remember an email I got afterwards from a guy who wrote me and said he wasn’t a fan of that presentation because it was “too theatrical.”

But it’s not. It’s only as theatrical as you make it. You can tell such a story and play it up, or you can play it very low key. That’s up to you.

The bizarre thing to me is that a couple months later this same guy posted a video of a coin trick where he said, “The leader coin calls the other coins to join it. So whatever hand it’s in, the other coins will follow.”

It blows my mind how comfortable magicians are with bland patter like this. Like, they’re going to make up a story… and then they choose a totally boring one? What is that instinct? I think it might be that a lot of the standard, corny, meaningless magician’s patter doesn’t require the performer to actually invest any bit of themself into the performance. The patter is just dead on arrival. It’s completely perfunctory. It’s like the dialogue in a porno movie. Magicians just want to “get to the good stuff.”

But what real people enjoy most with social magic is the presentation. Don’t waste it. Do what the trick-shot kid does and embrace it. The more fun you have with the presentation, the more fun the people watching will have.

Mailbag: Thinking Like A Magician

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If I had read your thoughts on Pro Caps before today [Sunday] it would have saved me $40 and some embarrassment. I got my Pro Caps on Friday and tried them out last night at a bonfire dinner we have in our neighborhood.

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I did end up getting called out twice on the caps in the four times I performed it. I knew they wouldn’t pass inspection or anything like that and I knew they didn’t exactly match a normal bottle cap, but that seemed to be thinking like a magician. I wouldn’t say it was magician’s guilt because I hadn’t read your post yet so I was highly confident going into the night. My last performance of the trick got the strongest reaction of the night but afterwards I almost knocked the gimmick off the table and my neighbor’s aunt said, “Oops. Don’t lose your special cap.” I was very tempted to toss it in the fire and say “Oh there’s nothing special about it.” But I chickened out at the end.

It would be good if you could partner up with Murphy’s or whomever and you could get effects pre-release to give your comments to us. You’re one of the few voices in magic that I trust to give an honest opinion. —JS

I appreciate the thought, but you may be confused about how magic marketing/promotion works if you think Murphy’s would want to partner up with me because I would give an “honest” opinion about things…that’s not what they’re looking for.

I don’t really have any more thoughts on Pro Caps. I don’t own a set and don’t see myself getting one. Hopefully the people who pick it up end up enjoying it. That’s pretty much my only thought on it at this point.

But I do want to dive into something you mentioned in your email: Thinking Like A Magician.

In the magic world we’re frequently being told, “Don’t think like a magician.”

Do these bottle caps look a little off? Maybe. But only a magician would notice that. You have to stop thinking like a magician.

Is this a big, bulky weird looking wallet unlike anything anyone carries in the real world? Don’t worry about it. Stop thinking like a magician.

You’re worried that the deck can’t be examined after the color change? That’s “magician’s guilt.” Stop thinking like a magician.

I have important information for all of you. As someone who has been involved with more testing of magic tricks than any human who has ever lived on the planet, there is no such thing as “thinking like a magician.” You’re not concerned about the bottle cap looking not-quite-right because you’re thinking like a magician. It’s because you’re thinking like someone with a couple functioning brain cells.

In the early testing days, we looked at the Ambitious Card to see what spectator’s ideas were in regards to how the trick was done.

The vast majority of the time, they suggested the possibility of some kind of trick deck.

Maybe it’s our performance, we thought. So we showed people Bill Malone, Doc Eason, Tommy Wonder and others performing the Ambitious Card. It didn’t matter who the audience was. It didn’t matter which performer they saw. “Trick cards” or “Trick deck” was always one of the top guessed methods.

We would soon learn that unless you controlled for it in some way, audiences almost always assumed a “trick” something was involved. A pen went through a bill? Trick pen. Coins jumped from hand to hand? Trick coins. One sponge ball became two? Well, it must be some kind of trick sponge ball that pulls apart, of course!

Questioning how much an audience will accept the normalcy of an object used in an effect is not “thinking like a magician.” In fact, it suggests a foundational understanding of how laymen think.

Any props that play a primary role in your effect will be questioned. You can get around this by using borrowed objects, examinable objects, and switches to make it feel like everything is normal. But you can’t get around it with wishful thinking.

How important this is to you may be something that comes down to the professional/amateur divide as well. If you’re a professional magician (or are performing in a professional style) people expect you to have your magic props with you. Do they probably know there’s something funky about your bottle caps? Yes. People don’t just carry bottle caps with them. In the same way they probably know there’s something funky about the box Copperfield put the girl in on stage. They allow for that in the professional performance because a professional performance is all artifice. Is the bottle cap fake? Sure. And the joke the magician just made was something he’s said 1000 times before. It’s all fake.

Social magic is less forgiving in that way. The whole goal of it is that the magic moment feels like part of a casual interaction. “Normal” objects have to really ring true as normal objects. What you say shouldn’t feel scripted. The moment should seem unrehearsed.

For the social magician, you can’t underestimate your audience’s suspicions. You need to anticipate them and adjust for them.

You might hope, “If I’m a great enough magician, that will get them not to question the objects I use.” But you have it backwards. You can’t get people to see you as a “great magician” until they get past their innate suspicions about the objects you use.

Max Maven

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I was sad to hear about the passing of Max Maven earlier this week. Max was a fixture in magic since before I learned my first double-lift.

While I don’t believe he followed this site at all (if he ever read it, I’m sure he would have called it something like, “A thing of terrifying stupidity”), he was someone I would reach out to from time to time when I needed a credit or history on something magic-related. It was amazing how much he knew about, and how generous he was with sharing that knowledge.

Here is a typical exchange of ours where he went above and beyond to answer a question for me.

He’ll be missed.

Today I’m going to repost something I wrote about Max back in 2016. It started with a video that was sent to me of Max screwing up a trick on television. But it’s how he handled it that I found funny and informative. I did ask Max once exactly what went wrong in the clip below, but he didn’t have a real answer beyond “I fucked up.” So let’s again watch how Max handles a fuck-up.

The Contents of the Empty Purse

I was sent a video of Max Maven performing on television in Taiwan by someone who wants to remain anonymous. Apparently there is a bit of a cult following surrounding this video, and I can understand why. First, the Taiwanese people are a trip. Their reactions to things -- even things that aren't magical in the slightest -- are fantastic. I'm not quite smart enough to understand the relationship between Taiwan and China, but there definitely seems to be a noticeable difference in the spirit of the two countries. Perhaps I'm just being overly influenced by Western views of the Chinese government which is often seen as oppressively cruel and brutally Orwellian. Which is in distinct contrast with the Taiwanese magic audience which is aggressively cool and practically L&L'ian

I went a long way for that one. I'm going to enjoy it for a moment.

Okay, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about screwing up. Let's watch Max screw up (part of) a trick and see what we can learn from it. (I've cued it up to the start of the trick for you.)

Let's take a real detailed look at this web of bullshit that Max weaves.

Maven: At this moment... this purse is empty. I know this purse is empty. Can you open that purse please? Is it empty?

Woman: No, it’s not empty.

Maven: Because inside is one piece of evidence. But do you know why it feels empty? Because nobody knows what’s inside. Only you do, right? So for everyone else and for me also, it’s nothing. It’s a mystery.

Seriously, that is an amazing pivot by Max. His original statement was about whether a piece of paper was in the purse, and when that didn't work out he turned it into a proclamation on the nature of existence and the persistence of object permanence and some type of Schrodinger's Doodle or something.

And at worst it comes across as a hiccup, but nothing much more than that. He just keeps rolling. There isn't time for the audience to really consider if he screwed up or not. 

This should be empowering to you. Your fear of screwing up is directly related to the derision you feel you might incur from it. But the truth is, everyone is taking their cues from you to see how much your mistake should matter, and no one will care about your screw-up any more than you care about it. (This is as much a life lesson as it is a magic lesson.)

How to Bed Women With Magic

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It was announced that Sam Raimi is going to remake the 1976 classic (in my opinion) film, Magic.

The original starred Anthony Hopkins, who was supposed to be this brilliant ventriloquist and magician. Yet this is what his French drop looked like.

He goes on to seduce Ann Margret with a Do as I Do routine. I’m not kidding. For you younger readers (and you don’t have to be that young—she was before my time too) this is Ann Margret.

She’s an all-time, easy 10 out of 10.

And here’s Anthony Hopkins.

Like you, he’s a generous 4.

And yes, he really beds Ann-Margret’s character by doing a Do as I Do routine.

Not something that looks like a Do as I Do routine. He’s doing the actual beginner’s book method for a Do as I Do routine with a key card and all of that.

I’m going to go through this scene and tell you what he’s doing that makes it believable that he could seduce one of cinema’s hottest women with one of the simplest card tricks there is.

Now, to be clear, Hopkins’ character is fucking insane in this movie. And in this scene as well. You shouldn’t really take things as far as he does in this scene. You shouldn’t be trying to manipulate people into having sex with you with something Mac King taught you after a commercial break on World’s Greatest Magic.

But you can still take some of the techniques he’s using here to give tricks more weight and resonance. These are things I’ve written about on this site frequently.

Here is that part of the movie. The clip is 9:30 long. There’s some set-up to the trick. Then there’s the performance of the trick. Then the clip of him balling her brains out. If you’re unfamiliar with this movie/scene, it’s legitimately worth your time to give it a watch.

1:00-1:50 - Techniques: Hook & Cast - Long before the two of them are ever seated at the table, Hopkins sets a Hook for the trick by talking about his mentor Merlin and his wife. Merlin and his wife used to do fake telepathy with cards. But as she was dying they tried it for real, and Merlin was able to read her mind.

I often write about expanding magic beyond the limits of the trick itself. That’s what he’s doing here. He’s giving the trick a history. The “story” of the effect exists outside of the few minutes the trick takes place.

I’ve also written (more in my books than on the site) about creating a “Cast” of people to populate the fiction of the trick. That too is what he’s doing with Merlin and his wife.

1:50-4:30 - Technique: Buy-In - Here he performs the trick for the first time and it fails. Asking someone to take the time to watch you do an effect and have it not work is something many magicians aren’t comfortable with, but it’s very powerful

I frequently like to incorporate some element of failure into my presentation for a trick. (See November 2019 for a series of posts on this.) Not because it makes the trick seem “more real” but because it confuses people into just exactly how the thing they’re seeing is fake. For example, if I do the movements of a coin vanish but without vanishing the coin and I’m like, “Can you see it?” You say you can. That’s a failure, so I’m frustrated. I try it again and this time I actually vanish the coin. “How about now?” I ask. Now the coin is really gone, but I act as if I don’t know if you can see it or not. This makes you less likely to think I ditched the coin somewhere. Because if that’s all the deception was, why would I have thought it worked the first time when the coin was clearly visible? “Failure” is a red-herring clue to methodology that spectators are usually not prepared to handle.

There’s other Buy-In elements here as well…

  • Hopkins’ character is yelling at her to take it seriously. You don’t want to genuinely berate someone like this. But asking someone to buy into the effect by changing their attitude is a powerful technique.

  • He also utilizes time so well here. In the second go-around of the trick it takes him 50 seconds to tell her what her card is, even though we know that he knows it immediately. Rushing your magic is the death of suspense and mystery, but it’s also something that 95+% of magicians do. Slow down.

7:20-7:40 - Technique: Reps - What does he do when he gets her card right? Does he say, “Ta-daa”? Does he make a joke? No, he slumps in his chair and mumbles to himself, “I didn’t fail. I didn’t fail.”

The idea of Reps is to blur the ending of an effect. What might you do afterwards if you had really just done what you pretended to do? Would you excitedly call your mentor to let her know the trick worked? Would you take an aspirin because your head was aching? Or would you slump in your chair and mutter, “I didn’t fail,” because you’re a sad-sack, piece-of-shit who nothing goes right for?

Any of these things will give the effect more resonance than just moving on to another trick or making a joke.

Now, here’s the part where I have to fucking spell shit out for the people who will inevitably write me because they’re misinterpreting this post.

The title of this post, “How to Bed Women With Magic,” is a joke about the clip I’m using. Not actual advice.

I don’t think you should scream at your spectators.

I don’t think you should manipulate them into fucking you while your ventriloquist dummy simmers in the other room.

I do think it’s okay to sometimes “blame” the spectator for something not working, if your goal is to get them to engage more deeply with the experience. (Not if your goal is—as I said—to stick your dick in them.)

The purpose of this post is not to get you laid. It’s to give an example of the power or some of the extra-presentational techniques I’ve written about, and how they can be used to make some of the simplest tricks feel un-trivial. Too often magic feels like a throwaway thing. And you can’t get around that with stronger tricks or faster tricks or more jokes (these are techniques most often used by magicians when they’re worried about how their tricks are going over).

But you can generate less trivial interactions by making the experience of the trick more engaging, which is what these techniques do. The “magic” demonstrated in the clip above is not that these techniques will allow you to bang Ann Margret. It’s that these techniques can be used to make one of the first tricks you learned interesting enough that it was presented in five-minutes of real time in a major motion picture.