Q&A Week: Day 3

How is Magic bettering the world? How can I as an artist use Magic to better the world? Does it matter?

I don’t really have answers to this sort of question. I only perform for friends and family. If your friends and family are always interested in seeing you perform and psyched to sit through what you’re showing them, then you’re making their life better. The rest of the world can fend for itself.

What is the key difference performing social magic for strangers versus people you know?

With people you know, you can be more comfortable asking for more time from them. Just like you probably wouldn’t tell a five minute joke to a stranger, you wouldn’t do a 20 minute trick for a stranger.

Also, if it’s someone you know, they’ve probably seen you perform before. With every performance you can push the boundaries a little and do weirder stuff, without making people feel uncomfortable. After a while you can let go of the reins completely and do whatever you want because they’ll know to trust you that it will be worth their while. But the first time you perform for someone you want to be a little gentler with them. If it’s a genuine stranger then they don’t know anything about you or your motivations, so you don’t want to get too weird with them. You want them to be able to engage comfortably.

When I perform for people who have seen me perform, I don’t need to say, “This is a trick.” They already know that. But with a stranger you want to ease them into the weirder stuff.

Why is my weenie so small and stinky?

Someone beat you to this.

You mention in The Bubble making props in the spectator's view, kinda like White Monte. Do you plant ordinary objects "laying around" to use?

Sometimes. I don’t really plant stuff around my house. But I will plant stuff at some of the coffee shops I visit regularly. One has a book and game shelf that i will leave stuff on. Obviously, there’s a chance someone could make off with what I leave there, but it hasn’t happened yet (that I’ve noticed).

More often, rather than having something planted, I’ll have something prepped ahead of time and then switch those items in before anyone is really paying attention. For example, I may have some business cards from the cafe I’m at that I’ve secretly prepped in some way—maybe it’s just marking them in some manner. And then I’ll ask someone to grab me five business cards from he counter and when they come back with them I’ll just switch them very simply in the process of getting a pen out of my bag. No one is looking for a switch at that point.

Harrison Greenbaum says "Magicians are a Beatles cover band but think they're John Lennon". Thoughts?

I’m not sure I buy that. I don’t think most hack magicians who are performing ancient tricks with unoriginal patter think that they’re doing something original. Instead they say things like, “The classics are classics for a reason.” Magic doesn’t really have a history of encouraging originality.

The issue, as I see it, isn’t that magicians think they’re creative when they’re not, it’s that so many magicians don’t even approach it as a creative enterprise in the first place.

Do you think the six card repeat fools anybody?

It’s a difficult trick to make fooling because the method that is used is often very close to what any normal human would suspect. That being said, I think it can fool people, but not when performed like this. That just looks like someone passing half a deck back and forth between his hands. (Especially given the fact that he breaks the rhythm of his count every time he passes the block.)

Do you have/use a script?

I have a premise in my head and then I may have a line or two I want to hit perfectly. But no scripting beyond that. It’s hard to have a script and not feel scripted.

One of the issues with writing my material out is that it may seem like I’m telling you my “script.” I’m not. I’m just writing something similar to what I said in the performance I’m thinking about when I write the post.

Do you have any magic guilty pleasures? As in, bad tricks that you like? Or maybe something you tried to improve but couldn't?

Hmm. I don’t think so. Not in the way you mean, at least. The closest thing I can think of is that I like buying cheap magic sets and playing around with them. So that’s a guilty pleasure in the sense that I’m only doing it for the sake of my inner 8-year old.

As far as tricks I couldn’t improve. Yeah. That’s most tricks.

There’s a whole genre that I’ve had a hard time improving: rubber band tricks. One of my first books in magic was Scarne On Card Tricks. That’s a 70 year old book of card tricks that a beginner can do. And yet, I feel I can take any trick from that book—perform it in some sort of context—and get someone thinking about it at least all night, and potentially for months or years to come.

On the other hand, I can perform the most modern, clever rubber band magic, get a really strong initial reaction, and then it’s almost immediately forgotten, or so it seems. I’m not sure why that is. I think it may be because rubber bands are inherently unromantic. Playing cards, money, pen and paper, cigarettes, hell maybe even thimbles are all props that potentially have some emotional weight to them. Rubber bands don’t. No one ever says, “Ah, I remember my grandmother used to get together with her friends and stretch rubber bands at the kitchen table.” Rubber bands are intrinsically worthless and disposable, and it feels like audiences treat the tricks to be done with them in a similar way. Even if they’re amazed by the trick in the moment, I never feel like it’s the sort of thing they think about for long after.

Did you ever have anxiety performing magic for people? If so, how did you resolve?

I’m fortunate enough not to have anxiety about anything. I might be missing part of my brain. I can’t even say I’m 100% certain what people mean when they say they’re anxious about something.

Anxiety seems to come from thinking too much about the “what ifs” of a given situation. What if the trick goes wrong, what if the person doesn’t like it, what if I screw up, etc. I think one of the cheat codes to life is just to ignore the “what ifs” in low-stakes situations. Introducing yourself to an attractive stranger at a coffee shop, getting a new hair style, or performing a magic trick for people—these are all objectively low-stakes situations. They don’t warrant you being concerned about the outcome.

If you were forced to do a formal show at gunpoint, what would you perform?

At gunpoint? Pull the trigger.