Monday Mailbag #53
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I think you like hearing stories of people trying pieces in the Jerxian style. If you'd like to read such a tale, read on.
I have a friend who is very used to seeing me practice and perform tricks. While she wouldn't describe herself as a magician, she grew up with a few magic books in the house and has significantly more knowledge than a typical spectator. The cross cut force is a no-go. Classic forces are instinctively resisted. She enjoys being fooled, but she'll instinctively try to reverse engineer everything first.
I'm a pretty mediocre performer of magic, though I practice a lot and end up performing in casual situations from time to time. I overfocus on technical skill and visual stuff. I love flashy flourishes. 90% of the time I just perform a somewhat overly difficult ambitious card routine, almost entirely as a visual piece of eye candy. I'm that guy. Darwin Ortiz fan, reporting for duty.
I'm one of those people that read The Jerx enviously, thinking "I could never pull that off".
But I finally tried your amateur at the kitchen table style, smearing the edges of a trick and trying to be just a bit more audience-centric. The context leading up to the trick was this friend and I were both just a bit stoned (Canadians, sorry) and on the couch when she grabs the cards, which are out not because I put the cards out and wait for somebody to ask about them, but because we'd just finished watching a movie and she's used to me noodling with cards quietly by myself like a weirdo.
After the movie, she grabs the cards and starts messing with them and shuffling idly. I start teaching her different shuffles, probably mansplaining up a storm, but she's into this kind of thing. I say some stuff about a faro shuffle, mixing fact and fiction a bit. Then, after she has mixed the hell out of the cards, I try to perform Joshua Jay's handling of Shuffle Bored for the first time. I've forgotten what he calls it because he gave his version a dumb name. He's this little known magician that nobody likes anyway. ;)
There was something completely disarming with this approach. We stumbled into it. We were playing around with cards. It didn't have that "shift into magician mode" moment that is always implicitly there when you're launching into a trick, where their guard goes way up. In terms of presentation, I had no script and made it a "peek backstage" where she was under the impression that I was teaching her a trick as we went into it. Presentationally I take as little credit as possible and instead try to sell it as a coincidence that we arrive at through shuffling and working together to remember the cards.
The weed 1000% helped give it a haphazard and bumbling feel as I improvised my way through. It probably helped enhance her reaction too, let's be honest, but it was still different from even strong reactions in the past. It was like she had nowhere to even start searching, so she just went for the ride the whole time. The magic was finally interactive and in the moment the whole time.
I know this is the babiest of baby steps into the Jerx Performing Style. All of this is very out of my comfort zone, and it's harder to get the nerve to shift into than you might think. As you can probably tell from this email though, I had a lot of fun with it. —KM
This is similar to a number of stories I’ve heard about people’s first experience with the style of magic I write about on this site. It starts off unplanned and almost unintentional and it’s only in retrospect—often after an unusually strong reaction—that they realize their performance was in line with a “Jerxian” performance philosophy. It makes sense that this happens a lot because it’s how I came to this philosophy myself—by backwards engineering the things that seemed to lead to stronger reactions. And those things weren’t more tightly scripted patter or better routining between effects. It was almost always the opposite—an effect that seemed unplanned and unscripted and just arose from the natural interaction.
When I first started playing around with this idea I thought that everyone had to believe what they were seeing was really spontaneous. But after experimenting, I found that wasn’t the case. I realized you could push the effects into more fantastical and more fictional realms as long as you kept the feeling of something that was an interaction and not a “performance.” I found that people are much happier to play along with the magic experience in informal and social situations, so long as you don’t force them into the role of “spectator” whose purpose is to validate the performer via their response to the trick.
So if you want to get into the “Jerxian” style, follow KM’s path: go get fucking baked and stumble into some performances and see how it goes.
I’m on [Michael] Weber’s mailing list (based on your recommendation) and just got his email with your endorsement of his effect “C.” Did you change your policy that you wrote [in this post] about how you won’t do endorsements/reviews? —SB
Yes. Michael Weber (along with Tim Trono) offered me $400,000 to promote their releases. Before the ink was even dry on the contract, Michael pointed out part of the fine print that said I was to be paid in something called “Weberbucks.”
I was at first confused, then angry. My lawyer silently shook his head when I asked if there was anything we could do about this. Then Michael skipped away, knees pumping up to his chest, as he gayly laughed over his shoulder at me.
Uhm, no. I didn’t change my stance on endorsements. The quote that was used in that email came from a previous newsletter where I briefly mentioned the trick. I don’t specifically write endorsements, but if I say something positive about an effect, I don’t have an issue with people using it in their marketing.
Michael Weber and Tim Trono are kind enough to send me many of their releases. We don’t have any agreement in place that I’ll mention those releases on the site or in the newsletter. In fact, most of the time I probably don’t. But, I’m obviously more likely to than I would be otherwise, simply because the first step to me talking about something is owning it. And if someone is sending me something for free, then I obviously would then own it.
What the post you mentioned was indicating was the idea that I don’t want to be indebted to anyone, and for that reason I wouldn’t want anyone sending me something under the idea that they think I’m likely to review it or talk about it. If people want to send me stuff, that’s great. But it’s just as well if they want to send me an email telling me about their new release and I’ll pick it up with my own money if it seems like something that would be for me.
If you’re doing the math, assume there’s a 90% likelihood I won’t mention whatever you send me. That way you can decide if you still want to send it my way. Of course, you may decide to play defense and think, “Well, I’ll send it to him, and while I probably won’t get any free advertising out of it, at least he probably won’t trash it either.” That’s a good point. I’m human. I probably wouldn’t.
If you definitely want to get your release mentioned here, then these are the only ways to do so.
Okay it’s a year and a half into the pandemic, what are you thinking and hearing about Zoom shows? Are they here to stay? Is it worth investing my time in coming up with one now?—TK
Hmmm… when the Zoom shows first started up I was somewhat skeptical, but then I heard from a few different people that they were making a killing on Zoom shows. More than they had ever made with live shows. I reached out to them recently after getting your question and heard back from a couple of them and it sounds like the interest in virtual shows has fallen off quite a bit. At least for the people I’m in contact with. I’m sure there are some people who are still doing well with them, but it’s probably not the gold-rush it was at the beginning of the pandemic (if I had to guess).
I can’t tell you what to do with your own time/energy. But personally I wouldn’t be devoting a ton of time to working on a Zoom show. There’s this thing people say about the pandemic, that it sped up changes that were already going to happen. Like it made working from home much more common, and that was a change that was probably going to happen anyway at some point. Many businesses around me went cash-less, and that too is probably something we may have expected to see ten years from now regardless. But, I gotta be honest, I don’t think “magic shows over the computer” is something that was ever going to be the future of the art. I think it’s something we did out of necessity.