Mailbag #89
/So, I’m using the [Jerx] app with some ideas, specially one that I just developed and I wanted your help to improve some details on it.
Is it possible to implement the fake home screen, like Earworm, Wikitest etc? Just to have the icons like the “NOTES” for us to “open notes” in front of the spectators, rather than opening “The Jerx “ or having to navigate through the tabs? —GV
Sure, I’ll put this on the list for possible updates to the app.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is the fact that no one needs to watch you get into your magic app. If you’re bringing up a magic app that is supposed to be a browser, or a drawing app, or a calculator, or notes app or whatever—then the most natural thing to do is to open your phone and bring up the app with the phone facing you. Maybe saying something like, “Let’s Google that,” or whatever the fake thing is that you’re bringing up.
If you’re like, “Okay, I’m just going to go into my calculator,” and you’re showing them the screen as you navigate to your calculator—that’s actually more suspicious than going to your calculator with the screen facing towards you.
To be fair, I know GV—the email writer—is a professional performer, and there are going to be different considerations in those situations. But in a casual performing environment, you want to handle your phone like a human. And that means opening it up, navigating to where you need to go, and then showing the phone to the person you’re with. That’s what people do all over the world, millions of times per day. What they don’t do is say, “Look, I’m just going to go to open my phone. Look… watch… I’m just opening my photo app. Now look, I’m just navigating to this folder,” etc. Whatever you gain in transparency in that way you’ll lose by acting weird. It would be like passing someone on the sidewalk and saying, “Notice I’m keeping my distance. I’m too far away to sexually assault you.” That’s weirder than just acting normal.
Do you remember the first real magic book you bought? And do you still perform anything from it? —CS
I assume by “real” magic book, you mean the kind that couldn’t be found at a library or bookstore, and instead needed to be purchased from a magic shop or sent away for from a magic publisher. If by “real” you mean a book of actual magic spells for witches and warlocks, then I don’t have an answer for you.
My first “real” magic book was Simply Harkey.
From that book I regularly performed:
Body Language - A four-coin production
Handiwork - A chain of paper dolls that goes from separate dolls to linked
Over the Edge - Coins to glass
Jazz Band - Linking rubberband
Dirty Pool - Small black balloon is slightly inflated. You pluck the nozzle off and it turns into an 8-ball.
Showdown - Like a bullet catch, but you catch the streamers from a party popper.
East Meets West - Pencil thru Bill
Transpose - A folded and unfolded card visibly switch places.
Le Ricochet - Coins Across
Spotweld (released as The Sizzle by Penguin Magic)
Two to Tangle - Rubberband penetrates a matchbox
Persuasion - A version of Paul Harris’ Re-set
Those were just the ones I have concrete memories of performing. But I played around with at least twice as many.
The most recent trick from that book I performed (and this was well over a decade) was a trick called Budge, where the spectator can’t remove a deck of cards from a card case but the magician can.
It was a very different time when I got that book, of course. This was an era where you’d read Genii magazine cover to cover every month because that was your monthly dose of magic content. And when you bought a book like Simply Harkey—especially if you were a kid with not a lot of money—you didn’t just read it through and pick out a trick or two. You sat with it for months and tried out everything you could.
In a way, I was spoiled by Simply Harkey because a lot of the tricks in the book sounded completely incredible. I didn’t perform them because I didn’t have the items necessary, but they were fascinating to read. Like a trick where you visibly change a glass marble into an hourglass, or one where the label on a mini bottle of alcohol penetrates the bottle, or one where a black crayon splits into three different colored crayons.
Since that was my first book, I thought that’s what most magic books would be like. I thought they would all have some totally unique effects with a variety of premises. I didn’t know it was more of an outlier until I started getting more magic books and thinking to myself, “There sure are a lot of ace assemblies in here.”