Dustings #107
/In Monday’s mailbag, I wrote about taking advantage of recurrent, seasonal events as the backdrop for your effects. This is an easy way to imbue them with a little more sense of “special-ness.”
This is just simple supply and demand. If you only got a boner when the seasons changed, you would cherish every one. If, like me at 14, you have a boner 23 hours of the day—acting as either a tent pole or a kickstand when you tried to sleep at night—it would be meaningless at best, and annoying at worst.
“I can do this anywhere, any time, with anybody,” is the opposite of a “magical” experience.
Many of us will have an opportunity this Monday to take advantage of the eclipse for one-such Sky Imp when the eclipse happens.
It’s all about picking the right trick, of course. You can’t be like, “I can stack any poker hand with two shuffles during an eclipse.”
I will be up near Niagara Falls in the path of totality. My intention is to demonstrate the cool gravitational anomaly that occurs with the gyroscopic effect when the sun and moon are aligned.
I’m going to demonstrate this “anomaly” using Grandfather’s Top (minus the disappearing phase, of course).
I think the image of a top spinning in the air in the midday darkness will be cool and memorable. Any other similar floating effect or balance effect feels like a good match for the eclipse.
A few times over the past couple of years, I’ve had people question me when I describe a trick and suggest grabbing a couple of business cards that are lying around a café to write something down on. They’ve questioned if business cards are commonly found in cafés still.
Yes. I don’t know if this is a regional thing. But in New York state, if you’re in a coffee shop that isn’t a Starbucks, there is almost always a place for people to leave their cards. Business card magic—which may be a dying concept in some situations (handing out your card at a cocktail party, for example)—is alive and well at coffee shops around me.
I visited my friend (and the publisher and distributor of the Jerx books) who lives outside of Syracuse NY, to plan out the release of the hardcover edition of the Amateur at the Kitchen Table. We camped out at one of his usual hang-out spots where I took these pics:
There were over 150 different little stacks of business cards. So yes, business cards are still quite natural objects in certain circumstances.
If you happen to have a coffee shop as your “third place” where you spend time and perform occasionally, I recommend spending $15 and printing up 1000 cheap business cards for some unexciting sounding business. “Proofreading” or “Commercial Real Estate” or “Vending Machine Repair.” Put a fake name, an email address, and maybe a Google Voice number on it. You don’t have to ever bother checking the mail or the phone number, they’re just there so the card looks normal. The reason I recommend doing this is that many modern business cards are so thick and have so much printing on the front and back that they become not great for billet work, or anything along those lines. Having a cheap stack of these fake cards lying around in a place that you perform regularly assures you that you won’t have to go digging through cards to find one that works for your purposes.
Random Trivia.
When I write a book, I listen to the same song over and over the whole time. I do this because it blocks out the surrounding noise from where I’m writing, and I prefer it to white noise. If I listened to different songs, it would be too distracting. But listening to the same song over and over is almost meditative. And I’m sure it helps put me in the headspace to work.
During the writing of my last book, Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon, I listened to this song 14,989 times.
I thought it would make a good song to write a book to because there aren’t many lyrics to get in the way. I love songs with harmonies and ba-ba-bahs. And this song is almost only harmonies and ba-ba-bahs. Plus, the Beachwood Sparks, are reminiscent of some of the Laurel Canyon bands (specifically the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield) that inspired part of that book. And this sunny tune usually put me in a good mood to write.
I was feeling bad because I listened to my own copy of the song rather than streaming it on Spotify to make the band some money. But I just did the math and it looks like my 15,000 streams would have made them about $60.
Don’t forget to send in your T.W.A.T. picks.
(Not your “twat pics.”}