Mailbag #155

/

I’m working through my inventory of effects, editing them and weeding out things that no longer belong. I’m currently looking at Michael Murray’s sightless which featured on your Xmas special. The overall premise is dermi-optics (think of the Netflix film “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”).

In practical terms: The spectator thinks of a playing card, and finds its mate in the deck. You then use your finger tips to “read” the name of the mate. All the cards are then placed in your pocket and you bring them out reading cards as you go with your fingertips, eventually stopping on their thought of card. 

The effect has some similarities with Luke Jermay’s Colour Sense 2.0 which has an engaging story of a gifted girl from Charlotte who reacts to someone trying to expose her dermi-optic skill by bringing a knife to her hand, and she cries out “Are you trying to blind me?”. As with most of Luke Jermay’s stuff, it’s solid, but on balance Michael Murray’s method is more robust and less error prone. 

I like the back stories, but unless I’m missing an angle, the effect is always going to be “look at my super power”, and that’s a problem. Before I archive the effect, I thought I’d ask you if you could see a way to rescue it?—DM

Being able to sense colors with your fingertips is firmly magician-centric, because the premise itself is: I’m about to show them a power I have.

So can we “rescue” it? Not in the sense that we can make it something other than a demonstration of your power.

But I think we can make it more interesting and less dismissible.

Tricks like these are intriguing in a directly inverse proportion to how confident you are that you can do it.

If you say, “I can read colors with my fingertips. Hold on to your asses while I demonstrate this power,” people will think, He’s confident, so it’s obviously some sort of trick. Let’s see if I can keep from being tricked.

Your own confidence suggests you know exactly what’s about to happen, which screams, “this is a trick.” While that’s not always an issue, a lot of people will disengage from the moment at that point. Eh, it’s a trick. He’s going to fool me. I’ll feel dumb.

But if you have an old copy of Henry Sugar in your bag or on your coffee table (you can find these on eBay for cheap)…

And you say, “Oh yeah, I picked that up from home recently. It’s actually the book that got me interested in magic, in a roundabout way. Do you know the story of Henry Sugar?” Explain, explain. “And I was young enough to believe you could do this, so I spent months trying it. In my memory, I think I got good at it. Like, much better than average, I mean. But the other day I was thinking, ‘Wait… did I actually get good at that? Or did I dream I got good at it and I’ve been remembering my dream?’ I wanted to try it sometime and see. Actually… would you mind helping me with it?”

Now we have the book, and the backstory, and the uncertainty buried in the question of “Can I still do this?” or, “Was I ever able to do this or did I just convince myself I had?” And those things are more understandable and interesting to people than just: he’s going to show me some trick he’s worked on.

I don’t know if that “rescues” the trick, but it’s the direction I would go.

A little while ago you promised some more on the “Carefree” approach to magic on the site. Do you know when we can expect that? —SS

Yeah, I have one larger post on the subject that I’ve been working on that should be posted in the next couple of months.

But beyond that, it’s sort of the lens through which I view magic now, so you should see it reflected just generally on the site, and in the newsletters and books.

Someone on facebook was asking about an alternative handling for Socks and I remembered you had one that I loved but i forgot the details. I searched but can’t find the post. Did I dream it?—KH

If you dreamed it, it’s a dream come true, because yes, I do have a post on Socks. It was off the site for a little while. Sometimes performers contact me to buy the performing rights to something I posted and posts get removed temporarily or permanently. Fortunately there are 2000 other posts to read.

In this case, I was working on a trick for someone inspired by my Socks handling, but now the post is back.

In brief, the idea is to do the card matching part first (the less interesting bit of the routine). Have the two actual sock force cards in a place (pocket, lap, card box) where you can ring them in after the first part—which means the spectator can shuffle after the first phase depending on how you’re adding those cards to the deck.

Then do any force with those cards.

The cards matching the socks on your feet ends up feeling much more unexpected, as it seems like you’re setting them up to do a repeat of the first phase where cards match each other and then things take a weird turn.

You can read all the details in that post.