This Illusion of a Life

2009-06-14T22:32:00.001-07:00

Time management… Wow. Trying to figure out a double major, working nearly full time while keeping grades up, preparing for my October wedding, and attempting to find time for magic. It takes the real life thought and application of a magician’s tricks to pull all of this off.

2008-12-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

When you begin to discover something worth fighting for, something that means the world to you, you don't just let it die. You don't just stand around and watch as it sinks into the depths of oblivion. You act. You save it. You do SOMETHING. You make an effort to preserve it because it was once of value to you, and even if it will never profit you again it means something to you.

2008-09-08T19:59:00.001-07:00

If you aren't careful when playing with bright lights, even a group of ten year olds may spontaneously shout "Rubber thumb!"

The Art of Impossibility pt.3

2008-09-05T19:22:00.001-07:00

The impossible. It’s what we do. Every day we do things that defy logic, nature, and any other law by which things can be bound. When a spectator sees a magician accomplish something impossible, are they immediately convinced? Do they automatically take for truth everything a magician says? Of course not. Everyone is a skeptic to one extent or another. Every set of eyes on your hands holding a deck of cards will be looking for something they can’t see. They will be doing what they can to unravel the mystery their eyes just beheld. They are looking for the guilty party. Whether a gimmick, or a sleight, or anything else, our illusions always involve something “guilty.” It is the guilty object in our illusions that we focus on today.

I call to attention a recent performance that I had. I did many illusions for the crowd of interested people watching. After the main performance, I did close-up magic for those who wanted to see more. I approached an older gentleman and asked if I could show him a trick. He laughed and said “Na, you will probably just make my wallet appear in your pocket.” Being quick on my feet, I reached into my pocket. His eyes got big. I smiled, and said I didn’t need his money. From my wallet I pulled out a folded dollar bill. If you don’t know me well enough to know, this was Danny Garcia’s “Greed” gimmick. I told the gentleman that I had all the money I needed right here in my hand. I received the usual confused look before turning a one dollar bill into a five dollar bill. Wide eyes. Five to ten. Wider eyes. Ten to Twenty. Jaw dropped. Just like in Garcia’s routine, I asked if he wanted to see me “do a fifty.” The man said yes, I shook my hand and the twenty dollar bill, folded tight, transformed visually into a fifty-cent piece. I dropped it into the man’s hand and told him not to be greedy. I took my fifty-cent piece back, smiled, and moved on.

Later in the evening, I overheard this man speaking to his wife about the previously mentioned illusion. What I heard him say changed my magic forever. “I don’t quite understand it. I know he switched out the twenty for the coin, but he somehow made the bill disappear in his hand without putting it anywhere. It was just gone.” For those not familiar with the routine, at the end the gimmick is palmed in the same hand holding the newly conjured coin. When I dropped the coin into the gentleman’s hand, the gimmick is right there, inches from his hand. I hold my “empty” hand naturally at my side, and I also use the same hand to take the coin back and place it (with the gimmick) into my pocket. The man KNEW that I had magically vanished the bill from existence. Why? Because he knew that he had seen my hand empty. I had created a baffling, confusing illusion by accident. The most amazing thing to this man was something that I would have never guessed.

Let us break this down. I will focus only on the finale of the illusion. I shake my hand, and a bill turns into a fifty cent piece. What is the “Guilty” party? My hand, of course. Nobody can see what I am holding in my hand, it could be anything. I could have just switched out the bill for the coin and have it in my hand still. This is the thought process a spectator goes through. It takes the spectator a moment to arrive at this conclusion, and by then, the coin is already in their hand. Here is what I learned. I broke this chain of thought. I ruined the only logical conclusion that they could think of. How? I made my “guilty” hand look innocent. I made it look empty. I subliminally told the spectator that there was nothing hiding in my hand without saying a word. All I did was use my guilty hand to deliver the coin to their hand. I opened my hand over their hand and dropped “everything”. My fingers were open, my hand was open. It was empty. The most convincing illusion that I created was the simplest. I had something small palmed in my hand. I then reached down and picked up the coin with the same empty hand and placed it in my pocket.

Before you perform your next illusion, do this with me. Think from the spectator’s position. Imagine another magician performing your trick for you. What is the guilty item? What is the logical conclusion a spectator will come to? How could the magician have possibly done that? Once you figure out what the spectator will think, it is time to move a step ahead.

Imagine this. You have a routine which involves six cards, posing as only four cards. Cards change from one number to the next, and at the end, you have four cards spread face up in your hand, with two hiding on the bottom. Before your spectator can piece together their logical conclusion (which will be that you have more than four cards in your hand) you need to convince them subliminally that there are only four cards. Dan and Dave Buck came up with a nice handling for this dilemma. The cards are all held square in the left hand. The top card is passed from left hand to right hand with a snap. The second is passed the same way. The third is snapped in the left hand before being passed to the right. While this card is dragged to the right, the bottom two cards (still hidden) are dragged along with it to the right hand, leaving merely the fourth card in the left hand which is snapped, pirouetted, and then placed on top. The conclusion that the spectator is quickly coming to is that the extra cards will be hiding at the bottom. The first three cards don’t matter. You just slip the idea into their heads that they are all clean and innocent (when in reality the third card is guilty.) The card that they think is guilty you can show as clean, even though moments before, IT WAS the guilty card. You thought ahead of the spectator and cut off their logical conclusion before they could complete it. You are short-circuiting their brain. You are crossing wires that they were not prepared for you to play with. This is the kind of advantage we can have if we prepare.

There is no wonder why suddenly psychologists are starting to seriously study magicians and how they create the illusions that blow people away using ordinary means. All we do is think ahead. We are always one step ahead of any thought the spectator may have. This is crucial to all we do. If we lose this advantage, we lose our illusion. If being one step ahead of a spectator is so critical, why don’t we strive to be even further ahead? Instead of just thinking about what our illusion will look like to a spectator, let’s think about that thought process they will go through. Lets plan so far ahead that every time someone watches us perform, we are able to cut off every possibility of “cheating” that a spectator could ever come up with. Here is how. Grab a pen. Write it out.

The Short Circuit Method

1. What is the illusion?

1. What does a spectator think may have caused the impossible to happen?

2. What in your act is “Guilty?”

3. How can you make said object appear, quickly and subliminally, not guilty?

If you can analyze these things, you can blow people’s minds. If you can use this to strip from a spectator’s mind every last strand of possibility of you cheating, you short circuit every last nerve in their mind and take away every possibility other than that you did what you claimed to do.

Think to the last time that even though your routine was performed flawless, someone called you out on it. “You have 2 cards there on the bottom.” When that is true, what do you do? It’s too late to convince the spectator otherwise. They caught you. You can’t really show them anymore. You lost your one step. If you could go back in time and change things, what would you change? Change the subliminal ideas you send to your spec. Go back and short-circuit the train of thought that got you caught. Cut them off before they ever get the chance to think that you have extra cards. If you can stop them from thinking it, you both stop them from saying it and stop them from loosing that feeling we all get when we see the impossible.

The Art of Impossibility, pt.2

2008-09-04T17:54:00.001-07:00

Next I move on to examine the thought process behind the illusions we create. Imagine the first time you saw some old uncle at a family reunion try to show you a card trick. Poorly rehearsed, sloppily performed, and all in all not very magical. This uncle claims that you just saw magic. What do you believe? First thing, your mind goes to the un-natural movements me made with his hands as he attempted each and every sleight. You think about the look on his face that just screams “Ha! I tricked you!” You think of what he said. “It’s magic.” You know better. There is no such thing as magic. He had to have tricked you. Unfortunately for your uncle, reverse psychology kicks in the door and casts doubts on his trick.
We claim magic and miracles. We do things that are impossible. When someone asks how we did something, we often respond with one word, “magic.” The only thing that we use to convince our spectators that we really are able to do the impossible is the actual appearance of the illusion. All of our performance and speech plays the reverse-psychology game against our work. What a wonder it would be to be able to turn the tables on this phenomenon and let reverse-psychology work FOR us instead of against us.
I recently stumbled across a sudden burst of success as a sleight of hand artist. Looking back, I think I have discovered the secret to my sudden popularity among the people in my small town. I tell the truth. At my first paid gig, right after my first trick, I told everyone something like this. “I am a magician, but more specifically a sleight of hand artist. The things you see me do seem impossible, but in reality all I am doing is fooling you. With my card tricks I do things in the background that you don’t know or see that allow for these impossible feats to become possible. If you want to know how magic is done, I dare you to catch me.” I carried into a Vegas Card Cheat routine. I showed them how a dodgy dealer will control any card however he wants. I told them I was cheating. But a funny thing happened. The tricks I performed were ones I have had loads of practice with and can do extremely smoothly and naturally. They also were tricks that were bafflingly impossible. People watched an ACR, and could not for their lives figure out how I got the card from the middle of the deck to the top. I would do next to nothing, yet the card found its way to the top. I began to subliminally cause my spectators to give up on catching me in my sleights. To them, there were no sleights. They knew that sleights were impossible. They watched everything I did with my hands. It was impossible. They gave up. Their brains gave up. They lost the desire to catch me, and began to find nothing other than enjoyment from seeing impossible things happen in impossible circumstances. They BELIEVED.
Let’s carry on with this idea. People will always be looking for an explanation. They thirst for it in all things in life. A magician is just a person who tries to fool people. Smoke and mirrors, invisible thread, trick cards, and tricks up the magician’s sleeves. This is what they expect. If you go into a gig and show the faintest bit of a lack of practice, people will see it. The convincing factor of your illusion, though you didn’t flash or blow the trick, just went down exponentially. People are looking for weakness. Now think of the most mystifying performer you have ever seen. How solid was their routine? Did you see weakness? Did you see a lack of practice? Of course not, that is exactly what sets them apart from us. They give the audience nothing to feed their thirst for answers with. When the spectators can’t find something to quench their thirst, they look harder in other places for answers. Soon, they have nothing left to go on. Now here is the small idea that I have been working with. When people have no idea how you are cheating them, when they are just starting to open up to the possibility that you really can do the impossible, you can do something very unconventional. Tell them that you are cheating them. Tell them that they are not seeing the impossible. Tell them it is all an illusion. They do not take statements like this the way they ought to. They don’t believe it. Your statement seems to be a statement to distract them from the truth. Maybe you really can do this, and you are just saying you have to cheat. The opposite seed of doubt is planted. This idea does not sit well with the spectator, it tears them apart inside. The specs get flustered. They become their own hecklers.
This idea is good in theory, but in practice, it is much different. You have to take A plus B to get C. If you want the result, there are two very specific things that you have to work into your routine. If you lack any part of this, the psychological effect is blown. You must be very thorough in your preparations.
Firstly, you have to have flawless routines. Once again, I do not say that you have to simply not flash. You have to understand the inner workings of your illusions. You have to understand the patter and showmanship. You have to have great confidence. You have to be smooth. You have to practice hundreds of times over to get to the point where you no longer put gas on a spectator’s fire of suspicion. Let’s analyze a simple sleight – The Double Lift. Where in the double lift does the real illusion happen? At the lift? When you set the double down? When you are being careful not to flash the second card while holding up the double? No. The illusion happens in the offbeat of turning the face of the double away from the spectator. They see the front. That really is the card that they think. The illusion is that moment when they first see the back of the double. They know that the back of that card is the back of the card they saw, hence it has to still be their card. Knowing this little tidbit about a double lift allows you to place more power into the real illusion. Everything else regarding a double lift is a mere technicality. Just tools to make the illusion more convincing. But to understand exactly what each illusion is allows you to modify your performance to play heavier on the parts of your illusions are the most important. Learn EVERYTHING about every illusion your perform and you will begin to become far greater of a performer.
Secondly, you must understand the idea of reverse-reverse-psychology. The spectators already know not to trust you and have that idea burned into their heads. Give them little reason to trust you. Cheat them. Let them know they have been had. Then, when trust is at an all time low, tell them the truth. You can’t do the impossible. Their brain doesn’t know what to do with this information, but it has to be a trick. The spectator will fool themselves into becoming a part of your grandest illusion, the psychological web of “knowledge” that the spectator believes that they have been weaving. Imagine a fly getting caught in a spider web, and thinking that they (the fly) spun the web. Poor fly. This is what we are trying to accomplish. Let the spectator come up with their own ideas, which are really yours.
This is our goal. Let’s look at the grandest illusion. The illusion that the magician is just a modest guy who doesn’t want to take full credit for all the cool things he does. The illusion that the spectator came to every conclusion on their own. The illusion that impossible things are happening in front of everyone’s eyes.

The Art of Impossibility, pt.1

2008-09-04T17:52:00.001-07:00

We see them every day. We are surrounded by them. Signs, the floor, gravity, doors, anything we can see. Limits. We are governed by them. We are held hostage by them. We are suppressed by them. The very door we close to keep our homes warm and safe also confines us to an even more limited plane. Each and every human is so accustomed to these barriers that we have kindly given them a title - Natural Laws. In a moment of weakness, humanity closed its mind to many possibilities. Humanity labeled certain events as impossible. Any action whose result lies outside of the realm of “possible” is deemed a miracle. It is my object in this short essay to touch briefly on those things that lie outside of what man deems possible.
As a magician, think back to the first magic trick you ever saw. Think of how it inspired you. For me, I was a young child in Disney World. The illusionist’s name I will never know. His whole act I do not remember, I was merely four or five. What I do remember was what I felt when, from my small ear, this kind man produced a three inch piece of frayed, white rope. I only recently realized how deeply this single, simple illusion impacted me when I stumbled upon this small piece of rope I have been keeping for more than seventeen years. A piece of rope didn’t change who I was. I was changed by the feeling I had in my young heart of having witnessed something I had before thought impossible. This feeling brought me in my childhood to purchase magic kits. This feeling brought me in my teens back to magic with the hummer card trick, allowing me to cause coworkers to stare in amassment as I caused something to fly inexplicably around my body. This feeling brought me mere months ago to click on a video on You Tube of a performance of a card trick that I simply had to understand and be able to re-create. That feeling is what drives me today to carry a deck of cards in my pocket at all times and to have it in my hands every available moment. The unknown illusionist didn’t send me a message telling me that he could pull a piece of rope from my ear, he sent me a message telling me that NOTHING is impossible.
I bring to you a very simple example. Think back again to the first time you saw something along the lines of an ambitious card routine. You KNEW you saw the illusionist take your card and place it into the middle of the deck. YOU KNEW IT. But there it was, right at the top of the deck. Something so simple was impossible. You knew it was impossible, yet your craved to be able to do it too. You watched as said person once again placed your card on top of one half of the deck, and then lost it underneath the other half of the deck. You knew it again. The card on top was not your card. It couldn’t be, but deep inside you hoped it was. And so you watched, over and over again as a mere mortal continued, right in front of your eyes, to do something that defied the limit that you had placed on your thoughts.
Mundus Vult Decipi. The world invites deception. People want to be fooled. Deep down inside, everyone craves to see the impossible. The idea that the boundary of possibility can be broken awakens a hope in human hearts. Though people will try to undermine magic, ruin illusions, spoil the fun, they really want to be a part of what we as illusionists do. If it was possible for a human to make a card fly at whim, when a magician came around making a card fly he would merely be an imitator. Illusionists are not in the business of recreating previous events. Illusionists are in the business of accomplishing things never before done by man.
I arrive at my point. Picture in your mind that you have, just as trusted as your own doctor, a psychic advisor. Said person can tell your, after merely thinking, anything you need to know. You make your weekly visit to said paranormal counselor, and are walking home. Imagine being approached by a man professing to be a mind reader. He allows you to choose a card in secret, and then reveals to you your selected card. Where is the miracle? Where is the magic? Your psychic advisor could have done that for you, after all, lots of people can see things, right? That magician accomplished nothing extraordinary, you have seen it hundreds of times, and you know it is a normal thing for a gifted person to be able to read your thoughts. There is no magic.
I present to you my personal opinion. I lay it before you in hopes that you will take it and apply it into your art as I have applied it to mine. I believe that the more we focus on the impossibility of our art, the more mystifying it becomes. Here are a few examples to help you visualize my idea. As you perform an ambitious card routine, you stress the idea that the card, just placed back into the deck, has NO WAY of getting back to the top. If you are a thread worker, stress, at appropriate times, that there is no possible way for you to move the fork that just spun around on the table, mind powers included. With a simple mentalist display, stress that there is no such thing as mind reading. This nearly seems blasphemous, but hear me out. If I say I can read your mind, then tell you the name of the card that only you could possibly know, then the only logical consensus is that I am actually able to read your mind. This single thought takes you one step closer to believing in a lie that is not just harmful to you, but also takes away from the feeling you get when you see impossible deeds done. Instead, inform your spectator with something along these lines. “There is no way I have been able to sneak a glance at your card, correct? You have in no way told me what your card is, correct? I could tell you that I can read your mind, but that is impossible, but even with mind reading being impossible, and you having never revealed your card to me, I know that your card is the six of diamonds.” Obviously, this script is bland and can not be used word for word, I mean only to introduce the idea. When you give no fake cover for what you do as an illusionist, and let the audience come to their own conclusions about you and your art, you become more powerful. You find people telling you that they know there is no such thing as magic, but at the same time they know you are magic. They get to see impossible things. They don’t get to explain a trick away by “Well, he can talk to ghosts, so maybe a ghost told him,” they can’t explain it at all. The trick becomes permanently impossible, and makes an impression they will never forget.
My other point is simple – Secrecy. I do not refer to revealing methods to laymen, I refer to being ill-prepared. I refer to flashing, to slipping up, to choking. I want to simply make a point that there is NO excuse in the world for a magician to be caught in the act. NONE. This sounds harsh, but once again, listen for a moment. You, as a magician, have COMPLETE control over what illusions you perform. Nobody can force you into anything. As such, you will never be forced to perform a trick that you have not given just practice. If you can’t do an Erdnase color change flawlessly every time, why do you do it? Why risk it? It not only ruins magic for the person you flash, it allows for laymen all around to discover how it is done. Don’t ever post a video unless you know you did the trick perfectly without flashing. We can’t afford to, via You Tube, reveal all of our secrets to the world because someone thought it would be cool to post a video of the trick they just learned. There is no excuse for an accident. We have all the time in the world to prepare for a trick, so we must do so.
This is my call to you, fellow magicians. Become masters. Do the impossible. When you perform, perform so impossibly that no soul can understand how it was done. Tell someone their card when you shouldn’t be able to know it. Make stuff move and fly. Let that card jump back to the top of the deck. It is all impossible. Make no bones about it. You don’t have mind powers. What you have the power to do is to do the impossible. That is your power. That is your legacy.

2008-02-18T21:25:00.001-08:00

The only moments when mankind has ever been great are the moments where a strong character with a determined soul has seen his dream beaten, smashed, broken, abused, defiled, mocked, torn, and abandoned by all others, yet refused to give up on or let go of his dream. Only through the trials of earth and hell is the dream of such a man ever made reality.

It Begins

2008-02-17T22:12:00.000-08:00

A brand new realization of a truth I have long known. It is my choice. Everything is my choice. Everything is simple. Only I make things complicated. I have choices placed in front of me, black and white, and a chain of events proceeding from each. It is my call. Every day. Every moment. It is time to quit merely thinking and to start deciding. To start making my choice. To move forward. To live for something.