A few days ago I mentioned how much I hate the term Organic as it pertains to magic. To re-iterate I get the need for gimmicked props that look natural, like a John Cornelius perfect pen, but somehow nicely engineered objects like that very rarely get categorised as organic. Rather, organic magic tricks are usually pitched at the younger end of the magic market who apparently don’t seem to own anything which costs more than £2.99, so they have to carry gimmicked bottle caps, gum packets and novelty keyrings.
Although the term gets passed around now and again, Organic has been supplanted by the new buzz phrase which if anything I hate even more – though not as much as its three letter acronym
Every Day Carry
On the face of it, this is a very neutral phrase. A magic trick you carry everywhere. Why not have a deck of cards in your pocket for emergency entertainment? Believe it or not dear readers, I used to carry a professor’s nightmare with me everywhere in my handbag, and I already mentioned that I always carry a purse with a shoelace in it these days. Pretty much anything smaller than a Rocky Racoon could be your EDC.
And yet just as organic split itself away from just meaning “gimmicks that look like natural objects” to… whatever links these fucking things¹ together, EDC has rapidly morphed to not just mean magic tricks which it is physically possible to carry everywhere (which is 99% of closeup magic) but rather the esoteric and meaning of “Overt props which blend in by looking like an item a normal non magician would carry every day”. A definition which has already been stretched by the kind of EDC himself, Craig Petty² when he said that Gossip was a perfect EDC trick. Because of course everyone carries a folded up magazine page and a photo of their favourite celebrity everywhere. When you try to retrofit the simple definition of EDC (this is small enough to carry) with the new (this is an object which makes sense to always carry) it just sends you crashing back to something I have mentioned once before about attaching too much of your personality to a premise or a prop. Except when I wrote that it was about the premises and background lore behind props used in a gig setting. The entire point of EDC is that its magic you carry in case you want to show a magic trick to someone in a social setting when there is a heightened expectation that the things you present are closer to the ground truth of your everyday life.
What does it say about you if you carry these kinds of things everywhere? A thick bundle of receipts? A folded magazine page? A worthless promotional scratch card³? Perhaps the way to sell an every day carry like this is to pass it off as if you just happen to have this thing on you today of all days but firstly I’m not sure I’d want to start lying to people immediately after meeting them and secondly, by the time you’re finished they’ll at least have an inkling that it was a magic prop, and therefore know that you carried it for this exact reason, and probably do every day.
Maybe it’s just me but increasingly I try to compartmentalise my magic, make it a tiny bit of what I do. I’ve talked a lot about causal premise and lore when doing a gig but in a social setting I always open the same way, from the days when I carried 3 ropes to my current shoelace in a purse. Someone finds out I do magic and asks to see some and I say sure, and I take out my little purse. The fact that I keep my one magic prop in a little bag lets people know two things about me:
- That I enjoy magic enough to always carry a trick with me
- Magic is one small aspect of my personality
The smaller the prop I carry the easier this has been to assert.
But I don’t want people to think I carry a trick, I want them to think I myself am magic, not my props.
Okay, weird but I get it. This is why I have only ever EDCed a prop which is 100% examinable and in a pinch disposable. I used to make my own professors nightmare sets so that I could easily let people keep the ropes or pull them apart if they wanted to look for secrets. After that I used ungimmicked card tricks, then rubber bands. Now I use a shoelace in a purse and while its quite a nice shoelace if someone said to me “I’ll give you £20 if you tell me how that was done,” I would happily respond, “Can’t do that, magic circle oath. However, I will sell you the shoelace and the purse for £20 and you can figure it out yourself.”
But I don’t want people to think I need a specific prop, my character is that of a mischievous imp who bends the natural world around themself.
Again weird but if that’s the case, have you considered learning sleight of hand with every day objects? You carry your hands with you every day. If you need a little pizazz why not EDC an extra thumb or something?
Fay Presto once told me that she has on her person at all times a small pouch containing enough props to pull off a 10 minute set. But what’s important is that pretty much every single one of the items was not intended to be seen. As far as her audience was concerned, all she was carrying was a lighter for the burnt and restored napkin. Other than that everything she used was taken from the world around her. Borrowed notes, coins and rings, napkins off the table, empty wine bottles. At an absolute push she would confess to carrying a single deck of cards⁴ but that’s just a typical magician thing and she wouldn’t uae them unless she was really looking to score a gig using her big finale.
That final point is really what I want to hammer home about the nature of EDC. Why do you carry magic tricks everywhere? In Fay’s case, she’s a consummate professional entertainer. Every interaction she has is an opportunity to book another gig, and as such she has honed her every day carry to resemble her full walk around closeup set almost identically.
Not everyone has an EDC for the same purpose. For some it’s because it acts as a social lubricant, a way to ingratiate yourself with strangers. Everyone has been at the kind of awkward social gathering where someone will say “So tell us about yourself” and magic gives a great interesting icebreaker. Not only can you tell them about your interest but you can show them.
Some people do it as part of their value proposition on the dating scene. The less said about that the better.
I carry a magic trick around because I enjoy performing. There are some professionals who actually hate being asked to perform in a social setting. Not just magicians but doctors always getting asked to look at their friends lumps and bumps, solicitors being asked for legal advice, or comedians being asked to tell a joke despite the fact that their standup is more about telling a long winded Kafkaesque monologue about parenthood and middle age. Amateurs on the other hand live for this moment. Diane Morgan once said she hated restaurant magicians because even though they had been paid to entertain her, they enjoyed it more than she did, and she’s not entirely wrong. I love when the audience wants to see me as much as I want to perform.
As amateurs the one time we should absolutely be 100% willing to show a trick is when someone asks us to, and in that scenario when there’s little chance or no interest in making any kind of professional or financial gains, why in gods name would you tear up a one-time-use £4 gimmick? Seriously what in the hell was the thought process behind Lucky Lotto? Even beyond its stated benefits as an every day carry, at £4 per performance you could do a bill switch from a fiver to a tenner and leave them with the bigger note as a souvenir for just a pound more. In American currency you could do the switch from a $1 to a $5 and it would break even in comparison. At least in that scenario they’re going to keep the fucking bill, rather than just throw away your expensive custom made gimmick.
This cuts to the heart of what I think magic producers are attempting to achieve here. Just as “Organic” allowed them to start making gimmicks out of cheap trash, “EDC” is a way of getting people to stuff flimsy delicate props into their pockets and wallets every day, ensuring they get worn out and used up. The optimal demographic for this marketing strategy is amateurs who worry that carrying sponge balls or a chop cup makes them a bit cringe.
I am here to free you from the tyranny of these delicate pocket fillers. Embrace the cringe, you can carry anything you like every day.
Wise up, beat the system, carry a professor’s nightmare.
¹ I mean that list has a Lubor’s lens on it. What is the definition of organic which allows you to pull out Lubor’s lens and have it seem natural for the setting and the circumstance?
² Craig cemented himself as the king of the every day carry before people even used that term regularly, when back on the Wizard Product Review he would use every opportunity to talk about his gargantuan clusterfuck of a keyring, which had enough gimmicked keys and fobs to perform a 45 minute set on the spot. I don’t think a keyring based trick went on the show that he didn’t enthusiastically announce was to be added to this cancerous growth of pocket filler.
³ Okay okay, these are all Craig Petty tricks, but I did say he was the king of the EDC trick, particularly this style of EDC trick. Oddly there are only 4 things tagged on penguin as Every Day Carry, and they’re the 4 varieties the Dee Cristopher Razor Wallet. I’ll concede that a gimmicked wallet is a good every day carry, but Craig Petty is, at least from where I have seen, the main proponent of applying this label to both his own products and some of the tricks he reviews.
⁴ of course she had 3 (one regular, two special) but she knew how to structure her act to appear that the same deck was reused, a skill which more people really need to know.