To briefly recap my last post for those of you who found it to hard to read, there are a number of feelings I wish to capture from the past book I read.
Confusing non-linearity aside, the main feeling it left me and other readers with was a lingering sense of interest that continued past the end of the book. I described it before as a madness affecting the author that infected the reader and drove them to pass along. This took on various forms for different people but it’s something which I would love to incorporate into my magic.
I had sort of been working on this already with the idea of souvenir tricks but it’s all coming together in my head now, and I’m going to start by confessing that until a few weeks ago, I didn’t understand the Pothole trick.
I like moving hole tricks. Holey, Holy Moly, Nothing In Transit, Keymaster, even that Matrix one, they’ve all fascinated me for years so of course I was interested in the Pothole trick but the framing never appealed.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Pothole trick uses 2 business cards, one of which has a map of your street drawn on, and the other one you draw a map of a spectators home, using their description to position any nearby junctions or corners in the road. You then tell the story of a pothole opening in the road near you, and use a ticket punch to put a hole in the road on your card. This hole is then moved, first down the street, and then take it off the card entirely and place it on the other card, on the map of the spectators house. Pretty good effect, but I didn’t get it.
The map premise seemed to be an excuse to do some cross hatching on the card to cover a part of the method, but that fact blinded me to the real purpose of it.
But first, a tangent.
The Longshot
In the before times, the long long ago¹, I was at a Boris Wild lecture in which he had someone pick a card, put it back in the deck, shuffle the deck as much as they wanted, then turn over the top card of the deck to reveal it was the card they had chosen.
We waited to hear how the hell this had been achieved so imagine our disappointment when Boris told us “That’s actually not the trick I’m teaching.”
In short he was using a marked deck to teach a trick that would have gone differently but after the super clean card selection and shuffle the card just happened to be on top, and since it was a marked deck he could see the fact and decided it was stronger to just have it turned over and blow everyone’s minds.
This is not a new idea.
Indeed I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard magicians say they carry a playing card in their breast pocket and open a trick by asking the audience to name a card, ready to leap on the 1 in 52 chance of a match.
This kind of longshot requires a certain degree of finesse and the ability to invisibly back down and change course if it doesn’t pay off². If Boris hadn’t been using a marked deck to see that the chosen card had been shuffled to the top, there’s no way he’d have chanced it and asked the spectator to turn it over, because after a move like that you can’t back down. Better to merely design a routine around the possible moment where you can veer into a longshot when one arises rather than design a longshot with an emergency escape route.
But you only need the escape route if you’re there when it happens.
The Moonshot
I read another blog on magic, arguably a more famous one that publishes an exclusive hardback book every year for subscribers and developed a new magical vocabulary geared towards the discerning amateur conjuror. One term in this vocabulary is Reps, short for Repercussions which is one part of an effort to smear the magic trick beyond the time and space the performance is bound in.
Repercussions are when after the end of a trick something is affected in the long term which could range from some permanent alteration to a spectators borrowed item, all the way to the spectator finding something after the show which is a direct result of the effect³
One effect The Jerx outlined to explain smearing is an effect revolving around dreams, and more specifically using “Last night I had a dream where-” as a lead in for a series of predictions, with the last one being preposterously surreal. The rep from this trick, beyond it being spread over multiple days for different dreams is the psychological effect of discussing dreams for several days with the same person heightening the chance of them then having a dream about you.
This is what I call a Moonshot, an effect which happens in the moment to a reasonably satisfying conclusion, but carries with it the hint of a possibility that something may happen later when you’re not even there.
Fire and Forget
I have incorporated Moonshots into a few of my routines. The first ones are less about creating magic than they are about trying to make an element of the trick last longer. I mentioned earlier my work with souvenirs; this began with a trick I called the friendship contract where I get two spectators to sign cards at the start of separate routines then when they’re done, before I dismiss them, I tear the cards in half, throw away the blank parts, then heal the signed halves together into a single card.
This, I explain they have to share, and they can use the blank bits of the cards to exchange contact info, to pass it back and forth.
Now I have no way of knowing if they actually stay in touch, or keep the card at all. But that’s what makes it a moonshot. A sliver of a chance that two people become friends because of me, maybe their children marry each other and I get to be the reason an entire family tree happens, the whole butterfly effect.
The second moonshot is one in my Toothfairy effect where a spectator is sent away with a silly name stuck to them, which I have called them by for the whole routine. The moonshot in this case is the shot at their companions deciding this is fucking hilarious and never letting them forget it, to the point where one day there’s a tombstone that says “Here lies Jonathan ‘Cockbelt’ Richardson”.
Both of these are things that the people involved have to actively participate in, by taking the dangled rep and running with it, deciding to keep the card, keep in touch, use the name, and so on.
What I really want is something that just happens, which brings us back to…
The Pothole Trick
You know the magical thing about potholes? They do actually just appear one day⁴.
So imagine this, you go to a magic show, or at least to a venue where someone is performing magic. While there the magician performs a trick that uses a little hand drawn map of your street and at the end of the trick the magician makes a pothole, represented by a hole in another little map, disappear from its initial location and appear on your street, on a little map you can take home.
Then on the way home as you go down your own street you hit a pothole and 7 million years of evolutionary pattern recognition kick in and involuntarily your thought is “God damn. That’s the magician’s pothole.”
And that sequence of thoughts led to the final pieces of my next creation: F.E.G. or If Tricks Could Kill.
(This is what in literary circles they call a cliffhanger)
¹ Say what you like about the surge in remote work and baking, the best thing about the covid pandemic was that it gave survivors an excuse to talk like a colony of post apocalyptic scavengers from a Star Trek original series episode.
² There are some tricks that exist entirely to bank on this longshot/course correction tradeoff, with varying degrees of success. The Mystery of the Ten Coins is one I was recently seriously disappointed by, where the trailer shows the longshot paying off and the instructions give a long arduous branching sequence of equivocal manoeuvers to dig yourself out when it doesn’t.
³ An excellent example of this rep is the vanishing golden brick from Derek Delgado’s In And Of Itself, which after the show the audience can go and find at the intersection one of them named during the show.
⁴ Obviously I know its not actually magic, potholes are causes by underground water slowly washing away the foundation of a road leaving the top surface unsupported, whereupon the next time a heavy vehicle drives over the weakened area it breaks through, leaving a hole. But thats invisible to drivers. As far as drivers are concerned they drive to work to to the shops or to a magic show⁵ and then on the way home you hit a pothole that wasn’t there before.
⁵ Ooooh foreshadowing the point of the blog in a footnote, how spooky. Must be October.