Dear Reader -

Pretty lofty title, huh? Fortunately, changing the world is inevitable. I promise, that by the end of your life, you will have changed the world. That’s the thing. In the most general terms: every person, with every action, changes the world in one small way every single day, right? Now, by the end of your life, those moments have built up some mighty influence over one’s surroundings. Victory, you’ve changed the world. Whether it be in an intimate way, or a grandiose way, you’ve done something.

Now that we’ve agreed on that, suddenly it might feel like a lot of responsibility to handle. However, no need for despair, all it takes is a little step forward every day. But you must take a step. It reminds me of an old idea: Indecision is a decision. Standing still is a choice against moving forward. And the decision or choice you make when you decide to stand still is: “I agree with the status quo.” Which is great sometimes, honestly. Don’t know where you want to eat? Let your friends decide. Don’t care what movie you watch? Have someone else pick one.

But, what if you don’t know where to step? What if you don’t know which way is forward? Honestly, with the information overload of this modern age, we’re being put into harder and harder decisions to make. Which makes the decisions that more meaningful. Which, if taken the wrong way, can be an anxiety-inducing thought. However, the opposite is true. Most of us want the best for humankind and one’s fellow spirit. The key decider is how we capture and parse information.

In the spirit of this, I urge you to seek dissenting opinions. Seek new information. Seek completely whole new realms you never once accessed. Because, just like you’re changing the world day by day, so are others. And imagine how sorrowful it would be to not know how they are changing it?

— J.R.

Watch them below, and make sure to subscribe to the Four Suits YouTube for the freshest magic content on the planet.

— J.R.

No, seriously, what does it take? You can send me your luminary answers if you have them, you little oracle you, directly to my inbox, because I want to know. I’ve written about FISM before, but it’s been especially on my mind as I search for rooming in Quebec City for FISM 2021.

I, myself, thought about competing (don’t anticipate this, but it’s so far out I can’t rule it out), so I started to research what it takes to make a winning act. A quick google search led me to some magic cafe pages (do I even need to link these?) which were… interesting… I then stumbled upon some random entries by Stuart MacDonald who has a pretty interesting article on his journey (later finding out he created a Go Fund Me to go compete. Which, I mean, I guess? Anyways.) His act is pretty awesomely good. Check it out on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us. Very magical. And pretty fooling for a live audience (I’m kicking myself because I actually just noticed the iron clad moment on this watch through). You can also check out Miguel Munoz’ act, chopped (available uncut without the final FISM presentation elsewhere).

Pretty stunning stuff. Combining this info with some of the videos my friends showed me from Busan last year, there has to be a technical component to your act that no one else is doing. Mirror duplication of large objects? Yeah, no one else is doing that. Production of contact juggling balls? You bet your local magic stage acts aren’t doing this. There was some contestant ( I actually can’t remember their name, if a reader knows, write me) who completed their Rubiks cube routine by having the cube assemble itself from a bunch of broken pieces. Talk about a cool visual even just reading that.

Point is, there’s some huge technological gaps that must be bridged to be a competitive act in this competition. You have to be doing some brand new move/sleight/setup/method that no one in the audience has ever seen before. Furthermore, each of these acts linked above have some sort of beauty to them. Taking Eric Chien’s ribbon premise, it’s intrinsically visually interesting. The technology for his act has been around for a while, but he took it to a completely new degree, thus refreshing the idea of it again and making it new. Because it is so purely visual, it has a beautiful simplicity to it as well. There’s a level of professionalism to the props/set pieces in each act as well, but I’m starting to digress.

How does one create/unearth unseen/new technology and perfect it in the modern age? That’s a question one has to ask if one hopes to take FISM 2021.

— J.R.

I’ll be honest, folks. I’ve been staying pretty occupied setting up for Spectokular amongst all the weekly/daily magic shenanigans that by the time Thursday rolled around, I was unprepared with a blog post… However, J.R. of years gone by had no shortage of meta-magic-blog-posts, so today I present you with a meditation (and challenge) on Magic, written from a Magic Convention, years ago. It’s left with a big blank at the end, all up for you to decide how to resolve it.

— J.R.

August 2014

E N T E R T A I N M E

As I sat in the audience at a magic convention, I heard the lecturer state that magic should come second, and the entertainment is always first. I looked at my tag, and it did indeed say I was at a magic convention, not an entertainment convention.

I've become so internally conflicted lately, in regards to magic. What should it be? What do people expect? Do I care what people expect? Is the best always going to follow what preceded in a nice line of one thing leading to another? What is "success"?

Is magic supposed to be a display of sleight of hand? Is it supposed to be heavy handed? Light hearted? Is it supposed to leave with something more than just a good time? What is the most important part of magic, the show or the show after the show? Is a successful performer one who is decorated amongst their peers, or their audience, or their critics, or their pocketbooks? What is success in magic? How is success determined in entertainment in general? Where does magic fall in the scope of entertainment?

Here's a new act for you then. Here's an act that pleases everyone. It is entertaining for those who think of magic lightly. It is easy to understand for those who prefer simplicity. It is complex enough to wow the knucklebusters in the audience. And it leaves you with that magical moment, something special and different…

Dear Reader —

We’re back after ALTÆR, a public thank you for joining us on that journey… With reflection on performances in general, I give to you this meditation on beauty within art…

We like to view beautiful things.

Because beauty so rarely exists.

Everyday life is ugly, there are struggles we all face. When we watch theatre, when we watch magic, we want to partake in a hyper-curated beautiful reality, we want to see a world in which we do not live. This is why the archetype of the magician has persisted throughout the ages. They are the harbinger of the fantastic. While there may be elements within our falsely constructed fantasy that connect us to daily life, we in no way want to see something that is everyday life.

There may be “ugly” art, but there is no doubt some way in which this art is has the qualities of beauty. Perhaps these ugly beauties exemplify something within us that is painful, visceral and vile, something heartbreaking or moving, however make no mistake that these too are beautiful moments, even though they may superficially harbor pain for us.

Therefore, only put things before an audience in which you have defined the beauty you will share. What are you showing them that gives them a new perspective, what are you giving them that shares some of the beauty from your life? For it is only when we do this, that, in return, you will receive the greatest response of all from them: you will receive their beauty back to you.

-- J.R.

     As a disclaimer, I should note that not only did I never learn the 21 Card Trick, I can’t actually even remember ever seeing it performed.

     A couple of weeks ago I was jamming with a few magician friends (almost all card and coin guys), and one of them had brought a friend who had just started practising magic. As I chatted with him I asked him what he was working on and he told me about some moves. I asked what kind of magic he wanted to perform and he said he wasn’t sure. I asked him if he had any effects he was working on that he wanted to show me, and he said he didn’t actually know any tricks, just the moves he had mentioned earlier. Now, let me be clear, for someone who had been practicing for only a few months, he had made incredible progress. He was working on advanced sleights, and he was performing them well. The friend who had brought him and another very talented magician had been mentoring him (and these are some of the most technically gifted guys I’ve ever met, both with published material). Yet somehow in his search to learn he had skipped all the magic, and moved right on to the technical behind the scenes stuff.

     Now this happened for a couple of different reasons: his mentors were also serious cardists, both performed predominantly for instagram, that group was pretty filled with move-monkeys, etc. I know that each of those could use a whole post on their relation to magic and performance (and maybe one of these days I’ll write them…), but the thing that jumped out at me most was that, since he had stepped straight into learning moves (even useful ones like controls, changes, additions, etc) he had missed something that I think we undervalue, and that is the performative experience one gets from doing self-working effects.

     I think just about every magician I know learned some self-working card trick very early on. The 21 Card Trick is the classic punching bag, but there are many. I think mine was naming the top cards from three cut piles using the one-ahead principle. While these effects are rarely the greatest (though I have been getting back into self-workers and man are there some good ones), since they are essentially move-less they allow you to focus entirely on presentation, which is as important a lesson as 100 pointers about where your second finger goes for a certain palm. While we look back on those performances as cringe-worthy, painful, and embarrassing (and I’m sure they were), we forget that they forced us to immediately begin learning how to make people care about the effect (since it would not have flashy visuals to pull them in), and how to invest each part with some meaning (since there was often a lot of procedure), and how to dress up a simple effect with perhaps the least practised but most useful magic sleight there is: acting.

-- Z.Y.

Fingers feeling stiff, but much better now this week. Thankfully. Enjoy a text conversation from earlier this year between two magicians.

H.B.
    Q: what is magic?
J.R.
    ARTFUL DECEPTION
H.B.
    What do you mean by that? What is artful in the context of deception? Why is deception artful? What makes certain deceptions magic and other ones lying?
    (Also there's antifaro stuff on the new ellusionist thing)
J.R.
    Deception isn’t inherently artful. Deception is artful when it is done without direct personal/emotional/material subversion or gain by the practitioner, and done, instead, for “art”. It’s all about the framing of the experience. This is what makes certain gambling demonstrations “magic” in my opinion, and actual gambling deception “not magic”.
H.B.
    What is an example of a gambling demo that is not magic? And what is an example of one that is?
    Sorry to grill you... The Tony Chang thing got me thinking, which is nice... You've a bit more experience so I'm picking your brain
J.R.
    Actual cheating at the card table isn’t magic. However, telling someone you’re going to cheat is, and which classifies it as demonstration of skill, Fitzkee talks a bit upon in Trick Brain
H.B.
    Ok... I accept that and am filing away the reading rec... What does magic intend?
J.R.
    Intends to disrupt
H.B.
    What do you mean by that? I'm also extremely impressed with how quickly these answers are coming
J.R.
    Well, the topic comes up fairly often actually. But it exists in order to create a disruption in people’s perception. It exists to find these natural gaps in the mind and make them just a little bit bigger. Sometimes you can fit a finger in, sometimes your foot, and sometimes you can stand in it. A wave of astonishment, to paraphrase Paul Harris [found in opening essay of Art of Astonishment, V1]. And sometimes the magician themselves can even splash around for a moment or two.

-- J.R. + H.B.

"If people have even a little understanding, it is better to move them than to amaze them." - Andres Segovia

Special moments aren’t made in the what, they’re made in the how. When it comes to magic, I frequently hear fellow practitioners claiming that people see a deck of cards come out, and a person will say “Oh, I’ve seen that one before.” A clamoring of agreement comes from the room. “Yeah, hate it when that happens.” etc. Card-workers also dislike that spectators don’t remember the specific effects that are occurring, and instead link the effects to the general category of “card tricks”.

Here’s my opinion: it’s because, while these various tricks may be wildly different for those of us who have an extraordinary amount of understanding, to those who only have a little understanding, all these card tricks are indeed the same. There’s an ounce of truth when the spectators announce “Oh, I’ve seen that before.” because they essentially have seen the same exact plot before. Whether their card is found in your wallet, between two others, or from a face-up/face-down shuffle, it’s all generally the same effect.

I was reading JAMM #08, by The Jerx, today, and was again reminded of this notion when he spoke about a modern dance metaphor of watching a magic effect. For those who understand modern dance or perhaps perform it themselves, they will be able to watch two seemingly similar performances and find a wide range of differences, all the different dance moves, etc. For an outsider to that circle of knowledge, it’s all modern dance.

To take another idea away from Magic Live 2017, Josh Jay shared the results of a study which examined various magic plots, and generally, card effects were the least memorable to the average audience. However, once the card effect distinctly morphed into a completely new plot (such as card through window, or Cyril’s fantastic Card Into Aquarium), then recall of that event shot through the roof. This is because the plot is now so far removed from whatever card effect your audience has previously seen.

To some degree, we’re on a constant race of innovation, to make magic more exciting and unique for our audiences. We’re in a wild time, especially with the leaps of technological methodology for magic expanding at an alarming rate. So, let’s show more than card tricks to our audience -- Let’s move them.

-- J.R.