Monday Mailbag #26
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I’ve been reading your site since the beginning and one of the most interesting things about it is seeing your thoughts and theories develop over time. […]I was wondering if there’s something specific you’ve changed your mind about regarding magic. —DT
I bet there is a bunch of stuff. But here’s the first thing that came to mind…
If you had asked me five years ago, I would have told you that you should always try and do magic with items that are native to the environment. If you’re at work you should do something with post-its and staplers (for example, I mean, not necessarily those items). If you’re at a bar you should do something with a bar glass and a maraschino cherry. If you’re at a coffee shop, do it with sugar packets and stir sticks. That sort of thing.
My feelings on this have evolved somewhat.
I perform a lot in coffee shops, for instance. So it’s great to have material that uses napkins, spoons, coffee cups, loyalty cards, and those sorts of things. But it’s only worth doing effects with those materials if the effects are brief. The whole purpose of using native objects is so the magic feels unplanned. If you go into a four phase cups and balls routine with coffee cups and crumpled sugar packets for balls and a stir stick for a wand and balled up napkins for the final load, then I think you’re missing the point.
I started feeling this way in a performance last year. I don’t really remember the trick, but I remember asking for a few different specific items from around the cafe that I was performing in. Something about it just felt wrong to me. It felt like planned casualness.
So I just try and go with things that feel natural.
It feels natural to do something quick with something that’s laying around.
It feels natural to say, “You want to see a trick? Hmm… okay. Let me grab a sugar packet and try something.”
It feels natural to say, “You want to see a trick? Okay, grab any four random items from around the room.”
It feels natural to bring stuff from home if I have a specific trick/experience I want to share with the spectator.
But what doesn’t feel natural is to act like this is a spontaneous moment, and then gather a half dozen specific items to do a trick with. That’s something I didn’t recognize before because I was seduced by the idea of using “normal objects in their environment.” But if your goal is to create an atmosphere of spontaneity, you can’t do that with something obviously so well planned. You don’t look like a master of improvisation, you look like a guy who has been practicing at home with shit he got at Starbucks. It’s not a good look.
David Regal owes you a drink. Interpreting Magic won the Tarbell Award over at your pal Steve’s “Cafe” for the best magic book of 2019. But I was following the voting from the beginning and your book had more votes early on in the contest than he ended up with at the end. If they hadn’t deleted all the votes for you, then you would have won. So I say you’re the unofficial winner of the Tarbell Award. —SO
Oh, I wouldn’t say that.
I’d say I’m the official winner of the award. And the Cafe agrees with me. Look, they didn’t delete those votes because they thought I wouldn’t win.
On years that I release a book, I suggest the Cafe rename its book award: The Second Placey. “And the Second Placey goes to…”
I’m not saying I would always win. I’m just saying the Cafe’s policy prevents any winner from knowing if they actually had the best magic book of the year. But they can be sure they have at least the second best book of the year.
I go into more detail on why the Cafe’s policy is actually beneficial to me in this post. The short version is just that I don’t gain anything from winning an award for a book that has been sold out for a long time. “Yes, but isn’t it nice to receive recognition for your work?” Not really. Once a year I ask the supporters of the site if they want to keep the site going another year. I only continue it if at least 90% sign up to support again. That’s enough for me as far as recognition goes.
Plus, I like Regal, so I’m happy he won. Congratulations, David, on your Second Placey!
I added some crediting to the DAP Switch in last Thursday’s post.
Although I tried to make it clear, a couple people misunderstood the point of the GIFs on that post. Those were there to emphasize the actions of the switch to you, the reader. Not to show you what that moment looks like in context. In context there isn’t much to see (that’s kind of the point).
Here’s a story about using that switch in something that was not exactly a trick, but it still got a reaction that was very amusing to me.
Because I do a lot of my writing in public places, I befriend a lot of people who are in a similar situation. I think of these people like co-workers. Pre-Covid there was one particular woman I would see a lot at the coffee shop closest to my home. Usually if she came in while I was there or I came in while she was there, we would join each other for a minute or two, catch up for a bit, and maybe we’d continue to work at the same table or go off to separate tables.
One time I joined her at her table and, in the process of making some room, I used that move to switch out her AirPod case for a thing of dental floss (which I had been carrying around in my bag for this purpose). When she was getting ready to go she gathered up her stuff and went to put in her headphones. I expected her to notice it was dental floss and then immediately be like, “What the hell, give me my headphones back.” Instead, she turned over the case, had this weird look on her face, opened it, and then pulled out like two feet of dental floss and just stared at it for a moment. She went into this strange, confused, autopilot mode. I don’t know that she knew what she was doing. She just did what she normally does when she has dental floss in front of her, I guess. She didn’t go so far as to start flossing—that would have been amazing. But it was funny to watch her mind catch up with what was happening.