Jerx Christmas - John Guastaferro - 4:56 PM

I was greeting some of the new arrivals when I heard some acoustic guitar music coming from the other room. A beautiful rendition of Oh, Christmas Tree. I went in the other room and saw John Guastaferro, acoustic guitar in hand, tickling the nylon.

We got to chatting and I asked him what he had going on in 2024 and he said he’s doing a combination lecture and TED talk at Magifest in January. And he has a new book coming out with Vanishing Inc., called “The Nth Degree.” It’s a follow-up to his previous book One Degree.

“What about you?” John asked.

“Oh,” I said, “I have a new book coming out too. It’s called The X Degree. Your ‘one degree’ philosophy says that small changes can have a big impact on a trick right?” He nodded. “Well, what I’m going to do is take your new book and add a small change to each trick and republish it as my book. In magic, we say that you can publish your own version of a trick if you’ve changed it significantly. And you say small changes can have a significant impact. Hence, by your own philosophy, I only have to make some small changes and I can publish it as my own. Sorry. Those are your rules, not mine.”

He seemed frustrated by this, but couldn’t deny the brilliance of my logic.

“What kind of small changes would you make?” he asked.

“Well, show us some tricks and I’ll tell you,” I said. 

“Here's my X-Degree change for that trick,” I told John:

I'd have the red aces in the box at the start of the trick. Then I'd scan through the deck in front of the audience to "get a general idea for where the aces are." Then I'd be like, What the heck?? And scan though the deck again. "Hmm... sorry, this deck is missing the red aces." I'd pick up the card case and look in. Shake my head. "This is crazy...," I'd say as I remove the aces. "Have you ever been stuck in a time loop?" I'd do Tilt to get one red ace under a black ace and put the other red ace on top, and then do a series of shuffles and cuts while I say, "This keeps happening to me. But no worries. It's ok. Uhm... sorry... okay, let me show you the trick. From this shuffled deck I will find the aces."

Cut to the black aces and put them in the box as you do. "And now the red aces." The black aces are produced. Confusion. A quick scan through the deck. Then pull the red aces from the box, "Have you ever been stuck in a time loop?"

“What else you got?” I asked him.

“Shoot,” I said, “that’s a hard one to add much to because it’s so simple. I like it. The sound element is a nice. Michael Weber does something similar in a trick in Lifesavers, but I like passing off the edge of the coin as the end of the spoon visually as well. My X-degree change, if I found myself doing it often, would be to look for an amorphous blob or chunk of metal to use in place of the nickel. That way it's not exactly a "vanish" but the coffee melted the spoon down to this little chunk. Of course, that makes it no longer impromptu. But then again, I rarely have nickels on me either. So I'd probably have to make a point of bringing something with me either way.

“Hit me with another one,” I said.

“I know that may seem like just a silly bit of business,” I told him, “but I love stuff like this. In fact, when something seems really silly, I think that's the time to do it completely straight-faced. Not tongue in cheek at all. People know from the premise that it’s not serious, so you’re free to take it as seriously as you want. My X-Degree changes would be to make it so the "wrong" card is signed with some name like: Quargon-14. ‘Damn... it's okay. This happens. Sometimes there's a fold in space-time and the card get crossed up with someone else performing the same trick in a different dimension.’ Again… not said in jest, just matter-of-factly. Then I'd grab my trans-dimensional hyperspace antenna (conveniently on a nearby shelf) and ‘correct’ the situation. I'd never refer to it as a Slinky. If anyone else did, I'd be like, ‘A slinky? No, no. The guy who sold me this charged me $1400 for it. So it's clearly not just a Slinky. Unless I'm some kind of major dope.’"

John liked the idea. In fact, he said, “Okay, you have my permission to publish your book The X-Degree that is 98% my book The Nth Degree, coming soon from Vanishing Inc.” Nice!

This party is off to a great start!