Mainly Mental

Nobody Said It Was Gonna Be Easy

There is a school of mind reading that suggests that everything you do when performing should underline the idea that the thoughts of others are an open book to you. They will tell you that, should you be attempting to duplicate a drawing being made by someone else, it is a nonsense to ask them, when one’s back is turned, whether or not they have finished drawing. You are about to wander into their mind and pluck their drawing from them, so really you ought to know whether or not they’ve finished drawing.

I don’t wholly agree with this. Fundamentally, reading someone’s mind should not be easy. It should be really really difficult. It should seem difficult to our audiences. Really what the small subtleties like the above do is sell the idea that what you do is without effort. But if it is without effort, then how can it be spectacle? Aren’t you just coasting, however remarkable your ability?

We know story structure. It’s practically hard-wired into us. We have a hero; those he cares about are put at risk; he attempts to rescue them but fails - he barely survives; he goes on a quest; he returns and, only just, succeeds in defeating his enemy. That is the kind of story someone wants to see. What they don’t want to see is a hero who fetches up and defeats his quarry on page 2. In fact, if we see such a story, we’re probably going to doubt whether or not that guy really is the hero. If he can crush his enemies like bugs, isn’t he more likely to be the villain?

The idea that mind readers can read minds so easily also gives rise to the idea that mind readers are “always on”. If you, as a performer, can keep that up when not on stage, then that’s all well and good, but it’s unlikely, isn’t it? I’ll admit, one of the fantasies that informs my own work (if you can call it such) is that I can read someone just by looking at them. I never think of this in terms of full-on mind reading, though. This is more like a slowly growing subconscious extension of my normal abilities, that has emerged from my active mind reading. Most importantly it is not a conscious or controlled effort.

The other question that comes up is that, if the mind reader can read minds effortlessly, and is always on, then why has he chosen a career path that is so pointless? Why isn’t he working with the police? Why isn’t he a psychiatrist? Why has he eschewed worthy pursuits.and has, instead, decided that the best use of his faculties is to dick around on stage with a bunch of envelopes?

So doesn’t it make more sense if, actually, mind reading is very difficult? Doesn’t it make sense that it’s so difficult and lacking in certainty that you would never feel confident enough to make serious judgements (guilty or not guilty) using these skills? Isn’t it likely that to get any kind of success at all with mind reading you need to control things as much as possible - restrict people’s choices, influence their decisions? Isn’t it then likely that the only place where you could put such skills to good use might, indeed, be as an entertainment and nothing more?

Finally, it shouldn’t be all about you, should it? We want our focus to be on our participants too. My process is almost entirely focused on talking my participant through the sending process. This does a few good things. It gives them something to do with their brains than think about other means by which I could know their thoughts. It allows them the possibility of an impressive skill-set that isn’t mind reading, but isn’t exactly cheating either. What it also does, though, is share the burden of the mind reading and, with it, the glory. It sets up a relationship where you and the participant are working towards the common goal of thought transference, making a challenge situation less likely. All of this is made more difficult if the mind reading is presented as an effortless, always on ability.

Vanishing Inc Does A Christmas

Joshua Jay has edited and released a 550 page book on magic theory. It includes hard to find essays from illuminaries such as Derren Brown, Michael Close, Teller and Juan Tamariz. The Tamariz essay hasn’t been printed in English previously. It is good.

So here’s a thing. I’ve never really rated Jay. This probably says more about me than it says about him, but he’d always struck me as a pretty boy that never tried to hard to succeed. Like I say, more about me than him.

But then I saw his interview on Reel Magic 28. If you’ve not seen it, check it out. It is free. In it he pretty much laments the state of the magic market as a place where the inexperienced release underdeveloped or otherwise misguided effects to a largely gullible public. He laments the way in which, irrespective of effect, products sell by the quality of their promotional video over any inherent quality of the effect itself.

So on top of this, he releases Magic In Mind. I’m only about a third of my through it, but it is a rich rich buffet. What’s more it’s edited with an intelligence and openness that is seriously impressive. This is not a cherry-picked polemic. This is a kaleidoscope of views that will either crystallise one’s own opinions or counter them, and there’s nothing more worthy than a view that has been countered and yet survives. It’s also not a collection that has been thrown together. Some of the contributions must have been difficult to get included.

And I suspect that the ends of this effort is to reduce the mass amateurisation of released magic; a marketplace filled with under-researched ideas, of effects that are solutions looking for a problem, or will only work under conditions acceptable by YouTube over the real world. But ultimately, I hope, to prevent magicians, old and young alike, of confusing method and technical ability with the skills necessary in being a successful performer, at whatever level someone find themselves

And lastly the book feels like a service being rendered on the world of magic, not least of all because it is free. Seriously. Read it.
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The Year Of The Apparent Process

There are certain lessons in magic and mentalism that one must learn over and over and over again before it really sinks in. These lessons will vary from performer to performer. one that I’ve, not so much struggled with, but have certainly taken a long time to grasp is the idea of focusing solely on effect.

I’d understood that how cheap or cheeky the method is has nothing to do with how potentially powerful the effect is. I no longer begrudge buying an effect that I loved in the demo, only to find it was based on stuff I already know. The effect is all, and original effects are usually much more difficult to come up with than original methods. But there is more to effect-centric thinking than that.

Let’s go on a journey together. There will hopefully be a point at the end of it.

I loved John Born’s work on the ACAAN plot Meant To Be, and within the book he talks about the idea of control. Control, Born posits, is the core principle to all effects.This is instinctively obvious but is still worth explicitly recognisable. The boy magician who must get his audience to close their eyes is operating with no level of control, and his vanishing sweet trick doesn’t impress. If it vanishes as we watch, then there is maximum control (but we might struggle to find a method for this). So in creating an effect we need to find ways of maximising apparent control (the magician never touches the deck, the choices were undoubtedly free and fair, etc.) without preventing a practical methodology. Frequently, we will shift the moment of magic to a point where we are placed under the greatest level of control. The performer walks to the opposite side of the stage before attempting to read the participant’s mind.

This is one part of the puzzle.

The second part has to do with my desire to convince people, in the moment at least, that my skills, whatever they are taken for, are genuine; that I can truly read minds, be that by supernatural or supernormal means. This can be facilitated by pushing, initially, at the open door. You present an effect that is limited in scope, that offers a person a way in along a number of real world methodologies. Then you can repeat the effect, but stretch the claim a little further. And it’s here where we come up against the idea of control, and the idea of the effect being more important than the method, because this idea of making stronger and stronger claims with each phase, which is very important for creating a kind of narrative to the set, tends to find its expression through increases of control.

The problem, though, arises in the nature of the control the performer is increasing. Too often, in thinking about this control, we consider methodology ahead of effect. We ask ourselves “how could I be doing this through trickery” and devise a control that rules out that trickery. In a sense, when we do this openly, we are guiding the audience in pulling apart our own effect. By increasing the control along methodological lines, we are inviting them to analyse method, rather than pushing them towards whatever supposed method we have devised for them. What we need to do is find a way of extending the control that is primarily keeping with our supposed method.

Of course, we can frame the control that we add to an effect. When a magician gets a spectator to sign a selected playing card, it is so that, later on, when the magician pulls the same card from his shoe, the possibility that it is a duplicate can be ruled out. But it is rare to have a magician expressly state this. The signing of the card is just business, or it is a way of the spectator claiming ownership of the card “I just want to get you to sign the card. Okay this is your card now…”

But it would usually be better simply to make the apparent task more difficult for the performer each time. One of the things I’m working on at the moment is a three phase routine in which I read three separate thoughts. The first thought is a randomly selected word from a small range. Each word is evocative and varied, so the idea that each word might trigger particular and identifiable physical cues in the participant doesn’t seem that outrageous. The second thought is a randomly selected playing card - a larger range of unevocative targets. The third phase consists of any word the participant wants. So we start on fairly safe ground, each phase gets more difficult, each phase increases the control, until we are left with something impossible.

But, and this is another important point, each phase has the same outward appearance. The selection process of each target varies each time, but that’s not important. What is important is the apparent process, which is the same each time (and, for good measure, is partly dependent on the ability of the participant - that third phase is optional, and only takes place if the participant passes the first two tests).

I believe that this process is the thing that ought to fascinate the audience. Because, as performers, we have to make this stuff work, we end up sweating the method - the guilt kicks in, we unconsciously cue that the selection process is what matters, not our ability to read people’s minds, and we knock a big hole in what we are trying to achieve. But if we care more about our apparent process than our actual method, if we spend more time thinking about that, then the methodology ought to become less important to us; less problematic; less difficult; less guilt-inducing.

It’s been said often enough that in order to be a successful mystery entertainer you need to really embrace the role of a mind reader; we have to think what it means to be able to read someone’s mind, to understand how this process works, to imagine what the experience feels like, and what the process looks like. Often though, and I class myself guilty of this too, none of this is given that much thought. This despite the fact that it’s the bit that we’re supposed to be about. Everything else we do is all about setting up the point at which we read someone’s mind, so really we should care much more about that part of our act than anything else. We should have a distinct methodology that makes some kind of sense to both audience and participant.  
And so that is my big thought for 2013 in my own performances - to explore and nail down exactly how it is that I can read people’s thoughts, and to make this an entertaining process for my audience.

Liber Mentis

I’m pleased and honoured to say that I have an effect in the Psycrets volume Liber Mentis, which is available for purchase here.

Psycrets is a society of Mystery Entertainers run by Todd Landman, Roni Sachnaey and Steve Drury. It organises biannual lectures from leading luminaries that are open to all and well worth getting along to. The book celebrates the society’s fifth year and includes contributions from the following:

David Berglas
Todd Landman
Roni Shachnaey
Steve Drury
Docc Hilford
Banachek
Enrique Enriquez
Scott Grossberg
Sheila Lyon
Alan Jones
Bob Percy
Dale Shrimpton
Dan Baines
Daniele Nigris
Dee Christopher
Derek Heron
Steve Murray
Freddie Valentine
Atlas Brookings
Arthur Emerson
Harry Lucas
Iain Dunford
Iain Jay
Marc Paul
Jon Thompson
Madelon Hoedt
Nik Taylor
Paul Voodini
Professor BC
Rainer Mees
Thomas Heine
Nico Heinrich
Ramon Fauria
Ray Doetjes
Rob Chapman
Rob Lupine
Roger Curzon
Simon Scott
Simon Shaw
Stephen Ward
Tom Lauten
Barrie Richardson
Barry Cooper
Lara Ruth

My effect is an unusual take on a principle probably familiar to most card magicians. My version doesn’t use playing cards. Or photos!

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Come Mind With Me

This is a thought I had some time ago, that I still pretty much stand by. I’ve seen similar thoughts elsewhere in print, so thought I’d get my ideas down too.

This came in part from two things. One was the sense that there is a problem with the way a lot of young people learn magic in these post YouTube days. A student will learn a trick, by fair means or foul, and then will practice and practice, on their own. They may well shoot a demonstration video of themselves performing it to no-one and put it up on YouTube either to show off or for advice. Then, finally, they will go out to the world, try to perform the effect on real people, only to find that the effect, that, like, totally fried on the video, seems at best flat, and at worst obvious. The reason is fairly plain, they’ve no real experience performing with people, and that, above all else, is the core skill that they should be learning, and it’s something that can’t be learning performing to no greater audience than a video camera. This leads me to the conclusion that magicians, when starting out on the journey, ought to get two or three solid self-workers or gimmick-based effects, and work their arses off performing them to anyone who’ll watch. That is not to say that they shouldn’t, alongside this, be working on their DL’s and whatnot, just that they shouldn’t get use to the idea that there is some perfect technical level that they can attain that will allow them to entertain anyone; there are more chops to learn than that.

The second thing was reading, in Michael Close’s Workers series, his lament at the widespread use of the “no skills required” claim on marketed effects. His argument, which is sound, is that performers ought to hold higher ambitions than that. There ought to be, for many, an element of shame in purchasing an effect that requires no skill. I don’t wholly agree with him. The effect is the effect, and the method is immaterial. Of course we should all strive towards great technical ability, but one cannot by that token write off effects that, despite their lack of technical requirements, pack an almighty whallop.

I suspect I’m making a bit of a Straw Man argument there, though. I suspect Close’s problem is that it is so often such a prominent selling point.

A long time ago I came up with an analogy that I think gets to what I’m talking about. An act is like hosting a dinner party - the tension is that you need to be both in the kitchen, preparing food, and in the dining room, entertaining your guests. One could phone in for pizza, and spend all your time in the dining room, but that’s likely not to impress your guests, or satisfy your own needs. Nor should you spend all of your time in the kitchen, irrespective of how magnificent the resulting food is.

What you’re looking out for, in the first instance, is a meal that will allow you to spend just enough time in the kitchen to come up with something satisfying, leaving you time in the dining room to be the gracious host you know you’re capable of being. Sometimes that will involve preparing as much of the meal as you can before the first guest arrives. More often it will involve practising preparing the meal to the point that you could do it blindfolded (stainless steel or otherwise). Either way, the skills you learn in the kitchen won’t transfer, in and of themselves, to skills in the dining room, so do what you need to do to be able to develop both skills in parallel.

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A Question Of Character

One of the biggest things I think I and a lot of performers or would-be performers struggle with is understanding what their performance character should be. Once we are sure of who we are as performers, we can use that knowledge to inform our decision making when putting routines and shows together, help us choose what areas to study both within and without magic and mentalism. It also makes it much easier for a performer to market themselves.

But how does one arrive at a suitable persona. There is a lot of advice out there, but not all of it is practical.

Someone might say “just be yourself” and whereas such honesty is commendable, often the last thing an audience would really want is for a performer to just be themselves. If you’ve booked a performer, or paid a ticket to see a performer, unless you have a decent knowledge of who that performer really is, you’re going to expect something a little more than the ordinary, and whatever skills we may have picked up over the years, we are pretty much all ordinary.

Someone might say “be yourself, but turned up to 11” but this doesn’t offer much more help. We should exaggerate ourselves? How? Which bits?

Paul Brook offers much more helpful advice in his Alchemical Tools, but this book seems squarely addressed to the existing magician with a fair bit of performance under their belt. It offers little usable direction to new performers, who are maybe starting from scratch or aren’t really aware of who they are already as a performer. I don’t mean to knock Alchemical Tools by any means, but I recall working through the exercises and being left none the wiser by the end of them.

I have a performance character called Jakob Newton. I created him primarily because I ultimately want distance from what I can do in everyday life, and what I can do when performing minor miracles.

On a whim, a while back, I did a brainstorming session. I think it stemmed from that Google game you can play where you key in a celebrities name followed by “is” into the search engine, and see what auto-completes come up. These tend to be the most popular search terms beginning with, for example, “Tom Cruise is…” and can sometimes reveal a lot about the way the public at large perceive them (gay, crazy, Jack Reacher, not Jack Reacher).

What I did was this. 

I began the sentence “Jakob Newton is…” and completed it in as many different ways as I could. Some of these seemed, on the surface, contradictory (Jakob Newton is a mind-reader. Jakob Newton is a fraud), but that didn’t matter. For this phase of the exercise quantity was king.

Once I felt I had enough of these sentences I took each one and wrote, at varying lengths, an exploration of what that sentence meant. Where I moved from one sentence to another that contradicted it, I would try where I could to manage that contradiction. By the end I found that I had a large amount of text, all describing a putative performance character.

What I also found was that he and I had a lot in common, and I had described him in enough detail for me to inhabit him. What’s more he is someone that I would be happy to inhabit - though I wouldn’t necessarily want to live there!

That this exercise helps me does not necessarily mean it will help you, but I offer it for consideration. I should also point out that I’ve still not used Newton in anger yet, but I feel he lends me a much greater confidence about performing and direction in learning.

If you do try the above exercise, I’d love to know how you get on with it.

Loci Tips

Of all the memory techniques that I’ve come across, I think the most romantic one is the loci system. This is, as I understand it, the oldest memory technique on record, and one that I have had the most difficulty getting to work. I feel much better able to use it now though, and thought I’d share some tips on how, if you have difficulty with it too, you could make it more workable.

Traditionally, users are told to take a route that they are very familiar with and remember things along the way. This was forever a haphazard affair for me, until I realised that I needed to think of the route in terms of a number of fixed “stations”. I had to divide the route into specific points at which I could anchor the images I wished to remember. This might seem obvious now that I’ve written it, but when trying to use the system before I found I was always skipping over things along the way, and it wasn’t until I had sat down and decided at which points my images would be placed that I was able to make any progress.

What’s more, until you do this, you don’t know how much information you are going to be able to pack into your particular route.

Initially I was quite basic in my approach. For instance, I ran a route from my bed to my local underground station, and made each room a station - the bedroom, the landing, the kitchen, the lower landing, bathroom etc. I made sure that the stations in the outside world were distinct and far enough apart.

Later, however, as my use of the system increased, I found I was able easily enough to divide each room into a series of stations. The bedroom (one image) became the bed, the sofa, the computer desk, the hi-fi, the chest of drawers, the DVD library (six images). I call this “granularity”. It’s important to keep it clear in your mind, though, how you order these sub-room stations. I work this by imagining myself surveying each room from a fixed position. The bedroom is viewed from right to left from the point of view of the bed. The kitchen is then broken down into stations in a similar way, but these run from left to right. This is intuitive to me, because of the geography of my flat - from the bed, the door is to my left. Standing at the kitchen door, the room extends to the right…

Another thing I find useful is to tie the function of each station in with the image I am creating. When using the Person Action Object system for memorising playing card sequences, for instance, and I need to picture Christian Bale, exposing his chest to an easel (10D, 4D, AH if you must know!) at the oven, I will try as far as possible to incorporate the oven into the mix - perhaps the easel is a miniature easel standing in a pan of boiling water. The ability to do this is something you should think about when picking out your individual stations - how easily will you be able to incorporate the station itself into the image?

One pursuit people who use these techniques sometimes speak of is the creation of their own imaginary spaces. This is really where the notion of memory palaces come from. People will either create their buildings and routes from scratch, or they will use doors or hallways to bridge, say, their childhood home to their current home.

Something I’ve started to experiment with is what I’m calling the Hotel of all my Friends. The idea is that I give each personal contact a room in a hotel, and coded in that room are things like phone numbers, birthdays, family relations etc. I can spend time in each hotel room with the occupier and tie everything together quite easily. It’s early days for the system as yet, but should be fun to play with.

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More Memory

Here are some further thoughts on memory that I have been toying with as I prepare the Pi for Memory Athletes volume. The book is something I’m putting together for my own amusement but will make it available through Lulu, should it prove interesting to anyone else. It’s very much a method looking for an effect, though!

In conversation with performers I have heard it said that memory acts aren’t “proper mentalism”. I don’t wholly agree with this. It is true that what most people think of in relation to magic, mental magic or mentalist acts is the display of paranormal abilities. Demonstrating a heightened ability of memory is the display of a supernormal ability. But things aren’t as clearcut as all that.

We need to understand what it is people get from watching displays of ability to begin with, and a good part of what they are getting when watching magic is a kind of wish fulfilment. Whether the spectator is a true believer, or has put their skepticism on hold in order to enjoy the spectacle, they are revelling in the possibility that a human being can levitate, can pass matter through matter, or can read minds. It’s there in the hackneyed “can you make my wife disappear” request.

The same is true of memory routines - you’re not just displaying a supernormal ability, you are displaying a supernormal ability that most people would value. What is more, most people feel they have an inadequate memory, so showing that you, a fairly normal-seeming guy, have mastered your memory, it gives the audience hope that they can attain a better memory themselves. And this places the memory performer in a great place, because his audience really can attain a better memory.

The joy of a lot of memory techniques is the ease with which they can be learnt - memory is something people tend to struggle with, so if a performer can get an audience to memorise a list of twenty objects and they do so with total ease, then that’s pretty magical! There’s an act to be had in interleaving extreme memory demonstrations with the teaching of techniques on which those demonstrations are based.

There’s another aspect to memory demonstration that’s worth thinking about, too. Most esoteric systems are grounded on them, be that the memorisation required for the use of oracle systems such as the tarot, or that required to recite great tracts of magical texts. One of the shibboleths in Masonry is the memorisation of huge chunks of quite abstract writing.

I’ve studied cults a little, and one of the things that cults use in order to recruit is to put out their “wins” up front. They rely on secret texts, and a slow and often meaningless progression to some kind of imagined spiritual ascension. In order to convince their followers that such texts exist, and have something to offer, they need to demonstrate by offering more immediate gains, and one of those easy gains is memory.

Powering someones memory up has another effect too for the cult-minded, and serves to further explain why memory is so often at the heart of these groups. It stems from the link between superstition and the ability to pattern spot. It’s been shown that people who are sensitive pattern spotters tend to entertain more superstitious thought and magical thinking than those who are poor pattern spotters. The idea there is that superstition is a form of pattern spotting - it’s spotting a pattern that isn’t actually there. In order to spot patterns you need access to data. The better your memory is, the more data you will have access to at any one time. Therefore, the better memory you have, the more patterns you will spot. Memory boosts magical thinking.

This is wild conjecture, but it’s interesting to note that in parallel with the extent to which we “externalise” memories, have all the phone numbers we need programmed into our mobiles rather than programmed into our heads, our society has become more secular.

I suspect also that memory techniques tend to push people into pattern spotting, especially when memorising literature. Here the learner will find cues and patterns in sentence A that will trigger the contents of sentence B; there the learner will use an acrostic or similar in order to deal with a sticking point on a particular turn of phrase. The work put in on committing things to memory exercises one’s pattern-spotting ability. I believe this is why, be it by design or evolution, cults tend to put so much value on the ability to memorise texts. This should offer an interesting way in to memory effects for the bizarrists amongst us.