Mainly Mental @mainlymental - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Effects involving diaries and playing cards have been around at least since 1935, when Tom Sellars saw his “A Memory Feat” published in The Magic Wand, but it wasn’t until Alex Elmsley performed and taught it in his 1975 lecture tour that what is generally thought of as The Diary Effect came to be. More than just a method, it is a plot, and there are numerous ways of presenting it, from the supremely fair open-index work of Simon Aronson through to effects such as Bob Cassidy’s ever popular Chronologue or the extremely cheeky Worker’s Diary from Mark Elsdon.

In its original form, this is how the effect would appear: the performer presents a diary or birthday book - against each day is written a playing card. A participant selects a card but it is not seen. The participant then states their birthday. They are invited to look it up in the diary and they find, written next to it, a playing card. They turn their selected playing card over, and it matches the one listed in the book.

In practice, the birthday is known either before the very start of the effect, or is otherwise learnt as the effect goes along. This is a sticking point for many, but Simon Aronson has a disarmingly no-nonsense method for getting the birthday, detailed in Simply Simon and in Volume 2 of his Sessions with Simon DVD series.

The niggle that I have always had though was in the object of the diary or birthday book itself. Diaries and birthday books alike have a reason for being, but I had never found a satisfying reason for a playing card to be written in next to each date. This isn’t a great crime of course - the effect can sometimes be reason enough for such an object to exist, after all, but it always seemed a shame that the filled-in diary had no feasible purpose outside of the effect.

Now it so happens that one can purchase books that tie in a playing card to every day of the year. These come from the world of cartomancy, and are used for the purposes of giving readings. However, because no conjury is built on these books, they don’t really suit our purpose. Also the layout of cards in such a book is very systematic (1-Jan AH, 2-Jan 2H, etc.). Were we to use such a book to present the diary effect, it wouldn’t take much consideration for the participant to think that there was a system at work, turning any effect we did into, at best, one of rapid calculation. We have an object that makes sense as an object, but if it’s going to be useful to us, we’re going to have to change it.

With all of this in mind, then, Phill Smith and I have created a birthday divination book. We’re not the first to do this. Paul Green put out The Fortune Teller’s Book Of Days with L&L. Now out of print, it gave, for each day, a brief personality description along with a playing card. This went some way to iron out the niggle of the Object Without Purpose problem, but even then it seemed almost too slight a solution. Also it was based around Elmsley’s original methodology, so there were some limits to the level of scrutiny the book could be put to.

Our book is a 366-day index, with each day featuring an array of things useful to someone giving readings. This includes a playing card. The cards assigned to each day are in a seemingly random order, but uses a procedural arrangement that allows the performer to easily move from the date to the playing card. But for the book to be an effective prop, its believability was paramount. To put this at the very core of the philosophy of its development, we had a particular goal - to be able to sell the book to laity without fear of its secrets being discovered. That’s why we’re taking great pains to avoid mentioning the title of the prop book on any marketing associated with Pythia. We appreciate you doing the same! We don’t want audience members or participant going away, having a Google, and establishing that the book is anything other than what it appears to be.

The ideal goal, though it would be a rare occurrence, I’m sure, would be for a magician to happen upon a participant’s copy of the book and go straight into using it - a kind of magic Trojan horse.

To go to this much effort to provide a convincing frame for a playing card would be a waste were the book not to include other things. To that end, any performer versed in the secrets of the book will, from the date alone, be able to determine an element, a number, a colour, a totem animal, and a tarot card from the major arcana (and even whether or not that card is inverted).

It would also be a waste to the lay reader if they were to pay for a book to only use a handful of its pages. Therefore, we include a piece of oracular advice against each day, along with a “yes”, “no” and “unclear” answer. This allows the book to be used as an oracle proper, using whatever selection process the user wishes. And, again, it would be a waste to the performer if this information wasn’t also rigged. Each piece of oracular advice uses one of nineteen force words, one of seven themes, and one of five styles, all calculable from the date, and each one in a unique combination. Even the yes, no and maybe can be calculable from the date. Three page selections could easily become a three-card reading with either tarot or playing cards. Each day features a character description, based chiefly on the zodiac. Each date also features three celebrities born on that particular day that, as long as the reader is familiar with them, can be used to inform readings.

The totem animals are openly borrowed from the Chinese Zodiac, so again there is yet another way in for a deeper reading.

Phill and I are now happy to make this available for purchase and are really excited to see what you will make of and with it. You can buy the prop book, and its manual in one handy bundle here:

http://www.phillsmiff.com/

or direct from Lulu at the following links:

http://tiny.cc/PythiaManual

http://tiny.cc/PythiaProp

#pythia #oracle #diary effect #product

The Dark Side of Ideomotor

A recent case in Newark, New Jersey was written up in the New York Times, where a facilitated communicator stood trial for sexual assault. Nathan Tapley brought it to the attention of members of Psycrets because it touches a great deal on the ideomotor response.

Facilitated communication (FC) is the controversial technique where a profoundly physically disabled person is able to communicate through the assistance of a second person. In its simplest form, the subject is able to point to images or words, so long as the assistant is there to support their arms, effectively smoothing out the “noise” of the subjects spastic movements to get to the “signal” of their intent.

The controversy, understandably enough, surrounds whether the messages are genuinely generated by the subject, or are created, consciously or unconsciously, by the assistant. Anyone who has spent time with an upturned wineglass and a spread of alphabet cards may know how compelling the former may seem even when left only with the reality of the latter.

Tests have had mixed results, stemming, one can assume, from the variety of different subjects, practitioners, and times. They usually run along the lines of the subject being given information away from the practitioner, who is later called in to assist with the subject relaying this information back to the examiner. Taken together, it becomes clear that the technique, on the whole, does not work. Individual cases that strongly suggest genuine communication is taking place are few and far between, and speak only to the skills of a particular practitioner and the abilities of a particular subject.

What I find most compelling, though, is the assumptions made by some of the practitioners quoted in the article - the notion that they can test the process once and from then on presume that in all cases subsequently with that particular subject, the communication is genuine. The case of McDonald speaks to this with some irony, based on the evidence provided it seems clear McDonald was communicating. But when tested as above, and called on to spell two words she had been shown away from her FC practitioner “string” and “quince”, she spelt out “string” and “quit”. This suggests that somewhere in the process of spelling each word, the practitioner has guessed at what the word will be, and completed it with this in mind. S. T. R. I. is heading towards only a few options, of which “string” may be the more obvious. Q.U.I is again heading towards only a few options, and “quit” would seem a more likely choice than “quince”.

Glass movers may to some extent recognise this process. Often there will be a dominant mover, with the other movers either fighting against them or going along for the ride. However, once a word starts to resolve the glass tends to speed up, as more of the movers start working together to complete the word.

It seems clear, therefore, that any practitioner would need to keep themselves constantly in check. The whole point about unconscious movement is that it is unconscious. One can never be certain one is free of it, and the practitioner will always be in a stronger position to impose their will over the subject, and will be unaware when they are doing so.

Perhaps the troubling irony behind all of this, though, is that a group of people coming together for a seance, theatrically presented or not, are at least taking in the notion that it may well all be bunkum, and are free to frame their experiences how they want to. A person doing the same but instead of voicing the imaginary dead, are voicing a living, breathing human being have the potential of causing for more harm, both to themselves and those for whom they speak.

40th Birthday Offer

I turn 40 in March. I don't look a day over 39, right?

To celebrate, I've decided to reduce the price of the e-book of Tesuji to 99p until the 1st of April.

It's available in lots of places online, but I feel the love more directly via Lulu.

http://www.lulu.com/…/si…/tesuji/ebook/product-21653838.html

If you don't have a Kindle or ebook reader, I recommend Adobe's Digital Editions which is available here: http://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions/download.html

25% Off Print Editions of Tesuji and Choked - ends 8th January 2015

Through 8 January, you can get 25% off all print books and calendars at Lulu with code FLASHY15.

Tabula Mentis XVI

A blustery November Saturday saw Psycrets return to Hitchin for its sixteenth Tabula Mentis, subtitled Entangled Minds.

Opening the day’s lectures was Atlas Brookings, whose ‘Train Tracking’ has been one of the biggest and most exciting releases to happen in Mentalism for some time. Not trains running today, though! Instead Atlas treated us to a number of other naked mentalist techniques that he uses, including his signature superhero divination effect.

Most valuable, though, was an insight into how Brookings chooses to present progressive anagrams, a technique I know many people shy away from for its apparent transparency. His handling of them shows a deep understanding of their weaknesses and so he is able instead to create effects that make absolute sense, and are capable of deep astonishment.

Looch set a conversational tone which happily remained for the rest of the day. He included in his lecture a number of confessional accounts of when things have gone wrong for him, showing how bad experiences are often what we need in order to become better performers, better businessmen, and even better people. This led to several members offering their own horror stories.

He was also keen to demonstrate that the simplest way of improving one’s performance is to keep in mind that it should always be about your audience. More weaknesses in method were patched up in Looch’s talk too, as he provided a wonderfully simple way of improving a technique with business cards, again by taking an illogical practice and changing it to make it make perfect sense.

After lunch we were treated to a live rendition of Stephen Young’s incomparable Yorkshire Christmas. There’s also a version of it on YouTube should curiosity get the better of you.

We then moved a couple of counties along as we were treated to the mind-reading styling of Newcastle’s Michael Murray. Starting off with a performance of his version of Out Of This World using a borrowed shuffled deck, he went on to outline a number of principles that he uses to rationalise process, to build rapport, and to use non-verbal communication as a means of creating false mistakes. Murray spoke at length, at speed and with passion, ably demonstrating why he has a reputation for being one of UK mentalism’s most prodigious thinkers.

Marc Spelman finished the day off with another generous talk. There’s a word that Marc uses quite a lot, which is “dynamic” and the more you learn about his thinking the more you see its importance, to not think solely in terms of method or effect but actually the framing, sensibility and, yes, dynamic of an effect that can be used both to bury the method and to create an emotional weight that might not otherwise exist.

Keen to continue the sense of dialogue between the speakers and the audience, Spelman joined in with the confessions, imparting the lessons that he, too, had learnt in the crucible of real world performances. The theme of handling required peculiarities of method came up again, too, as Marc gave his solution to the unnatural act of having a business card returned to your wallet. Lastly he spoke of how we have a tendency to collect methods of getting information, but put much less thought into how we reveal that information in an entertaining and interesting way. The day was a much more conversational affair than we have seen of late, and it was interesting to see how this led to themes emerging throughout the different talks - of learning from our mistakes, of rationalising our strange methods, of making what we do as much about our participants and audiences as possible. Hopefully this sense of dialogue will persist, as it brought with it a real sense of community and society.

#Psycrets #Tabula Mentis

Go-themed Google Doodle!

Well, it took quite a bit of string-pulling, but Google is celebrating the release of my new effect Tesuji with a go-themed Google doodle!

Get in on the fun by purchasing the effect here. This post may not be entirely true.

#Tesuji #Google

Tesuji

Tesuji is now available for purchase over on the products site.

I hope you enjoy it.

#Tesuji #Parlour #Game

Tesuji Launches Tomorrow

Tomorrow I will be releasing the effect Tesuji, a reworking of the effect that was published in Liber Mentis. It's been rewritten from the ground up, features multiple new illustrations, and a couple of ideas that more correctly reflect how I perform the effect since Liber Mentis was first published.

I think it's quite a graceful, aesthetically pleasing routine that really maximises the sense of random outcomes and participant control. I hope you like it.

It's initially coming out as an e-book. Depending on levels of interest and feedback, I may produce a colour and a black and white hard-copy version, too.

Forty comp copies have been distributed. Stay tuned for feedback!

Exciting!

#Tesuji

Free Effect

I've decided, for no real reason whatsoever, to give away one of my old effects. It's a card trick (hooray!) and I've had a lot of fun with it over the years. You can find it over at the products section. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Coming Soon...

...Tesuji!

On Tabula Mentis XV

On 29th March a shadow of mystery performers descended upon the faded imperial glory of Birmingham's Paragon hotel, there to attend the 15th Tabula Mentis, entitled Inductive Reasoning.

Marc Salem opened the day with what he described as a range of "rants, tirades, words of advice, and tricks." He gave us a stern reminder that what we were about, more than anything, was keeping secrets, and so the secrets he shared on the day ought to remain just that. Highlights included a remarkably clean Add A Number, and an inspired method for getting a spectator to divine which hand you're hiding something in using a pendulum. He also spoke about the structuring of mentalism acts, that they cannot follow the "climb, dip and climb" structure of a conventional magic act, but must, in effect, build relentlessly to a final, big closer.

A real treat followed Marc's lecture, as we were lucky enough to have Brian Barnes demonstrate his version of Al Koran's blindfold act. I hope I'm not giving too much away by saying that the blindfold in use for the act is genuine. It's an act that Brian has been doing for fifty years, and was an absolute joy to watch. The logic of the proceedings, the natural moments at which the truth of the blindfold was demonstrated, the tense excitement of the performer as he awaited confirmation that he had found the correct card, or correctly estimated the number of cards one of his participants had cut, all made for a genuine spectacle.

Stephen Young was up next, demonstrating his photo-psyche cards. Stephen has put together a broad collection of photographs to be put to reading purposes. Using the provocative idea that readings should be carried out with photos rather than tarot cards, Stephen talked us through the benefits of a system that had no esoteric baggage, could be placed firmly in a psychological framework, and allowed an easy way into an intuitive and interrogative process that I suspect won't replace the tarot but will certainly find a home with readers of the right hue. We were also treated to a whistle-stop tour of his Pict-ionage system, which seemed well suited to remote viewing and control condition style presentations.

Things then started getting a bit Conan Doyle as Ben Cardall introduced us to his approach to mentalism. Those familiar with his work will know that Cardall presents feats of deduction, and his lecture was a window into this world. I think the highlight of his talk for me was the rapid divination of someone's starsign, followed by an "off by two" hit on their date of birth. It's fascinating to watch the development of methods that seem more and more to resemble the kinds of skills mentalists have hitherto only claimed to use.

Which is the perfect segue, really, for the closing lecture from the inestimable Peter Turner. Allowing himself a free format for his lecture, he essentially took requests from those in attendance. He dazzled first with two ACAAN variants, one of which was explained, but the other, performed with a borrowed deck, where two participants both thought of the same playing card and the same number, where the card was, indeed, found at the correct position, seemed truly remarkable. My thoughts at the time, having seen the same effect used on a recent web interview with Turner, and hearing that similar performances had lit up well-known magic forums, was "no-one can be that lucky!" Turner was nothing short of generous in the methods that he tipped, and, again, his methodology seems on a par with the effects. The way in which his name divination works was remarkable enough, but his PIN divination is something else!

This was the first TM since Steve Drury and Madelon Hoedt took up the baton, and I think they have done us proud. If there were nerves, if there was chaos, it never showed, and the day had a great mix of speakers. A bill that features both Salem and Turner has to be seen as a triumph. I can't wait to see what November has in store.

#Tabula Mentis #Psycrets

On Bullet Catch

This is something I drafted a while ago, but for some reason never got round to posting. Although the subject matter is getting a little dusty the issues remain fresh.

Bullet Catch was a show that Rob Drummond put together and performed at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival. It played in the small downstairs theatre at the Traverse and received great reviews, a Herald Angel Award and a Total Theatre Award. It later played in New York and at the National Theatre in London.

As the title suggests the play takes as its focus point the bullet catch, and in particular a performance that resulted in the death of the magician. Its narrative blends fact with fiction. At one point the ill-fated performer receives a letter from Houdini warning him off doing the trick, but the text of the letter actually comes from a genuine one that Harry Kellar wrote to Houdini:

Now, my dear boy, this is advice from the heart, DON’T TRY THE D—N Bullet Catching…no matter how sure you may feel of its success. There is always the biggest kind of risk that some dog will “job” you. And we can’t afford to lose Houdini. You have enough good stuff to maintain your position at the head of the profession. And you owe it to your friends and your family to cut out all stuff that entails risk of your life. Please, Harry, listen to your old friend Kellar who loves you as his own son and don’t do it.

This, and other aspects of the presentation, strongly suggests that the story Drummond tells is true, which is not the case, but lends the show a mournfulness that is to its credit. The narrative weaves its way through a number of effects, as Drummond tells us both of the magician’s final days leading up to the shooting, and the impact that the shooting had on the participant that squeezed the trigger. This participant is represented on stage by a single volunteer. The journey Drummond and his volunteer go on brings them close together, the relationship building towards the bullet catch that, in fiction left one man dead and another destroyed. Drummond seems intent, in telling this tale, of bringing alive the danger and significance of the catch as it is played out.

In short the show is incredibly powerful and tense. Before the catch is performed, Drummond allows people to leave should they wish to. I believe in most cases people did walk out at this point.

And I’m saying all of this because it is vital to appreciate how good the show is before discussing what I want to discuss.

At one point, about two-thirds of the way through the show, Drummond and his volunteer levitate a table. Afterwards, Drummond talks to audience members about what preference they have for knowing or not knowing how such an illusion works, in essence, whether or not they are comfortable with letting the magic live. He then instructs the audience, if they do not want to know how the illusion is created, to close their eyes.

He then dismantles and packs away the table, showing how it works.

It is a L_______ table.

Now, here are a few things to keep in mind. The audience sizes, both in Edinburgh and, I think, London, were about 300, maximum - no thousands of YouTube secret hunters, these. Not everyone kept their eyes open (though most did). They saw this trick performed within the context of a play and, despite the aluminium attache case the table was packed away in, the early twentieth century trappings of the play masked the modern nature of the table (not that the table is, nor needs to be, particularly high-tech). Also, I would say that the secret of the L_______ table is, in a sense, a trivial one. That is not to say that it isn’t a supremely well designed and made prop, more that the quality of its thinking and execution has to do with hiding what is in reality a mundane method.

Lastly, and no less importantly, I watched the play with an intelligent woman who afterwards, on explaining the workings of the table to her husband, said that the table had a motor in it, and that she didn’t understand the box subtlety beyond showing off. In short, she had not understood what she had seen. I can’t use her as a stand in for the entire lay audience, of course, but I think it serves to show that not everyone who kept their eyes open would have learnt the secret.

Whether or not this matters, is a debate in itself, of course. Oh, and I’ve seen performances of the L_______ table that exposed the table more thoroughly purely through the incompetence of the performer.

But regardless of all these “yes buts” he does in the end expose a marketed prop that is someone else’s intellectual property, and a part of many others’ livelihood. Here is how Drummond himself defends the decision to expose the table, taken from the script book:

This has been a matter of contention amongst some members of the magic community. I accept fully that revealing the secret to a trick not of my own design is ethically fraught. However, the relationship this creates between myself and my audience, the comment on the nature of truth and depression, the moment of melancholic and profound theatre that this action makes possible, convinces me that such an act is justified in a theatre show. And, anyway, they chose to look.

I’m not convinced this is a great argument, personally. The audience choosing to look or otherwise isn’t the issue - the magician guards the empty box for his own sake, not for the sake of his audience. I also don’t feel that, in the moment of exposure, the “comment on the nature of truth and depression” was made loud enough - it was drowned out by the audience’s own curiosity. If, later on, they realise that they have forever lost the wonder of the illusion, I’m not so sure they’d tie it up with the themes of the show.

But here’s the rub, irrespective of my view on Drummond’s argument. He sees the exposure as an element of artistic necessity. I think it’s fair to say that most, if not all of us seek to elevate what we do from craft to artform. Here is a magic show that is presented squarely as an art form, but in doing so kills one of its babies. To use exposure as a leverage for other tricks is by no means strange to Bullet Catch. Some areas of card magic, for instance, pretty much rely on it - any card magician that incorporates gambling demonstrations, for example. Drummond no doubt feels he is right in the decision he has made, but without any legal backstop preventing exposure (a backstop the existence of which I don’t think I or many people would be entirely comfortable with), how does one reach that decision? At what point is the lasting effects of exposure less important than the impact of the theatrical moment of that exposure?

#Bullet catch #Rob Drummond #Exposure

Priestly Oracles

A coincidence in my reading (Zealot by Reza Aslan, and some research for a forthcoming release) led me to this. I'm sure it's not an original observation or piece of conjecture, but it's hopefully no less interesting.

At the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, some time before 600 BCE, it was possible to get a yes or no answer from God. If you and your question were both important enough, you could consult the Urim and Thummim, artefacts owned and used by the High Priest. The literal meaning of Urim and Thummim is disputed. It is often translated as "the Light and the Truth". Elsewhere it is translated as "the faultless and the cursed". The words are in their plural form, but it is suggested that this was to elevate their importance - an aspect of ancient Hebrew, much like the "royal we".

We don't know precisely what these things were. A section of Samuel refers to them being used to identify a particular sinner amongst a group of people. The group were divided in two, and the Urim and Thummim used to establish which group contained the sinner. The suggestion is of drawing lots.

Elsewhere it is made clear that these objects were contained in a pouch beneath the breastplate of the High Priest.

Most commonly, the Urim and Thummim are thought of as two stones, one dark and one light, that would give a simple yes or no answer. The priest would remove one stone from the pouch, and that would be the answer. Indeed facsimiles based on this interpretation are marketed today.

We now move back a century or two, and find ourselves at the Apollon temple at Delphi, home of the renowned Oracle. The Oracle would only answer questions for nine days each year. The rest of the time, the priests were on hand to answer yes or no questions.

Again, the exact methodology is lost, but we know that it involved different-coloured beans.

This is perhaps my inner cynic talking, but I would not put much faith in a priest drawing one of two stones from a pouch to determine a choice, even when that priest is the nearest human being to God. If it is divine fate that is leading the choice, I'd want as little interference from man as possible.

On learning of the Delphi priests and their beans, I envisioned the priest reaching into a pouch filled with beans, some light in colour, others dark in colour. They would then throw these to the ground, and answer based primarily on the predomination of either light or dark. Here the selection is much more random, and therefore less human and more divine.

I can't shake the idea that in Jerusalem the procedure was more or less the same, that Urim and Thummim are Hebrew plurals not (just?) to elevate their importance, but because there were more than just two stones in use. Nor can I shake the idea that both processes share a common ancestor. But I am not a historian; this is wild and amateurish conjecture. There was a similar oracle in the early years of Islam, which seems to clearly have used two or three distinct objects (for a yes, a no, and a refusal to answer), so it is far from improbable that the Urim and Thummim were similar.

What I can say, though, is that I love the imagery of it, of someone reaching into a bag and casting beans, perhaps having someone else determine whether the answer is yes or no. I also see it as an opportunity for a system that could be, ahem, manipulated by the operator.

As far as the Oracle at Delphi is concerned, the priests and the oracle herself were cultured respected individuals who concerned themselves much with social and political matters. They also were very powerful for a long time. It was on the word of an Oracle that wars would begin, for example. The Urim and Thummim were, in the main, used solely by Kings and Generals, again with very important questions to be answered. Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex not to explore the sexual kinks of the aristocracy (Oedipus's crimes were, in any case, unwitting - that focus is a modern one). The play is a parable demonstrating the folly in attempting to escape a fate decried by the oracles. It was a political volley at a time when growing rationalism began to question the wisdom of using divination.

It seems quite plausible that the Oracle at Delphi, and even, perhaps, the High Priest at Jerusalem, sought to maintain control over the answers given - to base them not on drawn lots or even ethylene-induced gibberish but on considered opinion. It seems the Delphi priests would interview the supplicants about themselves to determine whether they were worthy of speaking to the Oracle. The supplicants would then participate in a number of rituals, and join a procession to the temple, where they would wait in turn to be granted entrance to the Oracle's room. There is, therefore, plenty of opportunity for the supplicants questions to be discussed and answers selected prior to the moment the oracle is actually consulted.

The condition of the question posed to God at the temple in Jerusalem was that the question must be important to Jerusalem and its people. This, too, suggests a vetting process that would allow for discussion and thought prior to an answer being provided. Texts suggest that the question needed to be spoken, (there's quite a lot of evidence in scripture that God cannot know our minds) but that it needn't be spoken so loudly anyone can hear. If the question is vetted in advance, then this detail isn't that relevant. And the Urim and Thurrim were all but stitched into the priest's clothing - sacred objects kept far from the prying eyes and curious fingers of the inquisitive.

As the Delphi priests were selected less and less from good, cultured families, and more and more from the uneducated land workers of the surrounding village, the sway of the Oracle waned in kind. This appears to be a sort of downward spiral. The advice of the oracle is called more and more into question, so it loses its status as a respectable career. The temple then finds that it can no longer recruit the great and the good, and so the advice suffers further. A slow steady decline into irrelevance.

14% off at Lulu and a Tease

Should you wish to avail yourself of a copy of Choked, Lulu are currently offering a 14% discount in the run up to Valentine's Day. All you need to do is enter AMOR14 when you're at the check-out. Also, I will have an exciting announcement to make later in the year about a new product. It's a bit of a departure from my previous effect, but it solves a niggle I have with a certain plot in magic. I'm hoping others share the same niggle, as this will open up the plot for them. But I have said too much!

Memorising Pi At Crossroads Motel

There was a project I'd worked on for some time. It wasn't an effect as such, more a toy or a curio. It was to be a book detailing pi to 10,000 decimal places, laid out in such a way as to benefit memory athletes. Owners of the book and its secret would be able to create the illusion that they had not only memorised this sequence of pi, but that their command was such that they could name any specific digit of pi in this 10,000 digit run.

People have been memorising pi to ever-lengthening degrees for decades now. It is perhaps the first irrational number, a number that cannot be accurately represented by a fraction, that most of us encounter, so it has a familiarity that makes it at least meaningful to most educated people, even if it's "that button on the calculator" or "that number for working out stuff about circles". Alternative historians point to unconvincing evidence that it was in use anachronistically, such as its apparent use in the construction of the pyramids (the rebuttals to these theories are even more interesting - demonstrating ways by which pi can get accidentally included in the maths of such structures). It's been dwelt on in popular culture, as a test for extraterrestrial intelligence in Red Planet Mars, as an expression of the name of God in the film Pi.

To memory athletes, then, it offers a fixed but endless territory on which to compete. I suspect, also, that its abstraction is a draw.

I came very close to completing the book, but the fact that it was not really much of an effect, just a dry presentation of a supernormal skill, and a few wrinkles in the method that I never satisfactorily ironed out, meant that eventually I lost interest.

Part of the method, however, involved genuinely memorising the first 100 digits of pi. This would not have been, you understand, an integral part of the method. A decent bit of participant management would have removed any such requirement. However, it would be a useful thing to have as back up, should someone specify a digit from those first 100.

I did a little research on methods for memorising pi, and found some of them quite fascinatingly awkward. The realm of the "piem" where each word signifies each successive digit of pi by number of letters. Wikipedia offers the below example:

Pie

I wish I could determine pi Eureka, cried the great inventor Christmas pudding, Christmas pie Is the problem's very center.

This works well with, if we are being honest, sufficient decimal places for most scientists to work with, but it takes up a lot of space, and is somewhat oblique in that the user is left to count up letters of each word in order to find the number.

What surprised me was the paucity of lip-service paid to the Major system. Here the number would be coded into letters or, more exactly, categories of sound, from which words can be constructed. The above piem codes 20 digits of pi, but if we convert the verse into a number using the Major system we end up with a number more than twice the length, and encoded in a way that allows much faster access.

The Major system is generally taught as follows:

1=t/d

2=n

3=m

4=r

5=l

6=sh/j

7=k/g

8=f/v

9=p/b

0=s\z

It should be stressed that the system is phonetic, too. In terms of representing numbers it sees no difference between:

suave gnomes in flight, or safenames knife loot.

Both code the same sequence of digits - 082302851.

So this would have been the method put forward for the pi book, to convert the first 100 digits of pi to letters, and then create a poem from them. I was to include my own poem, but urge readers to create their own as it would be more memorable to them. My poem ran:

Amy Turtle punch low, my love. Pick up my knee, my fresh nosh, or my mauve mink ape. Listen! A fiver to bake a dish! Up my pub, I'm called Si.

I'll fancy I poke her poor ear. I'll bin my sock if too shy, or session a fish in a safe pipe a fish-knife is more final mourn a teddy; kiss a shaky pie.

This is, as you can see, utter nonsense, but as long as it is memorable nonsense, it doesn't matter. I feel I'm stuck with the above poem, which meant I missed the trick of ensuring that each line codes ten digits. You'll note too, that it doesn't rhyme. Getting it to rhyme is generally not practicable. What I am looking for is imagery, a strong sense of flow in the verse, and a useful acrostic (Apolu 1:10AM). All of this makes the task of memorising the poem much easier. In terms of getting the flow right, and to facilitate meaning, I will often use "empty" words - words that don't code any numbers at all.

But having got this far, I put away things pi. Then, many months later, I decided to see if the poem was still there in my head. It was, and the realisation that it was pleased me so much that I thought, why not go another hundred digits. So I did, this time ensuring each line featured ten digits. There seemed little additional trouble in learning another two verses of the poem, so a short time after that I learnt another hundred.

So I'm up to three hundred digits of pi. Much of the work went into the creation of the poem - the memorising of the poem took me little time, and is relatively trivial.

I don't want to stop at 300 digits, as much because I enjoy the constrained poem I am slowly writing. But I realise now that I need something. I need a book, containing, say, the first 10,000 digits of pi, laid out in such a way that it might assist me in writing and learning the poem.

So that might get a Lulu release in the new year...

#memory #pi

On Coincidence

Mentalism restricts itself to certain effects, and I think it is fair to say that those effects can be characterized as being those that represent powers of the mind. It is the mind’s ability to predict the future, to see beyond normal sight, to think the thoughts of others, and to render cutlery useless. Within this little box I am happy. I do, from time to time, come to envy the honest-to-goodness magician, who can commit himself to throwing coins into glass bottles or having selected cards mysteriously appear in wallets or shoes, but I generally recognise that the path on which I travel is slightly different, that it seeks out something that I might cynically qualify as “believable magic” (this with the caveat that all magic seeks believability, I just suspect that few adults go away from a traditional magic show believing they have witnessed real miracles - the suspension of disbelief is only temporary). But there is a wrinkle, I have. I love a coincidence effect. I would say, too, that mentalists greater than I love them too. Cassidy, who I understand has gone on record as saying that the difference between magic and mentalism is that the former presents the impossible, but the latter presents the improbable, has written of his handling for Do As I Do, perhaps the granddaddy of all coincidence effects. Add to that OOTW, GT, and ACAAN all mentalism favourites and there seems to be a serious suggestion that actually coincidence effects constitute a strong theme.

But let's slow down here, because I can already hear you countering this assertion. Before I give voice to those perfectly valid counters I just want to highlight something else about coincidence effects. They are effects in which, more often than not, there is no suggestion that the magician did anything more than take a risk on the coincidence playing out. And it is for this reason, I suspect, that many magicians don’t actually like them very much. The performer doesn’t get to do the magics.

Right, now what were you saying? Ah yes! OOTW isn’t a coincidence effect because the effect is that the spectator is capable of determining the colours of the cards without looking at them. This is true. Equally GT involves the participant knowing when to stop dealing cards. ACAAN constitutes one person naming the position of the card another person has named. These are all, one may argue, effects of clairvoyance, of sight beyond sight. I think that is a perfectly valid and fair observation. But I think that beneath that, there still lies coincidence. We can, of course, calculate the odds for the above effects, and demonstrate to ourselves how unlikely a successful outcome would be. This goes some way to suggest the power being demonstrated. The odds against someone successfully completing OOTW is truly astronomical, to the point where we can pretty much rule out chance, and plump for some other power being at work.

But I’m not so sold on ACAAN as clairvoyance. Let me pick this straw man of mine apart. In short, two people happen to select the same card in a totally fair and free, hands off manner. That is a coincidence above all else. It’s true enough that it can be presented as clairvoyance, or even a prediction (I predicted you would say the queen of hearts, and you would say eleven, so I placed the queen of hearts... etc.) but I’m not sure I’ve seen it done very often as such. And some may say that without giving it such trappings, it somehow is not an effect, but I think this is wrong.

I think it is wrong because of this; people love coincidence. Whole books devoted to synchronicity have been written. People thrill at those chance-in-a-million encounters - the long lost relatives who, by chance, end up holidaying together in the same hotel, the angler who catches a fish only to gut it and find his wife’s long lost wedding ring, the person who put the wrong numbers on the lottery and ended up winning the jackpot. These are stories that excite, that (and this is crucial) suggest to us that there is some great plan that we remain blind to, but from time to time is partially revealed to us. More than this, coincidence is really the recognition of patterns, and it’s the recognition of patterns that helps us make sense of the universe we live in. It is a deeply human part of ourselves and to create it within an effect is no small thing.

Here’s, more or less, the presentation I use for a Darwin Ortiz effect I accidentally reinvented.

“Before we get started I’d just like you to do something for me. If you can take these cards under the table, cut them and cut them again, as often as you like, then take either the top or the bottom card, turn it upside down and stick it back into the deck.

“Done that? You can place the deck down here. We’ll come back to it in a moment.

“You see, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about coincidences. It strikes me that there are two key ingredients to them. The first is improbability; what the chances are of a particular thing happening. But that can’t be the whole story. The odds of rolling any six numbers consecutively are something like one in 47,000 but no-one rolls 6,3,5,5,2,4 and thinks of it as a coincidence.

“Let me show you something. I did what you did earlier today. I took a card at random and turned it upside down in a deck of cards. Here it is. Why don’t you get yours, and just leave it face down here next to mine.

“You see the second ingredient is significance. A coincidence is really something that happens that is unlikely but somehow significant.

“With all of the billions of people alive in the world today, two people breaking their arms at the same time isn’t particularly significant. But if they are twins...”

The performer turns the cards over. They match.

To me this plot is gripping. The effect itself is solid, and it is played out against what I think is a real world observation both about what goes into making a coincidence and, implicitly, how coincidences seem significant to us.

Ah, but is it mental? I think it is. I think it’s magical too. It took me a while to realise this, but it’s in the way that the reveal is handled. The effect remains at heart a coincidence, but it is the certainty of the performer that makes all the difference. I had tried gingerly turning over the card, alive to the possibility of failure, but I dropped this in the end. The spectator turns over a card that matches mine. This is a coincidence.

What remains mysterious, though, is that I seemed to know with absolute certainty that that coincidence would happen. I don’t mean to say that this makes my turned over card a prediction - within the silent script of the effect, I have no idea which card I turned over. All I know is that my card will match my participant’s card. That certainty is something that adds to, rather than undermines, the joy of the coincidence.

Tabula Mentis XIV: Lateral Mentalism

On the ninth of November, Psycrets descended once again onto the HItchin Priory for its fourteenth meeting of minds, Tabula Mentis. It's a testament to the skills of the organisers that an event that offered such a wide range of thought and discipline, a programme that included everything from guided meditation to some sneaky stationery, never seemed less than cohesive.

After Dr Landman kicked things off with a brief demonstration of new effect the Ring of Gyges Peter Campbell Wells talked to the group about his experiences performing for several years at the Edinburgh Fringe. The Fringe is a big draw for performers, but its notoriety for the vast range of shows and average audience sizes purported to be in single figures makes it a somewhat daunting prospect. Learning of Peter’s experiences helps put that into perspective. Performing at the “Free Fringe”, which is essentially busking indoors, his approach has been to use his runs to develop commercial shows. I think the take home message of the talk overall is that you should consider doing Edinburgh only if you have specific things you want to get from the experience, and only if that specific thing isn’t money. It is possible to make money at the fringe but it is not the norm.

Next up was a talk by Nick Hobson on the Psycards deck he created in the 1980s with the help of illustrator Maggie Kneen. We started with a demonstration of one of the system’s strengths. Each attendee was handed an unseen card and guided by reader Nusa Horvat into meditation. Once in a relaxed state we were to think on a question in our lives, and then look at the card. This is the real power of the cards, that without any kind of formal tutelage in the symbolism used in the cards, it was possible to see in them some form of meaning pertaining to our questions. This is, for what it’s worth, what I think the reading process really is. The sitter contemplates a set of symbols and relates them to aspects of their own life. That is not to reduce what I find a truly fascinating process, merely to state that I don’t think it is particularly other worldly. The ethics of giving readings only really starts getting sticky when the oracle is granted authority or if the reader gives advice. A reading ought to carry the same weight as a conversation had with a stranger. But that’s a discussion for another time!

I was put in mind of Stephen Young’s PhotoPsyche cards, a wealth of rich photographic imagery that, like Psycards, takes a step away from the “spookiness” of the Tarot or similar, older systems, and is well worth checking out.

Jim Cameron spoke next, on the subject of eye imagery in mentalism and beyond, and how he uses mentalism in his work. I’m dutybound not to say what that work is, but the talk as a whole was witty and knowledgeable.

Luke Jermay gave us his second full lecture for the group. He has said previously that the tricks that he lectures are only ever there to illustrate a point he wants to make about the craft. If that is the case then this was Luke Jermay unbound. With the exception of a lovely and effective bit towards the end, Jermay spoke solely about the philosophy he has brought to his own work in order to ensure that he has a unique proposition for the paying public. A highlight of the talk was an audio clip of Derren Brown speaking to an interviewer about his forthcoming show, except it wasn’t Brown but another performer. Jermay pondered whether the artist had actually trained his voice to sound more like the king of the hill, and whether such acts would make more money if they actually promoted themselves as a Derren Brown tribute act.

Jermay set out to make his show as different from Brown’s work as possible, and spoke of how, once he had established what his show was about, that decision allowed him to quickly select material, and solve scripting problems and the like. It’s been interesting watching Jermay develop following his return to the UK and he is fast becoming one of mentalism’s deepest thinkers.

Headlining the day, though, was Christian Cagigal’s performance of his remarkable show Now, And On The Hour. We were a little disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t be lecturing the effects from the show, but the reason for this became clear very quickly. In terms of method there was next to nothing that would not be known to most of the people in the room (though I still couldn’t follow his ACR!). However, his hour is extremely powerful.

He had been asked to condense a two-hour show down into an hour for a run in New York, but the he found the process difficult, reducing the show but still keeping it a show. The audience focused in on one particular effect, and the attendant presentation which involved his father, a Vietnam vet, and his discussions on topics such as telepathy and time travel. The audience wanted to hear more about Christian’s father, but Christian didn’t want to talk more about it. But finally he relented, and the result, a remarkably open and unflinching autobiographical show that retains its original theme of time travel, but does something heartbreakingly optimistic with it. We will often talk about how important it is to make a particular effect personal to the participant, but we tend to overlook what can be achieved when we make an effect personal to ourselves.

At the top end of the show, Cagigal asks “Do you ever get that feeling that what you’re experiencing now has already happened, and that it will happen again?” It’s a great moment because it reflects not only the show’s central conceit, that the character of the performer is trapped in a single hour, ritualistically acting out the same tricks, the same memories, but also that the real Cagigal must do the same (until, he admits, he can no longer find the emotional strength to do it). Lastly, it reflects the cycles of behaviour that Cagigal relates in his past, the circles we travel in that ultimately serve to harm ourselves and those that we love, but remain difficult to break out of. There was a lot of manly sniffing going on by the end.

Cagigal will be immortalising the show in a film that intersperses the performance itself with conversations with collaborators of Cagigal, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it.

The other side of the Tabula Mentis meetings is, of course, meeting up with fellow travellers. With the day over, we repaired to a couple of Hitchin’s alehouses, to unpack all we had taken on board through the day, to share whatever effects we were currently working with (Choked may have come into play at one point!), and generally just share in our curious belongingness.

These meetings always leave me energised and inspired, and I can’t wait for my next fix in March.

#Tabula Mentis #Psycrets #Luke Jermay #Peter Campbell Wells #Psycards #Christian Cagigal

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Mainly Mental