#false shuffle

[sleightofhandsecrets-blog]

False Faro Shuffle http://sleightofhandsecrets.com/controls/false-faro/

[fuckyeahactionpalm-blog]

Fuck Da Police

These days, in between smoking pot and thinking to myself "wow, my Zarrow shuffle really looks good in the webcam," I occasionally have to step outside the shotgun house that I bum around in and go make some actual fucking money. Though I do not really consider myself an artiste in the strictest sense, I have certain artistically inclined sensibilities when it comes to video work (this is not to say that I won't sell out the first chance I get*).  Composition, lighting, and especially good sound quality (which I believe to be the most underrated and yet most important parts of filmmaking) must all be just so, meeting my never lagging standards. When filming interviews, a habit I have picked up from working with people who know what they're doing when it comes to sound recording, is to ask my subject to tell me what they had for breakfast while getting sound levels.  I find this a good question to ask for several reasons: 1st, because it is specific--far better than saying "hey asshole, talk about something for a minute," 2nd, because unless I'm conducting an interview in sub-Saharan Africa, pretty much everybody had breakfast this morning and will remember what it was.  I also realize how offensive that last line was.  My apologies if you're from sub-Saharan Africa. So, for example, this morning (actually more like 1pm) I made some bacon and eggy-in-the-basket.  It was fucking good.  Now, I could be more specific and describe how I saved the bacon renderings and cooked the egg in a piece of texas toast and then put the bacon back on top and covered the whole thing in swiss cheese and butter.  More detail.  It happened to me, I ate it, so I remember it pretty well.  Also it was around five hours ago as of this writing, so it's not too much of a stretch for the details. If you ask me what I had for breakfast yesterday, it was some Eggo waffles with butter (beginning to see a trend?) and honey and a cup of hot cocoa.  Again, not too much of a stretch of the memory.  But let's say you ask me what I had for breakfast a month ago today, November the 25th.  I have no fucking clue.  I could look at a calendar, maybe and figure out what I did that day, maybe figure out what I likely had for breakfast (probably bacon), but the 25th of November is just another day that blends into a lot of other days just like it. Now, say I ask you what you did for your birthday three years ago. It might take a little bit, but I assume one could recall more or less what he or she did that day. Most people have a certain feeling of birthday-ness that they associate with the going-ons of those particular waking hours.  Even if you don't remember what kind of cake it was, you know there was a cake, maybe you drank too much, took a shit on a table--I don't know (or particularly care), but some memory of what that day felt like exists.  But what if I asked about the day six days before your birthday three years ago?  Unless you're one of those super-memory savant types (in which case, fuck off, this article is not for you), you may be hard-pressed to come up with anything.  Maybe you went to class, but the people you saw, the conversations you held, let alone what you ate for breakfast, are all indistinct. I'll get back to all that momentarily.  My primary concern is the shortcomings of memory and empiricism.  An excellent documentary that deals with the subject thematically is Errol Morris' Thin Blue Line. First a disclaimer: when you watch it, you will lose all faith in law enforcement and the legal system (as if you had any left).  Let me go on the record and say, fuck cops, fuck DAs, and fuck Dallas County. Thin Blue Line details a murder case in November 1979 in Texas.  Morris conducts interviews with the convicts, the lawyers, judges, witnesses, and policemen.  It becomes clear during the course of the film that the facts, are not, the facts, that through whatever human error and the fact that Texas is fucked up (apologies to my one friend from Texas), reality becomes distorted.  The empirical data does not match up with itself and as such, the truth becomes amorphous, eventually to the point of irrelevancy.  Whatever actually occurred is clouded by the misinterpretation of events (and perhaps, it is implied, some legal meddling). In short, everyone interviewed is sure of their own interpretation, despite contradictory evidence. See, human perception is not as accurate as we may like to believe.  Our picture of the world is stitched together by our brains.  Consciousness, in a sense, is purely chemical.  We see something and, influenced by our personal biases built from prior experience, we ascribe a unique classification to it in out minds.  This is not a new idea by any means--it is the reason symbols carry meaning swastika equals bad, dove equals peace, and all that shit.  Of course we interpret things we see with bias--it's a fucking survival mechanism: red plump berries are good to eat, small green ones are bad.  It is through the combinations of these biases, through this stitching process that our brain does, where discrepancies arise.  Each of us, we see a seamless picture--our own personal composited reality; ergo we believe that there is always an concrete, objective truth of the matter.  What happens happened exactly as we interpret it. But the rough stitched edges are revealed in our recalling of events--we first and foremost recall the feeling, because this is the most visceral part of the memory. If you've ever been in a car accident you'll likely first remember that it was loud, you felt the shock.  And trying to piece it back together, what you felt will inform what you remember. In the performance of a magic effect, a strict emphasis is often placed on the mechanical sleight, uniformity of action.  By no means should this be undermined, however, it should not be the primary concern.  With the execution of a secret action, attention should be placed on the audience's empirical interpretation of the visible action. Naturalness is, as many magicians will forget, primarily a question of attitude.  The act of de-emphasizing a moment in a routine hinges not just on one's ability to cover it with some physical movement, but on honestly and truly not giving the moment any importance.  What is the audience feeling at that very moment?  The execution of false shuffles, for example, should not invite scrutiny.  If you can do the Zarrow with the audience placing their head down on the table, parallel to the cards and still being unable to see any hint of the riding block, then wonderful.  The easy part is over, because guess what? Anybody can fucking do that!  Remember that whole thing about the audience not detecting let alone suspecting that a secret action has been made (I think it was that Brad Christian guy who said that...)?  Achieving that is not simply a function of the hands.   One achieves it though body language, mannerism, eye contact.  You know. Being a normal human being. Here's a little secret.  You can do a strip out shuffle that flies by everybody in which you only telescope the cards halfway and then pull them back out.  All because the action isn't studied.  What people will remember is the feeling of the action.  If you look at something, the audience will look at it.  It then follows that if you care about something, the audience will care about it. The same thing that can put an innocent man on death row can make an effect stronger. Also, if anyone posts a comment or reblog (or however the fuck tumblr works) about what they had for breakfast three years and six days ago, fuck you.

[magicianscorner]

Push Through Shuffle with a twist... and Second Dealing

[fuckyeahactionpalm-blog]

Life Lessons, Italo Calvino, and The Roman Shuffle

So I was sitting across from SR. It was approaching midnight. The Applebees waitresses were wiping down tables, sitting at the bar having after-work drinks. SR and I will sometimes stay until one--the manager doesn't mind.

SR's been through all the evolutionary phases of card guy--from card punk who thinks he's inventing new revolutionary concepts, to move monkey, to forward-thinking student, to contemplative seeker of the Real Work.  That's how I see it anyway.  But he's read just about everything on the subject of cards published before 1997.  That is to say, that while most of his professional material involves using strong subtlety over involved sleight of hand, he know all the moves.  I think I've dug up something pretty fucking obscure and he'll look at me and give me a list of three other people who independently published it ten years before the reference I'm thinking of.  And not only that, but he can do all the obscure moves.

"So I've been reading Marlo's Riffle Shuffle Systems," I say.  He looks up from his shuffling and nods.  "That's some good stuff in there--a lot of groundwork."  I nod.  I started reading "Systems" to get info about cull shuffling--for me, it was a purely technical endeavor.

"You looked over the Roman Shuffle," he asks.  I had. It's a cool way of doing a strip out from an in-the-hands riffle shuffle.  I didn't think too much of it at the time--you need a table to do the cut at the end and I had learned the regular strip out anyway, so it didn't seem like something that really needed my attention all that much.  "Yeah, I said," and proceeded to do the shuffle with what I thought was a pretty good technique.  "No," he said, "not like that."

I didn't really get it--I had executed the shuffle exactly like it was described, covering where I needed to, getting a really fine brief.  I thought it looked good.  "It's not that kind of false shuffle," SR told me.  He picked up his cards and did it.  I watched closely--he did it nearly the same as I had, but there was something about it--I just figured it was the fact that SR has a much more natural touch when it comes to cards than I do.

"Do it again," he said.  I did.  "No, stop, right there.  You need to actually try to shuffle them."  I looked down.  "You're doing a false shuffle. You need to do a real shuffle."

Let's back up for a moment. Hopefully someone out there other than me has heard of a guy named Italo Calvino.  Easily one of my favorite writers of all time.  His prose style is the kind where you read it and while the words he uses don't seem particularly significant, nor his sentence structure anything out of the ordinary, you can tell that this is a kind of writing unlike any other.  It has this feeling to it, the way it flows into your brain.  If you haven't, go out and get a book called Invisible Cities.  It is my favorite novel of all time (And Lolita, too.  And some other books that are also my favorites).

Calvino also wrote, just before he died several essays entitled "Six Memos for the Next Millennium."  The first one is entitled "Lightness."  So just what the fuck is Lightness?  Quite simply, it is the removal of weight from things.  Here is a short excerpt:

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language...

I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the events of our century, both collective and individual. I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque. Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world–qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them...

At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa.

(and no, I don't actually believe than anyone will read this)

And now to the nature of "The Roman Shuffle." I won't obviously describe the technical details of the move--it's not my fucking job--however, I can provide a general outline of what it is, at its core.  The shuffle's intended objective is to closely resemble the casual riffle shuffle used by the amateur lay person--one who does not know how to bridge the cards--it's a riffle and coalescence of the packets.  This is followed up by a cut.  It is a strip out shuffle, but the mechanics to get into it are different.

So what I showed to SR was the shuffle as according to the dictation of the mechanics, but I failed to do it as described.  This is not a burn-the-hands shuffle.  That's not to say that it couldn't be burned--it can, but that's not the purpose.  It's supposed to be disarming--the Magician is shuffling the cards like everyone else--it's fast, direct, not at all flourishy--entirely utilitarian.

The shuffle is a "Light" shuffle.  Marlo removed the weight from it.  Many tabled riffle shuffles are, as Calvino writes, "a slow petrification."  They have weight.  For lightness to exist, so too must weight exist.  We as cardicians learn and practice things that do carry weight with them.  Lightness is a vector--it is mobility, it is unencumbered.

When I did the shuffle for SR, I did it as a demonstration of a shuffle.  This is what technique becomes most of the time when it is performed--that is, the effect is not performed, but the technique.  The effect may carry weight, or it may be light, but the technique, I believe, must be light.  The Roman Shuffle embodies this lightness.  I finally understood what SR meant when he told me I was doing it wrong--the way the shuffle is actually designed is so that the cards must be shuffled--actually shuffled; the construction itself creates the false elements. The shuffle that I do must be a true shuffle and I must trust the technique to be light without actually making it so.

I'm am quickly realizing that this will make no sense whatsoever to someone who doesn't know the Roman Shuffle.  I'm okay with that. Read Calvino, study Marlo.  When you've done that, you can tell me how much I'm wasting my life (it's a lot).