You would think that there aren’t many safer bets in life than buying Fortnum & Mason tea for relatives at Christmas. I sent some via airmail to my uncle in Greece in early December. When it arrived (mid-January) he sent a note saying ‘I will think of Prince George every time I drink the Christening Tea’. I wonder how many other customers made the same mistake as they rushed around looking for gifts. The teller probably thought ‘Here comes another one…’ while saluting me in the customary Fortnum’s manner and relieving me of a tenner for a box of teabags. I believe this is called KYC (know your customer). The customer may still be king in Fortnum’s, but the king has no clothes on.
Category: Situations
Reading situations
The Waldorf Salad Effect
Greater wholes and what produces and binds them are hard to define. The synergy of, say, the media and the events being reported by them remains vague and peripheral as we keep them separated into their constituent parts. We never think we are looking through a camera lens or through the mind of a journalist, who the cameraperson or writer is and how they came to be there, what their affiliations or biases are; only what we view through their lens as if their camera or words are our own senses. Our own biases, of course, are just as hidden, and what we see is reality – that’s it.
Think Time and the Importance of Being Foolish
Problems are often created out of thin air by failing to see the reality of a situation or concept. One imagines that a certain situation pertains or has changed due to some unfamiliar but actually unconnected factor, when in reality nothing has changed. The Double Un—–t is always the same, regardless of whether one is c—ing cards from top to bottom or from middle to top. The number of cards in the top section – one or 25 – is an immaterial factor. When those cards are moved to the bottom, the card below them comes to the top. One is automatically a byproduct of the other. The number of cuts is also irrelevant; you could have simply made a single, straight cut.
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Visual vs Cerebral Magic
The difference between something seen and something reasoned or thought about is obvious. I can show you, say, two apples and three bananas (five fruits in total) or alternatively ask you to think of ‘2a + 3b = 5f’. One is perception (or a mixture of perception and thought) and the other, purely thought. In magic, however, the differences between visual magic and cerebral – tricks seen and those created in the mind – are not immediately clear, mainly because most tricks are a mixture of the two.
Routining – The Formal Side of the Equation
We have looked at the multi-dimensional world of routining for the informal performer. In that world there are fewer formulae and fixed ways of looking at routining, because informally one is not doing long routines for captive audiences, but at most linking tricks individually or in pairs for people and groups who may not have asked for or expected a magic show. As mentioned there, we might produce the four Aces and then do a trick with them, but we won’t do a five-minute routine of Ace tricks if we know what’s good for us (and our spectators). To do so would be to end up ‘putting on a show’ and dominating a situation where, probably, all people wanted to see at most were a couple of card tricks as part of the broader social interaction. It’s equivalent to someone asking ‘How are you?’ and then using them for the next half hour as a surrogate therapist.
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The Multi-Dimensional World of Routining
As soon as you learn more than one piece of magic, the question arises as to what order to do the tricks in. Of course with two tricks it isn’t hard; you just do whichever trick feels right, first. However, as you develop a repertoire over the months and years this approach to routining – doing tricks in whichever order feels right – remains the core approach. Other factors such as choreography and logistics become more significant the more one develops magically, and the professional must be acutely aware of peaks and troughs of impact; but the artistic and intuitive side of the equation remains strongly significant.
10 Rules for Magicians
Rules are like inflatable armbands when a child is learning to swim: once you can swim the armbands become a hindrance. Once we start to become competent at magic we develop an intuitive sense of when to do certain things and when not to; continuing to think rigidly in terms of ‘rule #7 says such and such’ will hinder us. But when we are starting out our knowledge is less sophisticated and benefits from general guidance in the form of simple rules. The truth of many of these rules still resonates for years to come.
Psychology of Conjuring – Part 3
In the first two parts of this series (Part 1 and Part 2) we looked at patter and misdirection in terms of their psychological impact on spectators. Using patter is so much more than reciting words (when performing informally we don’t usually recite anything at all): we have to use the right words in the right way, both to connect with people and misdirect them effectively. The subtlety and complexity of this task comes to light when we acknowledge that everyone we perform for, and every situation, is different. The more one is aware of this difference, the harder it is to produce satisfactory results, but the better those results will be. This is why at top levels in any art form we have the pained and self-loathing artist, whereas at the bottom, anything goes and everyone is happy doing a slapdash job. Probably the best approach for the everyday magician is the middle path: concerned and interested, but not obsessive about getting it right.
Psychology of Conjuring – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series we looked at how patter forms a link between ourselves and our magic on the one hand, and our spectators. If nothing else, patter justifies what we do. In everyday life there is normally no reason, for example, to thread a finger ring onto a pencil and then look at it! Only a child playing a make-believe game would do such a thing. But if the ring represents, say, Houdini, and the pencil, prison bars (or the two objects, and the magic done with them, illustrate particles in quantum physics, say) then we have a reason for doing something that in everyday life has no purpose (making a ring appear on a pencil). It would, in fact, make more sense to use special props – a magic wand and/or magic ring – as then we are demonstrating the special properties of those specific props, properties that borrowed rings and pencils do not have.
Psychology of Conjuring – Part 1
Misdirection is all around us. In business it’s better to offer customers a payment plan than to tell them when to pay. Not only are we ‘offering’, but ‘payment plan’ is not just payment; the mind is misdirected by the word ‘plan’ which waters down the idea of payment. In casinos they use plastic chips to help distance players from the idea of betting with money. In the media, the superficial far outweighs the serious when it comes to reader attention (just look at what news stories are trending right now). It could be said that a psychologist is someone who academically studies how other people use psychology in real life, such as con artists, card cheats, shell-game operators, fraudulent psychics, pickpockets, and magicians.