essay
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Memorability: A Misguided Proxy Metric
Category: essayRead more: Memorability: A Misguided Proxy MetricWelcome to the final post in our series on memorability. In the last post, Jerry referenced the “Magic By The Numbers” survey, and in particular, the open-ended question that was used to explore what magical audiences expect to get from a live show. While the raw responses are not available, the summary does not mention…
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Read more: Mnemonic Possession: The Arc of History Bends Towards Oblivion
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. Edward de Bono One of my favorite activities lately has been attending magic shows with laymen friends. I get to pick up a few new performance ideas and get my finger on the pulse of the art as it’s actually being…
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Spectators as Mirrors
Category: essayRead more: Spectators as MirrorsI met one of my best friends in person for the first time in 5 years. I flew to the country where he was living just to meet him. That first evening, he introduced me to a large group of his friends in his apartment. After he hyped up my card skills, they asked me…
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No One Is Keeping Your Souvenirs
Category: essayRead more: No One Is Keeping Your SouvenirsEveryone wants to be remembered, but the human memory is notoriously fallible. No one is going to remember exactly everything that took place in your performance next week or next month, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have any influence at all over what is remembered. Rather than jump immediately into every possible aspect…
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Read more: Banachek’s Salad: Eggplant Is the New Broccoli
I’ve always enjoyed the psychological force of a carrot over the other forces Banachek has written about. The carrot force in its basic form is described in his Psychological Subtleties 1. What I’ve always liked about it in particular is that a carrot does not appear to be the classic archetype of a vegetable. What…
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Read more: Thinking Through Methods, Pt. 2
Welcome back. In our last episode Drew learned the value of thinking through methods. Today, he’s going to detail how he began to undertake this philosophy and what rewards he reaped by doing so. I just told myself I’d wait for the next time I was fooled. The next time I’d demonstrate patience, and this…
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Read more: Thinking Through Methods, Pt. 1
There might be a time (hopefully) when a magician friend of yours fools you with something badly. You have no clue how it was done. In this scenario, I implore you to think about the method, instead of immediately giving up and asking how. This post was inspired by a café meeting I had with…
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Monkey Business
Category: essayRead more: Monkey BusinessI have been a bad magic student. Up until recently I have largely neglected reading the Vernon classics, but I have been working to right that wrong. Vernon’s work contains a lot of valuable insights, but perhaps the most important thing I have learned so far is that Vernon had a pet monkey. I had…
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Read more: Dr. Strangelike or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Like Dariel Fitzkee
I originally became interested in reading Showmanship for Magicians by Dariel Fitzkee after Darwin Ortiz coined the phrase “the Fitzkee fallacy” in Strong Magic. The way Ortiz characterizes Fitzkee’s philosophy seemed objectionable to the performance of magic but especially so to the social performer. Recently, I chose to read it, if only out of morbid…
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