The Real Fake Thing

How many of you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender?  Not the movie, the show.  Very different aesthetic for a Western cartoon, no?  I'm not what you'd call an expert on Asian history or art, but it seems pretty obvious that the animators deliberately based their creation off of actual Asian cultures.  They didn't just throw some kimonos and almond-eyed character models at the screen and call it a day.  Any of my readers who are experts can correct me on this one, but my best educated guess would be:

Air Benders - Tibet/Nepal
Earth Kingdom - China
Water Tribe - Mongolia
Fire Nation - Japan

This technique has been around longer than you think.  One of the first writers (I'm aware of) to use it is Robert E Howard who based the cultures of his Conan mythos, The Hyborean Age, on real world nations and cultures to create a sense of familiarity among an alien landscape.  Tolkien later did the same with Middle Earth, but with mythology instead of actual history and societies.  In this way, you have a frame of reference to wrap your head around.

Not to say it can't be done creating a mythos from whole cloth.  The catch is that it requires a lot of work and even then you'll probably be drawing on real world sources for inspiration.  A lot of good works have been created that way but you have to ask yourself if you're willing to commit yourself that fully to building a world.

I've written in my book "Exalt of the Weird" that a coherent mythos is important to verisimilitude.  If you're contradicting yourself every other sentence, then you're only going to take your audience out of the experience.  This is especially true for bizarrists and mentalists.

I bring this up because Halloween is approaching.  And wouldn't it be more impressive to your audience if you demonstrated something that actually referenced old superstition or local folklore?  Every place and culture has its stories, mysteries and folk tales.  Their own unique superstitions, blessings and charms.  So what is a ghost?  Do you have an answer for that?  You should.  If you want to get into character and scare people, you need to devote more thought to your mythos and give people the real fake thing.

Price Tags and You

"What is a cynic?  A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
-Oscar Wilde

Look at that quote.  Really think about it for a minute.  In the last few years, the magic market has become saturated with products.  Single tricks, DVDs, books, ebooks, gimmicks.  And they tend to run the gamut from astounding (Ladybug by Paul Harris) to trash (iFloat).  A common complaint I hear is from magicians who despise the one-trick DVD trend, or sometimes even buying individual effects if they're not large-scale illusions.  The logic is always that the price is too high when you could get way more from a copy of Mark Wilson's or Modern Coin Magic.

Those of you who know me are aware how quick I am to recommend fundamental texts before DVDs.  For the beginner, they're a bargain.  Lots of material for little money.  And that brings me to the point.  Before we simply write off a product as too expensive for the quantity of content, try judging how much it's worth to you.

Some people would call me crazy to have spent the money I did on Docc Hilford's System 88.  But the system has been good to me.  I made my money back and then some.  There are people who have bought and performed material that I wouldn't touch, but they make it work whereas it would have just looked awful coming from me.

Value is relative.  It changes from one circumstance to another.  Prices are fixed by the market based on supply, demand, and the cost of manufacturing and distribution.  They are influenced by value, yes, but value is something separate.  Warren Buffet once said that his skill set in business and investment is disproportionately rewarded in the modern US, but if you were plunk him down in Peru, he admits that he wouldn't be doing so hot.  People in the States value what he does, but an agrarian economy... not so much.

The same is true of you and the material you learn.  Whether or not a book or DVD is worth the money depends on you, your act, your character, your style, and the sorts of shows you do.  So before saying, "That's way too expensive for a single trick!" consider instead the content and what you personally would get out of it.  Yeah, there are some really terrible products out there, cobbled together as obvious cash grabs with slipshod methods that could only fool a drunken toddler...  But maybe not as many as you think.

Voice and Scripting Workshop

With this post I'm happy to announce the official launch of my first webinar and scripting workshop on Sunday, May 13th at 6:00 PM EST. During this 3-hour session hosted on tinychat, I will be teaching everyone to strengthen their voices and command a room just through sound. I will be working with everyone to fine tune their scripts and routines as well as come up with new scripts suited to their performing styles. I will also endeavor to recommend each person sources of fiction and non-fiction to help inspire them to write new original material.

However... there's a catch. This webinar is a private affair. Entry into it costs $20 and only 10 spots are available. It is strictly first come, first served. Anyone interested in this must send an email before the end of Saturday, May 12, after which I will no longer be taking in applicants. Send an email with your request to join the list of attendees with the subject line "Script and Voice Webinar" to alexander@witchinghourproductions.com and you will subsequently receive instructions on how to join the webinar and a PayPal request. If you send me an email and the webinar is already full up, I will put you on a shortlist of people who get first crack at the webinar the next time I host it. You will not be asked to pay anything until the new date has been scheduled. If there is sufficient interest, it may not be long at all before I do this again.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Learning Styles

Whenever the subject of learning styles comes up, there is inevitably some argument about visual learners and books vs. DVDs. This is unfortunately something of a fallacy and both sides usually end up doing more harm to themselves than good. In the interest of trying to clear it up for some of you, my readers, I thought now would be a good time to explain how learning styles actually work.

Learning styles are commonly perceived as what media gets us the most effective gains. People who say they're visual learners claim to learn better from DVDs, but then the question becomes, what kind of person learns better from books? What other senses besides vision are books perceived through? By this definition, learning from everything except CDs is visual learning.

In reality, there are three learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. These are not simply a matter of dominant senses in a physical manner, but rather which sense we use as a lens to contextualize the information we take in. It's how we filter and describe our experiences. Sound complicated? It's really not. Let me give you an example. If you were given a choice of movies to go see, there are three ways you might describe your choice. A visual person would pick the one that they say looks really good. An auditory person would pick the one that sounds the best. And a kinesthetic person would pick the one that they have a really good feeling about. If that sounds arbitrary or superficial, keep in mind that this is all about how your brain contextualizes information.

A visual learner is someone who creates visuals in order to organize the information in their brains. They create elaborate maps and webs of interconnected ideas and info in their heads. They associate images with one another in order to create a tapestry of knowledge and understanding. This is why they will say things like, "That looks good," when describing something.

An auditory learner classifies everything by structure. I ask you, what is more structured than music? Meter, tempo, key, chord progression, cadence, etc. Music is the ultimate expression of order. Auditory learners are drawn toward list-based information or that which is presented in a clear and simple structure or hierarchy. Rather than create a map of information, their brain keeps an inventory. They are the ones who will say they, "like the sound of that."

A kinesthetic learner is unique in that they filter everything through a lens of action and feeling. It doesn't matter if you present it in a list-based format or something else entirely. The information won't stick until they've actually done it. The kinesthetic learner endeavors more than the other styles to commit actions to muscle memory. While the visual learner says the situation doesn't look good and the auditory learner says it sounds like trouble, the kinesthetic learner will tell you that they "have a bad feeling about it."

It is not uncommon for people to have a dominant and secondary learning style. For example, I'm primarily a visual learner but also inclined toward kinesthetic. This simply adds an extra dimension to how you contextualize information. I create a map of information in my head, but that map won't be clear until I've acted on that information.

I tell you all this so that you can understand not to thumb your nose at a specific medium for learning materials. The medium is not important. What is important is that you know how your brain is going to take in and catalog this information. Once you understand that, the source becomes irrelevant. Book or DVD is unimportant compared to what you do with the content.

So which of the three are you?

Putting the Cart in Front of the Horse

This is a little different from my usual posts, but it's an issue that comes up now and again and I want to address it for future reference.

Magic has been around for a very long time, and there are lots of teaching materials and references to choose from if you want to learn. Not all of them are good for beginners however. Show of hands, how many of you have seen a guy say he wants to learn more about mentalism and someone tells him to get Psychological Subtleties? One of the reasons I created my beginner's guide to mentalism is because this happens too often.

Please, do help people. But don't recommend material that you don't already have and don't recommend material that was clearly intended for more intermediate or advanced performers.

Do Something with This

Escher Wrist Band

What it says on the tin. That's too cool not to do something with it. While you guys are doing that, I'm going to go get some aspirin because staring at that thing is making my head hurt.

Psychic Sciences

People have been asking me about cold reading a lot lately, so I thought it was time to finally address this. To be a reader, it's best to know at least one psychic science, preferably more. I know to a skeptic the term sounds like an oxymoron. Really, we're just referring to systems that enable a reading.

Palmistry is one of the most common varieties as it's very easy to learn and study and can be done literally anywhere with no prior setup. There's a certain level of depth to it, but getting the fundamentals under your belt is typically all you need to start doing short readings.

Astrology is another popular choice because it still retains a certain ubiquity in our pop culture. Newspapers still print astrological horoscopes that are about as deep and accurate as a fortune cookie, but millions of Americans still swear by them.

Tarot cards remain popular even with all of the media out there showing them to be just fancy decks of cards with no supernatural qualities whatsoever. It's not uncommon to give readings using the only the major arcana, but using the full deck is also recommended.

Numerology is a little less common, but still very frequently seen among readers. Reason being that the use of numbers makes it look more like math or science and that leads many people to think that makes it more credible. It's really no more credible than the other psychic sciences, but that's largely irrelevant to the point, isn't it?

From here, we get into the psychic sciences that are popular within the New Age movement but don't have as large an audience outside that. The first would be tea leaves. By now most of us have seen the tea leaf reading scene in book 3 of the Harry Potter series and that's more or less what it's like if a bit less dramatic.

Gem stone readings are not uncommon in some regions, though they tend to have less appeal outside of the New Age movement. If you plan on doing a lot of readings in Sedona, Arizona you can probably find an audience for this easily. Otherwise, do you research on the local markets first.

Crystal gazing still has an avid following, though you have to be careful not to let this slip into the realm of camp. Considering how frequently crystal gazing has been lampooned in pop culture, that's pretty easy to do. Approach with caution and make sure you've got the acting chops to pull it off.

Rune readings are a bit niche, though if your city has a large Goth community such as LA or New York, it's worth looking into. The PUA community went through a fad of rune readings for a while, but I haven't seen that as much lately. Probably because, as I said, it's pretty niche.

There are others, though their popularity is even more niche than runes. Candles, free writing, doodles, dice, auras, etc. They can be a good way to provide people with something different and interesting or they can just be a total bear to have to explain to everyone. It really pays to know one of the more popular systems described above before you dabble in any of these.

Now why go through this? Because most of the people buying readings already believe in one or more of these systems. That's just where the market is. Ian Rowland in Full Facts of Cold Reading has said that you don't actually need to learn any psychic sciences to do a reading and can just fake it. He's half right. You don't need a psychic science to do a reading. But if you think you can do an astrology reading and just make crap up on the spot and no one is going to catch you, you're dreaming.

Again, this is where the market is. It's obvious that Mr. Rowland has never performed a paid reading for the shut eye market in his life. There's no other way he could make a statement that profoundly arrogant and ignorant. The shut eye market who are the most likely to buy readings are already familiar with these things. They know what the various star signs mean. They know what the major arcana mean. They know this stuff. And if you make up meanings for star signs or whatever, they will know you're taking them for a ride.

"Ah, The Hierophant! That means there's travel in your future!" Yeah, and if you pull my other leg it plays Judas Priest.

Mind, you can get creative with it. Docc Hilford describes a young man who does readings in a nightclub using Docc's System 88 program in which he gives readings to young ladies based on a kiss test. They give him a kiss, and he makes his reading from there. No kidding. Of course, unless you've got the charisma I don't recommend trying that yourself.

The point is that if you're going to be doing readings, you should have one of these systems ready to go. It's part and parcel with the job. If you find these psychic sciences so offensive to your sensibilities that you refuse to learn them or use them to facilitate readings, then you're probably not cut out to do readings at all.

I Have a Fetish

Now if that isn't the most provocative title I've ever used... Something that most people forget is that the word fetish has uses outside of the bedroom. The original definition referred to an object assumed to have supernatural power, typically of the protective variety.

I've spent some time studying real world superstitions and see the recurring trend of the use of fetishes and charms. Naturally, Westerners are most familiar with the ones that originated among the Slavic tribes or out of Christendom. And even some of the latter were co-opted from beliefs amongst the Greeks, Romans, Slavs and Germanic tribes. Once you really dig in you find a lot of interesting information.

If you're a bizarrist or otherwise like to perform with a more realistic supernatural persona, it's worth it to do some research on this yourself. The concept of a charm, fetish, amulet, or other mystical gizmo is deeply ingrained into the collective unconscious, some of the symbols even transcending national and cultural borders. For example, almost every culture believes that salt has power to either purify or ward off evil. Sumo wrestlers throw salt into the ring to purify it, even if they're not Shintoist themselves but still adhere to tradition. Among Westerners, a ring of salt is allegedly able to block evil spirits or even trap them.

As animists, the Native Americans built a large portion of their spirituality around fetishes. The Sioux for example would adorn their headdresses with strips of weasel skin at the temples because they believed it would make them swifter and react faster. Flint featured heavily into their myths, though those stories varied greatly, and was typically attributed mystical power.

Harlan Tarbell briefly described this phenomenon in Lesson 4 of the Tarbell Course, which makes it surprising to me that so few magicians still take advantage of it. Perhaps in our more cynical post-modern world we've stopped believing that such things could mean anything to anyone. But think about it for a second. Not many people wear medicine pouches anymore. And unless you live in certain parts of Louisiana or the Caribbean, you probably don't know what a gris-gris is. But how many sports fans do you know who have a lucky jersey? I'll bet most of you know at least one.

Charms haven't gone away, they've simply altered their form to match the aesthetics and sensibilities of the modern world. The function remains the same. The world is full of variables and forces that are beyond our control and it gives a lot of people a sense of comfort to believe that a talisman of some sort can alter fate in their favor, if only to a small degree. It should come as no surprise then that if you have a charm or fetish in your show, people will pick up on the meaning of it quickly enough.

On reflection, I think there might be another reason that magicians don't use these things anymore. Beyond the fact that the trappings have fallen out of vogue as of late, there's a prevailing attitude I've noticed even professionals parroting that goes, "I don't want the [prop] taking credit for what I did." That never sat right with me because most of the time people are not going to attribute supernatural or even mundane but secret powers to an inanimate object. In some cases however you want them to. There are times when you don't want to make it about you and what you can do. Drawing their attention to a mystical trinket can in reality be one of the most effective forms of misdirection.

Think about how much the atmosphere of a seance for example would change if next to his candle the magician also placed a bulb of garlic, or if he hung a wreath of hawthorn over all the doorways and windows explaining that it was a precautionary measure for the safety of the sitters. I know a magician who has a routine to turn himself into a vampire before the audience's eyes. Imagine a magician doing something similar after handing a spectator a holy talisman or pendant that he had been previously wearing through the whole show, as if it was the only barrier between him and the transformation. Imagine the same, but with a more totemistic sort of charm and the transformation being into some variety of lycanthrope. Imagine a Q&A act about romance utilizing an antique wedding band on a chain for a pendulum. Perhaps a performer is doing a routine based on myths of ancient China and wears a pendant of obviously Chinese design showing five bats, which is considered an extremely lucky symbol in Chinese folklore. The possibilities are limitless.

If you've got the character for it, consider utilizing this. It can spice up your act with a touch of realist mysticism. And yes, I know that sounds like an oxymoron. Just roll with it, okay? We have literally millennia worth of rites, traditions, superstitions and mystic trappings from hundreds if not thousands of cultures. There has to be something in there that you would find useful.

Hold Your Horses

In an earlier article, I talked about escalation and why it's a losing battle. In case you need a refresher, escalation is when artists pile on spectacle in lieu of actual creative inventiveness or innovation. The Star Wars extended universe is a prime example of this. And those of you who lived through the 90's probably remember Dragon Ball Z, which was about 10% animation and 90% insanity.

That in mind, I wanted to touch briefly on restraint. Restraint is a valuable skill to learn, especially when you start writing your own material. The less you say, the more valuable your words become. The less you explain, the more sublime the effects appear. This is especially true when you get into bizarre magic and mentalism. It's a trap I see a lot of new guys falling into, so I want to repeat this and for you to write it down and put it somewhere visible in whatever place you practice and rehearse in: Melodrama is NOT better drama.

Unless you're auditioning for a soap opera, there's no reason to apply the emotions, pathos and atmosphere with a trowel. Michael Cain once said for very tense dramatic scenes with a close-up on his face, he actually dials back his reaction, allowing the audience to impose more subtext over it. That degree of restraint carried him to the Oscars.

This is further evidenced by an experiment made by early Russian filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov. The Kuleshov Effect, named for him, shows that context is key. In the experiment, Kuleshov recorded a film clip of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin. Mozzhukhin was a star of the early silent films and very well-known to the audience. The footage of him shows him with an utterly expressionless face. He is not acting at all. Yet when that footage was juxtaposed with stock footage of a bowl of soup, a pretty girl, and a child's coffin, each clip used to make a different short film, audiences raved about the sheer depth of emotion in his face. But each time the emotion they perceived was radically different based on what the editing lead them to believe he was observing. Their brains were filling in the gaps and making sense of the context. He was looking at that bowl of soup with "hunger" because that's what you think when you look at soup.

I want you to practice some of your facial expressions and gestures in a mirror. Obviously if you're working on stage or busking, a certain amount of scale is necessary so the people further back can see you. But if you're doing close-up, show a little more restraint. Subdue your own reactions to events around you. Don't be afraid of a delayed reaction if it means you're giving thought to what just happened. You don't need a shark's grin to tell people you're happy. A regular one will do. Don't fidget constantly to show that you're afraid. Keeping a little tension in your body language does the same thing much better. And please don't try to toss off a snarky one-liner when an "implied facepalm" sort of expression (Google it) will do just as well.

Bigger is not always better. Less is more. Learn to dial things back a bit and you'll find that you're wasting a lot of energy doing things you don't have to.

Breathing and Ribs

There's a very simple secret to getting great low tones and a commanding voice. Stand up straight, and take a deep breath in through your nose. Do NOT lift your shoulders. Visualize directing your breath into your back and side. Feel the floating ribs (the ones at the bottom of the rib cage) push outward. Put your hands on your sides so you can feel it. Now try to keep your ribs expanded as you speak, letting the voice resonate in your chest.

That's it. By expanding the chest cavity, you create a better resonance chamber for the sound. A strong low end allows your voice to carry more effectively and has more authority to it. Practice that for a while and let me know how it works out.

Sleightly Negative

'Tis the season again! Apologies for the lack of posts, but the holidays have been keeping me derailed lately. I did want to get one post up before the new year though, but I didn't know what. Then I reminded myself that this is a season of peace and good will. We're all filled with positive thoughts. And then it hit me.

Here's something I'll bet you didn't know. The brain isn't very good at processing negatives. Really. Now, reading this paragraph intellectually you'll probably retain the previous negative of "isn't." But if you were in a more emotional state, the brain is going to be more inclined to edit the negative out and interpret the sentence differently. This is a trick political campaign ads have been using for years and something magicians can make good use of.

Let me illustrate. When trying to distort the sequence of events in an effect, magicians will sometimes say something like, "I didn't touch the deck at any point," or, "You shuffled the deck," planting in the audience's head that the magician was uninvolved in what happened. I find the latter to be slightly more effective because if I remove negatives and keep the attention away from what I did or did not do, there's less chance for their brain to accidentally edit out negatives and remember (correctly or otherwise) me manipulating the deck or whatever.

We already know that the brain is a very fascinating thing in its capacity for editing reality. So give this a try. Go through your scripts and routines and change any and all references to what you didn't do to what the spectator did. Even if it's a bald-faced lie, if they're emotionally involved and you say it with enough authority, their mind will edit the memory to match.

It's a bit knackier, but you can also use this phenomenon to your advantage by accenting and pacing a sentence in such a way that the negative being edited out by the brain helps the illusion. I myself haven't had a lot of chances to use this myself and wouldn't really recommend giving it a shot until you have more experience with the principle. It has to be used very deftly to create an embellishment and shouldn't be used as a main element of the deception.

So in the spirit of the season, cut out the negatives and be more positive. Happy holidays, everyone!

Too Cool to Be Cool

This is something I've had on my mind for a while now. A while back when I was auditioning for agents, I received a comment, "You're not like other magicians." I asked how so. Feedback is always appreciated. The answer was disheartening however. I was different in this person's mind not by virtue of anything unique I had done, but by what I wasn't. And while that's certainly not a bad way to approach building a character, it was the fact that this person considered magicians to be cornball, oily windbags with bad puns, stupid pickup lines and a sense of coolness about 50 years out of date.

I started watching more performances from both the old guard and the new guard and realized she was right. Most magicians come across as a stereotypical used car salesman. Most likely because that sort of corny act worked at one point in history. But not anymore. Times have changed. What was fashionable then is nothing more than an embarrassing novelty now.

There is a way for such things to continue existing however. They belong in the realm of ironic camp. People don't like it when magicians in real life tell their stupid jokes, but they still laugh when Gob did it on Arrested Development. Why? Because it was made abundantly clear on the show that Gob is not someone we're supposed to like as a person. The other characters' reactions to his obnoxious behavior mirror our own. Gob becomes cool by being interminably uncool.

Yet despite this very obvious lesson, magicians still persist in hokey, outdated one-liners and personae, totally oblivious to the fact that no one under the age of 60 finds this sort of thing funny anymore. They take themselves seriously. Too seriously in fact. They really do expect us to laugh at puns and pickup lines that are about as funny as prostate cancer. They think their cornball pseudo-Vaudeville antics that wouldn't make the cut in a Looney Tunes cartoon are endearing. They're trying so hard to be cool and command the spotlight that you can practically see the veins popping out of their necks under the strain and no one is fooled. It's the polar opposite of a lovable loser.

If they took themselves less seriously and didn't expect us to like them because of their campy image, they'd get a lot further. But they don't. And so here we are.

If you're going to try to be cool, you have to do it gracefully and with a sense of restraint. Or if you think you can be ironically entertaining, knock yourself out. But for the love of all that is sacred in this world, please stop aping the magicians of yesteryear and expecting people to like it and take you seriously because you're just going to end up looking like a tool.

YouTube: Is It Really the Devil?

Much has been made in the magic community of YouTube and the various exposure videos and channels up and running on the site. It's drawn a lot of criticism, not always undeserved. But how bad is it really?

I'm of the opinion that magicians make a bigger deal of their secrets than is necessary, and in the grand scheme of things YouTube really isn't that big a threat to us. The exposure videos are annoying, but if you're good at what you do, you can still maintain the mystery to your show. There are obvious ethical concerns with the exposure channels, especially the ones trying to monetize them, but that's not really what I want to address here.

See, what I think is the bigger problem with YouTube exposure videos is how crap most of them are. A lot of newbies go online looking for a place to get started, and unfortunately the exposure videos are pretty convenient. I'm not angry with the newbies. They don't know what's considered proper procedure in this community. How could they? It's not like we go out of our way to publicize it. And doing so would just draw more attention to the exposure monkeys and killjoys anyway.

The problem this creates however, and it is one that we have to be aware of in order to remedy, is that a lot of new guys end up getting their start learning from a bunch of incompetent teenage attention whores with the manual dexterity of a three-toed sloth. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: YouTube tutorials are to learning magic what a Swiss army knife is to open heart surgery. The overwhelming majority of guys who post these videos are terrible magicians and worse performers. I've looked up some of these videos, believe me. They couldn't deliver good scripting to save a burning orphanage, their hands are all stiff and weird like they're doing an impersonation of a robot at the bottom of the uncanny valley, and they have the timing and character of a fart in the middle of a eulogy. Their webcam performances could not be any worse unless they were stabbing you in the face is what I'm saying.

Yet this is where a lot of new guys get their start. And it's a bad thing because then they develop bad habits early on and they have to spend time breaking them. Time they could have spent refining the material they have or gaining a better understanding of the fundamentals. Learning from YouTube is one step forward, two steps back.

But ultimately the magic community must share a certain amount of blame here. Being as dramatic about our secrets as we are, there's a certain degree of outsider unfriendliness and suspicion. Guys turn to YouTube because other magicians don't make themselves very approachable. The majority of us aren't complete jerkoffs, granted. It's more a sense of complacency. It's an unintended side effect of our culture of secrecy.

So YouTube is not the threat many of us imagine it is. The problem it presents is more indirect. And the best we can do to combat it is to just step back and consider if perhaps we might be acting a bit too secretive. If more newbies discover early on that there are better ways to learn and that we will happily volunteer that information, we'll see the audience for the exposure monkeys shrinking. They'll never truly go away, but marginalizing them means there will be fewer new guys who get a bad start due to the incompetence of Magic Exposure Channel #347.

Make the Other Guy Look Good

As magicians, we love attention. Don't try to deny it. To be a performer, you have to enjoy the applause to some degree. You have to have a bit of an ego to enjoy being in the spotlight that often. But there are times when it's appropriate to give up that spotlight and make one of your spectators the star of the show. I'm going to give you two examples from my own experience, but keep in mind that there are many, many more.

When I was busking in 2008, there was one day where a young boy walked behind me as I was in the middle of a routine and he caught me palming a coin. He of course had to announce this to everyone. I didn't make a big deal of it, and neither did the audience. Hey, these things happen sometimes. No sense getting bent out of shape.

Unfortunately, the young man decided to stick around. His father stood about 50 feet off, watching mutely as his son watched my next several routines, loudly voicing every idea he had for how he thought I did something, no matter how outlandishly wrong those theories were. I didn't give him any attention, but boy howdy was this kid stubborn.

After about 15 or 20 minutes of him trying to shout over me and getting in the way and his father doing absolutely nothing I decided that enough was enough. I called for a volunteer, and framed the card effect I was doing as the work of the volunteer (whom we will refer to as Jeff) rather than me. Of course, after the reveal the boy shouted out his theories, but this time I interrupted him. "Hey! Jeff was talking."

I gave Jeff a moment where he looked good in front of a small crowd and turned things on the kid to make him out as being rude, not to me, but to Jeff. Since I made Jeff look good, he was now on my side. Sure enough, at the next effect the kid piped up but was immediately shouted down by Jeff and all his friends barking in unison, "Dude, shut up!" The kid walked off after that. He wasn't going to get the crowd praising him for how smart he thought he was. They wanted to enjoy the rest of the show. And Jeff didn't want someone messing with the guy who just gave him some of the limelight.

At another time, I was doing a set for a guy and his girlfriend. I had a suspicion that the guy liked the show, and wasn't going to chase me off, but he wasn't entirely on my side. I asked them if they felt they had some sort of special connection and that I wanted to test it. I had the girl select a card, which I controlled to the bottom of the deck. I asked her to look at her boyfriend and try to focus on her card.

When I turned to the boyfriend, I held the deck in both hands and tipped it up slightly so that he could see the bottom card but she couldn't. As I told him to look into her eyes and reach out mentally, I tapped the card and gave him a little nod. He understood. He looked into her eyes, paused a few seconds, and named her card. The look on her face was priceless. Her boyfriend of course left a generous tip in my hat.

If you make a spectator look good in front of a crowd or their friends or even a significant other, they will be your buddy. And they will thank you for it. Leave an anecdote in the comments section about any times you've used this principle yourself.

Horror Movies for Dummies

A friend challenged me to watch 30 horror movies this month, bonus points if I could get some ones I'd never seen before. Sadly, my schedule has been frenetic at best, and I don't think I'll be able to meet the challenge. But it did get me thinking. There are different kinds of horror. Some are better than others. Not all movies are created equal. And horror is a very ghettoized genre. It certainly doesn't help that it's difficult to write but every anonymous twit with a word processor thinks he can turn out something shocking and scary when he's really just aping whatever clunkers he saw at the box office recently.

So it occurs to me that it's time to provide a list of essential horror movies for those who are still relatively new the genre. If you want to do bizarre, shock, or haunted magic, you have to know how to do it right. You have to know the history of the horror genre. Since movies are my thing, I'll that there. So here, in chronological order, are the horror movies I believe are mandatory viewing if you want to add horror to your magic.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: This is the granddaddy of all horror films. a surrealist tale of madness and entrapment. It set the bar for the rest of the century.

Nosferatu: The original "Symphony of Horror." While some contend that Werner Herzog's 1979 remake with Klaus Kinske was better made, the original still has a strong place in film canon.

Haxen: If you're not into documentaries, large portions of this movie are going to be difficult to get through for you. However, it contains some striking visuals and will give you an introduction to real world superstition and religious fanaticism that shaped Western culture for centuries.

The Universal Studios Monster Movies: Take your pick. Whether you're watching a vampire, a werewolf, a mummy or the creature from the Black Lagoon, it's all magic, baby!

The Val Lewton Horror Collection: I argue that Val Lewton is one of the most underrated horror filmmakers of the Golden Age. His clever use of light and shadow and camera work made his movies unbelievably creepy.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers: This was arguably the birth of paranoid sci-fi, and though I love the remake as well, the original is still worth watching.

Psycho: This is Neo-Gothic horror at its finest. A tiny pocket of wrongness and evil in an otherwise normal world. There's a reason the shower scene became a pop culture icon.

The Haunting: Please see my earlier review for why you need to see this movie.

Night of the Living Dead: I'm not just recommending this one because I'm a Pittsburgher myself. This was a game-changing movie that redefined the zombie mythos and created a new face of evil for artists all over the world.

Rosemary's Baby: Forget that Paranormal Activity crap. If you want demonic overtones, this is how you do it. An intensely creepy movie with a bleak, tragic ending but not for the reasons you might initially think.

The Wicker Man: This is without a doubt one of the single greatest movies about the evil that men do. The creepy behavior of the villagers juxtaposed with the sunny locations and cheerful Scottish folk music really gets under your skin.

Halloween: This is Movie Zero for the slasher genre and actually has comparatively little gore and a small body count. It builds itself up on unrelenting creepiness and atmosphere, which is a good lesson for performers to observe.

The Thing: The next two are for the shock magic fans. Body horror in the 80's was all about the spectacle of the wet death. It hit audiences in a very vulnerable place. John Carpenter's foray into the genre is one of the bloodiest and bleakest films you'll ever see.

The Fly: What separates a virtuoso artist like David Cronenberg from a kitsch king like Herschel Gordon Lewis is the intelligence behind their works. This is one of Cronenberg's most successful movies, despite its intense gore, because it plays out more like a tragic opera than a monster movie.

The Hitcher: A distinctly less gory 80's affair than one would expect. This film is mostly defined by Rutger Hauer's chilling performance.

Se7en: Not a pretty thing to see, certainly, but a great example of the evil that men do. Other than that, I'm have to be honest. The 90's was pretty desolate. There were very few good horror movies that decade, and even fewer great ones.

28 Days Later: Zombie purists will argue this isn't a true zombie movie, but it stands out as a strong entry for 2000's horror for being the best of the scientific zombie flicks of recent years.

The Mist: This is seriously one of the bleakest films on this whole list. Really. The ending is such a friggin' downer. There are some parts that are a bit cheesy, but the atmosphere is great.

Geese - There's a Lesson in There

I looked out a window at lunch today and saw a flock of geese flying south for the winter. I remembered that the reason they fly in a V formation is to make the trip easier. The strongest of the flock are at the front, taking the heaviest winds and drag. The weaker members are at the back of the V where they take less wind resistance. In other words, you can tell who the leaders of the flock are based on their strength and status by watching how the flock flies.

My point? Humans are not so different. If you watch people long enough, you start to notice subtle signs and signals. When performing for a group, watch for who's got the status. Who is the leader. They're the one you really need to win over. Impress them, and the rest of the group will follow.

Friendship is Magic (Literally!)

So the new season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has started this month. Yes, I watch the show, as I'm sure some of you reading this do as well. Trust me, it stopped being ironic a long time ago. If you don't watch the show, then being connected to the internet at all in the last year means that you've probably at least heard of it and the immense, sometimes psychotic, fan following that it has generated. I was tinkering with the idea of working references to the show into some of my all-ages routines, and that's when I decided that now would be a good time to bring up the subject of being topical.

When you're in the entertainment industry, it's actually very important to stay on top of trends, fads, and patterns. Some do it very well, such as Cracked dot com. Some do it very poorly, such as the studios that still refuse to screen horror movies to critics, even when they turn out to be a hit with the social media crowd. Being topical is not easy. You have to pay close attention to the ins and outs of pop culture and get a good sense of what's selling, what isn't, what's popular, what's not, and why. Then you need to ask yourself if this is of any use to you. And then you have to actually research the topic in order to present it intelligently, smoothly, and in a way that doesn't make me the audience want to punch you.

If you want to see some of the worst attempts to be topical, take a look at early 90's cartoons that featured a rap song in some way. Bear in mind that rap was only just going mainstream in the late 80's and early 90's. The genre had been around for years prior, but groups like Run DMC and Public Enemy were taking it to the surface. Artists like Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. also lent their respective talents to expand and refine the genre artistically. On the other hand, there were also more commercial hip-hop acts like The Fresh Prince and MC Hammer who were making a style of rap that was... let's say, much less scary to white people. With the trend of rap as a mainstream genre on the rise, a lot of media moguls and producers tried to be topical and capitalize on it.

The result was some of the worst music ever made and subsequently marketed to children. I still remember cartoons and the commercials accompanying them with awkward MC Hammer references and some of the worst rhymes and flow I've heard in my life. Even as a kid who at the time only listened to whatever I happened to catch on Alternative Nation (a show back from when MTV was still about music), I could tell this was awful.

The sad thing? The same fate is befalling most performers who try to be topical. They come across as awkward, pandering, and ironically out of touch. They show no actual comprehension of the pop culture trend they're referencing. They end up looking like an old fart using anachronistic slang that's 20 years out of date in a desperate attempt to sound hip. I'm reminded of the documentary Uber Goober, a film about the history of games and the lifestyle of gamers. One of the interviews was with a musician by the stage name The Great Luke Ski who lamented that most humor about games and gamers was based on shallow stereotypes that took zero thought to come up with. He elaborated that he tries to deliver actual wit and humor by cracking jokes as an insider, someone with real knowledge of the subject he's singing about.

You must remember that lesson if you want to be topical. Yes, I know that which is topical has a limited shelf-life. Most of the time. Some pop culture phenomena live longer than any of us ever will, so some things will be pretty safe to work into a show years from now. But in the short term, being topical has its advantages. It opens doors. It's something everyone can relate to in some way. It gives them something to talk about. And it gives them an easy point of reference. In an earlier post, Brandon Porterfield described his experience doing a Pokemon-themed birthday party. Brandon didn't have much Pokemon merchandise to work with, so he was forced to be creative. He had to learn about different Pokemon, what they did, and get a decent idea of the franchise's premise and appeal. These circumstances allowed him to create a show that was both topical and effective.

So all you bronies out there, producing a Rainbow Dash figure out of thin air like would a coin or a card just isn't going to cut it. You have a chance to get in front of people and book shows because you can give them magic based on a show that a lot of people love. But you have to know the show, you have to take the opportunities it gives you, and you have to be creative with it. Be topical, but don't screw it up.

As an aside, I wrote this entire post without once making a single horse pun. You're welcome.

Whoooo are you?

Can you tell I'm having a bit of a classic rock binge?

A while back I learned a mnemonic device from Docc Hilford. The problem with names is that they're abstract. It's true that if you trace the etymology of a name far enough back you can discover it's meaning, but that's still an abstraction. If I told you to think of a car, you might think of different brands or models, but you can think of a car because a car is a specific thing. But what if I asked you to think of a Steve? Or a Jessica? Not quite the same, is it?

All memory is based on recall, the ability to connect thoughts together through association. The trick Docc Hilford shared with me is to associate someone's name with something memorable involving that name.

"What's your name?"
"Scott."
"Great!"

"What's your name?"
"Ash."
"Housewares?"

"What's your name?"
"Steve."
"I've got some jobs for you."

"What's your name?"
"Jessica."
"Like Alba?"

Don't worry if they get the joke or not. As long as the association makes sense to you. If they don't get it, just wave it off with a simple, "I don't know what that means," or, "Nothing, I'm just spitballing."

I've been using this technique for about a year now and it works every time. Give it a shot.

More Visual Characters

In a previous article, I talked about how visual design says something about a character, or rather that it should say something. Mystery Men is and always will be one of my top examples, but it is by no means the only one. I asked for contributions for other examples of this concept, but sadly came up short. So I scoured my own collection and came up with a few examples to elaborate on this concept.

Agent 47

The protagonist of the Hitman games is an example of very good, elegant design. Black suit, white shirt, red tie. An appearance of professionalism appropriate to the character. The lack of hair anywhere on his body, even eyebrows, gives him the look of both a fighter and something slightly alien. It's a subtle wrongness. That menace is complimented by the black gloves. This is a man who will kill you because it's his job and he will feel nothing.


Captain Marvel (Shazam)

Long story short, there are two Captain Marvels, one owned by DC and the other by Marvel. Marvel owns the copyright on the name, so DC has to market their Captain Marvel under the Shazam moniker. Look it up if you're really curious. Anyway, striking red, white, and gold color scheme that conveys a sense of regality and authority. Chiseled looks giving the image of a clean-cut good guy. The overly muscled physique also implies the power he wields and not just physically. The cape and double-breasted shirt give an old-fashioned military apperance while the sash suggests a touch of the exotic, anachronistic, even mystical. That mystic angle is enhanced by the embroidery on the cape and the lightning emblem on his chest. Archetypal Golden Age superhero with a mystical background. He is easily identifiable as a good guy and the color scheme and silhouette make him instantly recognizable as soon as you seem him in a comic panel.


Kikuchiyo

From Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune's character is a farmer impersonating a samurai. It soon becomes apparent to everyone. His perpetually hunched gait implies a life of manual labor in the fields. His top knot is sloppy and poorly grown. He's always dirty and itchy, obviously not bothered by getting his hands dirty with farm work. He carries a sword as almost no soldier would and possesses little if any combat experience. He clearly has no idea what he's doing and this quest to save a village from bandits has put him in way over his head.

Throat Infection Remedy

As I write this, I'm unable to sleep due to pain from a nasty throat infection. However, I thought I would take a moment to share with you all a home remedy that is quite nice for dealing with these things: apple cider vinegar. Organic and unfiltered if you can get it.

Apple cider vinegar is very rich in vitamins and minerals and when mixed with honey and hot water makes an effective remedy for acid reflux as it allows the body to absorb calcium faster and balance your internal pH. It also improves the immune system, helps maintain the liver and kidneys, aids in weight loss, and improves digestion. Good to have in your pantry in general. But for throat infections... well it's slightly less pleasant. In that case, gargle a tablespoon of it. Straight. For about 5-10 seconds.

Yes, it's going to taste unbelievably horrible. Your tongue will wither. Your taste buds will organize a protest rally. But the vinegar will kill bacteria and viruses on contact, impeding the infection and aiding the healing process by acting as a natural antibiotic. Obviously you should still stay hydrated and get rest, but a little extra help never hurts. As a performer your voice is one of your most valuable assets. Take care of it.