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THE NEAT REVIEW ISSUE TWO

THE NEAT REVIEW ISSUE TWO NEW YORK CITY 2019

Editor in Chief & Creative Director ALEXANDER HANSFORD Illustration & Art Consultation KEZDEARMER Photography BENJAMIN PRATT ALEXANDER HANSFORD KEZDEARMER ALLAN HAGEN

CONTRIBUTORS Tony Chang Eric Hu Eireann Leverett Benjamin Pratt Ricky Smith Tatanka Tan Vera Tobin Asi Wind CONTACT: @neatrvw on Instagram [email protected] ORDER: ultraneat.org The Neat Review is an ad-hoc journal, published two to three times a year. The articles published herein reflect the opinions of the respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the publishers and editorial team.

ISBN 978-1-5272-5019-2 Printed by Park Communications Ltd. The Neat Review proudly partners with Art ofPlay and As Is craft beer bar.

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© 2019 Ultra Neat Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Ultra Neat Ltd.

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WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM

TONY CHANG RICKY SMITH VERA TOBIN BENJAMIN PRATT ASI WIND TATANKA TAN ERIC HU , EIREANN LEVERETT

TO OUR READERS New York was terrific. During my time there I felt I got a peek into what it's like to be a part of the New York magic scene. It is a force. While I can't speak for every magician in New York, the group that I hung out with definitely had a resolute basis for what they believe magic to be. This isn't a definition, but it might aim at a definition. Maybe it's more of a framework for magic. Yes, let's call it that. This 'framework; as we insist on calling it, was at odds to the scene in London, and makes for a wonderful contrast against our first issue. The New York City Framework for Magic™ (as inferred by conversations and time spent with Tony Chang, Ben Pratt, Tatanka Tan, Asi Wind, Eric Hu, and Ricky Smith) - Magic is a craft, not an art. - It is about creating an experience for someone, not about getting the biggest reactions. - It is about trying to explore what magic can be, asking questions that risk breaking the structure of "what a magic trick is''. - It is heedless of commercialness. Heedless in that you know the benefits of the commercial, but reject subscribing to it as a constraint. - Almost unanimously this means having magic as a hobby, not a profession. - Magic is situational, thus you do certain tricks in certain scenarios, and only in those scenarios. The group I spent time with had the luxury of not having to make their performances fit into every type of situation. This meant that their approach to magic - what magic could be - was far more open than that of most magicians. They are aware that certain tricks will feel miraculous in some situations, yet horribly contrived in others, and are okay with that. There also seemed to be a keen study on the definitions of 'magic' and 'magician; striving to find conviction on what those are for oneself, regardless of the opinions of other practitioners. You feel in the way these folks think about magic a sensitivity to the duality of definitions in general, allowing room for definitions held by practitioners and those of the general public, and how those interweave. I appreciate in painting or acting or rhetoric things that are sorely missing from magic. I appreciate them elsewhere because they are missing from magic. In this rather unexpected way magic reveals a new richness to the arts. Plunging the depths of what magic is, hitting its walls and ceilings, finding its limitations, all of that business carves out an acute awareness for the expanse and scope of the arts. Magic is not an art. But it is a craft, and craft can point at art. So, how necessary is magic? The conversations shared with these folks in my weeks spent in NYC have stirred in me a new passion for what magic can be. Others would talk about belief in magic, a faith in its relevancy. They might mention the crisis of conceptual art as a parallel: magic is only relevant if you believe it is relevant. I come away from New York feeling as though magic is more complex and subtle and necessary than I ever thought before. I find a greater need to start answering yes-or-no questions with "No ... but yeah, but no'; and to make room for the subtlety and nuance inherent in all these unique, if very niche, ways of seeing the world. I can't wait for you to read how these wonderful people think about our craft and its relation to others, and hope it deepens the mystery for you all.

ALEXANDER HANSFORD

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Eric Hu runs Baby Grand, a boutique karaoke bar in Brooklyn. He has done magic for 14 years, and recently began working for Derren Brown on his Broadway show 'SECRET'. @wahpah babyg rand.com

VERA TOBIN Vera Tobin is an associate professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University. In her research she explores cognitive bias and how people think about other minds, investigating links between cognition, language and narrative, and how people interpret and construct narratives together. veratobin.com

TATANKA TAN Tatanka Tan is a hobbyist magician, semiprofessional gambler and chess player. He studied psychology and sociology, and collects trinkets. @tatankatan

TONY CHANG Tony Chang considers himself to be the 4th coolest guy he knows. Besides having a passion for editing commercials, he is also a magician. Having spent most of his youth performing on the streets of Seattle, Tony has applied his sleight of hand skills towards his editing. It is also known to many of his peers that his mother loves him dearly. @tonychangnyc

Eireann Leverett is a hacker and hobbyist magician. He runs a cyber security company, and is a regular speaker at computer security conferences such as FIRST, BlackHat, DefCon, Brucon, Hack.lu, RSA and CCC. He helped build the first cyber risk models for insurance with Cambridge University Centre for Risk Studies and RMS, and continually studies computer science, cryptography, information theory, economics, and magic history. concinnity-risks.com

RICKY SMITH Ricky Smith is a magic historian, and founder of the Buck Twins. Former resident of the Conjuring Arts Research Center and distant relative of one of the first cells to divide, he is currently retired in New York after having previously been tired. @diagonalpalmshift rickysmith.com

BENJAMIN PRATT Co-founder of craft beer bar As Is in Hell's Kitchen, Ben Pratt is a photographer, runs marathons, an~likes cardistry. @benjaminpratt

ASI WIND Asi Wind was born and raised in Tel Aviv, before moving to the US and settling in New York. Asi works closely with David Blaine, and has created material for all his recent TV specials and stage shows. Asi travels the world performing solo and alongside Blaine. Asi is also a painter, focusing chiefly on watercolour. @asiwind asiwind.com

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INSIDE

Vera Tobin explores what goes on in our minds when we experience plot twists, and the anatomy of surprise as it relates to fiction. Eric Hu discusses 'pipe dream' magic effects, and teaches an unusual card transposition trick. Eireann Leverett chats about how the worlds of hacking and magic overlap, picking locks for fun, and the nature of deception. Tatanka Tan teaches an unassuming, devastating card control. Ricky Smith and Benjamin Pratt take us on a walking tour through the city, learning of the history of magic here. Tony Chang suggests a new way of thinking about how to learn sleight of hand, and describes how to turn over a playing card. Asi Wind talks about painting and magic, and the aspect of time in live performance.

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Dr Vera Tobin is an associate professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. In her book, Elements ofSuprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, she argues that exploiting our mental limits allows for some of the most impressive feats of structure and aesthetics in narrative. "By capitalising on these biases, storytellers create aesthetic effects that are dazzling, vexing, persuasive and emotionally resonant:' The following excerpt has been adapted from Vera's book Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot - printed with permission from Harvard University Press. Copyright© 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

SURPRISE

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ELEMENTS OF SURPRISE Words by Vera Tobin

We all love a good plot twist. But what makes a plot twist 'good; and why are they compelling? For storytellers of all types there is a recurring predicament in carving out these special narrative hooks: how do we surprise audiences in a way that seems inevitable, or at least credible, in retrospect? To answer this question, we'll consider a feature of human thought that is typically understood in terms of hazard and limitation, and explore its potential as a source of creativity and pleasure.

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Novels, films, and plays are, among other things, perspective arrangements extraordinaire. They present us with words on a page, images on a screen, or actors on a stage. Through these, they conjure up a host of intersecting personas who see events from different angles, who remember and anticipate different events, who seem to know, want, and believe things-who can even themselves tell stories that are populated by yet more personalities, with their own varied and shifting perspectives. We clearly enjoy and value thinking about these sorts of complex arrangements of different perspectives. And by many There are a number of surprisingly durable measures, we are very good at it. solutions to the plot twist predicament. But when we look closely at what (Curious readers may like to sacrifice we do when we try to keep track of an afternoon to the wealth of material all these complicated viewpoints, catalogued at the website TV Tropes to it turns out that we make loads prove to themselves that tropes really do of mistakes. Cognitive science spring eternal.) The ones that I study can is full of this kind of confusing be as reliable as they are because they news: Hooray, we're brilliant! themselves rely on a kind of thinking that No, wait, we're terrible. Which cognitive science has described as a "curse is it? of knowledge" -a tendency that is a feature of both how we think about other Those who would like to emphasize the triumphs of human cognition can people and how we think about the past. 1 The curse of knowledge works like point to a healthy supply of compelling this: the more information we have material on the impressive side of the about something and the more ledger. Any species capable of inventing experience we have with it, the harder single malt whisky and the french-fried it is to step outside that experience to potato must be doing something right. appreciate the full implications of not The fundamental theorem of calculus is having that privileged information. quite useful, as well, and the integrated Information that is at the forefront of circuit is an elegant piece of engineering. our minds exerts a pull on our ideas The Colossus of Rhodes is said to have of what other people will know or been rather impressive. Euler's identity should be able to figure out. Once and Turing machines are clever notions, we know something (or think we do), and the Taj Mahal is a lovely place to visit. it shapes our expectations of what The "Ode to Joy" is a catchy tune. Umm other people are likely to know and Kulthum and Josephine Baker both made do and even affects our memories of some performances well worth attending. Sappho wrote a few nice poems. Mary how we felt before we knew it. Cassatt and Pablo Picasso were fair hands with a paintbrush. Einstein, too, was 1 The term "curse of knowledge" comes no slouch. from economics, coined in a 1989 paper by Perhaps most amazing of all is Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and the fact that, as part of our shared Martin Weber.

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birthright, human beings in general seem to be able, as Steven Pinker has put it, to "shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision"2 • That is,

"simply by making noises with our mouths"-or marks on paper, for that matter, or movements with our hands"we can reliably cause new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds': And yet, as Larry Summers, long before his tenure as president of Harvard, pointed out in a now famous but never published paper, "there are idiots. Look around" 3• Humans are often neurotic, obsessive, selfsabotaging, and petty. The most incompetent people consistently overestimate their own skills, while the smartest, funniest, and most competent people do the opposite-and, as the studies demonstrating the "Dunning-Kruger effect" have shown us, the less skilled you are, the less likely you are to realize it4 • We often blame ourselves when we are being oppressed and just as often blame others when we are in the wrong. We go to great lengths and expend considerable effort to put off doing small, simple tasks. We snap at one person because someone unrelated made us angry about something else, ten minutes earlier. We smoke cigarettes, taunt crocodiles, ride motorcycles without a helmet. When the odds are against us, we persist in thinking that we will come out on top. We believe in lucky numbers, drawing to inside straights, rolling the hard eight. We think that this time, just for us, things will be different. 2 Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow. 3 Fox, Justin. 2009. The Myth ofthe Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street. New York: Harper Business. 4 Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. 1999. Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 11211134.

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In short, the human mind is both endlessly dazzling and a source of bottomless disappointment. Its limitations are frustrating, but, excitingly, they are also the source of some of the most impressive tools in a storyteller's arsenal. Recent work looking at stage magic from the perspective of cognitive science 5 6 7 has shown that magicians' techniques can serve as rich sources of information about the psychology of perception. The tricks they have painstakingly developed to mislead and delight their audiences are also 5 Kuhn, Gustav, Alym A. Amlani, and Ronald A. Rensink. 2008. Towards a science of magic. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (9):

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6 Macknik, Stephen L., Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, John Thompson, and Susana Martinez-Conde. 2008. Attention and awareness in stage magic: Turning tricks into research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (II): 871-879. 7 Demacheva, Irina, Martin Ladouceur, Ellis Steinberg, Galina Pogossova and Amir Raz. 2012. The applied cognitive psychology of attention: A step closer to understanding magic tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology 26

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beautiful laboratories of perceptual and cognitive psychology. They show us when and how people will reliably notice some things rather than others, where they will see things that aren't present and miss things that are, and how they can be induced to believe they have been given free choice when only one option was ever available. The kinds of tricks that storytellers use are magic tricks, too, and they too take advantage of our cognitive architecture. Most storytellers are not cognitive scientists, but they certainly know that we all have blind spots in the way we make sense of the world. Those blind spots and biases are so tightly wired into the way we think that they act in ways that are predictable. And because they are predictable, writers and filmmakers have learned to use them to lead us (pleasurably) astray. By observing the shape of a good surprise, we can learn important things about the shape of our thoughts. The machinery of surprise depends on leading us to reassess what we thought we knew in carefully orchestrated ways. How those reassessments unfold can tell us a

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great deal. They show us interesting hidden facts about language, about perspective taking and intersubjectivity, about inferencing and self-reflection, and, best of all, about how all of these things work together and what happens when they do. For example, much of the pleasure of surprise is retrospective in nature. Suspense and curiosity drive us forward in our reading, speculating about what is to come, longing for some outcomes and dreading others. Surprise invites us to look backward, to appreciate (or disparage) how well the groundwork for the revelation has been laid, to savor (or deny) the new patterns of significance that the new information reveals in the early parts of the narrative. The curse of knowledge affects what happens when we do this looking back. Once we know the result of the surprise, in retrospect that outcome looks more inevitable and more predictable. We can see traces of this effect in what people notice and remember when they watch films and read books. It shows up in readers' tendency to remember partial clues as more complete than they were, as well as in their memories of the timing, obviousness, and structure of story twists after the fact. The information we acquire as we make our way through life or through a story affects what we think it's like not to know it. It constrains our guesses about the future, it colours our memories of the past, and it conditions our sense of what is or should be obvious to others. In these ways, knowledge itself creates predictable blind spots in our thinking. On the other hand, circumstances that make us overconfident in our judgments and predictions or that result in intrusions of false information into our memories of events also produce "illusions

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of knowledge:' Overconfidence effects8can produce illusions of knowledge by giving people the impression that they know with certainty that some mere inference or prediction they have made is actually a definite fact. The kinds of inferences associated with the curse of knowledge proper and those that produce illusions of knowledge both represent varieties of a general phenomenon I call "cursed thinking:' They both involve mental contamination effects where information we encounter in one context seeps into our representations of other perspectives, contexts, or domains. Scientific work on these aspects of human cognition has generally focused on cataloguing the errors that people make in solving problems or making decisions. These mistakes are real and can make real mischief for our efforts to understand and be understood. But the same tendencies that cause us such trouble also play an important role in storytelling, story reading, sense-making, and aesthetic pleasure. These aspects of their operation have received much less attention. To return to the magic of stories, then, people like to be surprised-at least sometimes, if the surprise arrives in the right way. Surprises in themselves are not so difficult to come by. If you want to surprise someone you're talking to, you could knock a vase off the shelf or scream or switch to gibberish midsentence. Making stories that will surprise audiences is pretty easy too: you can kill off 8 Oskamp, Stuart.1965. Overconfidence in case-study judgments. Journal ofConsulting Psychology 29 (3): 261-265. 9 Koriat, Asher, and Robert A. Bjork. 2005. Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31 (2): 187-194.

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characters with no warning or turn them into snakes. But a satisfying surprise is a different matter. As one recent guide to aspiring writers puts it, "The reason twist endings are hard is because they have to be a surprise without being a surprise" 10 • Surprises of this kind are not constrained to a single genre, though some genres-most notably the classic due-puzzle detective story-are more vitally invested in them than others are. Many stories in print, on film, and even in conversation are structured around a specific kind of surprise: one in which information revealed late in the narrative reveals a new, transformative interpretation of what has gone before. This sort of twist at its most dramatic pulls the rug out from under its audience; some of our most basic assumptions about the truth of what's going on are transformed in a sudden revelation that forces us to reevaluate previously represented events. This particular type of surprise requires a masterful balance if it is to be satisfying. The rug-pulling revelation must be genuinely surprising, but it's no good if the narrative simply tells you one thing, then another. This balancing act is a lot to manage, considering that the facts of a fictional representation are grounded only by what the representation itself gives to us. How can a story reliably give its audience the impression that one state of affairs is the case in the world of the text and later that it is not, without making a liar of itself? A narrative that seems merely inconsistent may indeed surprise us, but in a way that 10 Turner, Nicholas. 2012. Five ways to end with a twist. Script Frenzy. Accessed April 21, 2014, http:/ /www.scriptfrenzy.org/ node/413283 (no longer available).

is more likely to read as a failure of the text than as a gratifying success. To sidestep that failure, this kind of plot must build up a set of expectations only to undermine them later on, while also maintaining a sense that the undermining has all been done in a spirit of fair play. Specifically, the revelation surprise succeeds only if, first, it is unexpected and, second, it does not, in retrospect, conflict with the information otherwise presented. In fact, the surprise should do better yet.

In the ideal case, the new interpretation of events not only should seem compatible with previously narrated material; it should feel like a superior, more correct understanding of that information. These surprises are one variety of a phenomenon that Aristotle described as anagnorisis: when a story's turning point centres on a moment of critical discovery, in which the hero achieves a sudden awareness of the true nature of his or her situation. In a paradigmatic manifestation of the modern, rug-pulling version, it comes near the end of the narrative, in a dramatic incident that forces the audience, and typically one or more characters, to reevaluate the "reality" of some fundamental piece of what has gone before. But smaller surprises, or ones that come partway through the story, can also hinge on this kind of transformative disclosure. How do any of these stories work their magic-when they do? How can the same gambits succeed with the same audiences time after time? Crucial information has to be planted firmly enough that it

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will be remembered when the character that no other technique proper moment comes but can match. The author Mary Gaitskill 12 recently described her subtly enough that it will go own experience with this effect as unconsidered or misinterpreted she read Anna Karenina: "I found until then. Only then can one section in particular so beautiful audiences reliably experience both halves of the effect: and intelligent that I actually stood overlooking the information up as I was reading. I had to put the at first and recognizing it later. book down, I was so surprised by This effect can be more than just it-and it took the novel to a whole surprising: it can be poignant other level for me. You believe this and emotionally profound. complete turnaround. You believe As an example, let's look at Great it's who these people really are:' Expectations. It gives us the find it strange that the story of Pip, looking back from "I middle age on his origins as a moment[ s] these characters seem Victorian orphan from Kent and the changes in his life wrought most like themselves are the by two adults. The first is Abel moments when they're behaving Magwitch, an escaped convict in ways we've never before seen. whom Pip meets and helps in the short time before Magwitch I don't fully understand how this is recaptured. The second is could be, but it's wonderful that it Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster living in a decaying works:' mansion who is looking for a playmate In the case of Great Expectations, the for her ward, Estella. Thanks to the surprises of both plot and character get generosity of an anonymous benefactor, their electricity by exploiting the curse of whom Pip assumes to be Miss Havisham, knowledge. Both work by taking advantage he rises from the poverty of his youth of how permeable the boundaries of and becomes a gentleman. He courts embedded perspectives are for readers. the beautiful Estella, who insists that They depend on our willingness to let she cannot love him. When the convict information encountered in one place Magwitch reappears and reveals his role infuse our judgments and inferences in Pip's origins and social ascent, Pip is elsewhere. The different perspectives forced to face elements of his story and within the novel cross, mix, and mingle his identity that have been repressed; he is in a way that suggests a natural and forced to recognize, as Peter Brooks 11 has whole perspective-one that seems to be argued, that he has been misreading the gradually uncovered, or revealed, over events of his own life. the course of the novel. The rhythms In life, people continually surprise of surprise grow out of this process of us. In fiction, a character that is discovery. To start, they depend on our too surprising may seem merely having been convinced at least in part unconvincing or incoherent; and yet the element of surprise, when Fassler, Joe. 2015. When peopleit comes off, provides a depth of 12 11 Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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and characters-surprise you. Atlantic Online, November 3. http://www.theatlantic. com/ entertainment/ archive/2015/ 11 / by-he art- mary-gai ts kill- tols toy- annakarenina/413740.

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to share young Pip's interpretation of the facts of his circumstances: to "misread" events as he has done. Of course that's what happens, because our access to those events is filtered through what he tells us! And yet the result is not simply that we feel that Pip's account has been unreliable. Because we have followed his lead, we find ourselves also implicated in, rather than merely fooled by, that misreading. This narrative sleight of hand works in part because stories can tap into some general tendencies of human cognition that are vulnerable to exploitation. These twists capitalize very efficiently on general shortcuts and biases in our cognition. They use fundamental tendencies of our own minds against us-but also, ultimately, for us, because these tendencies are in a sweet spot of conscious accessibility that allows us to recognize them when we fall prey to them even as we are not quite able entirely to control or suppress them. That is how these tricks manage to delight and satisfy. A confidence trick can be successful if the victim never recognizes the deceit. This kind of narrative surprise, by contrast, presents both a ruse and a delayed-action means by which the ruse will be destroyed. If all goes well, when the deception is revealed, the "victim" will feel not victimised but gratified. What is especially handy about exploiting cognitive biases in this way is that people both succumb to them reliably and are also generally aware that they exist as a hazard 13 • This state of affairs has two convenient results. First, it means 13 Epley, Nicholas, Boaz Keysar, Leaf Van Boven, and Thomas Gilovich. 2004. Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (3):327-339.

that mere awareness of the pitfall is no guarantee against it, so that the technique can be effective even for audiences that have been taken in by similar tricks in the past. Second, it provides an avenue by which the audience can accept the misdirection as fair play. It is this sense that the authors didn't "cheat" that makes for a well-made surprise, though the defining feature of what I am calling here well-made surprises is not that they are made well, as opposed to poorly. Instead, the term is by analogy to a fashion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British drama, in what John Russell Taylor's 1967 monograph on the period aptly calls "the rise and fall of the well-made play:' The "wellmade play" or "piece bien faite" was a highly successful, largely neoclassical dramatic formula most famously developed by the French playwright Eugene Scribe. The formula emphasized plot over mood or characterization and drew heavily on Aristotle's precepts regarding the peripeteia: a sudden plot reversal that creates powerful emotional interest. The standard well-made plot hinges on a withheld secret, clever twists and turns, and a climax late in the piece in which protagonists defeat their opponents and all secrets are revealed. So the well-made surprise is one that follows (or aims to follow) a certain formula in a proper way. Whether a work deploys this formula in a paint-bynumbers succession of "mild stimulations" or in a way that transcends and resists assimilation to a type, the common aim of surprises in this tradition is to lead a reader in the direction of one set of assumptions and then exchange them, quite suddenly, for a new interpretation that overturns those assumptions. Their criteria for

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success hold that we should come away with a very specific impression: not simply that we did not know that a certain state of affairs was the case, or would result, in the story. Instead, the object is to produce what will later be framed as a mistaken (if also incomplete) idea of what was going on. The surprise revelation should seem to overturn that mistake. This is the logic of the well-made surprise.

at discerning what others perceive, want, believe, and intend. Scholars of literature and film have recently been especially excited about this particular aspect of our brilliant brains. Lisa Zunshine 14, for instance, has argued that the workings of "Theory of Mind adaptations" are what make literature possible and that the literary innovations of Jane Austen and Virginia urprISe Seems to e mUC eSS Woolf alike are the impervious to experience than result of pursuing new extremes suspense IS, I not a ways Ill t e of embedded representations ways that we presume. of characters' beliefs, making While many of the full satisfactions particularly taxing demands on this of successful narrative surprises are ability. David Herman 15 has argued only consummated on rereading, along similar lines that narrative audiences seem to feel that the firstembedding has special aesthetic encounter aspects of surprises are appeal because of the way that very important. Many people object it supports and recapitulates the to "spoilers;' a term that takes for everyday experience of thinking granted that to know a story's secrets about other minds. Certainly there ahead of time destroys its charms. is something peculiarly human and But while we are unlikely to be surprised specially complicated about the by information we already have, we narratives that we build to make can certainly be taken in by the same sense of our lives. strategies and formulas many times. Humans are endowed with an impressive For instance, red herrings-even if you ability to adopt the perspective of other recognize them as red herrings!-lead people. These dynamics of perspective you off track by taking advantage of what taking are crucial for both face-to-face Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann and literary discourse. But it is not at all called the "anchoring and adjustment" the case that people keep flawless track heuristic to exert a gravitational pull on of what other people intend, believe, and your speculation. Stories can encourage know. We do not always even manage to us to jump to conclusions about cause keep track of what we, ourselves, have and effect just by placing events next to intended, believed, or known in the one another. They can tap into hindsight past. Instead, we frequently overproject bias to make incomplete information information from one perspective to seem richer and more informative in another. We can't entirely set aside what retrospect. And the more engaging and immersive a story is, the more effective Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We it can be at getting us to be surprised by, 14 Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. or lose track of, discrepancies between Columbus: Ohio State University Press. different perspectives. 15 Herman, David. 2006. Genette As far as researchers have been able meets Vygotsky: Narrative embedding and to tell so far, humans are substantially distributed intelligence. Language and more skilled than any other animal is Literature 15 (4): 357-380.

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we know when we're thinking about what it's like not to know it or reasoning about who might not know it or when. Even when we're fully aware of these aspects of human cognition, we can't out-think them. It is this inescapabilty-together with the fact that we are in fact aware of these tendencies and that they can lead us astray-that lets authors pull off their magic tricks over and over again. Because narratives are complex perspective arrangements, the quirks of how minds do and do not reliably limit inferences across perspectives open up a vast array of potential narrative exploits that surprise us, even if we've seen variations of the form many times before. Ultimately, because we do generally believe that attributing knowledge or information to the wrong source is an error, the surprises that work this way can lead us to feel that what we missed was, or should have been, available all along.

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A note from our readers: DEAR MR. EDITOR, WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU PLAYING AT? IS THIS "ARTISTIC VISION"? THESE PAGES ARE BLANK. YOU'VE ASKED ME TO PAY FOR A SUBSCRIPTION TO THIS RIDICULOUS MAGAZINE, AND YOU CAN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO FILL EVERY PAGE? WE'RE PAYING FOR BLANK PAPER NOW ARE WE? HELLS TEETH! WAS THIS YOUR IDEA OF A JOKE? IF I WANTED REAMS OF PAPER I'D TRUNDLE OUT TO MY GARDEN YOU PRICKS TREES APLENTY OUT THERE! WARM REGARDS, Famed Mentalist

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I hangout with Tatanka Tan from time to time. He's an awesome underground close up magician based in NY, and we always end up chatting about our latest 'pipe dream' effects. I share ideas that I'd jot down as some impossible-to-achieve-but-may-inspire-melater types of things. I don't mean something like "do impossible signed card to bottle without accomplices, sleights, or touching the bottle'; but rather more hypotheticals that are driven by what spectators experience. As difficult as it is, I try to see things through the lens of the laymen rather than the magician's "fairest and most fooling way to execute a plot that other magicians will envy''. Not that I'm not guilty of yearning for those overawed reactions from an audience, but I found that this angle opens up other ways to think about magic. And not all pipe dream effects have to be exactly like this, but it's just what I gravitated towards. At some point, Tatanka and I started asking others magicians whenever we all got together to jam. Surprisingly, NO ONE ELSE had any pipe dream effects. The notion was completely new to them. We found it weird that something that seemed so natural to us had not even been considered by others around us. Maybe our sample size was a bit small, but still, it got me wondering what the magic community dreams about.

And I realised I wanted to explore *that*. There are so many emotions other than just surprise or being in awe of the "impossible" to explore as magicians. Yet, for the most part, those are the two main characteristics attributed to magic performances. Surprises and being fooled are great and all, but what about everything else? I don't have the answers, but I like asking the questions. The questions get you thinking. The more I asked, and chatted with Tatanka, the more I thought about what are some different ways we can think about magic. This is different for everyone, of course, but for me it was the connection with other people. I want to be sharing something that lasts beyond the magical effect. Not just "How did that just happen .. :' but more. Okay, I'll give

WHAT DO WE WANT TO SAY

WIITH OUR MAGIC?

This lack of pipe dreams is surprising to me since we're supposedly such a creative and artistic community. Or so we claim. But of course, some caveats here, art is subjective so this could lead down a road of arguing semantics. For the purposes of what I'm talking about, let's call whatever we're driving at here "the expression of one's self''. This made me think. When we perform magic, what are we creating, exactly? Effects aside.

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ERIC HU

you an example. And, no, I don't have a method. Method isn't the point here. I'm at Baby Grand, an awesome boutique karaoke bar in Brooklyn, NY, owned by a dashing gentleman. Business is good tonight. As I talk to a friend who I've met that night, I gently nudge the conversation to the subject of knowing someone. When appropriate, I respond to her,' "Well let me ask you this. Take a look around. There's a lot of people here, but find one that stands out to you that you find interesting, in a good way, just by looking at them. Take your time and point one out:' She scans the bar and points towards someone over at the other side of the room. It's pretty crowded so I ask her to describe who she's pointing at. "It's the girl by the window. She's got dark hair, wearing a yellow tank top, ripped jeans:' I go, "Oh, I see her. Okay, why do you find her interesting? Do you think you guys can get along? What do you think she does for fun? What do you think you guys might have in common?" I ask some other questions about why she picked this person, and finally ask, "Just by looking at her, who does she look like? A name, I mean.

Does she look like a Karen? A Mandy? I don't know, you tell me:' She thinks for a second, bounces between a couple choices in her head, and finally lands on 'Amanda'. "Interesting;' I say, "so she looks like an Amanda. Now let's keep going ... where do you think she's from? Don't guess, think about what her background could be:' She takes a moment, then says "Yonkers ... New York''. "Whoa, okay... hm ... wanna get her? Let's get her attention. It's a little loud but call her name:' "Amanda!" "Hm, louder. Don't think she heard you:' "AMANDA!" Amanda turns and looks around. We wave our hands at her and gesture for her to join us. "Yes?" Amanda is a little confused as she approaches us. "Hi, I'm Eric and this is Monica. Your name is Amanda?" Monica is speechless. "Yeah, do I know you guys?" "No, and sorry to bother you, but we were playing a sorta guessing game and she got your first name correct. What's your last name?" "Um, It's Buffamonteezi:' "Cool, Amanda Buffamonteezi. We didn't try to guess your last name, but ... where are you from?" "Yonkers:'

WHAT DO WE WANT TO SAY

WITH OUR MAGIC?

I"-'

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ERIC HU

ERIC HU

I leave and let Monica tell her side of the story. Worst case scenario, awesome effect. Best case scenario, they bond over this experience and become friends. Best best case scenario, they become lovers. There is a basic effect here. Someone guesses a stranger's name and hometown. But the idea is to go beyond just the "trick''. Most of us just go after the impossibility itself; guessing someone's name in this case. Okay, cool. But what does that mean? A typical supposed "solution" to adding more - whatever that "more" might be - is some deep, heartfelt, "philosophical" and "thought-provoking" presentation in our patter. I think that there are better routes than that, because that type of presentation only lasts for the duration of the trick. I've never heard of any spectators walking away and remembering what was said versus remembering how they were affected. In the case of the above 'pipe dream' effect, these two shared a moment that becomes a story, and the story could continue and connect these two people and they may go on to be in each other's lives. Or even if it's just having an awesome hang through the rest of that night, getting to know each other. The point of this is considering what they experience, not just stroking my clever ego. (Or hypothetical clever ego since I don't have a method ... yet.) One thing I'm trying to do with

this line of thinking is to see how we can try to get away from the "I am a magician, look how clever I am" thing.

WHAT DO WE WANT TO SAY

WITH OUR MAGIC?

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h kay, I've gotta come clean. I'm the dashing gentleman that owns Baby Grand karaoke bar. I'm not saying this to be showy offy. puring my time writing this, I just so happen to have learnt of something interesting that happened recently at my bar. ,A littlk backgrsmnd · into 1what my business partner Joey and I want our b~r to be. We want to ghre'people a great experience. When you come in, ~ ypu'p fit d)~at our space is small and awkward. But if you stay, you'll find it intimate and encouraging. The vibe is people singing their favourite 1 songs orf. s.tage, and~yeryone else loving that you're loving what you sing, . . and they'll sing'al51ig with you. They cheer and give you high fives when ymJ come off the stage. First-timers have a h~ d time not putting in more 11 · after their,first one. '" Which, by the way,nvny magicians aren't showing more passion wheri we perform is a mystery. We're more wordedrabout if we'll be 1 ling them or not. Or if we ..,.,,, ~• Jool~ ool' ~ ol;lgh wliil!_~G!ing them or not. Magicians covet the ego. Don't do that. j Mypoint is: people love seeing others being passionate.

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So, what exactly do we want out of magic? To me, it's always been about what to give to other people and how to give this very special thing to them. Along the way, of course, it's been muddled and likely abandoned altogether at times so I can chase the glory of a really outrageous reaction from a lay audience, or pride in releasing a download to the magic community. But later on, it got me questioning what my focus is, and what my focus could be. I realised it is very easy to get distracted by the glamour and glow of the reactions we can stir up from an audience. But I want to appeal to something more than that. Some may relate to this. I enjoy being taken on journeys. Whether that be a book, a TV series, a movie, or even real-life traveling journeys, I crave new experiences out of these things. I stay away from spoilers of stories (did not watch a single trailer or read speculations about Avengers Endgame) and I don't really research when I travel if I don't have to. I enjoy not knowing, not setting expectations, and being able to completely immerse myself in something new, and I want the impact of a journey to resonate with me well after it's over. And whenever I experience something like that, it makes me want to give that to someone else. How can we carry this thinking over into magic? Well, two strangers could just find mates from a shuffled deck, right? But how about instead of cards, they take part in finding something else that connects them to each other. We tend to jump to card tricks as a gut impulse, but perhaps it can be more than a pair of matching cards ...

THE NEAT REVIEW

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ERIC HU

ERIC HU

Now I'm in Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. I've been hanging out and doing a few tricks for a group of friends and their friends. At a certain point, I turn to this guy Jack, he's probably in his mid-sixties, and ask, "Jack, do you have a best friend?" "Yeah I do" I find a piece of paper and a pencil, and I ask Jack the name of his best friend. "Richard;' he replies. It turns out they've known each other since grade school. They're both married with kids and have stayed best friends for almost their entire lives. "Jack, I have a piece of paper here and a pencil. I want you to write something to Richard. It doesn't have to be a letter, but something that would mean something to him. Maybe that's an inside joke, an encouragement, a few words of gratitude, or something about a time you guys shared. Anything. Take your time:' As he thinks and writes, I ask Jack the whereabouts of Richard. He tells me Richard has a place with a nice view of Central Park, but lives mostly upstate, and that he's currently on vacation somewhere in Asia with his wife, though Jack can't quite remember where. They separated some time ago, but got back together and are rekindling their love. We all hang out some more and maybe I do a few other sweet card things. I'm in the middle of a trick when Jack

tells me he's done. I pause the trick, put the cards away, take the letter, and start folding. "So, if this is North;' I hazard a guess and gesture, "then this is East ... and Asia is just over the Pacific Ocean, I think ... lemme do this .. :' I glance down at my hands and everyone sees that I've folded Jack's letter into a paper airplane. I look up, take a deep breath, then launch the plane into the sky, eastbound. And we both stand and watch as it sails into the distance and disappears up into the clouds. We're all pretty amazed by this, and rightly so. The paper plane flew up and away seemingly entirely of its own accord.

WHAT DO WE WANT TO SAY

WITH OUR MAGIC?

LATER THAT DAY... Jack is walking home. As he approaches his front door, he sees something sitting on his welcome mat. It's too tiny to be a package, and his last online purchase wasn't due to be delivered for another two days. As he gets closer, he realises that it's a paper airplane. He hurries to the front door and picks up the plane. It's a letter to him from Richard. Jack calls Richard. They reconnect.

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ERIC .HU If the coin is going to bend in their hand, how does signing have anything to do with it bending? If they pick a quarter out of a pile of change, doesn't that already imply the randomness of a borrowed coin? If the .effect is serving th.e method, aren't these things we are used to a little backwards? Just because they can think of any card, does that mean it makes sense for them to just think of any card? Sure, it's fair, but is it all about the fairness or impossibility or could it mean something greater? It makes me think that even though we're creating and performing for laymen, we're really doing . it for other magicians. Look! Nq switches! If laymen think we're being sneaky, it's because we'rethe ones giving them the idea'. Most of us want to prove that what we're doing isn't trickery. But if you have to prove it, then the magic is gone already. They're · experiencing you 'prove' something, not magic.

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I do not consider myself an artist. I see it as something I'd like to achieve - I'll at least try. And I think thatif you find yourself a bit lost about magic in general,.a bitputout by it, having pipe dreams.could help you find soine answers to what you're really · searching for. Or at least some new questions. . . . . · Attimes, I'd hifa wall, as we all do. And mostly, our answer is just to explore horizontally and try to find the next "great" prnduct · or routine or patter or presentation. I haven't foundmany that helped me climb over thafwalL I'd like to think to do that. To me, it's a way to rethink how I defined And it all starts with pipe drea. ms. . · Remember when you were Httle and all you did was dream? Dreamed tobe athleteor superhero or.an ~stronaut or .even a rn:;igkian. You'd look up at the on your wall wearing your favourite gear, piH9w icase capes, paper masks your ears; and imagined yourself to be this awesovie inspirin.g person. We didn't ab_o ut the methods. We just wanted.to be; And as we grew up,we're inspired by ideas and 'Ne learned from. them, and they helpid shape 'Nho we .are now. ·In we tell ~tirselves allthg till}e that we love brihgi'ng this child-like wo.nder · spectators. Well, I think we can go backto being kids ourselves sometimes, too.

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Lockpicking as a sport

Defeating anti-tamper screws

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AH: Eireann, thanks for having me. I want to chat a bit about an idea that you've mentioned many times to me before, the overlap between the worlds of magic and hacking. From my limited perspective, it seems a good place to start would be a job title I've heard being thrown about a fair bit as of late, that of "Social Engineer; which seems to have a skillset not entirely different to those skills involved in magic... EL: Yes, you're right. Well there are lots of crossovers. Social Engineer is indeed a job title, and it's this: when I go to work, one of my jobs is to trick people out of their passwords, or get into buildings that I'm not supposed to, or talk my way past the secretary, or get a visitors pass upgraded to a press pass - that's a job inside the ethical hacking community, you can do that for a living, and it's called Social Engineer. Most Social Engineers these days are doing Red Team assessments and ethical hacking - but of course they study the fraudsters and people who rip people off for money or other items. Some people use slightly less what we would call technical skills, programming skills, and slightly more social skills. They call people up and trick them into giving them their passwords instead of using some shell code or an exploit to accomplish the same feat.

AH: And in our chats before, you've mentioned one specific Social Engineer, Sharon Conheady. EL: Sharon Conheady is a good friend, she's an incredibly charismatic woman. She's Irish, she has this sparkle in her smile and her demeanour, and when she tells stories of social engineering, people are fascinated. So she was giving a presentation at a hacking conference some years back, and on one of her slides she put up a black and white passport photo of this guy, then she asked the room if anyone knew who it was. Nobody had heard of him, but this guy was Victor Lustig, and she proceeded to explain to the audience who Victor Lustig was. He was a conman in the 1900's who fraudulently sold the Eiffel Tower twice.

AH:

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EIREANN LEVERETT

EL: He put an advert into one of the French newspapers in Paris, and convinced people to come to a fancy dinner where he would reveal a large metal building that was going to be demolished, and he would offer scrap metal contracts to anyone who was interested in taking on the scrap metal work. He made it clear that he worked for the government _ without proving it - and that they were embarrassed they would have to sell a large national monument, and he hinted to the people at these fancy dinners that he was open to bribery and corruption. Many of the company heads did try to bribe him to get the contract to buy the scrap metal from the Eiffel Tower. Then he absconded with all the money that they had offered him for the contracts. He was on the run for many years, word got out, and he was hunted for five or six years. Then about ten years later, he went back and did it again! And sold the Eiffel Tower again. This has become a sort of con-artist trope - you sell the Brooklyn Bridge or you sell the Statue of Liberty- but he was the classic. But Sharon's point in including him in her talk was to draw the parallel between con artists and Social Engineers. I have magician Gordon Bruce to thank for that friendship. He taught me who Victor Lustig was many many years ago, but Sharon and I became good friends through a shared interest in this Victor Lustig fellow. Each of us had never met someone who was both interested in social engineering as a modern phenomenon as well as being interested in the history of con artists. AH:

So can you give an example of what a specific job might be in her line of work?

EL: There was a company who was concerned that its employees were being a bit lax, so she was paid to spend an evening in a pub listening to them chat, to try to find out what the employees reveal about their company while they're out having drinks after work. And the answer is: quite a lot. And she was hired to teach people that they were being lazy with their own computers. She had this kind of gamification of this - employees were leaving their laptops unattended at work - someone could easily open them up and insert malicious code onto them like that. And she would sticker these vulnerable laptops. She would go round putting stickers on the bottoms of their laptops saying "Please go and see the security team in the morning, they want to have a chat with you:' AH: So an obvious common thread between hacking and magic is this element of deception.

EL: You could be a magician, and be a performer, or you could be a con-artist, and many of the skills are similar. Not identical - there are some substantial differences between

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show magic and street magic and conning people on the streets - but largely speaking the skill set is the same. And the same is true in hacking - you've got ethical hackers who do this for companies and only do it with permission, they get consent from the companies that they're hacking into before they do that. And that's very important from a legal perspective. It's your only protection, really. A lot of what we doing would be very illegal under other contexts. As a rudimentary example, spoofing text messages. You could give me your girlfriend's phone number, and I could send you a text message that looks like it comes from her, and if you reply, it will go to her. These things are illegal if they're not done with consent. So my point is there's a dark side and a light side to magic, and a dark side and a light side to hacking. And you've got people that wander from one side to the other and back again.

Houdini said "Magic is the right way to do wrong'; and I kinda feel like hacking is very similar. Ethical hacking is understanding how people deceive others, and then doing your best to prevent it. Sometimes even using deceptive skills yourself, with criminal elements. AH: That sort of reminds me ofJames Randi and the sceptics movement. Using the same skills that criminals might use, you combat some of what they do ... I think I have the stereotype of hacking being a very modern thing. EL: Yeah, people have a cut-off point for what they believe hacking is, which is probably somewhere in the nineties. But if the same concept produced something in the 1960's - such as, say, Phone Phreaking - people would say "that's different, that's not hacking''. But hacking has a long and rich history, going back to Marconi. You know about the magician John Nevil Maskelyne [founder of The Magic Circle in London], right?

AH:

My magic history is not terribly great. *Laughs*

EL: Jasper Maskelyne was 'The War Magician'. He was a magician, but he was hired as a camouflage artist for the British Army during World Ward II, and he tricked the Germans into bombing a fake Alexandria Harbour in the war - that was probably his most famous feat. Now, his grandfather was John Nevil Maskelyne. John Nevil was involved in an early incident where someone was touting the ability to use radio to communicate with ships off shore, and someone said "it's completely unbreakable - there's no way these radio signals can be interfered with''. And of course not many people were accustomed to radio at the

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time, so they believed that claim, but I think John Nevil was hired by some company to show that this wasn't true. And in the opening demo, he interfered with the transmission of the radios in the hall of the demonstration. But that's an early incident of ethical hacking, to show that something is flawed before it enters production and becomes dangerously insecure. Of course radio was a great way to communicate between ships, but just to believe that the signal couldn't be jammed could have conceivably gotten you in a lot of trouble, especially during war time. That's a very early form of ethical hacking stunt, in my opinion. But it's before computers, so people would think "Oh, that's not hacking''.

AH:

But Maskelyne was just a magician?

EL:

Yeah. He had nothing to do with the maritime or radio industry.

AH:

So what was the utility in him doing that demonstration?

EL: Well he was hired by the competitors to show that there were flaws in the product.

AH: Why would they hire a magician? EL: Well, if you want to know if something's impossible, don't ask everyday people. Ask the people who make the impossible their business. That's magicians. Magicians and hackers alike have a slightly larger model of "what is possible" than the laity. But both groups also know that there are real world limitations - some methods just don't work, and some things might genuinely be impossible if you've constrained them the wrong way. But if you loosen the constraints they might become possible again, assuming you have a budget of $10,000, or a budget of $1 million, or whatever. The thinking is: under certain constraints, I can do all kinds of things. So why would the British Army hire a magician? I think they hired him probably because he was an intellectual skilled at deception, and they wanted to find out if they were being deceived, but they also maybe wanted some showmanship to prove that the other peoples' methodology for transmitting orders to ships was not sound. And a lot of ethical hacking is like that too. Sometimes we're put in a position where a company won't fix a flaw in their product, and our only option is to go to the press, or keep silent about it.

But if you think a product is going to give up some users' privacy, or if you think peoples' lives are at risk, then you usually want to do something about it. And perhaps that sounds like an exaggeration, but I've found vulnerabilities in pacemaker products. So there is a danger to peoples' privacy and health and life from some of these things. And you sort of feel obliged to say something. THE NEAT REVIEW

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AH:

And that's where the showmanship comes in.

EL: Yeah. You need to be adversarial without being rude or losing your audience. You need everyday people to empathise with you as you go toe-to-toe with these giant corporations and their PR teams. Regarding showmanship, a great example is a friend of mine who's sadly no longer with us, named Barnaby Jack. He was a legendary ethical hacker, who once hacked ATMs onstage at Black Hat [hacking conference] and made them spit out cash. And as people ran up to grab some of the cash from the stage they realised it wasn't real money, but an invitation to IOActive's afterparty, who sponsored the research with Barnaby, and also sponsored much of my research for three or four years. Classic showmanship, is what I'm getting at. Making an ATM spit out cash on stage speaks to our wishes and dreams. I think years of watching magic tricks had that effect on me as well as in the hacking world. You know, you have your mind blown, you have your mind blown again, and again. And then you figure out how it's done, or someone teaches you something, and you try and perform it, and you realise how much went into those first performances you saw, and how much harder you're going to have to work to be really good at this, and you start to really appreciate the craft.

I think with magic and with hacking, eventually you crave that intellectual accomplishment. But you get used to this process of being mystified, and then demystifying it, and then being mystified again at the amount of effort and work and time and thought and the years of reading great magic tricks that goes into every good magic performance. And so it follows this process of mystify, demystify, mystify. Well hacking is very much the same. Someone shows me something and the first thing that goes through my brain is "What? How did you? What? How?" And slowly you go "Well... maybe ifl put together this technique, and this technique, and maybe he wasn't quite telling me the truth about this, and maybe she's really good at assembly code, I don't know" and you start to figure it out. And then it becomes mystified again, as you realise the sheer amount of craft that goes into a great exploit. So I think my psychology from magic has flowed over into the hacking world. And I mean that as a participant, not necessarily just as a magician, but as someone who watches, as someone who reads, as someone who performs.

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AH:

I was asking you earlier whether you'd ever cut your own key...

EL: Yes. Well, I haven't. I've picked locks - for example at a substation. A substation is one of those little green boxes or a building that houses some of the equipment that controls the electric grid, or the flow of water across a municipality or wherever. They're usually small buildings in a neighbourhood. One of these substations was given to us by the company as a target - it was a couple of kilometres out in the countryside and we chose it from a list. We had to ski to it. Part of the reason we chose it was because it would take the company a long time to get there. Like, they had CCTV cameras and alarms and things, but they couldn't physically get to the location quick enough, and we wanted to demonstrate that. So even though there's CCTV, which put most people off, we knew that it was what we call 'security theatre'. It looks good, and it intimidates nonprofessionals, but professionals know what they're doing, think things through, whatever. So I had to pick the lock, and it was cold, and there was adrenaline in my body from the skiing, and it took me about half an hour, I was clumsy.

He is a Dutch guy, runs one of the electrical companies, is a fantastic security person, amazing hacker, but he's also a Lock Sport champion. So he can take a key, or rather, not the key, just the lock, and an uncut key, and he can push the key into the lock and turn it, and impression it. It's made from a slightly softer metal, and so every time he turns it, he gets an imprint of the little jagged cut of the key, and then he'll file it a little bit, and do it again, and again. Impression, file, impression, file. And within eight minutes, he can fashion a key from a lock he doesn't have the key for. You can look him up online, or on any of the Lock Sports championships. And in some occasions he can do it as quickly as one or two minutes. And it's incredible to watch.

It's both intellectual - you have to understand how locks work - but it's also dexterity, because you have to feel the key in the lock and file it. THE NEAT REVIEW

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AH: So that's just one field of these competitions, presumably there are others. EL: Absolutely, there's people who do combination locks, people who do lock picking, there's shimming of padlocks. All with tutorials online. There's a wonderful hacker in our community famous for going around to people saying "Hi Neighbour'; he calls everyone "Neighbour''. And he's written some great zines and magazines with a bunch of cool hacking techniques with his friends and released them online - does this sound like the magic community at all? His name is Travis Goodspeed. So he was talking about something in a pub with some other people. Have you ever had a piece of electronics and there's a screw on there that's funny shaped, right? It's like star-shaped or hexagonal or something, and you don't have that exact screwdriver, so you're like 'Tm not gonna be able to open this because I don't have the right screwdriver''. And let's make it simpler - perhaps we're talking about Ikea furniture, and you don't have the little hex key. But you need to build the furniture. And Travis is like: "Oh, yeah. I never pay attention to those special security screws. I just take my lighter to the end of a Bic pen and then when the plastic's nice and molten, I stick it in there and I let it dry. And I can use that as a screwdriver for that thing forever after:'

So companies buy these screws as like 'Security screws' or ~nti-Tamper screws' and our "Neighbour" just defeats it with a lighter and a pen. '·'Both laugh*

AH: Funny how that knowledge, that technique, is describable in one sentence, and immediately understandable. And that is potentially a lot of mileage out of that single sentenceEL: Well that's the hacker brain, right? And that's also the magician brain! What's the simplest way to get to this effect, right? And that method is not intuitive, not until you've spent more time doing it. But that's the point. These things seem impossible or hard for people who don't do them every day. But if you do them every day, if you practise at the impossible, it becomes possible. You sit around talking about hacking techniques all day, geeking out, getting on some nerd time. We have jam sessions too. We sit and write code, and tinker with each other's work, we rewrite the exploit, "oh it could be done this way"; "oh you used a machine learning algorithm here, but you know, you don't have to do that, it could just be done with raw statistics:'

AH: In magic it's like some methods are so simple, that for some tricks, you could merely explain one sentence to a total lay person, and they would be able to do the trick too. And pretty well. It seems like that is not the case in the world of hacking. EL:

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AH: Well ... Do hacking folk suffer from the ''doing the easiest thing gets the largest applause" thing?

EL: Some exploits are incredibly hard to write. Incredibly hard. They take years of people racking their brain to understand tiny, tiny little details. And then when someone achieves them, we think "Oh that's truly amazing:' And other things people do are so easy it's ridiculous. And we applaud those far louder than the other stuff. I'll give you an example. I do hacking demonstrations. I used to hack industrial Ethernet switches. This is difficult stuff, it took me six months to find some good exploits for theses switches. A switch is ... if you don't want to hack one single computer, and you want to hack a lot of them, you hack the switch, because it carries all of the traffic between all of the computers, like in a school or a company, or, in my case, industrial control systems. You just go after the switch. Hacking switches is hard. And I learned a lot and it was fun. But if I do those demos, only hackers clap. It's like doing certain magic tricks for magicians. I do it for everyday lay people, in the insurance industry, they don't understand what I've done. I send a fake text message, which is something easy that took me ten minutes and another friend of mine taught me to do by buying a service from a company, and guess what gets the applause. AH:

And everyone loses their shit.

EL: Exactly. And audiences need to be familiar with the props. Everyone is familiar with their mobile phone, not everyone has seen an industrial Ethernet switch, or understands how important they are. Applause is not proportional to effort. AH:

Applause is not proportional to effort.

ENDS.

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16:47:12 86

TATANKA TAN

ANKA TEACHES A BRAND NEW METHOD FOR CONTROLLING A CARD. INSANELY, THIS INVOLVES : ~MINGLY NO MANIPULATION WHATSOEVER. IT IS A SURPRISINGLY PRACTICAL MOVE, WITH AN EXTREMELY VERSATILE VIEWING ANGLE

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Step one involves the setting of the deck on the table. Suppose you've just finished a tabled riffle shuffle. The deck is face down, long edges towards you. Both hands then rest at the short edges of the deck. The edges of each palm are in contact with the table, and will remain in contact with the table for the entirety of the move (see pie above).

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You will now turn the top card of the deck face up with the right hand. The right hand drags the top card of the deck back, towards your body, with the middle and first fingers, and the thumb at the back. During this motion, you also spread the second card from the top slightly backwards, creating an in jog. We will call this in jogged card the 'X Card'. The right hand picks up the top card between the thumb and first and middle fingers, turns the card, and places it face up on the deck. It is in this action of turning the card that you will execute the switch of the top card for the X Card. The left hand remains near the deck during this, the thumb hovering just behind the back edge of the cards.

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The left thumb now secretly contacts the back left corner of the in jogged X Card. The left hand mirrors the left, with the forefinger and middle finger at the front of the deck. This will provide stability for the switch of the top card. The right thumb peels up the back edge of the face up card, with the first and middle fingers on top, and begins to rotate the card forward to turn it back face down on top of the deck. At the same time, the left thumb is gently pushing down on the in jogged X Card, causing it to tilt up slightly, backwards, against the back of the face up card.

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The right hand continues to turn the top card over, towards the viewer, and the X Card continues tilting upwards, until the X card is almost perpendicular with the tabled deck. The two cards will eventually almost meet in the same plane over the top of the deck.

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The right hand continues turning the top card over, but at this point the X Card is now above the original top card of the deck. The two cards will land together, roughly square on top of the deck.

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Immediately the left hand drags the new top card (the X Card) off of the deck to the left. At the same time as this, the right hand lifts off half the deck, thus giving motivation for the right hand to have remained in place by the deck for the duration of the move. The left hand places "the top card" in the centre of the deck, and the right hand places its half on top, leaving the X Card jogged to the left.

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Finally, the two hands square the card into the deck and pause. Unbeknownst to your viewers, the remembered card is still atop the deck.

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Hello Team! Welcome to my literary presence. So nice to be in print with you. Many hundreds of years ago, during my late twenties and early thirties, I lived in a closet in the middle of Manhattan. It was literally a closet ... and it was glorious! It was right in the middle of the Conjuring Arts Research Center, a library for magicians with books going back to the 1400s (before I was born!). As such, I was very spoiled and learned many miracles and got to meet and experience many of the most wondrous people to ever exist. They were drawn to this wonderful resource just like a glorious simile I should have put in place of these words. They just weren't lucky enough to live there and needed help to make their visit as productive and miraculous as possible during the time they had.

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No, that is not where I come in ... they had Bill Kalush! Bill is one of the most knowledgeable and talented magical humans to ever exist on the planet, the executive director of Conjuring Arts, and he would generally fill them in on all the intricate and diabolical things their minds were looking for. However, on rare occasions, something would come up, and I would be in charge of a few hours of this most ingenious and incredibly talented person's time. Maybe now is a good time for you? Let me take you on a tour, nay one of the rarest tours to ever exist in the history of mankind of a few small, magical blocks of Manhattan, just as though you had just met up with me at a secretive magic library many years ago. We head out into the world, setting off from the Conjuring Arts Research Center.

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Conjuring Arts Research Center (30th St. between Broadway and 5th)

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The Little Church Around the Corner {29th St. between 5th Ave. and Madison Ave.)

Without fail, our first stop would have been The Little Church Around the Corner. Why? Because it is almost literally just around the corner. We would have walked the short distance to Fifth Avenue and turned the corner only to stumble upon a delightful brick church, dwarfed by enormous buildings, in just a few moments! Why go to this church? Well, it's where Dai Vernon, The Professor, got married! Many scholars maintain that they would not write about this particular fact, if they were to write a book about this storied location. However, in my tour it is the only fact that I mention about this stop.

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Our next stop would be a trip to THE magic store in New York ... but we can't travel the whole 5 short blocks without stopping for a tasty beverage! The Crooked Knife restaurant is a favourite spot for just such an activity! Here we may order two (or more? ... how many people are reading this with you?!) tasty beverages of choice, and I may regale you with stories about hanging out there with Bill Kalush and Tony Chang, or you might bring up that you were in London recently. "Oh!'; I might say, "Do tell how wonderful it was?" Then during our conversation the subject of Guy Hollingworth may come up, and we'll both be glad to be in the company of others who have such astounding respect for this man. Then I might say, "Do you know the shift from his book? Did you know that if you take a break under a small group of cards they can be surreptitiously left palmed in the left hand, instead ofletting them complete the shift?" Then I would know that I had had enough tasty beverages, and we should move on to the magic store.

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[An Explanation of A Palm is Detailed

See Guy Hollingworth's Drawing Room Deceptions for the original shift on which this palm is based.

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Noah Levine's show 'Magic After Hours' is performed inside Tannen's magic shop late at night on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. magicafterhours.com

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Tannen's (34th St. between 5th Ave. and Broadway)

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Tannen's is an excellently stocked and staffed magic store that is as old as some hills, but not all the hills. It is great and we would probably buy all the stuff we had spoken about at the Crooked Knife, and inquire about what is new and glorious. Then we would buy some playing cards probably and hear who was in town (you!), and do some miracles to whoever else was in the shop. I might mention that there is a glorious building trick, created for a special event, and see if I can contact the operator to get everything set up, so we can show it to you. Let's go to a nearby hotel lobby... that also has tasty beverages ... and hang out for a while. It will give our friends and colleagues a chance to make their way to meet us, and we'll keep checking on The Building Trick.

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Ace Hotel (29th St. between 5th and Broadway)

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We make it to the Ace Hotel and are in good spirits. Our favourite friends are en route and we were able to get a sofa and table to hang out at. Here I'll probably tell you that I had this place basically to myself for a few weeks and we had many magical get-togethers in this very lobby due to a lucky happenstance: they had a soft opening before the real opening and my friends and I readily took advantage of this great, strangely vacant location in the midst of the bustling big city. Magical things are happening and tasty beverages are readily available ... when we get the call!

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(50th St. and 10th Ave.)

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Well, now we've had a great time meandering about and seeing miracles and having camaraderie, the tour is over and everyone is antsy to get the evening going. Is there a glorious Derek Del Gaudio or Derren Brown show happening? You have tickets to Noah Levine's Magic After Hours tomorrow evening? Sounds like you're going to have an excellent time in the city. May I suggest one more thing? Let's meet up at As Is one of these evenings while you're visiting. It's wonderful and it's almost always possible to get a great group of miracle workers to show up!

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RICKY SMITH + BENJAMIN PRATT

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See you soon, Ricky

ENDS.

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NEW YORK CITY

THE NEAT REVIEW is made possible with the help of our sponsors. We love them

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THE NEAT REVIEW

In the NEAT writer's room, carefree, at the beginning of the second issue.

In the NEAT writer's room, hours before our print deadline.

00:16:23 AH: your work, along with that of Dan and Dave [Buck], opened a new world to me in card magic. It must've been ten years ago now that I first learnt of your stuff. It fucked me up because it was unlike anything I'd seen before. There was such a distinct style. The flow, the neatness, the softness of handling the cards. I don't know what it was, but something about that aesthetic-driven style of card magic resonated very deeply with me. It's defined how I, and undoubtedly many others, do card magic. Isn't that wild? And now we're here. How'd you come to want that aesthetic for your work?

TC: Wow thanks man. I guess, you're welcome? (Both laugh) Well I think it's down to your own taste. More so than people think. For me, the aesthetic probably comes from ignorance. I grew up in Idaho, in a time before YouTube, and had never seen anyone do magic. I would read these old magic books and figured if a trick was printed in a book, it should be perfect, otherwise why would it be in a book? So then that image in my mind was unaffected by, or sheltered from the styles of other magicians. And I always thought there was one perfect way of doing something - a colour change, a card control, whatever. I gradually learnt multiple ways of doing the moves, but I was still charmed by that concept of 'perfection' - the one perfect way. I probably became aware of it when I started seriously working on colour changes. So with a colour change, a Queen of Hearts changes into a Seven of Clubs, or whatever. What would it look like if you actually had magical powers? If you could make that card change in the realest possible way, what would that look like? It's not a simple thing, because if you really think about it, even that part of it is subjective. It's the beauty of the fact it's beautiful to my perspective, too.

Is perfection subjective?

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So, well maybe you put a card on the table and it changes. So HOW does it change? Is it instant? Does it slowly melt and change? And so NOW you realise that even though you have magical powers, in this hypothetical world, and you can change a card in the cleanest way possible, the visual aspect is entirely subjective. It's up to your own taste of exactly how that should happen. And then personally, I like the more mysterious stuff. I think the spectator should cover the card, holding it in their hands, then it changes. Or maybe they FEEL something - it's not just visual. so now you have that image to aim for. Now there's a goal, it's not ethereal. Now you try to get as close to that experience as possible. Because it's impossible to really change a card like that. That's the beauty of it - the beauty of it is not actually getting there, not actually achieving that image, because you never will, but getting as close as possible. I'm not saying that you're not striving for that perfect image of the card changing, but the beauty is in the act of you striving for it. AH: And that striving is what's human. The striving is what makes it worthwhile. TC: Yeah. We connect with humanness. I use an analogy when speaking with lay people about magic, and I say that what interests me most about sleight of hand is that I want to try to create the impossible with imperfect means. So I talk about watches. If the main purpose of a watch is to keep correct time, what is the point of mechanical watches? Like, a half-a-million dollar watch still loses two seconds a month, right? Why not just get a digital watch? The reason I have a mechanical watch is because I think there's a beauty in us as humans trying to master gravity and time. I like the concept of people trying to use tiny gears and jewels and little tightly wound springs - imperfect means - to try to defeat gravity and time. And you're at the mercy of the limitations of physical objects when trying to approach the ideal. It's human, it's blood and sweat. Sleight of hand is like that. It's imperfect. We're both trying to achieve the impossible image using imperfect methods. And I think there's something in that. AH: Yes. And Teller says "No-one wants to see a God, it's boring. There's no conflict. We want to see a demi-God; the human aspect makes it interesting." Or something like that.

Do people want to see perfection?

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00:24:09 AH: That's the problem with magic, because that's inevitable that audience members ask "How do you do it?"

TC: Yeah, and I think there are only two ways to answer that: 1. I do real magic. Well, fuck you - you don't, 2. It's all sleight of hand. I think magicians are trying to justify their card tricks. But they don't want to go and tell you it's sleight of hand, because we're all taught not to do that. So for some reason they say it's not sleight of hand. So then there's not a solidness to that argument, either, just avoidance. As an audience member, you know it's all sleight of hand. But the beauty of it is that I can create a feeling with a card trick, even though it seems so trivial, like a feeling that you will never have. Mentalism seems to sidestep this problem. In mentalism they say "Oh I'm not really psychic, but I use all these tools" then list the supposed tools. They give a solid answer to the question. But the magician version of it is nothing like that. It's not "Oh I'm not doing real magic, I'm just using sleight of hand." Well why the fuck not? They're trying to put a Derren Brown flavour on top when really you should just own it and say "I don't do real magic, it's all sleight of hand."

Why can't we just say "it's sleight of hand"?

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I get it - it's hard to say "It's real magic", but don't say "it's not sleight of hand". Very very few people can pull off the "real magic" angle. And I always find it interesting when people try to put overly philosophical presentations on top of tricks. We tell a good interesting concept or a story, gets the audience engaged, and then we show you a trick that has very little or nothing to do with the concept. The concept and the trick have to be created in harmony - as Derren Brown has done - but that's a lot more difficult to do than people imagine. So I'm asking instead of living in the past of explaining the story, and then recalling it in the trick, why can't the story be in the moment? Why can't we be creating the story that they're gonna be telling? How do you get them to live that moment? To me, the question "how do you do it" almost makes me think they're missing the point. So I'm never guarded in my answer, I just come straight out with "it's sleight of hand". Don't you think that's how it should be? Like that's how it is in music, or acting, or whatever. AH:

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What, where the method is known, but not of importance?

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TC: Well, any question I have in magic, I put it to any other artform. If we were actors, not magicians, would we care about the "secret" - that we' re acting? Would we guard it as intensely as magicians do in magic? Would we pretend that we're not acting? If not, then in magic, what are we guarding? The secret is already out. We don't do real magic, it's all sleight of hand. It's like if you go see Forrest Gump - I love that movie, cry every time I see it. So say we go see it, and afterwards you nudge me and say "Hey you know Forrest Gump? You know he's an ACTOR right?" And I laugh "Of course I know he's a fucking actor." Now let's say we went to see the best magic show. Then at the end as we leave, you say "Hey, you know they used strings in the second half right?" At that point I don't laugh, it's treated differently. Because people go up to magicians at the end of magic shows saying "Very good, but I know what you did ... I know you used sleight of hand", it's not uncommon for that to be like their first comment. Or. Say I went to the after party of the launch of Forrest Gump, and Tom Hanks is there in the corner, and I want to go up to him and shake his hand and I go over like "Hey I loved the movie, I just wanted to tell you I loved it, you did a great job" and he says "Oh thank you, thank you". And then I say "But I know what you did, okay? Waaaait waaaaait wait wait! Don't say anything! I know you ACTED. I don't know EXACTLY what you did, but I know you ACTED. Yeah?" And then, even weirder, what if Tom Hanks then said "What are you talking about? I'm not an ACTOR?? I'm Forrest fucking Gump." Who in their right mind??? But MAGICIANS say that! "WhAt ArE yOu TaLkinG aBoUt, I dOn'T uSe SlEiGhT oF HaNd?? I do rEaL mAgic!*#"

"Acting is behaving truthfully circumstances" - Sanford Meisner.

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what are you doing! It's like my friend in the bathroom standing on stilts and painting himself entirely blue, to look like Avatar, right? And it's like me going in and saying "You know Avatar's all fake, right?" And he goes "Of course I do!" He knows it's fake and he wants to believe. Why doesn't magic do that? Our audiences know it's not real, it's all sleight of hand, but technique and method draw so much attention in magic. "I want you to watch this movie, but when you watch it, can you pretend they're not acting?" Do you see how insane that sounds? That's what's happening in magic. AH: It is insane. But, to play devil's advocate, is the structure of magic flawed? There's a magician called Shawn Coelho Desouza who says that in crafts other than magic, the viewers only experience whatever message the craft is trying to convey when technique disappears. And technique only disappears if the craft is executed flawlessly. So with Tom Hanks, the acting disappears and you just see Forrest Gump, and his story. But with magic, while technique should disappear, or should become of little importance, the subject matter in magic is entirely about technique. "How is this being done?" Maybe that's why it's rare to push past magic being seen as surface level entertainment, because magic performances point directly at technique. TC:

So when you' re focused on technique, that's all that registers.

"I

want you to watch this . movie, but when you watch it, can you pretend they're not acting?"

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00:30:08 TC: Think of any other profession. Concert Pianist. Do they have the same trials and tribulations that plague the magic community? I don't think they do. Not in the same way. In something like piano, I feel like you would have to walk the walk. To gain notoriety, even basically, you still have to know how to play the instrument. But magicians seem to argue about even the basics of the craft. The analogy would be - imagine you' re my piano teacher. It would be me going to you for my first lesson, and you teaching me the C major scale, right, all the white keys. Then the homework is go away and practise just that. Then I come back to your next lesson next week and you go "okay, so how are you doing?" And I start playing with my elbows and feet, just fucking it up completely. You say "What are you doing??" And I just go "Fuck you, it's original". And it's like - we've not even BEGUN TALKING about music yet! We're talking about the basics of how to operate an instrument. But in magic practitioners are debating even at that level. See how insane that is in contrast to any other craft? And that seems stupid and crazy if you were a piano player, and applied it to a normal field like that, but in magic it's totally acceptable - like that's what you' re supposed to do. That's how you're supposed to gain fame. The gate is so high for piano. If you got into piano playing with fame as your primary or sole motive, you'd get weeded out very quickly. Everybody would laugh in your fucking face.

"1st Comment!"

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The problem is with magic there's too much noise. With piano, you don't have to listen to that noise - it's weeded out before anyone takes it seriously. The people who are the best at their thing, fame is always a side effect. And nowadays it's not about being good, in magic, it's about getting seen. It's about getting likes and views, so people can praise you. And it's fucked. And you read the comments on a video of a shittily-done move and they're all "FIRE, FIIIRE" and "OH SHIT SON!" And you're like "What??" But worse, there's no room for constructive criticism. Like I had a time when someone tagged me in a post on Instagram, and they say "hey this is Tony Chang's colour change" and they do it badly. And, cos they tagged me, I comment saying "maybe you should work on this, or this", or whatever. And then they're like "I didn't even buy the download I'm just working on it, Fuck you". And then I have to back-pedal? What the fuck?! What are we even talking about any more? But then me yelling at you is not going to change your mind, because that's what you want magic to be. When people were yelling at me when I was younger, I just thought "well fuck you, I'm gonna do it better. I'm gonna practise harder." And that's not here now.

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00:36:00 I knew a guy who played at a piano bar. It was a literal piano bar - the bar extends and at the end there was a piano, as part of the bar - holy shit that's cool right? - and they do Karaoke nights. Live piano. And this guy can play anything. "Hey you know Lady Gaga?" "Nah I don't know what that is" - they show him ten seconds of a clip on YouTube - "Yeah I think I can wing it" cos he understands pop structure, or whatever. I don't know. Anyway in his book of songs he's written in bold letters

"IF YOU REQUEST BILLY JOEL PIANO MAN I'LL FUCKING MURDER YOU" And it's funny because you'd think everybody would ask for that song! And I got chatting to him about it, and it's like even though we, as magicians, have done a trick a million times, and we're sick to death of it, we hate it - Ambitious Card or whatever it is - You gotta remember that that one drunk guy, singing Piano Man for his friends while you' re playing live piano for him, they will never forget it. Because it's so special. Even though he does not want to play it because it does not excite him creatively, or in any other way, it comes down to that line of "Who is it for?" Is it for the audience or is it for you?

00:43:11 For me, it's about the learning process. It's always about that process. I care more about the process of figuring stuff out than the doing of the thing once I learn how it works. So it's like "I just want to solve that problem." But I know I don't have the desire to put on a show at The Magic Castle, for example. That just doesn't spark anything in me. And maybe part of wanting to have magic as a hobby, for me, is fear of getting bored. It's fear of only doing magic. Like a weird irrational fear of not being able to do other stuff, with magic becoming all encompassing.

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The reason I don't do magic as a profession, as my full-time gig, is very, very easy.

I don't do magic as my full-time gig because when I show you something I love, and you hate it, I can't walk away because I'm being paid to be there.

People are allowed to abuse and heckle with me, and I have to take it, because it's my fucking job. So I never push magic on anyone, if they want to see then that's different. Like one time I was at a bar showing magic to these frat guys and they were amazing. They were loving it. Then this girl comes over and asks what's happening, I say we're doing magic. She says "Oh cool! Come over to our table and show me and my friends!" And I'm like "Why not bring them over here?" And she says "I'm not gonna do that" and so I say "fine" and turn back to the guys and continue, and they're flipping out. Later, she comes over with her friends and she asks to see a trick, so - cool, she picks a card, puts it back, and I ask her to shuffle. Then she's shuffling for four or five minutes. I ask if she's done, she says "Hey! Calm the fuck down, I'm shuffling". And I go " ... well okay ... " Then she finishes, hands the cards back, and I say "I guess you're used to always getting your own way, huh?" And she's like "Yeah" ... So I just turn around and start doing tricks to the other guys. And that was so satisfying! No way could you do that at a gig. I'm not saying I wake up in the morning looking for that. I'm saying: what kind of cruel world do you have to live in where this is something I love and you're just allowed to abuse me like that? And that's totally okay or expected or encouraged because "it's a magic trick"?

00:51:30 It's either you do what you love, and you struggle. Or you find a stable job and you can do what you love without people telling you what to do. Because the first way, I think only like 5% of people can make that work, and make that sit well with themselves. Having magic as a hobby, in my opinion, gives you the freedom to explore what it actually is. You don't have to just do the commercial stuff and the hack stuff and take shit just because it's your job.

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TC: So what are we trying to instil in the readers with this article? AH:

I don't know?

TC:

I don't know either?

AH: And they're gonna be reading this, reading these words right here - and these ones - trying to figure out what we're on about, and we don't really properly know? What is up with that? TC:

That's fucking crazy.

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Let's consider a sleight where you want to reverse a card from the middle onto the face of the deck. Tony uses the Mechanical Reverse by Ken Krenzel, but this is from a time where if someone published a move, people reading it would just assume the author could do it. That was often not the case. People would publish stuff just to lay claim to it, even if the techniques were not good. So the method is as follows: To learn the Mechanical Reverse by Ken Krenzel, you should buy Epilogue Magazine (Issue Special No. 2) from 1975, it's taught on page 251. Alternatively, learn the "Rosenthal Mechanical Reverse Transfer" by Harvey Rosenthal, from The Trapdoor Volume Two (Issue 34), from 1990, on page 613, or Bill Goodwin's "Mechanical Reverse Variation" from The Trapdoor Volume Three (Issue 62), from 1996, page 1198. But they don't tell you how it works. How it works in practise. How do you apply it in context?

TONY CHANG

Handling for right-handed folk: A card has been chosen, remembered, replaced in the deck, and you've culled it out. You are now controlling it under the spread. As you begin to close the spread into a smaller spread, one that can be held by the left hand alone, place your left pinky between the culled cards and the rest of the deck. The nail of the pinky will contact the back of the lower left corner of the culled card, while the left ring, middle and pointer fingers rest on the face of the culled card. See pies overleaf.

Handling for left-handed folk: A card has been chosen, remembered, replaced in the deck, and you've culled it out. You are now controlling it under the spread. As you begin to close the spread into a smaller spread, one that can be held by the right hand alone, place your right pinky between the culled cards and the rest of the deck. The nail of the pinky will contact the back of the lower right corner of the culled card, while the right ring, middle and pointer fingers rest on the face of the culled card. See pies overleaf.

1. Lock the left hand in place. It can rotate at the wrist, but the arm should remain in the same position throughout the move. 2. Left hand turns palm up during the rotation so goes from position one (see page 166 - left hand palm is facing the right, perpendicular to deck, thumb pointing to the right) to position two (see page 168 - left hand palm is facing upwards, thumb pointing upwards) 3. With deck in place, during the reversal, the left thumb goes from being on top of the deck, facing to the right, to contacting the edges of the deck, so as to square the cards post-spread. 4. The right hand moves the deck upwards slightly, so as to allow the edges of the deck to meet the tip (top) of the pad of the left thumb while the left hand twists but does NOT move upwards. 5. To finish the move, each hand does something different. The right hand takes over the deck. It holds onto the deck. The right hand's SOLE FOCUS is holding onto the deck. The left hand's SOLE FOCUS is squaring the long edges of the deck. Do not try to hold the deck with both hands, or square the deck with both hands, each hand has a unique and solitary job. The move is completed with the deck being held from above by the right hand. The left hand is not holding the deck at the end!

1. Lock the right hand in place. It can rotate at the wrist, but the arm should remain in the same position throughout the move. 2. Right hand turns palm up during the rotation so goes from position one (see page 166 - right hand palm is facing the right, perpendicular to deck, thumb pointing to the right) to position two (see page 168 - right hand palm is facing upwards, thumb pointing upwards) 3. With deck in place, during the reversal, the right thumb goes from being on top of the deck, facing to the left, to contacting the edges of the deck, so as to square the cards post-spread. 4. The left hand moves the deck upwards slightly, so as to allow the edges of the deck to meet the tip (top) of the pad of the right thumb while the right hand twists but does NOT move upwards. 5. To finish the move, each hand does something different. The left hand takes over the deck. It holds onto the deck. The left hand's SOLE FOCUS is holding onto the deck. The right hand's SOLE FOCUS is squaring the long edges of the deck. Do not try to hold the deck with both hands, or square the deck with both hands, each hand has a unique and solitary job. The move is completed with the deck being held from above by the left hand. The right hand is not holding the deck at the end!

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The Mechanical Reverse for left-handed folk (and Tony is left-handed) continued: The card begins its journey clipped between the pinky finger on the back of the card, and the middle, ring and fore- fingers under the card. As the card starts to revolve, however, it becomes clipped with the pinky finger and forefinger on the back of the card, and the middle and ring fingers underneath the card. The revolving of the card underneath the spread is helped by the fingers of the right hand curling inwards. The card will be revolved much of the way by the right hand rotating at the wrist, so the fingers curling in really only the card the last little bit of the revolution, but is still worth noting.

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The Mechanical Reverse for right-handed folk (and Tony is NOT right-handed) continued: The card begins its journey clipped between the pinky finger on the back of the card, and the middle, ring and fore- fingers under the card. As the card starts to revolve, however, it becomes clipped with the pinky finger and forefinger on the back of the card, and the middle and ring fingers underneath the card. The revolving of the card underneath the spread is helped by the fingers of the left hand curling inwards. The card will be revolved much of the way by the left hand rotating at the wrist, so the fingers curling in really only the card the last little bit of the revolution, but is still worth noting.

properly in a conversatiori. you know, the more .w ords youunderstand the more able you are to use the language. You collect the sleight of hand. But you can't become a slave to it. . . We can talk about . the Mechani_cal Reverse, but really I learnt a . lot of reversal moves. Instead of trying to .. make a new thing, :r learnt a bunch of different reversals, and saw which ones worked in which situations. A reversal is taking a card, and turning it over. Th~t's it. But >what are · you doing with the .cards? The cards are influx, in . a spread. You · lift up the deck and square the . deck. The sleight . isunclerneath that. It's in the sewers. Theexternal reality ·· is there .,.. you / are squaring the dec.L . . . ••··.•.. · . ·• .. ,0 when you do . moves, don't think of the sleight, think of what you' re meant to · look like you' re .doing. •• Peter. Duffie · said it the best~ L really remember . that, he said ...It, s a
So

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THE BAD MECHANICAL REVERSE

When doing something like the Mechanical Reverse, a big problem, and an immediate giveaway of the move, is that the deck "hops" over the card or cards you're reversing. This looks bad. The hands move in a totally unnatural way. Again, the only reason for the hop is to accomplish the sleight. Think about what you're meant to look like you' re doing - squaring the cards. No need for a hop.

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. .the ideamagic behind this journal is the interplay AH between and the various arts, because magic is considerably more niche than something like painting, cinematography, or these other arts. But I feel there is some real value in having that dialogue - how the more conventional arts inform something so niche and specific as magic. Have you painted for longer than you've been interested in magic? A 1 Yes. It started as a kid. All kids draw. It's a natural thing. They do it ,...,...,_ before they can even write - you draw a moon or the sun or whatever it is. It's a very natural thing for humans to want to make a mark on a piece of paper or a stone or a tree, I don't know exactly what the roots are, what is it about us wanting to leave a mark. To say "I was here"? This desire to express ourselves probably started with just making simple marks. With magic, one of the problems we have is it's challenging to express ourselves. A comedian can come and directly talk about the thing he or she wants to talk about, but with magic it's all symbolic; it's not explicit. When you perform the Ambitious Card - you are not communicating your point of view directly to your audience. There's an analogy that I keep making that relates to my relationship with painting. One of my favourite painters is Van Gogh. And one of his most famous paintings is 'Sunflowers in a Vase; it's considered a still-life. But why is it regarded as a piece of art? There are millions of flower paintings. Matisse said, "There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose because before he can do so, he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted:' So many painters have painted flowers, how do you paint flowers and say something new? I can't help it, but when I read art books I immediately think about how it relates to magic. "How do you do card tricks and make an audience feel like they see something new?" Van Gogh painted the sunflowers to decorate the yellow house, in his own words Van Gogh wrote to his brother, ''I'd like to do a decoration for the studio. Nothing but large sunflowers:' Paul Gauguin was about to come and live with him - Van Gogh wanted to create this hub for artists, and Paul took a lot of convincing and a bit of persuading on the part of Theo [Van Gogh] to make Paul move in with Vincent in this place. So Vincent paints these sunflowers. It's a yellow house; it makes sense to decorate the house with those paintings. His initiative, I am guessing, was to create paintings that will compliment the house he lived in, almost as a way to welcome Gauguin, and now we look at [these pieces] as works of art. The question is, why? There are many answers. I believe that a still-life is nearly an excuse to put pigments on canvas. It doesn't matter what you paint - almost. The subject matter in itself has meaning; flowers on their own have meaning - life, happiness, sadness sometimes - there's a builtin symbolism, just like a deck of cards is a symbol to something more significant than the object itself. It can make you think of playing Go Fish with your uncle, or gambling in casinos for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are inherent meanings and symbolism in anything. The symbolism in flowers is inherent, and Van Gogh chose to paint them for whatever reason he had, but to me, what makes this piece of art so powerful and unique to him, is with his brushstrokes, colours, and composition, he recorded the sensations and the emotions he had while painting them. It's a living document of what he felt at that moment.

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And you can almost - even though it's a two-dimensional piece - see the speed at which he painted it. You can sense the excitement; it's all captured on the canvas. In a way, the emotion is laying on top of the surface, in a still-life. And the same is true, I think, of a card trick. A card trick is our still-life. Everybody has done it - pick a card, put it back, here it is. And now you as the magician must decide how you're going to present it. What's the speed, what's the sensation that goes along with it? And you are expressing yourself with every decision you make, which is [the act of] presenting it. So it's your "brushstrokes'; your choice of colours, your choice of harmony. It's your composition. What do you see, what don't you see, what do you include or exclude from the composition? When we say composition, we always think of a rectangular piece of paper or canvas. And we say, "What goes inside the frame?" and "What doesn't belong in the frame?" That's the way we usually think of composition. But composition also exists in magic. In this case, instead of a blank canvas, we have a duration. We have a stage, that's our canvas. We have a space, and ten minutes or so - the length of our routine - and now we must decide what's in and what's out. But don't you think there's something inherently different between the two? When we perform, it's so ephemeral. We do a card trick or a show, and it's over. It just lasts for that amount of time. As opposed to a painting that you just do once - or perhaps there are many practise attempts, but they're never seen - and then finally you have this one piece, this record, that prevails. There's no record for the magic show, unless you video it, which is a different thing entirely. What do you think the similarities are between seeing a show in a gallery and seeing a magic show? A 1 It's a great question - no-one's ever asked me that. I'll attempt to answer ~ it, bear with me. I printed my book [Repertoire] twice. And in it, there are reproductions of the original watercolour paintings used to explain the effects. And I was struggling to get the colours as close as possible to the originals in print. And I couldn't! It's impossible! Although we got pretty close. But seeing a photo of a painting is not the same. You can't see a picture of the painting, for me, it's only a reference. It never does the painting justice. Because, just like we choose the colour, the brushstrokes, the viscosity, the medium we paint with, if it's pastel, oil, watercolour, ink, or whatever - we also choose another thing that a lot of people sometimes forget. We choose the size of the painting. For example, Lucian Freud's paintings are eight feet, five feet, six feet - they're big paintings. You don't have a five-foot large book, I'm assuming? I don't. *Laughs*

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Just by reducing the scale - forget the colours, the surface, the texture, everything else - just because you don't see the real size, you already lost a great deal of the painting. You do not see the actual painting. So I'm trying to answer your very elaborate question, but I'll keep on trying. 1

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When I go to see a painting in a museum, I don't have the money to take the painting home with me. So, very much like a magic show, I see it for the duration that I'm going to see it, and when I go away, I'm leaving with that memory of seeing it live.

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We're trying to force an analogy here, but that can be useful. .. Most of the times, to see a masterpiece, a beautifully painted masterpiece, usually you have about an hour or whatever that you're willing to spend in the museum to look at it - looking close, looking far, from the side, maldng sure the glare doesn't annoy you because it's not perfectly lit, and so on - and you have this experience with the painting. There is a space of time during which you're experiencing it. I'll add more to that. What about the But I remember there was a big curator of the museum. The curator is exhibition of Francis Bacon at the deciding, among other things, the colour Met in New York. It was the first time of the wall on which the painting is going I saw thirty or forty pieces of Bacon. to be hanging. So you see the painting in And they're giant. My heart was racing. contrast with that wall. If I take the same I felt like I walked into the world of Bacon. painting and I put it on a white, or blue, Seeing his work next to each other really made it a whole or yellow wall, it will be different. Some different experience for me. artists choose their frames, some don't, some get reframed, that will also affect the So you said the image is static, you can always see it as it is, it doesn't change, as opposed painting. I'll stretch it a little more. The to a live show. But you don't have evidence curator doesn't just choose the or anything to take home with you. But you colour of the wall; he decides what know, if I saw a show live and then saw the other works are going to be next to recording - that's two different shows. We it. And that's going to affect your don't have a way to record what happened in experience of that one painting. I'll reality faithfully. Similar to painting - there stretch it a little more. What's the are many different variables. When you see a weather like? Is it busy? Is it not magic show, are you happy, are you sad, are busy? Are you with friends, are you you tired? Who do you see it with? And that's seeing it with someone you love, what all the arts have in common, they are are you seeing it with a group? Are very complicated. you seeing it with somebody who And that's what Art taught me, doesn't like the piece it's the sensitivity to everything. or somebody who appreciates it? And the next time That's what separates the good performers you see it - maybe it's a different from the great and the bad. It's the fact that they are considering museum (perhaps it's a travelling many different levels of their show) - and you see it amongst a performance. It's the communication, different collection of paintings, it's the eye contact, it's the empathy they and now you see it differently. have with their audience. They are not And I know it sounds theoretical, but, for trying to control everything, but they example, I've seen many Francis Bacons. consider everything, and think about And it's usually a triptych, or it's one how every little detail is going to affect piece, or whatever, and it's surrounded by the overall feeling. paintings from his contemporaries if the curator did a good job of making a show that creates a dialogue between the pieces.

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AH

I was thinking that, to the uninitiated, the curator is kind of like an invisible force inside the gallery space (if you know a bit about it then, of course, you'll know that a great deal of thought has indeed gone into that aspect of the gallery) but it seems as though there are more elements that are under your control, as curator, in the gallery, than there are in the magic performance. A 1 Yes, we cannot control whether the audience is hungry or tired ,-,...,. or whatever. But! I feel if we are the kind of magician who thinks about whether the audience is tired versus the ones that don't care, by just considering that, even if I don't address it, but it's in the back of my mind, I'm aware of it, I think it impacts the way I approach a crowd. I guess, when you get older, you become more empathetic, you lose friends, you cry more often. You realise that there are people in your crowd right now who are struggling, recovering from a break-up, or they're in debt, whatever it is. And it's in the back of your mind; you're talking to them a little bit differently. I don't know how or what, but you look at your audience as something more complicated, more sensitive, there's a greater complexity that you put into the equation when you create the show. Even if it's just a thought in the back of your mind, it's going to make a difference. Wow. I would totally agree - that's an amazing point. And that's a subtle point! A 1 Well, subtleties are what I like! *Laughs* It's like, what's the difference ,-,...,. between a great meal - an amazing, well prepared dish - and something that someone simply slaps on a plate? It's really those details. Oh, I found this salt from the Himalayas, and it's the best one, and it's this quantity, and you need to add it only when it's this hot, and so it's really that, at the end of the day. All the arts are very similar in a sense we analyse, we think, we ponder it, we twist it around, we experiment, we try to find ways to enhance the experience or change the experience, or explore and find something.

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We look at the exact same thing over and over and discover something that we have never thought about before. It's those nuances that make a huge difference.

For the longest time I've rejected the notion that "We should have a message behind our performances" - what sits better with me is to match my performance with the feel of the dynamic of the scenario we find ourselves in. It doesn't make sense for me to jump to this lofty philosophical presentation while I've just been sat talking nonsense with my friends in a coffee shop. I would find that jarring. More and more I find myself just presenting card tricks like ... it is what it is. It's sleight of hand, it's something I love, but it's a card trick. To me, there's something more real about that than the forced presentational message we often see. A 1 Yeah. In my case, I don't think I'm looking ,-,...,. to deliver a message when I perform magic. The art that touches me is mostly biographical. It's artists showing the inner sides of their hearts, their emotions, and they're exploring that in front of me. And it's not "Oh I've found the meaning of life" - for me it's more the search in itself that's interesting.

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The works of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Andrew Wyeth - a lot of their stuff is autobiographical. It's very impulsive and intuitive. One of my favourite books is 'Interviews with Francis Bacon' by David Sylvester. It's a wonderful book. One of the things Bacon did over the years is brag that he never studied how to paint, was never a student at the [Royal] Academy, or anything.

Bacon says something that I find beautiful: "I am a medium for accidents:'

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He opens the gate for something bigger and greater than him to come through. He's the medium allowing that 'something bigger' to end up on the canvas. So, to me, there are great magic theorists, I like them and I read them, I think they're very informative and they can help you, but we also need to trust that intuitive voice. We need to trust the "it feels right and I don't know why''. Sally Mann, the photographer, says it beautifully. She gets asked, "You took a hundred photos, how do you know this is the one? Why not take another thousand photos? Maybe it will get better?" And she says, "You develop this tuning fork in your head and you know you hit the right note:' Sometimes you can't explain it, but it just feels right. Everything aligns and it's perfect. It's not too much, not too little. That's the kind of art that I'm very responsive to. I love the impressionists. I am attracted to Lucian and Van Gogh because of that. I feel like they are trying to record their sensations on the canvas. How do you do that? My work is not about "I am going to share this message''. But I do have one piece like that. I had this idea, something I worked on for five years. I watched Tommy Wonder's Visions of Wonder DVDs, and in one of those he explains how to do the "Nest of Boxes" plot - if you haven't seen it make an effort to see it because it's going to blow your mind. So Tommy Wonder borrows a watch, makes it disappear, then it reappears inside a box, and inside the box there's an alarm clock, and the audience member unscrews it, opens the alarm clock, and inside is their watch. And Tommy never touches the box, there's a little ribbon that he picks up the box with to give it to the spectator, they unlock it and everything, it's great. But what's better than the effect is the explanation, and the trick is already great to begin with! So I started showing my laymen friends the explanation.

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I am showing it because I found it so terrific, and I tell my friends "this is why I love magic''. And when they saw the explanation they'd go "What?? This guy is insane!" The level of detail that Tommy Wonder went to makes you think, "Okay, this guy is a maniac:' And that's why I love Tommy Wonder so much. It shows to my friends, "Look how complex it is, look to what degree this great Tommy Wonder is paying attention, how delicate it is, and how everything is thought out .. :' and they get it.

In the end, there's a world that I get to see as a magician that my laymen friends don't see, and I want them to get a glimpse of this beautiful side of magic. And I said, "I want to do a piece where the explanation is better than the trick, and I want to show the method to the audience:' That was the starting idea. All of that to say I'm trying to follow what moves me. And Tommy Wonder's Nest of Boxes performance-explanation moved me. That's the way I want to work something intrigues me and I'm drawn to it. I see a face and I want to paint it. I like to do the things I love and to share that with people, and if it touches them the way it touches me, then great. Your work seems so based on time. Pieces where something attracted you to that in the moment - in that year, or whatever. The pieces that you cringe at now were necessary for their time, but deeper than that, they are a record of that time, it will mark that time in your life forever - like little breakthroughs of discovering "What do I want to say with my magic?" And

AH

ASIWIND

you're happy leaving certain material in its place, when it's done, it's done, and you don't need to continue performing the same stuff for years on end. A 1 Yes: I have a hard time ,......,. see mg performers that are doing the same act, and nothing evolves. You saw them twenty years ago and now and the act is word-for-word the same.

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I want to change, I would not want to be the same. Because if you don't change, it means the exploration has ended. As soon as a piece is perfected, and I keep on performing it successfully all the time, that's when it starts to become boring for me. But if I keep finding those little bits and the slight changes, that maybe no-one notices but me, then it remains interesting. That's all I can do. That's what's great about painting. You make a painting and the moment it's over, it's not as interesting. Really the painting process is what I enjoy. I make a mark and another mark, I hit it, I fail - and fail often - and then you show it to a couple of your friends and they say "Oh that's very nice" or whatever, that's about it. I'm immediately interested in the next one. It's similar to magic, but it takes a longer time. It's a longer process. Because it takes a thousand shows to get a trick to a place where it works really well.

AH

Why aren't you a fulltime painter? Have you ever made an income from art? A 1 No. Never. And I ,......,. love it that way. I love that I don't need applause, or people to validate me as an artist. I don't need people to tell me I'm a good painter. It's pleasant to hear if somebody says something nice. But with magic, I need the audience to book me, or the audience to applaud at the end, but with painting I have another outlet for my expression where I don't need validation. Rarely, now and then, I offer some of my paintings for sale on my site. I don't push it whatsoever, but it happens that people buy them. And I always regret selling. I always want it back! So art is different to magic in that you're alone and you paint, you don't have an audience, you don't need instant validation even if what you did is good, which is the opposite in magic. So it's a great balance for me. The euphoria I have after painting is amazing, I can't quite describe it. Perhaps I paint for six hours, work on a piece, and it feels like no time at all. I put music on, and it's the level of concentration, it's amazing. When a magician is only in the world of magic, they build up a set of biases. They become heavily biased, thinking in similar ways to other magicians. I think to have other outlets, different types of art that you're into, breaks those biases. It allows you to see things in a much broader view. If you're the kind of person who's only reading magic books, only watches DVDs of magic, and everything's related to magic, then your work can only be as good as what you're consuming. So we, as storytellers, if we read Kafka, if we read Milan Kundera, or whoever we like to read, who are masters at telling stories, now we could aim to be as good a storyteller as they are. Or when watching great films that have nothing to do with magic, now we're artists, we are not in the pool of magicians, but rather in the pool of all artists.

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Magicians who do comedy - they usually compare themselves to other comedy magicians. But do they compare themselves to Louis CK, to Woody Allen? I don't know... I just mentioned two problematic people. *Both laugh* But I like them both and the art they create. I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago, and I'm pondering it now. We all have friends who like everything. They like every type of movie; they can enjoy all sorts of things. And I am a snob. And they always pick on me because of it, and it's true! I am a snob. *Laughs* I hate 99% of magic. And I'm thinking, ''Am I just being a douche?" I'm trying to figure out, or maybe rationalise, being a snob. I think it's because if I can't critique the art that I consume, how can I critique the art that I'm trying to create?

I think ifwe become a bit more specific about what we like and what we don't like, and we understand why, more or less - this really touches me and I feel it, and I want more of that - then when you work on your art, I think you're less lost. But say if you like Adam Sandler's films and you like Jacques Tati's films, what kind of a show are you going to create? Like a hybrid between those two? Or, more likely perhaps, you'd be paralysed by all the possibilities. A Yes. Focus is important. Andrew Wyeth, whom I've grown to like more ,......._ and more, I like not just the art but what he had to say about it. He was one of the most successful living artists of his time. And he was criticised left and right, and a whole new generation of critics grew up to really like him and appreciate him eventually. And he only lived in two places. He lived in Maine, and he lived in Chadds Ford, in Pennsylvania. And never really travelled. He painted those two places. He painted home. And he said [of those places] "There's so much I have to say about this, because I know it and I understand it, and it's moving me:' And he painted one of the hills in Chadds Ford many many times, in different seasons and so on, you know, and he found depth. I mean, talk about focus! So that's an argument for you to dig deep, deep, deep into something that you want to talk about or know about, as opposed to the one who does everything. Then you're only scratching the surface because you don't have enough time. Andrew Wyeth was able to dig deep because he knew the history of the place, and his roots were so deep into the ground he lived on that everything there moved him. When he did Christina's World, the painting that made him very famous, the reason that painting is so strong is that he knew everything about her. It's a moving piece, it's a strong, strong piece. So to me, that's the kind of critical mind I'd like to have. I want to know what I like, and what am I responding to. And every now and then there's something that's on the cheesy side ... You're allowed about ten percent of that stuff. It reminds me of this interview with David Hockney. He has moved out to the country, he still has a studio and home in London and houses in Los Angeles, but spends most of his time out in the countryside in England, and he takes this interviewer on a drive through an orchard near his house, and he says "I have enough material here for a lifetime'; because of the seasons, and the different times of day, and it's

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the same place, but it's a phenomenal expanse of countryside. A 1 You know, what Hockney has in common with Picasso, and it's something ,-....,. that I admire, though it's contrary to what I said earlier, it's that they seem to be doing everything. Picasso painted realistic then more cubistic, then it was this and this, I'm not a big Picasso fan, but I do admire his playfulness and willingness to try different things. Similarly, Hockney has done photography, iPad paintings, large scale, small scale, sketches, it seems like he's all over the place. And yet there's something in common with both of them that is focused. It's that they're very truthful and honest about what feels right. They're very spontaneous and that's a powerful thing about their personalities. The spontaneity, the impulse, I'm going to go with what feels right at this moment. They don't overthink it. Okay, I'm going to go to the countryside and do seasons because it's interesting to me. I'm gonna do photography and play with perspective, whatever he was drawn to at the time. These artists tie in with lots of things you talk about - they are intuitive, impulsive, not over analysing their art, but rather trusting that , voice in them. And of course, Hockney is very interested in science and the ' whole idea of what is considered cheating in art. Which is a terrific thought. And Hockney's book Secret Knowledge - about the camera obscura and speculating just how the great renaissance painters painted, Caravaggio and so on - was the springboard for Tim's Vermeer [documentary] produced by Penn & Teller. Hockney's book was what made Tim want to find out how Vermeer painted those paintings.

The point of it is when you consume art on a broader spectrum; paintings, opera, plays, read great novels and prose and whatever, then you're an artist that lives in a bigger community. Like when I was a kid, I was told to hang out with the good guys, and you will have to 'level up' with them. You will want to belong to that group. It will push you hard to meet the level, the average, at least, of that group. So if you think of yourself as an artist - who doesn't live in the magician's community tiny bubble, but rather in the artist's world - then you have a chance to level up, to belong to that group.

AH

Beautifully put. Thank you for making time for this.

ENDS.

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Photography by: Benjamin Pratt -pgs. 17, 36, 37, 80, 81, 107-115, 118129, 136-7, 166. Allan Hagen -pgs. 18-19, 34, 35, 102, 103, 131, 142-3, 147, 165,177,201. Alexander Hansford - pgs. 7, 10, 45-47, 51, 53-63, 77, 78-79,86-101, 148,149,155,198. Kez Dearmer - pgs. 116-117, 168-172. David Blaine - pg. 180.

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