Blake Vogt: We’re recording. Welcome to “Inventing Magic,” Episode 4, with Justin Willman.
Justin Willman: Let’s do it. Is our goal to theorize a trick or to hopefully have something visual to show?
BV: Either. It could be visual; it could be conceptual. There is no preconceived notion that a magic trick can be invented in one hour. The goal is just to work on magic for an hour. But as you and I know, we’ve worked on stuff together that’s taken over a year to get to a good, polished place, and you and I have accidentally stumbled onto stuff within five minutes.
JW: We’re down to 55 minutes….
BV: What do you have around you right now?
JW: I have a garden gnome. Ping Pong ball. I’ve got a bunch of stuff. Do you want to go object based, or do we want to come up with a concept and figure out what fits?
BV: I’m trying to look around my desk. I’ve got Post-it Notes directly in front of me. I’m going to [limit this to] within a foot, because if I go 5 feet, it kind of becomes too crazy. Have you ever done anything with Teflon tape?
JW: It’s very slippery on the backside, right? I’ve never used it myself, but I know that there are certain tricks that involve sliding mechanisms that have Teflon tape to ease the friction.
BV: I got that in the mail today…. I’ve got envelopes. I’ve got old rubber bands. I just found out that if you don’t use rubber bands, they go bad.
JW: Yeah, they get brittle.
BV: I never knew that.
JW: Balloons, too.... I’m trying to think of what’s on my board. A trick where I know there’s something to do with it. Is there a premise or a plot that is ready for a little reinvention?
BV: Here’s a fun question I haven’t asked anybody. What’s your everyday carry right now? Not magic, just stuff like your keys and wallet.
JW: I don’t even bring keys with me because my phone unlocks my car. So, I have my phone, Chapstick, and then maybe a couple of credit cards.
BV: And you always put that stuff in the same pockets. Or are you a random pocket guy?
JW: I’m a random pocket guy. I wish it was a little more predictable. It’s always in the last pocket I check.
BV: You’re saying you’re walking around with some potentially empty pockets to carry some new tricks?
JW: I would love to have a new everyday carry.
BV: When you get on stage, are all your pockets loaded?
JW: Every pocket is loaded on stage.
BV: Do you perform in pants with four pockets?
JW: Jeans, so I’ve got four pockets, plus the thumb tip pocket, and then on stage, I’ve got… a left and right jacket pocket. I try not to use those, because there’s a bulge that always happens there. Bulges are very distracting, I feel like people are taking you in head to toe, so any bulge will be noticed, even a die, or a thumb tip.
BV: You’ve got a belt on you. Do you normally wear a belt?
JW: Yes. I always wear a belt because then I’ll have my mic pack clipped to the belt. I hate it when it’s pulling on my pants.
BV: Talking about stuff that’s just been in my idea journal, “belt” has been at the top. I have badly wanted a belt trick that either uses my belt or a borrowed belt. I just love the funny idea of walking up to somebody and saying, “Give me your belt.” I love that. And I don’t know what the trick is, that’s a problem. There’s linking and unlinking. But there’s something invasive and intrusive, and hilarious about making someone take their belt off.
JW:: Belt through body.
BV: Belt through body would be awesome. Can we jam on the belt for a second?
JW: Okay, let me take off my belt.
BV: I’ve got to find one.
JW: Moving holes feels like it would be a cool trick. If you had a hole that was filled in with something you could steal out, you could almost move the hole. In fact, it’s a bit of a wish fulfillment: Sometimes, when your belt doesn’t fit right, you wish you could move the hole.
BV: This is a social experiment. Put your belt down and don’t look at it. How many holes does your belt have?
JW: Four?
BV: Do you know that?
JW: Five. Dammit.
BV: Here’s the weird concept. If you could miss call someone’s belt hole number at the beginning. If you had them pull their belt out and you could cover one hole up, then you pull your belt off and you could remove one of your holes or move it around, kind of like Mike Close’s Pothole Trick on a business card.
[What if] the end of the routine was you removed the hole from your belt and added it to theirs. Then they walked away with five holes on their belt. But they never knew that they’ve always had five.
JW: What you just also made me think of is you take the holes that are there and almost do a Matrix with the holes. Or a bunch more holes appear. Little black circles fall, and then you shake it, and it spells out a word.
BV: Word reveal. I never thought of…. You know, you talking about being on stage with the mic pack also just made me think, I have two belts here. If you lifted your shirt and then took off your belt, but you had another belt underneath it, you could always end the trick, sort of like Ring, Watch, and Wallet: Your belt ends up back on your waist.
JW: Well, if you’re doing a Ring, Watch, Wallet [talking] about going through TSA, you’d have to take your watch off, your phone out of your pocket, and your belt off. Love that….
What about doing a belt in a bottle? I was just in Texas doing a show and there are some big belt buckles. If there was a bottle that had a wide enough mouth that the leather strap would fit in. But certainly, this [buckle] wouldn’t….
BV: Everyone has heard of the Linking Rings, but what gets overlooked is no one carries around these big rings. On you right now you have three rings. Your ring, your watch, your belt…. This is such a great application for any Ring on Rope move that works with a belt. I’ve seen you do your old Ring on Rope routine. Are there any moves with a belt undone and a watch that carry over as is?
JW: Let me see. The first move you do is you put the ring on the rope.
BV: I bet 90% of the moves don’t work. But I’m wondering if there is a move that exists with a rope and a ring that works with a belt and a watch?
JW: Well, let’s say maybe we go back to what we were just talking about, about the placement of the key… then the watch could be… Gosh, I really want to cut a belt.
BV: There have been five times on this call with you I have almost cut this belt.
JW: Do I have time to cut a belt and to hot glue it?
BV: I don’t want to make you cut a belt.
JW: I’m cutting a belt.
BV: Then you can do all the Linking Ring stuff. You have magnets?
JW: I’ve got the magnets with the putty here, but which I’ll hot glue on in a second.
BV: This is so great. If I didn’t have a gig in two days and needed to get a new belt….
Well now I’m just so jealous of your belt. All right. How many holes did you put through?
JW: [Working on the belt gaff.]
BV: Nine minutes. This is why this is a fun challenge, but completely impractical, because this is something we could work on for the next few weeks.
JW: Oh, and I will…. Eventually I’m going to call you and say, “Blake, you can’t put that episode out. It’s in my show.”
BV: Well, this won’t come out for at least a month.
JW: So, I have a month to be the only one.
BV: That would be so cool if the creation of a trick in your show existed hidden on YouTube. Good plug for Genii magazine.
JW: It’s the least I can do, after all the tricks that I’ve learned from Genii.
I don’t know about you, but magic magazines were my true portal into the magic world as a kid. At magic flea markets in St Louis, I would buy peoples’ archives of old magazines. So, I was reading old Genii’s from the ‘70s. I was catching up on the past. I don’t think I realized how influential reading all that old stuff would be, reading the news of the day, the minutiae of what were the fads and the tricks of the moment.
Okay, so I’ve now got a key belt.
BV: I love that. That looks great.
JW: What we’ve got then is a magnet and it kind of lines itself up and it opens. This is a little rudimentary. If I were to do the two belts here, like we talked about earlier. Let’s see how it holds up from both sides. [Holds up linked belts.] Damn.
BV: That looks exactly like what it should look like.
JW: And the magnet does not need to be this big.
BV: What I like about what you just did, is it gives you such a visual, real link. But then you could always end by having it balanced on the back of their belt loop to do that one discrepant move.
JW: Come on, hot glue! It’s not holding. This is a job for epoxy, but we don’t have time.
Okay, so it’s two belts buckled, right? No holes in the belts. Pull through, linked. You can even do a kind of a fake out. It almost looks like you’re teaching an optical illusion at first.
BV: I just cut mine.
JW: Genii owes me a belt.