Blake Vogt Welcome to Inventing Magic, Episode 10. My name is Blake Vogt, and my special guest today is Nick Diffatte.
Nick diffatte Thanks so much. I’m thrilled to be doing this.
BV One hour starting now, let’s go.
ND I’m lucky enough to be in my apartment this week, which is not always the case. Are you like me in that my brain has to have things in front of me in order to remember that I’m working on them?
BV I’m the exact same way. I write everything down as best I can, but I’m not great at it, and just out of frame of this camera are like 17 things that have been started but not finished.
ND I’m here for a week with nothing going on and a handful of things coming up. So I have the half-done table. I didn’t want to tell you before, but I have the half-done table, kind of close to an idea, and objects that I like.
BV That’s awesome. I have the same thing. I was going to mention that you’re currently performing at Mad Apple at New York, New York, in Las Vegas, right? How is that going?
ND It’s a blast. It’s the greatest. It’s about seven months out of the year. I love it.
BV Do you have set material? Do you get to play around at all?
ND The only thing is timing. There’s a giant hockey clock in the back of the room. And I gotta hit 15, kind of dead nuts on. There’s some wiggle room within that for how I’m feeling and how they’re vibing.
BV Do you ever try stuff out there? Or, what is your process for putting something entirely new together?
ND I can’t really try stuff out there. It’s kind of like a showcase spot for me, I’m doing the same main trick every single night there with a little bit of wiggle room with the opening stuff.
BV Let’s do objects that have nothing to do with anything you’ve even thought about doing.
ND Large lima beans. I do a handful of close-up things a year, not a lot, but I love it. I’m very much in the Eugene Burger sort of thinking that with close-up you need a really strong opening line and a really strong closing line. And I just think that pulling beans out of my pocket… I love selling people on a theme that sounds like a factual thing that you’re just telling them over coffee, but is the worst conceit to get into a trick. I have a trick with the iPhone camera that I’ve done for years, where it starts with a three-minute conversation about an update to the iPhone camera, before they realize that we’re into a trick.
BV What’s the size of the lima beans?
ND They’re pretty big. Button size, yeah, half an inch or something. And that was originally what I wanted to do. You know, Gaëtan Bloom’s Buttons Through Table? It’s a badass sleeper trick. And I used to futz with it. And I was like, “Oh my God, if I pull out magic beans and I tell them, ‘These are magic beans, they’re legit. Like, I got them from a real guy.’” Then pull them out of a coin purse, which you need for the trick.
BV I’m gonna write down beans. How many objects would you say are around you right now?
ND I’ve got three or four big ones.
BV OK. What if we each do three and then we’ll just talk about those six things. One thing that I just keep everywhere, because it’s such an interesting object to me, is a tape measure, yeah? And this one has a sticker on it right now, for no reason. I love them because they can get so big. I haven’t seen tons of tricks with them. Josh Jay had a cool one years ago.... I like that it’s retractable, like as a method.
ND Do you know the Thayer thing that they sold? It was a thing that was a tape measure with some other brass shit welded to it and painted flesh tone. And it was a handkerchief suspension. You extend the gimmick and the handkerchief is now rigid, and then it can suck back into itself.
BV I love that. Last thing I’ll say about tape measures is I love that if you get the ones that lock or stay open, you could put 10 of them on stage and make a barrier that you’re trying to get through. I just like the visual of it, because it’d be so fragile.
ND I think that these objects are inherently funny. Yeah? Tell the whole story. A guy pulling out a tape measure on stage in the right setting is a pretty funny thing.
BV Or beans.
ND For a while, with the bean thing, I was just buying every little brass trick—Ring Casket, Bill Tube—and thinking “How does this apply to beans...?” There’s another science class thing that I’ve always wanted to show an audience. If you take a normal straw, you can stick it all the way through a potato.
BV That’s real? Or that’s a trick?
ND This is real. And I’m obsessed… I have that thing that I think everybody has, where you fall in love with an idea, and then you fall out of love with an idea, and you need to be able to push through, to re-fall in love with it. And then that’s everything in my act. “This is a piece of shit. I’m never going to do it again.” And then I just gave it that extra 10%.