Blake Vogt Welcome to Inventing Magic, Episode 11. Very excited to have on the podcast this week, Stuart MacLeod. We’re recording this on Thanksgiving week. Thank you for taking an hour to do this.
Stuart MacLeod No problem.
BV We have nothing prearranged, nothing set up. I just told you that we’re going to start right away. I’m going to start a one-hour timer, and that begins now. Do you find that you prefer to jam with teams of people, by yourself, or one-on-one?
SM One-on-one, I think. I was in a double act as Barry and Stuart for 15 years, and that process of coming up with tricks was sitting in a room for eight hours a day. We’d meet Monday through Friday, like it was a job. I get very overwhelmed in rooms. I’m a very quiet thinker. I’m not like a spitball kind of person, so I’m waiting for the right answer or inspiration. The aha moment.
BV And that’s probably easier in a smaller setting than with a ton of people.
SM I mean, 50% of working with Barry was just silent. It was like a Quaker meeting. We just sat there.
BV Did you guys work with consultants or writers or just the two of you?
SM We had brilliant magicians who built stuff. And in the process of building a thing, it’s only 30% worked out. You know, all of the hard stuff is in building it. Scott Penrose would build a ton of stuff; Danny Hunt. We did sit with Sebastian Clergue, who is a genius. Not only as a magic consultant, just this monster brain that would say brilliant things. And in the early days, working with Andy Nyman and David Britland, Anthony Owen, I had to pinch myself. I was 21 years old and thrown into the creative mix with the Derren [Brown] team.
BV Do you find that most of the stuff that you jam on for yourself is for stage/parlor stuff more than close-up?
SM Yeah, almost no close-up. It’s either two buckets: [Some of it is] séance material, which I’ve certainly become obsessed with. About 15 years ago, Barry and I took a séance show to the Edinburgh Festival, and that just kicked off this whole obsession with that world, which touches on bizarre magic, mentalism, all that stuff. But 90% of it is comedy, stage parlor magic.
BV That’s so cool. And do you ever blend séance-y stuff into your stage work? Or are those two completely different buckets for you?
SM No, they’re not different buckets. Bizarre magic has always been a sort of undercurrent. Even all the stuff that Barry and I did, it was in some way dark either in theme or overtly dark with gore and blood. So that’s been ongoing.
BV I would love to jam on either séance or dark, bloody gore. That has not been touched on yet in my podcasting articles.
SM OK, is this close-up? Is it impromptu?
BV The more parameters probably the better. I would say that the target audience for this type of trick would be a magazine reader. If there was a close-up version of this that would be cool. A strolling or parlor type of dark séance or gore. I don’t do anything gory.
SM Well it’s sort of gone out of fashion. I feel like around 2000, 2010, those early aught years, there were—even in comedy—things that were outrageous or edgy, and that has just completely gone away. And then all of those thread out of the eye, or nail up nose, I feel like there was a period of time where everyone was doing it, and now it’s chilled out a bit. No one wants to see that.
BV That’s so interesting, because with you guys and the Amazing Johnathan.
SM It was Amazing Johnathan and Penn & Teller. Growing up watching that in the mid ‘90s, and in the U.K., we had this great TV show called The Secret Cabaret, which people can go and see on YouTube. I watched it when I was 12 years old. It was a huge, formative creative experience.
BV What about séance-y stuff? I don’t do a lot of séance-y stuff myself, but I’ve worked on stuff for Justin [Willman] or other magicians in the séance world. What kind of stuff would be in the realm of possibility? Like, walk-around séance? You know, I’ve never heard those two words put together.
SM I feel like Eugene Burger used to do close-up séance stuff. And I believe he would have resets for those things. Eugene had a great close-up thing that used cigarette paper. [He] crunched it up into a little ball and lit it with a match. In a flash, he opened it up, and there was a burned message on the little cigarette paper, which is a cool, closer version of Spirit Slates.
BV That’s great.
SM Just the other day I was rereading the House of Mystery book. I feel like the spiritualists were the first mentalists. You know, they were using all the Q&A and all of the impression pads and all of the switching devices that mentalists use. Really it goes back to spirit mediums. And they were not publishing their stuff, but it was quite clearly magic.
I read a cool little trick the other day, which was someone had to write a message to someone that had passed with a question, seal it in an envelope, and then they hold on to it for a minute, and the spirit medium calls upon the other side to come and give us a message. And when they tear open the envelope, their message had changed into a reply.
BV What that’s making me think of is, I love FriXion ink.
To jump off the Eugene Burger thing, if you had a piece of tissue paper and you had flash paper behind it, and you wrote a message, or had it prewritten, and then they could even initial it, and then you lit that message, would the heat from flash paper be enough to cause the FriXion ink to vanish?
SM I don’t think so. But that is something, well worth the test.
BV Yeah, I did one thing once, where I wrote a message on a piece of flash paper. And it was [the effect where you write], “The name of the card is…” and within that is “Ten of Hearts.”
The thing I discovered, which is very weird, is if you write with FriXion ink and real ink on a piece of flash paper, there is a distance that you can get the flash paper to not burn. I wrote, “The name of the card is,” I had the real Ten of Hearts palmed and folded up. I was holding the prediction, and I held it close to the flame, and the letters rearranged to “Ten of Hearts,” so that was hit one.
And then whenever I touched it to the flame, it changed into the actual Ten of Hearts. I didn’t think that you could get flash paper warm, but not hot, but it’s very possible, which is kind of cool.
SM How hot does it have to get? It wouldn’t work on your hand?
BV Ooh, on your hand is crazy.
SM Well, that’s how I did this cold/blood thing. I wrote the word “blood” on my hand, and parts of it were dry erase, and that could be wiped away and flipped over and you would see the word “cold.” With FriXion ink, I don’t know if we would take one wipe, or if you need to stick your thumb in a cauldron.
BV No, I think it needs a lot more heat than body heat. But what I would be curious to know is, I think it’s just the flash of heat. So, if I put a lighter directly on my hand, just for a millisecond, it’s not going to burn me, but I don’t know if that’s enough heat to cause the thing to disappear.
Here we go. [Tests FriXion ink on hand with lighter.] No, it got hot on my hand. Nothing happened. Just pain. That hurt pretty bad. Worth it, though.
SM Don’t hurt yourself.
BV Matches are cool, though. Matches feel séance-y.
SM Talking about coffee cups: What if there’s a message either in the cup or underneath, like holding the lights or matches under the cap and it’s now burned into the bottom.
BV Or that reminds me of ink blot tests with coffee spills and reveals built in that way. I love thermochromatic and hydrophobic materials like waterproofing spray.
SM I once closed a show with that. It was an interactive thing where people could choose a murder weapon.
It was actually a lot darker than that. We ended up with a gun, which was not the thing. And then the gun accidentally went off, blew off the back of my head and blood on the wall behind me was the thing. Nice, easy, close-up effect.
BV Do you have matches with you?
SM I have a lighter. I don’t think I have matches.
BV Matches, fire, lighter, friction, ink, séance. I feel like we’re tiptoeing around some stuff that’s all starting to sound similar. You know, the reason why I like those props too is they fit in your pocket. A lot of people have matches or a lighter.
SM Just pitching this: The drawer of the matchbox comes out. You tip the match onto their hand, or they take it out themselves. They close it. The match is struck on the side and then held underneath the box. And then when you open the box, you see the message in the tray. Now, if the heat would be sufficient to go through two layers of cardboard….
BV I’ll tell you right now, I’ve got all the supplies necessary.
SM The matchbook could be shimmed and metal will keep the heat.
BV This is thick matchbook cardboard. I love the idea of those House of Cards matches.
SM You know what’s interesting? And we can talk method later, the idea of opening the matchbox and they clearly see there’s no message in there, strike the match, extinguish it, put it into the box, rattle it around, and it’s as though the ash from the match is writing the message on the bottom. FriXion might not be the best method for this, but that’s a cool little Spirit Slate. Because it’s self-contained.
BV I’m realizing the average matchbox drawer is about the thickness of two layers of matches. So, if you built a box that was just a half, you would still have enough depth for your single match. Does that make sense? You take it out, dump the match out, and even an Okito move or something like that.
SM And you’re talking about no moving parts, it’s just to flip?
BV No moving parts, though you have all the classic Spirit Slates methods at your disposal. A super low-tech version—no magnets—would be like if you had just a piece of the exact size… we’re doing great on time, by the way.
SM How long does it take for the FriXion to come back?
BV It depends on the temperature. So if it stays at room temperature, I don’t think it will come back. If you put it in a refrigerator, it comes back pretty quick. If you put it in a freezer, it comes back the fastest.
SM Yeah, and we all know that ghosts write their messages in the freezer. You just need to carry a freezer around with you.
BV So if you had this and then a cover, right? If you had the match there first and you had your paper here, you could know which way you need to open it, but let’s say you guess incorrectly at first. Now the paper you know is down, but you can sandwich it between… is this making sense?
SM Yes, we’ve basically just reinvented a slate. I do love it.