The Archive
What used to be premium-only is going public in weekly stages. Past posts are being updated regularly, so check in.
The Cabinet Before Houdini: How Séance Room Furniture Became Escapology’s First Stage
October 30, 2024
Every escape artist owes a debt to a piece of furniture nobody remembers by name. Not a trunk, not a milk can, not the water...
The One Ahead Principle: The Quiet Engineering Behind Mentalism’s Most Elegant Time Trick
October 12, 2024
Every mentalist eventually runs into the same wall. You can build the most convincing psychological read in the world, but the moment the audience senses...
Reading a Room That’s Already Turned: Performing Bizarre Magic to a Hostile Audience
September 23, 2024
A hostile room doesn't announce itself with heckling. It announces itself with silence, the wrong kind of silence, arms crossed, phones half up, a table...
Part 1 of 2 · The Convention Circuit
The Convention Circuit: How Magic Gatherings Built, and Gatekept, Bizarre Magic as a Genre
September 10, 2024
Bizarre magic did not grow up on television. It did not grow up in glossy trade magazines or viral clips. It grew up in windowless...
Part 1 of 2 · Reading the Body
Reading the Body Before the Mind: What Interrogation Trained Microexpression Work Actually Offers a Mentalist
August 29, 2024
A polygraph examiner and a bizarre magic performer both watch faces for a living. That's about where the resemblance ends. I've spent years reading books...
The Moving Hand: Automatic Writing as a Performance Tool, From Spiritualist Parlors to the Contemporary Seance
August 17, 2024
Nobody hands you their hand and asks you to write with it. That's the wall automatic writing breaks through, and it's why the effect still...
Talking to the Board: Collecting Ouija Boards, Planchettes, and Spirit Communication Devices
July 23, 2024
My father-in-law once handed me a talking board that had been in his family's attic since the 1930s, wrapped in a pillowcase, "just in case."...
Words That Hold: The Craft of Mentalism Scripting and Why It Differs From Stage Patter
July 3, 2024
A magician can flub a line and the crowd laughs with him. A mentalist flubs the same kind of line and the whole room quietly...
The Words Are the Work: Scripting Mentalism for Emotional Precision Without Killing Spontaneity
June 11, 2024
Watch a mentalist blow a moment and you'll usually see the same failure. Not a fumbled prop, not a technical miss. A word choice that...
The Book Test at 100: How Mentalism’s Most Abused Method Became Its Most Sophisticated
May 27, 2024
The Method They Warned You Off Somewhere in nearly every beginner's mentalism course, there's a paragraph warning you off the book test. Too fiddly, they...
Vertex Reconsidered: Why a Single Point of Contact Still Fools Working Mentalists
May 3, 2024
Most performers reach for complexity when they want to feel impressive. That's backwards, and it's the reason so many "advanced" effects fall apart the moment...
Part 1 of 2 · Designing the Seance Room
Lighting Design for the Séance Room: A Working Framework for Every Effect
April 8, 2024
Most performers think about lighting once, on the day of the show, when they walk into the room and realize the overheads are fluorescent and...