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Another contemplative thread that will go nowhere!

This stems in part from a thread going on in mental quarters and in part from a simple bit of business I came up with as an adjunct to Messrs Shufton and Harris's X-Ray. I am pondering how far doing something very cleanly in one instance allows you to be much dirtier elsewhere.

Occasionally when I have shown someone X-Ray they have asked to see it again and, for reasons apparent to people who own it, it's not advisable. However, X-Ray is fantastically clean, and I've just shown that I can be that clean, so would repeating the trick in a less clean manner still count as clean in the spectator's mind? What I can do after X-Ray is shuffle the cards, have a card touched, turn the rest of the deck face up around the touched card, which remains face down, and proceed as before. Certainly more hands on, but I feel I can legitimise this under the guise of "getting to the trick" more quickly than the cutting procedure.

There is the wisdom that if you present the same effect using two different methods, the spectator is likely to assume only one method is in place. Therefore if the two methods used cancel each other out, it makes the method much more difficult to guess at. But where one method is cleaner than the other, can the dirtier method inherit that cleanliness? My instinct is that it can. I'd say this was certainly true in mentlism. If you open with an effect reliant on the D_______ Ploy or P__-S___ that therefore has no real way into a solution from the audience's point of view, I suspect they won't mind so much, later on in your set, you have people write thing down, because you've already demonstrated that you don't *need* them to write it down.

Or am I barking?

I don't know what the x ray trick is, and I don't know if my thinking will be as applicable to mentalism, but I would imagine that using a dirty method before a very clean one would be most effective. People will be paying more attention to details during the repetition, and they'll know what effect to expect.

I have x-ray and in my thoughts, once something has happened before someones eyes and you have demonstrated the ability to achieve the impossible, im sure that most people would take you at face value for any follow up effects along the same vein.

I would probabaly be inclined to start with the weaker effect and then point out the weaknesses and then demonstrate how you can eradicate that doubt with another example. This would probably work out to be a nice routine. Trouble is, most lays are bamboozled by the mose simple of tricks and may not need the convincer.

I think that sometimes we dont have the confidence in the effects we perform, probably due to the amount of times we perform the said effects. I for one sometimes find myself looking at the person thinking "is this REALLY fooling you?" Of course it is.

Alec