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Luke Jermay Lecture: 21/1/2004

Allegedly Luke Jermay, is still just a young guy of 18. I say allegedly because he seems to have knowledge, experience and sheer balls well beyond his years. For those that don’t know (and shame on you) he is an up and coming mentalist with some truly ground breaking insights into the psychology behind his chosen field.

He uses a mixture of psychology, language, NPL, suggestion, body language and even to some extent hypnosis techniques to not just achieve the many various types of mentalism, but to actually make you believe that maybe he can do these things…

I felt privileged to be at the lecture last night, especially and I was in very good company. Just quickly looking around I noticed Nicholas Einhorn, Martin Cox, Mike Austin, Jamie Badman and Colin Miller (The Underground Collective) and our very own contributor Liam Montier (to name just a few).

The lecture was a mixture of routines followed not so much by explanations, but more the psychology, insights and subtleties behind the effect. I don’t think Luke will mind when I say that not everything went 100% to plan, although I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing. It certainly didn’t seem to phase Luke in the slightest, he just used the experience to highlight specific points about the effect and the best ways to go about achieving it.

One of the points that is very evident about “mentalism magic” is that it isn’t in the self working easy to do category. There may not be any difficult sleights to learn but you do need a lot of balls and self confidence to carry it off properly. Many complaints I have heard about “Building Blocks” and indeed his earlier book “7 Deceptions” were that it was all theory and wouldn’t work in the real world. Well watching Luke in Action would appear to disprove the critics.

There may be some people who were disappointed that there weren’t more routines shown (not that I actually met anyone that said so). Personally I would strongly disagree with them, as the main reason I was there was to hear Luke speak about what he knows best. I thought that there was a good mix of discussion and routines.

I have to confess that before the lecture I didn’t own “Building Blocks”, but after seeing Luke, and hearing him speak I bought a copy as it would now be inconceivable for me not to read every single word he has so far written. If anyone has any interest what so ever in the “art” of mentalism, then I strongly urge them to do the same.

Because I hadn’t pre-read the book, all the routines he showed were new to me, and of course this meant that I was seeing it from a slightly different perspective than many.

He started off with a routine where he got an audience member on stage, sat them down, and asked them to close their eyes as they merely thought of a card. After a few moments of consideration (and the silent moments are so important), he delved into a deck of cards that were sitting on the table and removed one. He showed this card to the audience, and then asked the spectator to name the card that they were thinking of. Un ‘kin believable! Forget the Breakthrough Card System. Forget the ID. Luke was using no props.

He then repeated this with another card before asking another audience member to pull out any one card from the tabled deck. This WAS the next card that the spectator had been thinking of.

Another routine that Luke demonstrated, and admittedly it could have gone a lot better (and this was purely very bad luck on Lukes part), was his “Magic Castle” effect. Although it went a little astray, for me this has a heck of a lot of potential, and is something that I am definitely going to at least try.

Basically there is a "Magic Card Castle" already built on a side table. A member of the audience is nominated as the "Castle Monitor", whose job it is to knock the castle down at any point of the performance.

When the castle is knocked down, the performer turns his back and says he is going to try an experiment with “Remote Viewing”. He asks the spectator that knocked the cards down, to spread them out on the table so that he can see them all.

He then asks the spectator to count the face up cards – and is visibly seen to be counting himself. Of course he gets it right. In a similar fashion to "Pre-Deck Ability" he then counts the red cards, the diamonds, and even spots when the spectator focuses on a particular card and names that one card.

Although this didn’t go to plan last night, it is actually probably one of the easier more reliable tricks to do, and so very effective. If you wish to see Luke performing a similar version of this, I believe he will be soon doing it on a BBC TV program. I’ll give you more details when I have them.

To summarise, "Building Blocks" is a very aptly named book, as Luke pointed out that all the techniques discussed are merely the building blocks to providing a good mentalist act. It's then a matter of applying all these blocks together to build some impressive routines.

Last nights lecture has provided me with an awful lot of food for thought, and I can hardly wait to start reading the book, at which point I am sure I will have a 1000 new questions to ask him.

In many ways what Luke was actually teaching was how to do mentalist magic without any props. No gaffed decks. Just mind reading.

And that truly is magic.

Review of Building Blocks
Alakazam should have a new batch of Building Blocks on sale.

Am really gutted that i missed it. Have been reading the book since December and it's great.

Good review.

S

Ironically, the card castle is one of the few effects I have published that has a pure method, as in it is self contained and sure fire.

It so happened in my lecture that a spectator miss counted the number of cards, which took one of the mind reading parts away however the climax still worked as planned.

For the record (which can be confirmed by those attending) i performed, all with no failure:

Twisted Palm

My Pulse Routine, which no one thinks works

Several things from Building Blocks.

The phobia rutine from 7 Deceptions which no one thinks works...

Basically people have now seen that the routines everyone doubted working, well work.

Very much enjoyed performing these to prove thier worth.

Luke Jermay.

Thanks for your posting Luke and welcome to the Forum!

Can I just mention to all & sundry that the South Tyneside Magic Festival is on from March 19th to 21st and will feature, (pause for fanfare of trumpets).... Luke Jermay! In view of Bananafish's review I'm trying to free up that weekend so I can get there and see all this wonderment for myself - can't wait!! Tickets for the weekend are a very reasonable £30 apparently.

(Contact details are: karri.prinn@s-tyneside-mbc.gov.uk or martinduffy@magic99.freeserve.co.uk)

Sounds good, I am curently trying to muster funds for my next spending spree and your work is pretty high on my wish list Luke. I have to say that I was puzzled when I heard initial reviews of 7 deceptions in which people said that stuff in it didn't work and guessed at the time that it might have been because they hadn't put the effort in, I mean why would you publish stuff that doesn't work? It's hardly likely to help sell anything you come up with in the future.

I'd just like to vouch for the fact that all the routines that Luke mentioned not only worked, but were quite astonishing.

I can understand why some people would have doubted him after reading "7 Deceptions", as frankly some of them appear to be quite impossible.

But there would have be no doubters after his performance last night, and if I was him I would have one heck of a smug grin on my face at the end.

As an example, he not only slowed then stopped HIS pulse (No rubber balls were used), but he slowed and stopped the pulse of a spectator (well actually half the bleedin audience!!!). What he says works. I don't know why. I'm not even sure that Luke knows exactly why. But it works.

Luke Jermay wrote:My Pulse Routine, which no one thinks works

I performed this routine at my Magic Club's competition and it came off brilliantly!
The 'victim' spent the rest of the evening checking his pulse - he thought I did something evil to him!

And the looks on the faces of the rest of the club members was priceless...

Try it!!! It really does work!