EM"Disorderly Conduct" is the title to the mnemonic deck section, and it’s fitting. It's not about tricks at all, but about specific strategies to conceal the ordered nature of the cards while performing with a mnemonic stack.
As I say in the text, many of the best effects that rely on a stack are so direct that smart people will begin to suspect that "order" has something to do with what they are seeing. So this chapter presents an overview of my approaches to creating a convincing illusion that the cards are mixed, and that the order is random.
There are ideas to help your false shuffling be more convincing, ways to lay out and pick up cards in performance that look chaotic, a couple of advanced procedures that really do disorder the cards and procedures to get them back where they need to be.
These ideas are largely original with me, but many similar (and in some cases identical) things are hinted at in Tamariz' brilliant "Mnemonica" and other sources of information on the mnemonic deck. As far as I know though, this is the first time these concepts are thoroughly examined as a separate issue from memorized deck magic in general.
WK: Please talk about your approach to Vernon's "Trick That Cannot Be Explained."
EM: Equivoque, or "The Trick That Cannot Be Explained" has been a passionate study of mine for more than 20 years. In truth, every thing you need to know about it theoretically is contained in Ganson's original description from "More Inner Secrets of Card Magic." There is nothing radically different in my approach, although I have a great deal of real world experience performing it, so there are some ideas here that have not seen print before.
One of the things I decided early on in my own explorations of Equivoque was that I wanted to provide myself with a safety net in case of catastrophe. So I began developing a loose kind of structure using similar looking effects (that didn't rely on equivoque as method) to support and surround my fledgling attempts at equivocal magic.
It gradually dawned on me as I worked at this that not only did the additional effects provide a level of comfort while learning the skills of Equivoque, but that they provided additional opportunities to engineer those miracle situations that other methods simply can't touch.
This section of "Tangled Web" is really aimed at advanced practitioners of this kind of magic, giving them some new tools and ways of looking at Equivoque to help make the miracle class of effects more likely, and those "other situations and outcomes" more palatable.
