Posted on 09/07/2003 6:20:49 AM PDT by knighthawk
Profile: David Blaine
Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a Blaine! As you read this, David Blaine will be into his third day suspended in a see-through plastic box high above the Thames with only water for sustenance and a catheter to remove the consequences thereof. Other than that, his only company will be "diapers, Wet Wipes and lip balm", at least one of which he hopes not to have to use.
America's most celebrated magician hopes to be left high and dry for 44 days, before he's removed, babbling incoherently, "Pick a diaper, any diaper. Go on, think of a Wet Wipe, any one you like. It's the moist white one, isn't it . . ? Have you seen me saw the diaper in half . .? Bwaha-ha-ha-ha." The Guinness Book of Records has turned him down on the grounds that it doesn't do any starvation records, otherwise the book would be full of anorexic schoolgirls and cadaverous Rwandans trying to outdo Bobby Sands. And pretty much everything else Blaine's doing up there has been done before, longer and more cramped.
A couple of years back, some South African spent 67 days in a very small barrel, an eighth the size of the American's plastic box, which at 7ft by 7ft by 3ft is bigger than many London hotel rooms. So this won't be one for the record books, unless he gets through a record amount of nappies. At the press conference last week to launch the stunt, Blaine apparently cut his ear off, which presumably gives him a shot at the Man With Fewest Ears Suspended In Mid-Air category. But, even then, you get the vague feeling Guinness would find some technicality to exclude him. Blaine may already have set a record for Most Rejected Grounds For A Single Stunt.
Down on the ground, meanwhile, the nappies are all anybody cares about. Where else in central London can you see a grown man changing his own nappy? Well, okay, there's Nanny Whiplash's Bondage Nursery in Paddington, but apart from that, I mean. David Blaine has distilled the art of illusion to its fundamentals: When Houdini was chained in a trunk, who knew what was going on inside? Did he have to pull his chain before relieving himself? But Blaine in his nappy-accoutred see-through box seems to have recognised that the only thing the public wants to know about him is: is he full of s***?
Blaine is 30 now, and although much of his showbusiness career has followed a traditional trajectory - he's dated Daryl Hannah - he is credited with radically transforming the magician's art. He did this not by developing any ingenious new tricks but rather by doing the same old tricks - but without a tuxedo! Audiences were amazed: no bow tie, no drumroll. How did he do it? Rather than standing there waving his magic wand, he waved his magic wand goodbye and tossed it in the trashcan, and, before you could say "Abracadabra", he'd been taken up by celebrities from Robert De Niro to Leonardo DiCaprio as the magician you weren't embarrassed to be seen with. In fact, if you stood him next to his pal Bill Clinton, you would assume, from the big bow tie and wing-collar, that Bill was the one about to get his wand out.
Instinctively or otherwise, Blaine had a brilliant insight. Across the last century, evening dress has been discarded in one entertainment field after another - from pop vocalists to BBC newsreaders. But into the 1970s and 1980s magicians seemed imprisoned by the conventions: able to spring themselves from locked trunks bisected by a dozen saws, they remained trapped in their tuxes unable to escape. The sparkly, spangly accessories reflected the unchanging nature of their business. The really astonishing never-before-seen things happen in the real world: you can clone a sheep, you can drop a bomb from an unmanned plane on a carload of terrorists in the Yemeni desert, you can watch from your office desk persons on the other side of the world in various combinations performing whatever sexual acts your credit card can afford.
Yet magicians are still doing essentially the same things they did back in the horse-and-buggy days: cards, coins, flags of many nations. Even when David Blaine moved on from card tricks to more spectacular stunts - standing on a 100-foot pole in New York's Bryant Park or entombed in a block of ice in Times Square - they were, when you take away the baby wipes and lip balm, pretty much the same things his hero Houdini was doing a century ago. If the point of magic is to transcend the confines of the everyday world, it seems to be falling further and further behind: last year, I happened to find myself standing behind Paul Daniels at the front desk of the Plaza Athenee in Paris and, running late and with a plane to catch, I couldn't help thinking, if you're such a bloody great magician, why can't you just magic your minibar bill through the express checkout and get on out of here?
A decade ago, the emerging Blaine seemed to understand that, as there was no possibility of changing the tricks, all you could do was change the sensibility you brought to them. In dispensing with the glitter and the traditional persona, he transformed magic from an ancient art one has to master into a personal projection of his own demons.
We already know more about his Brooklyn boyhood than the childhoods of most other famous magicians put together. For all their childhoods' relevance to the act, most magicians might as well have been born middle-aged. That's what the evening dress represents: confidence, polish, urbanity. But they're the very last things Blaine wants to convey. Every time he gives an interview we hear yet again that, by the time his father abandoned his family, the three-year old David was already doing card tricks; and, when his mother was sick with cancer, he used his magic skills to distract her; and, when she died in his arms, her teenage son decided that "death is a beautiful thing". And thus, supposedly, began his obsession with death, coffins, self-punishment, self-mutilation, self, self, self. On his left arm he's had tattooed Primo Levi's concentration-camp number. The late David Nixon never seemed to have felt the need for Auschwitz chic.
But then Blaine seems to have more in common with celebrity obsessives like Michael Jackson (they're both pals of spoon-bender Uri Geller) or fellows like that German performance artist a few years back who cut his penis off and bled to death live on stage. Any half-decent agent would have pointed out that, while the act certainly had novelty value, it lacked long-term potential: it's a rare penis-severer who gets to celebrate his 50th anniversary in showbiz. In that sense, Blaine's most adroit trick is turning his death obsession into a lifelong career.
Nobody at that press conference last Monday thinks he really sliced his ear off. Maybe he sliced just enough off to cause a lot of blood, or maybe he had a fake ear and a couple of McDonald's ketchup sachets. And maybe that's him up there with the Xtra-large Pampers dangling over the Thames, or maybe it's just some animatronic model and he's on the beach back in the Virgin Islands sipping a banana daiquiri and having a good laugh.
Houdini had it easier. Audiences today routinely discount the evidence of their own eyes: they know that in The Hulk that big green man tossing stuff around is computer-generated; that the colourised Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner in a television commercial is a dead man artfully edited. In Houdini's day, if something appeared to be happening, it generally was. No matter what Blaine cooks up, he will never enjoy that presumption. On the face of it, if he survives his 44 days on nothing but water, he could be returned to his supermodel girlfriend alive but brain-damaged. But the chances are that people would be sceptical about whether he's faking that, too. In a world where everything's an illusion, thinking you can still make a career as an illusionist may be the biggest one of all.
More like: Box of rocks.
LOL...JFK
Here, I kept looking for Blane as the lead in to a discussion about Cretien, Blair, Bush, the Pope or some other important person. Never happened. Disappointing Steyn; unfunny Steyn; non-thought provoking Steyn; atypical Steyn.
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