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David Blaine: death-dealer
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 14/09/2008
He has already spent a week in a glass coffin, 64 hours in a block of ice and fasted for 44 days in a box in London. For his next trick, he'll live on two burning high wires in Central Park for three days, followed by a mysterious 'Dive of Death'. Is there anything this seemingly fearless magician is afraid of? Yes, actually... By Michael Joseph Gross
The magician's face is fat with blood. So much so, that the little scar between his eyes, from a failed attempt to do a flip from a park bench at age five, is momentarily invisible. His eyes are bulging. The whites are pink. 'Are blood vessels popping?' he asks. Four of his friends (one of whom is operating a video camera) bend down to check. No popping. Sweat soaks through his T-shirt and drips onto his chin. He says he cannot feel his feet.
'I'm going to hang here until I black out,' David Blaine declares. He is hanging upside down in a pair of boots attached to the top of a weightlifting cage in a little cave-like, brick-lined room in the back of the cellar of his New York office, at 8pm on a Friday in August.
The magician, whose idea of magic encompasses natural feats of endurance less redolent of Las Vegas than of Lives of the Saints, is risking glaucoma and circulatory failure in order to prepare for his next trick.
He will spend three days and three nights (22, 23 and 24 September) living at the intersection of two tightwires, stretched between four pillars, 50ft high, in Central Park. When he sleeps, he will sleep hanging upside down - 'like a bat,' he says - at the convergence of those wires, which will be on fire, and there will also be a fire pit on the ground beneath him. :shock:
At the end of three days and nights of this, he will do... well, something, which he is keeping secret for now, called 'Dive of Death'. He took the title from a vintage daredevil poster given to him by a fan in 2003, when Blaine was fasting for 44 days, suspended in a Plexiglass box beside Tower Bridge.
Now, just over nine minutes into his maiden experiment with hanging upside down, he pushes a couple of fingers at his gut, grimacing. One of his friends says, 'All your stuff is hanging on your lungs.' Ten minutes, and Blaine groans: 'This is hard core.' Nineteen minutes, and he asks, 'Do you think my organs are repositioning themselves?' He and his friends pass time talking about tricks: peeling the lifeline off his hand, mixing up salt crystals and pepper flakes and separating them.
Then the magician changes his mind. He doesn't want to black out this first time. He wants to stop at 23 minutes and 23 seconds: exactly 23 minutes and 23 seconds. 'It's lucky. It's a good number,' he says.
The guy with the stopwatch calls time and Blaine's friends winch him down. Blaine shakes his feet and shuffles into his office, where his latest world-record certificate (from Guinness, for holding his breath - 17 minutes, 4.4 seconds, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, earlier this year) hangs behind his desk. Nearby sits a picture of Blaine's mother, Patrice White, who died in 1994 after enduring painful ovarian cancer, a struggle that remains the example and touchstone for his own acts of self-mortification. Later, he says that Patrice 'was born on the 23rd, and died on the 23rd', hence 23 minutes and 23 seconds.
But why?
'It's a good number,' he says, again.
Why does that matter? Just for luck? Does he believe the number provides a mystical connection with his mother? He chuckles, Beavis-like: 'Heh-heh.'
Warming to the topic of his own mystery,
Blaine says that the titles of all his shows are anagrams; and the dates, durations and physical dimensions of his stunts are laced with hidden meanings. This is true, he points out, of 'Buried Alive' (in 1999, a week in a glass coffin underground); 'Frozen in Time' (2000, almost 64 hours encased in a block of ice in Times Square); 'Vertigo' (2002, 35 hours standing on top of a 90ft pillar); 'Above the Below' (2003, the 44-day fast); 'Drowned Alive' (2006, a week submerged in a giant sphere filled with water); and 'Revolution' (2006, two days shackled in a spinning gyroscope, ending with an escape).
I ask him to spell out one of the anagrams, and he says, 'You'll have to look for it.' His declaration was intended to establish a principle: in Blaine's world, everything is a code, everything a clue - to a mystery that can be solved.
This, of course, may well be hokum. But after spending more time with Blaine, I begin to realise that, even if it is hokum, he proclaims it in earnest, for what seems a simple reason: if you believe it, then maybe he can, too.
The next week, Blaine urgently tells me, 'You should make the article negative. You should say, 'David's life is chaos and I think he wants to die.' Blaine, who has a tattoo of Machiavelli on his lower abdomen (and Jesus on his back, Primo Levi's prisoner number from Auschwitz on one arm, and 10 more images and phrases scattered across his 6ft 1in, 13st 6lb frame), gives me this advice one morning while he's jogging on a treadmill in a posh, private gym in New York. (His personal trainer also counts Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein among his clients.)
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... blaine.xml
I understand the risks he took by indulging in excessive use of oxygen. In his stunts, he takes many risks ... I just don't find it entertaining, myself.
As did Dynamo (who was pulled by the River Cops for jaywalking on water). Which makes it undeniably-real.
. I performed the same 'trick' on the Son of a lady who comes into our shop and immediately afterwards deliberately started talking about something else to his Mum ..... she told me later that they'd both spotted me in Norwich and he'd said "Look ! .. there's the magic man !" and she thanked me for doing it 
