Hold your breath . . .
David Blaine has spent 44 days fasting in a Perspex box, 61 hours encased in ice and, for his latest stunt, seven days underwater. But what has it got to do with magic? And to what extremes will he go next? He talks to Tim Dowling
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian
Graeme the photographer has an idea: he would like David Blaine to wear swimming goggles for the picture, and he has brought along a couple of pairs. Ben from ITV makes a face when he hears this, but ultimately he says it will be Blaine who will need persuading. When Blaine knocks at the door of the hotel meeting lounge, looking sharp and fit in a black suit, the idea is put to him. A moment of deep inscrutability passes over his face, and then he agrees. In fact, he models both pairs and poses for as many shots as are needed. Then he says, "You know, it might be better if we filled the tub with water and I got under in my clothes." It is decided this will be awesome, and we decamp to Blaine's hotel room. After several minutes of lying under the water blowing bubbles with the photographer standing on the sides of the tub, Blaine surfaces and says, "You might also want to do some without the goggles." And so it transpires that through Blaine's extreme graciousness, Graeme gets exactly the shot Blaine wants him to get.
It is a fortnight since Blaine emerged from his giant goldfish bowl in Lincoln Center, New York, where he spent seven days underwater, breathing through a regulator, not eating and wearing a condom-like external catheter. At the end he came up for a few deep breaths before attempting to break the world "static apnoea" record (ie, holding your breath) - currently 8 mins 58 secs - while escaping from handcuffs and shackles. In the end he was pulled from the water by his minders almost two minutes shy of his goal.
"Which was unfair," he says. "If you look at the actual footage, there's a moment when he [his minder] says go, go, go!" At this point Blaine put his finger up to signal that he wasn't ready to quit. "I could have had an extra 10, 15, 20 seconds. They were so worried something was gonna happen."
ITV will show the actual footage tomorrow night, as part of a 90-minute programme on the preparation for Drowned Alive, as this latest stunt was called. Two weeks later, his fingers are still peeling, but he looks surprisingly well. He is tired - he was out late the night before, at the Beckhams' party - and maybe a little diffident, but not at all remote. "I feel, not a 100%, but pretty amazing considering. The things that still affect me are just simple, like itchy skin, pain in certain muscles because I was weightless for a week; the weightlessness, without any resistance, causes certain muscles to atrophy."
In fact, he says, his liver started to fail while he was underwater, much as it had when he spent 44 days fasting, suspended over the Thames in a Perspex box. He recognised the pains, he says, but a recent blood test showed that function has returned to normal. Still, I say, he was perhaps not in the best shape to attempt to hold his breath for nine minutes.
"I found out that all these guys who do the best breath holds, they don't eat that whole day," he says. "Your body's not digesting anything, so it's easier to slow your metabolic rate." He thought he could take this notion further. "I found papers, scientific papers, that discuss that if you go into starvation your body - its metabolic rate, heart, everything - has to drop. So I thought that by doing the stunt, having seven days of no food, that I was gonna have a huge advantage, and get this extra boost of 30 seconds. I was completely wrong in my calculations."
Ironically, this failure convinced a lot of his detractors that the stunt was genuine, and that Blaine himself was for real. Like his hero Houdini, Blaine has made a career out of combining illusion and feats of endurance in a way that some people find confusing, even untrustworthy. Where does the trickery end and the genuine endurance start? In Houdini's case, says Blaine, a lot of the criticism came from fellow magicians: "They would say, 'We don't get it. What's magic about breaking out of a prison?'" What, one might ask, is magic about sitting in a box and not breaking out?
"What's different about me," says Blaine, "is my stuff is more about tedium almost. Mine is about the art of doing absolutely nothing, which in this day and age is so unusual." His 44 days as a Hunger Artist (an idea borrowed from a short story by Kafka) provoked, in varying degrees, awe, irritation, disbelief, admiration and downright hostility. His box was pelted with eggs. People chanted to keep him awake. A model helicopter carrying a Big Mac was flown round his cage. A man climbed the scaffolding alongside him in an attempt to cut off his water supply.
The young Blaine made his reputation as a card magician with a deadpan, almost otherworldly bearing. In 1999, at the age of 26, he volunteered to be buried alive in a glass coffin for a week. "That was the easiest for me," he says, "cos I'm not claustrophobic." The next year he spent 61 hours encased in a block of ice in Times Square, with his eventual release broadcast live on television, followed in 2002 by a 34-hour vigil atop a 90ft pillar.
Along with his magic and his stunts, Blaine has also acquired a reputation for disquieting public appearances. He once went on GMTV and said nothing, merely staring intently at an increasingly flustered Eamonn Holmes. "That was one of my favourite things, by the way," he says. Mine, too, I say, at least before I found myself in a position where he might do it to me.
Later, at a press conference for the London stunt, Blaine appeared to slice off one of his ears. "Sometimes, being a magician," he says, "you feel it's your job to do some form of magic, but I don't like doing things that people look at as tricks. I like to do things that touch a nerve. Like in America I went on a talk show and ripped my heart out of my chest and collapsed. And in the theatre they ran out crying. It was really strong. NBC wouldn't air the footage for a couple of weeks."
Blaine readily accepts that some people are bemused, even annoyed, by his stunts. "The way I can relate to it is when I go to a museum, like a modern art museum, and I stare at one of those black paintings, which is like a black canvas. I'm the kind of person that goes, 'I don't get that. What the fuck is the point of that? And how can the guy that painted it get a million dollars for it?'" He says he wants people to take away whatever they can get out of his performances, the way people do with modern art in that way he doesn't get. When I quote him a remark made by a bystander at Lincoln Center - "I wouldn't do it, but I feel like somebody's got to do it" - Blaine says, "That's cool. I agree with that."
While he was floating in the goldfish bowl, he says, the idea for his next performance came to him. It's something he won't discuss - "I don't want to talk it away" - but he has implied that there will be no safety net this time.
It's difficult for Blaine to articulate exactly why he does what he does, why he risks his life and his health performing these stunts. "It's like the only time colours are really vivid," he says, "the only time when I feel completely alive, in the moment, not distracted, not thinking about this or that, is when I do these things."
He is definitely, he says, not afraid of death. "I think if I was afraid of death I wouldn't be able to live my life because my mother passed away in my arms, and I never looked at it as horrific; I looked at it as poetic, because she was peaceful. If I looked at it in any other way, since I loved her so much, it would be difficult for me to accept the beauty of the world."
He doesn't believe he's done himself any permanent damage yet, but considers himself lucky. He thinks his time in the ice came close to messing him up mentally, and his 44 days in the box probably did him the most physical damage. He nevertheless describes his time above the Thames as the highlight of his life. "I loved it," he says. "I would never take that away. Ever. I mean, if I could have done it again I would have made the box much smaller, so when they threw things it would be harder to hit"
· David Blaine: Drowned Alive is on ITV1 at 9.45pm tomorrow.
