One must love an article that begins thusly:
The first time I meet David Blaine, he is weird. Zoned out, distracted or high on something. It’s a private dinner in an upstairs room at a London hotel and he enters without small talk. Dressed all in black with a black baseball cap, the American illusionist is big, bulky and intimidating.
The article in today’s The Evening Herald profiles magician David Blaine from a distance – at least emotionally. The writer is clearly not one of the millions sold on the concept of David Blaine. He views the performer as an oddity; hence an appropriate topic for a news story, we presume.
Mr. Blaine performs some pretty amazing effects for the reporter but he does not seem overly impressed. The tricks he describes seem great but as the writer notes, “w
e expect to be astonished.” He does not say if he was astonished though.
Mr. Blaine confesses that despite his reputation as a performer of death-defying stunts, he is “obsessed with magic.”
He considers magic as a grounding center for his peripatetic life. “It’s what drives me. It’s my favorite thing. It’s my saving grace. Like a meditation. I don’t even know what I would do without it.”
We know the feeling. Give us a deck of cards and we are content. Take away our deck of cards or our two silver dollars and the panic comes back.
Mr. Blaine teased his fans with scant information about an upcoming performance.
“There is a very big idea that I am going to do in London for the first time ever,” he says. “It’s a very simple idea, but it will be the best thing I have ever done. The most exciting. I know that it will drive me and I will push myself in a way I never would if it was not in front of me.”
It is scheduled to happen sometime in 2016 and in a football stadium. That’s all we know so far.
We were thinking it would be the world’s longest performance of The Six Card Repeat. That would have a lot of magicians watching for sure and there would be drama as he risked paper cuts and wrist injury. Perhaps it is something different.
“No, an event. It is different from anything I have ever done, but combines everything. It will make sense out of everything I have spent my career working towards. If it works.” Continue reading “David Blaine: Waiting for the Wheels to Come Off”
