Post by Mr. Hendrickson™ on Sept 2, 2003 21:12:37 GMT -5
The screams of agony seemed genuine. So too did the stream of blood splattering on to David Blaine's immaculate shirt yesterday as he slowly sliced off the top of his ear in front of an audience of bug-eyed journalists.
It was an act far removed from the state of zen calm that the world's most extreme illusionist will require to complete the feat he will start in four days - spending six weeks without food while suspended 40ft above the Thames in a narrow transparent box.
But as a publicity stunt to rouse interest in his one-man crusade to prove the human body can withstand astonishing levels of deprivation - preferably in full view of a lucrative television audience - it did the trick. Literally.
Magic is now big business for an elite handful of entertainers capable of captivating millions with a combination of conjuring panache and a large production team of publicists, engineers and legal advisers.
None more so than David Blaine, who last year made £3m from the brand of set-piece death-defiance that has made him an A-list celebrity in America and now in Britain.
Yesterday, the magician, 30, was holding court in the glittering ball room of the Savoy Hotel in central London to explain the reasons behind his desire to spend 44 days inside a Plexiglas case hanging from a crane near Tower Bridge.
The spectacle will start on Friday when Blaine, whose previous ordeals include being encased in ice for 61 hours and buried alive for a week, will enter his 7ft by 7ft by 3ft box with only a pen, journal, cushion, mat and some lip balm to sustain him.
He wasted no time in underlining the perils of lasting so long without food.
Sipping from a glass of water, the only liquid he will be allowed during his ordeal, the magician said: "I consider this the most difficult thing I'm ever going to do in my lifetime and by far the most dangerous. The damage could be irreversible.
"You may never see me in this condition again. Everything I have done before is irrelevant compared to this. I think it is worth it for my art even if I drop dead."
Other performers may have considered such rhetoric sufficient to satisfy a gathering of journalists from Spain to America and Israel to Brazil on a Monday morning.
But David Blaine, born of Puerto Rican, Russian and Jewish extraction, is the man who wants to be remembered as the "greatest showman of all time" - and no opportunity to prove it goes unspurned.
He is also the man who has painstakingly built up a reputation as the cornerstone of magic's lunatic fringe. As Blaine put it: "All my heroes are bonkers."
There was no immediate indication whether Van Gogh was among them but when a lone voice asked Blaine whether he could do a trick, the New Yorker hesitated only briefly before walking through the audience to ask a random line of cameramen if they had a penknife. Having set aside his designer jacket and fiddled momentarily with the blade behind a table, Blaine proceeded to saw off a two-inch section of his left ear, yelling and hopping in pain amid a blizzard of flash bulbs.
Aides ushered away the bleeding magician as he proffered what appeared to be a chunk of freshly hewn ear in a white handkerchief.
He returned a few minutes later to pose once more in front of the photographers, displaying his apparently damaged ear before being driven away in a blacked-out limousine. It was less magic than self-mutilation.
One of his coterie gushed: "Wow, that was so David. He worries me sometimes."
From where The Independent was sitting, there seemed little cause for concern about the mental health of the magician, who started his career as a street performer before achieving celebrity with a string of girlfriends including Daryl Hannah and Madonna. He counts Tobey Maguire and Robert De Niro among his friends.
When Blaine asked for a knife, he was offered two identical and brand new Swiss Army knives. His "severed" ear was covered in a translucent goo used by make-up artists.
Any attempt to examine or photograph the podium, where a sachet of stage blood could have been secreted, were firmly rebuffed by a line of helpers who surrounded the area.
Organisers of the 44-day stunt say there will be no hint of sleight of hand in Blaine's Plexiglas adventure, televised by Channel 4 and Sky with the title Above the Below.
Sky One, which is screening the start of the feat live, will also offer continuous footage of the box on its digital service. Why anybody will bother to watch is perhaps the biggest mystery.
Apart from a pipe to feed pure water into the box and another to take away Blaine's urine, there will be no access.
His health will be monitored by doctors testing the urine to ensure his kidneys and liver are functioning. Any other call of nature will be dealt with by the nappies he will wear for the first few days.
A lack of any heating means Blaine's body, protected only by a cotton and linen costume, will have to deal with the chilly early autumn despite producing only a third of its normal heat. Doctors warned that if his body failed to "harvest" enough sugar from his muscle tissue, he could suffer delusions and eventually multiple organ failure.
Blaine, who expects to lose 45lb from his 14 stone 8lb body, said: "I assume that mentally I will start to lose my mind after a couple of weeks and by day 40 it will be a nightmare.
"If I make it through 44 days, the real danger will be afterwards. I don't want to be brain damaged. I expect to spend a month in hospital afterwards."
In a mawkish move, the magician has had the numbers of Primo Levi, the Auschwitz survivor and novelist, tattooed on his arm after learning that victims of concentration camps lasted 43 days without food.
Blaine denied that his 44-day deadline was related to this or that it had an religious significance linked to Christ's 40 days in the wilderness, saying its only symbolism was his birthday on April 4, or 4/4.
But despite the magician's talk of death, medical experts cast doubt on how much risk the magician was facing.
Michael Rennie, professor of physiology at the University of Dundee, said there were documented cases of hunger strikers surviving for more than 60 days. He said: "There is no reason why he cannot last for 44 days without any long-term damage. The only risk is infection or low temperature but a fit man in his 30s should come through it.
"My main concern would be that it is extraordinarily boring, not just for him but for the rest of us. What could be more boring than watching somebody not eating?"
It was an act far removed from the state of zen calm that the world's most extreme illusionist will require to complete the feat he will start in four days - spending six weeks without food while suspended 40ft above the Thames in a narrow transparent box.
But as a publicity stunt to rouse interest in his one-man crusade to prove the human body can withstand astonishing levels of deprivation - preferably in full view of a lucrative television audience - it did the trick. Literally.
Magic is now big business for an elite handful of entertainers capable of captivating millions with a combination of conjuring panache and a large production team of publicists, engineers and legal advisers.
None more so than David Blaine, who last year made £3m from the brand of set-piece death-defiance that has made him an A-list celebrity in America and now in Britain.
Yesterday, the magician, 30, was holding court in the glittering ball room of the Savoy Hotel in central London to explain the reasons behind his desire to spend 44 days inside a Plexiglas case hanging from a crane near Tower Bridge.
The spectacle will start on Friday when Blaine, whose previous ordeals include being encased in ice for 61 hours and buried alive for a week, will enter his 7ft by 7ft by 3ft box with only a pen, journal, cushion, mat and some lip balm to sustain him.
He wasted no time in underlining the perils of lasting so long without food.
Sipping from a glass of water, the only liquid he will be allowed during his ordeal, the magician said: "I consider this the most difficult thing I'm ever going to do in my lifetime and by far the most dangerous. The damage could be irreversible.
"You may never see me in this condition again. Everything I have done before is irrelevant compared to this. I think it is worth it for my art even if I drop dead."
Other performers may have considered such rhetoric sufficient to satisfy a gathering of journalists from Spain to America and Israel to Brazil on a Monday morning.
But David Blaine, born of Puerto Rican, Russian and Jewish extraction, is the man who wants to be remembered as the "greatest showman of all time" - and no opportunity to prove it goes unspurned.
He is also the man who has painstakingly built up a reputation as the cornerstone of magic's lunatic fringe. As Blaine put it: "All my heroes are bonkers."
There was no immediate indication whether Van Gogh was among them but when a lone voice asked Blaine whether he could do a trick, the New Yorker hesitated only briefly before walking through the audience to ask a random line of cameramen if they had a penknife. Having set aside his designer jacket and fiddled momentarily with the blade behind a table, Blaine proceeded to saw off a two-inch section of his left ear, yelling and hopping in pain amid a blizzard of flash bulbs.
Aides ushered away the bleeding magician as he proffered what appeared to be a chunk of freshly hewn ear in a white handkerchief.
He returned a few minutes later to pose once more in front of the photographers, displaying his apparently damaged ear before being driven away in a blacked-out limousine. It was less magic than self-mutilation.
One of his coterie gushed: "Wow, that was so David. He worries me sometimes."
From where The Independent was sitting, there seemed little cause for concern about the mental health of the magician, who started his career as a street performer before achieving celebrity with a string of girlfriends including Daryl Hannah and Madonna. He counts Tobey Maguire and Robert De Niro among his friends.
When Blaine asked for a knife, he was offered two identical and brand new Swiss Army knives. His "severed" ear was covered in a translucent goo used by make-up artists.
Any attempt to examine or photograph the podium, where a sachet of stage blood could have been secreted, were firmly rebuffed by a line of helpers who surrounded the area.
Organisers of the 44-day stunt say there will be no hint of sleight of hand in Blaine's Plexiglas adventure, televised by Channel 4 and Sky with the title Above the Below.
Sky One, which is screening the start of the feat live, will also offer continuous footage of the box on its digital service. Why anybody will bother to watch is perhaps the biggest mystery.
Apart from a pipe to feed pure water into the box and another to take away Blaine's urine, there will be no access.
His health will be monitored by doctors testing the urine to ensure his kidneys and liver are functioning. Any other call of nature will be dealt with by the nappies he will wear for the first few days.
A lack of any heating means Blaine's body, protected only by a cotton and linen costume, will have to deal with the chilly early autumn despite producing only a third of its normal heat. Doctors warned that if his body failed to "harvest" enough sugar from his muscle tissue, he could suffer delusions and eventually multiple organ failure.
Blaine, who expects to lose 45lb from his 14 stone 8lb body, said: "I assume that mentally I will start to lose my mind after a couple of weeks and by day 40 it will be a nightmare.
"If I make it through 44 days, the real danger will be afterwards. I don't want to be brain damaged. I expect to spend a month in hospital afterwards."
In a mawkish move, the magician has had the numbers of Primo Levi, the Auschwitz survivor and novelist, tattooed on his arm after learning that victims of concentration camps lasted 43 days without food.
Blaine denied that his 44-day deadline was related to this or that it had an religious significance linked to Christ's 40 days in the wilderness, saying its only symbolism was his birthday on April 4, or 4/4.
But despite the magician's talk of death, medical experts cast doubt on how much risk the magician was facing.
Michael Rennie, professor of physiology at the University of Dundee, said there were documented cases of hunger strikers surviving for more than 60 days. He said: "There is no reason why he cannot last for 44 days without any long-term damage. The only risk is infection or low temperature but a fit man in his 30s should come through it.
"My main concern would be that it is extraordinarily boring, not just for him but for the rest of us. What could be more boring than watching somebody not eating?"
.