On David Blaine

I have loved magic as long as I have been alive. And since my childhood, there is one magician that has thrilled me more than all the rest. His style of magic is understated and slightly awkward in a way that somehow amplifies the wonder that his tricks produce. But what has captured my imagination and my heart are not just the stunning sleight of hand tricks, but the endurance stunts that he has been performing since I was a child.

David Blaine is the magician that has extended himself beyond magic and into the human psyche and condition. He not only captivates audiences with amazing tricks with his trusty deck of cards, but he does it in his own unique style that amplifies the effects produced. He’s been on TV for as long as I can remember, and he has a new show out this year on National Geographic called Do Not Attempt that I haven’t finished yet because I can’t watch it around the kids.1

I first remember seeing Blaine perform in his early street work specials in the 90’s. These were made long before everyone and their mother had a camera in their pocket. These man on the street videos depict Blaine levitating in front of crowds, doing incredible card tricks that send the audience screaming into the streets, and sending celebrities through the fourth wall with whatever magic he can produce from his staple, understated uniform of a black t-shirt and black pants.

There is something about watching magic on television that is entirely removed from the experience of seeing magic in person. Just like many performing arts, the magic is better when you witness it in the flesh. But what captivated me about David Blaine as a child was how calm and collected he remained after completing a trick, while the audience around him screams in horror and amazement. He delivers his instructions in a monotone New York accent with a neutral facial expression, showing no emotion while he sets up and knocks back trick after trick.

I hate the language that we have to cling to to attempt to describe something which, at its essence, is indescribable. Tricks and stunts sound like diminutive terms to try and capture the breadth of what magicians do. Illusions are the bread and butter of the magic trade (Insert Gob Bluth clip here!) but ‘illusions’ do not encompass the oeuvre of David Blaine. His trickery extends beyond cards and coins and operates in the space of performance art with stunts like Frozen in Time when he spent 63 hours encased in ice on the street in NY, or Buried Alive where he spent 7 days and 7 nights in a clear coffin underground.

I used to joke that Criss Angel was the greatest performance artist of our age, the height of which culminated in some friends buying me Criss Angel chocolate bars from his Mindfreak residency in Vegas. But the more that I think about it, the more I become convinced that Blaine, not Angel, is the most important performer of our time. He is easily recognised by hardcore fans of magic and even casual viewers of the craft. He continually pushes the entire medium forward as they attempt to keep up with his cutting edge material. And his performances stand out in the mind like a sticky work of art, echoing back their meaning through memory of a wildly individual experience.

I had the pleasure of seeing David Blaine perform in Eugene, Oregon a number of years ago. As it was my first time seeing him in the flesh, I had to spring for the added cost of a meet and greet so that I could see his magic up close. I was so hyped to see him after dozens of years of watching him on his many network television specials. We were ushered to a weird room with sad catering to wait for our time with Blaine. When he appeared, a crowd of people shuffles to surround him as he pulled his custom designed playing cards from his pocket. And for the first time, from the outer edge of the crowd, I saw Blaine create close magic in front of me. The feeling was electric as we all stared at this man’s hands quickly working to defy time and space.

The actual show was great and involved a combination of his tricks and some endurance aspects. The tricks were amazing and the endurance feats were exciting despite their scaled back size and duration. I remember that the show ended with DB swallowing a living frog and then wrapping the show with a sweet FaceTime to his daughter. We never found out what happened to the frog, though from listening to interviews with Blaine, I’ve learned that he can house a gallon of water in his body for hours, keeping the little frogs safe so that he can swallow and regurgitate their soft bodies. He says that he has never hurt a frog through this process.

Blaine consistently tests the limits of what his body is capable of, and so far made it through these feats relatively unharmed. There was Vertigo (2002), which found him perched atop a 90 foot pillar for 35 hours without sleeping before jumping to a pile of cardboard boxes below. Above the Below, in 2003, consisted of suspending himself above the Thames in a plexiglass box for 44 days, surviving on water alone. These spectacles follow a familiar pattern–man VS himself, occurring in public where anyone can see the real gravity in person, and delivered in his steady deadpan style.

I just watched the footage from his last stunt yesterday with my son, and it does not follow this same formula. Called Ascension and completed while live streaming to YouTube in 2020, Blaine fully realised a childhood dream of floating away on a bunch of balloons into the upper atmosphere. To do this, DB had to become a certified pilot and have his balloon rig classified as an aircraft. He credits this experience to his daughter and wanting to create something beautiful for her after ceasing his live stunts when she was a toddler. The effects were sweet and truly pretty. He floated up into the sky above Arizona mesa until he finally reached a height of over 24,000 feet before skydiving back safely to the ground.

It’s the least extreme of his stunts in some way, because while it happened in public and required a lot of physical training to complete, the agony he experiences is hard to see and capture from such a height. While the image of a man floating away on a bundle of balloons is beautiful, it lacks the visceral schadenfreude of his previous work. I think there is something to bearing witness to his suffering that made his previous stunts particularly poignant to viewers. This flight into the atmosphere and rapid descent towards the earth is no doubt impressive and moving, but it is so removed from the common man’s experience that it is hard to capture the radical joy that clearly overtook Blaine during the experience.

Writing about magic is like dancing about architecture. I know that’s not the quote (insert ‘music’ for ‘magic’ here!) but the sentiment remains the same. It is much easier and more visceral to talk about Blaine’s endurance work than the tricks that brought him his original fame. I won’t bother wasting your time trying to capture the feeling that comes up when one witnesses an incredible trick, but hopefully you already know that feeling in your heart. I’m reminded of the mentalist Oz Pearlman who recently captured my imagination with his feats of mentalism that can be carried out on any unsuspecting audience members. Oz, an America’s Got Talent contestant who has more recently made the rounds on many popular podcasts, can seemingly read minds and control the thoughts of others, constructing elaborate systemic tricks that seem to mystify and alarm those around him.

Mentalism is a practice that has been around for hundreds of years, and I would not be surprised if it started sooner than that and was lost to history, because it makes sense to me that as long as people have been speaking with each other, people be lying. Magic is a form of deception that becomes enjoyable situationally. David Blaine himself is also a mentalist, and far exceeds the hokey stunts of Criss Angel that I found so funny as a teenager. I have never had mentalism performed on me, and I think this is my next magic goal, to get first-person mind blown at the putty of my own mind.

The intro to magic with my kids has been through the work of Justin Willman, an American magician who created the Netflix series Magic For Humans, which is a great and pretty tame intro to many different styles of magic. There’s three seasons of this sweet show with a mixture of street magic and elaborate prank-style stunts that show off Willman’s wizardry skills. I think that the kids will need to be a bit older to take on the archive of David Blaine’s work, but they might be ready soon for the other two favs of my magic universe, Penn and Teller. I mention them mainly so that I can include this photo of me with Teller, who SPOKE to me!!! Right after he signed my Valium bottle and asked me if I was ok because I was so excited, we snapped this selfie after their Vegas show.

I don’t have anything profound to say about magic here, I just wanted to share my love and admiration for David Blaine and magic with you. If you see magic, please send me magic, because if nothing else it transcends the banality of everyday life and heightens the senses to the upper limits of understanding. And I do truly think that there will always be a place in the world for magicians, even when AI overtakes us, because while even animals can be surprised by magic, I don’t foresee that AI will ever hold the wonder of a magic trick in its context window.

Thank you for reading, dear Reader, and please tell me the moments that you remember believing in magic, because I think that the real trick of magic is the shared experience that occurs between magician and the observer.