BLaine Fails!

Well, let's hope this will keep him from suspending himself off the Brooklyn Bridge by his feet for a month or some shit.

WHERES MY DROWNING DEATH. I WANT A REFUND.

I'll be more impressed when he swims the Atlantic unsupportrd or something. Maybe jumps 17 blazing Routemasters on a microscooter.

Actually, that gives me an idea for a thread-within-a-thread: what do you want to see Davey Boy do next?

I misread that as Rottweilers!

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), May 9th, 2006 2:31 PM. (later)

WTF?

I love to know what his record was prevous to the big puclic attempt.

Suggestions:

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the before:

http://img309.imageshack.us/img309/6163/appleblaine13hp.jpg

I have no patience for this man. He's so damn melodramatic. He's like that girlfriend we all have to constantly dates horrible men and then bitches about her ill treatment.

His medical team and trainer said they would talk in detail about his condition at a news conference later Tuesday."

Why does he have liver damage from being underwater? Was it secretly booze? That would have been a much better stunt.

http://www.cbsnews.com/images/2006/05/09/image893d75d2-89da-474d-99d1-ed554f4dbde5.jpg

http://store.davidblaine.com/sendmessage/

Or David Blaine sucking cocaine from a hooker's tit and hate-fucking a wolf.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2004580002-2006220487,00.html

(send him to that zoo in holland with the bears! ^_^ )

When the City Was Magical
By KENNETH SILVERMAN

As every New Yorker knows, the magician David Blaine last week spent nearly 180 hours submerged in a water-filled acrylic capsule. Staged in the plaza of Lincoln Center, his endurance test provoked much criticism and ridicule in the press. But such cultural hauteur is misguided: magic, escapes and related feats have a long history of public performance here, and New Yorkers once realized that they added something important to the city's creative mix.

For example, as a teenager in the early 1950's I belonged to the Peter Pan Magic club, which was sponsored by the Parks Department. Every summer we showed off our color-changing silks and vanishing wands at Central Park's Naumburg Bandshell.

Never mind me. Public miracles in New York were conjured most famously by Harry Houdini himself. In July 1912 he was manacled and locked in a wooden packing box. Nailed shut, roped, loaded with sash weights to make it sink, the box was dumped in the East River near Governors Island. With a small splash, Houdini bobbed up from the water about a minute later. Tugboats tooted, ferryboat passengers applauded, The Times ran appreciative headlines.

Mr. Blaine's critics attack not so much what he did as where he did it — his supposed desecration of highbrow Lincoln Center. Yet Houdini regarded himself as part of the legitimate theater. He opened his 1925 full-evening show at the Shubert Theater, while steps away Eva Le Gallienne was starring in Ibsen's "Master Builder." The same crowd could have been expected to see both.

And however devoted to Better Things, Lincoln Center also houses the city's Library of Performing Arts (where several David Blaine videos are available for loan) and adjoins the grounds of the Big Apple Circus.

Besides, Mr. Blaine's no-cupcakes-in-school critics ignore the undoing over the last half-century of the old distinction between high and popular art. Last year, visitors to the Guggenheim Museum paid to hear the performance-artist Marina Abramovic masturbate beneath the floor of the stage, her moaning fantasies broadcast through a loudspeaker.

At the end of his feat Mr. Blaine removed his breathing apparatus and held his breath underwater for an astonishing 7 minutes 8 seconds — yet the press has criticized him for failing to break the world record. Well, his knockout climax would surely have pleased Houdini. In his 12-room brownstone on West 113th Street, he often immersed himself in a sunken tub for ever colder and longer periods. He succeeded in staying under warm water for two and a half minutes, under ice water for 38 seconds.

Houdini's strenuous breathing exercises made possible his mindbender of August 1926. Soldered into a galvanized iron coffin, he was lowered into the swimming pool of the Hotel Shelton at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue. The crowd at poolside included a physiologist from the federal Bureau of Mines, who hoped to learn something that might help miners trapped in collapsed shafts. Keeping still and breathing shallowly, Houdini stayed underwater in the sealed coffin for 1 hour 31 minutes.

David Blaine is no Houdini — nor is anyone else. At Lincoln Center his problem was to stay in; for Houdini the problem was almost always to get out, from every imaginable confinement: jail cells, the world's largest envelope, a giant football, the belly of a "sea-beast" that had supposedly washed up on shore near Boston.

Yet Mr. Blaine has brought into the present something that was essential to Houdini's success: a democratic style of performance. When on stage, Houdini spoke conversationally to his audience, sleeves sometime rolled up, one leg planted in front of the footlights as if ready, he said, "to spring among the people."

Mr. Blaine started as a street magician, levitating himself or doing card tricks for a sidewalk audience. When members of the audience at Lincoln Center touched his transparent bubble, he would sometimes place his own hand on the other side, striving for a connection. If nothing else, his feat of endurance brought a diverse crowd of thousands of New Yorkers together, renewing for a while the city's waning spirit of democratic community.

Toots and applause, David.

Kenneth Silverman, the author of "Houdini!!!", is writing a biography of John Cage.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7635202.stm

Couldn't even manage 60 hours without getting down to pee. Lightweight!

Also, what happened about the living with wild animals stunt?

The wild animals refused to be involved with such a blatant publicity stunt.

*insert deprived urban area of your choice* zing

Blaine shrugged off criticism during the stunt, telling one interviewer that he was "not going to pee all over myself".

haha

Well, let's hope this will keep him from suspending himself off the Brooklyn Bridge by his feet for a month or some shit.

― Man Man (kenan), Tuesday, May 9, 2006 3:06 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

What a dick, they could've easily set up a system for him to pee in a containter. What a shit stunt.

(xpost) Incredibly unlikely - remember all the stuff that was thrown/fired at him when he was in a glass box suspended over London?