Interview Magazine: David Blaine
Interview magazine has a great piece with David Blaine as interviewed by Adam Kimmel. Discussed is his involvement with the fashion designer and a scary stunt performed underwater in the middle of the ocean surrounded by great white sharks they collaborated on. Kimmel then asks Blaine about his next public stunt and if he has a “fantasy endurance test”. My favorite part of the interview though is a story Blaine tells about his experience performing magic for the burn victims at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. It really puts magic into perspective and reminds us of the emotional impact and healing power our art can achieve and as Blaine closes, “Things like that visit remind you of what is important and what matters.”
In September 2009, magician David Blaine chartered a sailboat with menswear designer Adam Kimmel and marine photographer and filmmaker Bob Talbot to perform yet another feat of endurance, bravery, and, some might argue, complete insanity. The reason for the expedition was simple enough: Blaine was planning to swim in open water with roughly 20 great white sharks. He lowered himself into the water with no body armor—save for an Adam Kimmel spring/summer 2011 tuxedo. As he descended beneath the surface, the sharks began to circle him. At one point he touched a passing fin; at another, he seemed to be smoking a cigar underwater while a great white inched behind him.
Talbot captured Blaine’s stunt in a short film tentatively titledDressed for Dinner. For most people, the footage looks either like the document of a man with a death wish or a piece of Hollywood CGI trickery. But in the last decade, the 37-year-old Blaine has gone to great lengths to prove time and again that he isn’t like most people—or perhaps most accurately, he has spectacularly demonstrated the very limits and extremes that a human body is capable of surviving.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Blaine started out as something of a New York street performer—an expert at card tricks and sleight-of-hand illusions. But he quickly gained notoriety with a series of very public, very harrowing endurance feats that tested his ability to withstand extreme forces as much as they did the nerves of the audience watching him. In 1999, Blaine lay for seven days in a claustrophobically restrictive clear coffin across from Trump Place for his stunt “Buried Alive.” The spectacle transformed him from a cool young wizard running with a fast downtown crowd into a mesmeric body artist who was challenging our understanding of stamina, control, and survival. Other tests quickly followed, each one a stunning, dramatic death-defying performance that continued to separate Blaine from the David Copperfields of the magic world: In 2000’s “Frozen in Time,” he was encased in massive blocks of ice for 63 hours. In 2002, for “Vertigo,” he stood on a 100-foot pillar in New York’s Bryant Park for 36 hours without a safety net. In 2003, he sealed himself in a Plexiglas box suspended over the South Bank of the River Thames for 44 days and nights for “Above the Below.” In 2006, he was submerged for seven and a half days underwater in a glass orb at Lincoln Center, and then tried—and failed—to break a world record for breath-holding. (He subsequently did break another breath-holding record in 2008 on The Oprah Winfrey Show, going without air for 17 minutes and four seconds.) A couple of years ago, in “Dive of Death,” Blaine hung upside down in Central Park for 60 hours.
With these various feats, Blaine has revolutionized the contemporary world of magic, redefining the magician’s work as something more internal than supernatural—as about battles of will as well as tricks of the eye. The shark swim is just Blaine’s latest project as he prepares to cross the ocean next summer in a glass bottle. Blaine’s friend and sartorial accomplice Adam Kimmel recently spoke to him about his work, including the shark swim, and why his biggest dream challenge is one day beating the world record for staying awake.
Source: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/david-blaine/
