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We're certainly not the first ones to point out that the feats of "magician" David Blaine have nothing to do with magic. In June 2002, when Blaine was standing for thirty-five hours on a ninety-foot pole in Manhattan, Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker that "this magician wasn't doing anything magical." Nevertheless, Gopnik celebrated Blaine's stunt, which he saw as indicative of the Zeitgeist, a moment that found "each person standing on a pole above an abyss of anxiety."
Perhaps Blaine can be defended as a metaphor, if not as a magician. It's difficult, however, to pinpoint what spirit-of-the-moment he's defined with his subsequent stunts. He recently made headlines for starving himself in a Plexiglas box while hanging over the Thames river. (Perhaps we're all starving ourselves spiritually, as we hang in our Plexiglas boxes of despair over a river of, um, uncertainty.)
Blaine's next announced escapade will involve dropping himself from a helicopter at a great height into a river, which seems to symbolize nothing more than the general public's increasing desire to see David Blaine dropped from a great height into a river.
Furthermore, not only do Blaine's stunts have little to do with "magic," they now barely qualify as "stunts," unless you precede that word with the word "publicity." Oddly, he continues to be described as "illusionist David Blaine" in the press, though, of course, his tricks are entirely illusion-free. We don't recall seeing crowds of fans watching as he emerged, ragged and bearded, from his plastic box, then all of them shaking their heads and declaring, "Wow! How did he do that? We'd love to see that again!"
Blaine once performed actual magic -- he used to do a nifty illusion in which he could fool people on the street into believing he was levitating -- but he's long since abandoned that quotidian hobby. Now he's focused solely on public acts of self-degradation. The IMDb describes his act like this: "Performs potentially life threatening [sic] acts of endurance for the public to witness." Yep, that sounds about right, but here's our question: when did that become a job?
These days, David Blaine is like a walking Stupid Human Trick, without the Trick. He's like Jackass, without the big belt buckles and the sense of humour. He's like (wait for it -- there's one more) Evel Knievel, without the showmanship or the skill or the cool motorcycle.
We're definitely down with someone jumping over a canyon (or not), all the while spangled in a stars-and-stripes jumpsuit. That's serious entertainment. We're less entertained, however, by someone freezing himself in a block of ice. Or dropping himself into the canyon just to see if he'll survive. Or starving himself while growing a beard. Considering that rowdy Britons were throwing eggs, flashing, and having sex in front of the box-imprisoned Blaine, we have to figure that, during this stunt, he had the only good seat in the house.
As pointless as his trickless trickery has become, Blaine does, however, possess world-class skill in one area: getting our attention. To this end, we applaud him. There are, after all, millions of people who want our attention, and who are willing to go to great lengths to get it. Blaine's just willing to go to greater lengths. His notoriety is, in fact, a triumph of willingness, not wonder. He's the master of one-upmanship, of going one step further. He's that kid in the schoolyard who wouldn't just eat the boogie, he'd eat the boogie with the hair in it.
And we'll always give up props to the kid who eats the boogie with the hair in it.
Still, we have to feel sorry for Mr. David Blaine. At the same time he's announced his next act of craven neediness, a parallel celebrity subplot is illustrating just how needlessly he's expending his energy.
For sheer celebrity uselessness, Blaine is outclassed by only a few famous people, the Hilton sisters foremost among them. Now one of these women, Paris, is about to make a dual premiere: her reality show, The Simple Life, is soon to debut on FOX, while her amateur sex tape is in previews on an internet server near you.
Hilton's camp (and don't you just love the idea of a celebrity's "camp," as though her handlers are all huddled around a bonfire or tucked into sleeping bags) has bleated with predictable outrage at the release of the grainy and unsavoury tape. Of course, only the pathologically cynical would speculate that the near-concurrent arrival of the sex tape and The Simple Life is anything but coincidence -- and those types, with their scurrilous conjecture, are certainly not welcome here!
In any case, it doesn't much matter. What matters is that, once again, the world is paying attention to Paris Hilton, for reasons that would baffle any self-respecting anthropologist or fact-finding alien emissary.
When you think of Paris Hilton, save a prayer for David Blaine. Here's a man who'll do almost anything to keep our attention, and here's a woman who's done nothing to deserve it. Both are way, way, way too famous -- they are, in fact, the very twinned personifications of what this website was created to protest -- but only one of them is starving himself publicly to get there. Well...okay, only one of them is starving himself publicly while in a Plexiglas box hanging over the Thames.
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