David Blaine

David Blaine is our Houdini. He’s a master illusionist, but he’s also an amazing endurance artist. He’s been buried alive for seven days. Frozen in a block of ice for 63 hours. He stood on a 30-meter-high, half-meter-wide pillar for 35 hours. He spent 44 days with no food in a plastic box 10 meters in the air in London. He spent seven days immersed in a water-filled sphere, at the end holding his breath for seven minutes and 12 seconds, just failing to set a world record. He stayed inside a one-million-volt electrical field for 72 hours. Stuff like that. But in a way I find his simplest things, the card tricks, the most amazing.

text by GLENN O’BRIEN
photography by SANTE D’ORAZIO

 

I first met David at the Bowery Bar, then New York’s hippest hangout, 20 years ago. He would completely amaze us with card tricks. In…