Here's an article about David Blaine in the Guardian UK...especially interesting is the bit regarding his appearance on Carson Daly's talk show Last Call. Apparently, and according to several accounts, he pulls his heart out of his chest.

This video is offered in streaming form on a couple sites I found through Google, but they're really glitchy and don't load properly.

I might even call the network and see if I can get a copy of the show...




Is this the new Houdini?

Today magician and stuntman David Blaine embarks on his latest trick. He will stand on a 90ft pillar for 35 hours before jumping off into a pile of cardboard boxes. But is he the real thing or is he a charlatan? Oliver Burkeman talks him down from a two-inch-wide railing 30 storeys above the streets of New York

Tuesday May 21, 2002
The Guardian

High above Fifth Avenue, on the rooftop of a stately 30-storey apartment block, up where the air begins to chill and the gusting winds muffle the sound of horns from the street below, there is an old iron fire escape bolted to the side of the building. There is nothing beneath it except more fire escape and then, far below, the tree-lined sidewalks and the convoys of yellow cabs. It doesn't look terribly stable, and it would take a particularly fierce blaze to make stepping on to the iron platform a remotely sane thing to do. Right now, though, David Blaine, the illusionist turned purveyor of telegenic feats of endurance, is posing for photographs not on the platform but on the two-inch thick railing that is there to stop people falling off the platform.
There are plenty of people - rivals, mostly - who think Blaine is a charlatan, who say he has used his languid good looks and camera-friendly manner to transform a passable familiarity with some run-of-the-mill magic tricks into - abracadabra! - a furiously lucrative media phenomenon and a life spent hanging out at parties with Leonardo DiCaprio and the Clintons. They may well be right. But at this point in time it must be conceded that he is balancing on a two-inch-thick strip of metal, high above a very hard New York street, and still managing to hold down his end of a conversation.

"I'm just hoping it's not this windy next week," the 29-year-old is saying in a stoned, barely-conscious monotone that jars with his precarious position. "Because if it is, I'm going to be fighting for my life." He is referring to the moment, at 5pm UK time today, when he will climb to the top of a 90-foot pillar in Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan. He plans to stand on the pillar's 22-inch-wide surface for 35 hours, without a harness, without food, without liquids, and without safety nets to protect him from the flagstones beneath. At the 35th hour, during a live television special on Wednesday, assistants will stack cardboard boxes at the foot of the pillar, and Blaine will jump.

Assuming that this stunt is all it seems to be - and that disclaimer is pretty much unavoidable where Blaine is concerned - it will be significantly more dangerous than the one for which he is most famous: spending 61 hours encased in a six-ton block of ice on Times Square. "With the ice, if there was a problem, they could cut me out," he says. "With this one, if there's a problem, and I come down, there's nothing but pavement, so... you can figure out what would happen." And yet he claims to be looking forward to the experience, just as he looked forward to the ice and to the time before that, when he was buried alive for five days with just enough water to keep him alive. "When I do these things, it's like the one moment that I'm actually clearheaded," he says.

Back downstairs in his apartment - black marble floors; snapshots of DiCaprio on the wall; biographies of Houdini in a glass cabinet - Blaine shows off the five-foot wooden training platform he has been using to build up his stamina. Then he slots a videotape into his home-cinema system and plays footage of the practice he's been doing in recent months in the wind-whipped Nevada desert, plunging over and over again from a steel tower on to a stack of cardboard boxes. (He broke two ribs and received whiplash injuries.) Ask him about mental preparation, though, and he turns his sleepy eyes on you without expression. "If I put you on the top of a building ledge and told you that if you fall forward, you're going to die," he says, "you would try not to fall forward."

It has to be said that this, for Blaine, is actually a relatively illuminating response. The last time he was interviewed on British television, by Eamonn Holmes, he said almost nothing. For several excruciating minutes, right in the middle of GMTV's peppy morning chatter, he just stared at the presenter.

Blaine scares people. A surprising number of them seem to think he is actually the devil, an impression they gain not so much from his high-profile stunts - which are, they presume, at least theoretically possible - as from the up-close "street magic" he has perfected in a series of TV specials (and for which the stunts, not accidentally, serve as excellent publicity). In one scene, Blaine borrows a quarter from a woman on a Manhattan street and bites a chunk out of it; then he spits the piece out and the quarter is complete again. The woman's eyes widen and the cry of panic she emits doesn't sound completely like she's having fun. At one point her companion, perhaps five months pregnant, declares: "I'm gonna have my baby right here." In another trick, he asks a woman in a bar to pick a card, any card, sign her name on it and put it back in the deck. He throws the deck in the air and asks her to inspect her beer bottle. When she sees the card inside the neck, her name visible through the glass, she doesn't laugh. She looks like she's going to cry. A musclebound American football player, baffled by another Blaine illusion, is reduced to a confused mumble about how he's got to go and have a shower. In each case, the camera lingers on their confusion, refusing to move on to the next trick. This is Blaine's trademark, and it gets to the heart of why he enrages other magicians: these people weren't expecting a magic show, and Blaine, in his close-fitting T-shirt, didn't look like a magician. Thus their overwhelming astonishment, even if the tricks themselves were only fairly good.

"That's why I do it," Blaine says, sitting in the back of his chauffeured car and fielding calls on his cellphone from producers and talkshow bookers in between bites of chicken and rice with hot jalapeno peppers. "There's a moment when they just wonder. Einstein said there's a handful of people that know everything, and those people go around in complete astonishment. They see the leaves, they look at the clouds, they smell the air when it's been raining." His cellphone buzzes again. "And I don't see these things most of the time, because I go around with a wire clamped to the side of my head."

In the most astonishing of his tricks, Blaine simply levitates: floats a full foot in the air on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, in front of bystanders whose jaws drop as their eyes widen; in many cases they literally turn and run. It's an impressive feat, but also another illusion that annoys his critics: it's actually a simple trick combined with glossy production values. What he really does is a time-honoured illusion called the Balducci levitation, in which an audience, if they're positioned at exactly the correct angle in relation to the illusionist, seem to see him rise an inch or two in the air (he is actually standing on the tip of one toe). Then - though he'd never admit to it, and won't discuss it - he cuts footage of reactions to the trick with footage of himself being hauled into the air on a cable. "Look. If I'm a target, I'm a target," Blaine says of his critics. "At least I'm a target."

But the stunts are different: clearly, they involve genuine danger. "It's not a death wish," he says when I suggest that this is what it looks like. "It's a life wish. When you take all the plea sures away - food, water, space, light - you appreciate it in a new way. I've been reading this book about the Holocaust, what was done to these women and children in Poland, lined up in jail cells, mothers and their kids stuffed by the hundreds on top of each other, given no food, no water, kept in there for three or four days... little kids and women, and a lot of them survived. They really fought." Yes, but they had no choice. You do. Why risk death if you don't have to? "There's a risk of death every time you get on an airplane."

More than anything, though, it is the death of his mother from cancer that looms largest in his numerous answers to the question: why does he do it? "I watched my mother suffer from cancer for years, and never complain once," he says. "So, in a weird sense, I understand more of what my mother did, to appreciate more, I like doing things that are just, for me, honest. The rest of my life is so full of nonsense."

There is an expectant atmosphere in the studios of the NBC television network, at the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Blaine is due to appear for a recording of Last Call with Carson Daly, a chat and music show hosted by an amiable graduate of MTV and widely watched by a certain segment of the late-teenage demographic, who have turned out tonight in force. They are prolifically pierced, dressed in black and chains, and here primarily to see an absurdly camp heavy metal band called Coal Chamber. Except when the group's name is mentioned, they just look sullen. A stage manager bounds to the front to warm them up, but soon abandons the attempt. "Are you people only happy about death?" he eventually asks, exasperated.

Finally it is Blaine's turn. He is as soporific as ever, which is hardly Daly's style. Daly asks him to describe the best magic trick ever. "The best trick I ever saw," Blaine deadpans, "was this magician who pulled a girl up on stage, and he cut her in half, but he never restored her. He, like, put a rug over her, and there was blood everywhere, and then most of the people in the audience ran out. And that was the end of the trick." A few Coal Chamber fans begin, reluctantly, to titter.

Blaine talks about his most recent girlfriend, the model Josie Maran, and how he has a J tattooed over his heart. He unbuttons his white shirt and shows the tattoo to the audience. Then the conversation moves to Blaine's illusions, and he tells Daly that he has mastered the ability to slow his own pulse down as much as he likes - indeed, to stop it completely. He offers the presenter his wrist, and stares straight ahead, apparently meditating. Within seconds, Daly is reporting that Blaine's pulse has indeed ceased. "That can't be healthy," he says.

This is what Blaine does next: he unbuttons his shirt again, only this time he starts prodding the flesh around his heart, probing deeper and deeper. Daly looks shocked. Then Blaine's face contorts and a rivulet of blood begins to flow from the skin of his chest: he seems to have pierced the surface. The audience gasps in horror. Seconds later, he has worked a larger hole with his fingers and plunged his hand inside. Then, with a bellow of pain, blood spatters on to the stage and Blaine pulls out a large, quivering heart, dripping crimson blood.

Daly is up on his feet, horrified, stepping backwards towards the wings. "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh," says a pierced girl sitting to my left. "This isn't fun any more." At which point Blaine, groaning in agony, hauls himself to his feet, stumbles forwards a couple of steps, and collapses heavily on to the front of the stage.

The audience falls silent. "Is there someone we can call?" Daly asks. He notices that the cameras are still rolling. "Cut!" he yells. "Cut!" He looks again at Blaine's lifeless body, and then he hurries from the stage. He never returns.

The studio lights go up, and five security guards appear from nowhere to lift Blaine from the stage, carrying him out through the central aisle of the studio. In hushed voices, audience members begin to vent their confusion. "There was no resolution," a Coal Chamber fan on the row in front of me is muttering, over and over. "There was no resolution. There was no resolution."

Eventually a studio employee clambers up on stage and explains to the audience that the show is over. Disoriented, they file out of the swing doors, past NBC ushers who themselves look dazed with horror. They head for the elevators, down into the lobby and towards the darkening Manhattan evening. Then they are gone, and then the stricken ushers leave too. And then there is no sound but the insistent rasp of a stagehand pulling duct tape up from the floor, and then the studio is silent.