![]() ![]() ![]() But in magic, style is everything and Blaine's intense, streetwise persona is nothing like your typical showman in a cape. Many professional magicians may scoff at Blaine's bag of tricks: making a chosen card rise out of a deck or reappear after being torn to pieces. If there's no connection, there's no magic.' ![]() 'For me it's more about the people than the effect,' he says. Such feats apart, Blaine's brand of magic is purposefully intimate - a pack of cards, drawing a snake out of a baseball cap, making things appear in unexpected places. His next spectacular is to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Two years ago he was buried underground in a glass coffin for seven days. When we think of magicians, we think of $50 million a year. 'He was a man of the people, but he still was this amazing guy they all looked up to. 'Eighty years ago, when Houdini was here, he brought magic to the streets, to the people, and he would be accessible to everybody,' Blaine said before last week's stunt. And Blaine likes to see himself as Houdini's heir, a populist who has shunned the light displays, tigers and orchestras of Vegas-performing magicians for a minimalist approach that strips acts of magic to their essence. His hero, Harry Houdini, had planned but never executed a similar stunt before he died. 'I was screaming my girlfriend's name in my head and she walked towards me but I couldn't hear her through the ice and just thought, "That's it - I'm dead",' he later explained.įor Blaine, being trapped in ice for nearly three days wearing hiking boots and trousers, was itself the culmination of a dream. He muttered that his mind did not feel right. He emerged looking shaky and disoriented. Last Wednesday the illusionist was freed after spending nearly 62 hours standing upright in a small cavity inside his arctic tomb. But last week the 27-year-old captured the world's attention by encasing himself in a block of ice in the middle of the traffic jam that is New York's Times Square. The sheer brilliance of Blaine, combined with his capacity to turn his art into a great public spectacle, has helped lift magic on to a new plane. ![]()
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