LONDON - Poor David Blaine; after Michael Jackson created and accepted his own "Entertainer of the Galaxy" award at last year's "Video Music Awards," he had to go and totally discredit Blaine.
"Your magic is real and I believe in you," Jackson said just before he got even weirder and dangled children out of hotel balconies.
How could Blaine respond? He had already frozen himself in a block of ice, balanced on a 40-foot pole and managed to pull his heart out on the set of "Last Call with Carson Daly."
What more could he do? Simple, he could sit in a box for a month and a half and starve to death.
Right now Blaine is suspended 30 feet above the ground in a transparent box over the River Thames in London. He is living on nothing but water and attention for 44 days, hoping to be remembered as this generation's Harry Houdini. The only difference between the two is Houdini's stunts were both entertaining and terrifying to watch. Seeing Blaine sit in a box is neither.
Blaine is dedicated, all right. In preparation for his stunt, he gained weight and prepared to meditate for hours while confined. Unfortunately, he chose a bad time to do it - London is coming off of the worst heat wave it has had in years.
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While triple-digit temperatures might not seem like a big deal to students at UNM, add on 100 percent humidity and some of the most crowded buses and subways in the world and it might. The result is some pretty annoyed Brits looking to take it out on someone, and Blaine is an easy target.
The act is boring - all Blaine does is sit there. Usually, he waves at people, sometimes he stretches out on his blanket, but mostly he just sits and smiles. The act isn't for charity and it isn't a protest; it's just another publicity stunt.
London isn't impressed. While it's pointless to watch a grown man starve to death in a box, it's apparently really fun to harass a grown man who is starving in a box. People pelting Blaine with eggs and Happy Meals has become sort of a national past time. A Web site with plans about how to heckle Blaine has been created, and in response his girlfriend now stands guard, screaming at anyone who dares attack her lover or disrespect his art.
Some Americans are surprised at how London is reacting to all of this. New Yorker Allison LaFata, in an article in London's Sunday Times, said "(Americans) think of (the British) as prim and proper."
Obviously, she is forgetting that it's legal to carry beer on the streets, and the malnourished Blaine is an easy target for some drunk, rowdy Brits. You really can't miss him, he's the fat ugly blob in a box suspended by a crane next to the glorious Tower Bridge.
Blaine was expecting people to hate his act, but at least he's getting some attention. He is being broadcast live on a popular British television channel, Paul McCartney got in a fist fight in front of the box one night and throngs of tourists have come to wave, cheer and take pictures.
Blaine doesn't need food to survive; he just needs the publicity. While it seems incredible that he will go 44 days without food, it's even more incredible that he will go 44 days without a mirror.
