DAVID BLAINE :: DEATH DEALER

The London Telegraph has published one of the better articles on David Blaine that I have come across in some time. "The magician, whose idea of magic encompasses natural feats of endurance less redolent of Las Vegas than of Lives of the Saints, is risking glaucoma and circulatory failure in order to prepare for his next trick.  He will spend three days and three nights (22, 23 and 24 September) living at the intersection of two tightwires, stretched between four pillars, 50ft high, in Central Park. When he sleeps, he will sleep hanging upside down - 'like a bat,' he says - at the convergence of those wires, which will be on fire, and there will also be a fire pit on the ground beneath him.  At the end of three days and nights of this, he will do... well, something, which he is keeping secret for now, called 'Dive of Death'. He took the title from a vintage daredevil poster given to him by a fan in 2003, when Blaine was fasting for 44 days, suspended in a Plexiglass box beside Tower Bridge."