There's something really beautiful to me about high-profile magicians who immerse themselves so deeply in the history of their art that they wind up making choices that only really make sense as homage to traditions most people have never heard of.
I once had the opportunity to hang out with Teller one-on-one after a show, and when I praised one of the smaller, less flashy things he'd done, he responded with the most wonderful, impassioned flood of information about the history of that particular tiny piece of craft.
What David Blaine is doing today is tremendously cool, and should be visually gorgeous. But it's also the culmination of years of him trying to reanimate a very specific kind of celebrity that mostly disappeared from the pop culture landscape before he was born.
(If you've missed it, David Blaine is minutes away from grabbing onto a giant bouquet of helium balloons with one hand and launching himself 20,000 feet in the air like a three-year-old in a cartoon, or the house from Up.)
The YouTube stream for today is here:
From the stream, Blaine talking with an adviser:
A: "Let's say all the altimeters don't work, what're you gonna do?"
B: "Eyeball it, open at twelve-five."
A: "Open high. Love it."
A: "Let's say all the altimeters don't work, what're you gonna do?"
B: "Eyeball it, open at twelve-five."
A: "Open high. Love it."
(He's taking the balloons up, then will uncouple at the top and parachute back down. Liftoff is in about ten minutes, and the backstage livestream right now is great stuff.)
Blaine is gonna go up in a couple of minutes. Currently he's floating six inches off the ground, and has been for a while. 
From the comment stream:
FAKE ARM
NOT FAKE
Fake arm
THAT ARM IS NOT FAKE
FAKE BALOON
FAKE ARM
NOT FAKE
Fake arm
THAT ARM IS NOT FAKE
FAKE BALOON
Ah, this is the stuff.
(I have not yet formed an opinion on the claims of the "fake arm" conspiracists, but I hope they're right.)
There's something about this kind of ridiculous sublime spectacle that's really perfect for this moment. There's a reason that people in the chaos of the interwar period were fiends for this kind of thing.
Blaine's (~11-year-old) daughter just got on the comms with him, and her first question was "how are you?" His response: "It's so beautiful. It's like magic."
Blaine is in the process of putting his parachute on. He's giggling.
This is the thing. Blaine is a "magician" these days primarily in the sense that Houdini was a magician—most of what he's doing is in the vaudeville-era spectacle tradition, which is intertwined with the history of magic, but not quite "magic" per se.
(Although I'd be open to the argument that if Blaine did actually use a fake arm for this stunt, that makes it a magic trick of sorts.)
And no, I don't get the sense that most of Blaine's stunts in the last two decades have been about chasing maximal celebrity. The Copperfield/P&T path was available to him. He chose not to follow it. I think he's doing the art he wants to do.
The idea was that they rigged up a fake arm so he'd be more comfortable (and maybe to hide the cables). But he only kept his arm up for about twenty minutes, so I'm inclined to think it was real.
They didn't make any serious attempt to hide the fact that he was attached to the balloons via a body harness, and once he was a few thousand feet up, he let go of them completely and started using both his hands to work.
Blaine is at 17,000 feet now, and still going up. This is the endurance stage of the feat, the place where you have to start selling the audience on the idea that what you're doing is actually difficult.
I once had a conversation with James Randi about the time when he did a strait-jacket escape while suspended upside down from a crane above Niagara Falls.
I'd assumed that the upside down part and the Falls part were mostly just garnish, and that the stunt itself was straightforward, but actually he said that the whole thing was hugely difficult and a giant pain in the ass.
As with magic, the parts of a stunt like this that look easy are often actually hard, and the parts that look hard are actually easy.
(David Blaine is currently arguing with his handler on the ground about whether he's hypoxic. I have no idea how much of the conversation is legit and how much is staged for effect.)
They're apparently a couple of minutes away from uncoupling from the balloons and starting the drop. Livestream here.
Blaine-eye view. 22,000+ feet up.
The parachute is open.
Now he's discussing where's safe to land with his ground crew. This is GRIPPING. So good. "David, there's a nice ravine down at the bottom of that canyon."
He landed ON HIS FEET.
A lot of Blaine's endurance stunts haven't really worked for me as spectacle—I could see what he was shooting for, and what he'd been inspired by, but they felt kind of cloistered and eccentric. But this really brings all the strands together.
This was Houdini and Knievel and Petit all mashed up together in a beautifully satisfying way. I hope Randi was watching.
I think MAYBE he had a small backup chute on. But all his gear was small enough to fit under a hoodie—he wanted the look to be "regular guy holding balloons," not "dude strapped into a cumbersome apparatus."
This is the kind of detail I crave.
