Crowds marvelled when he was buried and frozen alive. But can David Blaine survive his next stunt -death on a stick?

By Scott Athorne.

David Blaine doesn't look like a magician, more like a rock star. He arrives at the Gramercy Park Hotel in downtown New York on a large motorcycle, dressed casually in black, with closely cropped hair and lots of facial stubble. Inside the hotel's smoky bar, his greeting is a simple 'How's it going?', but in vowels so drawn out I think he's about to fall over.

Actually the 27-year-old Brooklyn native is just laid-back, which, given what he does for a living, he needs to be. In April 1999 he was locked into a glass coffin and placed beneath 2,000 litres of water for a week; in November 2000 he was entombed within six tons of Alaskan ice for 62 hours. In spring, he will stand for 48 hours on an eight-storey-high telegraph pole with a diameter no larger than a football, without a safety net. His closest aides are calling it 'suicide' and have refused to take part.

What on earth impels him to do such things? 'I don't do it just to make a spectacle,' he says. 'I do it because I want people to think and feel and be curious, to make them wake up for a moment.'

To prepare for Frozen Alive, Blaine submerged himself in icy water for 12 hours, fasted for four days and learnt how to sleep standing up. With the first cuts to free him, he was heard shrieking 'I want out now,' before being carried to an ambulance: shaking, disoriented and unable to walk for a week. He says he's been having a recurring dream about the approaching pole stunt, in which he falls off but then walks or flies away unharmed - he can't remember which.

Whichever way you see it, he has a knack for pushing people's buttons, a flair for the dramatic that he shares with Harry Houdini, the master magician and escapologist who died of a ruptured appendix in 1926. He is a big fan. There is a rare Houdini poster on the ceiling of Blaine's downtown apartment -he paid $15,000 for it - and Buried Alive was something Houdini had planned to do. 'He understood that when you are doing a straitjacket escape, if you are on a vaudevillian stage, there is no life-and-death danger.

But if you are doing it in the biggest city in the world, dangling from a rooftop at the same time, everyone will come to see it.' If Blaine's stunts seem bizarre, then his unique brand of street magic looks to be from another world. Again, audience reaction is crucial. In his television specials, Street Magic (1997), Magic Man (1999) and Mystifier (2000), he performs magic for New Orleans bar girls, New York City cops and baffled Amazonian tribesmen that looks impossible to pull off. There is no paraphernalia - no capes, wands or mirrors, or scantily clad assistants. His favourite accessory is an ordinary pack of playing cards.

One clip shows him reassemble a torn-up card in the fist of the supermodel Tyra Banks; another shows him reading minds with unbelievable accuracy. Most spectacularly, he levitates some 8in above a New York pavement, causing several onlookers to run away in terror, while others stare in utter disbelief. 'I like reactions,' he says, in his sleeping-pill tones. 'Anybody who doesn't live with a feeling of mystery and astonishment and awe and curiosity is as good as dead.' He recalls the first time he performed the levitation, at 16, for his doctor. 'I walked into his surgery with a brick in my pocket.

I said, 'Doc, I have this weird problem.' I pulled the brick out and started levitating, and the guy just freaked; I mean, he wanted to take me in for tests.' Nowadays, everybody wants to take Blaine in for tests. In 1997, fact seemed stranger than any fiction when accusations of blasphemy followed the broadcast of his first special, Street Magic. Perhaps inevitably, ABC's next promotional campaign asked: 'Is he an entertainer, a con man, the devil, or a guru?' Internet messages are equally over the top: 'What David's magic does for me is almost indescribable,' writes one devotee. From another: 'You are not real, I am not saying you were sent from heaven or hell, but you do possess real magic.'

There is criticism, too, of course. Some critics say that any professional magician could do the same. Even his stunts have been lambasted. 'If you look at the physics of it,' sniffed Phil Lobel, a spokesman for fellow magician David Copperfield, before the ice-tomb adventure, 'it's going to be warmer than a down-filled sleeping bag in there.' Is Blaine annoyed by this? 'No. The serious magicians out there, people like [American] David Williamson, and [Briton] Guy Hollingworth, they wouldn't have time to to say he's this or the other, they're too absorbed in their magic. Some people have too much time on their hands. It's like the people in high school who gossip.' And with that he begins to sneeze uncontrollably ('The air in here is really bad') and cuts the interview short for an uptown dinner engagement. We agree to meet the following evening at his favourite Japanese restaurant, where the more sanitary Zen surroundings seem to open him up.

Blaine (actually his middle name) was born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1973, and raised by his Russian-Jewish mother, Patrie Weiss, a primary school teacher, who had the same surname as Houdini. The only thing that Blaine remembers about his Italian-Puerto-Rican father, who fought in the Vietnam war and left when Blaine was three, is that he taught him how to play chess. Shortly after, he was introduced to magic when a homeless man on the subway transformed a stone into a crystal for him. It amazed him so much that his mother bought him his first magic trick, 'the pencil through the card', and soon conjuring became 'an obsessive-compulsive disorder'.

The sloe-eyed stare came early on, too. 'I started with that when I was 11 or 12,' he says. 'My friends would say, 'You're so weird. Why do you look at people like that, like you're looking into them?' Now I look back on it, I realise I was a weird kid. But at the time, I just thought it was normal to stare at a curtain and try to make it move.'

When Blaine was 18 his 48-year-old mother died of ovarian cancer, an experience he compares to 'spinning round and round in a tornado with nothing to hold onto'. Which raises the question: why, having seen his mother die, does he now risk his own life? 'That's how I kind of relate to her,' he says, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. 'I guess because I saw her suffer, I felt I should suffer too. It was a long, harrowing goodbye and I saw her overcome pain and fear.'

After his mother's death, Blaine moved to Manhattan, and began performing at hip downtown venues such as the Bowery Bar. He had a skilful manager, Jonny Podell, who promoted the idea of the young magical genius, and soon found himself with a cult following among the famed and moneyed set. The actor Robert De Niro has optioned Blaine's life story, tentatively titled Trick Monkey, for his production company; Jack Nicholson, Madonna and the film director Spike Lee have all become admirers. So, predictably, have a string of beautiful women, including the pop singer Fiona Apple, with whom Blaine had a long relationship, and Josie Maran, the Guess jeans and Maybelline cosmetics model, from whom he recently separated. He also forged a friendship with the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who helped host Street Magic, and momentarily became part of DiCaprio's notorious 'Pussy Posse' before deciding to distance himself. He felt he was beginning to be known more for the company he was keeping, and in 1999 he told Time Out New York: 'I just don't want to be connected to anybody right now.' Then, at a party in New York in August 2000, he completely ignored DiCaprio. 'That was a long time ago,' says Blaine dismissively. 'There's nothing to talk about.'

Now, as we eat sushi, he would much prefer to discuss a book, a film, or the merits of Buddhism. As it happens, he's pondering a remark by Albert Einstein. 'Mystery is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science,' he quotes with the zeal of a televangelist.

Blaine is more circumspect these days about the company he keeps. 'The people you surround yourself with are important to your growth. I like people who stimulate me intellectually: friends who study the craft, or study their own craft.' Could this also explain why he has no home telephone, only a mobile, the number of which he guards closely?

On our way into the restaurant he had bumped into an acquaintance: 'Blaine!' the friend had hollered. 'Where've you been? Have you changed your cellphone number again?' He had, for the third time in six months. Inside, the raw fish and sake have put him in good spirits. He pulls out his ever-present cards. 'Watch the move, watch the move,' he tells a trio of waiters. Cards appear and disappear, as they look on, goggle-eyed. 'How did you do that?' they chorus.

'The story that you write shouldn't be about me,' says Blaine. 'I'm just an entertainer. I like people's reactions to my magic. No, you should make people aware of what they already have: their family, their loved ones. They shouldn't be influenced by what other people or society want them to be.' When it comes to the physical and metaphysical, Blaine is wonderfully vague. Earlier he had referred to Jesus as a magician; now he changes his mind. 'What I meant was that Jesus was a prophet.' Do you believe in the supernatural? 'Absolutely, if 1,000 years ago you had told somebody that you'd be able to talk into a little thing like this [pointing to his mobile], they'd have thought you were crazy. To me, that's supernatural.' But isn't that also scientifically explicable? 'Everything's explainable. Do your research, you gotta do your research...'

Whatever your thoughts about Blaine's talents, you can't deny his ambition and drive. Apart from the pole stunt, a magic book entitled Mysterious Stranger is in the pipeline, and a new video and DVD will be released on November 12, including footage of a real accident involving the magician's little finger and a knife. There is also talk of a live show produced by James Nederlander, head of the Nederlander Organization, owner of some 30 theatres in the New York area, or possibly a co-production with the Canadian performance company Cirque du Soleil. 'I see a person who has blown me away with his talent and magic,' says Nederlander. 'He's going to be the next Harry Houdini.' Blaine seems similarly certain: 'This live show is going to be the greatest show the world has ever seen. We're going to have our own tent outside the Broadway district, and it's going to be very difficult to find out how to get a ticket. It'll be something that P T Barnum would be doing if he were alive today.'

And so the Blaine train continues, confirming that the world is a much weirder place than we imagine. 'I'm going to take my craft to the end of my life,' he says, stretching his arms high above his head and letting out an exaggerated yawn. 'Till I'm dead, because it's all I have and it's all I care about.'