To the extent there was a consensus among those watching the illusionist David Blaine's latest endurance feat, it was that Blaine did not deserve to be pelted with eggs, attacked by golf balls, harassed with laser pens or jolted awake by people banging on drums, as has happened to him since Sept. 5.
But that doesn't mean that Blaine's latest stunt -- living in a see-through box suspended from a crane near Tower Bridge -- was winning lots of new fans among the hard-to-please Britons gathered below.
PHOTO:THE NY TIMES
"It's rather pointless, I must say," remarked Philip Landau, a 38-year-old lawyer, watching Blaine lie down and then get up again. "There's not much to watch. It's like watching someone sitting in a box."
Blaine entered the plexiglass box, a structure measuring 2.1m tall, 2.1m long and 91cm wide, last Friday, vowing to spend 44 days there with no food and only water to drink. "The feeling of wonder is amazing," he said.
Blaine, 30, who is from New York, is a dazzling magician who has also made a name for himself with a series of stunts, equally odd and well-publicized. His death-defying acts have included standing for a long time on a plinth, burying himself alive in a plexiglass coffin and encasing himself in a massive block of ice. But never before has he had to confront the particular brand of British cynicism that regards him, as Jane Moore wrote in The Sun, as "that total twerp currently dangling in a glass box over the Thames."
There has also been unpleasant speculation about his bathroom arrangements, in keeping with Britons' well-known lavatorial obsessions. Liquid wastes are being expelled via a tube leading out of the case; solid waste details have been murky, although at one point there was talk of adult-sized diapers. Using the British word for diapers, one radio commentator began referring to Blaine as Nappy Man.
In The Guardian, the columnist Catherine Bennett encouraged Londoners to join in "an exhilarating act of public ridicule" by taunting Blaine with food. "Even a blob of oily ice cream," she wrote, "tastes exquisite when consumed in the suspended company of the preposterous, faux-starving Blaine."
The ridicule started soon after his stunt began, when he was pelted with bananas, French fries and eggs that dripped down the side of his temporary home. Humiliatingly, his German girlfriend, Manon von Gerkan, had to be cranked up on a crane to wash the box with a cloth. "I find it quite bizarre that people here have felt it necessary to throw eggs and other things at David," she told reporters. "We never had anything like this in New York."
Other teases followed: a hamburger van pulled up beneath him, ostentatiously frying onions and other pungent foods designed to make his mouth water. A group of men positioned themselves on Tower Bridge and tried, unsuccessfully, to hit him with golf balls. Some women took their tops off and flashed their breasts at him.
Perhaps worst of all, a group congregated drunkenly beneath his box in the middle of the night, banging loudly on a drum when Blaine tried to go to sleep.
Blaine's handlers raised his box a bit, so it was not so close to the public, erected a wire fence around the spot over which he is hanging, and hired the sort of security guards who usually can be found outside violence-prone nightclubs in scary parts of town.
"Unfortunately, you will always get one or two thugs," said a spokesman for Sky One, which, with Britain's Channel 4, has bought the TV rights to Blaine's story for an undisclosed sum.
Projectiles aside, Blaine still has his fans. More than 2 million people watched the TV special in which he entered the box, and he is attracting a corps of loyal observers, including one the other day dressed as Saddam Hussein. "I think he's really brave," said Hitesh Vajir, 21, a student, as Blaine waved at some people below. "You don't normally get things like this in London."
Chris Alexander, a bartender and writer who had come from Boise, Idaho, specifically to see Blaine in the box, had worn the same clothes -- black pants, a white windbreaker, and a black beret -- every day, and tried to catch the illusionist's increasingly bleary eye.
"I give him the same wave, and I think there's been a glint of recognition," Alexander said. He attributed the egg-throwing and other episodes to simple jealousy. "They have to put him down because they can't fathom doing something like this in a million years," he said.
That's right, said another bystander, Robert Jones, 49, who was far from impressed at Blaine's activities, which included some desultory squat-thrusts and exchanging what appeared to be sign language remarks with a man on the ground.
"How boring is this?" Jones said. "They were probably doing him a favor, throwing eggs at him."
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