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Your Opinion.

houdini is considered to be a benchmark of magical intent so every magician wants to be better than houdini.

but to answer the spirit of the post i think blain wants to be remembered as a great magician like houdini, but i dont think that going for the latter day profit / desciple is the way to go, houdini was fit for his time wear as blain is out of his time and maybey his head too.

magicbilly wrote:Frustrating? Sorry, but do you mean "trying"?

Yes My Friend.

http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=9987#9987

same point different thread.

David Blaine will go down as a good street magician. But he will never be the new Houdini

i dont know whether he will be or not but he is definately trying to. he said himself "i'd like to be remembered as the greatest showman on earth.
pretty conclusive

we,ve all thought it at one point or another during our carrears.
I'm personaly a legend in my own mind same as blaine, we are both shamless selfpublisists and equaly talented in diferent fields.

why should't he strive to be as big as houdini who himself was just as big a show off as blaine and had a style that captures as many people's reactions as distaste, houdini was not as talented as history paints him to be but he was a shrude judge of marketing startergy like blaine and like blaine the best policy is misdirection, blaine uses camera edits wile houdini used the media and peoples perception of what he did not what he actualy did, basicly houdini did a version of the levitation trick blain does were what you see is not what actualy happened, yes houdini was a master of locks same as any safe cracker and lock maker of that day the only diference was that he new how to manipulate the market and his market was unsaturated and eager for new thrills a demand which he was in the right place to cater for.
blaine would have his work cut out with todays fickle world but if he had been born in houdinis time we amy well have been refering to houdini as the up and comeing upstart on the coat tails of blaine the mystic.

Surely everyone tries to be as good as they possibly can? Certainly no shame in it.

If you can get hold of a copy of Hiding The Elephant - see review http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/viewtopic.ph ... g+elephant - you'll get a better picture of how things were in Houdini's day and why he did the things he did. None of the well known names seem to have been necessarily as good (in terms of performance and their own characters) as their publicity and popular ledged suggests so, as much as I've had a pop or two at David Blaine in the past, he's only doing the same as the oldsters did. And for the same reasons.

David Blaine trying to be better than Houdini? I wasn't aware Blaine was an escapologist. we all remember Houdini for his escapes, in particular the water torture chamber. Surely Blaine's stunts involving standing in a block of ice, standing on the pole and hanging in a box are just endurance and I don't see how he can compare himself to Houdini. I can't see anything magic about any of those stunts. Fair play to the bloke, his street magic is excellent but what is it he wants to be remembered for, his magic (which we have seen little of recently) or his endurance stunts?

David Blaine trying to be better than Houdini? I wasn't aware Blaine was an escapologist. we all remember Houdini for his escapes

True Mark, Houdini is remembered by many for his escapes but this was only a small part of his career.

He was also a close-up magician, a stage magician, a debunker of mystics, and even a man of impossible endurance. It was this claim of superhuman strength that was to be his downfall as a blow to his stomach (which he promoted as being as tough as steel) by his understudies would later kill him by a ruptured appendix.

My point is that David is trying to constantly re-evolve the way Houdini did. After all does David Blaine just to 'street magic' ?

regards,
Valentino

his understudies would later kill him by a ruptured appendix.

Yeah i heard of this but i've often been confused by it being his appendix as surely you can live without it? please enlighten me :S

cheers guys

yes that is true nowadays, as the operations are pretty routine now. But if the ruptured appendix is not identified quickly it can turn very poisonous and then prove to be fatal, which is what happened in Houdini's case.

A good book on his life and his magic is:

The Secrets of Houdini
by J C Cannell
published by Dover (ISBN 0-486-22913-0)

And there are many other threads on this board that go into his life in more depth. I'm sure one of the more learned members will post some links to them here shortly.

regards,
Valentino

I think Blaine has plenty more years to decide what he is going to do to make his mark in magical history