“Here, talk to Fee for a second,” says David Blaine, passing his cell over to his girlfriend while he packs his bag.
“Here’s the most important thing,” are the first words out of Fiona Apple’s mouth. “I love David so much. I am completely in love with him.”
He’s the guy who had a sweepsweek special on ABC called David Blaine: Street Magic that gave the X Files a run for its Nielsons—which would mean nothing if it wasn’t a dead cool repackaging of a bastardized art form. She’s the nineteen-year-old singer whose debut Tidal has been on Billboard’s top 100 chart for 48 weeks—which would mean less than nothing if it wasn’t a work of honesty and soul that turned you on and made you want to fuck and cry at the same time.
And they’re in love. Which would mean nothing if it was one of those convenient Claudia Schiffer/David Copperfield cross-promotional relationships. This is how it went down.
February 25th, 1997
Fiona Apple had been looking forward to this night for a while. I mean, it’s not every day you’re a presenter at the Grammys, right? Getting dressed up and meeting some mega-musicians and seeing the show—there’s an element of “arriving” in that, right? She never could have known it was going to suck so bad. Close enough to see Celine Dion’s pores is a dangerous place to be.
She spent most of the day looking for vegan food in the press tent, saying little more than, “Yes, I’m wearing a Prada gown.” This was followed by hours of flashbulbs and vodka drinks at the Sony post-party. Weak with hunger, she sits next to Marilyn Manson and gnaws on a piece of bread. She’s never been the optimistic type, but this level of disilusionment is extreme even for her. Everything about this star-studded deal seemed sham-like and flat; woefully life-sized.
Handsomely thuggish—Russian, Italian, and Romanian blood reesulting in olive skin, black hair and sleepy black eyes—24-year-old magician David Blaine spots her from across the obligatory crowded room. Like most people, he think she looks like an angel; dirty blonde tresses and cerulean blue eyes. He begins to walk over, ready to deal out fascination from his deck of borderless casino quality Bee cards in a flurry of legerdemain.
Blaine doesn’t bother with an introduction; he just sits down and declares, “I want to show you something.” She shrugs unenthusiastically, and he begins making cards switch suits, float through the deck, group together, and generally behave in ways that cards don’t normally. He focuses his black eyes on her—his hands like doves, flipping the cards around like marionettes—and though she doesn’t really remember the tricks, she remembers the guy.
About a week later, they had their first date. It was stock enough for a magician with national heat and a platinum-selling musician—Breaking the Waves at the Angelika, and a walk afterwards with some good conversation—but at one point during one of his responses David levitates, floats back down to the ground, and continues talking as if he were just clearing his throat. (As pick-up gambits go, levetation has the tortured artist or wealthy power broker beat, hands down.)
“He has an amazing lure,” says Fiona. “No matter how infatuated I’ve been with any guy, I always want them to go away. And I don’t really get it. The first time that he called, I said to my mom, ‘You know how I never want to spend time with anybody? Well, if there’s anyone who’s going to pull me away from that, it’s going to be this guy. From the first time I talked to him. He’s just full of everything.”
Though Blaine is more zip-lipped about things, Fiona willl tell you the exact moment when she realized she was being swept off her feet. They were in his apartment, having a stupid argument, and, as you know, it’s always the stupid ones that spirial out of control; the ones where 20 minutes in, neither of you can remember what it was you were arguing about in the first place.
“We reached that point in the argument where there was nothing left to say. I was like ‘Whatever, fuck it. You don’t get it.’ David walks away and I’m just sitting there in his apartment sulking.” Yeah, this was a fight fight and no card trick was going to win her over. Hanging off the fire escape wasn’t going to distract her. This would take something really insane. While Fiona fumes on his couch, David dissapears into his bedroom.
As an old school rap track comes on at full volume, David bursts—I mean bursts—out of his bedroom wearing seven blazers, one on top of the other, and a white top hat with glow stickers on it. He’s rapping, ignoring her. “It was so inexplicable,” Fee says. “And I love that. I just love the way that his anger manifests itself. You’re having a fight with someone, why would you go and put on seven jackets and a top hat and start rapping?”
Argument over. Feet swept. Love fallen into. They’ve got the cheesy, four-for-a-dollah photo booth pictures to prove it.
One rule of magic is that it is easier to convince the many than the few. It follows from this logic that since Blaine honed his chops one-on-one with strangers, Elite models, and celebrities in Manhattan, it’s little surprise how he has rolled comfortably into the big time, and I’m not talking well paying state fair shows. Big enough that ABC has him inked to do a card trick at half-time during Monday Night Football that all the armchair quarterbacks and fans in the stands can participate in. I’m talking come down to the set and do some tricks for Snoop Dog. I’m talking set up the meeting with President Clinton. Big Time. Yeah, cool, as Blaine might say.
With his, “You want to see something?” approach, “come closer” drawl, and shelltop Adidas, he has taken magic from the crazy prop crap and showgirls of Vegas and somehow made it alright. Since most people’s experience with magicians is limited to Doug Henning, Uncle Bob’s disappearing quarter, and Siegfried & Roy, making mime hip might’ve been easier.
David Blaine: Street Magic was basically a PG affair—take that down to G if you remove the trick where he rotates his hand 260 degrees acompanied by a loud crack, or the arousal in ther eyes of a few women on the street. It’s a decidedly mesianic performance, with David walking the earth, making a believer out of people one at a time in Compton, Manhattan, Atlantic City, and Dallas.
He threw his light stuff first, aware that some of his more horror-show tricks—like the one where a randomly selected tarot card carves it’s way on to his chest from the inside out—might have had the Vatican and most of the Midwest throwing holy water on him to see if it sizzled. As it stands, he’s already gotten a little greif for saying things like, “Jesus was a magician.”
Black Book Your show had a real Jesus trip to it, at least the way I saw it, just a guy walking the earth trying to make believers out of people.
David Blaine I like Jesus, I think he was great. I think he did have his Apostles run ahead and tell people what he did , what he was capable of. So they were already believers when he walked into town, because here comes this guy with a whole posse around him. So when he does some healing masage and tells a person they’llbe able to stand again, the will and the belief of that person enabled them to stand. And if that worked with one out of 20 people that buzzed all over the place.
BB So the Apostles were really running PR for Heysus back in the day?
DB Jesus’s intentions were pure. His intentions were to spread hope and love. The last thing my mom said to me before she passed away [from cancer in 1994] was “God is love.” That’s basically the molding for my work.
BB What are the most important qualities in a magician?
DB I think it’s being able to relate and respond to people. Same as being a good actor, it’s the ability to relate and respond truthfully to people. If you see a good actor, versus a bad actor, the bad actor is thinking about himself, he’s self-concious, unlike the good actor. Like Leonardo [DiCaprio], for example, if you watch him, his responses are always simple and pure, even in life, if a door is slammed, you’ll see him jump. Magic is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
BB Is it good if you get into a fight with your girl to roll up with a trick?
DB All that stuff is useless. She dominates everything. That’s what’s funny about men—they always crumble under women. Behind every good man there’s a woman. That’s why Fee is such a great backbone. She definatley believes in me more than anybody. Anything I do is OK with her there, I’m not worried because I know she’s there.
Fiona? Hell, if you don’t know her, just turn on MTV or a contemporary radio station for 20 minutes. You know the one: nineteen-years-old; throat like a 40-year-old soul singer who been done wrong every six months for the past twenty years; and, though she hates hearing it, her angel face and petite 5’2” frame—accompanied by that voice—has an ethereal impact. In person, however, she’s pleasantly rougher, less breakable, and more like her voice than the ingenue you’ll see her depicted as in photos.
“Everyone thinks David’s the devil and I’m the angel, but it’s totally the other way around,” she says. Most will call her wise beyond her years, but all she wants to know is what nineteen-year-olds are they comparing her to?
“I’m a pretty smart girl, and everything, but when people started saying I’m wise, I don’t really get it. I can write, but I’m not writing about these incredibly profound things that no one’s ever written about before. I’m just being honest about stuff. Everybody feels the way that I do, they just don’t write it down.”
In any world without record conglomerates, she’d probably be at a Northeastern art school studying pottery, or, more likely, Romantic literature, perhaps playing her songs in clubs, perhaps just keeping them all in her journal and a soundproof room at the performing arts center. But she quietly cut that three-song demo, handed it to a friend who baby-sat for music publicist Kathyrn Schneker, who passed it along to producer Andy Slater (producer of the Wallflowers). Slater, who Fee now counts as one of her best friends, orchestrated a record deal and got her in the studio with a band—she’d played all her songs alone up until this point.
By August 1995, she was writing songs to complete Tidal. Sony cleared out a conference room for her and a piano, where she went to allegedly write for three hours a day, but ended up doing a lot of crossword puzzles instead.
BBSounds like a different way of writing than you were used to.
Fiona Apple When I’m just overwhelmed by a certain emotion, I just sit down, and I don’t even look. A lot of songs I’ve written just by going “ugh”, and hitting the piano and just improvising until I hear something that makes me go, “Oh, that really says what I want to say, now I’m going to build from there.” But I start out blindly rather than say [breathy] “I want to write something with a C minor augmented chord.” The song “Criminal” was purely an experiment. I was in the studio one night, and I was like, “Fuck man, I’m gonna have to learn to write under any circumstances, because obviously I’m going to be in situations I’m not going to be comfortable in.” And I’m so weird and particular about my surroundings that I just don’t want that to be the death of me. Too many nights, I would have to ask everybody in the house to leave for two hours so I could light my certain number of candles and go through my rituals. I can’t live like that. This one night in the studio, everyone was going out to dinner and would be back in 45 minutes, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to write a song. I’m going to sit down, and I’m going to fucking write a song and I’m not getting up until I do.” So I wrote “Criminal.”
She arrived at music like she arrives at most everything else: she stumbled upon it. “I had no friends. My family used to go out, and I would just do weird things. I would roller-skate around my house or put on some music that fit my mood, and, like, get on the floor and sway around. And this one day I found this book called the Real Book,which was this book of jazz standards that had chords but no specific instrumentation.”
Looking through the book, she began teaching herself songs she had never heard.
“It was an experiment to get up my own version of the song and make a little tape, and then I’d go out and buy the song and listen to how it sounded. And I made a lot of better songs than were recorded, I thought [smiles]. I like things to come from me and my own instincts. I think instincs and intuition is the place to follow. That’s why I follow the open doors. And I don’t want anybody else’s version of anything to get in my way.”
Propelled by the single “Shadowboxer,” Tidal was released to love-letter reviews in August of 1996. The piano lessons, the rape at eleven, the lonliness of a self-absorbed girl with no friends all poured into Tidal and into the media. Without thinking much, she walked through an open door and has regretted it more than once. Now she’s got people telling her what to wear. All that attention to the surface of a sullen girl—these stylists and interviewers and promoters—not only takes away from the task if writing material for Corrupt, her follow up album, but is such a stark contrast to the years of being called a dog that it freaks her out. “If I start crying at the photo shoot,” she tells me, “don’t be surprised.” It’s enough for her to tell her publicist, “Oh yeah, there’s another movie premiere? Another awards show? Well, I’ll go, but only if I can wear a blanket.”
As a student as PS 230 in Brooklyn, Blaine was miserable. Questioning was discouraged. Sitting still and reading the fucking text book was praised. And then there was the art teacher who would rip into him every time he colored a green snowman or a red sky. She did it so harshly and so often, he laid paper over her classroom and lit it on fire.
His father went MIA when David was around three, leaving his son with little more than the knowledge of ches, which has more to do with magic than you might think. Both are about thinking and reacting and responding to the situation at hand.
His real initaion with the craft came when he was four.
“I was sitting on a subway and I had this rock tied to a piece of string that I used to swing around like my little pet rock. I was alone on the subway, and this black guy, this magician, sat next to me, and said, ‘Look.’ He took the rock in his hand, kept it on the string, and put it in the palm of his hand. When he opened it, the rock was a crystal. He did it so simply, it amazed me forever. So that forever made me love magic, and the way he presented it to me was amazing. He amazed me. For no reason he amazed me, and I ended up with a great crystal, which is cooler than a rock.
It’s amazing that when you take shots of the moon, or a nuclear submarine goes underwater, people don’t even respond to it. But you make a card rise out of a deck and people won’t stop talking about it the rest of their life. That’s because of the simplicity. It’s right in front of their face.”
David is fond of pointing out that even 100 years ago, magicians were the biggest entertainers around. Crowds of thousands would gather on a pier to watch a loinclothed and manacled Harry Houdini jump into the ocean. But before that, back in the Renaissance, magic was less about entertainment than consciousness. Magic was considered a function of love. All life had its source in the erotic magic of the conception mircale, and the magician and the lover were the same person.
“What does the lover do by means of his deeds, words, services, and gifts other than create a magic web around the object of his love?” wrote philosopher Marsilio Ficino in his twelfth century tratise on eros. “The lover and the magician borh capture certain objects to attract and draw them to them.”
BB What do you think about that? How are magic and love similar?
DB Mystery is an attraction. Mystery is the most fundamental form of anything. And anybody who can’t wonder is as good as dead. That’s something Einstein said. And if you can allow that wonderment and mystery to exsist, that’s pure attraction. Mystery is what draws people in. You’re attracted to what you don’t understand logically. That’s where the connection between could be love and magic. It’s at mystery. Mystery is always an allure. Things that you don’t understand are always attractive.
FA Magic really has to do with control. It has to do with drawing people in and keeping them at a distance. How close can you get to someone whose whole persona has to do with mystery? That’s the draw. I guess magic is kind of a hard-to-get game. “How do you do that? You’re sooo interesting!” David and I have this stock conversation. He’ll say shit like, “What if my feet left my legs and stated walking away?” and I’ll say, “Well, that’d be great, but how are you going to do that?” “I can do it.” That’s how it goes. It’s the same every time. He has no limits.
BB And then—like two weeks later—his feet walk into the room five minutes before he does?
FA Right. Whenever I go any place with David and people ask, “Oh, do you know all his tricks? No? He won’t tell you?” No, I don’t ask. I don’t need to ask. He could tell you the answers and it would still be incredible. Why would I want to rob myself of that enjoyable naivete?
David will tell you how he’s doing the tricks. He’ll tell you he’s watching for your pupils to dilate when you see your card, or hear a minor fluctuation in your voice that’s going to tip him off when he’s doing card tricks over the phone. When he slows the tricks down so you can see where the card is jumping from, it’s no easier to understand, no less impressive. And if the skeptics are right, and there are magnets in the soles of his shelltop Adidas that make him levitate, so what? Prestudgatators rely on distraction, so that you’re looking over here when they’re placing your card on top of the pile. Sure he’ll distract you, but maybe he’ll distract you from a reality you resent for a minute or two before he walks on.
Evan, the publisher of the Bookshows up at Pier 59 Studios, as the sun is digging low in the sky and reflecting off the river. Late as usual, but he digs into the conversation while Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking flips yet again.
Evan Schindler How does music play into what you do?
DB I love watching Fiona perform in front of a lot of people—that’s inspirational. I like seeing people react in masses. That’s what I’m working on right now: a show that will captivate the same number of people at once live. I think that’s the ultimate rush.
FA You can’t get into a magician’s mind. Then he wouldn’t be a magician.
ES How about you? You got into his mind.
FA[laughing] That’s because I’m me. Whereas I just kind of pour everything out and make myself the most accessible, vulnerable thing in the world. So that’s weird. How can you find that attractive? What’s the allure?
ES Well?
DB She has tons of allure. I do magic to get things out of people. She’s already giving everything. Her reactions are usually pure and honest. Mine are covered; hidden in a lot of ways. Plus sometimes I wish the magic would happen to me, but that’s what her music does to me. Last night we were at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and with Chloe [Sevigny] and Harmony [Korihe writer/director of Kids] and he hadn’t really experienced Fiona. So she goes for the piano there. After he heard her play he said, “That was insane, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.” And this guy who was standing there listening said, “I’m going to call my mom and tell her about that.” That reaction is the same that magic brings. It’s primal. Even a good painting, anything that can make you forget yourself.
FA Music is something so intangible, yet it can be something so powerful. It can ground you or make you soar. But you can’t really capture it. It’s the same with magic tricks; you can’t capture them, you can just watch them. That’s all you can do.
BB David, I heard about your stock conversation when you’re developing tricks.
FA You’ll say things that are completely outrageous.
DB It just starts out from an idea, and I say, “That would be amazing.”
FA I think with David it starts from him being so…he could do anything. And when he says, “I can do it.” I’m not going, “Yeah, right.” I’m going, “Whoa!” He can just tell me about a trick, he never even has to show me them done, but I know that if he thinks it, he can do it. I think that’s pretty cool.
DB I was joking around the other day, telling these people that I was going to build a Lego village under the water to move into. They said, “Well, if you say it, you’ll do it.” It comes from the thought of something that I would find amazing. It could come from a dream, it could come from a nightmare, it could come from an image that’s stunning. It also comes from feeling, its like a feeling in your hands.
FA It’s translating the different feelings in your body. With David, magic is just a middle man, it’s something that enables the rest of us to see what’s inside of him. He’ll take what he sees and creates an action, just like I take what I feel and turn it into songs. Maybe I want to make people listen to me, and the only way I can say how I feel, and feel like I have some kind of connection with anybody, is for me to voice it. We have to make it physical somehow because we’re physical beings and it’s frustrating, but that’s the way it is. For me it doesn’t have anything to do with leaving a mark anywhere, it just has to do with a basic, visceral need to get it out, you know?
ES What about you?
DB I like marks.
FA You want to leave a mark?
DB I think so.
FA For who, though?
DB For the same people I studied and those that will study onwards. When I was a kid, I studied certain people, cause I didn’t have Dad really. There were certain figures I looked up to and studied.
FA He’s really into biographies because he didn’t really have much parental guidance after a while, and didn’t have a dad ever. [Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hughes, and Orson Welles are among the people he admires. You don’t have a role model, so he found the people. In a way, I think that’s pretty cool. Some people have dads that are their role models and they turned out fucked up because of that. But David chose people that he wanted to be like, and he studied them and took the traits that he wanted.
DB From Howard Hughes I took the germophobia.
FA True.
In a cab driving uptown later that night—after yet another movie premiere, yet another sheepish grand enterance—David will have his arm around around her, perhaps asking the cabbie, “Do you know how much I love this girl here?” Walking into Fiona’s building, she’ll ask her doorman Kwame if he wants something from the deli. Ater a late snack of lemon and bread, David will fall off to sleep, dreaming, perhaps, of his Lego village under the sea, or his feet leaving his body, or just about the crystal that was given to him on the subway 20 years ago.
As is customary, Fiona pads down the hall to get some isolation therapy after everyone else is asleep; some alone time in the silence of the same Upper West Side apartment she once sprawled on the floor of, roller skated in, where she told her mom she met “the guy.” The same place she made her own version of “Summertime” before she’d been told how it should sound. The place where she sang about the jumping fish and the high cotton in a melody wrong enough to make it her own.
