UP IN THE AIR.(pole sitting as metaphor)(Brief Article)

Last week, a man stood on a pole in a park. Then he jumped off. It happened not far from the offices of this magazine, and a few people who work here walked over to watch him. David Blaine, the magician who did the standing and the jumping, is a local boy, from Brooklyn, and in years past he has tried such self-improving stunts as having himself imprisoned in a block of ice in Times Square for three days and being buried alive in a closed coffin on West Sixty-eighth Street for a week. This time, in Bryant Park, he stood for almost thirty-five hours in baggy clothes on a small platform atop a ninety-foot pole.

The strange thing is that this magician wasn't doing anything magical. He was just standing there. For P.R. purposes, Blaine invoked the tony pedigree of certain earlier columnists: the saintly stylites, out there in the Byzantine desert at the dawn of the last Dark Age. But what he was doing, in fact, belongs to a very different, local tradition of doing nothing in midair. They called it flagpole sitting back in the twenties, when it was all the rage in this part of town, and it, too, had its heroes: Alvin (Shipwreck) Kelly, who perched at the top of a sky-high pole above the old Madison Square Garden for twenty-two days and six hours, and fifteen-year-old Avon Foreman, who, over on Broadway, reportedly established the "juvenile flagpole-sitting record"--ten days, ten hours, and ten minutes.

Back then, flagpole sitting was never confused with magic. Magic was what Harry Houdini was doing down the street at the Hippodrome--an office building and parking garage now--struggling in and out of straitjackets, slipping in and out of handcuffs, escaping from locked safes underwater. Magic was work. Magic was activity. Flagpole sitting was simply endurance, its only prerequisite an endless capacity for standing there.

That's not magic, that's just a stunt, we think. But each age calls magic whatever stunt it needs to marvel at, and each age gets the magic it deserves. David Blaine, standing up there, is actually as good a magical metaphor for the moment as Houdini, fighting his way out of the straitjacket of immigrant identity toward prosperity, was for his, or David Copperfield, causing whole monuments to disappear while having dubious assignations with supermodels, was for the Gilded Age now in twilight. ...