Connect: Due to remain in his seven by seven by three foot box for a further eight days, David Blaine is already looking wretched. Small wonder: since he began fasting in his transparent Plexiglass container on September 5th, it has been regularly attacked.
Angered Londoners have hurled eggs, golf balls and paint at the New York magician/ illusionist and have repeatedly baited him. Blaine has been subjected to the smells of food cooking below him and one sadist, using a model aircraft, tried to drop a burger into the box. He has been assailed by noise to stop him sleeping. He has had laser-pens shone in his eyes.
Bared breasts and buttocks have been flashed to taunt and mock him and a man was charged with attempting to cut off his water supply.
He has also, however, attracted serious lobbyists. Aid activists staged a symbolic hunger strike under him last week. "We are not attacking Blaine," they said. "But we are borrowing some of the attention focused on his apparent fast to highlight the fact that for millions of people around the world, starvation is not an option - it is a reality." (Note "apparent" fast!).
The activists carried a banner stating that in the four weeks since Blaine had begun his fast 672,000 people around the world had died of hunger. Based on a figure of 24,000 people (the population of a fair-sized Irish town) dying of hunger each day, more than one million (the population of Dublin) will have starved to death by the time Blaine's target of 44 days is reached.
Amnesty International too has borrowed some of the attention focused on Blaine. "Not All Prisoners Get This Much Attention," proclaimed a poster on a cage set up beneath the Plexiglass box this week. It's true. Only for such a "celebrity inmate" as Jeffrey Archer did Britain's media carry as many updates.
Much speculation has focused on why so many Londoners find Blaine so distasteful. They can see through him as easily as they can see through his glass box, claim supporters of the Blaine-baiters. He's just a trickster, a self-publicist, reputedly getting £1 million (€1.4 million), mostly from Channel 4 and Sky One TV, for his grotesque starvation gimmick. Some detractors claim the entire gig is a hoax. It's a clever illusion - smoke and mirrors (or smoke and Plexiglass) stuff.
There are nutrients in Blaine's water supply, say some. There are nutrients in some or all of his accoutrements - pen, pad, wipes, nappies - claim others. Perhaps there are, but nobody, including the tabloids, has proven as much.
Anyway, there is a broader context to be considered. Blaine is an American and the more sycophantically Tony Blair's government supports George Bush's, the more resentment intensifies among British people desperate to reassert their own identity. Blaine, unfortunately for him, is thus a focus for residual anger over Britain's perceived toadying to the US on Iraq.
It's not surprising that many of the taunts and insults directed at Blaine exhort him to "go home". Back in the US, the illusionist has been buried alive for a week, entombed in a block of ice for three days and has stood on top of a 90-foot pole for 35 hours. As a result, he has become the most famous of his breed since Harry Houdini, who died almost 80 years ago.
Still, not all British people are Blaine-baiters. On Wednesday, he opened a panel in his glass box to tell supportive musicians he was finding "beauty in suffering" and that the stunt was "inspired" by his mother's death from cancer when he was 17.
"I watched my mother die a beautiful death," he said. The crowd applauded and sang John Lennon's Imagine.
There is, mind, a clarion irony in the singing of a Lennon song. The Beatles, after all, "conquered" the US through their music, which evoked a cheerful irreverence towards established authority when Vietnam was awakening young Americans to the hypocrisy of politicians' patriotism. Thus a country on the slide as a world power warned one on the rise.
The Beatles were influenced by the US too, of course. Their embracing of the San Francisco scene, with its drugs and radical politics, has been exhaustively documented. But in a country where Arnie Schwarzenegger has become governor of the wealthiest and most populated state, the raw, terminating power of crazed "celebrity culture" and illusionary showbiz appals many outsiders.
Ultimately, the scene beside London's Tower Bridge, a quintessential symbol of England, is linked not only to Houdini. In 1903, in front of thousands, Houdini was handcuffed, sewn in a bag and thrown into the Thames. He soon surfaced, waving the handcuffs above his head, and was unanimously acclaimed him by the crowd. A century later, however, Houdini's successor is finding that the world has changed. The old Beatles-like irreverence of the British is no longer cheerful. Now it's angry, fearful and militant. David Blaine is finding out that he can recreate history but he can't escape the present and its incoherent but intense battles for British identity in a popular culture dominated by the US.