Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Whimpering existential wimp-thug David Blaine lays his cojones on the scales against cackling, criminally irreverent feces-diver Johnny Knoxville. Knoxville's have more heft.
May 21, 2002 | Before Sept. 11, in those long-lost days when America's bravest young men had no war, famine, saber-toothed tigers or any other actual challenges to pit themselves against, they were forced to prove their manliness through inventive forms of public masochism: the more gratuitous, idiotically conceived and potentially harmful, the better.
Spearheading the ranks of bescabbed professional skateboarders, fractured BMX riders, dead BASE jumpers, no-necked backyard rasslers and hundreds of jacked-up halfwits that make up the puncture casualties at Pamplona's annual running of the bulls are two celebrity self-torturers who arguably occupy the drivers' seats in the demolition derby that is the American male mystique: MTV's "Jackass" star Johnny Knoxville and model-mystifier David Blaine.
Both young men are hawt, fashionably macho, and famous through their acts of simulated crisis.
Blaine will mount a 90-foot pole in midtown Manhattan tomorrow and stand on a circular platform for 35 hours before jumping, on Wednesday, into a big pile of cardboard.
Knoxville once put live leeches on his face.
In the past couple of years, Blaine has been buried alive for seven days in a glass coffin and spent 61 hours standing in a large ice cube.
Knoxville let us watch as he got a colonic while wearing a Santa suit.
Blaine raised a pigeon from the dead. Johnny swam in shit.
Blaine is famous for "street magic," which seems to mean taking classic sleight-of-hand tricks to the South Bronx and performing them for excitable black and Hispanic teens in a haunted-sounding monotone. Knoxville is famous for such stunts as being voluntarily shot with Taser darts and rolling around in giggling anguish (although, sadly, now that he's a movie star, he does it only in reruns.)
If this were the '70s, both Knoxville and Blaine would be important conceptual artists (that is, if Blaine didn't end up a cult leader instead). Many "Jackass" installations closely resemble the '70s offerings of artist Paul McCarthy, who would sit in a bathtub wearing a wig, drinking ketchup, and stuffing raw sausages in his mouth and up his ass (the latter with the assistance of handfuls of Pond's cold cream) to the point of illness. Both Knoxville and Blaine are the intellectual godchildren of masochistic artist Chris Burden, who for his MFA thesis in 1971 locked himself in a 2-by-3-foot locker for five days at the University of California at Irvine -- the first of many such endurance pieces in his career. Later in '71, Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22, and in 1974 he crucified himself on top of a Volkswagen.
It is only serendipity that put Knoxville on MTV as opposed to the Whitney with a placard above his video installations reading:
Knoxville, Johnny -- "Fecal Lake, 2000" Performance at Anaheim, Calif. Port-O-Let, crane, swimsuit.
As for Blaine, he recently discussed with Rolling Stone magazine his wish to be shot .
Knoxville and Blaine belong to the same genus of masochist but are of different species. Hip grown men tend to dislike Blaine, whereas they adore Knoxville. "Blaine is a pansy, fairy, and self-important prig," one friend of mine sneered. "Knoxville is like that incredibly selfless best friend you've always wanted, who does all this whacked-out, wild, hilarious shit that makes you want to be around him all the time. He's a rock star."
Blaine might be wearing a Mylar cummerbund and performing in Vegas with an albino ocelot if he were not (1) a photogenically seductive, tattooed, proto-geek/thug contradiction, (2) strangely Rasputin-esque and maybe psychic, and (3) a champion star fucker. His best trick is spending long periods of time in elaborate public imprisonments, which is comparatively interesting, even compared to the voluntary group-torture/humiliation dynamic of reality TV. Blaine's problem, however, is his spin on these events: He is tragically prone to fucking up his image with whiny, sissy-drama histrionics.
