About a month ago, David Blaine came out with his most recent magic special, “The Magic Way”. Few people know this, but I am a huge David Blaine stan. I reply to viral tweets with FanCam edits of David Blaine looking cute and hot. I doxx Selenators and Swifties. Blaine Hive: rise up!
Unfortunately, I rate this most recent movie to be one of his weaker efforts, especially compared to his past two films. It is still, of course, worth watching, especially to find out that LeBron James is a huge fan of live magic. However, “The Magic Way,” suffers mainly for one reason: David Blaine is doing magic.
Blaine’s 2016 special “Beyond Magic” is completely different. There are no magic tricks. Instead, Blaine regurgitates frogs, shoves an ice pick through his palm, and nearly dies catching a bullet with his teeth. The brilliant conceit of that movie is that the magician reveals his secrets. Blaine explains his methodology for each stunt in detail. Rather than LeBron freaking out about a card trick, Drake and Dave Chapelle simply stand there revolted as David Blaine throws up frogs into their champagne flutes. Blaine got famous on this type of non-magic: holding his breath for twenty minutes, living in a box suspended above the Thames for 44 days with no food, and freezing himself alive. Normal magic tricks make you figure out how they are fake; David Blaine makes you figure out how the hell this can be real.
Outside of the magic forums, much of the discourse this week concerned Elon Musk (a Relationship Guy with divorced vibes) and his seventh child, whom he named after one of the size options offered by a body positive brassiere company. But a week before that, while Grimes was treating her cramps with whale song therapy, Musk tweeted that Tesla’s stock price was too high. Of course, this caused quite a tumble, a major blow to the Posting Coursera Certificates on LinkedIn community.
Any CEO being openly negative about his company in public like this should cause a concurrent blow to its valuation. However, the effect on Tesla was so pronounced because it is a fake stock for a fake company. Tesla has never had a profitable year. They make cars for people who know that swag is for boys and class is for men. The cars are unreliable and unrepairable. In ten years, their resale value will be determined by their viability for artificial coral reefing projects. Tesla stock exists so that 19-year-olds who run a drop shipping company can make Tik Toks in which they explain investing to their fathers and berate them for being in a union. It goes up when Elon is epic or savage. But when he is too epic or savage, it goes down. Tesla will go up and up until it implodes sometime in 2022, requiring a major bailout package from Fed Chairman Dan Bilzerian.
Traditional companies are like traditional magic: they use artifice, cleverness, speed, or skill to control your attention and persuade you a certain way. Tesla stock, like David Blaine living underwater for a week, just does something crazy because it is possible.
In his incredible documentary Hypernormalisation, the British filmmaker Adam Curtis describes how the real world, which is inherently chaotic, entropic, and confusing, was replaced with a simpler and easier version of reality. At almost three hours long, the documentary is perfect for Q-tine (kind of a silly way of saying “quarantine” I’ve come up with). Curtis argues that systems like international finance, data surveillance, and Middle Eastern politics are made to appear controllable or tamable, while underneath they churn and wreak havoc like acts of nature. David Weinberger, a philosopher, argues that the world, and our knowledge of it, has progressed in complexity to a point beyond any human brain’s capacity for understanding. He points as an example to Eureqa, which surprisingly is not a blue raspberry-flavored sexual lubricant. It’s a supercomputer which has identified equations to explain the function of a cell that cannot be understood yet with current science. The world is beyond our comprehension. In seeking to reduce it to something we can make sense of, it becomes fake.
More and more though, the world seems to show us how it performs its tricks. We have watched two fake American coups d’etat in the past two weeks. The first happened in Michigan, when a large group of Toby Keith fans put on their paintball clothes and brought machine guns to the Michigan state capitol and tried to enter the governor’s office. The entire time, they knew they would not shoot and that the police would not shoot at them. On both sides, their guns were symbols of force, not weapons. It was a game of mutually-assured destruction, with both sides putting the others’ muzzles on their foreheads and daring them to pull the trigger, knowing they would not.
The other coup involved a group of former US military operatives, all of whom were dishonorably discharged for not posing obscenely enough in photos with corpses. While smuggling coke to Venezuela, they decided to try the side mission of overthrowing Nicolás Maduro. However, their cargo pants were overloaded with tactical gear and collapsed to their ankles, causing them to fumble around in their underwear to the Benny Hill theme song. Eleven minutes into the operation, they were captured after running into a tunnel painted on the side of a cliff.
All around us, we are surrounded by fake shit. The other day, my mother received a Groupon for a discount on TSA PreCheck. This is proof that the TSA is not just security theater, but a psy-op engineered by Supreme to habituate us to waiting in lines. Lil Miquela got the first Hollywood deal for a virtual character. (Motherfuckers act like they forgot about Hatsune Miku…) We have zero in-person friendships. Sexual contact is in cyberspace. Being hot does not matter anymore. It’s all about having the fattest e-pussy and laying the best iPipe. Our choices for a president are a senile sexual harasser who calls his wife rare anti-Slovenian slurs and a senile sexual harasser who calls his wife to ask why he smells toast.
I’ve been down for so long it look like up to me.
Very funny with brilliant insights. Is this a compliment or fake love for you?