I'd go to Coney Island to hang out, and I saw a magician doing a rope trick on the boardwalk. I was fascinated. I guess that's how it started.
I was obsessed with the idea of fasting and isolation.
Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.
My mother encouraged it so much. She was so supportive. Even if as a kid, I would do the dumbest trick, which now that I look back on some things, she would love it, she would say that's amazing, or if I'd make the ugliest drawing, she would hang it up. She was amazing.
I think that when Evel Knievel crashed over the fountain at Caesars, it kind of gave you a credibility and then anticipation for everything he did.
I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldnt get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic.
As a kid I used to hold my breath longer than anybody else, and then I heard stories about people accidently underwater for 45 minutes - how do you recover from that? It's not a miracle. Something allows us to survive.
I have not had time to reflect on my own truths in many years.
I'd always wanted to do these types of things - pieces of magic I could put out not as illusions, but really doing it.
It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line.
