THE
GAZER
tions are endless: If Braco’s $8,
8-minute soul-sweep doesn’t do it
for you, why not an embrace from
Amma, the jolly “hugging saint”
from India, who once wrapped her
arms around Sharon Stone? Or, if
you prefer your healers clean-cut,
there’s always Dean Kraft, a psychic who wears suits.
Staring can be transformative,
this we know. Scientologists call
it “confronting,” as dramatized
in The Master, when the drifter
played by Joaquin Phoenix loses
it while contemplating a wall. In
the spring of 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic planted herself
in the Museum of Modern Art
for a multi-month stare-athon,
and all anyone could talk about
afterwards was how many visitors cried. Locking eyes is an intimate act. A few years back there
was even a flurry of “eye-gazing
parties” — “NY’s hottest dating
trend,” Elle magazine called it —
wherein single people looking for
love first looked into a potential
partner’s eyes for a few minutes.
But Braco is unique. He may
offer less than any star healer on
the market: no mantras, no dictums, just the sight of him seeing
you. When his ongoing tour, Braco
in America, launched in 2010, he
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
became a punchline. On his radio
show, Howard Stern wondered if
the silent Croatian was mentally
disabled. A few months later, the
comedian Tim Heidecker, of Tim
and Eric Awesome Show, Great
Job!, tweeted a link to a YouTube
video of Braco gazing at a crowd of
tearful onlookers.
“He looks absolutely
like some guy you’d see
eating at a cafe in Santa
Monica, staring out and
doing nothing at all.
There seems to be nothing
special about him.”
“I was obsessed,” said Scott
Jacobson, a former writer for The
Daily Show, who first encountered Braco in a video emailed by
a friend in comedy.
“He looks absolutely like some
guy you’d see eating at a cafe in
Santa Monica, staring out and doing nothing at all. There seems to be
nothing special about him, which is
why the cutaways to the audience,
their responses, are so wonderful.”
Jacobson wound up doing a
day’s worth of gazing sessions in
2011 for a gonzo article for Vice
magazine (which he later pub-