Criss Angel, ugh.

Until the magician announced a major stunt in Clearwater — an escape from an about-to-implode building to be shown live on A&E Wednesday at 10 p.m. — he was little more than a vague name to me.

But I caught a bit of Criss Angel: Mindfreak last week — the one where he walked on water out West — and I found the guy repugnant.

This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...