From Hogan to Hellas

As we left Barrus, we were watching Nasdijj head for Dubai, preparing to unveil clips of his new film Immolation: The Sanity of Salo for the benefit of a shadowy Asian moneyman.

Then, just before he pulled his blog entirely, and just as, once before, "Mike Willis" had taken over the heavy work of carrying Nasdijj's message to the world, a new name appeared: Drakon Kerberos. For just a little while, there he was, a genius Greek boy who had joined the tiny brave band of artistic seers making this landmark of neo-transgressive cinema. He had a Myspace profile; he had a blog of his own ("Never Been So Alive"). He was edgy, punky, ready to rock'n'roll.

Just before he pulled the plug on his blog, Barrus briefly had up a curt notice, giving the journalists who had so maddeningly been hounding the project a few crumbs of information. Among them, the odd touch that he could confirm that Kerberos was, on his mother's side, a "Tsakos."

But then, like all else connected with Immolation, Drakon was gone. De-Myspaced. "Never been so alive" rang hollow in connection with this short-lived creation. But he left behind a few clues: Tsakos; the name "Adam Duquette" (one of Immolation's supposed young stars; "The people he knew would leave him or the war-like, jagged edges of terrain that haunted him with monsters every single time he left this earth and closed his baby eyes to sleep the sleep of ghosts," in typically understated Nasdijj-ese); and, most of all, a feeling that, just as before Barrus had tested the waters by submitting pieces on fatherhood and fishing to obscure online journals, rough-drafts of Nasdijj, Kerberos was a kind of coalmine-canary for a new direction.

Barrus, it was becoming clear, was leaving the open spaces and tragic history of the American Southwest behind him. No more the dark secrets of Athabaskan; bring on the Attic in its place. Like Raymond Duncan (Isadora's toga-addicted brother, eccentric even by her standards) before him, Barrus was Going Greek with a vengeance.

And Drakon led on to the next phase of this transformation: Immolation, it seemed, was now a new and different project, one financed by the incomparable wealth of the legendary Tsakos industrial family. Well, they're real enough, but now, we're told, the patriarch of the family is entrusting a special project to -- why, to the newly incarnated Timotheos Talos, sometimes Niko Samos, sometimes, still, Nasdijj. Tim Barrus is now, in what he is headlining "Entirely Fiction/This is not a blog," riding herd on a set of decadent millionaire teen aesthetes out to make a film called A Debris of Stones, which is simultaneously a film script and a novel. Confused? Not to worry -- it only gets more so from there.

It's clearly a work in progress, a "film script/novel query," tagged with the paradoxical request not to copy any video or text, odd only in that all of the video and so much of the text (great swathes, once again, of song lyrics, for example, but bits and pieces of articles and other found items as well) are themselves borrowed. Myspace plays a role here, too, with profiles that refer back and forth to each other among the rich Greek boys and their mentor; Youtube videos are liberally sprinkled throughout to illustrate key plot points, and the tone is resolutely, determinedly hip: emo, goth, hiphop, everything up to and including a dramatic appearance by Greek Madonna-wannabe-by-way-of-Eurovision Anna Vissi as Medea -- all the styles of the moment are borrowed to decorate what, it seems, turns out to be... (drumroll, maestro, please):

The chance to bash the Evils of Journalists (literally: there's a gleefully gruesome murder scene) while circling, sometimes warily, sometimes not, the erotic attraction of the under-18 set. In six parts. Everything old, in the immortal words sung by the late, great Mr. Peter Allen, is indeed new again.

It may turn out to be fabulous - if only King Charles's head can be successfully kept at bay - a visionary fusion of word, image, ancient, modern, youth, and experience. Or it may end up more like something along the lines of The Blood Runs through My Big Fat Greek Film Project. Or it may just, in a drakonkerberosische way, simply disappear.