Island Hopping

Well, to paraphrase Mrs. Federline -- oops, he's done it again.

Apparently the fascination of Mykonos, Delos, et. al. has proved to be all-too-exhaustible, for in recent days, NasTim has abandoned A Debris of Stones and turned his attention to a new project. Recent messages from him (after a vitriolic spate of musings on the death of culture and, of course, the horrors of publishing) taken a turn for the voodoo-esque. At one point, he was heading to New Orleans to research a new work (as if the poor place hasn't suffered enough); at another, things Haitian seemed much on his mind.

Now, however, this new project has moved further south, and it looks like the newest destination for the wanderer is Cuba, for he tells us that his next novel will be something to be called Killing Castro. Since NasTim is, to put it mildly, rather predictable, I decided to check around and see if there were yet any online signs of this new creation, and, lo and behold, there are.

So far, it's only the barest of sketches, an opening salvo as it were, albeit one in which the author manages already to find his usual mystic depths: "The emptiness of Cuba is like the Beggar Queen whose blindness confines in wombs strange new midnights wrapped succumbed in all the music of the dark..."

A few traces of his Attic adventures remain, for illustrating this new work are videos from a familiar name - this new work will apparently be just as much a multi-media extravaganza as the last. Yes, that 18-year old Greek prodigy Drakon Kerberos is now a YouTuber, creating slideshow videos rather like those that showed off the film side of the novel/film that NasTim's other alter ego Niko Samos posted to Google and used on the various Debris of Stone not-a-blog Blogspot pages. I supposes it's quibbling to note that our author shows his usual exquisite cultural sensitivity and ear for local flavor by setting images of Cubans at work and play in threadbare Havana to music by Santana, which somehow gives at least one of the pieces approximately the same effect one might have wandering through Covent Garden listening to Piaf.

But here's where things get a little (to use one of NasTim's favorite word's) disturbing. Unlike the MySpace profiles that underpinned A Debris of Stones (as of this writing accessible from here), which NasTim clearly said were meant to be a walled garden in which the various characters did not interact in any way with more, um, reality-based Internet users, Drakon has given us some insight as to what other YouTube content he finds interesting. If you guessed "postings by teen boys who have a tendency to take off their shirts," you wouldn't be far off. If I were a parent, I'd been uncomfortable just thinking about this pseudo-Hellene being aware of my child's existence...

I somehow don't have the feeling that this latest new direction will have the legs that the Greek phase did. From its first stirrings early in the summer through just the past week or so, it waxed and waned and shifted shape but, whether as a journal of NasTim's exile, as Immolation-that-morphed-into-Pasolini-Lite, or as a teen murder mystery/movie, it was clearly much on the author's mind. Cuba somehow seems more of a feeler. If nothing else, it would seem to be a risky thing to stake a new novel on the premise of Killing Castro, something that time and a lifetime's cigar habit seem to be taking care of on their own.