Un-retired...

Geez, the way NasTim is going, he's going to be mounting Farewell Tours ala Cher - his complete, utter, total withdrawal from writing and from the evil Internet lasted just under three weeks, and that's even if you credit his current claim that the various videos mounted during his stint as a Digital Video Artist weren't even his. He appears to be disowning, wholesale, not only those now-deleted works, but pretty much everything written since his Navahoax exposure. Perhaps, indeed, someone dreamed up Immolation, Immolation: The Sanity of Salo, A Debris of Stones, and Killing Castro on his behalf; perhaps all of it is, as he now contends, lies, lies, lies:

Many of the things posted to the Internet about me or supposedly by me are either complete lies or if they were supposedly by me were not written by me nor would they ever be written by me. I am amused to note that on the Internet these are people often referred to as the haters. The shoe definitely fits. It's easy to pose as if you were either Nasdijj or Tim Barrus. You simply use the name or names. These people are stalkers (they call me and hang up) and their intent has been to humiliate me and facilitate me to leave writing and publishing altogether. You can't beat them and they know that. They use the web as if it were a stick and I'm tired of their lies and distortions and writing as if this writing was being done by me. It wasn't written by me. Much of this stuff was simply written by people posing as me and they win. I am simply not interested in having anything to do with a space they now completely dominate. Life is too short. I don't read the Internet anymore and I haven't posted on the Internet for some time now with the exception of this post. Videos supposedly made and produced by me were not anything I had anything whatsoever to do with. I am simply not the monster they have made me out to be but that impression is what always reigns. So be it. I am not going to expose myself to this place where it seems to be the hate that always wins. -- Tim Barrus

The preceding is drawn from a site linked directly from his own LitKicks profile, so it's just about as much verifiably his as possible. Of course, that goes for all the material he' s now disowning, so it all becomes something of a house of mirrors.

Well, given that, unless my cyber-searching skills have failed me utterly, I'm pretty much the only one out here even thinking about NasTim, I guess those "haters" are, in toto, me. For the record, I don't consider myself a "hater" (and what a vague, inadequate, and silly term of opprobrium that is, really), but rather, in a way, an appreciator. I don't think of him as a "monster," although I do admit to finding some of his work grotesque, some of it simply a shade over the top, and much of it quite entirely half-baked. I am genuinely surprised by NasTim's ability to surprise, albeit within a very narrow conduit of predictability.

For example, I would have guessed that a rant like the one above would in fact be the harbinger of a whole new direction in his work, and - voila - here it is: now he is a crusading artist/documentarian, using his own groundbreaking, transgressive work to illustrate the mindscape of (what else?) children (read, I am all too sure, boys) with HIV, under the, um, shall we say slightly...derivative title Speaks Memory (perhaps Mr. Nabokov is taking over the psychic real estate formerly and quite firmly occupied by Mr. Hemingway during NasTim's Islands in the Dream phase?).

This newest venture seems to fall between a project of its own - his film (and I do look forward to finding out how his dauby abstracts are meant to "document...the lives of children who live with HIV all around the world") and some larger venture: "We take your images, your art, and work with artists to find the story that flows all around them in that narrative we refer to as time." apparently he does this by creating slides shows set to music.

Ah, you say, but how could I, as a potential user of NasTim's services, know I was getting quality work? Just check out his client list: "Banished Films, the Children's Rights Group, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations, the Janus Artist's Collective, Photography International Foundation, and the Manhattan Children's Writers Group."

And then, just for a bit of a reality check, go and try to Google any of them but the UN and the Ford Foundation. Banished Films, you may remember, is in fact the hardy group that labored so to create first Immolation and then A Debris of Stones, NasTim's own now apparently abandoned projects. He's already been called out on the Photography International claim, and the rest have left similarly slim trails.

I suppose what we really need to do is just sit down and wait for his promised appearance in the LA Times. Perhaps with that all will become clear.