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.

Pronouncing the Imagined

Here's a fun-fact for your weekend: according to a rather good interview with journalist Matthew Fleischer, "Nasdijj," insofar as an invented word has any received pronounciation at all, is apparently meant to be pronounced something like "Naz-DEEZH." To me this gives the word a rather exotic, slavic air; "Nasdijj Negri" might have been Pola's baby sister.

Boy Trouble

"In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been for upwards of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of the Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there now."

Sometimes, reading Barrus, I'm reminded of Dickens's lovable character from David Copperfield, Mr. Dick (there are many reasons that name might swim into one's consciousness while reading Barrus, I know, but do try and keep your mind out of the gutter; I'm being literary here). Dick was a sweet old gentleman, happily engaged in his dotage in writing a magnum opus that is continually undercut by his inability to refrain from reverting to discussion of the unfortunate Stuart monarch.

King Charles lost his head, you will remember, and Barrus loses his in writing about "his boys." No matter what else he is doing, they are sure to crop up. Sometimes he’s the wise father, and sometimes something far more unsettling – a kind of savior/mentor, with just enough eros thrown in to be jarring. And it is jarring, because we’re not talking well-they’re-almost-18 boys; they’re far younger, and usually written of as having about the kind of world-weariness and sophistication, especially on all matters sexual, one might associate with… well, with a man in his 50s writing about dirty little boys.

If for no other reason (and there are many), this obsessive quality is why Barrus’s stories of his work – invariably his excruciatingly difficult, world-changing work – with HIV+ boys always felt so false. He wrote repeatedly, for example, about a place called Refuge House, a kind of transcendental asylum for terribly abused, terminally ill adolescents (and, it seemed, their younger brothers). Its location seemed to shift – it was at least once meant to be in Mexico – and its clientele were at times supposedly illegal aliens brought daringly over the border by Barrus so that he could save their lives. The apparent peregrinations of this remarkable institution set up an interesting internal contradiction in Barrus's writing: when Refuge House was in Mexico, it was there because the Evil American Medical System made lifesaving drugs unaffordable for the boys; when it housed boys Nasdijj had daringly brought over the border from Mexico, it was so he could heroically provide them with drugs unavailable there.

The numbers involved, too, seemed to fluctuate -- as high as 50, as few as just a handful. Certainly, he never seemed to write in detail about more than three or four at a time. Sometimes there didn't even appear to be a "Refuge House," but rather just some sort of "support group" in North Carolina.

The scarring lives and afflicted existence of these boys brought on some of Barrus’s choicest rants; here he is, for example, in a blog entry called “fade,” taking a rather unorthodox approach to detoxing his favorite 12-year-old:

“Bane was in Big Girl trouble. Here was a twelve-year-old who was shooting junk and was barely getting high. That's the thing with opiates. You need more and more. But there's the contradiction, too. Bane was flirting with overdose and death. I waited for everyone to leave.

They did.

Bane and I were alone.

It was now or never.

I beat him up. I just went for him. I pushed him. I shoved him down the stairs. I hit him in the gut. He doubled over and vomitted. I didn't care. I slapped him hard. I socked him in the jaw. His nose was bleeding. His eyes were flooded with tears. I kicked his ass.

I wanted his undivided attention.

No adult in his life had ever demanded this of Bane and he had pissed me off.”

Barrus's writing about these children, whom I devoutly hope are as fictional as his portrayal of them suggests, reveals how airless his work can be, how unconnected with reality, even as it is obsessed with concepts of “truth,” “history,” and “self.”

In Nasdijjland, it seems there are no little girls (he rails only at the horror that face boys in the Great Threatening Out There from which he is saving them), just as there is no good in publishing, just as there is no honest curiosity in journalism… One could go on at length about all the things he has erased from consideration, consigned to the world of Pumpkinhead (among his favorite insults) and the oblivion to which he shunts all that to which he feels superior. Without that comforting feeling of near-holiness, he might have to actually analyze some of the unshakeable assumptions from which he writes: that Timothy Barrus is a dangerous rule-breaker, an outsider, a regular little ol’ hellion, hounded by the legions of the hypocritical who aren’t worthy of his time, his art. I suppose that would mean he would have to start with the Timothy Patrick Barrus who was the fresh-faced youth, the student-council leader, the drama-club member, and (as one old schoolmate says) the “odd duck” we see in the photographs dredged up by his Lansing, Michigan, hometown paper.

And the Barrus who write honestly about that, might actually be a Barrus worth reading: stripped of his impostures, of his poses, of his supposed brushes with fame, of his endless rhetorical flights of scatology and invective. Were he to tell the truth about what brought that boy through the adventures, real and imagined, he has regaled us with, and a little bit of why, he might actually become the writer he so diligently proclaims he is. “I am going to do my work until my last dying breath,” he says on an online profile (and is there any last breath that isn’t dying?). I hope that in doing so, he spends as much time re-writing as he does writing, finds himself a good (and merciless) editor, and sets to something serious.

With or without Drakon Kerberos, the mysterious half-Tsakos.

All Too Apt: "A Thief's Journal"

It was an interesting thing, in the months following "Navahoax," to watch Nasdijj's blogs come and go. Sometimes it was one (hosted here); sometimes they were many, with colorful names like "The Son Also Rises" (again with the Hemingway, boychik?) or, even more so, "Us Whores." He waxed poetic in naming some ("Gentlemen, Let Us Save the Moon") and more characteristically blunt in others ("Your Stupid Rules"). In all of them, he wrote about his travels, his "exile," and his activities, including film-making (more of that later). Of course, it wouldn't be Nasdijj if he didn't also go off on the Utter Evil of Publishing, fit in some general creepiness on the subject of teenage boys, and tout his own transgressiveness. Nasdijj is Nasdijj, after all.

Except, of course, that he isn't.

[An aside -- I realize I'm going to have decide on calling him either Barrus or Nasdijj; the names are so many -- and could be so many more. I'm thinking I'll go with what the State of Michigan registered when Mr. and Mrs. Barrus named their baby, and just call him by his birth name. Although I have to say that, were it not cumbersome both to type and to read, I'd probably go with "soi-disant one-time Leslie Bovee impersonator," in the way that the old Spy magazine only ever referred to "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump."]

The main blog, though, was generally called "A Thief's Journal," which rather fit. Barrus, of course, is now most known, insofar as he is at all, magpie-like, for his acquisitions -- of other peoples' identities, of fragments of their lives, of bits and pieces he used to create his work. Beyond that, though, the blogs were littered with what would at first seem like random texts -- song lyrics, mostly, although there was also at least one obscure academic article slightly altered to seem like a text about Nasdij (sadly, it seems to have vanished uncached). In keeping with the idea that the author was travelling (one blog, by the bye, was "Tangier Again"), some were in translation -- an odd, awkward French version of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," for example, that seemed to have been passed through Babelfish by someone with only a passing knowledge of French (similarly, it did seem a schoolgirl touch to head each day's entry with "Lundi," "Jeudi," etc.; one wonders exactly how francophone Barrus might be).

Trying to identify the texts (or to work backwards from the French) was something on the order of a game. All of it was unattributed, so you would be reading along and suddenly think, "Wait -- isn't that that Grace Jones song from, like, 1983?" Sometimes they fit, more or less, with the text around them; sometimes they were jarring interruptions; sometimes they were the only thing on the page.

In part, the blog served as travelogue, reminding us how happy the writer was to be away from the Perfidy of Publishers and the Jealousies of Journalists. We were repeatedly reminded that Barrus was not taking calls or inquiries, that he had no interest in publicity, and that "I no longer bother reading anything going down on the Internet because it's simply a huge waste of my time. Knowing people sucks. The less people I know, the better off I am." The horrors of publicity, of being laid seige to by the Fourth Estate, is a recurring feature of Barrus's writing; Andrew Chaikivsky mentioned it in his Esquire article, noting with bemusement that, at least when he went to interview the Barruses, the legions of TV trucks Barrus had complained of were nowhere to be seen outside the house in which he was staying.

Accompanying the blogs' accounts of these travels -- to Paris, to Tangier, to Greece -- were both art-photos of the kind Barrus had been posting for years, and more straightforward travel pictures (landscapes and other scenes with handwriting, often in a recognizable hand, added digitally). He was never in them; almost the only image of the man himself on the blogs was the startling image, called "Nasdijj by Rosen" in "Navahoax," of a smiling, mohawked, topless, open-pantsed Barrus, a cord or fine chain, connected to his very visible Prince Albert, in his teeth. Most of the images were unpeopled, or had only a few -- you guessed it! -- teenage boys, often seen so that they were unidentifiable. The pictures might have been more convincing proof of the author's flight from the benighted shores of Amerika if they hadn't, as a very little searching quickly showed, been lifted wholesale from other peoples' Flickr postings.

As the summer progressed, June into July, he focused more tightly on the project he said was taking all his energies: a film (never, of course, anything so mundane as a movie). Now, exactly what that movie was is a tricky thing. It kept changing. Sometimes it was a little project with a group of old friends; sometimes it was an epic of Wagnerian breadth. Mostly it was called Immolation, although toward the end it took a surreal turn when Barrus breathlessly revealed that it was in fact a remake of Pasolini's art-porn scandal, Salo, and was going to be called Immolation: The Sanity of Salo (which, if you ask me, isn't quite up there with Snakes on a Plane in terms of catchiness; more on the order of Death to Smoochy). We got dispatches from the set, we got long musings on the difficulties of independent filmmaking, and, most of all, we got screeds against the journalists who were continually trying to undercut the creation of this masterpiece-in-the-making. The film involved, but of course, a trio of tender, inspiring, angelic young (and I do mean young) brothers, whom Barrus (now mostly, by the bye, calling himself Timothee) would alternately drive to their limits to achieve great performances and comfort as they wept. There were pictures, putatively of the youngsters -- doe-eyed, sweet-faced pre-teens. One can only hope that they, too were Flickr-finds.

Toward the end of that round of blogging, Barrus posted a wild range of pictures, supposedly of the film -- huge surreal sets, surging crowds of extras; by contrast, shots of small film crews in intimate interiors and on the beach. They were hard to reconcile as being from one project; the people in the film crews, generic types in shorts, were mostly not seen full-face. Shots of an actual immolation in a couple of the pictures made it clear, and a quick trip back to Flickr made it clearer -- whatever else Immolation, in its shifting grandeur, might be, the pictures were from Burning Man 2005. Given that Barrus was clearly going for the youth market on this one ("I have the manpower, I have the talent, and I'm as hip as any kid out there. I am surrounded by them and their creative, turbulent, fluid energy..."), this just seems careless.

And then, one day, it was gone. The journalists, alas, were just too much. They were going through the crew's trash, they were scum. He wasn't talking. Don't ask. Barrus started putting up and taking down postings quickly, removing the blog's archive.

Briefly, there was a post about a mysterious trip to Dubai, where Barrus would impress a shadowy investor from Hong Kong with the brilliance that was Immolation. Illustrating it, of course, were snapshots from some tourist's 2005 visit to the UAE.

Then, just a snarky post (well, not all that much snarkier than others, really), saying no, wait, it's all fiction (and if so, why the rage over journalists' going through non-existent trash?).

And then it was gone.

And that's where I come in. It seemed so odd to get Blogger's 404 page when I went for my Nasdijj-fix, I felt like I had no choice. I'm the meta-Nasdijj, commenting on the vanished blogs of the also-ran in 2006's Great Literary Scandals.

What do you suppose Nasdijj will get up to next? And is Drakon Kerberos a clue?

"I have scars. I earned them."

Ah, Usenet. Out from the ether this week comes a piece of what I assume is vintage Barrus-iana, an example of the Writer as Erotician. More or less.

It's a short story called "Another's Burning," and it is, in the words of the late Miss Dorothy Parker, a little love -- a kind of Backdraft, if, in the great tradition of such epics as Shaving Ryan's Privates, it were to be remade as Backdoor. If nothing else, it adds yet another category to the list of groups-to-which-he-does-not-belong that Barrus has fetishized in his writings; working-class Irish firefighters join his pantheon of heroes -- Navajos, leathermen, sick boys, Vietnam vets, migrant workers... can Fuller Brush men be too far off?

For those not offended by graphic -- if thoroughly unarousing -- descriptions of male-on-male action, the story is almost worth a read. It revisits (or, if it is old enough, I suppose, it helps crystallize) a remarkable array of the themes seen elsewhere in the author's published and online writing. It is written in the first-person, in a tone that almost begs for belief in its authenticity (it's set in a firehouse, so of course it has to mention the dog mascot). It portrays the narrator in a way both heroic and victimized. He submits to a fellow firefighter's Tough Love ("I love him. It’s not easy. Nothing good is ever easy.") and survives near-death while on the job (giving rise to the title quote above). The writing alternates between short, punchy sentences and lyrical, awkward, high-flown passages that are, especially in the context of stroke fiction, the very definition of "high-falutin'." It posits the existence of sub-rosa, late-night circlejerks in the firehouse. Most of all, I fear, it induces giggles. It's one thing to refer to a band of fellow recruits as hairy urchin lads (calling up, somehow, quaint images of a pornographic Horatio Alger novellette); it's another to do so within a few lines of alleging that Boston firemen are among the most dedicated and accomplished urophiliacs in the known world.

I'm grateful to the poster of the story (who accompanied it with a rather Durer-esque illustration on the same theme), if only because it is the first extended sample of the author's early work I've found. I can't say that it makes me want to rush out and find a copy of Mineshaft, but it does confirm to my satisfaction that while Barrus/Nasdijj has many names, he hasn't that I can find accomplished the rather more complex task of writing in different voices.

This makes it all the more perplexing that readers didn't question earlier, for example, why the writing Nasdijj posted that was supposedly by the prodigious young Bane Bianchi (one of the ghostly legion of afflicted ephebes he was claiming to care for as late as July) didn't sound just exactly like Nasdijj For Young Readers, or why any sane editor, presented (as at least one was) with by side-by-side samples of Barrus and Nasdijj didn't put, not even two and two, but one and one together.

And, for those readers not interested finding out more first-hand (as it were) about Tim Barrus's exceedingly scatological take on homosex, I can confirm that yes, in writing about tough-as-nail prole firefighters, he does manage to refer to fire as both a mistress and a whore.

(Oh, go ahead -- find it on Google Groups. Maybe it will appeal more to someone who doesn't immediately think about the poor man's wife. The more I think, the more she's really the heroine of this tale...)

Don Q

“He didn’t think windmills were monsters, he just hated windmills.”

- Lars Eighner on Tim Barrus, Navahoax

Dr. Brown to the White Courtesy Phone...

Of all the iterations of Nasdijj's blogs, the one on Typepad that pre-dated the LA Weekly exposé, was, at least of what I've been able to track down, the wildest -- free-ranging fantasias of anger, whimsy, and startling bits and pieces of "biography," held together by the energy of the writing, by the (now mostly unavailable) images, and by what can seem at times likes a blinding streak of paranoia.

One that can still be tracked down (thank you, Google cache!) is the undated "Foot", which stands as a good example of Nasdijj in full steam: it takes off from an incident in his first book, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, in which Nasdijj lays claim to have been involved in the unsolved vandalization of a statue of a Spanish conquistadore in New Mexico, and becomes a rant that attacks publisher Judith Regan, rhapsodizes/fantasizes about an interview Nasdijj supposedly did with former New York mayor Ed Koch, claims that the HIV+ boys he is caring for are illegal aliens, and namechecks a gallery of camp icons and powerful ladies: Mary Todd Lincoln, Sigourney Weaver (a former neighbor, he says), Bette Davis, Laura Bush, La Toya Jackson, Faye Dunaway, Gloria Allred, and others all turn up, along with, of course, inevitably for Nasdijj, Marie of Roumania. Via Dorothy Parker poor Missie of Edinburgh appears to have gotten lodged permanently somewhere in his subconscious, popping up at the oddest times.

In this version of his ongoing saga of trial-by-publishing, Nasdijj attributes his "exile" from Bookland to having refused to allow the New York Times to review his third book, Geronimo's Bones. I suppose that's possible.

And I am Marie of Roumania.

In any case, sandwiched in among the famous names and lurid throwaways ("I know! I know! Sigourney Weaver will torture my tits and flush the bible down the toilet that BITCH! TORTURE! TORTURE!"), is, a name that pops out precisely because it isn't famous: the mysterious Dr. Vivian Keysley Brown.

I think it stuck in my head mostly because I love the name "Vivian" -- you know, Vivian Vance, Vivien Leigh, the slight melancholy one feels about a name slowly vanishing behind us, along with Bertha, Euphemia, Harriet... It has a lovely period feel to it, like all those girls who were named Elizabeth and Margaret Rose in the '20s (see, I can gay-namedrop with the best of them!).

In any case, there she is, Dr. Vivian Keysley Brown, who may or may not be a podiatrist ("Dr. Vivian Keysley Brown. She removes nails one nail at a time."). What she may also be is yet another fragmentary persona of Tim Barrus ("You're Dr. Vivian Keysely Brown... We thought you were Dr. Vivian Keysley Brown... I mean the real one"). I believe she turned up in at least one other previously googlable (?) iteration of Nasdijj's blogs in addition to "Foot," but can't at the moment track her down, possibly because he may not have been consistent in spelling her middle (maiden?) name. Separate from Nasdijj, she appears to have, at least in the googleverse (!) no other existence. There are a couple of Vivian K. Browns out there (a county-fair winner -- first prize for two-crust apple pie and chocolate fudge -- brava, Vivian! -- and the survivor of a heavy-equipment operator -- his daughter, not his victim -- in a Hawaiian obituary among them), but none clearly connectable to Our Boy.

This raises the question of just how many Barrus personae there have been. He's written that there are more than just the public faces -- Tim Barrus (the Mineshaft writer and, more or less, real person) and Nasdijj, the invented Native American. There are the others who have come and gone on the blogs, and earlier this summer he was claiming also to have written advice columns in Genesis magazine for 70s porn demi-legend Leslie Bovee.

Who else has Tim Barrus been, and are any of them still out there? Is he really Miss Manners (no, I think Judith Martin has a lock on that one)? One of the bots who's now writing Dear Abby? I'd like to think he was the power-behind-the-throne of Miss Ann Coulter, which might at least explain the incoherence and sheer volume of her oeuvre.

We shall see...

Blurring the Boundaries

Nasdijj wasn't on my radar before last January; until LA Weekly came out with "Navahoax," Matthew Fleischer's incisive, thorough-going smackdown of Tim Barrus's created persona, I wouldn't have thought I would have any special interest in the man or his work. Like anyone reading the news, I had registered the stories about James Frey and JT Leroy, but Nasdijj's story resonated for me not so much because of the literary scandal angle, but because it involved such an intense act of creation for such a fraudulent purpose; it was more akin to the stranges tales told by Binyamin Wilkomirski and Lauren Stratford than to Frey's frat-boy posturing.

Barrus, after all, didn't just write as Nasdijj -- he performed him, convincing lecture audiences at universities and credulous fans at book-signings that he was everything his books said he was and more. He carried out extensive correspondences, did online interviews, and even enlisted his clearly long-suffering wife into the charade -- her account of their travails during a book tour, "2004 A Hell of a Year", turned up on a rather touching, earnest books-and-reading site on which Nasdijj also appeared (that site's editor's crestfallen response to the Nasdijj revelation echoed those of many readers who had placed stock in his tales of suffering and survival). That piece leaves me wondering even more about him, and them -- did he really have avascular necrosis, the "bone disease" she writes about (as does he, elsewhere)? Did she, on any level, believe what he wrote, or did she just go along, as it were, for the ride? In an article last May in Esquire, she is portrayed as trying to pass off their dog (who appears as a leitmotif throughout both of their writing) as a service-animal -- is she as much a grifter as he?

I found myself scouring the Net, the Google cache, Usenet, you name it, for traces of Nasdijj's writing, especially the blog content that seemed to come and go on a daily, sometimes an hourly basis. Sometimes it was lucid prose, poetic, illuminating, wry, even witty; sometimes a screed that raged incoherently about injustices large and infinitesimal. Often it was deeply disturbing (a point of pride, it seemed), turning around and turning back to and never straying all that far from a few themes: the horrors of modern publishing; after his "reveal", a mixture of pride and anger at the whole question of identity; and, inevitably, a complex mixture of sex, violence, boys, and how Nasdijj relates -- as savior, as predator, as desired and desiring -- to all three.

This Used to be Nasdijj's Blog....

...but he took it down.

I miss him.