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?