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Manifesto: CinemathequeArt is on the road. I hear our critics scream blood. I usually assume they scream FOR blood. Usually mine. Ho fucking hum. I don't read "comments." I make them. Or I am the subject of them (there are rumors, you know). I enjoy the difference. Between the People Who Make Things. And the slugs who don't. There are people who create and people who consume. Usually the ones who consume consume everything because that is about all they do. I used to think they were simply empty or stupid or both. But now I realize they're vampires. They take. They suck. They have little (usually nothing) to give. They bore me. The New York Times finds my work to be "disturbing." I find that rather Rich. To be called disturbing by the New York Times. You should be disturbed. Your culture deserves whatever artistic examination I can throw at it. Whatever paint I can explode upon the wall. I will do that again and again and again and again. Get a clue. It is what I do. I do it in video. I have done it on film. I do it in poetry. I do it in books. I do it with photography. I do it on canvas. Art is dangerous. I am dangerous. Life is dangerous. If you're living it. Most people wouldn't have a clue where to start. What is really dangerous is to enable children to throw paint against the cultural walls. What is even more dangerous than that is to facilitate -- or to teach -- Children at Risk to throw their paint and their video and their film and their poetry and whatever else they might want to make at the cultural walls because when they're done with any luck they will render those walls into something we have never seen before. Art is subversive. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. -- Picasso Who are the children "At Risk." Why do I use that term. I know them well. I've been teaching them here and there for more years than you will ever know. We're the failures. The ones who got kicked out of some school somewhere. We question a lot of things. Actually, we question everything. "He doesn't really mean everything," you say. He does. Mean everything. We're your outcasts. I find that if we can focus, if we can create a safe place to do that, a place where we can get all of your nitpicking out of our heads, a place where we can even take your sacred cultural icons, and pound them with hammers, put blow torches to them, cover them with graffiti, wrap them in plastic, sand them, saw them, and generally wreck havoc upon them, that not only is it great fun, but when we're done (and we are rarely really done) the thing is far more strange and sometimes twisted than before we got our hands on it. To articulate havoc upon the sacred is why we are here. It is what we were put here to do. This SO CONCERNS our critics that they literally go gaga. Like that is going to make us stop. Your "comments" on some blog somewhere are going to make us stop. It might drive us underground. We have kicked people out of poetry readings we've done. Don't bring cameras to our poetry readings. But no. People never listen. I myself have been accused of everything under the sun including but not limited to my really being Andy Kaufman. You see how absurd it gets. I rather liked being accused of being Andy Kaufman. I AM Andy Kaufman. But the death threats are so dull especially when you mix them up with all the sexual things you are supposedly going to do to us. I DO go out of my way to make you really work for it to find us. Take your death threats and your whining and your boring jealousy and your sexual confusion and all the other sick things your society is about somewhere else and then stick them up your ass. Just my being on the road (or difficult to pinpoint) pisses our critics off. Into a royal, rabid froth. So. You've been provoked. Like I care. I hear about their little temper tantrums here and there. Like the twittering of little birds in the background. It doesn't engage me. Mainly because I do not expose myself to it. I have that option. And then I'm off to something else. I'm never anywhere for too long. I don't own "things." It doesn't interest me. Everything I own, everything in my name, can fit into one bag. And it's a carry-on. I don't check luggage. All my computer stuff has been downsized. It is now all so small -- all of our cameras can literally fit into our pockets and this summer when we filmed Until They Arrive Home Again we did so subversively under the nose of the government which manages the estate we filmed on -- you won't even know you're being filmed. I call it The Revenge of Art. They did not even know we were there. Subversion as an artistic tool interests me. And owning things is simply the culture's way of tying you down. The more you're tied down, the more accessible you are, and I am only accessible to the people I choose to let into my life. Period. I decide. My art. My way. Does that provoke you, too, again and again. Get a life. I have been kicked out of a thousand blogs. A thousand stages. A thousand publishing companies. That and fifty cents. And some bus somewhere. It amuses me to watch them grind their teeth. As they squirm. Exile only is. Oh, there he is again. Teaching children to do it -- and At Risk Kids are very good at this -- really PISSES the status quo off. Why do you think such children are attracted like moths to a fabulous yellow roman candle. Get a clue. If you can find me why don't you think they can. It can begin with something as innocuous an an email. And then it goes from there. I want the mad ones. The dangerous ones. The ones who burn. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say an uncommon-place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles. Like I said, we're on the road... Your screaming blood, your screaming for my blood, isn't going to stop me. The most absurd ones, the ones I enjoy intimidating the most, are the moral police. Those are the ones I teach my students to look out for. Most cultures have them. They're ordinary. And then it usually goes to sex. For me to walk away from art that speaks to sex would be a little ridiculous, don't you think. But don't put me in any of your little boxes because I won't fit and the bitch will burn the box if she can get her hands on matches and she can. To the ground. And then she'll call it art because the bitch has balls. I know. I know. It's against the rules. While we're at it, let's throw some paint, some poetry, some film, some video, and some books at them, too. Le rules. Don't even tempt me. I think I will put this on both sides of this page. How arty. -- Tim Barrus As an educational entity, Cinematheque students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation and video and film production.

Give me poetry. Make it tough. Make it hard. Make it intransigent. Give me poetry. Make it with the disconnects. Make it controversial. Make it real. Give me poetry. Make it political. Make it us. Make it with the contradictions. Give me poetry, Make it complicated. Make it turbulent. Make it flawed, but make it. Make it. Make it now. Give me poetry. -- Tim

Assignment: Talk to me in the languages of symbolic and or iconic images that express how it feels to you to be rendered either invisible by Americans (with their rage and their death threats) who would destroy you if they could -- or -- they would compartmentalize you as voraciously, sexually promiscuous where you can, again, be rendered invisible by a morality that would deny you any validity as a human being. Give me no more than two minutes. And give me graphics and writing and no lyrics. -- Tim

My friends from high school Married their high school boyfriends Moved into houses in the same ZIP codes Where their parents live But I, I could never follow No I, I could never follow I hit the highway in a pink RV with stars on the ceiling Lived like a gypsy Six strong hands on the steering wheel I've been a long time gone now Maybe someday, someday I'm gonna settle down But I've always found my way somehow By taking the long way Taking the long way around Taking the long way Taking the long way around I met the queen of whatever Drank with the Irish and smoked with the hippies Moved with the shakers Wouldn't kiss all the asses that they told me to No I, I could never follow No I, I could never follow It's been two long years now Since the top of the world came crashing down And I'm getting' it back on the road now But I'm taking the long way Taking the long way around I'm taking the long way Taking the long way around The long The long way around Well, I fought with a stranger and I met myself I opened my mouth and I heard myself It can get pretty lonely when you show yourself Guess I could have made it easier on myself But I, I could never follow No I, I could never follow Well, I never seem to do it like anybody else Maybe someday, someday I'm gonna settle down If you ever want to find me I can still be found Taking the long way Taking the long way around Taking the long way Taking the long way around KickStart. Even on the big black bike everything smelled hot with pine. I had taken the long, long way. San Felipe del Rio was twenty miles north of Taos and down the one and only dirt road when you got to San Christobal. San Felipe del Rio was a ranch. Not like any ranch you would know. We had cows, horses, a big garden, cougars in the wild, alphalpha, hogs, sheep, eagles, a view for three hundred miles west toward the Jicarilla mountains and the Apache reservation there. North, we could see Colorado and the Sangre de Christos really did appear to be the color of blood whenever the sun set. Valdez and Arroyo Seco were in the valley. We rarely went to Taos. It was too far away. Then summers would end and the kids got shipped out to the Taos Public Schools which they hated with reason and a vengeance. We were not welcome much in Taos. They didn't like us. There is a myth about Taos that it's this liberal haven of diversity and tolerance. It is a lie. Taos is ripe with ethnic tension, infighting over turf, and racism. The people of Taos had two names for San Felipe del Rio. The informed crowd just called it the ranch. It was a big ranch, and if someone in Taos said "the ranch" everyone knew the ranch you were referring to. The misinformed called it the Orphanage Up There. They meant just north of the DH Lawrence property managed by the University of New Mexico. Remote is an understatement. We had kids. In fact, we had one hundred Mescalero Apache children. I was personally responsible for the well-being and safety of twenty-five. The Mescalero Apache are a proud people. Remote is an understatement. In 1863, both the Navajo and the Mescalero Apache people were rounded up and put in a concentration camp called the Bosque Redondo which today is the arroyo and cattle country -- high desert mesa -- of Lincoln County and the Pecos river. A fundamentally nomadic people were told by the whites to make gardens in a place that could not and did not support gardens. Evan as a concentration camp, the Bosque Redondo was a failure. Many Navajo and Mescalero Apache people died of starvation and disease. The word famine would be appropriate. It was a matter of life, death, and genocide. In the middle of the night, the Mescalero Apaches disappeared. All of them. It came as something of a surprise even to the Navajo who never did escape. To this day, the only people who really know how the Mescalero Apaches pulled off the overnight disappearance of an entire tribe are the Mescalero Apache people and they're not talking. To white people anyway. The Apache traveled light. And he was fast. He still is. I had one sixteen-year-old boy -- Joseph -- who could run and run and run and run. That is essentially what he did. When he wasn't tending to his horses. James Thomas Gilroy ran the barn. Joseph worshipped this man. I think Jim still lives in San Christobal and he's been a teacher for many years. The ranch attracted a lot of teacher-types. And a few types such as myself who didn't know what the fuck they were. To this day, I have never met a cowboy who knew as much about horses as Joseph. Being responsible for twenty-five Mescalero Apache children was the most difficult thing I have ever done. Ever. And I have done a lot of things. As a writer, I dislike going here. Because most people can't bring themselves to believe that a place like San Felipe could even exist, and I do not really know where to start. There is a photograph of us on the Internet. We are at the barn which really was the spiritual heart of the place. We are spilling out the window. Spilling out the windows was what we did. Robert del Conte ran this place. He was simply the most extraordinary man I have ever met. Bob Conte scared me half to death. Because he meant everything he said and he always, always put his money where his mouth was. San Felipe Humanitarian Alliance was created. This from their PR materials: For nearly 30 years, Robert Del Conte was the driving force behind San Felipe Humanitarian Alliance. Under his guidance, San Felipe evolved from a small group home for abused and neglected children into a respected humanitarian organization serving people in crisis around the world. No need was too small or too large for Bob. Whether he was helping a mother find a runaway teen or helping a community rebuild their lives in the aftermath of human conflict or natural disaster, he approached everything he did with the same tenacious energy and commitment. All of which happens to be true. You got to the ranch and life just took over and there it was. The first day I arrived, Joseph took me up the mountain on a horse. The two of us totally escaped. You are in the wilds of New Mexico now. Where the wind comes up. I grew close to this Mescalero Apache boy. He took me to his house in Mescalero and I was able to meet his family. It broke my stupid heart. I don't care about the poverty. Poverty only is. These are a PROUD people despite the poverty. The alcoholism was profound. The adults were passed out on the floor when we walked in the door. There were babies crawling around among the beer cans. "They like to drink," Joseph said, and he laughed nervously. He meant his parents. We changed diapers that morning. It was at least something. The alcohol has crushed this boy like a beer can crumbles. I do not know anymore if it is politically correct to write these things. I don't care. They are only things. It's how it was. Joseph came over with his homework a lot. "They want me to cut my hair," he told me. He meant the Taos school district. Apache men have long, beautiful hair. But Joseph would either conform or else. I met with his principal to plead his case but there was only a snide arrogance there. They were Apaches. As the school year went on, the pressure built. Joseph became very quiet and I thought he might explode. Late one Saturday night, the adolescent girls in my house came home. I greeted them at the door. Mainly to tell them that it was late but they had other business to attend to. One of the girls had been attacked and she was badly, badly beaten up. Joseph had attacked her without provocation. He had beaten her to a pulp in the dark on the path to the barn. Frankly, I didn't know what the fuck to do. We patched her up and she wept all night. Joseph was her cousin. I cared about this kid and he worried me deeply. Joseph had been drunk that night. I had him arrested. He was put in jail. It was not a good time at San Felipe del Rio. There was a part of me that felt this boy had to understand there were consequences for violence. This boy was going to take the long, long way around. There was a part of me that felt strongly that unless Joseph began to fathom that outside the context of the Ranch where he was relatively protected, the white world would eventually come down on him like a ton of bricks. He would be released. "Let's go for a ride to the top of the mountain," he said. It was almost like nothing had happened. The top of the mountain was just this safe place we could communicate. We would sit there and watch the horses graze. "Why," I asked. "Why, Joseph." "I don't know why. I wish I did." This boy was facing some abyss he did not in any way understand. Jail did nothing. It was only mean. I was failing this boy. I was failing all of them. "I'm leaving," I told him. "I can't watch you destroy yourself. It just hurts too much." Would I do it again. Have him thrown in jail. No. Just no. What would I do. I have no idea. How do I deal with Joseph and then be responsible for the adolescent girl whose face he had rearranged. I don't know. It's still bigger than I am. "I don't want you to go." There are moments in a narrative that unfolds between two people where you either grab the narrative and you own it or you don't. I didn't know that then. It could have been an opportunity to cut a deal. I stay. But he cleans up his act. But this was real live and not a fantasy and that is not how it unfolded. He did not say goodbye. I went out looking for him and found him on the path up to the top of the mountain. He was on his horse. He was leading a riderless horse. Mine. He looked over his shoulder at me. Joseph could run and run and run and run. If any human being has ever seen right through me with those dark and turbulent eyes it was this boy then. And there. I left. I went to live in Mexico. KickStart. Even on the big black bike everything smelled hot with pine. I had taken the long, long way. -- Tim Barrus As an educational entity, Cinematheque students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation and video and film production.

The truth is not some shining light in the dark. That is a convenient fantasy. What the light creates are shadows. You don't want the truth. It's easy to blame the media. I did. To a certain extent, I still do. The truth is usually nuanced. By cloaking the media as vampires, we get away with a them versus us mentality. According to this fantasy, there are givers and there are takers. We don't tolerate because we are intolerant. We are the vampires. We want blood because pain and consumption and gluttony are our existence. So is sex. The media as the vampire is us. The media paints John Edwards now and always will in the color red. The letter he will wear, whether he recognizes this reality or not, and he does not, is scarlet. We say we want the truth but it's hypocritical, too. What we want is punishment. What we want is retribution. What we demand are the public stockades and the media serves this function. What we want is a pound of flesh. Rousseau does go to truth-telling but he's addressing the idea of cultural idealism, not society; there's a difference. A big one. It is important. Far more important than the crime John Edwards committed. Years after a media-contrived literary scandal, I still get death threats. Nowadays though the death threats get all wrapped up in the violent sexual fantasies of the email writers. They want to destroy you, but they want to touch you, too. They are conflicted. This is rape. These people are as sick as the society they come from. I did not say culture. I said society. Again, literary culture is not a culture. It is the society of revenge. We do not care to explore the difference between society and culture because society is still the tribe. Us. Them. Culture is nuanced. Truth is a more complex animal than we want to consider. We paint it as black and white when, in truth, the thing is grey. Until we cut it open and the thing bleeds red. Exposing the inside of it can usually destroy it and then it does not exist and maybe it never did. After we expose the inside, we bury it. Society will expose it and expose it and expose it until John Edwards becomes the crime itself. When, in truth, he is a human being, and not the crime. We do not ask our politicians to address the truth. We ask them to address the fantasies of symbolisms. We elect saints. Marriage is a symbolism. It embraces the fantasy of monogamy. Truth is another thing and it exists within the context of a society that is, in truth, duplicitous. We are John Edwards. He is us. We must bring him to the stockades for the sins we do not care to explore too deeply. What we fear is the nuance we see that exists in confession. What we want is suffering because that is what we see when we look within ourselves. Even these small paragraphs will elicit screaming. Somewhere. I am writing this from Rome. Where the thieves and the liars and the criminal were put in the arena where public sport was to watch them try to defend themselves. It was entertainment. And then they died. Watch. Even these small paragraphs will elicit screaming. Somewhere. Edwards' sword is applied internally. He will be eviscerated anyway. Blood is blood and we want it. Blood. Death. The political arena. Crime. Punishment. All of this is the stuff of high drama and high literature and that is where culture comes from. Culture is contrived. It is not society. Society is what is imposed upon us. Culture we can reject. Shakespeare was right in his pound of flesh. Sorkin was unequivocally right, too. So was Cicero. "You can't handle the truth." -- Tim Barrus, Rome

I could build vast underground bunkers to keep the vampires out. The people who have arrived to take and take and take. I used to think they didn't choose to give. Back anything. But now I realize they have nothing to give back. They're simply walking vacuums. I could build castles to keep them out. Defend the fortress from the attackers and invaders. I know what it is they want. And they know I know. It never goes public. No, they don't want that. It can't be talked about. Perhaps they will take their secrets with them to the grave. Although they attack as if they know me and some of them claim to know me intimately or at least let us go to motivation -- they claim such fundamental awareness as to what motivates me. Yet they have never met me and they do not know me. Nor, ironically, do they know my work. "Oh, it's so disturbing." Yet they know nothing about it. I suppose the adrenaline surges in a fight. But I am bored with walls. I am bored with castles. I am bored with bunkers. I am bored with their turf wars. And being underground is relative. Sometimes you have to see the sun just to know it's there. So. For now. No walls. No castles. I like being here where I am living on this beach with my crew and cohorts. It does disturb the vampires deeply to know I have either one. I am supposed to be alone, bitter, impoverished, and ultimately punished. But the narrative didn't unfold like that. It rarely does. Let them flail away with their jealousy and their contrived rage. I don't have time for it. They can kiss my ass. I am too busy to even dig the moat. -- Tim Barrus

The drops of rain they fall all over This awkward silence makes me crazy The glow inside burns light upon her I'll try to kiss you if you let me (this can't be the end) So Stalker you love me So stalker you love me So stalker you love me Tidal waves they rip right through me Tears from eyes worn cold and sad Pick me up now, I need you so bad Mister Stalker you are my lover Mister Stalker you are my lover Mister Stalker you are my lover You bring me down down down Down to Cyprus down down Down down down down Down down down down Down down down down Down to Cyprus down down It gets me so Down down down down Down down down down Down down down down Down down down down It gets me so Dead dead dead dead Dead dead dead dead Dead dead dead dead Your vows of silence fall all over The look in your eyes makes me crazy I feel the darkness break upon us I'll take you over if you let me (You did this) Stalker wants to come inside of me Stalker wants to come inside of me Stalker wants to come inside of me Tidal waves they rip right through me Tears from eyes worn cold and sad Pick me up now, I need you so bad. You bring me down down Down down down down Down down down down Down down down down Down down down down It gets me so Down down down down Down down down down Down down Down down down down Down down Down down down down Down down Down Down It gets me so Dead dead dead dead Dead dead dead dead Dead dead dead dead Dead dead Dead Dead Come back, Stalker, I need you Come back , Stalker, I need you Come back, Stalker, I need you Down to Cyprus down down Down down Down down down down Down to Cyprus down down Down to Cyprus down down Down downAs an educational entity, Cinematheque students are allowed access to fair use art materials in the teaching of video and film production.

Put it in the red chair.As an educational entity, Cinematheque students are allowed access to fair use art materials in the teaching of video and film production.

La Nuit de Po sie de Cinematheque/ le Boulevard de Clichy la rue dans l'artillerie lourde/ la recherche et le secours/ les quipes/la douleur/ a poss d dans son virage/ comme vous/ le gar on/ change lentement dessin loin/ le d sir/ port vers quelque theatricality informe/ une blessure qu'il a comme le scandale/ sa main/ agraf lui/ Timoth e Le Tallec cinematheque.films.fr@gmail.com Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Mary Scriver went to college in Evanston, just to the north of Chicago, at Northwestern University, graduating in 1961. Her focus was writing and theatre. On the way back home, she fell in love with the Montana Blackfeet Reservation and stayed until 1973, teaching high-school English. She partnered with Bob Scriver, a major Western sculptor. In 1973 she returned to Portland and took a job as an animal control officer and spent five years going door-to-door about complaints and responding to emergencies. In 1978 she returned to the University of Chicago where she earned both a Master of Arts in Religious Studies and a Master of Divinity. Until 1988 she was a Unitarian Universalist minister. From '89 to '91 she again taught on the Blackfeet Reservation. In the last years before retirement Mary worked for the City of Portland. In 1999 she returned to the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation with enough retirement money to concentrate on writing. Her biography of Bob Scriver, Bronze Inside and Out, was published in 2007 by the University of Calgary Press. She self-publishes at www.lulu.com/prairiemary, mostly materials about Blackfeet for Blackfeet to use. Mary Scriver works in myth and story. Living at the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation, in sight of the Rocky Mountains, she sits in her book-lined but humble house reading and writing. All lives interest her, past and present, but mostly the lives of this place. Sometimes an Internet address counts as place. Scriver's mother always admonished her to "take care of your little brothers." Now she listens to and for them, carefully, from great distances. In another life, Tim Barrus was the more infamous Nasdijj. His literary scandals have included such notorious books as Genocide, which was a nightmare's vision of a world ravaged by AIDS, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping, and Anywhere, Anywhere. Barrus was an editor at DRUMMER magazine and Knights Press. His writing awards under all his names are numerous. But what most people don't know is that he taught deaf children in San Francisco, emotionally disturbed children in Los Angeles, Native American children in New Mexico, Head Start children in Michigan, and blind children in New York. Barrus considers Paris his "home in exile." But with Cinematheque Films, he's always on the road. There are people who think Tim Barrus is a fiction himself, but he's flesh and blood, and his home is where his hat is hung. Most of the following conversation with Barrus took place at Connemara, the Carl Sandburg estate where Barrus was filming Until They Arrive Home Again. There is an argument among the adolescent boys of Cinematheque Films. Most of them are film students. Their disagreement has to do with how to attach the poetry they've been writing to the animation they're producing called Tilting at Windmills. "It's not really an argument," Tim Barrus says. "It's a process. There is a difference. This time it has to do with the conflict between hope and the reality of total destruction. What else should poetry be about?" The US National Endowment for the Arts might claim to know. They moved to shut down one Cinematheque Films production that Barrus (no stickler for etiquette) called Artistic Poets and French Sex Bitches. Their condemnation makes the discussion -- what is art -- germane. Mary Scriver might know. As it happens, she thinks about art quite a lot. Barrus has brought his Parisian film group to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the States where they've been filming "Until They Arrive Home Again," a poem by Carl Sandburg. Barrus and I are sitting on a bench beside Sandburg's lake on the Sandburg estate outside of Flatrock, North Carolina. It's a long way from Barrus' loft on Place Vendome. And sitting down for any length of time (especially for an interview) is not Tim Barrus' style. The adolescent boys--Barrus calls them "My Grunts"--are arguing and setting up tripods and video cameras at the edge of a dam where the lake drains into a mountain creek. The creek is filled with snakes. "How do they come to any sort of artistic consensus?" I ask Barrus. He pauses. "They kick it around. Sometimes they kick a thing to death and that's okay. Certainly, they've been doing that with Carl Sandburg. They're not Americans. They're European so it's a little different. Sandburg doesn't intimidate them like he might a group of American adolescents who grew up with Sandburg in classrooms. I brought them here not to just understand Carl Sandburg but to develop some kind of 'take' on America. Most of them have never been to the States." A writer for Esquire, Andrew Chaikivsky, suggested to Barrus that he do a film on Sandburg versus Genet. As it turned out, Barrus decided to do separate projects on the two authors. The Sandburg film will eventually sit in his Paris darkroom and the Genet project (partly filmed in Larache, Morocco) sits on his desk in a billion bits and pieces. "Like really bad books," Barrus claims, "films are made by editors." "What does Tilting at Windmills have to do with Carl Sandburg?" Like Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus: "Everything and nothing. Actually, I think they've given up on Carl Sandburg and that's okay, too." "Does that mean this film isn't going to get finished?" "No. It only means that they've been touched by something. This time it's Sandburg's struggle with hope and hopelessness. So they take what they've learned and they go work with it. They iron out the issues. They leave Sandburg in his grave for a while and they try out the stuff they're wading through and then they'll come back to Sandburg. It's how it works. I'm not going to tell them they have to stick to my timeline or agenda because this is art, not Hollywood. I am not compelled to follow the rules of either Hollywood or Manhattan publishing. "Sandburg sided with hope and strength and America as a kind of muscle." Hope and strength as the steel of America. A Sandburg theme. Vis- -vis Chicago. Vis- -vis the America Barrus left (he uses the term kicked out) and the more fundamental America Scriver lives in. A place of sweeping landscapes. If there's anything both sweeping and fundamental that connects Barrus to Scriver, it's not landscape; it's that elusive thing we call art. Landscape is just a part of a bigger picture. Pun intended. I asked Scriver, "It seems incongruous that you would know Tim Barrus. How did that happen for you? Barrus scares most people like the boogeyman. A monster I think he sometimes employs to his own ends it keeps people away." "When I read The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping I thought he was really Indian and I recognized as authentic much of what he said," she replied. "When the scandal of him not being an Indian broke, I was interested because there's always so much more story. I know Indian charlatans and some of them are Indians! But writers have always felt entitled to assume different identities and it's never been a capital crime until now. Are the Bronte sisters discredited because they used pseudonyms and pretended to be male? "Once I knew Tim's 'real' name, I Googled and discovered more books, so I read Anywhere, Anywhere, and saw that it was not about porn, it was about loving each other and helping each other. Why should anyone care whether Barrus saw combat in Vietnam before he wrote this book? "As a teacher I knew gay high school boys who tried to help their partners. As an undergrad theatre student I knew lots of gays, some of whom became famous like Marshall W. Mason, the theatre director. As a Unitarian minister, I knew other Unitarian ministers who were quietly gay and who died of AIDS. In Portland I knew Rodger Larson, who wrote What I Know Now, a gentle and tender book about a boy realizing he is gay. I kid Rodger and his partner Andy as being 'teddy bear gays,' with tummies and beards. But I don't like labels. I like to know the stories of people, not labels. I am not gay. There are many kinds and ways of being gay. And the same goes for not-gay." "You have had the opportunity to know both Anglo and Blackfeet artists. It's obvious that Anglo artists have more opportunity to expose their art to the art world, or at least, that part of the art world that is economically inclined to attach sometimes-enormous value to a work of art. RC Gorman would have been one example of a Native American artist who broke this barrier. Is this a racial discrimination issue or is it simply hard to get noticed?" Scriver is always thoughtful and she never judges her interviewer. "As for Anglo artists having more opportunity than Indian artists, I would argue the opposite. Being a romantic 'Indian' is an advantage in the arts." "Working in bronze seems amazingly difficult. Not too many people are doing it or can do it well." Scriver is patient with my obvious ignorance. "You are perfectly situated in Paris to find out about the Beaux Arts School and the Great Shift from marble sculpture to bronze sculpture, which made work like Rodin's possible. Also, the work that is related and key to Bob's bronzes is that done by the Animaliers, a set of sculptors who specialized in portraits of animals, usually pretty ferocious! But also domestic animals. Rosa Bonheur and Barye are two favorites of ourselves. This shift to bronze is related to war, the expertise gained in the making of weapons, especially cannons. There is a strange symbiosis between cannons and monumental bronzes: one is forever being melted down to make the other." "Personally, I find the big spaces of the American West to be intimidating. Why is so much of this particular sculpture focused on images of the American West?" "It's mostly timing. The expertise and American foundries arrived with the opening of the frontier and the need to celebrate the Civil War heroes. More recently there has developed a new kind of casting that is much easier and cheaper. We used the old-fashioned 'Roman block' method, but this modern ceramic shell casting -- which gets slightly less admirable results is everywhere now. Small foundries in unexpected places." Scriver speaks of small foundries and Barrus often speaks of small publishers. A connection? Barrus thinks so. "The techno-revolution has the art world shrinking (or shrieking). Some people would say expanding but I would say it's shrinking. It's becoming more ubiquitous. Like publishing, it's so about mannerisms. There's more edge in pornography than in the world of art. In fact, it was the landscape of porn that imbued the Internet with technology that worked." I would call much of the art on the Internet public art. "Public art is becoming more and more abstract," I say to Scriver. "Contemporary public art is almost entirely an abstraction. Why do you think that this form of art attracts more controversy than traditional public art that is more realistic than surreal? The Cinematheque video that the NEA had such a fit about was public art. It just wasn't public art that necessarily portrayed America as a great and shining city on a hill." "I think it's turning back the other way. The great abstract contemporary movement of the first half of the 20th century is now retreating, though you wouldn't know it from the mainstream magazines. Art of the West or Southwest Art and a few others document a plethora of realistic bronze monuments across the US. We seem now to be reconciling the abstract with the realistic, maybe because of the amazing technologies of image which are often so trompe l'oeil, forcing us to reflect on what is real and what is an illusion or what we want to see." Which brings me to questions about gender and stereotypes. "Cowboy art seems very male. Gorman broke with that tradition." "It's true that his motif and trademark was the Navajo woman with her chin in the air," says Scriver. "It's so distinctive that there have been New Yorker cartoons about it! But his secret was excellent contacts who were interested in promoting him. Don't mistake me: he did fine and unique work, but that's not the same as marketing." "Could an artist with this kind of background who defies tribal tradition ever return to the reservation? Isn't the loss of his presence a loss for the tribe?" "Tribes are not romantic. They are cut-throat competitive, both between each other and within. Their reaction to Gorman probably depends on whether they see him as competing with them or being a possible sponsor. I never heard of him sending money back to his tribe. Navajo politics are as vicious as any and he may have felt he was well-off to have escaped." Barrus knew Gorman when they both lived in Taos, New Mexico. "He got a lot of those contacts in San Francisco. Mary is talking about when he was the most famous nude model around. He was Navajo and he was usually nude when posing so both were pretty authentic. Those were the early years." Barrus is going to see that as more the marketing of a mythology than anything authentic. He maintains that marketing is the American obsession and violence is the real American life. He's an expert on the identity of the authentic. Or not. Barrus maintains that scandal only is. Barrus lives in exile and Paris is that. For him. This particular American life has been lived in the trenches -- not the suburbs as Barrus' critics contend. Barrus wouldn't know a suburb if you pushed him out of a moving plane into one and there are a lot of people in publishing who would volunteer to do exactly that. His American life is about exile and the edge. So are his complex books, which Barrus claims are about survival. "I can't say or predict that My Grunts will side with Sandburg. America as a kind of muscle might sound visionary to an American. I doubt that it sounds too visionary to them. America the workhorse and the train and Abraham Lincoln and pride or a singular nobility through work may be American themes that American culture wants to reflect upon itself, but I'm not too sure that is how the rest of the world reflects upon America. Actually, if I'm going to teach them about America, I would, indeed, bring them here." I ask the questions. Barrus gives the answers. Or sometimes it's the other way around. This is typical Barrus territory. Getting him to organize his thoughts can be like pulling teeth. He's thinking ten steps ahead of the here and now. "How do you think they see America, the American story?" "I note the use of two words that keep popping up in their discussions. One is brutal. And the other is ruthless. I can't say Sandburg would have necessarily disagreed." It can be difficult to talk Barrus down from the suicidal relationship he has with both film and books. Right now, he's staring silently out across the shimmering lake that is always so fogged in the morning. He says fog can help film although no Hollywood director would agree with that assessment. But Barrus is not your typical anything. This American life, indeed. I spoke with Scriver about the Santa Fe art scene, which I was recently able to take a brief look at. I noted that that on one level, Indian art is pervasive, but the people with the galleries are not Indians. "Yeah, well, if you'd gotten into the 'cowboy' art scene, you'd have found that the dealers weren't cowboys. Artists are products. Galleries are businesses," Scriver says. "Isn't there a cultural disconnect between Indians selling art on the sidewalk on blankets and white gallery owners making big percentages?" "Don't underestimate the Indian in a blanket. He may be making as much money as a gallery. At home he may not wear a blanket at all. The 'image' of the poor primitive Indian sells art." "Is there the same kind of disconnect in Montana?" "The disconnect here is more a matter of East and West. The big money and the fancy galleries are owned by Easterners. Both cowboys and Indians are product. There's a weird and possibly sick little dynamic here where a wealthy professional -- often a doctor or lawyer -- adopts an artist and controls him (rarely her). Alcoholism often is part of the dynamic. The professional 'helps' the artist by acquiring the art for low prices or even nothing, then storing it until the artist dies (young) and the value assumedly goes up." "Do any Blackfeet artists go to Europe?" "Blackfeet who get to Europe go a little crazy! You'll want to read Jim Welch's book called The Heartsong of Charging Elk, which is based on a true story of an Indian man in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show who became ill and was left behind in Marseilles. He goes 'native,' that is, becomes a Frenchman! There are almost always some Blackfeet over at the French Disneyland doing fancy dancing. You ought to go look for them! One older Blackfeet woman who likes to emphasize her tribal affiliation told me, 'Once you make it to France, you'll never have to pay for your own meal or hotel again! The French just love us!'" "In Europe art schools are everywhere. Are there art schools on reservations?" "Just the regular public schools, but the reservations have tribal colleges that might have big art departments. The thing is, a school imposes standards, and one of the hallmarks of 'real' Indian art is improvisation in materials and unique vision. You can't go to school for this. It comes from confidence and the ability to really see." "Many white Europeans see Indian art as more craft that real art. How do they go wrong in assuming this? Why do they assume this?" "Those nutty Germans try to become Indians, because it was a big part of a national philosophical back-to-nature movement. They admire 19th century objects, which are art because the Indians decorated everything in their lives, but they were defined as crafts, sort of collectibles, thought to be primitive. Everyone always thinks that their OWN art is 'higher' and 'realer' than that of someone else. Anyway, the modern Indian art movement has assimilated the abstract art of the twentieth century and -- at least in the Western US -- has absorbed many Asian contexts and givens, which is quite un-Euro." Where Scriver's America seems a sweeping place, Barrus' America is littered with Lincoln, Sandburg, and disconnect. I am sitting with him in rural North Carolina, hearing words like "brutal" and "ruthless." The setting is idyllic. The Sandburg home sits up on the hill not far away, comfortable and elegant. "How do you get brutal and ruthless from a place like this? This is seriously nature." "You note the disconnect. Between a place like this and what's just outside a place like this." "You mean North Carolina." "North Carolina and all of its military and racist glory. Sandburg did go to the conflicted Lincoln. Sandburg did go to the depression and the agony. But America sees what it wants to see and what it sees is someone not too controversial whose work they can bring into American classrooms to bore the fuck out of everyone." Tim Barrus and controversy. The man courts it. He went into exile completely on his own volition, even if he does bitterly claim to have been pushed there. Paris doesn't really care one way or the other -- exile is ordinary -- even if they cared a lot in North Carolina. And they did. The death threats Barrus gets on a daily basis are breathtaking. His assistant, Kilian Sullivan, says the threats can be a real drain. "Tim ignores them but they come with a certain sadness attached," Sullivan says. Barrus does not call them breathtaking (he's wrong). He calls them American. He is distinctly not comfortable here. And when the subject of boys and Tim Barrus comes up, American culture goes, as he puts it, totally ape shit over nothing. In June, Scriver reviewed Barrus' The Boy the Dog are Sleeping in her blog, Prairie Mary: This week I decided that I would reread The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping, just to see -- now that more than a year has passed -- if it were as good as I remembered. It was. Three of Tim Barrus' books, out of an unknown dozen or more -- some of which sell for hundreds of dollars now -- were published under the nom de plume of "Nasdijj:" The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Geronimo's Bones, and The Boy and His Dog are Sleeping. The first two, in my opinion, are rehearsals clearing the way for the third. A man is asked to take a boy, not to raise, but to care for until the boy dies because the boy has AIDS. He will never grow up. Why take the boy? Because once the man was the boy. He'd been a suffering child and this was a way of getting his revenge: doing what the adults in his life should have done. Why tell us about it? Because we need educating. The power of this story comes from a combination of rage and compassion. In the midst of it, the author must protect the identities of his parents and the many boys he has known while teaching and house-parenting in the southwest. (But now his parents have died. The boys must be nearly adults.) So the story is simple. The man does his best for the boy, trying to pay the bills by writing. The man's wife and daughter are not with him but they are in support. Just as the man is exhausted and Awee is about to die, Crow Dog, a boy who did grow up, comes with the dog, Navajo. All this is not a great sacrifice, but rather a great love affair. Maybe it is time-limited but it is far from unrequited. And it really happened. A small cluster of characteristics, esp. in men appears to make them more attractive. I would suggest that this triad is also characteristic of artistic success. Some call it "Demon Lover" or "Heathcliffe Syndrome." Also it is called the "Dark Triad," because it consists of three possibly genetic characteristics: narcissism, possessiveness, and scheming. These are at the heart of abusive relationships when they are dark, because they carry an emotionally magnetic intensity that intrigues others. But I would suggest that they can also be something good, depending upon intelligence and empathy. For instance, narcissism is "all about me," but when informed by empathy ("I feel your pain") it can be powerfully connective. Possessiveness ("I own you") can also lead to protectiveness ("I will allow no one to hurt you") and scheming, the ability to form strategy in pursuit of a goal, is value-free. It's the realistic purpose, to what end, that gives it morality. I propose that Tim Barrus has inherited this triangle from his father, just as he inherited his father's strong body and mind, but that his mother's heart kept the triangle full of light. Barrus' empathy for Awee is due to his own childhood abuse and then the (self-inflicted in adolescence) shotgun wound to his abdomen. It is a kind of reliving. His possessiveness gives him the will to enforce the necessary AIDS regimen on Awee in spite of the boy's objections and complaints, and it is his defiant plotting in the face of medical authority that keeps the meds coming, even when they aren't medically prescribed, as well as charting their usefulness. I see these as the underlying forces of what happens in this short, powerful book. But there are matters of style, description, dialogue and so on to consider, because this is writing, which is an art form. This book is true, but the memories are "displaced" and sometimes disguised to protect people, which is different from an "unreliable narrator" -- a story told by someone we feel sure is lying for their own ends. To me it seems clear that the events of the story happened and that they are as accurately described as they can be in a memoir, but that sometimes Barrus is Awee and sometimes he is himself. The emotional "facts" are true, authentic and real, but facts like the name of White People Town, the hotel, or the hospital are just left out. A few key people, dear to Barrus, have their real names: Tina, Kree, Navajo. If he had known that a stalker full of hatred for Barrus would threaten and harass them, he would have given them disguises the same as he did his mother and father. (If you write about real people, Richard Stern advised us, use reversals: switch genders, make the brunettes into blondes, give them new occupations.) Awee is not nonexistent, invented. Barrus did teach troubled boys with considerable success because his occasionally rough life-style gave him strong street creds. The motorcycle didn't hurt either. He and Tina have fostered and mentored children all along, but to name individuals would be to expose them to hyena media with their own dark triads. Barrus' earliest attempt at redemption, fighting his son s autism and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome rather than AIDS, did not end in death but in despair when he couldn't save the boy and had to put him back into an institution. He was gutshot all over again. (Don t make stupid distinctions between genetic and adopted children.) Much of this book is dyadic conversation: Awee asks, Barrus tells. Such an unequal relationship is risky, but in spite of the boy s neediness the story gives Awee great poise, considerable skill as a softball player, and even a little romantic episode of his own. In my experience with Blackfeet boys, this is not unrealistic nor unhealthy. It is also most common in our culture between a man and a woman who are in love, which is what gives it a sexual overtone even if there is no physical contact. We convert everything into sex, but the eroticism here is motherly: nibbling toes, smelling necks, brushing back hair, and constant cleaning -- like a baby. More than anything else, Barrus enfolds and gently rocks Awee as boy becomes infant again. This is both the beauty of the story and (perhaps) the source of some of the virulent jealousy it seems to trigger in some. To repeat, my theory would be that Barrus' mother, a master gardener and a nurturer (this is in her obituary), was not able to break free from the dark triangle in her husband, partly because of her need to help him and partly because of a need for his shelter, but she was able to transmit enough of her good qualities to keep her son from being an abuser. (Freud called it "repetition compulsion." One can't escape, but one can transform.) Other forces helped: members of the art department at the university where Barrus hung out (people who did not color inside the lines), the hospital where Barrus' life was saved, and then the unfolding Age of Aquarius in San Francisco and Key West. Somehow he was a full participant in the throwing-off of social shackles while as a single parent raising the daughter from his first marriage in a way that produced a healthy, intelligent, contributing mother and teacher. Two "tribes" or groups in America have survived through forming underground communities: Indians and gays. They are skilled at evading authority figures and some are generous among themselves with resources and knowledge. Some have a lot of money. Some of them will attack full-force to maintain the secrecy. How do I know this? Oh, walking into rooms unexpectedly, having friends in those groups, teaching on the rez. They can be unreasonably jealous. I don't know specifics. I don't ask. Why did critics attack Barrus viciously? Why did they insist on ferreting out contradictory facts? Why didn't they go after The Education of Little Tree, the much earlier memoir-style fictional novel written under the pseudonym Carter by Earl Carter, a one-time KKK member? (The book was bought by the of New Mexico Press and has sold millions of copies, a huge windfall for an academic press. It also became a movie.) Or why not attack Lancaster, the author of Piegan? Not a nice man. Both of these writers endorsed the cultural illusion of the noble savage. Barrus harshly criticized the way the United States has treated Native Americans. Why didn't reporters go to the Navajo reservation and make a pitch for their needs? Barely mentioned in the book is that Barrus himself was suffering from avascular necrosis. While Awee was dying, Barrus' bones crazed and shattered. The three Nasdijj books were written to pay for hip transplants to get him out of a wheelchair. (Memoir sells better than autobiography.) His publishers were fully aware of what he was writing and who he was -- they didn't write checks to Nasdijj and they didn't buy plane tickets for Nasdijj. But as soon as the media made accusations, they disclaimed all consent or encouragement. They abandoned their author as Barrus did not abandon Awee. Barrus reacted with outrage that scared people. At the inevitable end of the book -- Awee's death -- Barrus escapes emotionally into a kind of nature mysticism. The last paragraphs are shattered triangles: the control is lost, the strategy fails, the words fall into near schizophrenic "word salad" of cryptic image and rhyme. He says, "the universe does not hear me" (the death of narcissism) and "death just cums" (the final eroticism). This is more than emotional -- it is religious in the broadest sense but not in the sentimental Hallmark tradition. Barrus was Nasdijj for ten years. In the end, shunned for impropriety, he escaped to the future: video/vlogs. Still wrestling with crumbling bones but determined to avoid painkillers other than the traditional stuff like alcohol, he has gone international with a pack of videographers about the same age as army recruits. They help him put his shirt on in the morning. They "mother" him as he "fathers" them. You can catch Tim and his crew on YouTube or Blip.TV. Look for Cinematheque Art. They win prizes in Europe. The whole issue of Barrus and boys seems distinctly American. The articulated notion of Barrus having sex with the boys he teaches film to causes the boys themselves to laugh so hard, they're rolling on the ground. Jules Rousseau is sixteen and French. "It's hateful," Rousseau claims. "They think intimacy has to be sex. Sometimes it's just intimacy. America seems to have a real problem with it. I think people are jealous of Tim. He's our teacher and it's called a relationship." "The poetry video they're putting together (between the Sandburg shoots) has to do with tilting at windmills," I noted. "You used the metaphor of the Windmill in your My Derelict Hotel Poems as Timoth e Le Tallec. Everyone knows Le Tallec is Barrus. You were Le Tallec for as long as you were Nasdijj. Adopting a foreign culture. Going native. But coming to it from the context of someone who is so far underground it's hard to find him just like it was always hard to pin Nasdijj down -- the guy didn't even have a last name which if you ask me was always a red flag -- at least I thought that whoever was using this name was trying to tell us something like the name can't be real. Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times calls Barrus your "realer-sounding name." Although the author tours helped to end that mystique. I assume that was corporate publishing. Isn't there something about tilting at windmills with all the names." Timoth e Le Tallec gets real serious here. "I tried but I couldn't avoid the tours. They get deadly serious about how much money they've invested in you. Lawsuit is always thrown around as a reference point. I hated the tours. I had to do them with broken hips, crutches, wheelchairs, and an assistance dog. Navajo would sit under tables on stages. People always liked her more than me. I got a blood clot on a flight during one trip, and ended up hospitalized at UNC Hospital where I was fighting for my life, and medical staff was definitely confronting me on who I really was. I don't know who 'everybody' is. I don't believe in the idea of an 'everybody.' My literary critics would have you believe that is what they are, literary critics, but I know who they are. I know what they are. Some of them were gay men who were and are outraged that I turned out to be someone who isn't actually one of them. The anger there is pretty horrific. I've left the Le Tallec stuff. It was attracting too much attention with where will he turn up next. My Derelict Hotel wasn't even finished, and I had to leave it because of the attacks. The Morocco material, in terms of what these people scream about, once again turns out to be stuff Americans who hate sex, and assume everyone but them is having it, go after. It was harder to find you, to get to you, to shut you down, before the Internet. Now, if American culture doesn't like you, and you're coming to the Internet as a different culture with different values, the Americans can shut you down. They own it. They don't seem to understand that a metaphor can be poetic, too. I don't know why the reactions are so intense or mean there, but I don't think they teach much poetry in America. The NEA claims it has a vast reach into classrooms, but it's laughable. No Child Left Behind and testing has a vast reach into classrooms. The NEA's reach isn't even symbolic. The NEA, who I tangled with -- or the people there -- went behind my back to web-servers, and considering the fact that in this post 911 world, web-servers view governments with dread, and governments are now imbued with a certain anti-terrorism gravitas, it's easier to take down the offending poetry than it is to engage the poet in a face-to-face confrontation. This is government censorship by intimidation. This is the new censorship. You don't know it's happening. Your work just disappears. Writing sex is so much more threatening as an idea than portraying it literally everywhere on the Internet. They can get away with putting it into the same context they put terrorism only this would be a cultural terrorism. Real sex or straightforward porn doesn't have a whole lot of new ideas. But poetry does. There are things I have to assume here. And one is the old idea that a poet has to leave the States for whatever reason, and can flourish more creatively in a place like Tangier, and it is not an accident that Tangier is a Muslim environment. You would leave the freedom of American democracy for a Muslim country to create art, and art they think has to do with sex. So, yes, I would assume a pseudonym here. Why. Because vindictiveness is powerful. It doesn't just rest or stop with the NEA. People read Genocide and think I'm paranoid, but I am more than convinced -- I know -- that the same people who pretend they're actually literary critics have two voices. One is the voice that follows me around on the Internet like a rabid little dog at my heels, and this includes the academics at the NEA who use the power there to maintain a certain academic status quo. The other voice is a harassment they don't want you to know about. It could be and has been harassing a web-server. It can be and has been personally harassing my kid on the phone. It can be and has been an attack on my computers, and I can document that, too, but to who. My computers were supposed to be overloaded with so much viral incoming that they'd simply shut down. That was the goal. So what I do is simply forward everything all around the world with a variety of servers and -- not to obfuscate as I use my name -- but to protect my software with so many filters at every checkpoint, and then on to the next checkpoint, that to date anyway has blocked most of the incoming. I still typically get a hundred thousand hits of junk mail that I never see. When this doesn't shut me down, they go for the jugular. Apparently, according to prevailing logic, I am supposed to take the we are going to kill you and your pets and your family stuff as an annoyance, but when it's so consistent, and has lasted not days or weeks or months, but years, it's not periodic; it's something you can't say how you'd deal with it until it happens to you. One way I've dealt with it has been to change my identity. So then the outrage becomes he's committing identity theft. Identity theft is taking an established identity, not establishing a new one. Sometimes you feel so underground you feel buried. If they can't shut you down they will simply bury you. It seems to be the American way. Most of my work is buried. I go underground. I don't know how you can continue to look forward and create new work at the same time you're always defending your existence from people who are literally -- no metaphor -- going after your life from three steps back in the past. You call it tilting at windmills. I call it survival. I'm embattled. The people in my life are embattled." "There's a lot of tilting the camera's focus both personally and at Cinematheque," I say. Barrus smiles. "Actually, from what I've seen of the animation, no one is tilting at the windmill. What I've seen is that the windmill is totally destroyed by helicopter gunships that appear to be very, very American. It's adolescent. But so are they. War and violence has had a dramatic impact on what they see as artists. What they're really struggling with is this thing they have to share as filmmakers, and even more than that, as poets and storytellers, and that is the conflict between hope and hopelessness. That does speak to American culture. I'm not really sure we're here to get Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was more embattled than I first understood when I came to where he lived. The evidence for that is Mrs. Sandburg. Everything about Connemara can sustain itself if cut off from the world. This was the 1950's and all the anti-communism hysteria. If what the Cinematheque crew comes away with today is just their little animation about how windmills are destroyed by the destroyers, or the helicopter gunships, or an anonymous military they have constructed with their drawing and art, that's okay with me. Sandburg will have provoked them. What really touches me personally like a fist shoved up my ass is that they're adolescent boys writing poetry. When I first said Carl Sandburg, they rolled their eyes. Oh, there goes another old geezer who wants us to do the work of old geezers when what we want to do is animation. There he is imposing the past on us when what we want to do is address the future. But I know something they don't know yet. There is no future without a past. One does not exist without the other. Maybe we'll fail at this Sandburg film. I can afford not to care. They're adolescent boys -- with everything that means about culture and chaos -- and they're writing poetry. They're putting that poetry to video. You tell me where the failure is in that." As for the idea of failure, both Barrus and Scriver might go rather immediately to the notion of traditional publishing. "How easy is it or how hard is it to write and get a book published today that deals with American art in the American West," I ask Scriver. "Depends on the book. Mine, which is very atypical, has been hard to get published. People expect big picture books which they buy if they can't afford the actual art or to show off how important their art is. Publishing is not about art: publishing is about marketing." "Is there a difference between how open mainstream publishing is versus the way in which smaller presses are in terms of their willingness to publish for the audience who would read such a book?" "I don't think there is such a thing as 'mainstream publishing' anymore. it's all broken into specific audiences, including the one that thinks it's mainstream, i.e. "best sellers." Is 'chick lit' mainstream? That's what's selling!" "Who are your readers and do you hear from them?" "I'm only hearing from a few people. I have many more readers of my blogs. Often the people who respond to the book have a personal connection with Bob. This book of mine is meant to remain useful for many years because it contains so much art history and I don't think there will be a lot of response until word-of-mouth has gone on for a long time." Strange. No mention of death threats. "The art world is always in flux," Barrus tells me. "Even if that flux is bogged down with convention. We've got one guy -- Nino Fabriano who is fourteen -- from Florence, doing adolescent anime, when Nino's training is as an artist, and the kid is talented, has been pointedly traditional." "Isn't that a failing as a teacher?" Barrus shrugs. "The kid came to me to get away from the suffocation of the past. I think all of them right now are feeling some of that by being here. The idyllic setting is sheer bullshit. I find it quite amusing that the rushes I've seen of their windmill being bombed by a military gone berserk are created in part by Dutch boys. One of whom's brother is in Iraq. I like the fact that the past is so oppressive to them. Maybe it's because the past is oppressive. Go figure. They're the future. The tragedy would be for them to come away from this experience with the attitude that poetry itself is a dead thing. It's not. And they're not fighting me on it anymore or they would have slapped some rock and roll on their video and they didn't do that. The music video is the past as well. They're reinventing something. I'm not sure what it is. But I am sure I would never in a million years tell them they can't make what they're making because it doesn't keep its coloring between the lines. The people in poetry will tell you that video poetry is a poet reading his work to a camera. They would laugh at that. They want poetry to explode and maybe engage in a car chase, or in what I've seen of what they're doing, become a spaceship sort of like a flying island. Their imaginations run wild and that is what I want. It's not about Tim Barrus. It's not about some stupid typically American controversy. It's not about the Grand Poobahs who keep poetry in its cultural place, those people would be appalled by boys making poetry; it's about wherever they want to take it, and the wonder is that they're bothering to take it anywhere. Maybe their vision has no hope for anyone. Maybe when they're done, the world they have created in animation will be totally destroyed. Not unlike Europe was, not a Europe they know. But I find something hopeful that the Carl Sandburg film has sort of become dull as bones in the face of what they want to make on their time. As a teacher, I want to rock and roll with that. Their struggle between what is hopeless and what is hope IS Carl Sandburg. They're up all night putting their own subversive film together. They want me to read the poetry and I might. I might have to set Sandburg aside to do that." "After everything you've done to get them here." "Wherever they're going, they're getting there on their own. Make no mistake about it. Tim Barrus is here for the ride. They're teaching me far more than I could teach them anything. All I can do is provide opportunity. They don't even need my support. They're going to do it anyway. Every morning when they pull me to show me what they've done -- I have arrived home again." The idea of home is everywhere in the work of both these writers. I ask Scriver: "Do Indians live in the town you live in or do they mainly live on a reservation?" "Of the Blackfeet, 8,000 live on the rez and 8,000 live off. Valier is off the rez, but only barely. My neighbor to the east is Indian. Eagle Speakers live a block to the north. There are other Indians in town. The town is very wary of them, but if they keep their yards nicely and pay their bills, everyone forgets they're Indian." "Are Indians in America required to live on a reservation?" "Not at all. The government would like to close down the reservations. American Indians never had to stay on reservations except in the early years when the whites wanted their land. In Canada they tried to keep the Indians "at home," but they also prevented white people from going onto the reservations. The result is that they have kept more of their culture." "Are there stores on reservations?" "In the US you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between any small town and the reservation. Tim was on a much larger rez where things were poorer. Around here sometimes the rez has better stores and amenities (like a laundromat) than the white towns, which are shrinking and falling apart. The image of Indians and reservations is a constructed one, in large part coming from 19th century art." "In Europe it is illegal to sell tribal art as a tribal artist if you are not really from the tribe you say you are from. People who do that can go to prison. Are there rules like that in America?" "Yes there are, and there are many games played with this. Tribes have the right to define their own members. It's much too hot an issue for anyone else but the tribe itself to mess with. So when Ward Churchill wanted to make money by selling "Indian art", the tribe that liked him made him an honorary member. He looks Indian but genetically he is not. So is he, or isn't he? Some people hate the ambiguity. They want some kind of scientific certainty when even scientists know there is very little of that in the human world." Soon, the film interns at Cinematheque will be editing whatever gets filmed back in their Paris studio. Barrus will resume work on his film on Genet and Scriver will remain in her beloved West. The windmills are all still there. There might not at least superficially seem to be any connection, but when you get underneath the skin I do see more than a few. I met Mary Scriver here at Cinematheque Films in Paris, via the Internet. We have one intern, Kilian Sullivan, who does nothing outside the context of his art but answer email. We can be scattered all over the planet and Kilian is Cinematheque central. He had been corresponding with Mary Scriver for a while. I saw her book, Bronze Inside and Out, on Kilian's desk, and he loaned it to me. I had to get in on this and started corresponding with her myself. Ironically, when I first met Timothy Patrick Barrus, it was in a way not entirely unlike the way I met Mary. I was involved with a repeat trick at the small hotel where I was living in a tiny room. My room was crowded with cameras and computers because I love cameras and computers and because I was an Internet whore. My bed was an Internet chat room. I was a little famous. I know a tiny bit about that underground world Scriver and Barrus speak about. What the Internet did was take me off corners of Boulevard de Clichy. I used to have this wild fantasy about how glamourous it would be to be chased by paparazzi but meeting Barrus dashed that one high and dry on rocks like a shipwreck. I had this thing, maybe it was a fetish, for older tricks. For one thing, they could afford me. But I'm real clear about the attraction. My dad abandoned us and at least for me everything begins and ends there. There are a ton of guys out there like me. I am not alone, though I felt very alone. I had a booming business and I am painfully aware of the dangers of becoming too close and too involved with tricks. This trick's name was Paul and he was everything I could have wanted. He had a wife and children. My fantasy was that he would adopt me and I could live as a member of this family. But it was a fantasy. I was used to tricks falling in love with me. It could be annoying. But I was not so used to falling in love with tricks. I think I scared the hell out of Paul. "There are alternatives to this life you lead, you know," he said. But I did not know and if I had I would not have believed any of that would mean me. Paul was in real estate and handles leasing a lot of property in Paris. "Tim Barrus is in town," he told me. Paul had leased him a loft. If Tim is notorious in the straight world, he's way more notorious in the gay world. The irony is that he does not live in either one. His books are literally collector's items. Not all of it is porn but the porn is infamous. My Brother, My Lover is a book no one gives away. If you can find a decent copy, you keep it. Forget about a signed one. He won't sign books anymore. The most famous Barrus book is Mineshaft. It describes a pre-HIV world I never knew. My world has always lived in the shadows of the disease. Then came Genocide and Tim was the first to connect government policy to the AIDS horror. I did not know Tim Barrus but I certainly knew of him. I started buying his books on my first trip to Amsterdam. You couldn't buy them in Ireland then. I never thought we would meet. Paul connected us through Skype. Tim is very careful about outsiders knowing his exact whereabouts because the death threats against him are so intense. His film crew was shooting La putain folle dans le Pigalle in Place Pigalle and he said we should meet. I tracked him down the next day. He doesn't just take anyone into Cinematheque's inner circle. He has to know you and he takes his time. He doesn't take on vampires and there are a lot of people out there who take and never give. La putain folle dans le Pigalle would become -- like the typical Barrus book -- tinged with controversy and when that happens, and it happens a lot, Tim simply walks away. Most people only know him through the work. So they make this connection to sex that is more mythology than reality. It took me another year to actually make the move to the Cinematheque loft where I live with the rest of the film crew -- people who are not all that much unlike me. "Life is way too short," he says. "I'd read Mary Scriver's Prairie Mary blog before. Mainly because I wanted to steal the name. It's a great name -- Prairie Mary. It conjures up a vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder's great mad aunt emerging from a sod house early in the morning with her apron and her hands bloody from just having butchered a buffalo. It is so American. She's the only American writer I didn't scare. I had gone out of my way to scare everyone at a perfectly ridiculous art blog called Flyover. If the name is a problem, chances are good that so is the content. The name implies that you might want to fly over, but the content advertises art in this part of America more breathlessly than the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Prairie Mary was there. She was sort of standing back in the shadows listening. But I saw her eyes sort of roll upward a couple of times at some of the inane stuff at Flyover so I thought -- this woman sounds smart and interesting and she's better than this blog. So I wrote to her. I found out that one of the things we shared was a history of teaching. Teachers are so not valued in Western culture. They make no money yet we need them badly. Again, I had this vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder's great aunt in a one-room school with a Franklin stove and a woodpile in the back. Which is about as silly as Tim Barrus having orgies with boys. Once you get beyond the mythology the name conjures up, you find a rich life far more interesting than the mythology. And you know, that's exactly the sort of person I want my students to be able to communicate with. Someone who is more real and bigger than the myth they arrive with. You guys at Cinematheque find everything American intriguing. You've seen a little of it but you don't know America yet. Prairie Mary's take on art has a lot to do with work and sweat if you read the Scriver book. Personally, what I think it does is something no book is ever allowed to do, and I don't know that Mary would agree with this, but I did put it into the video we made, and that was about a stripping away of myth to reveal a reality that contained a love story richer than any myth could make. That's very difficult to do in publishing because it's not marketing and it would scare most publishers into running. Anyone who can do that has my vote for President." Mary calls the way in which this interview took place an "organic" process. I am pounding my head against the wall with this interview stuff. It seems so effortless for two writers like Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus to describe themselves. But for me to describe myself is a can of Irish snakes. And not the fictional St. Patrick kind but the real kind like the ones at the bottom of this Connemara dam. When asked if he could make a feature film what that film would be about Barrus goes immediately to Mary Scriver's life. "Both the lives and the art jump out at you from Bronze Inside and Out. Cate Blanchett would be Mary. Tommy Lee Jones would be Bob. Ronnie Howard would direct." Mary and Tim are the real writers. What I am is a whore who is trying to reinvent himself. I have always wanted to be a writer but being a whore is easier. A fictional whore would have more talent than I do. This is work. Let me be frank. I am a junkie and a whore. I am a junkie who isn't doing drugs and a "sex worker" who isn't turning tricks. Not anymore. I left Ireland at the age of thirteen. I ended up in London turning mostly Brit tricks. A French trick brought me to Paris and his promises of a life together turned out to be just that: empty promises. So for the past five years I've been working Place Pigalle which is the red light district of Paris. I was hardly the only kid doing this in the Pigalle. In the Pigalle, the Internet is used like a pimp. The Internet allowed me to become a web-camera whore (I was a "model"). By the time I found the program Tim Barrus was creating CinemathequeArt, a place for at-risk boys -- I was so strung out I was almost dead meat. But that's another story. There are a lot of programs that will get you off the street. But finding one that can do that and replace that life with one that has a focus, not on culture, not on just some low-rent job, but on you, is easier said than done. I have a long way to go and a lot to learn. But I have left Place Pigalle and I don't miss it anymore than I miss Ireland. Place Pigalle is not a place of pretend. It has a hard edge. It is a hard place and you would find addiction there as easily as the sex work. You would find a lot of art, too. As a sex worker, I learned how to worm my way into people's lives. I have wormed my way into Tim's and Mary's lives and I am getting a real taste for how difficult the writing life really is. But I am doing what I always wanted to do and I am doing it every day. I would not call myself a writer yet. But I have high hopes I am on my way.

The kid in the film was stoned to the gills again. It is disturbing to watch. It's so easy to get pulled into the tangle between the boy in front of the camera and the man behind it. When Tim Barrus claims he has no idea what the New York Times is talking about when it calls his work "disturbing" I do not believe a word of it. There is a publication that has asked me to get an interview with Tim. He will not do it. I am SO pissed off. He gave one to Eavan, why not me. "Because you're not ready to handle the fallout," he said. "You want the thrill of seeing your name in print. But there is always harder stuff where that came from. Stuff they will throw at you." Yeah, but what about the stuff he throws at me. Like this assignment I got today. "If I can do it, will you give me the interview." "We'll see," he says. "We'll see."YOU WON'T GO THE BALL. YOU WON'T GO TO THE BALL. It's so hard to believe the world is this meatgrinder he always says it is. I know it is. but I do not WANT to know it is. I WANT that interview.Listen boy, I'll tell you a thing. I'll make you a career in the business I'm in. I'll make you rich, I'll make you a toy, I'll make you turn over into my little boy. Y'see I'm going somewhere. I don't know what I'm gonna do when I get there. I know money's a thing - your only inspiration And your only meaning. You must think that all I do Is spend my time making pretty pictures of you. You can fall when I will climb, But I'll be falling over just by having you in mind. 1st. chorus: Mend that fight - oh listen to them Kickin' up a ball inside a Jericho wall. Mend that fight - it's all twisted through them. If you ain't rich then you won't go to the ball. Having mercy and licking up love, And moving through your ocean like I've never had enough. Y'see you ain't all I want, You're everything and more that I have ever hoped for. You must think that all I do Is spend my time making pretty pictures of you. He knows. I really, truly, honestly hate watching this. Watching him work. But it's my fucking job. Whenever Eric's eyes (Eric is the boy trying to get through this shoot) get really tight and he's right on the verge of crying, he will sometimes look my way. I'm sitting over here in the shadows. Pretending to be a disinterested assistant. I don't know if Eric can see my eyes but if he can I just want him to know it's going to be okay. Something in me is so twisted. I really need it to be okay when this is said and done and it needs to be said and done soon. I know that Tim is only trying to get the best stuff out of Eric. But Eric is a kid and this hurts like hell to even watch it from the sidelines. Eric is playing himself. I keep trying to tell myself that it's a performance. Maybe it is. I don't know anymore. It's like the camera isn't really even a participant but it is. Like a silent witch. Tim puts Eric in what we call the "Hot Seat." In this scene, it's not a seat. It's a corner and Eric is on the floor. The idea is that the person in the "Hot Seat" speaks to something or someone that isn't really there. It could be someone you love. It could be someone you hate. It could be someone dead. It could be your pain. It could be your rage. It could be your parents. It could be your lover. It will be your guts. It could be all of this at the same time and the world will crash in on you and you will have to sort it out. Motherfucking Tim. There is a red chair (I think Tim deliberately picks red) between Tim and Eric. Tim is pacing behind the camera. Eric is supposed to talk to the empty chair and it's making him bleed all over this floor and I want to run out of this room but my legs are numb. I can't move. Eric is speaking to his own numbness. He's stoned or drunk or both (I can't hear this stuff so I don't know exactly) or back to coke and booze and paying Mama's rent with fifty dollar tricks and long soaks in tubs until the water freezes and you can't get clean and you're leaking blood from your ass and he doesn't want to but he's going to do some crystal just to be able to summon the energy to get UP and OUT of that corner. I am this boy. Fuck you, Tim. "Tell the chair, Eric." That's all Tim ever says on this shoot. "I'm going to kill myself," this boy screams. The hair on my neck is like a deep freeze. "Tell it to the chair." "I want to die." "How does wanting to die FEEL, Eric?" Sometimes I hate Tim. I hate him. It never lasts. but when I feel it, I feel it hard. "I'm sad because I want to LIVE," Eric is screaming at the chair. And for the first time today, not at Tim. It's about what's sitting in the chair. Often, it is my heart. Tim steps in front of the camera. He hands Eric a big kitchen knife. "Tell the chair." Eric gets up off the floor. He walks over to the chair and starts stabbing it and ripping it to shreds with the knife. I think I am going to be sick. Anyone who claims that prostitution is a victimless crime needs to have to sit in this room for five minutes -- or -- have their head lobotomized. Tim is holding him now. Protecting him. All of this on the fucking camera. Tim is looking up at me. His liquid eyes are always putting me on the spot. I detest confronting these issues. His hands are reaching down your throat and pulling your innards out of your mouth. It's coming. I can see it a mile away. My turn. It always comes as an assignment. Mine to is to go out there and film my own speaking to the chair but not to use the crutch of the image of human beings. If I said I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT it would be a lie. It's ALL dog eat dog. What crutch. He's talking about rape. You won't go to the ball. You won't go to the ball. I hate him and his deep-red chair is shreds. You won't go to the ball. You won't go to the ball. You won't go, you won't go, You won't go to the ball. (repeat) You must think that all I do Is spend my time making pretty pictures of you. You can fall when I will climb, But I'll be falling over just by having you in mind. cinematheque.films.fr@gmail.com

The Paris sky at night can be so vivid and so black you can almost scrape diamonds on the stars with nails. The poet reading his work on the stage was naked. He had to be, what -- all of fifteen. Kid had talent. Balls. I'm not sure I could do that. Nudity is one thing. Vulnerability another. Nevertheless, here I am attempting to put the impossible into words. I do not know that I have talent. I do know that reading about someone's dream to become a writer is almost painful. Even I wince at the notion of it. You want to wish them luck then run. I am quite aware of my talent as a whore. Your tricks either keep coming back or they don't. Most people don't think of blokes when they think of whores. Most people don't know squat about the world I live in. Writers. Whores. I have never bought Timothy's line that one is usually the other. That's the thing about Cinematheque. Everyone here has talent. Often, extraordianry talent. The extraordinary is the ordinary. Sometimes you lose track of the reality that you are not outside anywhere in the big, bad, and all too real world. The big, bad world is a reality I very much wanted to escape. The narrow stairs that lead up to the Cinematheque loft are covered in graffiti. You tend to know right away you have left the reality of the world as you know it behind. You might never be the same again. The bouncer at the top of the stairs refused to let me in. Big sign by the door: NO AMERICANS (that means you, yank). NO PRESS. NO CAMERAS. "But I'm Irish," I explained. "Not American." I would not have gotten into the room where the Cinematheque Poetry Night was being held if i hadn't had my passport. The huge loft space was jam packed. Mainly with the French and everyone was wearing black. Even me. It was a sea of black as dark as the night outside. The boy reading poetry on the stage -- a punk rocker with a mohawk -- had an erection. It did cause an almost amused electric current to run through the room. This had to be the place. It's infamous but only to the people who would know. I scanned the crowd. I wondered if I would even be able to pick him out of all the people here. There was a guy on the other side of the room with a camera. And not just any camera. It was a steadycam. He was shooting film. I was impressed. That had to be Timothy Patrick Barrus. Had to be. Americans would know him as the big, bad, and notorious Nasdijj. I'm afraid that what is a literary scandal in the States wouldn't be a blip on the radar screen in France. I'm not sure the French expect their writers to behave. Tim doesn't behave too well. In the American world of books it might be important. In the French world of art, it's not all that important. Tim Barrus in exile is not exactly a newsworthy item in Paris. Those rules: No Americans. No press. No cameras. Did not mean him. "My rules. My way." How many times have I heard Tim say those words. For well over a year now. That first night at the poetry reading seems like yesterday. Time at Cinematheque is just another colorful abstraction. I had to worm my way into Cinematheque. It isn't easy. "I'm not here to make anyone's life easy," Tim has written. No shit.

Tim Barrus: The Museum of Modern Art So. The National Endowment for the Arts hates my fucking guts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what. So the Museum of Modern Art describes itself as a nonprofit institution. This is artiface. It is philosophically disingenuous. It is patently absurd. Somewhere in the 70s these money-making machines figured out they could all become nonprofits and it became a feeding frenzy. Among artists, the trend has been dying out. Groups of artists banned together to make it through the economic battlefields as comrades in arms has become so cliche. It didn't really work for either artists or individuals. It only worked well for the people admininstrating the nonprofits. Imagine that.The staff and the directors of the Museum of Modern Art wheel and deal in art as if art itself was nothing more than a marketplace designed specifically to enrich them. It's a big economic trough and the predators have staked their claim to it. I always thought that the Museum of Modern Art was sort of like a very exclusive bank. It was where rich artists came with their wares in order to increase their value. The more the value, the more the money.I was the first artist on le Tube who started producing film that was uploaded as digital to MOMA's Tube channel as video responses to work shown in the museum. I did it for about a year. And then I took all of the videos down because it was beginning to color how I saw my own work.It was like kneeling in front of the elite and they're going to fuck you now with their cock in your mouth.You were supposed to be grateful and pretend you liked the taste of it. I didn't. And I don't really pretend all that well regardless of what stupidity you might read on the Internet. It had evolved into something I no longer loved. MOMA had a BAD taste to it. It wasn't publishing, but the taste was like eating shoe polish.It was just about the money and as such it was a chore. I don't know how any artist can expose himself to MOMA and not come away from it in need of a very long and very hot shower. With soap. Scrubadubdub.It felt like rolling in slime. MOMA may, indeed, refer to itself as without monetary regard, but I assure you, it's all about the money, and that is why artists show there, and that is why people come there, and that is why people sit on their board -- because being around or associated with all that money increases ones value especially as value exists as an abstract idea -- we imbue value on people and on things in terms of how those people and those things are contrasted to, associated with, and juxtaposed against the backdrop of enormous wealth.There is a LOT of wealth at MOMA. It sort of feels like visiting Exxon.I refuse to take my art students there ever again. If you want to stand around and look at money you can take a tour of the Federal Reserve where they do not pretend that what they do is not about the money. Just walking through MOMA gives me the creeps. I feel like I'm an untouchable who sleeps on the floor at the Calcutta train station and there's nothing you can do, really to lift yourself from that caste -- the untouchables -- it's rags and gruel and charity and disease and MOMA looks down on the scavengers of life from the mountaintop of gods.It's just another New York brick wall and in New York they're a dime a dozen. As an artist, if I wanted to be spit on and deal with s secretive society of gatekeepers -- the gatekeeper class -- I could go back to publishing and there is no reason to ever do that. Neither world ever really changes. I see it as them and us because so do they.

Tim Barrus: Writer or Filmmaker I suppose it's presumptuous for anyone to call themselves an artist but I do call myself that because I am one. People write to me all the time with the question: are you writing or are you making films. I make little art films. I try not to write. Writing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. In the art world, I understand that it's filled with mad people, crazy individuals, and jealousy, and backstabbing, and fashion, and who's in and who's out, and the destruction of the self, and caste, and class, and hierarchy, and who murdered who. In the writing world, I just mainly minded my own little insignificant business, and when the jealousy came along and the claims that only one individual could own all the stories ever told in human history, I stood there thinking: say what. The writing world is about class and caste and how you can undermine someone by any means other than the quality of what you write. What anyone writes is irrelevant. It's about a destruction of the self, hierarchy, and who murdered who, and claiming you own all the stories ever told in human history. They belong to you and you alone because you say so. Anything I might write is going to threaten some other turf and I'd rather write than become involved in turf wars. So why write. It's mainly self-defeating. There is no hope in it. The walls are too thick and too tall and the gatekeepers defend those walls with their lives. Sort of like the drone bees. So I am making art and no one is pretending that the art world is anything other than the mad place it is. I'm just a guy who makes little art films who used to write but Tim doesn't live there anymor