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 what sort of feature film he'd make if he could, 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.
Eavan O'Callaghan is a struggling writer who lives in Paris where he is currently writing a screenplay, La nouveauté étrange des garçons, being produced by Cinematheque Films.
Comments (closed)
not so gullible
2008-08-16 18:23:05
doesn't anyone else think it's funny that "cinematheque arts" exists where barrus claims it does? that he magically is able to fly unrelated, underage kids around the world constantly? with what money? and isn't it funny that the footage that "they" are shooting all the time is chopped up music videos and public domain stuff, or else shots of barrus sitting alone in his house with a tripod.
after all those books, blogs, etc. about the horny at-risk teenage boys that gravitate to barrus, why does anyone believe he's not just recycling the same old crap stoyline?
do a little research, for pete's sake.
JPenton
2008-08-16 20:58:44
Gee, you found this page really, really fast, "not so gullible." I haven't announced it yet; Rick Lupert plugged it five minutes before you wrote this. The name of the site and my name appeared on O'Callaghan's blog... yesterday? the day before? How regularly do you read his blog? I wasn't aware that O'Callaghan is particularly horny; I mean, all teenage boys are horny, but thanks for updating me with that particular descriptor; I hadn't been reflecting on it, myself.
The idea that Cinametheque Films is a fake would have to be predicated on your statement that all they create "is chopped up music videos and public domain stuff, or else shots of barrus sitting alone in his house with a tripod." This is false. Sure, much of what they create falls under that description, which is what you'd expect from teenagers who have computer savvy and a finite number of grants, but a near-infinite amount of time. "Tilting at Windmills" does not appear to meet that description, nor "Gunslinger," nor the clips of kids screwing around, and particularly not the clips of the boys themselves. So, either Barrus is getting grant money to educate some real boys, or he is HIRING real boys to PRETEND to be learning from him, as well as producing a wide variety of films (some of which are computer made and some clearly aren't) and writing numerous blogs in a wide variety of voices (note I spent some time helping O'Callaghan edit his work). The latter scenario would be one of the biggest hoaxes of the art world, done in such a way that it could never make the perpetrator a dime. If I were to believe something like that, I'd believe that you were Barrus, too.
Mary Scriver
2008-08-17 11:26:11
There's a concept called "a moving target" which is Barrus. But this critic -- and I think I recognize the rhetoric -- moves his criticisms around to where he thinks they will be most inflammatory. I think he learned to do this on the old NA Lit listservs where flame wars -- usually against whites -- were the order of the day until everyone got tired of it.
In America there's a recognized phenomenon: People who will never be the President of the United States, though they want to be. They call it "Lee Harvey Oswald Syndrome."
My guess is that this guy is neither white nor American -- just jealous or maybe phobic. Certainly he is not very tech savvy.
Mary Scriver
Mary Scriver
2008-08-17 12:12:07
Here's another thought. One of the constant accusations is that Barrus and the boys simply don't exist. (The critics seem to think that Paris exists, whatever they think Paris is.) What if they DON'T??
What if the biggest so-called hoax is simply a work of tech-expanded fiction, an on-going narrative that ought to be regarded as a kind of serial novel with no one able to guess the next twist or turn in the plot! A long story written by a fellow who never did get out of his wheelchair, but sits somewhere at a keyboard and editing thingamabob. What if even that commentator with all his objections is the author who may or may not be Barrus. Heck, what if even I don't exist? (I AM sort of an unlikely character, quite apart from my own very unlikely story!) So what?
It's an old idea -- which Chinese poet was it who said we might all be butterfies dreaming we are people? Basho? Don't we all speak of world events as though they were a "nightmare" from which we would like to wake up? Well, then, what's wrong with a continuing fantasy about a man who tries to save young men from the very forces that victimized him as a boy? (I especially like the figure of a Australian Kelpie named "Navajo." The most protective dog since J.M. Barrie's "Nana.")
Let us leave the stained realm of morality and leap to the philosophical world of poetry.
Prairie Mary
JPenton
2008-08-17 12:41:02
You mean "Last night I dreamt that I was a beautiful butterfly fluttering through the fields. Now I awaken. My question is this; how do I know if I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamt himself a butterfly, or if I am a butterfly, now dreaming itself Chuang Tzu?" Alternatively Zhuangzi.
I didn't know the accusations were constant. As far as I knew, they're all coming from basically one guy. If Cinematheque is a hoax, I would not judge it a malicious one, partly because it would COST rather than MAKE Barrus money (which also suggests that its not a hoax). It would be, unlike the Nasdijj scandal, massively illegal, because the use of so much Copyrighted material is predicated on the firm being an educational entity, and therefore having broader fair use rights then Barrus would alone. I have difficulty imagining someone with Barrus' experiences conducting such an illegal hoax. Bottom line, though, this particular critic's descriptions are incorrect: there are boys in many of these films. They come from somewhere.
Mary Scriver
2008-08-17 13:13:29
Thanks, Jonathan, for adding the proper quote. Maybe you could change the spelling of my name in the headline as well: it's SCRIVER. It wouldn't matter except for computer tracking since it's a name that has a lot of variants.
I mentioned to the boys my admiration of Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais" which is in Paris. A later photo shows three boys imitating the poses of the Burghers in front of the actual statue. That proves to me that they are listening and responding, actually THERE. At least THEN. There have been other instances.
I suggest that the stalker is keeping the "Nasdijj" controversy alive because he is basing his academic career on the pursuit of imitation Indians. Otherwise, who would care? I hope his advisors are a little more sophisticated than he is.
I do have a name for this critic and other Nat Lit people know him. They say he's NOT Indian.
Prairie Mary
JPenton
2008-08-17 14:10:11
D'oh! It should be fixed in all instances. You'll have to refresh, since it's an image file.
Mike Willis
2008-08-26 19:50:34
"...and writing numerous blogs in a wide variety of voices..."
that's been his schtick for quite a while now, actually:
monduhoteldunordproposal.blogspot
nasdijj.blogspot
Drako
2008-08-28 05:07:13
"Tilting at Windmills" is a music video made a couple of years ago for the band Gorillaz (you can see it here with the original music - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEB7i8bSwNA, though it's available in lots of other places as well and is very well known). All Barrus did was to remove the original music and add a recording of himself speaking, then pretend that he made it himself. The same is true of several other films on his website (including another video from the same band, for their single Feelgood Inc).
Mary Scriver
2008-08-28 13:28:38
Drako, I looked. You're right, at least about the windmill one.
Mary Scriver
JPenton
2008-08-28 16:11:05
Mike, I wasn't suggesting that first-person fiction was outside of Barrus' skill set. I express skepticism that he'd have time and inclination to fake so many things, knowing that it would bring him no financial benefit, and because of the fair-use claims could potentially get him in much more trouble than the social difficulties caused by the Nasdijj scandal.
Regarding the Gorillaz video: this issue is being discussed, and formal statements are pending.
Drako
2008-08-29 08:15:13
Barrus' videos have been pulled from Blip.tv. Another film he had retitled and put out as his own work can be seen here - http://current.com/items/89049300_my_drunken_shame. I'm afraid I can't remember the title Barrus gave it but it was something like "The Story Stolen Isn't Your Own."
It is not easy trying to search for videos, especially very ordinary scenes like "boy listening to music". But if you go to any video hosting site like YouTube and type in something like "boys on bus" or "boy listening to music" you will find hundreds of amateur videos of that type, which could be easily downloaded, the credits cut off and could then be re-uploaded as Barrus' own work. Through the same process using Flickr or any one of millions of tourist websites it would certainly be possible for him to find a photo of teenagers messing around near the Burghers of Calais statue – unfortunately it’s very difficult to search for such a picture.
Mary Scriver
2008-08-29 09:04:18
No, I recognize these boys at the statue of "The Burgher of Calais".
What you're missing is that it is mostly the Cinematheque boys who are taking the photos and doing mash-ups of pre-existing work. It's a CLASS where they are learning how. They did a "review" or response to my book, "Bronze Inside and Out," that was clearly assembled but also clearly done after reading and skimming the book. So far, three have read it. Not all of the dozen speak English.
What I see is daily communication in emails that are totally private. I rarely look at any videos because I'm on dial-up and it takes an hour to download a video of any length. My admiration is based on Barrus' books -- not just the Nasdijj ones. But the Nasdijj ones are in content NOTHING like any Native American book I know and I've read dozens. Not the pop ones, but the NA Lit Renaissance classics.
In fact, I discover that I was on a listserv with one of the Barrus-phobes who obsesses about him while NEVER reading his books.
Sherman Alexie, you know, has backed off the opinion in his essay saying that Barrus writes just like him. In the first place, the only similarity was writing about reservations. (Alexie doesn't have HIV and has never talked about HIV in his books.) In the second place, he said he finally realized that thinking in that prosecutorial way only leads to terrorism like 9/11.
Prairie Mary
Drako
2008-08-29 10:24:35
Mary, I'm afraid that your unsupported word won't count for a great deal. Can you give some evidence of Alexie's change of position? I've done various searches such as "Nasdijj + Alexie + 9/11", "Nasdijj + Alexie + 2008", "Nasdijj + Alexie + 2007", etc. All I can find is a blog post by Prarie Mary (you?) (http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html) which gives an interpretation of a news story that in itself only says Alexie has "worked hard since then to shed the negative parts of tribal thinking," and certainly doesn't say anything about Nasdijj.
In March of this year Alexie called Nasdijj sociopathic (http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/spot-news/sherman-alexie-on-margaret-sel/). Has he changed his mind in an article, blog or book since then?
Mary Scriver
2008-08-29 11:16:37
Drako, sure lucky this isn't a formal court case but just your own insistence on information, since I don't remember much more than what I said in that blog. (Yup, I'm Prairie Mary.) The story came to me via the H-Amerindian automated list compiled about Indians. It was a speech in Canada, I think to Indians. True enough, it may not have mentioned Nasdijj. And Alexie may have called him Tim Barrus. I notice that people in general make their bold accusations very loudly and then rethink them very quietly. The accusing essay is on Alexie's website, not not the rethinking. Not good for business.
Sociopathy is in the eye of the beholder. And Sherman Alexie is not the last word in Native American writers. In fact, the Indians think he's a bit of a "fancy dancer." There are MANY more authors out there. If Joe Bruchac had something to say about this, I'd be far more impressed.
Why are you so obsessive about this? What's at stake besides your own need to be right?
Prairie Mary
JPenton
2008-08-29 15:13:57
Draco, thanks for bringing the Gorillaz video to our attention. Barrus has prepared a statement, and Jeffrey Spahr-Summers and I are working on Unlikely's.
Several of the posts above constitute allegations of criminal activity. Presumably everyone here is an adult and understands what they've said, and is prepared to deal with any consequences should these accusations be unfounded. At this point, though, I think everyone's clearly presented their case. The Truth Of The Matter cannot be conclusively determined in this forum. Anyone can examine all this and form their own opinions; I think we should probably stop using this space to try to prove or disprove the existence of Barrus' students.
I'm available by e-mail. If folks have final points on this issue they want to make, please feel free to do so (perhaps after we release our statement); let's do it with a mind towards wrapping up.
JPenton
2008-08-29 15:14:59
That would be "Drako," not "Draco." Apologies.
JPenton
2008-08-30 03:24:49
The staff of Unlikely has more to discuss, but I reckoned it was time to get rid of the Copyright violation, so I've replaced the video with Barrus' statement. Ours will be appended.
JPenton
2008-08-31 01:39:57
Okeydoke, our official and hopefully final statement is now at http://www.unlikelystories.org/barrus0808.shtml
Drako
2008-09-01 06:40:47
Mary, I have made three posts here, all based on fact. My first and second demonstrated wholescale plagiarism on the part of either Barrus or his students. The third showed that there is no evidence that Sherman Alexie made the statement you attached to him. Your reply is to accuse me of obsession (based on three posts!), and then to attack Alexie - when it was you who brought his name up in the first place!
If you are going to reply could you please reply with facts for which some evidence exists beyond "take my word for it", and not with insults?
Mary Scriver
2008-09-01 07:21:43
No.
Prairie Mary