The eXile is back up!
It's the best news I've heard in some time. The eXile is probably the best English language Moscow-based spiritual schizocolloid of Private Eye and Rolling Stone with the who-gives-a-fuck outlook that New Russia seems to engender that has ever been produced in the entire world. Or until recently, it was.
After 11 years of exposees (corruption in the Russian government? Yawn), thrills (a new prostitute interview every week!), spills, viciously insulting editorials ("Freed from the shackles of oppressively responsible journalism, we now have full license to urinate into the president’s mouth"), shockingly unprofessional journalistic practice (they baked a pie full of horse semen and threw it at the chief of the New York Times' Moscow bureau), they finally caught the administrations attention last month. A raid by four "chinoviks" ensued. (Words keep cropping up in the eXile like "dyev" and "pafosniy" and indeed "chinovik", which I surmise translates as "scary offical". This is done in case you forget you don't live in Moscow, you're not a Western expat, you can't afford a coke habit and the nearest you've ever come to this kind of gritty decadence is watching seventeen year olds do poppers at Time and Envy.) The eXile wasn't particularly critical of Putin - not that the eXile has ever said anything nice about anyone, they pride themselves on being equal-opportunity assholes. But there were all those columns from Edward Limonov, wacky Russian dissident with laughably poor command of the English language, whose contributions in particular the chinoviks found very interesting. Here's the editor's blog entry revealing the raid in more detail. Anyway the most immediate consequence was the eXile was dropped like an emotionally comitted woman by its publisher, and all the investors stopped returning phone calls, quit showing up for lunchdates, and finally submitted change-of-address cards with "123 Fake Street" written on them.
Anyway, pursuant to a donation drive by the editor Mark Ames and a six week wait where all the readers crossed their fingers hoping he would do the unexpected and use the money to get the servers back online rather than spend it all on drugs and hookers, the miracle finally occurred today. The eXileD (note the D, a grudgingly appended reminder of their shame) is back up in blog form at http://exiledonline.com/, and there is content, like a new War Nerd article which is exactly what I started reading the eXile for in the first place, and a Limonov rant, and a photo essay of what appears to be a Russian Glastonbury, and that means the women are Russian as well as muddy and semi-naked. Good times. I've got some reading to do.
After 11 years of exposees (corruption in the Russian government? Yawn), thrills (a new prostitute interview every week!), spills, viciously insulting editorials ("Freed from the shackles of oppressively responsible journalism, we now have full license to urinate into the president’s mouth"), shockingly unprofessional journalistic practice (they baked a pie full of horse semen and threw it at the chief of the New York Times' Moscow bureau), they finally caught the administrations attention last month. A raid by four "chinoviks" ensued. (Words keep cropping up in the eXile like "dyev" and "pafosniy" and indeed "chinovik", which I surmise translates as "scary offical". This is done in case you forget you don't live in Moscow, you're not a Western expat, you can't afford a coke habit and the nearest you've ever come to this kind of gritty decadence is watching seventeen year olds do poppers at Time and Envy.) The eXile wasn't particularly critical of Putin - not that the eXile has ever said anything nice about anyone, they pride themselves on being equal-opportunity assholes. But there were all those columns from Edward Limonov, wacky Russian dissident with laughably poor command of the English language, whose contributions in particular the chinoviks found very interesting. Here's the editor's blog entry revealing the raid in more detail. Anyway the most immediate consequence was the eXile was dropped like an emotionally comitted woman by its publisher, and all the investors stopped returning phone calls, quit showing up for lunchdates, and finally submitted change-of-address cards with "123 Fake Street" written on them.
Anyway, pursuant to a donation drive by the editor Mark Ames and a six week wait where all the readers crossed their fingers hoping he would do the unexpected and use the money to get the servers back online rather than spend it all on drugs and hookers, the miracle finally occurred today. The eXileD (note the D, a grudgingly appended reminder of their shame) is back up in blog form at http://exiledonline.com/, and there is content, like a new War Nerd article which is exactly what I started reading the eXile for in the first place, and a Limonov rant, and a photo essay of what appears to be a Russian Glastonbury, and that means the women are Russian as well as muddy and semi-naked. Good times. I've got some reading to do.