Issue #10/91, May 25 - June 8, 2000  

BATWING SOUP REVISITED

By Owen Matthews

There is something strikingly odd about the eXile asking me to compose a review of the editors’ recently published book, The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia. Not just odd, but tastelessly ironic, as I am one of the chief targets of Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi’s puerile/poison pens, depicted as a backstabbing “double-agent,” a darkly menacing foil held up for merciless mockery. What makes this review a kind of meta-ironic event is that I will publish yet another review in this Saturday’s edition of The Moscow Times, which, I assure you, will be qualitatively different from this one. Why did I accept this offer? Simple. Love or hate the eXile, you at least know that no view is too scandalous, tasteless, or shocking for their pages, which gives me the liberty to express the complex totality of my reactions. Whereas with The Moscow Times, I’ve had to stare over my editorial shoulder at the likes of such middlebrow cretins as features editor Oliver Ready, or his chief editor Matt Bivens, a young functionary so tightly wound that you could probably sharpen a quill in his arse. And never succeed in removing it.

A vague sense of dread overcame me when I agreed at the last minute to compose this book review for the eXile, knowing that somehow I was playing into their hands. But it was too late, and I’ve been colossally bored lately, pinned by ennui to the wine-soaked floor of my apartment. After so many near-death ventures into the front lines of Chechnya and Grozny, a setting of awesome destruction and post-apocalyptic beauty, Moscow seems quaint and suburban by comparison. So when the offer arrived, I accepted without thinking, having been deathly stoned on Caucasian hashish which I procured from a blood-soaked warlord who goes by the klichka “Double-Chin.”

Besides, not taking them up on their offer would expose me to further ridicule, a notorious hobby of theirs. I was even touched by their grotesque sense of fairness, for they seemed to relish the opportunity to get skewered not once, but twice in two days over a book that I know they worked so hard on, and wasted so many precious brain cells and seratonin receptors in the making. It reminds me of another example of when the eXile could have, but didn’t, aim below the belt when, early on, Taibbi once walked into my apartment unannounced and caught me in the middle of my first bi-sexual experience with a young man named Pierre, an aristocrat from the Bourgogne region whose family had earned itself a notorious reputation for having buggered Joan d’Arc’s executioners. Today, of course, I am indifferent to the point of pride about my experiences with men, but back then, I was still finding myself, and the eXile didn’t crush me during that fragile moment. Now, in stark contrast to their image as infantile avengers, these guys are proving that they can take criticism, and they can take it head-on. “Do what thou wilt” was Dashwood’s advice, and they appear to have heeded it.

And now the book that everyone’s been waiting for. The eXile book is both a collection of some of their greatest articles and pranks (though I miss a few choice moments, such as Edward Limonov’s advertisement soliciting money from readers to help him wage a revolution), as well as fresh text describing the creation and operation of their tabloid newspaper, set in the context of Moscow Babylon. As gut-pounding hilarious and insightful as the book is, it also lacks.

As most people who remember my “Batwing Soup” columns will agree, I am no stranger to the world of Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia. With one key difference: I invented it, refined it, and bequeathed it to them, though they are loath to admit it.

Lautremont once opined that what is omitted is as revealing about the author as what is printed, and in this book’s case, one of the crucial omissions in Mark Ames’s first chapter is the fact that I was both the inventor and the first editor of the eXile’s predecessor, Living Here, a rag we threw together in late 1995 which brought bawdy tabloid journalism and the first anti-politically-correct club guide to Moscow’s expatriate community. The concept for Living Here as a nightlife guide/tabloid came to me over several cases of cheap Hungarian wine and ashtrays packed with cigarette butts during creative jam sessions I held with the autistic Derk Sauer wannabe Manfred Witteman. While chain-drinking and smoking, my then-girlfriend Tanya, a desperately thin dyev who relished in the burgeoning excesses prevalent at the time, clutched to my side, I mused that fusing Time Out with The Sun would capture a burgeoning niche. I also created my first alter-ego, John Evelyn, a pseudonym necessary to protect my day job at The Moscow Times. Many people still comment on my introductory “Generation X-Pat” issue, which can be said to have set the whole trend of celebrating Moscow’s hedonistic party-at-the-edge-of-the-volcano atmosphere. Indeed, it was I who first suggested that Ames’s nascent column be named “Moscow Babylon,” which he soon appropriated for himself for the duration of his career; and it was I who introduced the co-authors over a wine-soaked luncheon at Patio Pizza, when we bandied stories of Russian gore and serial murders, bonding in other people’s blood while chain-smoking Gauloises.

But whereas I chose to take a route that those two de rigueur rebels might have called “bourgeois” (indeed, I have been a leading correspondent for Newsweek since 1997, despite the fact that I’m substantially younger than Ames and Taibbi), they chose to throw their professional careers away, as they somewhat disingenuously claim in the early part of the book. To commit professional and journalistic suicide by creating a newspaper that would get them banned for life. Each chose their own form of poison: Ames, by playing the role of shocking debauch diving head-first into the sleazy underworld of Moscow Babylon; and Taibbi, by publicly denouncing his fellow “hacks” and taking a decidedly (if childishly) leftier-than-thou moral position at a time when neo-liberalism ruled the editorial slant of Moscow’s foreign press and talking head corps.

As if barely able to contain their anxiety of influence, the editors go out of their way to ridicule my pre-maturely receding hairline and swollen tummy, neither of which is exactly accurate—I am considerably heavier and balder now than I was then.

But it is in the realm of courtship where they show their deepest insecurities. Whereas I’m depicted as both a gross failure and a scavenger, the truth is that it is I who arranged nearly every sexual encounter for Ames in the early eXile days. Despite his public pronouncements, Ames was often too shy to dance with even the most mediocre, desperate provincial dyev, instead poaching off of me (even by his own admission).

In Ames’s chapter on Russian women, titled “The White God Factor,” I am wrongly depicted as having been a sore loser because the town slut didn’t meet me for a quickie the following day. The truth is that she was a lesbian, and while Ames lay in bed, I managed to shag two delicious teenage whores-for-hire in a local thug’s banya.

If Ames’s insecurity is girls, then Taibbi’s is journalism. That would explain his slander of me in his chapter on the Western Press Corps, “Hacks For Hire,” which for the most part is a brilliant, savage account of the press’s idiotic failure. However, when he accuses me of laziness and a purveyor of false quotes, Taibbi stretches the medium a bit too far into the realm of irresponsibility. There were times when I was working on so many stories at once for top British and American publications that I may have slipped, but this does not in any way fit into the general critique of American and English reporters who lived in an insular bubble apart from Russia. For I am a half-Russian Oxonian who has spent more time, and understands more nuances, than perhaps any expat in town. Lastly, Taibbi’s account of how he assaulted my father by throwing him against a wall was hurtful. Thanks, Taibbi.

Many parts of the book shine with brilliance and energy not seen in most non-fiction accounts of chaotic, crumbling empires. Taibbi’s chapter on the eXile pranks, which were epic and are sadly too few and far between today, is recommended to anyone, while Ames’s semen-soaked descriptions of the Hungry Duck’s heyday will be sure to inspire envy back in the home country… and ire from the feminist inquisitors. The book captures the anarchic paradoxes and moral ambiguities that I summed up in one of my Batwing Soup columns in early 1997:

“Moscow should be a decadent place — it is, after all, a giant, incandescent crucible of dirty money, crime, murder, conspicuous consumption, simmering social tension, imploding ideology and political upheaval. We should be behaving like party animals in the twilight days of Weimar Germany, if only because fiddling while Rome burns is much more therapeutic than wringing your hands and trying to do something about it.” Enough said.

But there are some questions today left unanswered. Such as, if you guys (two healthy middle-class jocks) are so clever and daring, why have you been so quiet about Chechnya, where reporters like myself have risked life and limb, and experienced hell and back again, while you snorted speed in your safely locked Moscow flats and waxed witty about your colleagues’ failures? What about coverage of the elections?

Even leaving petty jealousies behind, “The eXile” book is worth buying as a paean to an era gone by, both for Russia, and, sadly, for the eXile.

Cards

Links

The Vault

Gallery

Who?