Issue #26/51, November 5 - 18, 1998  

The eXile has been undergoing a lot of changes lately. Our own staff doesn't know what's going on. One of the paper's two editors-i.e. me-has been missing in America for over five weeks. Nothing even remotely resembling investigative journalism has appeared in the paper for nearly two months. Rumors are circulating everywhere that we're closing up shop. Our own employees hunt for jobs openly, right before our eyes, tying up telephone lines for hours without any visible fear of reprisal. In short, things look bad-sort of. Because the truth is, the eXile isn't crashing and burning right now. This is the consciously self-indulgent slide of smugly overconfident creative personalities. You know-the third album full of twenty-minute instrumental improvs instead of singles with lyrics. "No Quarter" for an hour. Our Ravi Shankar phase.

Why now? Because today, November 5, 1998, nearly half a million Americans will pick up Rolling Stone magazine and see Jean MacKenzie referred to as a "middle-aged woman with anger lines." That's right: a 4,000-word feature on the eXile has, by some insane accident, appeared in America's establishment rock magazine, allowing our sad adolescent hangups to ride the turbo-charged public relations coattails of Alanis Morrisette's new album release.

The eXile is going Hollywood. Or, at least, it's trying to. The reason I've been in the United States all this time, instead of writing "Death Porn" and mooching Marlboro Lights off our Russian staff, is that a glossy stateside version of the eXile is in the works-and I've been sent to set it up. If all goes as planned, Washington, D.C. will soon be the home of a vicious, nonpartisan, self-congratulatory new magazine, modeled on the Russian eXile.

Our business plan boldly predicts that not a single D.C. resident will actually want to read the publication. The magazine's first cover will show a photo of a giant middle finger, under the headline, "Hey, Washington!" For almost two years now, the Moscow eXile has been helping expats describe and celebrate all the reasons for leaving banal America to indulge in Russia's lurid charms. And now that the economy is forcing us to look homeward, we're going to make America pay. We're bringing our revulsion home, and we're going to take it on a long public walk, once a month, in our nation's capital.

Our hand was forced. Like every expat business in town, we've taken a major hit since the crash. Our staff, including both editors, has taken salary reductions that rival the draconian across-the-board pay cuts over at the Moscow Times. eXile ads have mysteriously become cheaper lately. And our secretaries are no longer babes with huge breasts. The cleaning lady answers the phones now. She's a great person, but she's in her fifties and weighs about three bills. We still sexually harass her, but it's not like the old days, not by a long shot.

Times have changed. There are reasons why we haven't done much hard journalism lately, and they're not all rooted in our laziness. The truth is, we just don't care to anymore. Since the crash, every hack in the journalism world has turned into an angry, left-leaning crusader striving to scrupulously document the criminal liberatarian excesses of the Yeltsin regime. What we were doing two years ago is now the establishment norm. Frankly, we don't see the point. Russia is done. You can stick a fork in her. All that's left is the gravy. Straight gallows humor. Learn how to forage for food. Put a blindfold on and play pin the tail on Switzerland.

They're easy hits, but they're all we've got to work with. Creatively, we're as strained for capital as every brokerage in town. As redeemed as I privately feel by the eXile's apparent decline in my absence (although the decline started while I was still there), I'm not happy to be leaving Moscow. It's been a great time, in the best sense of the word "great". After production days at the eXile, Mark and I used to crouch in the office amid all the garbage and scattered papers and say to each other, "You know, someday this war's gonna end." It's ending for me. And now I'm heading to Washington, which by almost any standard is the lamest, saddest, awfullest city in all America, and maybe even the world.

If I didn't feel such a strong professional responsibility to make our future American readers miserable, I'd probably be hanging myself now.

The staff of the Moscow eXile, which is not following me home, is staying in business for the same reason. They will survive the humor recession, no matter what sacrifices are required. The fact that Russia's dying doesn't mean we have to. Bad times always end. In Russia, historically, they're almost always replaced by worse times. And in worse times, we at the eXile will thrive. Mark, Ilya, Kevin and I will see to that. Semper Fi, dudes.

Hang in there with us. The era may be over, but as the Carpenters once said, "We've only just begun."