x-Rated Journalism

March 24, 2003 06:15

Mark Ames, founder of the eXile, on Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: "I don't think I lasted through more than 45 minutes of Fellowship before popping it out of my VCR and calling a whore who provided 'anal' for 70 dollars, an experience that was so unsatisfying that I pretty much lost interest in the Dry Hole until just last week."

Mark Ames: Berkeley-educated, drug-loving, whore-fucking, pain-in-the-arses-of-bureaucracy founder of the eXile. Dr John Dolan, late of this University, says of Ames: "He talks about sex more honestly than any American writer in history; for that he's called 'misogynistic.' Which in a sense he is."

John Dolan: formerly of Otago University, English department - poet, critic, and now co-Editor of the eXile. In his poem 'I Prayed to the Moon,' Dolan, shirtless, describes himself as a "bald barrel / of hair and fat." Add thick glasses and you get a fairly accurate depiction of the physical figure that Dolan exists inside. But that's not the interesting side. The interesting side emerges from behind a force-field of ink and paper - a medium from behind which Dolan excels.

Last year Dolan, with his wife (former Dunedin student Katherine Liddy), escaped the tedium of academic life in Otago and headed to the bleaker pastures of Moscow, Russia.

Moscow: a city of rabid debauchery, wanton excesses and pirated software. For Dolan it's as close to perfect as you can get. It's also home to the eXile.

The eXile: a Moscow-based English-language newspaper that transcends the boundaries of 'decency' (as defined by conservative middle-class Americans), bringing filth, gore and serious politics to a worldwide readership since 1997. The eXile has made itself (in)famous for its vitriolic attacks on Western journalists, its intricately-rigged pranks on high-profile politicians (such as when they somehow convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to enter into negotiations to become assistant coach in charge of perestroika - Gorbachev's economic, political and social restructuring program - with the New York Jets), and its candid-to-the-brink-of-obscene style. Yet it also produces highly-respected political journalism that is widely-read not only in Russia, but also in the States. As Liddy wrote in a recent Listener article, "With vigilante zeal, it pursues stories that conservative US media choose to gloss over or ignore. The eXile was the only English-language newspaper to predict the great Moscow financial crash of 1998." Funny, then, that you probably haven't heard of it.

Which is a shame, because so far you've missed the uproar about an eXile columnist who says he raped a girl who fell off the bar top and into his arms at a Moscow night-club called the 'Hungry Duck.' You also would have missed the article in which former editor Matt Taibbi cast a proverbial 'Horse-Sperm Pie' in the face of Michael Wines, the then chief editor of the New York Times. Unfortunately, Wines was protected by Russian special services and Taibbi received a severe retaliatory beating at the hands of, as Dolan puts it, "a half-dozen big men in suits." You're not too late, however, to go to the eXile's website (www.exile.ru) and find ads announcing "The Best God Damn Lesbian Show In Town!!!" and a "$9 Lunch Special With Frolicking School Girls" on Thursdays. Here also you can find the latest instalment of 'Death Porn' which details - in written and pictorial form - gruesome deaths from around the city. In a 1999 Rolling Stone article, Ames defended 'Death Porn' as "a legitimate reflection of some innate Russian inability to be shocked by gore. Murders so gruesome and shockingly stupid that they would plunge a Western nation into months of self-examination are, in Russia, as common as... well, the common cold," he says. The latest instalment of 'Death Porn' shows a photograph of a man with a severely bashed-in head, lying face-down in a sprawling pool of his own blood.

So what the fuck is Dr John Dolan - an aging academic with a PhD in rhetoric from Berkeley - doing writing for the eXile? Well, for a start, Dolan says life in Moscow is an improvement on Dunedin.

"Moscow is bliss. Sometimes a very frustrating bliss, especially since my Russian is still not close to fluent. But there's a relaxing feeling to the place, the certainty that no one is watching you, no one cares what you do and if anyone looks at you on the Metro, it's simply to guess the price of your footwear, not to pass tedious judgement."

"Life is better here because it's a wild place, huge, anarchic yet well-organised, with the best public transport system anywhere. I work frantically for three days or so when we're producing an issue - and I mean all day and all night - but then it's time to relax and watch cheap pirate videos and buy equally cheap pirate CDs. That nonsense about how piracy 'hurts us all' - lies, lies, lies. Piracy hurts Hollywood execs and stars... which is all to the good."

So does the Moscow nightlife beat sipping G&T at the University's Staff Club? Dolan: "I avoided the Staff Club. Never got that Lucky Jim nuanced gloom. I don't need help feeling grim. It was the G&Ts that got to me, or rather the fact that there was nothing but G&Ts to be had in Dunedin. As I said years ago, banning the kinder, gentler, smarter drugs in Dunedin is like banning fire in Alaska or air conditioning in Riyadh: gratuitously cruel. Do you guys know how savage, how stupid and crazy it looks, the way your courts send people to prison for years for the 'crime' of trying to brew wild poppies into opiate tea while letting wifebeaters off with parole? To my mind, the most savage criminal in Dunedin was Judge David Saunders, who regularly sent harmless users of drugs other than alcohol to prison - to be beaten and terrorised and raped - by way of sending a 'message' to the community. I remember a picture of Saunders grinning mindlessly at a benefit, holding a half-empty glass of wine... and that, in short is what's wrong with Dunedin: a foul and unsightly, tired but malicious colonial snobbery on its last legs and determined to take some of its detractors down with it."

Despite its appeal (or is it part of the appeal?), Moscow is a relatively dangerous place - especially if you're associated with the eXile (see the Taibbi incident outlined above). There are many men in poverty-stricken Moscow who will only too happily jump you for a few bucks. Last year, Dolan explains, the eXile's music editor, John Heisel, "was coming home at midnight on a Saturday and he passed an alley where some local scum thought he might have enough cash or booze to be worth jumping. So they hit him on the head, knocking him out, then (to judge by the bruising and chipped teeth) kicked him in the face several times.... [T]wo weeks later he was walking past the same alley, again at midnight Saturday and AGAIN he was knocked out and robbed. This time they didn't do any gratuitous kicking, though."

Dolan, however, is not fazed by the prospect of facing violence on the streets of Moscow: "Listen, I taught the first-year med students at Otago for EIGHT YEARS!!! You think I'm scared of death? Death is nothing! Those terrible lectures in ENGL 124 on Monday afternoons - those were the test for me. I remember that nightmarish first year - I came so close to bolting from Castle 2 one time. The valium prescription had run out on me about halfway through the lecture and I saw in full intensity the serried ranks of those mean, med-student faces sneering lazily down at me from the nearly-vertical rows of seats. People at Otago don't know how strange the atmosphere there really is by comparison with most real universities. I had been teaching at [University of California] Berkeley, where students of 18 are grown-ups and pleasant, witty, trusting grown-ups at that. To be faced by eight or nine hundred vicious, provincial adolescents staring down at you on a sleety Monday evening...you think that after surviving that I'm going to be scared in Moscow? Death is easy; the med students are scary. Those were the most vile, evil, worthless excuses for human beings I've encountered in a long and checkered life. It's a pity they can't all be put to work shovelling the water out of the Leith with colanders."

But back to the eXile. Working for a free bi-weekly magazine (Ames: "Nobody purchases our 'magazine' - it's free because we're too stupid to figure out how to make money on it") means taking a bit of a risk financially. The income, one would think, would be less 'steady' than that of a lecturer. Wouldn't it? Dolan again: "We're making more than I thought we would. Getting by quite comfortably, in fact. The eXile is attracting a lot of ads, a lot of new strip clubs are opening up in Moscow, new restaurants and we're their preferred venue."

Cheap movies, cheap CDs, great nightlife, good public transport and a job writing uncensored abuse/considered and intelligent reviews (as well as earning decent coin on the way) - is writing for eXile the best job imaginable? Dolan's honesty makes good copy: "Oh, no, by no means. I can imagine many more satisfying jobs. I'd like to be given a daily column in the New York Times, with a lifetime's worth of libel insurance. I'd like to be official Sinn Fein propaganda chief. And if I had it to do all over again, I'd never go near an academic job but bet on my talent while I was still young. Be a science-fiction novelist or essayist. What I can say is that writing for the eXile is vastly better than any other job I could ever hope to have. Nowhere else are you allowed to write what you think. Least of all in America. New Zealanders should know that their press is much freer, and covers a much wider spectrum of opinion, than does the American press. When you understand this, the bizarre behaviour of the American electorate is easier to forgive. Not condone, you understand - just forgive."

Dolan, an ex-patriot American himself, has an interesting attitude to America. As he explains, "The eXile has become a deeply anti-American newspaper and I'm probably the most extremely anti-American of all its writers. I'm wary of saying this to NZ students, because your anti-Americanism is so... forgive me for saying so, but - so stupid. So wrong. You get it EXACTLY wrong. What's great about America is what you affect to despise; what should be most despised is what you try so feebly to imitate. Where to begin? Well, for example: in Dunedin I heard so much about how America has no culture, bla bla bla. Nonsense. American culture is the great achievement of the past century. When all who live are forgotten, the students of the 25th century will be studying 20th [century] American film, animation, pop music and graphics with awe, as we study Florentine or Athenian culture now. What is most to be despised and rooted out of American (and thus world) culture is what NZ 'progressives,' poor fools, so eagerly imitate: American virtue, American moral certitude. I can think of no more loathsome incarnation of it, in its old cloth-capped-authoritarian-patriarch form, than Jim Anderton."

That's Dolan for you - give him an inch and he'll write a column lambasting everything that's wrong about the society you live in. A nice change from the Lord of the Rings-invoked self-congratulatory patriotic masturbation that New Zealand media is so keen to impose on us. But Dolan, by the eXile's standards, is not as extreme as it gets. His diatribes may be hateful, but they're not as in-your-face as Ames' 'Whore-R' (read 'Horror' with an American accent) columns, each one detailing a night with a Russian prostitute (yes, with all the details.) Nor are his columns as brashly lewd as the 'Club Reviews.' Example: "[of the 'Hungry Duck'] There is still hope for Putin's Russia! Still boasts girls that are illegal even by Russia's lax standards! As always, the best place to have a chick pass you her phone number while deep throating some guy."

Actually, in truth, Dolan, being a happily married man, doesn't fit "the perfect eXile paradigm." He does, however, have the essential tool-of-the-trade: "I'm a squeamish moderate in body; I'm older, more easily broken, than most eXile staff. But I can hate with the best of them. I can still hate. That's the last to go."

by Hamish
News Editor