A hyperlink from antiwar.com's news roundup page led me to Mark Ames' interesting essay on the situation in Georgia.
It's all very entertaining (the film reviews are hilarious and even a bit insightful) and there's clearly some keen intelligence on-tap but I wonder how seriously these folks want to be taken?
DRM -- The eXile is an English-language newspaper founded in Moscow which used to be Matt Taibbi, Mark Ames (both Americans) and Eduard Limonov (Russian, leader of the National Bolshevik Party). Taibbi is now in the US, as I'm sure everybody knows. Anyway, the point as far as I can tell was to create the most offensive publication conceivable (drugs, prostitutes, every racial stereotype imaginable, intense misogeny), and at teh same time rip the crap out of the English-language press corps in Russia (as when they famously hit the NYT's Moscow bureau chief in the face with a pie made from horse sperm). I think the sadism is over-the-top.
Personally, I liked Taibbi press review. I find Ames to be boring, repeating a hackneyed "Henry Miller in Moscow" routine ad nauseum. John Dolan (who used to be a professor in New Zealand), who does the book reviews, is an excellent writer. His wife is very nice. I also like Limonov's pieces, which are deliberately left in his slipshod, unedited English so that, as Ames put, "he could take one last shit in his Western reader's face."
BTW I'm translating part of Limonov's latest book for my own edification, his prison diaries. It's quite good.
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