THE EXILE - X YEARS WASTED

Feature Story

June 29, 2007

X YEARS WASTED
A Decade In Exile

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5.HIRING TOM TO RUN THE EXILE'S MERCHANDISING AND CORPORATE FINANCING. Tom, a squat, bald freak from Texas whose last name eludes us, said he could make us a lot of money, and all he wanted in return was to party with cool dudes like us. So he started up an online merchandising business in the summer of 2001, and within two months, he darkly hinted to Taibbi that he may have murdered a prostitute he'd met at the Boar House. For proof, he showed Taibbi her fingernails, which he'd kept in his pockets. We never saw him again.

6.WEEKLY EXILE. In 1998, the eXile decided it was time to go from bi-weekly to weekly. Within four months, the staff was so burnt out from amphetamine abuse and creative barrenness, as well as growing losses, that we had no choice but to revert back to our biweekly format.

7.THE FRENCH ISSUE. In the summer of 2001, The eXile translated an entire issue into French, rendering the paper useless to 95 percent of our readers, and pissing off all of our advertisers.

8.NEVER GOING OUT. In the first two years, The eXile editors, or at least Ames, could be found constantly partying and schmoozing. For about the past eight years, you couldn't drag Ames or any of the editors out of their apartments if you lobbed in tear gas.

9.NEVER EXPLOITING THE WEBSITE. In 1998, the eXile launched its website, www.exile.ru, and quickly was named Yahoo! Cool Site of the Week. But we never sold ads. Today, with some 200,000 unique visitors every month, we've finally moved up to the lowest revenue earner of all - Google ads. The site supposedly is going to be completely revamped and advertiser-friendly within days or hours after you read this. Yeah, and we're a bunch of Chinese jet pilots.

10.ATTACKING OUR READERS. Most businesses work hard to woo their customers. We, on the other hand, have made it our mission to not only heap abuse on our readers, but worse, we've done everything possible to drive them out of business and run them out of town.

Best Whores

1. ALLA. 2001. At Morris Snideman's 50th birthday party, she was the hottest ho Ames had ever dripped sweat onto. A few weeks later, Alla returned to Moscow to meet Ames. But she'd cut her hair short, and she claimed that her vagina was sick because she'd sat on a cold bench.

2.SVETA. 2003. A spunky redhead from a Leningradsky Prospekt tochka, she couldn't shut her mouth and was up for anything, including helping us recruit more whores. She gave Ames so many whore-r stories, including tales about having to blow cops every other Saturday to keep from getting locked in jail, that she helped transform the Whore-R Stories into one of our best hits.

3.ALLA. 2003. The first time we tested her in the summer of 2003, she had a tight, barely-tampered-with body, straight from Ukraine. Ames liked her so much he took her out to a bar to meet his friends, where she got violently drunk and passed out. Two weeks later her vagina was so stretched and foul-smelling that it was decided, with great regret, that the relationship just wasn't working out.

4.MASHA. 2005. How brutally realistic was the Swedish anti-sex-trafficking indy flick "Lilya 4-Ever"? Ames tested it by paying a whore, little Masha from Crimea, to come over and watch it with him. Result? She was bored, annoyed, and worried he wouldn't want to fuck her.

5.VIKA. The 40-something whore.2005.As grotesque as it was, she did go the extra mile and try to rim us. Even though we squeezed her mouth away, we had to give her points for effort.