B EAST Magazine website

June 11, 2009
Photographs by Vijai
Model: Maria Zhakarova

Kiev’s biweekly Top 10 listings magazine is actually quite a cool zine: A well-designed, edgy contrast to the mainstream Time Out and Afisha. Unlike other local listings mags, Top 10 is more aspirational, choosing often to cover the Venice Biennale or Ibiza than events happening closer to home, despite the fact that a vast majority of Kievans have never ventured beyond Turkey and Egypt. But the magazine, like a transplanted New Yorker for an emerging Kievan elite, sets it sights high and thus separates itself from its competitors, which choose instead to shine shit and hype the local scene instead. So far so good. Somewhat edgy fashion shoots and trend mag design have endeared the publication to us during our stay in Kiev.
However, the praise only makes sense within a local context. Compare Top 10 to the doyens of the trendy listings scene in Europe – Portugal’s Diff or Athen’s Ozon – and it comes across as wanna-be, and desperately unironic. It’s ‘I Love Kiev’ campaign is so so 80s, and except for the heart on the T-shirt being slighty bloodied, it might as well be a children’s hospital in Oregon feeling good about itself. And when the magazine writes about the West, its coverage verges on adulation. Where’s the Beasty vibe, the ‘Eat the West’ attitude that demonstrates local pride.
So, just to show them we’re onto their game, we tore up a recent copy of Top 10. Ok, we admit, we were also bored, not much else going on now that it’s 33 degrees outside. What better thing to do than sip champange in a cool studio and have fun being bad.

B EAST founder, Vijai and the eXile go way way back, to the summer of 1997, and those gonzo days when whoring, smacking drugs, being obnoxious, slanderous, mean—and chasing slutty Russian dyevushki—seemed a literary pursuit. Hunter Thompson was still fresh in our minds, and the high-minded English daily, the Moscow Times, spurred vyked expat writers to reject the mainstream news feeds and go groping the belly of the Russian beast.
Having fallen out with eXile founder Mark Ames over girls and dirty underclothes (lol), the Moscow rag slandered me endlessly, printing club reviews under my name even when I had moved on to edit Russian Playboy in 1999. Given the country’s weak libel laws at the time, there was little that I could do. I just hoped that the loser, misogynistic writing that defined the rag would sink it eventually, and the magazine would go under, leaving sweaty, shy, frustrated Mark Ames without a job. Brave behind the computer screen, he’s actually shy in person, with an inferiority complex towards extroverted partyers. However, the eXile kept going and going … Until this week, that is.

Eleven years later, the eXile seems to be finally going bust. Hurrah. Moscow has moved on, to a more sophisticated nightlife scene, and a young generation that’s bored of endless talk about sluts and speed and hookers and dyevs and all the rest of the loserish 90s zeitgeist. Plus, Russia doesn’t want to be seen anymore as another country to be gleefully exploited by drugged-up Yanks.
However, we do feel a slight pang of regret that Moscow’s only alternative is out of vodka, and might have to go into exile. So, in a spirit of comraderie, with the old skool un-PC beast we also ask our readers to contribute to save the eXile. Click on the link above to donate.