Matt Taibbi is a thrower of coffee, horse semen pies to the face

Whenever anyone questions my adoration for Matt Taibbi in the future, I’m going to send them the link to this amazing Vanity Fair article on The Exile, a now-defunct English-language Moscow alt weekly.

Yet The Exile was too vitriolic to romanticize for long or to consult just its fans. And listening to the critics is too fun. They call (Mark) Ames and (Matt) Taibbi, singly or in combination, children, louts, misogynists, madmen, pigs, hypocrites, anarchists, fascists, racists, and fiends. According to Carol Williams, of the Los Angeles Times, “It seemed like a bunch of kids who’d somehow gotten funding for their own little newspaper.” A former New York Times Moscow-bureau chief, Michael Wines, offered a no-comment comment. “I think I’ll pass, thank you,” he e-mailed, “except to repeat what I said at the time, and what Shaw said a lot earlier: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”

Of course, a pig is probably not the farm animal that comes to Wines’s mind first when he’s reminded of The Exile. It was Wines, then the Times’s Moscow-bureau chief, who, having won The Exile’s coveted Worst Journalist in Russia March Madness contest in 2001, was typing in his office when Ames and Taibbi rushed in unannounced and, by way of congratulations, slammed a pie in his face. The pie was made with fresh vanilla cream, hand-puréed strawberry, and five ounces of horse semen.

‘That’s what he said?,” Ames asks when I relay Wines’s comment. “He said the same thing back then, the poor bastard."

Go read the whole thing. I did earlier and still feel like I need a cigarette.