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Mark Ames (1965-) is a Moscow-based American journalist and editor. He is the founding editor of the satirical biweekly the eXile in Moscow, to which he regularly contributes. Ames has also written for the New York Press, The Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Alternet, Птюч Connection, and other periodicals, and is the author of three books.
Biography
Born in 1965, Ames was raised in Saratoga, California, a then-provincial town in the Bay Area's Silicon Valley, where he attended an Episcopalian private school. His Saratoga upbringing produced a lasting influence on his writing.
After leaving Saratoga, Ames attended the University of California, Berkeley while living with his father (his parents had divorced when Ames was eight years old). He later described how his college years shaped his later political views in a section of the eXile book (The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia):
- "I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all. We'd ridicule the boring lefties, our enemies. We'd drop all sorts of drugs and go to the underground shows: Scratch Acid, Husker Du, Sonic Youth. It felt like something might happen, and soon." (excerpt available online)
After college, Ames "lived in poverty and vileness" ("жил в бедности и злобе," according to his publisher's biographical sketch) in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Prague, and played in a short-lived punk band. () In the eXile book he recalls this period of his life as a dull one:
- "The Bush years marked my decline, the Fall of my empire of dreams. When Bush and his golfing buddies got tossed out in '92, I started thinking, hey, Bush and I have a lot in common. Except in one small respect: Bush was a filthy-rich historical figure, whereas I was an unemployed, barely-published, aging zero."
It was during this time that Ames began his gradual migration from California to Moscow. In August 1991 he visited Europe, sojourning for two weeks in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). "That 14-day Homeric adventure on the streets of Leningrad really made an impression," Ames wrote; and though he returned to the United States to live in Foster City, California, he continued thinking of Russia, and delved into Russian literature. At this time Ames also suffered from a painful case of scabies (possibly contracted through a sexual encounter in Russia), whose severity allegedly merited a case-study mention in the New England Journal of Medicine (). After spending mid '92 to early '93 in Prague, Ames moved to Moscow. In 1995 he published The Rise and Fall of Moscow's Expat "Royalty" in the English-language Moscow newspaper The Moscow Times, and was shortly thereafter hired by its competitor Living Here. In 1997 he left to establish the eXile, where he remains as writer and editor.
Bibliography
- The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia (ISBN 0802136524). Co-authored with Matt Taibbi, and published in 2000 with a forward by Edward Limonov.
- В Россию с любовью (Записки американского изгоя), Мама Пресс, 2002. (ISBN 5-902382-02-5) available in Russia. The title can be translated as To Russia with Love (Notes from an American Outcast).
- Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, 2005 (ISBN 1932360824). In this work Ames argues that "killing sprees" at U.S. workplace and schools are acts of political insurgency rather than ordinary crimes or the actions of disturbed individuals.
See also
External links
- A column written by Ames in 2003 for New York Press, about (and against) Spin Magazine writer Chuck Klosterman.
- 'BOOKS' (NY Press, Volume 18, Issue 21, May 25, 2005)
- The Exile - an English language, Moscow-based, semi-weekly alternative paper
- 'Trenchant Warfare!' (Silicon Valley Metro, May 25-31, 2000)
- 'From Russia With Malice' (Reason Magazine, January 2001)
- AlterNet, 3 October 2005, "A Brief History of Rage, Murder and Rebellion" - interview with Ames
- Mark Ames of 'the eXile' - a feature on Mark Ames including a brief introduction by Dan Pulcrano and several excerpts from the eXile book.
- Forbes review of Going Postal, 2 December 2005
- Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman, Greg Palast, and Dan Briody 8 December 2003