TYBS#31 Art by John John Jesse
It’s a fact that every journalist or editor worth his salt will tell you: this town is full of shady publishing deals. Like magazines and books. Especially magazines. Making one of those things on the rack with the glossy pages and the perfect binding is way harder than making a monster.
I mean, Dr. Viktor Frankenstein only needed lightning, magazines require millions of pesos, an iron will and the ability to work around or withstand stupidity you can’t believe is possible in a race that invented the airplane and the condom. In the face of that, well, lightning is peanuts.
To make a monster: sew body parts, go mad in the process, add lightning. Voila! To make a magazine: get funding, assemble mag, go mad. No voila. Just errors. This system is non-operational.
I’ve lost count of the meetings, brainstormings and power lunches I’ve attended over the years for magazines that supposedly had solid funding, a great concept that balanced the commercial with the artistic and publishers willing to take risks. I’ve lost count of how many of them have never seen the light of the printing press.
Recently, my band mate told me the term in the TV industry that’s the equivalent of this vanishing act: cancelled. Cue Krusty the Clown clutching his curly Jewish hairdo and stomping his tiny boots, “Cancelled! What do you mean cancelled?! I already bought five dozen pies” Yeah, cancelled. Succinct. To the point. Perfect as a pie in the face.
I say this because yet another publication in the works led me to believe that their dealings were honest and transparent, and that they sincerely wanted to make a different kind of glossy. Of course, I was wrong. After a month of meetings, they asked me to come in regularly (timed bundy clock hours, mind) without having seen a shadow of a contract or a peek at a terms of employment. Regular editorial management without a contract? Promises of a fat check at the end of the month without having signed a thing? No effing way.
While you can chalk it up to experience and say that it goes with the territory it still feels like falling for the wrong women. Somehow you can’t shake the feeling that, by this time, your instincts should be more sophisticated, professionalism in those you deal with equal to yours, and the notion of employees assessing the employer just as stringently as it is in the vice versa being a given.
You take pride in your ability to sniff out bullshit. You tell yourself that your sixth sense acts like a polygraph for detecting charming but hollow pitches, classic signs of deadendom by the second issue, increasing compromises to vision, field insurance and trust that finally lead to a reduction in the promised salary. You say to yourself: this will not happen again. Shame on me if they fool me again with their grifter methods, con men tricks and shylock fast talk. Like falling for the wrong women ad nauseam, I tell you.
In retrospect I should have been tipped off by the fact that my prospective boss didn’t say a word when I asked him which articles he wanted to write for the first issue. Guy, just because somebody gives you the position of editor doesn’t mean you ARE one. For one thing, it assumes you can write. And not just your own name either. But hindsight is always 20/20, so perhaps my glasses need a higher grade.
I don’t even blame the magazine people for trying to pull a fast one -- though they can shove their ideas right where the empty husk of their heads are – because it’s just in their nature to do so. Just because the world is not fair. Just because the Ari Golds of this world outnumber creatives.
What I feel most upset over is that I feel I should have detected this sooner. That it never should have gotten to the point that I felt complacent enough to hang everything on it and not have an immediate escape plan, a point of egress, a fall back option.
If I didn’t love these creatures of glossy tree bark, jumbled alphabet and pictures I would say no to any kind of magazine deal and go into pure porn. But I continually put myself out there because I love starting something from scratch and being version one point oh of something. The chance to make something “new” (or at least relatively fresh) is something I will not pass up, two-faced publishing people notwithstanding.
It’s like getting a try at Goliath. Bringing down the giant is the reward itself. Yet, the void lies in wait like a coiled predator on each and every writer’s, journalist’s and editor’s paper trail and the trick is to never break eye contact as you scribble away against its entropic force.
What’s the moral lesson? Once in a while, like the inevitably of a driver crashing his car, the good guys will fall in (and the hardy will come out with stories and scars) but there is a special hell reserved for the magazine trickster who promises ghostly contracts. A very special hell.
For young journalists dreaming of being the next Hunter S. Thompson and making the local equivalent of Rolling Stone, remember that HST blew his head off. You’ve been warned.
I mean, Dr. Viktor Frankenstein only needed lightning, magazines require millions of pesos, an iron will and the ability to work around or withstand stupidity you can’t believe is possible in a race that invented the airplane and the condom. In the face of that, well, lightning is peanuts.
To make a monster: sew body parts, go mad in the process, add lightning. Voila! To make a magazine: get funding, assemble mag, go mad. No voila. Just errors. This system is non-operational.
I’ve lost count of the meetings, brainstormings and power lunches I’ve attended over the years for magazines that supposedly had solid funding, a great concept that balanced the commercial with the artistic and publishers willing to take risks. I’ve lost count of how many of them have never seen the light of the printing press.
Recently, my band mate told me the term in the TV industry that’s the equivalent of this vanishing act: cancelled. Cue Krusty the Clown clutching his curly Jewish hairdo and stomping his tiny boots, “Cancelled! What do you mean cancelled?! I already bought five dozen pies” Yeah, cancelled. Succinct. To the point. Perfect as a pie in the face.
I say this because yet another publication in the works led me to believe that their dealings were honest and transparent, and that they sincerely wanted to make a different kind of glossy. Of course, I was wrong. After a month of meetings, they asked me to come in regularly (timed bundy clock hours, mind) without having seen a shadow of a contract or a peek at a terms of employment. Regular editorial management without a contract? Promises of a fat check at the end of the month without having signed a thing? No effing way.
While you can chalk it up to experience and say that it goes with the territory it still feels like falling for the wrong women. Somehow you can’t shake the feeling that, by this time, your instincts should be more sophisticated, professionalism in those you deal with equal to yours, and the notion of employees assessing the employer just as stringently as it is in the vice versa being a given.
You take pride in your ability to sniff out bullshit. You tell yourself that your sixth sense acts like a polygraph for detecting charming but hollow pitches, classic signs of deadendom by the second issue, increasing compromises to vision, field insurance and trust that finally lead to a reduction in the promised salary. You say to yourself: this will not happen again. Shame on me if they fool me again with their grifter methods, con men tricks and shylock fast talk. Like falling for the wrong women ad nauseam, I tell you.
In retrospect I should have been tipped off by the fact that my prospective boss didn’t say a word when I asked him which articles he wanted to write for the first issue. Guy, just because somebody gives you the position of editor doesn’t mean you ARE one. For one thing, it assumes you can write. And not just your own name either. But hindsight is always 20/20, so perhaps my glasses need a higher grade.
I don’t even blame the magazine people for trying to pull a fast one -- though they can shove their ideas right where the empty husk of their heads are – because it’s just in their nature to do so. Just because the world is not fair. Just because the Ari Golds of this world outnumber creatives.
What I feel most upset over is that I feel I should have detected this sooner. That it never should have gotten to the point that I felt complacent enough to hang everything on it and not have an immediate escape plan, a point of egress, a fall back option.
If I didn’t love these creatures of glossy tree bark, jumbled alphabet and pictures I would say no to any kind of magazine deal and go into pure porn. But I continually put myself out there because I love starting something from scratch and being version one point oh of something. The chance to make something “new” (or at least relatively fresh) is something I will not pass up, two-faced publishing people notwithstanding.
It’s like getting a try at Goliath. Bringing down the giant is the reward itself. Yet, the void lies in wait like a coiled predator on each and every writer’s, journalist’s and editor’s paper trail and the trick is to never break eye contact as you scribble away against its entropic force.
What’s the moral lesson? Once in a while, like the inevitably of a driver crashing his car, the good guys will fall in (and the hardy will come out with stories and scars) but there is a special hell reserved for the magazine trickster who promises ghostly contracts. A very special hell.
For young journalists dreaming of being the next Hunter S. Thompson and making the local equivalent of Rolling Stone, remember that HST blew his head off. You’ve been warned.
P.S. This essay ends the official Philippine Chronicle run of TYBS. This site is now a horror writer's blog.
~ 30
~ 30
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