Borak: Hurray For Half-Truths

Magazines are cool, or so they’d like you to believe. Having spent a bulk of my late teen years reading GQ, Q, and FHM, I’ve always thought the life of a magazine hack consisted of getting drunk one night before interviewing a celebrity the morning after. And knowing celebrities was what I shamelessly craved for—a notion that British mag hack Toby Young coined as “starfucker.”

Short of being a celebrity myself—a notion dismissed at the thought of a humourless, self-deprecating, and non-distinct looking celebrity—delving into the world of magazine journalism was decidedly the only reasonable way I could obtain Paula Malai Ali's number.

Besides, writing is also a profession I could apply for using “aspiring writer” as a resume qualification and still come away with a job. This, if you think about it, is quite amazing, considering it's the equivalent of someone buying IKEA furniture, assembling it, and then deciding that it'd be a good idea to pursue a career as an architect. That being said, my current employers bought it (twice), as did my other employers with FHM, The Sun, and Chrome (a men's fashion magazine where I was deputy editor. It has since folded).

After four years in this biz, I've always had the sneaky suspicion that my jig as a writer will be exposed. Writing, after all, is no rare skill, as the crayon-coloured teeth of five-year-olds can attest to. I remember the incident this illusory bubble burst. It was at an editorial meeting when the editor asked us what we did for weekends. The writers around me paused, looked at each other, and then answered that they'd rather stay in.

You'd forgive the editor for the slack-jawed, incredulous look he wore. Here, after all, was the nexus of a hip urbanite magazine, which he now finds out is being run by a team that likes nothing better than avoid the weekend traffic. Since then, I've always sensed an implicit, roguish trust between magazine writers—that the reason why we still have our jobs is not because of that vague concept of talent, but how good we fib it.

This trust doesn't extend to newspaper writers, however. Whereas newspapers can only be what they are—the news—magazines, and by extension, its writers, have to dazzle readers with an over-the-top reality. It's a common thread in each magazine I've worked at. FHM portrays an image that hot women are walking in and about the office in a constant state of undress; KLue is populated by high-browed critics determining coolness like Joaquin Phoenix's thumbs-up-or-down in Gladiator; and Chrome was dominated by staffers who would desire nothing less than the latest Paul Smith jacket. The truth, however, is that hacks could not be more high-browed Roger Ebert shaved off all his facial hair. And sadly, no women walk into the office half-naked.

This is not to say, for the benefit of my current and future employment, that magazines lie. Like over-posturing, collar-up, name-dropping guys you meet in clubs, magazines tell half-truths. There would be no point otherwise—no one wants to read about sleeping in and watching DVDs. There'd be no “content,” we'd be out of a job, and you won't have anything to read while you’re going through the motions in the morning.

In spite of all this, I did manage to achieve an enviable status of having a few celebrities keyed into my mobile. This too is an illusion of grandeur I was glad to purport, seeing that those who envied me were earning three times my salary. Truth is, besides having their cell phone numbers and intimate knowledge of certain measurements, calling out Hannah or Marion for drinks bugs me as somewhat unprofessional. Being on a first-name basis and knowing their bust sizes, I suspect, are not an invitation for booty calls.

Despite being somewhat disillusioned and cynical of the business, I'm still in it because of the duplicity. Newspapers may explain the human condition, but only magazines actually live out humanity, or at least the fantasy of it. It's the best cure for a cynical world.

John Lim still doesn't have Paula's number.