The King of Nothing to Do #2

The second installment of my column should be out in the Manila Bulletin today. Woo hoo! This time around, I wrote about writing about music, PULP stylee. An excerpt:

"It’s been a while since we used midgets."

That was an actual statement from an actual editorial meeting for the publication I used to work for... I used to be a staffer for PULP magazine, the notorious music-oriented monthly. (Or, as an old friend of mine put it when I told her who my employer was: “PULP? Every mother’s nightmare, PULP?!” She should know; she’s a mother of two). PULP made its name by catering to the obsessive fan of music—particularly the heavy, stave-in-your-skull variety—and by staging elaborate, outrageous photo shoots involving anything from freaks, Vikings, religious iconography and buckets of fake blood to, yes, some vertically challenged members of our society. (Oh, and more often than not, naked women). Politically correct was something it never aspired to be, but it was undeniably attention-grabbing...

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as some smart aleck once said, what we were doing was like tap-dancing about architecture, or cartwheeling about biochemistry, or some other playful variation on the original analogy.