Pete’s Exhaustive Review of Modelland

Introduction

Fuck you, it’s Modelland.

That’s the slogan I came up with for this project. Or a chorus, if you will.

My first attempt to read Tyra Banks’ Modelland started in 2012. It also ended in 2012, somewhere about 20% into the book. I couldn’t take any more. There were so many other things I could enjoy, why spend time on Modelland? There were birds…trees…

Then, in 2015, I decided “fuck birds and trees.”

I threw up a Kickstarter. Pete’s Exhaustive Review of Modelland. And with that, I answered the question, “How much would money would convince me to read Modelland?”

A hundo, it turns out. A well-earned hundo.

I read the damn book, and as part of the deal, I wrote a long, detailed, exhaustive review.

And here it is.

Now, full disclosure, this gets long. About 50,000 words long, if numbers matter to you. There was just so much to say, so much to outline, and so many dead ends and wrong turns that made reviewing the book a true challenge. Which details are significant, and which will be dropped almost immediately and without fanfare? Which characters will return, and which will be left to the wayside as completely unimportant? It’s impossible to say.

But I’ll say this: the book itself clocks in at over 500 pages, and I counted exactly ONE decent joke in those pages. So if you want to experience the crazy of Modelland without the pain, or at least without ALL of the pain, then this is the way to go.

Think about this like the MST3K of book reviews. Frame by frame, page by page, we’ll go through this mother.

Crack a beer. Maybe five. Hundred. And enjoy Pete’s Exhaustive Review of Modelland.

 

The Journey Begins

Modelland. Here begins the chronicle of my second run at Modelland.

I just want to start off with something here. A problem I’ve found in talking about bad books or movies or games or whatever.

Sometimes I find that, when you’re getting into something that’s bizarre, it tends to sound awesome.

I’ll give you an example. I was talking about the movie Escape Plan just this morning, and I described it like this: “Well, Stallone and Schwazenegger have to excape (that’s what I think the movie should have been, The Excape Plan) from the same prison that I’m pretty sure was in Face/Off, and they blow up the guy from the Jesus movie with a missile and 50-Cent is like a computer hacker.”

If someone described a movie to me that way, I would want to see it. That sounds like the perfect movie, really. Stallone, Schwarzenegger. The meeting of Jesus and modern warfare technology.

When you describe something terrible by kind of explaining how terrible it is, well, there’s fun to be had. And there was fun in Escape Plan. And when you describe it, you have to think , “Why didn’t I enjoy that more…oh yeah, because what I described was the 2 minutes of fun in 2 hours of movie.”

That’s the problem. Not the absence of fun, but the ratio of fun to not fun. 50-Cent being the tech guy occupies 10% of my review, but he was in like 2% of the movie. The Jesus guy is the Jesus guy to me, but it’s not like anyone in the movie acknowledges how funny it is to blow up Jesus with a missile.

Which kind of brings us to the other problem. When I talk about Stallone being a prison escape artist, I know that’s stupid. I’m not so sure that Escape Plan knows it. If a movie kind of knows it’s a little stupid, things tend to work out better. For example, the Stallone/Kurt Russel vehicle Tango & Cash. I’m pretty convinced that at least SOME of the people involved with that had a pretty good idea that they were making a stupid movie. How seriously can you discuss a battle van?

With Escape Plan, I’m not convinced. Maybe a couple people had an idea, but I don’t think most of the cast and crew realized they were making a hilarious movie, and therefore it doesn’t feel like a hilarious movie. It’s mostly kind of boring.

Modelland is 569 pages long. It’s jammed with crazy. Packed to the gills? Balls to the wall? Is that the same? It’s filled to the balls with crazy.

I have a suspicion that, in some ways, based on this review, Modelland is going to sound fun. When I describe just how tortured the whole thing is, I think it’s going to sound pretty fun.

Let me reassure you. Although it’s fun to discuss, it’s not fun to read. Based on my previous experience, it’s painful. Even at a few pages per day, it’s a slog.

Without further ado, let’s start with the introduction.

 

Modelland Introduction

The intro to Modelland is a few pages of italicized type that makes no sense.

One of my least favorite ways to start a narrative, just throw me in with a narrator narrating a bunch of crazy words that mean nothing. Throw me into the body of someone I’ve never met, who is mid-conversation with someone else I’ve never met, and don’t worry about bringing me up to speed. There’s no time! We only have 569 pages here. Let’s get clipping along!

Rather than parse the text of the introduction, which I don’t think is comprehensible, I want to include my favorite portion.

The Land you thirst for has loomed at the top of the mountain in Metopia for as long as you can remember. But for most of the year, it’s covered in fog, its color changing with each passing day as if it’s a gargantuan mood ring. You begin your mornings staring at the fog, longing for the fateful evening when it will turn a golden yellow and then, finally, like a push-up brassiere, lift.

This little section is pretty representative of the entire book, honestly, and you can take a lot from it. It’s so weird so early.

I mean, I have to believe that 250 pages into reading this thing, ANY editor would probably say, “Fuck this shit. Just let Tyra say whatever. Who cares? I only work here because everyone pretends not to notice that I smoke at my desk.”

I picture ALL editors as J. Jonah Jameson, by the way.

But this is the beginning. The start of this tale. And for me, it all comes down to the little line at the end, the one about how fog lifts like a brassiere.

When the word “lift” is used with fog, it means “dissipate.” Right? The fog dissipated.

When the word “lift” is used with a bra, it means “elevate.” The bra elevated.

If my analysis sounds right to you, then Tyra’s little comparison here means that she thinks either

A) Fog goes away by ascending into the sky, where it remains always.

or

B) Bras have a tendency to vanish.

I might have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way a bra works. I might. It is not my understanding that, like fog, a bra dissipates in the presence sunshine or wind. Possible third dissipation option,  Scott-Baio-based-superpower from that Scott Baio movie where he had some sort of magic power and mostly used it to make bras disappear. You know, that movie that really seemed like a Charles in Charge prequel movie, but they were like, “Hmm…being in charge isn’t enough. Let’s give him a superpower or something, or like a sassy parrot.”

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Tyra’s right. But I kind of doubt it. I kind of think what happened here is Tyra picked what she thought was a good comparison because both phrases have the word “lift”, and no one told her No. Which is an on-going theme here. If I had to create a subtitle for this book, the full title that appeared on the book’s cover would be Modelland: The Time Nobody Told Tyra No.

A strange and prophetic start.

 

Introducing: Tookie

In chapter one of Modelland we’re introduced to a whole lot of mess. A whole mess of stuff.

First mess, Tooke De La Creme. Our heroine.

Tookie de la Creme is teenage Tyra. No need to beat around the bush. Tyra’s admitted this herself in interviews. Plus, in description, Tookie matches Teen Tyra to a T(yra), except that Tookie has one yellow eye and one…I don’t know, probably an eye made of fire or something? Purple? Who gives a shit.

Here’s what’s weird about it. Tookie calls herself a Forgetta-Girl. As in a forgettable girl, someone nobody really remembers even after they meet her. Tyra describes Tookie’s flaws, mostly. Tall forehead. Wild hair. Aaaand that’s pretty much it.

This is Tyra Banks at age 15, people. A woman who moved to Milan to model when she was 16. First African-American woman on Sports Illustrated Swimsuit’s cover and Victoria’s Secret’s cover. These milestones might or might not align with your definition of success, but I don’t know if there are a lot more ways a person can be told they are attractive.

Reading this description and understanding that 15 year-old Tyra is being defined as unattractive, it just made me feel like I must be uglier than I thought. Because my flaws at 15? Holy shit. I don’t need to get down on myself, but there was acne on the level of medical intervention.

You know, a good test of how hot you are might be the Tyra-Milan test. Tyra’s looks took her to Milan. That’s how far she could leverage looks. Looks per mile, if you will. My looks? I mean, I rode the bus. And I paid for the bus. I couldn’t even get a bus driver, a public figure we’ve all acknowledged to be creepy, to notice me and let me ride free. What does that tell you?

The real problem introduced with Tookie is the problem of beauty, and it’s one that goes through the entire book. We’re made to understand that Tookie is not conventionally attractive. She’s teenage Tyra, and also unattractive. So which one is it? Is she headed to Milan in 12 months or is she a Forgetta-Girl?

Sure, we all go through our awkward phases. Tyra, like a lot of beautiful people, is quick to point out that she was an “ugly duckling” of sorts until she blossomed into adulthood. This is something beautiful people LOVE to say. How they know what it’s like to be an uggo because they were once unattractive too. They identify with our struggle. They weren’t always one of the most beautiful people on an entire planet.

Let me tell you something, and this comes from the uggos. It’s not being ugly for a time that’s difficult. It’s accepting that you are, and will remain, not hot. While I totally get that you beautiful people look back on your pre-teen years and shudder, might I advise that you don’t try to bring us uggos onto your side by explaining that you were ugly too…before you got hot?

Tyra, saying that you know the ugliness feels, it’s like telling a paraplegic that you understand what it must be like because your leg fell asleep once.

Also, while we’re on the topic, The Ugly Duckling is the stupidest story ever. We ALL learn a great lesson because this duck is really ugly and has low self-esteem, and then he gets hot. So I guess the lesson is wait and then you’ll get hot, so don’t worry about it? Because every adult goes through a hot phase?

Alright, back to the book. Back to Tookie.

Instead of doing what hot people do in school, like…I don’t know, wearing letter jackets and shoving nerds into lockers and stuff, Tookie skips class and lays around in the hallway, shooting whip cream into her mouth straight from the can.

And already I start getting the idea that Tyra was so busy modeling at 15 that she doesn’t even really know how school works. Because Tookie is the bestest school-skipper of all time, and she skips class to lay around in the hallway. She doesn’t even leave the school. Just hangs out there so we can be introduced to some more characters.

More characters? Well, surely we don’t need any more characters, you must be saying. But Modelland, like whichever dumb TV station, has that “characters welcome” philosophy, is crappy and has plenty of characters to go around.

Let’s meet Myrracle. Myrracle is Tookie’s sister, and just in case you weren’t sure which child was the golden child, one of them is named Myrracle. Our introduction to Myrracle is pretty brief. Myrracle sings some song about how she and Tookie don’t share DNA as she passes in the school’s hallway. Which is really dumb. I mean, if there was one thing that’s not going to hurt your sister, it’s a completely made-up non-fact. Tookie and Myrracle do share DNA. They’re sisters. That’s one of the very few things they share, for sure, regardless of how they feel about it.

Anyway, all we need to know about Myrracle is that she’s the bratty bitch favorite.

Then we meet Zarpessa. She is the bratty bitch favorite too. But favorite of Tookie’s love interest as opposed to Tookie’s parents.

Which brings us to Theophilus Lovelaces. Tookie’s love interest.

Yes, we have four characters now, and their names are Tookie, Myrracle, Zarpessa, and Theophilus.

Who is Theophilus? Well, he’s the handsome, if short, class president awesome cool guy who is kind and does everything right except for dating one of the worst humans on the planet, Zarpessa.

Did this…did this ever happen in real life?

I felt like this high school, perfect-person-dating-the-jerk narrative comes up in movies all the time, but when I look at it now, as an adult, I just feel like it’s kinda dumb. When I look back at high school, most of the people I thought were jerks really were only kind of jerks, and the people they dated were pretty much equivalent jerks. It was just that one set of jerks had boobs and butts, and because I was young, people who had boobs and butts seemed nice to me. Because, again, I was dumb, and there were these weird, horny fluids in my brain (penis). It’s a logic that only applies for about three years of youth, when a person says, “Well, this person has boobs and a butt, so they CAN’T be bad. I wonder what that boobs and a butt is doing with that jerk?”

So I GUESS the perfect person dating the hell bastard happens in real life, in a way, but it’s an issue of perception. And because Modelland is written in third-person, not from Tookie’s perspective, things are pretty confusing. If Tookie was seeing things that way, it’d make sense. But the book is telling me that Zarpessa is evil incarnate and Theo is perfect.

However, all of that is really more a critique of a common narrative. It’s not nearly the worst of Modelland’s sins. Really, at least it’s a plot I’m familiar with, so I feel like I SORT OF know what’s happening there. The use of a cliched plot device, the aligning of the love interest with the enemy, is one of the better parts of the book so far. At least it’s something I understand.

Let’s talk about the main action in this chapter, show you what I mean.

Theo is wearing a button. It’s printed with his campaign slogan for his bid to become class president, and his campaign slogan is “VOTE FOR LOVE.” Which, I guess, refers to his ridiculous name, Theophilus, which means “Lover of God.” The origin of his last name, Lovelaces, I can only assume has to do with an affinity for the shoes that lace up and a bitter hatred of velcro.

I don’t know. I don’t know that Tyra picked these names with a lot of purpose. I don’t know whether she looked into the names or sort of picked them from the world’s worst, ugliest, most stupidest hat.

What I do know is that the button falls from Theo’s jacket, gets kicked all around the halls of the school, stepped on, and it zings into the lunch room trash. It’s like the fucking magic bullet that killed JFK, except even more painful to ONE brain. My brain, you guys.

My brain hurts. My brain hurts worse than if it were national tragedy-ed. Why?

I’ll let Tyra explain what Tookie sees when she retrieves the button:

The poor thing was badly damaged, dented and slimy from its voyage. In fact, it no longer said VOTE FOR LOVE. Instead, the V and O and E of the first word were gone, the F and R of the second were totally erased, and of the last word, the L was knocked into nonexistence and the V was scratched so badly it resembled a K, but the E remained intact. Tookie almost threw the button back into the trash before her eyes focused again and she saw that it now spelled its own version of…her.

T  O  OKE

Okay. Let’s hold the phone.

What Tyra did here was to create this sort of fate-based incident. A button is mangled and kicked around, and the text changes from VOTE FOR LOVE to   T  O  OKE.

The problem I have isn’t with a fate-based coincidence here, even though it’s kind of stupid because the only thing that makes coincidence interesting is when it’s real. Or possibly prophecised way ahead of time the way it is in a book like A Prayer for Owen Meany.

The problem I have is that this is a set up coincidence, so why not make the resulting text on the button MAKE FUCKING SENSE!?

Tyra can start off with whatever fucking words she wants on that button. Why not something that could actually be altered and wind up looking like “Tooke,” or for that matter, throw in an “I” so it might result in THE ACTUAL SPELLING OF THE NAME TOOKIE!?!!?!??! What the fuck? Guys, what the fuck?

Is this Tyra’s threshold of believability? If she added the one extra letter, it’d be too wild?

I just wish she would have THOUGHT about it. Because god knows I have.

Here are just a few things that could result in the button displaying “TOOKIE” and still be campaign slogans on the level of VOTE FOR LOVE:

Theo: The Look, The Brains, The Prez
Vote for Theo, Keep It Real
Time To Rock The Presidency

I mean, they aren’t awesome, but this is 5 minutes of thinking here. I didn’t even use the word TOOK which is pretty low-hanging fruit. Or TOO. Really, there are so many good options it’s ridiculous.

While I have you here, let’s just wrap up the chapter with the rest of the weird shit Tyra throws in.

T-Mail Jail: This is what Tookie calls her notebook. She uses it to write letters to her friends that no one will read. The notebook’s cover is adorned with scribbles begging people to look inside, the reverse of the old KEEP OUT and TOP SECRET. At first I thought this was a really dumb version of reverse psychology, but the chapter made me think that Tookie is actually SO DESPERATE to be noticed that she wants people to read her secret diary. She really is pathetic. She keeps lamenting how nobody notices her, but maybe the problem is that they’re turned off by the way she lays on the floor in the hallway and writes PLEASE READ ME on the cover of her notebook.

TDOD: The Day of Discovery. This is the day when girls are whisked away to Modelland. It is coming right up, believe it or not. Something Tyra really likes is making sort-of acronyms. Something Tyra is not very good at is making sort-of acronyms. For example, did it not occur to her to leave out “the” and “of” and call it DD or Double-D? Which also has a second meaning in the world of clothing and fashion and women?

B3: The stupid name for the school Tookie attends, which is called B3 because it used to be a factory that made Buttons…Baubles and Bullshit? I don’t know. It made three things and they all started with B, and then it was converted from a factory into a school for no fuckin reason. And the vents belch weird gases from time to time, and no one seems interested in that.

 

Tyra Time

As part of this review, I do also want to talk a little Tyra, explain a little of how this book came to be. While I was looking into this, I kept seeing that Tyra was a Harvard grad. Which blew my fucking mind. Not because I think all beautiful people are dumb, but because I think Tyra is kind of dumb.

Okay, there’s this whole idea that anyone who is successful must be SORT OF smart. The kind of, “If she’s so dumb, why is she more successful than you?” kind of thinking. Or this idea that so and so knows how to market himself. He’s not only a successful board shorts model, but he’s actually a really savvy business man.

My personal theory, we created these narratives because we don’t want to believe that some people just get things. That sometimes luck is a factor, and that sometimes a fool gets lucky.

So let’s just toss out this Harvard grad business out the door.

Tyra did attend Harvard. But she didn’t get a degree. She got a certificate for completing course work in the Owner/President Management Program, which does not grant degrees or academic titles. The classes do not count towards any degree programs. Jezebel wrote a long article about it, and I’ll sum up what they seemed to be getting at: The application to the OPMP asks about your current income, and, as of 3 years ago, the cost for a single course was $33,000. Sounds to me like Harvard has set aside a few courses for rich people who want to say they went to Harvard.

To say Tyra went to Harvard, that’s like me saying “I played basketball at Duke” when what I did was play a game of basketball on the Duke campus with other people who were just around.

There you go.

 

 

Bookz 4 Teenz

This is where the book takes a total trip to teen book town, big time, for real. Every element in this chapter is straight out of a book with a title like Teen Scene: Write It So They’ll Read It or GRL, U NEED 2 WRITE CAN HAZ BOOKS or something.

Basically, this part contains every element used to beef up a teen novel, all jammed into the same chapter.

This isn’t me bashing on teen lit right now. There’s great teen lit, and even great teen lit that uses the tropes I’m about to scream about. But let’s play fair. If teen lit is a legitimate and deserving genre, which it is, then we have to acknowledge that there’s some garbage in there too and that it’s not above criticism.

What makes it so awful in Modelland, what makes these teen-itizing attempts so horrible, is that they seem like such naked grabs at story that isn’t there. Let’s take a look at the three biggies in this chapter.

First, we have Tookie, our main stah, lamenting how there’s no way in hell she’ll be picked to go to Modelland. The place, not the title. She’s already in the BOOK called Modelland, now she wants to go to the place WITHIN the book that also has the same name. You know, like how most books are named after the place where the people go, like how the book Battle Royale was originally called Asian Kid Death Island, and how The Shining was called The Hauntedest Room In The Whole Stanley Hotel.

Modelland’s premise is a Willy Wonka kind of thing. Some people are selected somehow, and those selected people are whisked away to Modelland. And Tookie is moping around, always saying things like, “Sigh. I know I’ll never get picked for Modelland. Might as well not even try.”

Now, I’m reading a book called Modelland in which a young woman is talking an awful lot about Modelland. If Tookie didn’t actually end up being selected to go to Modelland, I’ll be pretty shocked and disappointed. It’s obvious she’s going, right? Is there any way the plot in this could twist to the point that Tookie doesn’t go to Modelland?

And this is trope the first. We have some sort of role to fill, and we have a character that doubts his or her place, his or her ability to step into a big pair of shoes. Take Hunger Games (original title: Vaguely Medieval Kid Death Park). Will Katniss go or won’t she? The first book has a very brief misdirect that makes it seem like Katniss won’t be headed to stab teens in the eye with arrows, but then, of course, she goes. It’s a used idea, and it’s there, but Hunger Games keeps the will she/won’t she pretty brief. We don’t spend a lot of time wondering, and that’s probably because the author figured the story really happens when we get to the HUNGER GAMES, so let’s get the characters to the HUNGER GAMES already.

We get some of the same medicine in Harry Potter (original title: Platform 9 ¾, Followed By A Train Ride, Ending at Castle School). Oh man, will Harry be able to get back to Hogwart’s, even though those bastard Dursley’s are always fucking with him?

By the way, one of the worst things about that series. Jesus Christ, why in the holy hell would they send Harry back to live with his shithead relatives? That’s madness. Second question, why would he go? Couldn’t he just work at Target, or Wizard Target or whatever and pay rent somewhere? Don’t wizards need hand towels? Harry could sell hand towels over the break, live in…I don’t know, one of the a billion rooms in Hogwart’s. There are secret ghost rooms and shit all over that school. There was a troll in a bathroom and nobody noticed. The least they could do is clear out a closet under a staircase. I don’t think that’s asking a lot for the kid who basically saves the Magicaverse or whatever.

Maze Runner. Again, same thing. “Gee, I hope I become a maze runner instead of, whatever, a farmer or some shit. I hope in this book called MAZE RUNNER I get the chance to be a MAZE RUNNER.”

So that’s trope the first. That aspirational bit. The problem in Modelland is the constant “Golly, there’s no way a loser like me is going to Modelland” when we, as readers, know there’s no goddamn way we’re NOT going to Modelland. We all know we’re going there, so let’s just go there already.

Oh, and the timeline is a real bastard too.

Skipping ahead, in Modelland, the characters arrive in Modelland on page 149. One hundred and fifty pages to get through before we open the doors to Modelland. What the fuck? I have to wait that goddamn long to get to the place I’m told about IN THE TITLE? Holy shit.

150 pages, even if these pages aren’t dense, that’s going to take a while. Let’s call it a minute for every 2 pages, let’s be generous, it’s still going to take me 75 minutes to get to Modelland. Do you know how long the ENTIRE Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie lasts? 100 minutes. In the time it’s going to take me to get TO Modelland, I could have seen a fatso drown in chocolate, watched the scariest goddamn boat ride ever, pondered the plight of little people actors, remembered that Mike TV seemed like an okay kid whose mom just never pushed back when he pushed the boundaries, and be pretty much ready to wrap it all up.

This is taking forever.

But to be fair, there’s some world-building to be done here. Let’s move on to trope 2.

Trope 2 is a society that is divided very sharply into different sectors, sometimes geographically, sometimes by job or position. But there’s always a division, and it’s always super-important where you land within that division. You know, which wizard house you’re in, whether you’re a pretty or an ugly, ninja turtle or battletoad.

The world of Modelland is divided into geographical quadrants. We don’t know a lot about the quadrants, but what we do know is Tookie is in the shitty one. It’s hot as hell, windy as hell, if hell is windy, and mostly made up of factories that make jewelry and crap.

What bugs me about this shit, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything in particular preventing Tookie from leaving Shitsville and moving right over to Awesomeburg. Some teen books handle this stuff through technology that prevents movement, or they toss in other magic or genetic ways that lock people in. In Modelland, Tookie was just unfortunate enough to be born on the wrong side of the tracks, and apparently doesn’t have the…will? The will to jump over to the other side?

It’s another trope that kind of sucks. If you have these different castes or whatever, you gotta explain to me why people can’t move between them. Gattaca was a movie based entirely on explaining the ways in which someone could move between stupid lines drawn by a stupid society. Ethan Hawke had a fridge full of piss! That’s a barrier, right there. Tookie’s main barrier? I don’t know. She’s too busy…I have no idea.

I know, I know. It’s not that easy in real life. I’d like to move myself and haven’t managed it. But I know a big part of my problem. I’m comfy. I think there’s potential to be happier, but I’m happy enough. I’m sure as hell not living in a land of intense, crazy heat, working in a toe ring factory and living with my shithead parents. Meanwhile, Awesomeburg is about 5 miles away. It’s a long walk, but holy shit, get a backbone and then put a backpack on that backbone and start walking.

Not to get all lit professor here, but I think this whole thing speaks to a desire most teens have to get out of their one-horse town and see the world. It’s weird when you’re a teen because you probably have access to a car. You could just drive off and leave wherever and go wherever. But there’s this other stuff that keeps you where you are, at least for a little while. It’s not so much physical or tangible, but there’s life stuff that lets teens ride it out, part of which is the knowledge that high school will end and then they can pick a path.

With Tookie, we’ve got a loser who is headed for a life of loserdom, and there’s no getting out of it. Except simply getting out of it. AND we all know that she’s destined to get out of it, as seen in trope one. Which means that seeing how crappy her town is doesn’t mean a whole lot, and we’re just dicking around like a bunch of fools, waiting to be swept away to stupid Modelland. We’re really just killing time here pondering whether a quest will happen when we know it’s ABSOLUTELY going to happen, hoping to get out of a town when we know that is ABSOLUTELY going to happen as well.

Which brings us to trope number three, real world problems.

A lot of teen lit deals with real world shit, and like any medium it has varying levels of success. Some books are successful in realistically portraying something, others are more heightened and use real world shit to bring some drama to a relationship or situation. And then some just seem to throw real world drama in there because why the hell not?

Right in that last category, why the hell not, let’s introduce Tookie’s friend, the Cutter.

The Cutter is a crazy girl who is Tookie’s only friend. She’s homeless, sort of. She lives in a treehouse that’s described as being filled with jugs of water and pastries and also has a twin mattress in it. The narrator points out that she doesn’t know how a mattress got up there, and points out that there’s no explaining how a young girl carried a twin mattress into a treehouse. I wasn’t exactly dying for an explanation on that one. It would have been fine to go ahead and not highlight a mattress brought high up into a tree, especially in a world where we’ve already seen an insane, Rube-Goldberg-ian action sequence to alter the spelling on a button, a world in which we’ve got characters with names like Theophilus Lovelaces. A mattress in a tree house, something accomplishable with a little know-how, isn’t the first thing in this book that made me say, “Now hold on. I’m up for believing a lot, but this is a bridge too far.” Yet, someone decided we needed to highlight the inexplicable nature of a mattress in a tree. Go figure.

Anyway, Tookie’s friend is in and out of some kind of insane asylum, and she’s also a cutter. Tookie sees the girl pick up a sharp rock(?) to cut herself with, and the chapter ends with Cutter skittering away, bending down to pick up yet another sharp rock.

This cutting business is taken seriously. Inasmuch as it’s not a joke in the book. But, hoo boy, does it feel tossed in for no particular reason.

I’m kinda on board with a madcap romp through insanity with Tyra at the wheel. I’m kinda on board with the overdramatic nature of some teen lit. What I’m not so on board with is the combination of the two. The introduction of a cutter into this story feels pretty unearned. It’s the perfect example of what’s wrong with this book. This book doesn’t know itself. It’s filled with these moments, these moments when Tyra writes herself right out of the few things that make the book enjoyable.

It’s like this. I just watched Demolition Man. It’s awesome. It’s fun. It’s stupid, and it knows that it’s pretty goddamn stupid. There’s a little message in there about society being weak and namby-pamby, but it’s pretty light on message, heavy on people diving while firing a gun with each hand.

If Tyra wrote Demolition Man as teen lit, we’d have a scene in here where the Sandra Bullock character smokes cigarettes as part of her love of the 20th century lifestyle. And Stallone would have to talk her out of it, saying he lost his mother to lung cancer or something. Now, I ask you, in a fun movie, is that fun? And if it’s not fun, does it at least accomplish the goal of making cigarettes less cool? No, and no. It’s off-tone, and it’s a waste of film, and Sandy B. can do WHATEVER THE FUCK she wants.

Modelland’s introduction of a character with an actual problem just doesn’t work. It doesn’t add to the fun, and it doesn’t have anything serious to say about cutting other than saying that this made-up girl does it. And I don’t want to infer too much, but the two least-explained aspects of this character are her cutting and the fact that she managed to get a mattress into a treehouse. Connection? Almost definitely. I guess next time I move, I’ll poke myself with a toothpick and see there’s a marked difference in upper-body strength.

There’s a really weird moment in this section that encapsulates the whole issue. Tookie is walking down the street in her crap town, and she’s thinking about the plight of all these poor factory workers. And while she’s thinking about that, while her heart is beating for all these factory people, she catches a glimpse of herself in a reflective surface, and she reminds all of us that her forehead is a bit on the tall side.

If’n the reader is going to learn, along with Tookie, a ham-fisted lesson about what real problems are, I can dig it. But my memory of this book doesn’t make me think we’re headed that way. My memory of this book has me thinking that Tookie’s beauty doubts continue to be forefront, and we as readers are supposed to identify with the curse of being a 9.7 out of 10 as opposed to really feeling the struggles of an oppressed working class.

If it’s a ridiculous world where beauty is all that matters, cool. But then we get class struggle, cutters, and a brief glimpse of the rich girl in school (Zarpessa) dumpster diving?

I’m all for mixing genres and ideas. Don’t make a mistake and think I’m not interested in that shit. But it’s just done so badly here. It’s like, imagine reading a book that’s light and fun, and at the end of each chapter you get a little text box with a message in it like “Don’t forget, world hunger is a thing and someone will die while you read this book.” Or “Hey, 9/11. Nothing to do with the contents of this book, but imagine the choice to jump out the window of a burning building. Like, whoa.”

There is something, a glimmer of something almost smart about Modelland. Tyra is uniquely equipped to tell the story of being a young model, of how strange that world is, and of what it might be like to be a model who doesn’t necessarily believe in her own beauty.

What I don’t think Tyra is equipped to do, based on what I’ve read so far in Modelland, is tell the story of teens who cut themselves. Or of what it’s like to grow up in a crap town with a crap life being the only future. I don’t know if Tyra ever engaged in self-harm. I do know that she went to an all girls’ school with a $12,925 plus fees tuition (2013 rates), which kind of rules out the toe ring factory future. But that doesn’t really matter either. It’s possible for people who haven’t experienced something directly to write about it with authenticity. For PEOPLE it’s possible. For Tyra, I’m saying no. She doesn’t have the particular skills to pay those particular bills, and her book was smart to stick to the craziness and quirkiness, and when it just threw in a cutter for no reason besides throwing in a cutter, it lost the thread.

Because here’s the reality.

As a reader, I’m having an experience with this book. And that experience is a crazy-ass pile of crazy, and the best thing I can do is hang on. That’s kind of what’s to be expected, and if I was pissed off that the book was crazy, I’d be in the wrong. As a reader, with my outside knowledge of Tyra and who she is and what she does, I’m expecting a Demolition-Man-esque ride of a book, perhaps with more eyeliner.

What I’m getting so far is a pile of different stories, NONE OF WHICH are any fun. Is the story of Tookie’s doubt interesting or fun? No. Let’s get to fucking Modelland already. Is the story of the divisions in society interesting or purposeful or fun? No. Let’s leave them behind and get to Modelland already. Is the insertion of real-life problems fun or purposeful or handled so deftly that they cannot be denied? Again, no, and couldn’t we deal with this stuff IN Modelland? Wouldn’t that make more sense? Wouldn’t that speak to Tyra’s real experiences, her story to tell, the one that only she could really tell if she could just get over Tookie being such an individual that she has a dumbwaiter instead of a locker and a whipped cream canister she keeps in a cooler at school? We get it. Tookie is weird in her world, and uber-normal in ours. WHO ARE THE REAL WEIRDOS HERE, TOOKIE? AREN’T THE NORMAL ONES THE TRUE WEIRDOS? AAHHHH! PIGFACE TWILIGHT ZONE EPISODE!

Fuck, enough. Just…can we just go to goddamn Modelland already? Is that so much to ask?

 

Tyra’s Master Class

Let’s talk about writing technique.

Okay, first, for those following, let’s cover the characters and concepts introduced in this next section. There’s so much going on in every chapter that it has to be done.

See, one of the problems here is that, as you read along, you can’t possibly know which pieces of this story are relevant and which are just crazy garbage tossed in for no fucking reason. It’s like, you know how there’s that playwright who talks about hiding the gun? In the first act of the play, someone hides a gun, and then you kind of build tension because you know it’s there the whole time, and you’re thinking, “Well, they hid a gun, so I guess it’s going to come into play eventually. It would be pretty weird if that gun never showed up again.”

Modelland is hiding guns all over the place. In terms of hiding guns, it’s like an 80’s action movie where every time Kurt Russell taps on a dresser or something, a hidden drawer with a gun pops out. He’s taking a shit and a gun falls out from behind the toilet paper. He goes into the pantry to get a can of beans, and next to the other cans you’ve got a can that is suspiciously shaped exactly like a gun, as though it may not be a can of beans at all, but rather, a gun.

This is what Modelland is doing to me right now, and I’m almost positive most of these guns will remain hidden. But in the interest of not going back to say, “Oh, I forgot, in chapter 4…” I’ll just outline what I see happening and hope for the best.

Roll Call:

Creamy de la Creme: Mom. Basically, evil stepmom from fairy tales. Image-obsessed. Crazed. Spends the family’s money on things they don’t need, like a brand new tea kettle when they already own several.

Dad: Dad. Lost eye in a circus accident, not yet covered. Also still wears circus outfit just as clothes, apparently. Calls his wife “woman”. Dad seems like a jerk, and he mostly just ignores Tookie somehow.

Ci~L: Not actually present, but discussed. She was a girl selected to go to Modelland years ago, and now she’s missing. That’s her arc so far. And yes, that’s a tilde in her name. Which is not something that can be pronounced in speech. You could spell this name Ci]L or Ci%L and it would be, basically, the same.

Smize: In our world, it’s a short way of saying smile with your eyes, and Tyra is credited with inventing this term. In Modelland, it’s…I don’t know what the fuck it is. It comes out of the water taps, it’s like a bubble, then morphs into a film that I picture being like a Listerine strip, then it has a flag that pops out and displays scrolling text. It’s described about 8,000 different, contradictory ways. The point is, it’s an object that doesn’t make any sort of sense, and what you need to know is its purpose. It serves similarly to Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, except instead of a guaranteed passage to a chocolate factory, it gives the finder a 91% chance of being selected to go to Modelland. Smizes always come out of water taps or pipes, and EVERYONE is looking for them.

Of course, Tookie found a smize. She was filling a tea pot for her mother, and she saw some weird object fall from the tap. She ignored it at first, and Tookie’s sister Myrracle busted in the front door and did a dance number for no apparent reason, a number which was well-received by the parents, although Creamy did point out that Myrracle should be focused on things that are more likely to help her provide for the family, namely hoping to get picked for Modelland.

This part where Tookie ignores the smize falling out of the tap is pretty damn stupid. The book can’t stop reminding us that EVERY PERSON is running the water constantly, fighting over sewer outlets, and waiting for a Smize to pop out of a tap. This is what every character is obsessed with. Tookie sees a weird amorphous object come out of the tap amidst all this craziness, and she goes ahead and ignores it for no reason. Until she decides to not ignore it, which is when we find out it’s a smize. Goddamn is this book dumb.

Also, her parents force Tookie to give the Smize to her sister, Myrracle, for no reason other than to prove that they are total dicks. Seriously, it doesn’t matter which daughter goes to Modelland, it’s somehow going to make them rich(?)

A thinking parent who strongly preferred Myrracle would say, “Hey, Myrracle has a great shot. Now Tookie has a 91% chance. I think we should go with two 91% chances over adding the 91% to a child that I think hung the moon and has a 91% already.”

Basically, we’re turning in two 91% chances for a single 99%. But whatever. The point of this move wasn’t to be smart or realistically money-grubbing, the point was to remind us that everyone thinks Tookie sucks. Which she kind of does. How stupid can you be, you know? Everyone’s looking for a thing in the tap. You see a thing in the tap? You grab that shit. If Tookie’s behavior so far is any indicator, I kind of don’t blame her parents for hating her. Tookie is so desperate to be noticed, but expresses her desperation by laying around in the hall at school, hoping to be noticed. She doesn’t have enough ambition to run away from Helltown to a Paradiseton about 5 miles away. And a smize falls in her lap, and she just ignores it because…again, no fucking reason.

Tookie kinda sucks.

Alright, that’s all the content you need to know. Let’s talk about technique.

This section feels like Tyra went to one writing workshop and someone said the famous phrase, “Show, don’t tell.”

People take this as a face-value, gospel rule in writing.  And it’s fucking stupid.

For one, that’s not possible. In a book, it just doesn’t work that way. If you write a full-length novel, there will be things you tell, or things characters tell each other. This is how it works.

Second, people take that rule, and they think they can sort of get by on a technicality. As long as you go the route of showing instead of telling, you’re writing something good, and they think ANY way of converting information into SHOWN information is better than telling.

I’ll give you an example. You know how in a lot of horror movies, someone’s being haunted by a ghost because haunting is the best way the ghost can figure how to ask for something? “I want to be put to rest and have my body taken out of a well, so I’ll communicate that by…making a tree turn into an evil monster. That should get the message across.”

Okay, that happens, and then what the main character does is go to the library, look through some microfiche, and find a story that says, “Here’s exactly what the fuck happened.” Or, in a more modern movie, they type “ghost” into some site called something like “Doogle” and then a video pops up and starts in with, “Ghosts often terrorize people because they want something specific, usually water-well-related.”

That’s showing by technicality. Yes, we’re seeing it. But we’re seeing something TELL that story.

Also, don’t fuck around. Don’t Google ways to defeat a ghost. You know who to call.

Let’s take this to a logical limit for a second.

If a character goes to the library and reads the newspaper about the ghost, if that’s showing, then it’s also showing to have the newspaper blow around in some wind and hit a character in the face. Or to have the character turn on the TV and the news segment is “Tonight, in our series where we just pick some shit out of an old newspaper, a story about a grisly murder where a girl was thrown down a well.”

This is what happens in Modelland, by the way. Ci~L is missing, and it’s in the newspaper, and Creamy reads the story out loud for no reason other than the reader needing to know that this is important. The newspaper text reads an awful lot like the book’s narration, by the way, but we don’t need to get into voice differentiation.

Technically, you’re showing me something. But it’s just not good writing. It’s not good storytelling. Having Tookie write in her journal, excuse me, in her T-Mail Jail, is showing, sort of, but still a very stupid version of it. It still doesn’t really work. Having dialog in the kitchen where the mom says, “I hate when anyone reads the newspaper before me. I’m very particular about things. You know that. We’ve discussed it a hundred times.” is showing. But…wouldn’t it be better to have the mom say some shit that sounds real?

It’s also a really common trap with dialogue. Dialogue, in a story, isn’t going to be your best expository tool, the reason being you have to have someone who is basically Encino Man so you can explain absolutely everything. “Now we are at the school, where we attend the 11th grade, or junior year, and we are currently occupying one of the lower social strata, but with you, caveman friend, we have aspirations to rise up to higher levels and create a new peer circle within this, our school place!”

And sure, you could show us all that shit separately. Show the bullies picking on the other kids, show someone being made fun of by the popular girl. But goddamn, that takes forever. Just tell an ice man.

Hear me, aspiring writers. Show me when there’s something to show me. When you can show me something instead of telling me something, do it. But don’t become so married to that rule that you have ridiculous dialogue, unrealistic situations that only make sense when I realize that you’re being expository, and for fuck’s sake, stop using the newspaper as a cheat to showing me shit.

 

More In-Depth Action 

Let’s do some info dump.

Tookie’s sister, Myrracle, has won some pageant eight times in a row, and nobody else even enters anymore because Myrracle is such a pageant badass. Myrracle also takes lessons on walking, posing, facial expressions, pouting, and phonics. Phonics. Because our pageants and models are well-known for their knowledge of phonics.

Although, when you get down to it, Myrracle is a complete idiot when it comes to words, but at least she’s doing something about it. Sure, she calls a “period” a “periodical”, but you know what? Enrolling in phonics classes is an acknowledgement that she’s got a (hilarious) problem.

Which is why I’m starting to prefer Myrracle to the whiny Tookie. I don’t think I’m supposed to feel this way as a reader, but I really do. Myrracle is gifted, but jesus, at least she’s taking some classes and shit. She and Tookie both want to go to Modelland, and I can’t help but notice that one of them is doing SOME work towards that goal while the other is…

Hey, wait a second. We’re up to about chapter 5, and so far Tookie hasn’t DONE anything. She’s been in places, like school and with her friend. But holy shit, so far she hasn’t actually done anything. She hasn’t even gotten her period! Which I know because it was specifically pointed out. And I gather this is a sore spot between Tookie and Myrracle because Myrracle has blossomed into the ripe fruit of her womanhood (the blood orange of womanhood, if you will) while Tookie hasn’t. Or, to put it simply, Myrracle has a period, Tookie doesn’t. Which Tookie feels is very cosmically unfair as she’s two years older.

Reading this as a dude, I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is meaningful. I get that it probably is. Maybe it’s just weird because there’s no real male equivalent. What’s the equivalent? First boner? Nah, that doesn’t work. Babies have boners. Does the first actual boner happen in the womb? I bet babies have boners in utero.

Yep. Confirmed. I took a quick trip to the Google, and babies in utero have boners. Enjoy, expecting mothers! Remind me again about the glorious miracle of life sometime, and don’t forget to include all the boners when you do so.

By the way, one article with info on unborn boners was “7 Amazing Things Babies Do In The Womb.” I tried to look at the other 6  things amazing enough to share article space with unborners, but it was one of those stupid-ass articles designed as a slideshow where you had to load a whole page for every item, something to which I’m morally opposed. Besides, what’s going to be better than unborn boners? I would love to see one of those anti-abortion billboards with that on it. “I had a heartbeat when I was two seconds old. And we all know what follows a heartbeat. That’s right, a ragin’ dick! So please, don’t mash me up before I get the chance to put this boner to use.”

Anyway, Tookie, like a Judy Blume character, is really looking forward to her period, I guess. Will she get it? Golly, I hope not. Nothing against Tookie, but reading Tyra’s descriptions of periods…I don’t think there’s a cotton wad absorbent enough to suck up all the feels. And the last thing I need is to just get confused on the topic. I can’t imagine Tyra writing about a period in this book without, I don’t know, some kind of rhyming, cotton-y gadget that’s used in lieu of a tampon, or maybe a party of sorts that doesn’t make sense and just makes it take longer for us to get to Modelland.

Let it be known, I’m not at all opposed to reading stuff about periods or discussing them, and it’s not something that grosses me out. What I’m opposed to is reading TYRA’S take on it, which is mainly due to me being opposed to reading her take on just about anything at this point.

And with the topic of periods thoroughly flushed out, on to Chapter 5 and Chris-Creme-Crobat.

Yeah. Chris-Creme-Crobat, Tookie’s father. Or at least that’s how he was known his circus glory days.

Yes, we finally get the story of Chris’ eye-gouging. Finally, the part I’ve been waiting for, my favorite section from my first readthrough of this book.

Here’s how it goes down.

Chris was a famous tightrope walker. You know all those famous, rich tightrope walkers who were deeply respected by society? The sort of thing people get really excited about in the age of television? Those people you can name one of (Only real-life examples count. No fair using the Flying Graysons)? He was one of those.

The De-La-Cremes were at the circus. Tookie and her mother in the crowd. Chris, the dad, was doing some kind of highwire act(?) It’s hard to say what exactly he was doing because Tyra’s descriptions leave something to be desired, but Chris was probably doing some sort of screwing around on a thin wire of some kind? Listen, the important thing is that Chris is 7 stories up and doing something dangerous, meanwhile, down below, the entire circus ring is lined with swords pointed straight up.

I Googled quite a bit to find out whether a 7-story fall is fatal on its own, without swords. But, of course, the internet is no help. You can fall from a chair and die, or you could fall out of a goddamn airplane and survive somehow. This is the kind of wisdom the internet provides.

This is the sort of thing where I feel like science has failed me. Shouldn’t there be a height after which we can say a person is most certainly doomed? And a height where, most times, a person will survive?

There was one discussion board where someone happened to be writing a novel and wanted someone to fall and die. Which I bring up because another poster said “Just have the person fall, get up for a second, then blood comes out of his ear and he falls over dead. I’d believe it.”

I just hope that novel gets written and turned into a Nicholas Cage movie. I hope that more than I hope for the health of my firstborn child. I wanna see that shit.

Okay, back to Modelland.

While Chris is wow-ing the crowd from on high, Creamy, Tookie’s mom, decides to apply some makeup to her face. When she’s got her mirror out, she accidentally reflects a stray beam of light into Chris’ eye.

As would be the case with any trained circus performer, a brief flash of light causes Chris to fall immediately. The guy can walk on a highwire, but a beam of light? What is he, God or something? No man can overcome the sheer force of something that’s fairly bright or brighter. I know that whenever the sun reflects off something when I’m in the car, I just spin the wheel like crazy and hope for the best. Because what other options are there? I’m a mere mortal man.

Chris falls 7 stories in front of a horrified crowd.

Now, a lesser performer would have died on impact. But Chris ain’t no lesser performer. He lands “on his upper back” and then somehow tumbles to his feet, totally fine.

It’s an interesting take on the art of tumbling. I thought, generally, landing on your back wouldn’t be preferred. But then again, I’m only the world’s eighth best circus performer, so you should just ignore what I say. I would probably be killed by Chris’ fall. If not instantly, then shortly after I stood up, blood would gush from my ear and I’d pass out (I keep including this in hopes it will become part of the public consciousness and get into a big movie).

Chris is fine. Sigh of relief. And ever the showman, he takes a bow, and then another, and during one of his many bows, Chris bows his eye right into one of the swords that line the circus ring.

Let me just reiterate what happened here. A man fell 7 stories and survived due to sheer athleticism, and while he was taking kudos for that inhuman act of incredibleness, he then leaned his own eye into a stationary sword.

Meanwhile, Creamy knows that she shined a light in Chris’ eyes, and she tells Tookie to keep her mouth shut about it. So somehow Creamy knows that her weird act of vanity caused her husband to lose his eye. I mean, sort of.

I think I know what Tyra’s trying to do here. That’s a dangerous claim, but I’m going to give it a shot. I think Tyra’s showing us how selfish and shitty Creamy is, and to kind of having Tookie keeping this secret with her mom. But it’s a stupid secret, and it’s the clumsiest way ever to do it. I mean, come on. Even if we were prepared to believe that a light in the eyes was the downfall of Ol’ Chris, it wasn’t until he was on the ground that he bowed and lost his own stupid eye. And also, if you’re a circus performer and a light in the eyes makes you fall, is that really someone else’s fault or are you kinda shitty at your job?

Think about it. What would happen if Tookie told her dad?

Tookie: Dad, it was mom’s mirror that shined that light in your eyes and made you fall!

Chris: WHAT!? When I lost my eye? Why I oughta…oh, wait. The fall was fine. I just bent over and put my eye on a sword. Haha, boy, what a maroon, huh?

It’s like a very retarded O. Henry story or something. O. Retarded.

Anyway, Chris loses an eye, and that means he can’t walk a tightrope anymore, and it means Tookie’s mom isn’t attracted to her husband anymore, and Chris turns into a worthless drunk in that way you see worthless drunks portrayed, which is them having a bottle in hand sometimes, and sometimes drinking from it.

This is easily one of my favorite sequences in the book. It’s just, there are just so many things happening. Oftentimes you’ll find a book where not much happens. In this chapter, a bunch of shit happens. Granted, it’s all backstory that amounts to “This is why Tookie’s dad is worthless,” but there’s about five times as much story here as there needs to be. This has to be the most overwritten, overexplained book in the history of anything, ever.

This is Modelland, people. Answering all the questions nobody asked.

 

Chapter 6

When we last left Tookie de la Creme, she was not in Modelland and hated her family and a bunch of other bullshit. Which brings us to Chapter 6.

In Chapter 6 we meet the 7Seven.

And already, goddamn it.

How do you pronounce 7Seven? How does a person say this? “Seven-seven”? “Suh-seven”? “Guh-fuch-yah-selv”?

This is one of the many reasons I wanted a Modelland audiobook, and also it makes me wonder if it’s part of the reason said audiobook does not exist. In any form. People would ask questions like, “Tyra, how would you like someone to pronounce this unpronounceable thing?” Or maybe they had a narrator set to read it, and she said, “I know how to pronounce very little of this book, but here’s something I know how to say: fuuuuuuuuck this shit.”

I shouldn’t be so hard on Tyra. We all remember the classic film The Seven7 Samurai. And who could forget Twe12lve Angry Men? And who could forget The Taking of Pelham One1Two2Thr33? Or Lucky Number SLeven? Actually, that last one is almost as stupid. It’s got a character named “Slevin.” And an upside-down “7” in the title. Did Tyra miss out on a writing credit here?

Rather than bashing further on Tyra’s naming convention, let’s talk about what the 7Seven are. And bash on that.

They’re X-men? Models who are X-Men?

The basic thing, every year girls get selected to Modelland, and the super-special-est girls become Intoxibellas. Which are synonymous with the 7Seven? I think? There are seven Intoxibellas? Let’s go with that for now. I’m sorry this isn’t something that I researched better, but there are NO other sources that describe this book in detail, and the book itself isn’t exactly helpful. I’m relying on my own notes, and I get so angry at points that I can’t see the paper, just the a deep maroon color, and some of the finer details escape me.

So the 7Seven are the bestest models selected last year on The Day of Discovery, and now they all wear these golden belts that unleash their inherent, latent powers. In this world, everyone has powers, but only wearing a magic golden belt from Modelland unleashes them. I think. That seems to be the implication. Guys, I don’t fuckin’ know. Just, go with me here. Let’s just introduce the Intoxibellas and their powers.

Evanjalinda, with the power Chameeleone. There’s supposed to be an accent on that last letter, but I’m not going to dignify this ridiculousness with that many extra pixels. Chameeleone lets Evanjalinda change every aspect of her appearance. Like, you know, the Chameleon. That lizard everyone was obsessed with in 4th grade because it could change colors. This is really cool because she can be tall or less tall. She could have a big butt or a bigger butt. Other stuff too, I’m sure. What I don’t know is if she could do something like have a sideways butt crack. Or grow a dick or something. I’m not sure if this power is actually awesome or if it’s mostly just looking like other people.

Simone, with the power of Multiplicity. She has a screen in her stomach that shows the Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity on constant loop. Okay, fine, that’s a lie. The truth is, she can clone herself, like the Multiple Man. They don’t get into the questions that naturally come along with your multiple men, such as whether the multiples’ strength is divided amongst the clones, whether they have a hive mind or individual mind, that stuff. Simone just multiples and then unmultiplies and we all move on.

Bev Jo. We’ll get to her powers in a second, but I just want everyone to appreciate the name Bev Jo. Because what the fuck.

Bev Jo, with the power of ThirtyNever. She’ll age to 29, then revert to looking 17, then she’ll age to 29, then back to 17, and on and on until she dies. Bev Jo kinda lost the cool powers lottery. And also the names lottery. Seriously, Bev Jo sounds like a third lead on Reba McEntire’s sitcom. Also, what happens when you’re 70 chronologically and you appear 17? That’s going to be rough. Sex-wise, decrepit-ness wise. All the wises, this power makes is horrible.

Leemora. With the power of Excite-to-Buy, which makes people around her want to buy shit. Not anything in particular, it seems. Just stuff they were already thinking about buying. Tookie thinks about a hair product, her mom about wrinkle cream. So I guess if you needed like, I don’t know, a mop head, you’d go “Holy shit, better buy that mop head right now!” SUCH RAW POWER!

Already, just a few girls in, already I fear there is too much POWER to go unchecked. Hopefully they get a moon base constructed soon. And write up some sort of oath. Possibly rings they can put in a circle or something.

Moving on, Sinndeesi. With the power of Seduksheeon. Which isn’t explained other than the men who see her being awed, and one of  them saying “I’m ready to sin with Sinndeesi right here, right now!” Which I have to assume means he’s telling us that he has an erection. Maybe he means morally ready? Emotionally? But no. Let’s assume boner. It’s kind of a policy of mine to assume boner unless otherwise informed. By that same token, the power of Seduksheeon isn’t explained either, so let’s just assume it’s really big jugs. Are big jugs a superpower? That’s a debate that I can’t answer. If Lincoln and Douglas couldn’t come to an agreement in their great Lincoln/Douglas Big Jugs Debates, then what chance do I have?

Next we have Katoocha, whose power is to know which fashions will be popular a short time in the future. That’s right, she’s wearing what you’ll be wearing next year.

I put this power in the category of powers that are sort of useful, but fuck man, pretty boring. You could get a good gig at a fashion…place. A place where they do clothes, A DESIGNER! You could work with a designer. See, I know from fashion.

Lastly, Exodus. Teleporter. Which seems to be amazing to the people of this book because I guess they don’t have comics with characters such as Nightcrawler, Supergirl, Misfit, Jenny Quantum, Darkseid, Gog, Blink, Cloak, Doorman, Spiral, Spot, Gatecrasher, U-Go Girl, Lockjaw, Venus Dee Milo, and…wait a second. EXODUS! Created by Scott Lobdell and Joe Quesada, Exodus was a teleporting, 12th century mutant who was eventually freed by Magneto. (First appearance X-Factor #92 -Smilin’ Stan!)

So not only is this a boring power, but motherfucker, the NAME has already been used with that power. That’s some lazy shit.

Now, unfortunately, a Triple7 was not produced this year, which is a model who possess ALL 7 of these powers.

Which is extra confusing. I kinda thought these powers were new and unexpected, different every year. The reactions of people were not like, “Oh, I guess that’s the teleport chick, so that must be little miss seduction over there.” They were oo-ing and ahh-ing all over the place, boners a-swingin’ like they’d never seen any of this shit before.

Do the Intoxibellas always have the same powers? Does the Triple7 always have all of those powers, or does she have whichever seven powers the other girls have? Or…I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck any of this is talking about.

Why superpowers are a part of this book, I do not know. I do not know why this is a needed addition to the narrative here. Or whether this goes anywhere. Because, like I said, we’re still only about HALF WAY to actually entering Modelland. If Tookie ever gets powers, holy fuck, it’s not even gonna happen until the last 10% of the book. At which point, what, 2 of the powers will be totally worthless to readers? She’ll age at the same rate regardless, and we won’t really know how good her fashion future-casting is until the following year. Those two do nothing for the story.

But hey. Just be thankful your name isn’t Bev Jo.

 

Chapter 7

When we left you last time, still, almost nothing had happened. Still. Tookie is Tyra in disguise, her parents are jerks, and Myrracle is her sister, who is destined to be selected to go to Modelland, the magic place on the mountain where people are turned into models and also superheroes, somehow, for some reason.

In chapter 8 we get a heated, overheard discussion between Tookie’s parents regarding her parentage.

Duhn-duhn-duhn!

Tookie’s father claims that Tookie isn’t his daughter. The basis for his claim seems to be that he did not actually SEE baby Tookie exit her mother’s vagina during the birth. He was off earning the big bucks as a circus performer, supporting the family. His secondary, B-level evidence is basically that Tookie sucks.

I’ve never heard of this before, someone disclaiming his child as being from his seed because, well, she sucks. “This kid sucks. The only explanation for such a thing is that she isn’t mine!” I wish I had an ounce of that self-confidence.

To drive the point home, Chris is holding Tookie’s toothbrush, and he’s sort of threatening his wife, saying he’s headed to the DNA lab just as soon as T-DOD (The Day of Discovery, when models are selected for Modelland) is over.

If Tookie is NOT his offspring, he wants to sell her off to work in a factory, which is a thing that happens in this book but hasn’t happened to Tookie yet for basically no reason. They all hate her, they have no use for her, and yet they don’t just sell her off to make a few bucks. Why not?

This whole thing is a Cinderella story, and at least with Cinderella, even if it never made sense that she didn’t just say fuck it and run away or at least be drunk all the time, at least Cinderella was doing all the housework. You could totally see why they’d keep her around because it’s like, “I hate that Cinderella for being so hot, but goddamn, what I hate even more is doing one ounce of housework.”

Would I be annoyed if Chris Hemsworth was my stepbrother and did shirtless housework all around my house? Sure. Would I be so annoyed as to be a dick to him and kick him out? I might politely ask if he could wear a shirt sometimes, but if I came home every day and the place was spotless, what do I care? So all my neighbors want to bang the guy who cleans my house before they want to bang me. Duh. No shit. As long as cleaning all of the male and female cum off the linens and side of the house is part of his duties, he can do whatever he wants, far as I’m concerned.

It’s not just Cinderella. All Disney movies have the craziest relationship with attractiveness. Like Maleficent. She has to be the NUMBER ONE hottest woman in the world? When the mirror tells her she’s the second-hottest person on Earth, she gets pissed?

My partner told me I was more attractive than a billion people. Which made me happy until I realized there’s like 6 billion people in the world, which means I’m still in the bottom 20%. But still, being hotter than a billion, that’s not too bad. That’s a big-ass number. I can live with that.

Anyway, Modelland makes no sense because you’re just thinking, why wouldn’t the parents just ship Tookie off, or why wouldn’t she just run away?

Glad you asked that!

Just when I couldn’t take it anymore, Tookie writes some kind of cryptic symbol on the front door, which makes no sense as a reader, but let’s just go with it, and this symbol SOMEHOW signals her insane cutter friend that they should run away together first thing in the morning. I guess the door graffiti is sort of like the passover thing. Except not at all and instead of marking a whole door, she could just leave a Post-It or something. I could see why you wouldn’t want to go the Post-It route on passover. I’d hate for a slight breeze or a light rain to damage the Post-It, therefore causing the death of my first-born. That’s worth tracking down some goat’s blood and ruining a door for. It makes me wonder how none of the Egyptians picked up on everyone in town painting goat’s blood on the outside of their homes. But hey, from what I’ve seen of pyramids, the Egyptians made some pretty strange life choices, so who are they to wonder?

I guess we’re to assume that Tookie’s nutto friend is checking Tookie’s front door every day on the chance that she’ll be ready to run away sometime in the next 12 hours.

If I was Tookie’s friend, her crazy friend who lives in a tree and cuts herself with found objects that aren’t even sharp, I’d probably say, “Listen, Tooks. I’m not exactly sharp in the brain, so if you could just come and get me when you’re ready to make a run for it, that’d probably work a lot better. I hear voices. Daily checkups on your property aren’t my strong suit.”

Of course, the runaway plan doesn’t work. What foils it all? What could possibly stop this juggernaut of a genius plan which consisted of “wake up a 20 minutes early and walk out the front door?” Tookie’s parents are awake, and they don’t want her to leave. Curses. It’s like a goddamn Ocean’s 11 movie, everything was in place just so, and one little oversight ruined it all. Who could have predicted that Tookie’s parents would be up slightly earlier than normal? How could we have expected Tookie to prepare for such a WILD twist of fate!?

Tookie can’t just leave when her parents are awake, which makes me EVEN MORE CONFUSED. Her parents wish she would fuck off, she wants to fuck off, all she has to do is say, “I’m getting the fuck out of here. Peace!” and walk out the door. Her parents high-five, Myrracle goes to Modelland, and that’s pretty much it!

It doesn’t happen. Sorry. This isn’t a gag book that ends here with a “Haha, wasn’t THAT a ride? Okay, seriously, go read Raymond Chandler or something.”

Tookie has to go along with her parents and assist Myrracle at T-DOD somehow, and as the De La Cremes drive away, they see Tookie’s friend in the driveway, howling. Of course, Tookie’s parents comment on this urchin weirdo being in their driveway because they have to get in a couple jabs, just in case we as readers weren’t totally sold on the idea that these people are monstrous asshole dickfaces already. Although when you take a step away from the story, these parents have seen someone who is an acknowledged escapee from multiple insane asylums, who has more voices in her head than she knows what to do with, howling, animal-like, in their driveway. Sooooo maybe they aren’t totally wrong to comment? Just maybe?

And that’s Chapter 8.

The good news, Chapter 9 begins with us headed to The Day of Discovery! So maybe we’ll be on our way to Modelland soon (although we’re still about 70 pages from entering the gates, goddamn it).

I wanted to add a little meat to this chapter, to this review, because it’s so light. And what I wanted to talk about is negativity in reviews.

Famously, in 2013, Buzzfeed hired a new books editor who declared the site would no longer traffic in negative reviews.

From an interview:

“Why waste breath talking smack about something?…You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

There’s a lot of debate about this. Should people review books negatively or should they go by that old thing about having nothing good to say and shutting their weeping shitholes (something like that, I can’t remember how my grandma put it, exactly)?

And I do think there are a lot of times when negative books review are kinda bullshit. I do feel like there are many, many times when a negative review is kind of written by someone who expected to dislike the book, read it looking for flaws, and then feels the need to tear down something that’s pretty serviceable. This is probably most common in the literary fiction world, to be honest.

But let’s talk about what negative reviews are, at the core. Because I think there are two types, really.

One type is the type that may result in a low rating, but acknowledges that the book isn’t inherently bad. I gave A Tree Grows In Brooklyn a negative review, and I was pretty clear about what I disliked about it, and I was also clear about the “not for me, but maybe great for someone else” factors. Which is important in this type of review. It’s negative, but defensible. People are allowed to have opinions on things.

The second type is trashing a book up and down. Saying that not only is it not for you, but it’s a badly-written book, and a bad experience. This is harder to defend, but it’s what I’m doing to Modelland. So I have to mount some kind of defense here.

If this book were written by a teenager, even a very young and inexperienced writer, I would feel differently. It’s the difference between trashing a low-budget homemade movie created by a few teenagers and talking shit about Transformers: Rise of Revenging Robosaurs.

Critiquing a home movie would be pretty unfair. Especially to go negative on it. But critiquing Transformers is fine. And I think it’s fine because a big studio with a big cast and a big budget had every opportunity to succeed, and they failed miserably. They didn’t put out something bad because they tried really hard and didn’t succeed. They didn’t make use of what was available to them, and we see the results on the screen.

To me, it’s sometimes about looking at how close something was to its maximum potential. If the home movie was about as good as you can expect for what it was on paper, then it’s assholery to go negative. If Transformers was a 6/10, it wouldn’t warrant shit-talking. But all it needed to be was a 6, and all it really needed was giant robots fighting, and we didn’t meet even those low standards.

Let’s talk about the potential of Modelland.

It was put out by a big publisher. It had a BIG marketing push, including a lot of talk on Top Model and in other outlets.

Within about 250 miles of where I sit, there are 840 libraries that have Modelland, and I couldn’t tell you for sure HOW MANY copies they have. And I don’t live in a dense part of the country.

And while I can’t be sure what Tyra made for the book, she signed a 3-book deal with Delacorte, a sub-pub of Random House. She’s got people to handle contracts, and she’s no stranger to this shit, so I’m sure she came out A-Okay, financially.

I’m not trashing this book because I’m jealous or think that what Tyra got should have gone to someone else. I understand the publishing world has to publish garbage sometimes because, hey, garbage sells. Why do you think Tori Spelling has FOUR memoirs in five years? Because that shit makes money.

I don’t blame the publishing world for this. Although I do feel like there must be a whole lotta people working in that world who have to wonder how far they’ve strayed from their original reasons for getting into publishing.

The reason I’m cool negging on this book is because, like a big-budget movie, there was POTENTIAL for it to be decent. At least, it could have been blandly, inoffensively bad. But that modicum of potential was not realized. This book is under-edited on a very basic, story level. Nobody went back through and checked the continuity of this. Nobody went back through and explained to Tyra how to write a book that wasn’t flat, that emphasized certain important aspects and let the unimportant parts wither away so that a reader isn’t trying to hold so much in mind the entire time.

The money was there to hire editors who could have brought out the good in this story. Which, dare I say, is there.

I think there’s a good book, or the core of a good book, hidden in the whirlwind of shit that is Modelland. There’s a value to the messages Tyra is trying to send to young women, the messages about redefining beauty, about how the life of a beautiful person is not a life that is without struggle, and about the ways in which Tyra’s own experience was bizarre and unusual.

That’s all IN here, but it’s the single pickle slice on the shitburger.

Here’s the other reason why I think negative reviews are important.

It’s 20-fuckin-16. Any idiot can type out a book and throw it on the Kindle store. I’ve done it. Which means anyone can. Technological advances mean that I have a worldwide distribution method available to me, same as a huge author.

And make no mistake, many, many people have taken advantage of this system, and many, many people write lots and lots of garbage. Just search my name on the Kindle store for confirmation of this fact.

I’ve recently come to feel like the tearing down of artistic barriers isn’t the best thing in the world. Photography was an early example. Now, anyone on the planet can take a picture, scroll through filtering options, and post pics online. In seconds. While I don’t feel like this has de-valued or ruined photography, it does mean that you have a lot more nonsense to sort through before you can find what you’re looking for if you’re a fan of photography.

Movies. CG has gotten so inexpensive that it’s easier to put out a hundred garbage movies than it is to put out a dozen decent movies.

Look at something like Bandcamp. It’s a great spot for artists to post music, but it’s not an awesome way to find new music or artists. There’s just TOO MUCH STUFF, and too much of it is sub-par.

Imagine if there was no filtering process for Saturday Night Live. You tuned in every Saturday night to a crowd-sourced collection of sketches. How many episodes of that would be tolerable?

Books. Although the publishing world isn’t perfect, and there are dozens of stories about things that were rejected and later went on to become classics, we still need SOME kind of filter. We do. I don’t want someone telling me what to read and what not to read, but I’m pretty cool with someone outlining the reasons that a book is a poor version of its own vision. Although I might be missing out on some hilarious SNL sketches because they don’t fit the SNL aesthetic, I also know that I’m being spared a whole lotta garbage too. If every movie had the ability to look like Avengers, and if every movie had the same distribution, I’d waste a lot of time and money watching things I didn’t like.

The filter that was once in place by publishing houses is fading fast. They gotta make a buck. And other outlets are figuring out that, Hey, if we charge people a certain amount to put up files, if we charge bands to put up files or take a cut of every sale, we can make money even if they barely sell a song. In those cases, there’s no incentive to filter whatsoever. The more the merrier.

Let’s make this all very simple.

When someone says that an artist spent a lot of time on something and therefore it can’t be criticized, I take issue. Writing is tough, and you have to BE tough. Commercially-viable art isn’t just about dumping the contents of your head into or onto a medium. It’s about pouring yourself onto something in such a way that others can understand your words, understand the emotion of what you’re painting, and so that the message of your work is reachable.

This is why you’d be an asshole to walk into a garage where someone was painting and start critiquing their work. And it’s why if someone wanted to sell those same paintings in your gallery, you have every right to criticize them.

Yes, I’m taking a stance that adults, who are operating within their own faculties, open their art up to criticism when they put a price tag on it and sell it to you. I do think that putting your money, time, or effort into experiencing someone else’s piece of art affords you the opportunity to then discuss how you felt about your expenditure.

With Modelland, Tyra put a book into an enormous number of bookstores and libraries. She signed a 3-book deal having not written all the material yet, which means she knew this was a commercial endeavor, not just an artistic expression of inner feelings. If I can be so bold as to think of my mind as a gallery, or to think of my mind as an indie movie house, when Tyra put out this book, she was asking that people hang her work in their mental galleries. And that means people are allowed to explain why they would not do so, or why they might hang it for a time and then be allowed to explain why they took it down, why they regretted the decision to give her work that space.

I can see why Buzzfeed made the choice they made. They’re mostly about fun, no? And what’s not fun is to watch a huge media empire beat up on a single person. For Buzzfeed to rag on Jonathan Franzen, it’s stupid, it’s silly, and it’s pretty easy to ignore their opinion based on the fact that they’re a web site that lets you take a quiz that determines what kind of cupcake you are. There are so many great books out there, I could see the appeal of only steering people to good books rather than steering them away from the bad ones.

I’m a dude. Just this one dude. I don’t represent a media empire. I don’t make a decision that sets the tone for shit.

I’m reading Modelland, I think it sucks hard, and I think its level of suck is kind of astonishing considering the available resources and options that could have improved it.

As a final note, I say offensive shit on my web site, my podcast, and all over the place. Not horribly offensive, but things that I’m sure people get pissed off about.

The thing is, it’s not my goal to offend people. But I’ve also decided it’s not a goal, not an important aspect of what I do, to make sure that no one is offended. I don’t consider part of my work to police what I do and make sure nobody would be offended. In other words, if someone is offended, I don’t wear it as a badge of honor and say “I’m doing my job.” But someone telling me they found something offensive doesn’t necessarily make me think I’ve done something wrong.

Which is why I’m pretty comfortable in my position: This book is really terrible.

 

Chapters 8 and 9

We finally made it to The Day of Discovery, or T-DoD if you prefer the obnoxious shortening.

It’s not totally clear how The Day of Discovery works. But that’s to be expected in this book, so buckle up.

From what I can tell, the way this works is that any aspiring models who want to participate and possibly be discovered go to Modelland, dress up, and for 15 minutes or so, walk around. The hope is that a scout will see them, pick them from the crowd, and then whisk them off to Modelland.

We join our heroes in the town square, ready to rock. Well, Myrracle is. Tookie isn’t participating. I guess she’ll just stand still and, I don’t know, hold Myrracle’s coat.

The mayor, Mayor Rump, as he’s properly named, initiates things by saying the classic pump-up phrase “Begin”, and the girls start walking around.

What happens is about 15 minutes of girls all walking around in heels and dresses, and it would seem a lot of these girls learned their catwalk techniques at The Moe Howard School of Perambulation.

We have a girl trip and fall, and not only does she fall to the ground, on the way down she hits her head on an old man’s  mobility scooter. We have no less than three girls fall down the same open manhole. Which, by the way, is a big public works fuckup. You can’t just have an open manhole in the town square, let alone on a day when a goddamn parade’s coming through.

The girls walk back and forth, in model format I guess, and then they collide and they fight and roll around on the ground and tussle. They break shoes, they tear dresses, and they have people shouting “Go! You can do it!” and shit like that, even though all they’re doing is walking around.

Tookie tries to get above the crowd by standing on a solid gold car with spinners, and once atop the car, she sees the Modelland scouts begin to appear. A light post magically transforms into a scout who picks a girl. A hole opens in the ground, and another girl is chosen. And then, get this, you are not going to fucking believe this, a scout comes out of the roof of the car and selects…MYRRACLE! Tookie’s sister! Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Probably because it’s not what happens, and instead of picking Myrracle, the scout reaches out to Tookie.

Guys, beleive it or not, it looks like Tookie is going to Modelland. She didn’t believe in herself, but fuck it, she’s on her way!

That’s two entire chapters of this book, the T-DOD and selection. What I just summed up in like 10 words (who’s counting?), two fucking chapters.

Here’s the big problem with this whole fucking thing right here.

We hear about T-DOD over and over and over. Oh, this is when the models are chosen. This is when girls have to parade around. Myrracle’s in walking lessons for years, and they get the perfect dress, and this is the big day. And then the scout just picks Tookie. Who isn’t dressed, who isn’t walking around. I get that we’re probably building to a point about inner beauty, but if Tookie gets picked for doing nothing, what the hell, why would anyone do any of this model shit anymore? If you can just stand around and watch, what the hell is everyone parading for?

This last weekend I went and saw Mad Max: Fury Road. Which I’m really happy about because it was fucking awesome, but also because it is really helpful in explaining what I like about bonkers things and why Modelland is bonkers and still terrible.

I’m not going to say a whole lot about Fury Road because you need to see that shit, and the less you know ahead of time, the better. If you like movies, films, if you have ever enjoyed a movie, then you’re the ideal audience for Fury Road.

Here’s what I do want to say about it. It’s a good movie in all the ways movies need to be good, and it’s also fucking bonkers. Like really crazy. And it’s great. Crazy shit happens, the characters are insane and gross, and it’s as close to a non-stop car chase that a movie can be and still be watchable. And I’m not a huge car chase guy. I fell asleep during Ronin. But Fury Road adds things to the car chase lexicon that we’re going to be seeing forever. It’s way more than squealing tires and shit. This is the movie that I think Fast and Furious aspired to be and never reached because it’s just too damn stupid and there’s too much silly plot that gets in the way of the Fastness and Furiousness. Fury Road is crazy, it’s fast, it’s fun.

Modelland is also crazy. But for whatever reason, Tyra kind of screwed herself out of the ability to write about crazy stuff and have it be entertaining. It’s crazy, but it’s slow, and it’s not all that fun.

The big sin, Tyra over-explains EVERYTHING. Every little piece of the world, the narrator shares the backstory. Why this is this way, why that is that way. Not only do I not need to know as much as she tells me, but the backstory of this world is, uniformly, a lot less interesting than the world itself as it exists in the story. And when you explain everything, it makes it feel like the world is less novel and weird. When I know the history of everything, and when that history is kind of trying to justify the existence of something more than it’s trying to tell a good story, it really removes the magic from the world.

Tyra’s world in Modelland doesn’t believe in itself enough to tell you that some things are a certain way, and they’re that way because this is a world that’s different from our own. Everything is in the context of being explained to us, the readers, and that method just normalizes everything or makes it dumb.

Fury Road hits it right. It explains very little because you don’t need to know a lot. You know the people are people, some apocalyptic shit happened, and now we’re in a crappy situation. The rest plays out in the movie. We don’t have to stop and get a backstory about every vehicle and every type of person. Nobody asks the bad guy like, “Hey, what’s up with the scary breathing mask thing?” We don’t have to hear what the different territories are and their history and who lives there. We keep fucking moving forward.

And what’s really weird about it, the page Tyra could have taken for her book, the ONE page that could have replaced a couple hundred, is that everything in Fury Road DOES have a backstory. All these characters have backstories created for the sake of making a real, filled-in world. What Fury Road doesn’t do is subject us to every backstory of everything within the actual movie narrative. The backstories are out there, on the internet, and you’re welcome to check them out. But you sure as hell don’t need to. And they sure as hell didn’t stop the movie every five minutes to explain something that doesn’t matter. Why do they call it guzzoline instead of gasoline? WHO GIVES A SHIT!? I know what it is, it makes sense in the context of the movie, let’s move on.

This movie has a guy on bungee cords who shreds on a flamethrower guitar as he rides a giant war vehicle that’s blasting through the desert. How is that improved by an explanation? I don’t want to know who that guy is. I don’t want to know how he learned to play guitar. I want to see him shredding on a giant war vehicle that’s blasting through the desert.

It’s a narrative problem that kills the mood in Modelland. And when everything is explained to me in this, “Wow, isn’t this a strange world?” tone, then it brings me into that world in a way that feels disingenuous. Just show it to me. Believe me, if it’s anything like a bungee guitar road thrasher, I’ll understand that it’s weird. I’ll get it.

But instead of handling the uncanny that way, Modelland goes out of its way to explain why something weird and cool isn’t that weird and, by proxy, isn’t that cool either.

It’s weird how these two things are similar in my mind, Modelland and Fury Road. I think both are very crazy and strange. Both have characters that have ridiculous names like Rictus Erectus. In fact, a Modelland versus Fury Road name game would be pretty sweet. And difficult. Slit? Which one does that come from? Who even knows anymore?

Yet, one of these entertainments is great, the other is dogshit. And the reasoning is pretty simple. Modelland feels the need to explain absolutely everything, and absolutely every explanation is absolutely stupid. Fury Road is crazy too, and it recognizes that not only is there no need to explain a guitar bungee flamethrower guy, but that any explanation of that would just make it stupider and less fun.

Which is maybe the key to the whole thing. Fun. Fury Road is crazy and fun. It doesn’t lose sight of the fact that, although a lot of the movie deals with death and apocalypse, you have fun watching the movie. Modelland is not fun. It’s very serious-minded, or very oriented towards making a point. Or about a hundred points, really. Most of which seem to be quelling Tyra’s private, inner voice of self-doubt that must be a holdover from her younger days.

That all adds up to making it really difficult to actually enjoy Modelland.

And also adds up to me telling you to see fucking Fury Road. It’s a good movie. I don’t see a lot of movies because I kind of tend to hate so many of them, and this is one of the few that never left me wanting anything else.

Let me sum it all up here.

Fury Road is crazy. The events are crazy, the people in it are crazy. But it’s not stupid. It’s purposeful, and everyone knows what they’re doing.

Modelland is crazy. But the main character is very normal, and the side characters are crazy in very predictable, fairy tale ways that don’t offer me a whole lot to be interested in. And Modelland is stupid. The book, the story, it’s very stupid.

 

Another two weeks, another chapter of Modelland.

This thing, it’s taking me so long to get through each chapter. I pick it up, I mean to read like a hundred pages, and then I can’t go three pages without saying, “Okay, that’s just fucking stupid.” And then I have to put the book down and eat an entire Freschetta pizza by myself and use the diarrhea time to think about my life and what it’s become.

Anyway, this chapter sees the reappearance of one of my favorite characters, Wingtip.

Yes, Wingtip is a character who is a magical black man bum. At least, I’m pretty sure he’s black, but if he’s not, then he’s a white magical black man.

You all know about the magical black man, right?

Originally called the Magical Negro, this is a character who has a lower social status of some kind, shows up, helps a white character, and has some kind of magical power and dispenses a whole lotta homespun wisdom. Your Baggers Vance, if you will.

I suppose the one way in which Wingtip falls short is that he’s advising Tookie, who I assume is black because I assume that Tyra is not actually creating different races and stuff.

This is always something that bothers me in fictions about other worlds. Like Gears of War. Your best friend Dom, is clearly Hispanic. And yet this game takes place on an Earth with countries that are not analogous to our own. Am I to understand that this totally other world developed a Europe and Central America of sorts, from which Hispanic people came, and those Hispanic people developed almost exactly parallel to those we know? How does that make any sense? I mean, sure, the development of certain objects works. The sombrero makes sense because you have to keep the near-equatorial sun off your body. But the language? The name “Maria”? How does that work?

PS, I spent some time Googling whether “Hispanic” is a proper term. The answer is that no one has declared, however, Hispanic usually refers to people of Spanish origin, and because Dom’s last name is Santiago, I assume that he’s of Spanish descent. There’s also the additional consideration of Go Fuck Yourself.

Modelland is supposed to be this crazy-ass world, but it seems like black and white people are pretty much black and white people. Am I to understand this an Earth of the far future? Except some technology has gone backwards and isn’t even up to its current level? There are no cell phones. But there are Smizes and Modellands. Where is Modelland, time-and-space-wise?

ANYWAY, Wingtip. Wingtip is a homeless dude that gives Tookie some advice. And she calls him Wingtip because he wears wingtip shoes.

Remember, Tookie’s a creative type.

Wingtip had some VERY wise words for Tookie: Dream big. Even you.

Wow. Bravo. It’s baffling that you’re homeless with a wit like that. What size would you advise people to dream, in general? Small? Moderate? Ah, big. Brilliant. I am learning much of things from your wise words, Wingtip.

That’s Wingtip. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of Wingtip.

Hopefully we’ve seen the last of Tookie’s parents, however, as the Day of Discovery scout takes Tookie away to Modelland. Yes, the scout scoops up Tookie in what I can only describe as a cross between Santa’s bag and an enormous, gossamer scrotum. Destination: Modelland.

Or at least, Destination: Modelland: Eventually.

Because first we have to stop and pick up some other girls.

Which brings us to Bou-Big-Tique Nation.

Seriously, stop reading this and just type that name. Everything in this book, the hardest shit to type.

BBT Nation is a place where it appears the country is a giant store. Like a huge mall. Like my dreams as a 14 year-old, a mall you could live in instead of just sleazing around a few hours every weekend, playing Captain America & The Avengers when you had enough quarters to maybe finish it (somewhere between $3 and $5).

Oh, and some tossed-off dialogue says the babies of BBT Nation are raised on wombat milk because why the hell not. Just spin a wheel that has animals on it and that’s the kind of milk the babies will be raised on. Because it’s a giant mall, so it only makes sense that wombat milk plays a part. Jesus fucking christ.

Here’s where we meet Dylan. Dylan’s notable features are a big ass and the sass to match (by which I mean “a lot of it.” My apologies to mousy people who have big asses). Her other distinguishing feature is that she has an accent that goes in and out worse than Heather Graham’s in O’ Pioneers. One minute Dylan sounds like maybe a southern belle(?), the next a sassy aunt from a UPN sitcom(?), and the next there appears to be no accent at all.

Oh, and Dylan DOES have a catch phrase she uses twice in the first two pages we see her: Cuh-ray-zee.

Good one. That’s right up there with Joey Lawrence’s “Whoa” in terms of craft. Lots of characters come and go, but I’ll never forget Dylan’s cuh-ray-zie and the way she said it her in SouthernBelle/SassyAunt/None accent.

Dylan is like Tookie in one significant way, which is that she seemingly does not give a fuck about Modelland. She’s not actually parading around for The Day of Discovery, just stopping a fight between some other girls. I strongly suspect we’re going to be subjected to a message of some kind here. About what’s REALLY important being inside. Or more accurately, that what’s really important is inside, but it’s also very helpful if what it’s inside of is a curvaceous butt.

Which ends this next section, thank fuck.

It didn’t really hit me before, but there’s something fundamentally stupid about Modelland that we haven’t discussed.

It seems that we’re learning a lesson about inner, non-traditional beauty. There are many ways in which this could be discussed and elaborated upon, especially considering that we’ve got an entire fictional world. And the way we’re learning about inner, non-traditional beauty in this book is through the lens of outer, traditional beauty.

I guess I don’t get it. I don’t get why girls who don’t aspire to model are going to learn the value of their inner beauty through the medium of modeling, an industry that’s 100% about outer beauty. I don’t understand the value of having a stuck-up, overall shitty industry accepting your looks as being something valuable.

It’s sort of this thing about how beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. Which it totally does, and I don’t know why we’re looking to the fashion industry to validate that fact.

The fashion industry brings us shit like this, Scorpion From Mortal Kombat:

Or this, First Orthodontic Appointment Where I Can See Your Wang Chic:

Or this, Accordion To Jim’s Pants:

When you look up a plus-size model, you see this:

I mean, she’s not a waif, but she’s a pretty goddamn long way from CHUD status.

Hell, she’s not even John Goodman in CHUD.

The point is, the fashion industry is based on insane, bizarre, and unrealistic beauty standards. And I’m kind of the opinion that we let the crazies have it. Let those weirdos do their dumb shit, and those of us who spend less than $1000 on a pair of jeans will find our own fashion icons, thanks.

I mean, look at this fucker! Is this who I’m supposed to take advice from when it comes to looking good? Techno Dracula?

Look, a fashion show is like a chili cookoff. But with farts. Actually, I bet fashion shows have farts too, so just kidding.

Enter a chili cookoff, and there’s plenty of room for different taste, but in the end there’s a chili that’s selected as being the best. And we pick it and move on, and it does’t matter if the lady who brought Chili X is a good person inside. If her chili isn’t great, it’s not great, and she’s also not a bad person. Sure, she could have spent more time on the name instead of calling it Chili X. That was pretty lazy. But when you’re not first place in an unimportant ranking, who gives a shit?

Let me try and more succintly summarize what’s going on in Modelland and how chili farts relate.

Tookie is learning that she is beautiful too, even though she doesn’t conform to traditional beauty standards, which, I guess, are shared between the world of this book and our own. But the thing is, Tookie’s ACTUALLY, OBJECTIVELY beautiful. So rather than conveying the message that beauty can look different or that inner beauty is important, what we’re getting from this book is the message that hopefully you’re beautiful and you just weren’t really aware of it. Which is not something I’m sure exists. I don’t know how many super-attractive people out there are unaware of their attractiveness. Yes, sometimes they don’t FEEL attractive, but for the most part, I think they notice that OTHERS find them attractive.

So I guess the secondary message for uggos out there is…sorry you’re not hot? I mean, check and make sure you’re not secretly hot, but you probably aren’t? If you’re wearing overalls and a ponytail and weird glasses, maybe a mean-spirited boy makes a bet with his friends as to whether he can make you prom queen, and then he’ll transform you as much as possible, and then when you go to the prom you’ll know whether or not you’re hot based on whether someone dumps gallons of pig’s blood on you?

And who knows, maybe it’ll turn out you were hot all along and just needed to be convinced. Maybe you’ll be whisked away to a far-off land in a gossamer ballsack, at which point you’ll figure out just how hot you are.

 

Chapter 11

You may have noticed this is chapter 11. Which is also like bankruptcy. Which is not a coincidence as Modelland is bankrupting my soul.

That may be taking it a bit far. But maybe not.

Tangential memory, I remember as a kid when Marvel Comics filed chapter 11. It’s probably hard to believe now, what with all the filmographic success and all, but I swear, it’s true. Mighty Marvel was Mighty Broke.

I was terrified. Was this the end of Spidery’s Web-Swingin’? Was Clobberin’ Time up? Was Black Widow going to trade in her leather bodysuit for sensible business attire and become, oh I don’t know, a social media expert?

Luckily, it didn’t happen. And we still have all of our heroic friends and their commitments to various revealing outfits.

Anyway, Modelland, Chapter 11.

All that happens in this entire chapter is that Tookie and two other girls are still being transported to Modelland inside of the gossamer ballsack.

They do pick up another girl, who’s basically a dick and also not traditionally attractive. She points out that none of them are all that hot, to which Dylan has a brilliant retort: “Ex-cuh-use me!?”

Gold stars.

Something did occur to me reading this part. For a book about modeling and beauty, this is probably one of the least sexy books of all time. Not that sexiness is something I always look for in a book. In fact, more often than not, it’s just uncomfortable.

But how do you do a book about beauty without having anything remotely sexy happen? I don’t know. But Tyra does. She’s cracked the code to a safe nobody wanted to see inside of.

The only love in this book is so chaste it’d make Stephanie Meyer be all like, “Oh, come on! At least throw a digit in a lady! Handys are fine! Even my asinine moral-highground upbringing says so!”

I’m hopeful we’ll get a sex scene because I can only imagine what that is like through the eyes of Tyra Banks. Through the eyes, I said. Let’s leave it there. No need to be crude.

 

Chapters 11, 12, and 13.

 

At the beginning of this section, we’ve got Dylan in the ballsack, and I was SO glad to get back to this because, well, I’ll let Tyra take the wheel here.

“The pouch swept through the green portal again. After a few minutes, a vanilla-scented breeze tickled Tooki’s nose. In seconds, the pouch began to fill with white goo.”

And there you have it. Definitely a ballsack. Do I think Tyra was representing a sexual thing here, that the ascendancy to Modelland involves the loss of virginity, a baptism in semen? No. I WISH that was what happened, but it turns out that the ballsack isn’t filling with cum, it’s filling with candle wax. See this ballsack teleports and ends up in weird spots, like inside a streetlight or coming out of an old man’s ear or some shit. And in this case, we are inside a candle. Why? Because we’re in the land of Canne Del Abra. That name immediately made me regret restarting this book, by the way. Fuckin Canne Del Abra.

Canne Del Abra is a land where all of the economy, nay, all life revolves around candle production. I can’t help but wonder if the dystopia in this book couldn’t have been avoided by a little bit of diversification. I mean, a whole country devoted to making candles? We don’t even need our disparate weird aunts doing this in their garages, let alone an entire country of it. But, whatever. We pick up Shiraz, who thinks she’s perfect, but she’s 4’7″. I don’t know conversions, but she’s like, 10 vertical furstones or something in metric.

Then we roll over to the land of Sanscolor where everyone is albino.

Tookie does say that she knows the people have albinism, but isn’t sure whether it’s proper to call someone an albino.

Turns out, this is a hotly debated topic amongst albinos.

Some hate the word because, basically, it’s been used as an insult. Others feel like it’s fine. To paraphrase one albino forum poster: “If you have diabetes, you’re diabetic. If you have dyslexia, you’re diabetic. If you have albinism, you’re albino.”

Frankly, it doesn’t matter. Because Tyra is making up all this bullshit anyway, so she could make up a different form of albinism or a completely different thing or whatever because all the rest of this shit is insane anyway. And if you choose to call your land SansColor, give me a break.

Let’s get back to the story. And for the record, you can call me an asshole OR person with assholism. But other assholes might feel differently, so be aware. And hey, you could call me an asshole or someone with assholism, but I prefer “Pete” #NotAllAssholes

Okay, get ready. Cue up some celebratory music. If you’re stuck, I recommend looking up “BBC Grandstand Theme.” You’re welcome.

We’ve arrived at the gates of Modelland. Yes, fucking finally.

We immediately meet a tailor who has a hand for a face. This isn’t explained much beyond Dylan’s amazing one-liner “This thang gives new meaning to the phrase ‘Talk to the hand.’”

Truly, one of the finer wits of our time.

The fucked-up part is that I’m not sure whether the handface character was created specifically FOR this joke or if the joke was applied to the character. Because that’s how this book is insane. You can’t tell. Why are they meeting a tailor outside Modelland? Who the fuck knows? Why does he have a handface? Why does he choose to clap by headhandbutting his regular hands instead of clapping normal style?

In short: The. Fuck?

Okay, then we find out that the scout who picked up Tookie in her magic nutsack is none other than the missing model, Ci~L.

Yes, as a reminder, that’s a tilde.

And yes, we’re told how to pronounce this name, and the tilde has NO effect. “See-ell.” Good. Good thing that happened. I guess that shit’s not getting much use on the keyboard. Frankly, it beats that Beyonce accent bullshit. That’s hard as hell to type. I’ve got the tilde. It’s right here. ~~~~~~~~ I’ve got tildes all day long, so why not?

Do I think Tyra just looked at a keyboard and said, “Hey, THIS thing!”? Yes. Yes I do.

Ci~L is more than just a convenient place to shove a tilde. She’s also all of the following: A scout, an Intoxibella, a “7seven-7” and a slam poet. I don’t know which of these things I hate more.

On the one hand, the 7seven-7 means she’s one of the 7 selected models, and a rare one who exhibits all 7 potential model powers at once. I wanted to list these all again for you here, but they’re very stupid and unimportant. Nothing cool like opening a door to a pocket dimension of all lasers with your eyelids so it appears that lasers shoot out of your eyes. Nothing cool like that.

But the slam poet thing, that’s just albino as hell. Aw, shit. Busted. Busted using albino as a slur.

The slam poet thing is so dumb. Why in the fuck does she need to be a slam poet? Why does that matter at all? Reading about Ci~L, it’s like old Superman comics where he exhibits a new power every issue because it’s like “Well, he’s super at EVERYTHING, right?” Which is how Superman once re-assembled a broken machine he saw briefly because of his Super Photographic Memory. Or when Superman used his Super Broadcasting to turn his voice into radio waves. There was Super Kissing. And, regrettably, the power to create Super Midgets. Tiny Supermen that shot out of Superman’s hands. Because you know what would be a lot more useful than Superman? TINY Supermen! With the same powers!

Okay, two last important things.

1. We are about to enter Modelland. Now, there’s some kind of statue face thing that verifies you’re supposed to enter Modelland, and there’s speculation in the book that Ci~L is somehow sneaking her ballsack full of freaks and geeks past the face. This is not hinted at lightly, but bashed over the head of anyone dumb enough to read this, so be aware that something shady is happening.

2. Zarpessa shows up! Tookie’s nemesis! Who is also broke and dug in the garbage and Tookie saw it one time.

I just want to reiterate, one more time, that we’re on page 149. And we are, just now, entering Modelland.

Up to this point, it’s been this huge question. “Will Tookie MAKE IT?” Ah, the tension. You could cut it with a knife.

Look, can I put on my editor hat for a second? Say what I would have said to Tyra here?

Tyra,

First off, this shit is bananas. But I think it’s the on purpose kind of bananas, so keep going.

One thing. Can we get to fucking Modelland already? Kurt Vonnegut once said that the way to write a story is to start as close to the end as possible. And many a good story has been written by breaking that rule, but I feel like you’ve broken that rule, exhumed Vonnegut’s corpse and crammed a long ice pick up his skeleton urethra. Because goddamn, there is a whole lot of nothing that happens before we get to Modelland, which is where we want to go.

It’s like this.

Pretend this book is a road trip we’re taking together. I’m driving, you’re the passenger.

And it’s like two years later, and you’re telling someone about this road trip.

You don’t need to start with “I woke up before Pete picked me up. I took a shit, and I wiped 17 times. I call that a smearster. Then, I got in the car, and three hours later, and this is where things get interesting.”

Okay, no. Just start when the first thing happens. I don’t need to know about the shit you took and what kind it was unless that has some bearing on the story later.

In this first 150 pages of Modelland, you’re taking shits left and right and telling me about each one. And you’re not wiping, Tyra! You’re not wiping! You’re making a mess and dragging these poo threads along behind you, unresolved.

This metaphor is getting all out of hand, so let me put it like this: You can probably cut the first 150 and be better off.

 

A couple more chapters? Why not?

Let’s get the plot out of the way first. Because this won’t take long.

In this section, our heroes have entered Modelland.

This is it! What we’ve been waiting for. What the whole world has been waiting for. This is the moment where we enter the world of pure imagination. Where all the hard work pays off.

Aaaand we see a couple weird buildings, a bush seems to be a portal to other spots, and that’s about the extent of it.

Okay, the buildings are kinda strange. A cube building that stands on one of its corners. A building that’s actually a boat. Which I’m pretty sure we have a name for already, and it’s called a “boat.” Or a “building.” Either, really. It doesn’t seem to be at all significant that one building is a boat and one is a cube. Just know that they aren’t like those shitty, portable buildings you had in elementary school.

Stupid buildings aside, there’s this weird thing going on where Tookie is starting to wonder if Modelland isn’t what it seems. Tookie wonders this after seeing an obstacle course where girls on their final year of Modelland training compete within rings of fire or some such shit. And it’s like we, as readers, are supposed to be suspicious that Modelland is doing something shady, but this is after the guide openly admits that the rings of fire place is where models compete in their final year.

It’s like Tookie thinks there’s more going on than meets the eye, except also maybe it’s exactly what meets the eye? I dunno. I can’t even tell. The way this is written is just so godawful that I can’t tell whether Tyra is laying in a secret or telling the readers to keep their eyes open or if we’re seeing the truth or what. This is impossible to parse.

There is a brief moment in this section where we’re trapped in a room that’s made of zippers. I wish I could tell you more, but that’s the extent of the description.

I’ll say this. Tyra respects her audience in their intelligence. She isn’t handfeeding me shit. I don’t even know what this fucking place looks like. MODELLAND. THE PLACE THAT THE BOOK IS NAMED FOR. There’s some weird buildings, a bush teleporter, and a zipper land. From there, go nuts.

And this thing just gets lazier as the chapter wears on.

Page 168, description of the young men. Who are sort of models, but not the stars. Oh, and they come from a place called Bestosterone:

“A group of young men marched in, doing a highly powerful staccato dance. Each was more handsome than the next.”

And page 169, one page later, describing board members. Sorry, Bored members. That’s intentional. A character reminds us just how intentional that is. Anyway:

“Tookie counted six members of the Bored, one stranger than the next.”

Oh, rad. So the description is “Here’s a pretty poorly defined quality, and each subsequent person exhibits that quality more than the last. This is all relative bullshit, but who cares? Modelland!” And if that’s not lazy enough, then we get that same thing AGAIN on the NEXT PAGE.

And what the fuck is a powerful staccato dance? Tap dancing? Some shit from Stomp? You made me wait forever for this shit, and now it’s just blowing by! I had to read all about a land where they make candles and have a candle-based economy, and now we finally get to Modelland and you’re like “I don’t know, who’s got the time? They danced, there was fire, the end.”

Ah, there was, however, an interesting little tidbit about the Bored, provided by your friend and mine, Tyra.

The Bored members. Here are the Bored Members:

1. Guru Applaussez: Man with a hand for a head.

2. An old man with moving tattoos all over his body that change shape and content.

3. A lizard with yellow eye and a forked tongue who can change colors.

4. And a “stunning figure that looked like it was three-quarters man, one-quarter woman…He-or she-was muscular, yet thin, with blond hair slicked back in a tight ballerina bun.”

I’ll just point out that THIS fourth character elicits a stronger negative reaction from the crowd of girls than a lizard person, an old man who must be mostly naked if we can see he’s covered with tattoos, and a man who has a hand for a face. I’m not going to get all social justice here. There’s no need because I can talk about this from a storytelling angle.

I just have a hard time believing that this parade of weirdos being ended by someone who’s gender ambiguous is a big fucking deal. Seems like kind of a letdown, to be honest. That’s like having a sideshow with The World’s Fattest Man, The World’s Tiniest Woman, The World’s Ugliest Baby, and then A Guy Who Has Pretty Long Eyebrow Hairs Here And There. Because I’ve seen some people who are gender ambiguous, but I have never, in my life, seen someone with a hand for a fucking head. Or a lizard man. Or a man with living tattoos who mounts a stage mostly naked, slaps at one of his tattoos and the words within the tattoo are altered.

Oh, but this other person might have an abnormally large clitoris. Wow. Call the papers.

And seriously, what kind of description is that? One-quarter woman? Believe me, with my thighs, I’m a Schick disposable and a couple bottles of shave gel away from being one-quarter woman. Nay, one-quarter babe.

There is one other thing here. At the top of page 168 we get a little piece that felt, to me, like stream of consciousness. What Tyra was fucking thinking when she wrote this.

Tookie’s new Modelland classmates have just expressed friendship:

“A rush of warmth settled over Tookie. They cared about her well-being. Maybe they were even her new…friends. She let this moment sink in for a second. For the first time in her life, she actually used the word friend in the plural. She made a mental note to herself to start spelling friends with four S’s, friendssss, in her T-Mail Jail. One s for each of the four friends she now had: Dylan, Shiraz, Piper…and, of course, Lizzie.”

Reminder about T-Mail Jail, that’s what Tookie calls her diary. I understand the desire to find a word other than diary. But c’mon. I don’t call my fucking diary LL P-Money-Papers or some shit. I call it a diary and I move on.

That section, though, that just felt like the running thing in Tyra’s head. Okay, I’ll call them friends, but I’ll do it like friendssss because there’s four, and each one gets an S. Why the S? Doesn’t matter. Or I could dot the I with four vertical dots maybe. Let me call Microsoft and see if that’s possible.

Friendssss? Jesus, let’s hope she doesn’t make any more friends. Maybe that’s why this book is so goddamn long. Maybe she gets up to a couple hundred friends, and we just have to gut it out every time that word shows up.

Fuck, I’m not even popular, and if I did that based on Facebook, I would have to write friendssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. Every time.

My diary entries?

Hey, LL P-Money-Papers,

Well, I made one new friend on FB today. That means I’ve got 207 friendssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. Sometimes I wonder if I should pare down my friendssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss list, but it’s not like you have a limit to how many friendssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss you can have online, and besides, the more, the merrier. It’s like that one episode of Friendssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss where Chandler…

Hell. This book has taken me to hell.

 

11/20/2015 Update

You know what’s amazing about this book? Tyra is so prescient about doing all the things I dislike in books. It’s uncanny.

At the end of this last chapter, we’re treated to a song. Yes, a song, expressed in only text, without any indication of tempo or melody or musical style, a fucking song.

Songs in books are a pet peeve of mine since the old days of Lord of the Rings. God did I hate those songs.

It just doesn’t make sense. Text is the worst medium of musical expression, if you ask me.

Let’s start at the top of the music medium hierarchy.

1. Recorded Audio.
2. Live performance. Some would probably swap these two, and I get that.
3. Live performance as experienced by a deaf person.
4. Sheet music. A certain subset of people can certainly appreciate this and “hear” the music on the page.
5. The sound that just barely comes out of my headphones when I forget to turn off my iPod and hear it hours later, just barely, and I’m not even sure if it’s music at first.
6. The awful polka music played from an across-the-street neighbor’s truck that rattles the windows in my apartment.
7. Songs played via farts.
8. Farts. Just the regular kind.
9. Lyrics written out on a page.

Seriously, with written lyrics in books, there’s no indication of tone or tempo. It’s just words, some of which rhyme, written on down the page.

I tried so fucking hard to find the text to copy and paste. But here we go. Transcribed because I fucking love you.

Mr dear Modelland is a heavenly queendom,
Its walls rich with memories of yesteryear.
Our laws, antiquated, but must be respected,
Or I’ll discard you like moth-eaten cashmere.
Listen to me now, my spanking new No-Sees,
You’re infants, you’re rascals, and oh-so-askew.
You’ve entered a world that most would slay for,
But amongst them all, I have chosen you.
Modelland is your new HOME.
Welcome to this superDOME.
For you XX-chromoSOMED.
Modelland is your new HOME.
Regard your dear neighbor, the Bella to your near left,
Ambassador to Modelland, and you are now, too.
She’ll excite the world to buy wares of design and splendor.
Here’s a list of Modelland’s career menu.
From footwear to freeze sprays, foundation, face powders
To corsets and camisoles and culottes and trousers,
Moccasins and miniskirts, mesh tops and bronzers,
Sandals, suspenders and sunblock with powers.
You’ll wear waistcoats, wedding dresses, wet suits, and lingerie,
Leotards and yellow belts, deodorants every day,
Hosiery and houndstooth and rougy lips to chalets,
Bandeays and bodices and LBDs at soirees.
You’ll exfoliate, emulsify, depilate and moisturize,
Sell glycerins, jojoba oils, fragrances and flourides.
Cocktail dresses, cardigans, concealers for tired eyes,
And practice all your posing tricks from sunset till sunrise.
Perform in petticoat-themed, much-attended fashion-elite expos,
Safari-wear, tuxedos, tunics, tops, all types of clothes.
Kilts and cloaks and swinging coats and crocheted kimonos
With audiences making bets on who will fall upon their nose.

Okay, that’s not the whole thing, but that all I can stands. Seriously, that’s like half of this fucking thing.

Friends don’t let friends make fake songs in fiction.

 

Chapters 16 and 17

This book is a clown car.

Just when you think we’ve got enough characters with the kinds of crazy names Stan Lee would balk at, we get another dozen or so. Out of nowhere, and it’s just like the clown car at the circus where you’re saying, “Surely there aren’t any more people in that car. There’s just no need!” Then we get Somebody de Something from the land of Ice and Fog. Jerkoff Jerktopolis from Annihilia, the land where everything was annihilated by a swarm of ladybugs that were not just red, but dashing yellow, orange of fire, and all colors of the rainbow!

Yes, this is made-up shit, but this is also my audition to ghostwrite Modelland 2: Eclectic Boogaloo. Tyra, I might not be enjoying Modelland, but damn it, who knows the material better?

Who else is so dazzled by your made-up craziness that has nothing to do with anything?

The girls have their lips waxed in this chapter. That’s something that happens, and their lips are waxed with a dark black kind of wax, and “The label on the wax jar said ‘LP Wax: Recycled from vinyl albums of yesteryear.’”

But WHY? Vinyl? Music? None of this has ANYTHING to do with ANYTHING that’s happened in this book. And it doesn’t make sense. Scientifically OR thematically.

Records are actually made of PVC, people. You would not want to melt a goddamn PVC pipe and stick it on your face.

And this book doesn’t have themes about melting down the past to pave the road to the future or some such horseshit.

What is the message? What’s going on? Where am I?

It’s what’s so baffling about this book. You’re humming along, and then there’s something in there that YOU KNOW won’t ever come up again, for any reason, ever, and it makes no sense and sticks in your craw. It’s like a Nicholas Cage movie where you just know he’s going to do some weird shit like eat-drinking red and yellow jelly beans out of a martini glass. Because, you know. He’s a stuntman who turns into the spirit of vengeance. Seems like a thing he’d just really enjoy.

Swear to god, this is a movie where Nicholas Cage pees fire and eats bullets and then shoots them out of his face. But it’s this jelly bean nonsense that will haunt my life forever.

As for plot in these chapters, we have now entered THBC: Thigh-High Boot Camp. Which, don’t be mistaken by the name, does not involve boots of any kind, any sort of thigh-high anything, and is less a boot camp, more a haunted house that the ladies of Modelland have to sit through. But please, just ignore the fact that the name doesn’t describe anything that’s happening, and mostly just rhymes.

So the ladies all sit in chairs. And then 4 tests are administered by Gunnero Narzz, the man who is 3/4 man, 1/4 woman, and has Z’s to spare. At any point, the Modelland candidates can run through a door marked HOME and be taken away from THBC and Modelland forever.

Test the First: Measurements
The ladies are measured. That’s pretty much it. Humiliating, I know. I got measured for a suit once. It didn’t fit, and an elderly woman spent quite a bit of time sliding her hands around my groin and asking me to which side I dress. This is the polite way of asking which pant leg your penis points down. She asked more than once, like I wasn’t sure. Believe me, I know. I hadn’t really thought about it much before that day, but when asked, I knew right away which way my penis had been pointing for the last decade.

Test the Second: Ogres
The ladies are all made up by robots or something that all use the same tubes and powders and shit on the different girls. And they look beautiful! And then they start to transform into hideous ogres. It’s kinda crazy. Bursting eyeballs and shit. A bunch of girls run through the HOME door and leave, but Tookie has a feeling that this is all a trick. She’s the only one who suspects this, even though, from my accounting, every thing that’s happened so far in the book is a trick. Which it is, and the lesson we learn here is that it’s a bad idea to share make-up. Doy.

This introduces a segment I’d like to call Pete’s Rules for Surviving Modelland.

Rule 1: Yes, it’s a trick. If you suspect it’s a trick, it’s definitely a trick. If you don’t suspect something is a trick, it’s definitely also a trick. Everything is a fucking trick. From the name Thigh-High Boot Camp to the portals disguised as bushes somehow, it’s all a trick.

Okay, back to the tests.

Test the Third: Deadly Accessories

Oh, we get lovely jewelry, purses. Hobo bags. By the way, world of fashion, I don’t know what you THINK a hobo bag is, but I’m telling you right now, a hobo bag is a Walgreen’s white plastic bag with a receipt in it for Pyramid cigarettes.

The accessories turn on their wearers, strangling them and such. And the lesson we learn here is that it’s wrong to accessorize with knockoffs. Some designer out there worked really hard to make that ugly-ass purse. And in a bout of very confused politics, we also learn that knockoffs are made in Asian sweatshops, and if we stopped wearing knockoffs, then the lives of those sweatshoppers would be PERFECT.

And finally, Test the Fourth: Get Stabbed In The Head By The Needle From A Giant Sewing Machine

I shit you not.

The other tests all caused candidates to go running for the HOME door, which means they leave Modelland FOREVER. But Tookie and her friends have held on, and they face the last test, which is described by Tyra as a giant sewing machine moving towards them slowly, and one at a time the machine stabs the girls in the head and they sort of disappear.

Is this the end of Tookie de La Creme?

Or is it Modelland, and when in Modelland, should we always follow Pete’s Rules for Surviving Modelland, specifically Rule 1: It’s a trick.

Tookie gets stabbed in the head. But she’s fine. And then she’s just her face in a floating orb. And her friends are all faces in floating orbs. And then the orbs all float towards a door that says HOME. Oh shit! Tookie tries to backpedal her orb, but it floats through the door!

That’s the cliffhanger. Has Tookie left Modelland forever?

For some reason, Tyra has gotten real RL Stine in the last few chapters. By which I mean, cliffhanger chapter endings that aren’t cliffhangers.

Chapter 16 Ending: Will Tookie and her buddies be stuck as ogres forever?
Chapter 17 Beginning: No. For like almost one more sentence, though.

Chapter 17 Ending: Have Tookie and her compadres flown HOME on accident?
Chapter 18 Beginning: No. It’s not really explained, but by this point they were faces floating in orbs, and they’d just been stabbed in the head with a giant needle, so how much explanation is required?

And we’ve almost crested page 200, people. The mid-point is in sight.

 

“Admiring the D, are you?”

The first piece of dialogue in this chapter, spoken aloud by a giant face made out of vines and flowers.

But before we talk about The D, Dylan summarizes the last chapter for us, for some reason. In her accent of sorts: “Honey chile, I just been invaded by bacteria, sliced and diced by earrings, stabbed by a monster needle, and had my head imprisoned in a bubble.”

Thanks, Dylan! It’s almost like this book was written with the knowledge that a person can only take about one chapter at a time, after which a month-long hiatus is necessary.

Which brings us here. “The D.”

The D is not as exciting as I hoped. It’s basically a sorority house. Or what I imagine a sorority house is. It’s like a sorority house for lame teacher students or something. Why do I say that?

How about THIS gem from the tour of The D:

“This is the UnCommon Room, where you’ll all hang out!”

I see what you did there. This room is ANYTHING but common. What with its couches, tables, AND pillows. Haha, whoa! Watch out! Lock up your…I don’t know, antique library card catalogues that could be turned into a jewelry box or some shit?

Don’t tell me, this UnCommon Room is where you get crazy and play Cards Against Humanity. And one time you binged like a whole season of Sherlock in here. And the cat walked across the piano in the middle of the night and freaked everyone out because they thought it was a ghost. Ah, the UnCommon Room. These are the memories that will bolster me for another day of teaching long division, these times where my wild oats were sown allow me to settle down and slowly build up my scrapbook of things discontinued by Restoration Hardware.

That’s really bitter. I hated school, not teachers. Sometimes the bitter spills over. Sorry. You’re mostly good people, teachers. Just stop wearing sweaters with embroidered chalkboards that say A+ on them. Can we agree on this one thing?

Once we’re in the UnCommon room, the remaining 50-some girls in Tookies class receive their Senturas. Special scarf things that are worn around the hips and make a person’s powers even more powerful. Think of these like Charles Xavier’s science helmet, Cerebro, which enhances his already existing power. Think about it like that, except these are color-coordinated scarves instead of cool science helmets, and remember that the powers we’ve seen so far include bullshit like the ability to make people want to buy stuff. Wolverine these folks ain’t. Hell, they’re not even Jubilee. At least Jubilee could fuck up the TV in a bar that shouldn’t have a TV. At least Jubilee could totally make your phone go wacky if you were hanging out together and on Instagram nonstop, and she was like, “I’m a real person. Pay attention to me, not your stupid phone!” Then the sparks happen, then the anger about who owes how much money to who.

Tookie gets a Sentura too, and this is yet ANOTHER thing she can’t believe. She just can’t fucking believe it.

Swear to fuck, every minute of Tookie’s life is like that part in the Blind Side:

I never had one of these before.

What, your own room?

A bed.

It’s like that, except not touching and not interesting, and holy fuck, when is Tookie going to accept that some weird shit is going on and she’s part of it?

It’s like that weird thing in Zelda. Every time you find a new thing in Zelda, you hear that Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh! music, Link holds the new find up in the air so we know what the fuck it is, and then we move on.

Modelland is like that because it doesn’t seem to matter what Link gets, he’s equally fucking pumped. Empty jar, jar with a live bee in it. Oh, that bee. That little fucker was like my mutually-assured destruction in that game. What I wouldn’t have given to be able to tell bad guys “Listen, if you don’t leave me alone, I’m opening this bee jar, and NONE of us are going to be happy about it. I might get stung more than you, I probably will, but I’ll do it. Don’t push me.”

This book is like, imagine playing The Legend of Zelda, and every time you found a new item, all that normal stuff happens, then there’s a dialog box where Link says, “Gosh, I’m just a boy of questionable lineage (elf? part elf?) who started off swordless on an adventure, and now look at me, owning my very own EMPTY JAR! I never dreamed this would happen. I’m so pure of heart that everything is a gift from the universe, and every mouthful of bread is the heavens smiling down on me, and holy shit it’s kinda hard to get anything done because I’m always thanking no one in particular for every small fortune, but so be it. #LovinLife.”

That’s Modelland.

But let’s not dwell on this. Let’s go to the second floor. Up the staircase constructed of only flat, suspended boards that are supported seemingly by nothing. No rail, no risers, just the flat steps. Let’s not dwell on that either because A) This is exactly the kind of thing that in a good narrative, would come back later and B) we’re going up to the second floor to get bedrooms assigned and C) it’s time to get Harry Potter up in this beyotch.

We’ve done Willy Wonka, we’ve done Hunger Games, we’ve done R.L. Stine cliffhangers. But so far, we’re missing a little Harry Potter.

That is, until we go up the magical stairs, find bedrooms, and bump into invisible beds, which then become visible, after which a pencil scratching sound happens in the room and each girl’s face is drawn onto her comforter by magic invisible pencils.

But that’s not all.

What Harry Potter story would be complete without some kind of magic gizmo?

Enter the Headbangor.

The Headbangor.

Basically a headband iPod. That’s waterproof. Because one of Tookie’s friends has a terrible music addiction. Her professor/inventor father made it for her, and she wears it all the time, and the songs piped in are sung by her actor/director/singer mother.

And wait a second, what Harry Potter story would be complete without a bully?

Which is why our nemesis, Zarpessa , is roomies with Tookie. Of course.

I have a Harry Potter question. Actually, I have a lot, but one of my questions is about Crabbe and Goyle.

Why have a sorting hat if you’re just letting dopes like that in the school? Seriously, those numb nuts were totally worthless, and you’d think that a school run completely by magic nerds would develop a system that weeded out kids whose primary joy came from picking on magic nerds.

Moving on, what Harry Potter story would be complete without weird, arbitrary rules? Such as the rule introduced here that the model candidates can only keep two of the things they brought with them.

For Tookie, it’s easy.

T-Mail Jail. Which I didn’t even know she brought with her, but was apparently stashed in her cargo pants, which I didn’t know she was wearing when she left but would have been a nice detail because everyone looks bad in cargo pants EXCEPT what’s her face from Freaks & Geeks who pulled off that 90’s grunge military jacket thing like a champ.

What’s item number 2? Of course, the button. The magic button that got smooshed in the early chapters to kind of (not really) spell out her name: T O OKE. That beloved object that came about when Tookie’s crush, Theopholus, accidentally squished it and it shot all around the room in crazy fashion, and Tookie dug it out of the garbage, after which she kept and cherished the item lo these last 48 hours or so.

This. Fuckin’. Button.

As if the origin of the button wasn’t insane enough, Tookie busts it out, then realizes she can’t be seen with it in front of Zarpessa, who is Theopholus’ real girlfriend and will somehow identify it as an object of her boyfriend’s.

What happens next is hard to explain. So I’m going to just say what the book says.

Tookie busts out this button, someone asks what it is, Tookie panics, looks around the room, runs into the hallway, picks a flower from the WALL, attaches it to the button, and then comes back in the room, a cool customer, and is all like “Oh, this is a corsage and shit. Probably not even button-based.”

The perfect crime. The perfect nonsensical crime motivated by nothing.

And then Tookie puts on a nightie with AN ATTACHED MOTHERFUCKING CAPE, and the Harry Potter cloning is complete.

What’s next? A laser sword duel? A bunch of boys crash land on an island and beat up a fattie? A cancer-based romance? What bases do we have left to cover.

If you said Requiem for a Dream, and if you figured Tookie would sleepwalk into a room where Ci~L was beating herself bloody with a paddle and wailing, you were totally right. And I really question the way your brain works and wonder if you’re interested in participating in a really crazy study.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with this line, from Tookie’s sleepwalking adventure:

“This definitely isn’t the D.”

Indeed. If there’s one thing you know on sight, it’s The D.

 

“Every new Bella started menstruating at exactly the same time.”

Mic drop.

A couple days ago I was saying that this book has ape-ed Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and all kinds of other stuff, but I forgot Judy Blume. I should have known we’d get to Blume.

The chapter begins with Tookie having stomach pains, and then another Bella (model candidate) said, well, the line quoted above.

I should be fair to Tyra and say that it’s explained THREE times that a one-day synch-up is not what normally happens. Tyra repeatedly explains that cohabitation can cause a synch-up where everyone’s Aunt Flo visits on the same day, but it normally takes months. Or longer than 24 hours. Tyra is so good about explaining this that I’m like, “Okay, I get it. I get that you don’t think this is how it happens in real life! Geez!” I mean, THREE times in one chapter.

Also, I’m not happy with that Aunt Flo thing. How is that a euphemism for period? That’s like me taking a dump and saying “Oh, just gave birth to a baby named Duke. 7 lbs, 8 ounces. Healthy boy. VERY healthy boy.”

We’ve come a long way in this book. Young Tookie has gone from girl to woman in these pages. Or from girl without a period to girl with a period. Or woman without a period to woman with a period. I’m not really sure what the defining thing is between a girl and a woman, and I’m not totally convinced it’s period-based. If so, then what’s the defining thing that separates boys from men? I’d say it’s the first time you perceive that the world is a horrible and crushing place and it’s best just to stay inside, so for me somewhere around 2nd grade, I became a man. If women would like to use that same standard, I think that’d be cool, although I guess we’d have to start calling a lot of elementary school students men and women.

The period talk isn’t over, but I just want to put a short bit about the class we attend in Modelland during this chapter. This is kind of how the chapter is “structured” anyway, period, then class (period), then more period, so we’ll do the same thing here.

Let’s look at Tookie’s class schedule, copied here verbatim:

Uno: CaraCaraCara: Time Midnight-Blue, Sharp
Dos: Run-a-Way Intensive. Time: Kelly Green, Sharp
Tres: Mastication. Time: Goldenrod, Sharp

Alright. Am I expert enough a linguist to break this down? Can I channel my inner Tookie, who speaks EVERY language, and translate this from Fuckface to English?

Our first column is obviously Spanish. Got it. Why we need a time AND an order is a little confusing, and why the number is there in Spanish instead of as a numeral, especially if we’re dealing with girls who don’t all speak the same goddamn motherfucking language, I don’t know.

Excuse me. Especially if we’re dealing with WOMEN who don’t all speak the same goddamn motherfucking language. These may have been girls yesterday, but they’ve Blume-ed into womanhood. Apologies.

Next column on the schedule, we have the class name. Instead of being a class that has a name that kind of says what the class it about, we have this crazy horseshit. Most classes are named by what you study. “What do you study in this class? Chemistry? Okay, then let’s call it Chemistry, how ’bout?”

Not in Modelland!

The Modelland version of that conversation: “What’s this class about? Chemistry? Okay, hmm. Let’s call it…something about chemicals. Beakers. Pipettes. Fashion…Camisoleistry. Done and done.”

Finally, the time portion of the schedule. Time is told by color in Modelland. Again, replacing the universality of numbers with something that no one understands. Good. Perfect. That makes all the sense in the world.

This is what I fucking hate about Modelland. This is the thing right now, anyway. There are lots of things to hate, and they rotate through my brain like a carousel of hate. A Lazy Susan where all the spices are stupid Tarragon. A Hate-sy Susan of Hate Spice, if you will.

A good sci-fi-ish or fantasy thing to do is to take something in real life, twist it a little, and thereby make the world a stranger, more interesting place.

But the trick is, you have to actually IMPROVE something. Not make it shittier and weirder for the sake of making it weird, also with no explanation of how any of it works.

Let’s look at some weird clocks that do a better job than Modelland when it comes to telling time:

Crazy wires and tubes and shit. Still numbers.

Obnoxious, makes you do math, I’ll be mad if I ever see this in your home, but still uses numbers.

I guess if you want to really feel time pressing down on you, ruining every fiber of your being, this is one way to go. My god, talk about a way of saying “Get back to work” with all the subtlety of the Hulk lifting a clock factory and smashing it over your face.

This is a RIDE. A fucking ride, and it’s still a better representation of the way time works. It’s not a GOOD clock, nor is it a GOOD ride. I mean, I can remember being on something like this and hoping I only had to go around one time because by the time I hit the apex, I was bored as shit. But still, better clock than Modelland.

This one is racist as fuck, and it’s still a better method to tell time. Awful racist clockmakers were better at time than the whole of Modelland.

This one has what I can only assume is a Goombah swinging from Mario’s wiener. I know, it doesn’t look exactly like that, but graphics weren’t as good back in the day, you guys. You really had to fill in a lot with your imagination. A shitty turtle was a deadly beast, and a straight black line was a juicy wang. And even though this clearly pornographic clock is inappropriate in a lot of ways, one could still use it to tell time.

Okay, we do actually make it to class in this chapter, despite the schedule complications, and it turns out that CaraCaraCara goes like this: an instructor who sounds like Speedy Gonzalez tells the girls to make opposite faces of their emotions. The girls are shown various images, such as a rabbit with no ears and then a “photo of a dead cat giving birth to an octopus on an abandoned road.”

Judy Blume, David Lynch, all in one chapter.

Oh, and this whole class takes place in a giant ship that’s constructed out of a whale carcass.

I’m blowing through this because at the end of class, a statue constructed of an element that “doesn’t exist in the periodic table”* comes to life and tells the girls that from now on they will never have periods for the rest of their lives. They can still procreate, but gone are the cramps and whatever other crap goes along with a period.

*just a note, if a new element is discovered, it’s just added to the table, as happened earlier this year. That’s how science works.

Let me just recap something here.

At the beginning of this chapter, Tookie got her first period. A potentially interesting event in a young girl’s life, I’d imagine, especially if she were to be away from home in a strange place. This is potentially a powerful, grounding element for this story that could mix the humanity of the situation with the kooky Modelland whatever-ness.

And as a quick aside, it did not go unnoticed by this reader that Tookie got her first period, didn’t do anything about it, and then just went about her day. Maybe…? I don’t know.

And yes, I’m AWARE that she could cramp BEFORE there was any bleeding. But, god help me, I wanted to know what kind of tampons they have in Modelland. I’m that deep in the rabbit hole. If you present me with something like this, goddamn it, I want to know. I want to know what crazy ass name they’d have. Crampons? Clampax? I want to know what sort of weird packaging they would come in. Our main characters just saw a roadkilled cat corpse give birth to a live octopus, so I ask you, WHO IS THE WEIRDO HERE?

But we didn’t address periods beyond their existence, really, and it didn’t matter one bit because no sooner does Tookie get a period than a magic statue makes it so none of the girls ever have to have periods again for the rest of their lives.

Okay, that’s even another route. You could go the route of saying that Modelland is stripping away these human things about the models.

But then again, you really can’t because Tookie has her period for all of an hour before it’s gone forever. How much is she going to miss it?

So it seems that we’ve got another situation in Modelland where the way something was executed was the LEAST powerful or interesting way. Almost purposefully so. Tyra wants the credit of bringing up periods and womanhood, but can’t be bothered to write about it for more than a chapter, so fuck it, we’ll just wipe the slate clean once again.

Gah!

As a quick P.S., I got a Kindle for Christmas, and so now I can A) read this book in public and not be embarrassed. I’m not a believer in book-shaming, but I DO think I should be book-shamed for reading Modelland, so there you go. B), I can tell exactly how far into the book I am, right at 41%. Almost half way. I don’t really know what bullets could possibly be left in the chamber with this book, but it’s still surprising me, so I guess we’ll see.

 

44%

Okay, there are a few storylines that I THINK are coming to actually mean something. Now, 44% into the book, I think I have a handle on a few developing pieces of action that we probably need to outline for the rest of this to kind of, sort of make sense.

Think of this book as a smoothie made out of a bunch of insane shit. You came home, Hannibal Lecter is there with an avant garde French chef and a space alien. They’ve teamed up to create a smoothie in your kitchen. You see some ingredients laying around the kitchen, but you don’t know what all ended up in the final product. You look at the glass of beige (it’d probably be beige, right? Like hummus color? The weirdest color for food besides pitch black?) goo, and you can see in there a piece of carrot, a human ear, and there’s a piece of celery sticking out of the whole thing as garnish. The celery has been placed in the exact center of the glass, and the thickness of the smoothie is holding it straight upright. But it’s definitely celery, carrot and ear in there amongst other ingredients.

This book is a smoothie full of a bunch of shit, but I think I’ve identified 3 ingredients that will probably come up later, so we need to get them out of the way here.

But that sounds boring. Just rehash of plot. How might we liven this up?

A few weeks back I signed up for the beta of something called Wordseye. This is a software that allows you to set a scene with text, write out a description of a scene, and the words are interpreted into images that appear on screen. Which could be pretty cool and useful for something like visually creating a scene in a novel. Or you could just do shit like, I don’t know, have a baby on a ping pong table with a sandwich.

It doesn’t work too well with verbs, and some of the stuff doesn’t translate well. Plus, I suck at using it so far. But interspersed throughout the things I’m typing here, I thought it’d be nice to include some images I made in Wordseye, using text from this chapter of Modelland.

Storyline 1: Zarpessa, Tookie’s Enemy, Is Secretly Poor
Earlier in the book Tookie somehow spied Zarpessa dumpster diving or something. It turns out that Zarpessa is poor, or we’re supposed to think that, but it’s a big secret. Not only is it a secret that she’s poor, but Zarpessa seems to insist on rubbing in everyone’s face the lie that she’s rich. Somehow, Zarpessa KNOWS that Tookie KNOWS this secret, and she threatens her with empty nonsense so that Tookie won’t tell, even though it doesn’t seem to matter one bit in Modelland if you have cash.

I’m not sure where this is going. Zarpessa is being a total, unmitigated dickhole so far, but maybe the pair will find friendship? Maybe a tearful, “I was only mean because I was afraid” kind of thing? Maybe Zarpessa will remain mean throughout, something I wouldn’t predict in a normal book because why then would we show her as poor? However, Modelland has surprised me in stupider ways. That should be a motto for this book. Just when you thought a surprise couldn’t be more stupider, it gets a whole lot much more stupider.

Storyline 2: Tookie and Some Candidates Aren’t Supposed to Be In Modelland
It has been suggested, with a hand heavy as Steve Avery’s father’s hand (take a look. Kielbasa fingers all day), that Tookie and the other candidates she arrived with are misfits who don’t actually belong in Modelland. This is confusing because, fuck, the whole structure of this thing is confusing, but it seems like this storyline is going to play a part somehow.

I don’t know when this is going to be revealed to be true or not true, or if this is another Wonka-ing, making Tookie THINK that she’s unfit to be a model when really, the true test of character is blahblahblah. I don’t know much about this other than to say it’s happening, so it’ll probably come up sooner or later.

Storyline 3: Ci~L (the 7Seven from the past who also was the scout that picked up Tookie & Co.) is A Bad Rebel
We’ve seen Ci~L (possibly the most annoying name I’ve ever typed as a tilde doesn’t have a fucking sound associated with it, is therefore rarely used, and is not meant to be used as a fancy dash. In fact, I looked into this a little more, and the only language where the tilde appears without being above, below, next to, or in place of a letter it’s modifying is Guarani. In which case it’s a velar nasal consonant, which is the -ng at the end of “sing.” Meaning this name is perhaps pronounce “See-ng-ell”) beating herself with a paddle, we’ve seen her dressed down by most of the Modelland staff, and it would seem that she disappeared for a time.

Ci~L is also the one who brought Tookie and her crew to Modelland, so it would follow that Ci~L is pulling some bullshit by bringing a bunch of losers to Modelland. Or that she’s so far ahead of the others that she knows this is a good move. I don’t know. It’s impossible to say with this book.

What we know, without being really told what happened, is that Ci~L is in deep shit for some reason. But what it means to be in deep shit in Modelland is pretty unclear. They basically abuse the hell out of everyone anyway, so I’m not sure how different it is. It’s like being in the POW camp from First Blood Part 2, but instead of hooking you up to a car battery, they use a MARINE battery, which we all know has more lasting power. We all know that, right? From watching those disaster prep shows?

These seem to be the main plotlines of the book at this point. That and “Modelland be crazy.” If that can be generously called a plot point, then there you go.

We are currently 44% through the book. So I have to say, I’m a little nervous. I don’t think, knowing what I know now, that the dramatic tension of these three points can be maintained by Tyra for another 56% of this brick. There could be twists and turns, but I have a feeling it’ll be more like twists and burns.

Look how clever my writing has gotten thanks to this book. You take a word, but then instead of the word, you write a DIFFERENT word that RHYMES with that word.

Suck it, F. Scott Fitzlame-eld.
Take that, HemingWRONGway.
How do you like me now, James NoJoyce?

 

No Rules, Just Right

Apparently we have an Australian instructor in Modelland.

Excuse me, not Australian. She’s from a land called Didgeridoo. Which sounds exactly like Australia. It has koalas and kangaroos, although the kangaroos are tiny and rat-like and can be eaten alive, which happens twice in this chapter.

This Aussie also has a special power, which is that she’s a tongue reader. This is not a make-out thing, which is not surprising because for being about modeling, this is THE MOST sexless book I’ve ever read, and that includes Cormac McCarthy joints that seem to be primarily about waiting for someone to have a hole blown in his head by a device used to execute beef.

No, tongue reading is the ability to look at someone’s tongue and determine their favorite food. Which is kind of a worthless superpower because
A) You have to grab someone’s tongue, and
B) You could just ask.

The girls all go to the Aussie’s class, or maybe it’s a cafeteria. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, honestly, but after not eating for a day, they’re all hoisted up in harnesses, put in front of cauldrons full of their favorite foods, and suspended there for a while before being released to eat.

Tookie’s favorite food is whipped cream. So that’s what she eats a shitload of, including many varieties of whipped cream that don’t exist.

Zarpessa, the secret dumpster diver, is tongue-read as loving weird mixtures of old, tossed-out food, which suggests that she is a dumpster diver who LIKES dumpster-dived food, not that she eats it as a matter of necessity. I suppose there’s possibly someone out there who prefers half-eaten meals from a dumpster to regular food. Actually, no. I don’t think so. I can’t believe that there’s anyone who, on a pure taste level, prefers thrown-out food to its not-thrown-out version. That’s fucking stupid. Tyra, that’s dumb.

The girls’ cauldrons then all transform into elevators, the girls step inside, and the elevators go sideways into another room. Why they needed elevators to go sideways, and why they needed elevators at all if they could just walk around, and why the elevators and food vessels are all the same things-

just another pack of Modelland mysteries. In fact, I bet whoever built this fucking place had a LOT of questions. “You mean you want me to build food cauldrons, which aren’t a thing, and harnesses that allow girls to be hoisted into them, which is not a way anyone eats, and then you want the cauldrons to transformerize into elevators that move sideways rather than up? Would you be willing to settle for a table, some plates, and a hallway? Because boy would that be a lot easier.”

The non-elevator elevators drop the girls in a shower room where all the showerheads shoot out desserts. Chocolate, caramel. One is jammed because it’s full of pralines.

“Again, I got my plumber in here, and he says that there’s a lot you might not know about fluid dynamics, but you just can’t really make a praline shower. Nor would you want to. And if you did, you’d definitely have to make a shower head with big enough holes for the pralines to fall through. I’m not trying to tell you your business. I’m just wanting to make sure you know what I’m about to do in here, which is hook up a tank of pralines to a pipe, hook that to a showerhead, and then it all just rots in the wall.”

And once again, a bunch of models covered in chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and caramel, and not an ounce of anything sexy happens. Not even the slightest suggestion.

Oh, and Tookie drops a whipped cream can, and do you remember the corsage thing she made out of her pin to disguise it? That whole thing? Well, apparently that has somehow become a magic food receptacle. The corsage somehow hides the whipped cream can inside of it, even though the object itself is smaller than the can. I don’t get it at all. The pin swallows the can, Tookie reaches into the corsage’s center, and there’s a whipped cream can. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I’m getting so fatigued by things that don’t make any sense, but here you go. Sometimes you drop a thing and it falls into a magic thing that you made yourself without knowing it. We’ve all been there.

The girls finish eating, and then the Aussie labels them as one of three things: Jammers, Chowers, and Poachers. These are people who eat too much, too little, or just right. And the significance here seems to be that the Aussie tells those who starve themselves that when they’re ready for help, they should come to her. Which makes total sense. Come to me with your eating disorder. I harnessed you up and dropped you in a vat of bacon grease. I definitely have a healthy relationship with food.

And again, for no reason, the Aussie uses a heretofore unheard of magic power to renew the girls’ appetite, which she follows with this blessing: “You’re now so hungry, you could eat the ass out of a low-flying duck!”

See? You ask for sexual content, and this thing goes from zero to bestiality in one chapter.

 

Officially announcing that I am over 50% of the way through this muhfucker!

I feel like a little celebration is in order:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SUzc…

Yes, none of us thought it was possible. Mostly me. I have a whole new respect for the people who have finished this book. My hat is off to you.

I also have a whole new suspicion. How did you do it? What pulled you through on those dark nights?

We visited a few new locations since we last spoke. So let me bring you up to speed.

First, the OoAh. Which is spelled OoAh, Oooo-ahhhh, and OOAH on the same page.

Let me place here the text Tyra uses to describe this place when she enters:

The fluttering light at the end of the hallway expanded into an immense glowing circle. A Mannecant stood at the reception desk shaped like the letters H, O, and A. The letters moved around in a disorganized jumble, probably making it hard to set anything on the surface. There was a great round room behind the desk, its walls covered in a furry-looking fabric and its ceiling gently pulsing up and down, as if breathing.

This is the entrance to the OOAH, which is basically a spa.

Let me try. I’ll try my best.

A desk. Made of giant letters. Which move around on their own. “PROBABLY” making it hard to set anything down on the surface of the desk.

No. Fucking. Shit. A desk that’s made of three components that are all oddly-shaped and constantly moving. I might go so far as to suggest that this is a worthless design for a desk.

I want to see someone take a shit in Modelland. I’m just coming out and saying it. I have a feeling that, at some point, a guru will remove the models’ need to shit. They’ve already had their periods removed, and a guru was able to remove and replace hunger at will, so shits doesn’t seem like a bridge too far. But I want to see how shits get done. What in the FUCK is a Modelland toilet, I ask you. What is it made from? Does it function, at all, in its capacity as a waste receptacle and disposal unit? Do you flush and the bowl fills with pralines? Because I see a desk here that does not seem to serve any purpose, even though the purpose of a desk must be amongst the simplest purposes in the wold: providing a flat surface on which things can be placed. It’s a table with an extra piece of wood on one side, and also more often a place dreams go to die, but goddamn is its purpose simple.

If no one takes a shit in this book, I’m putting it out there right now, I’ll be let down. Make me read this much nonsense and you don’t give me the one thing I want? I’ll be upset. I’m not much for entitlement, but I think I’m OWED a shit-taking in this book. Never something I thought I would say in words, but there you go. Tyra, you owe me the depiction of shit-taking in your novel.

The girls go to this spa. Nothing much happens until they come across these three ladies who can transport them into the past to relive memories. BUT THERE’S A CATCH! A VERY STUPID CATCH!

All three girls, Tookie, Dylan, and whatever must go in together, all experience each other’s memories, or not go at all. Why this is the case is inexplicable. I think if the girls had asked why, the future-seers would have broken down and said, “Look, there’s a lot of fucking dumb shit in this book that just serves the narrative, okay? Grow up. That’s how this book works.”

They all decide to go, which seems like a mistake afterwards.

What does Dylan relive?
She’s at the park with her loving father. Who says he’s “going away for a while soon”, at which point you figure he’s dying, but I was still a little surprised when he promptly dropped fucking dead, right there in the park, seconds after telling Dylan he doesn’t have much time. Jesus, dad, how about you make this announcement when you’ve got like 6 months, not 45 seconds?

What does girl number 2 relive?
Long story short, she gets her entire extended family killed. Not really her fault, but kind of. Just enough her fault that she can blame herself, but not enough her fault that any reader can blame her. Oh, there is one survivor, a little girl, who has since disappeared.

What does Tookie relive?
A moment when she was a baby and her parents actually loved her. Which could be a good memory except she doesn’t actually remember it, and it mostly causes anguish because it’s like “What the fuck happened to make these people so bitter?”

I guess they don’t have stories about genies in this world, because aren’t we all aware that asking a genie character for something means you get a fucked-up version of what you asked for? Genies are such wise-asses. They know goddamn well that when you ask for a set of wheels, you don’t mean that you want your legs to turn into Bridgestones. They’re just so bored? Is that it? Not TV’s in their giant rooms made of all pillows? Yeah, maybe you should have got a couch put in there, asshole.

And now the story leaves our hero for a moment. Not without a clumsy letter Tookie writes to her mother, which begins, “You probably can’t believe it, but I’ve been in Modelland for three whole months.”

You. Motherfuckers.

You made me go through 50% of this book to get through like 4 days, and now the FIRST THREE MONTHS of Modelland (minus day 1 and 2) are just tossed aside? The only detail we get is about a class called GustGape, which is a class about “how to keep [y]our eyes open even in extreme winds.”

Well, if I’ve ever disrespected models, let me take this moment to tell you, I get it now. The struggle is real. TOO real, if you ask me. Having to keep your eyes open in high wind. That’s definitely a feat, and something that probably requires instruction. It’s certainly not something you’d just like, do when the moment arose.

And is that really a class you’d take in your first quadmester at Modelland? They don’t want to teach you, I don’t know, how to avoid being sued when you throw your cell phone at someone or assault like 11 different people or your personal assistant or a couple cops at the airport? How to blow rails off a Lana Del Ray album that you bought on vinyl because it seemed right and also because to blow rails off of? How to pretend you’re having fun on one of the stupid celebrity game night shows? Seriously, how low is that? We’ve now eschewed even the low-level of excitement provided by BOARD GAMES in favor of watching famous people play the very same board games. Finally, board games without all the hassle of playing and learning rules and not looking at Blake Shelton.

Anyway, post-letter (a letter Tookie writes to her mom, Creamy, who she hates and has no reason to contact) we’re transported to the Diabolical Divide, the chasm that separates Modelland from the rest of the world. Here we meet a man named Kamata, a guide who takes on the dangerous job of leading pilgrims across the divide and into Modelland. This is apparently a journey attempted by many who are not selected on TDOD (The Day of Discovery).

Everyone collected at the non-Modelland side of the divide hands over wads of cash, Kamata makes them swallow a big bag of pills and take a shot in the butt to protect from whatever awaits in the divide, and the group is about to leave when two travelers come running up…

Creamy de La Creme and Myrracle! Tookie’s mother and sister!

They’re going to make the dangerous trek to Modelland to…I don’t actually know. I’m not sure what happens when they get there. Maybe they’re going to remove Tookie? Try and get Myrracle in? I mean, that’s like me blowing a job interview, walking to Google headquarters, and then they’re like, “Well, we passed on you before, in our interview process, but you walked here. That has nothing to do with the job, but we really have no choice but to make you a member of the team.”

Anyway, I read the first line of the next chapter, and it starts like this:

Our most unusual tale picks up at the start of the next Modelland quadmester, three months and four days into the Bellas’ first year at the unusual, untouchable, and never uneventful fantastical land at the top of the mountain…

I…

By my reckoning, we had something like 3 days in the regular world at the book’s outset. Then TDOD and the first day in Modelland seem to be one, as the girls don’t have beds until the end of that first night. Then we have day two in Modelland. Then we skip 3 months ahead, have this brief scene, then skip 4 more days ahead.

5 days of this book happen in approximately 50% of the text. Then we have 3 months that are not present AT ALL, we skip this crucial period, but whatever.

That doesn’t bother me as much as why the fuck we need to skip 3 months, then an additional FOUR DAYS? What the hell for? What’s the difference? Who gives a shit about four days? Why would that matter AT. ALL? “No, we go 90 days forward, then this tiny scene, then another…4 days sounds good.”

This whole fucking thing could have been accomplished with a “3 Months Later…”, but no, we had to add those four days. I’d still be mad about the three months later, I’d still be confused why the part we skip is probably the most interesting part of the book thus far, meanwhile I got an explanation of why a girl calls her diary FUCKINGBALLSSHITASS T-Mail Jail, but you can’t at least do me the human courtesy of skipping 90 days and then giving it a rest without going another 4?

Damn this book.

 

 

Love interest? Love interest.

Our love interest is a man named Bravo from Modelland’s male counterpart, Bestosterone. Let the brilliance of that one sink in. We changed a whole letter there.

The whole Bestosterone thing is confusing. It seems that this is where male models go, but it also seems that the Bestosteronies are mostly construction workers who rebuild crap in Modelland? While also being photographed? So perhaps while Modelland is a school of sorts, Bestosterone is more of a work study? If this is a scathing commentary on higher education, and if Modelland classes about keeping your eyes open in high winds is supposed to be Tyra’s editorial on classes like The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media (a real class which, if anyone had a brain, would just be a constant loop of “Party in the U.S.A.” and whippets), then congratulations are in order. But like many aspects of this book, the line between half-baked idea and genius is pretty thin.

Well, not really. .

It’s almost like, reading this book is like how I felt about Shakespeare in high school. If you read something ASSUMING that everything has double or even triple meaning, then it’s easy to find that double or triple meaning. If I watch Demolition Man with the assumption that this is not a straight-up, balls-out action extravaganza, but instead a commentary on the way modern action movies have made someone like Stallone feel as though he’s lost and confused in a future that doesn’t make sense, then I bet, voila, that’s the movie I’ll see.

Anyway, I think that this whole Bestosterone thing is just stupid because Bravo and Tookie are just a bit at odds. Why? Because at one point, Tookie had a whipped cream goober hanging from her nose, and Bravo pointed it out to her, not unpolitely.

It’s like pointing out something’s in your friend’s teeth. For some reason, we all get defensive, but you take a breath and say, “Okay, this person isn’t trying to hurt me. They’re telling me something was in my teeth because there was something in my teeth. The implication wasn’t that there’s something in my teeth and therefore I should kill myself.”

But, you know, if the romance was easy, it just wouldn’t be fun, right? There has to be a reason it doesn’t work right away. And sure, this is a book where we could decide it wouldn’t work because, I don’t know, Bravo has a robo penis, or Bestosterone men are like Ken dolls downstairs, but no, we should just come up with a silly, awkward thing that nobody would ever do.

If I was in my teens and an extremely attractive woman told me that I had something in my teeth, and then continually went out of her way to talk to me and hit on me, as Bravo does to Tookie, I think I’d get over it real quick. REAL quick. She could repeat the tooth thing over and over, say it in our wedding vows, name our firstborn Crapstuckinteeth, but if the person was attractive and I liked her, I think I’d be able to get past it.

Anyway, we’ve doddled too long. It’s half past aqua and we have to get to WOW class.

WOW takes place in a giant ball, which pulls the girls into it via magnetism.

Let’s just ignore the fact that a magnet doesn’t pick up human flesh. Let’s ignore that. Let’s ignore everything and sate our curiosity with ICP’s classic line, “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”

War of Words. Commonly called WOW, or even more commonly called Debate. But this is Modelland, remember? We can’t call things what they are. We have to come up with insane names for shit.

WOW is taught by a troll man named Mattjoe Von Megalo. That’s all that we really need to say about him, other than he asks the class for a first debate topic, and they decide on bra versus no bra.

Shall we just transcribe the point-counterpoint:

To bra or not to bra. That is the question. The melon fruit is one to be supremely relished. A sweet treat one should enjoy in its pure rawness, without a fork to spear its tender flesh or a napkin to sop up the luscious juice that drips from our chins. Honeydews, cantaloupes, casabas, crenshaws, muskmelons, and watermelons. Best appreciated without the interference of objects created by man’s hands, mm, mm!

I guess that’s the anti-bra statement. Because a watermelon shouldn’t be eaten with a fork, people shouldn’t wear bras. Sort of like arguing for wearing an athletic cup by saying that hot dogs shouldn’t be cut into little pieces and put into mac and cheese, I guess.

Sometimes it’s almost like Tyra doesn’t understand metaphor and simile. When you call breasts “melons” that doesn’t mean that they take on all the qualities of melons, and therefore anything that’s true about melons is true about breasts. Like that earlier metaphor about a fog lifting like a support bra, which is kinda the same thing here. A bra does not lift like a fog. A melon is not forked like a breast. Let’s leave it at that and check out the pro side of things.

The boobies high and tight on me. My knobbies pert and firm, agree? But forever young they will not be. No bra, they’ll sag with grav-i-tee!

Well, blow me down.

This second, rhyming argument carries the day. Much as we see in most debates. If you rhyme, then people listen to you. We all remember how that works. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, “Four score and seven years before,” and MLK’s “I have a dream, that racism gets creamed” speeches are great examples of the power of silly rhyme and cleverness trumping content.

Stay tuned. In our next update, we have the return of Ci~L, and the ultimate debate of niche versus popular beauty! A debate this big can only be handled by Modelland.

Now that we’ve debated the merits of wearing a bra (less saggage) versus not wearing a bra (watermelon is delicious), and before our next debate can begin, Ci~L bursts into the room with some handlers.

And now, the big announcement:

Ci~L has been demoted from model, Triple7 no less, to a first year Bella. That’s right, the model we all loved so much is no better than our own Tookie de la Creme.

I don’t know what Ci~L did to fuck up so bad, but there’s no torture worse than going through Modelland THE BOOK again, so I can only imagine how shitty it’d be to go through the actual Modelland a second time.

Really, it’s a shame that this book has not been committed to audio. If you ever needed to play something to get a bunch of hostage takers out of a building, screw “Master of Puppets”, this would drive them out in no time.

I always thought that was weird. “I know, we’ll blast AC/DC, a band with amazing hooks that’s actually meant to be played really loud. That’ll learn ’em!” There were moments in my life where I would totally fake a hostage situation to hear a little “Shoot to Thrill.” I’d wave a gun around and fire in the air to hear Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” right now.

Maybe it’s like a marketing scheme. Some savvy marketer was like, “What we’ll do is put out a fake study about how this band’s music can drive people crazy, then suggest it to the police. The police will investigate as far as seeing that you have to pay $12 to read the full article, say screw it, and then our boys’ music will blast a bunch of criminals out of hiding. We’ll look like badasses.”

Anyway, Ci~L is back. Of course, Zarpessa says something bitchy about it because she says something bitchy about everything, and Tookie can’t stop herself: “Yeah, well you’re no stranger to slumming it yourself!”

Oh my god! Tookie almost revealed Zarpessa’s secret, that she’s a dumpster diver. What a disaster that would be, to see a character who is repugnant in every way get taken down a peg. Why Tookie can’t just out Zarpessa is beyond me.

Tookie, if you feel bad about telling everyone Zarpessa’s poor, just make up something else instead. I don’t know what kind of rumor has effect in Modelland. Something tells me that the classic gerbil in the butt isn’t going to cut it. But get creative. Try something.

Enough about that, back to WOW.

For our second round of debate, we’ve got a two-person debate. Tookie and Dylan on one side, Zarpessa and Ci~L on the other!

The topic:

“Unusual physicality versus defined beauty. You two (Ci~L and Zarpessa) will argue that atypical features are superior to conventional beauty.”

Zarpessa makes a two-prong, backhanded argument:
+Uglies deserve to feel attractive too.
+Ugly people are beautiful inside.

Okay. Sure.

I’ve always felt this was a strange argument. Everyone is beautiful inside. I thought we were saying that beauty wasn’t important, but then we backpedal. I know the meaning of the saying is that beauty is behavior, but that’s dumb. That’s different things. Next time I fill out a job application, I’ll remember to put Rich…In Friends! in the requested salary line. Idiots.

Lest we think the prosecution rests, Ci~L enters the debate as only Ci~L can: with a poem.

Perhaps perfection is your snout
Queen bees have stung your handsome pout.
What lies within your cantankerous head:
Infected hard pus in ol’ blackheads.
Strength be with you, ‘pessa as you fade
whilst the UL’s dance upon your grave.

First off, the poet laureate of Modelland rhymed the same word with itself in a 6-line poem. There are 6 rhymes, and two of them are the same word. 33% of your rhyming uses THE SAME WORD!

I mean, this is a terrible poem. Like really bad. Here, let me try. I’m no Ci~L, but I’ll give it a shot. It seems like we’re slamming Zarpessa, so here we go:

Zarpessa, holy diver
of dumpsters, you liar
not a rainbow in the dark
but a goddamn bum. You aardvark.
(in memory of Ronnie James Dio, 1957-2010)

Might have used a rhyming dictionary on that last one. Truth be told.

But hold on. Let’s hear what Tookie and Dylan have to say.

Tookie makes a loooooong speech to Ci~L, and her point is that only conventional beauty matters, as evidenced by the fact that people like her sister, Myrracle, better than her. Compelling argument.

Then, Ci~L can’t hold it in anymore, and she shouts back at Tookie:

“They have lobotomized you! We’ve all been brainwashed to think that beauty is this or that or that or that or that. When in fact, if we reprogram our brainwashed-with-extra-strength-bleach minds, it can be that! And this!”

We finally get the discussion of what beauty is and the value of beauty, although it’s presented in a pretty simplistic way that irks me to no end. Pretty sorry showing, Modelland.

I don’t like when people say “This or that is beautiful! Everyone is beautiful in their own way! Magazines make us only see certain things as beautiful, but really, everyone is beautiful!”

How about instead, fuck beauty, some people are not beautiful, and that’s fine, and let’s stop worrying about that. The primary function of the human body isn’t to be a vessel for beauty. The primary function of someone who comes to my house to install cable is to install cable. I don’t care if it’s a hot babe or a studly dude. I care mostly about if he shows up at some point, and I strongly prefer he doesn’t track shit in the house. That’s pretty much it. I don’t think there’s a How’d We Do? form at most workplaces that’s like “The person who helped you at the register…you’d do her, right?” Because who cares? I don’t associate with people because I want to fuck them. I DON’T WANT TO FUCK ALL MY FRIENDS!

Why are we trying to backwards, intellectualize ourselves into saying everyone is beautiful when it’s a lot easier and more realistic to say that some people find some people attractive and other people not attractive, and the truth is that you’re a shitty person if you treat people a certain way based on their attractiveness? If you’re not looking for a romantic partner, then don’t worry about whether or not someone is attractive. Fuck it! Who cares?

So there you go, Modelland.

Oh, then Dylan enters the debate, says that it’s all bullshit because she’s fat, and runs away crying. Cool debate, bros.

 

 

The things that you have to write like they’re normal in order to review this book.

Here’s how MattJoe ends WOW class:

“Class is allowed to, um, depart!” MattJoe announced. “I’ll see you soon, but now I have to go make a, uh, a special deposit, yep, yep”

[Reviewer’s note: This manner of speech is the one given to the speech and debate coach in Modelland. This is the ONLY character that uh’s and um’s and adds something like Yep Yep to the end of his sentences. The speech and debate coach is the only one. Whether this is by chance, the way I suspect so many character traits on this book were assigned via dartboard, or if it’s a 10,000 spoons irony, I do not know]

“Ew,” Chaste snickered. “I can only imagine what kind of DEPOSIT he’s talking about.”

I think, and maybe my mind is warped and awful, that the implication here is that MattJoe is ending class by announcing, in essence “I’m gonna go jerk off.” But I don’t know. I wish this was that book, where a teacher ended a class that way, but it’s not. But maybe it is. Sort of.

Or possibly he’s taking a dump? Maybe he’s ending class at the appropriate time, but feels the need to tell everyone he’s rushing off to shit? Again, I would love a book where a teacher said, “You know what? I have to shit, badly. So class dismissed.”

Anyway, class over, a small group of girls chase after Dylan, who is seen entering a giant plaid cube that’s balanced on one of its corners. The cube, it turns out, is CATWALK CORRIDOR!

Which is said with horror the way someone in a movie would say “THE HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES!”

By the way, awkward movie title. Everyone says “House of a thousand corpses”, but technically I think it’s “House of one-thousand corpses.” Which seems like an exacting number for a house of corpses. 850, 1023, who gives a shit? Once you’ve crossed a certain corpse threshold, just say “a thousand.” I’ll fill in the blank, no need to call it by the exact number or something like “House of Something In The Neighborhood of 1000 Corpses, Give or Take.”

Catwalk Corridor is a punishment place. Models who are…catty(!) are turned into actual cats, and they hang out in Catwalk Corridor, a building that can show up in any random spot and doesn’t seem to exist in geographic space.

The cats have painted claws, they scratch the girls, critique their looks, and offer them drugs over and over for some reason. “Take one of these…you won’t sleep for days!”

A key sign that someone doesn’t know much about drugs is this: A story where a drug dealer is desperately trying to give away all of her drugs. There’s that classic story about how the first taste is free, but come on. They’re drugs. I can give them away to you or SELL them FOR MONEY to someone else. This is how drug dealers work. Think of it, I don’t know, like a business. Do drywallers do one wall of a house for free, leaving you wanting more? Fuck no.

In fact, I thought I’d look up whether Tyra has ever been involved in drug scandals. Her story? She has never used drugs, drank once when she was like 12, and is completely sober EXCEPT she will order wine in restaurants, not to drink, but to look sexy. She can’t stand the taste. (http://www.askmen.com/celebs/entertai…)

Yes, nothing sexier than a lady sipping wine, holding back a face that looks like the one a baby makes when it eats a lemon wedge.

And again, this has been expressed like 1000 different ways in this review, but why is Tyra sex-essorizing herself? She’s a famous fucking supermodel. She’s outlasted all of her peers. Cindy Crawford. Kathy Ireland! Kathy Ireland had a line of clothes at KMart! She starred opposite Scott Bakula in Necessary Roughness! But still, Tyra is like, “Gotta look sexy, better have a glass of wine on the table in front of me.”

Also, I personally would have been relieved if Tyra’s answer to the drug question was “You know, not really into drugs, but there was a period when I was writing a book that I just dove in, head first, and I don’t even remember writing a single word of that book. I just went into a fugue and woke up, and now every Borders has a copy of this…thing with my name on it. I dunno, man. Life’s weird.” Maybe Tyra doesn’t count hallucinogens as drug? Is PCP not a drug in her mind? How can we explain this book coming from a complete absence of substance abuse?

Back to the book:

Before too long, the girls are surrounded by cats, but then a lion who looks suspiciously like the Belladonna (President-ish person of Modelland) shows up, scares the cats off, and then opens her mouth and extends her tongue like a “furry red carpet” which the girls walk along, into her mouth, after which they emerge in a totally different building.

And again. No drugs were involved in the production of this book.

 

The Porcelain Pact.

Finally, a frank discussion of eating disorders as only Modelland can handle them.

After her freakout in debate class, we find Dylan hurling in the bathroom. She’s got her hair dipped in the toilet, puke on her clothes. She’s moaning. And we find out that she has an eating disorder, which had been under control for three years, but her close contact with Zarpessa and Ci~L brought it roaring back. With a vengeance. REvengeance!

Before we go any further, I don’t think eating disorders are hilarious. But I do think that the topic is pretty poorly handled here, and THAT’S hilarious.

Dylan, for someone familiar with the binge and purge, is not great a puking. She’s kneeling in puke, dipping her hair in the toilet. Look, I have an acquaintance, let’s call him, who managed to puke more neatly while he was completely wasted and dressed in a Santa Claus bikini. Get your shit together, Dylan.

But no time for critiques, it’s time to solve eating disorders. The girls all crowd around Dylan and reveal their vulnerabilities, showing that none of them are perfect.

Piper (the aforementioned albino): Hates her mom for marrying her dad because her dad is albino. “If she had just picked someone normal, I might not be this way.” Sure. That’s how genetics work.

Piper passes around a picture where she’s got on a wig and makeup. Not blackface, exactly. Tan face? I would accuse this of being racist, but it’s really only as racist as the over-tanned appearance of every person from fitness competitions.

Shiraz (the tiny friend): I’m really small, and then my mother died, and my father subsequently died of a broken heart, which means my father only loved my mother, not me.

Shiraz then pulls out a picture of her and her father with a hole poked through the picture where here father’s face would be. Which is a move I never understood. If you have a picture with your ex and then you hate your ex, throw that shit away! Don’t cut him out or stab his eyes out with a pencil. That’s some Girl, Interrupted shit. Just throw it away and take a new picture. Same goes for dad. If you ever have the impulse to mutilate a photo, go ahead and just place it in the trash.

Tookie: Tookie reads a letter from her T-Mail Jail, which is a letter about how much she hates herself.

“Why do you rise each day? What is the point of you even existing? Of breathing this earth’s precious air, which rots each time you exhale?…I hope you sleep tonight and don’t wake up. Oh, how beautiful the world will be tomorrow, with you dead. Oh, I can’t wait…Please hurry up and end it. Just go…for all of us.”

What. The. Fuck. A murder/suicide note. Not even of the “What’s the point?” variety, but of the “You have no point” flavor.

Okay, okay, that’s pretty dark, but let’s cut back to Dylan’s reaction:

“I feel so guilty!…I’ve had issues with my body my entire life, but I never, EVER wanted to be dead.”

Aaaaand problem solved!

It turns out that all you need to do for a friend with an eating disorder is to tell her something EVEN MORE FUCKED UP that you feel, and then she’ll just be like, “Christ, I thought I had it bad, but you’re really messed up. I’ll stop hurling and let’s be friends.”

Cool.

If there’s anyone out there with an eating disorder, allow me to cure you.

I used to have some fear on airplanes, and then it just went away, and when I tried to figure out why, I figured out it’s because I used to care whether or not I died, and now I kind of don’t. In fact, if the plane crashes, I mostly just want the plane to crash early rather than spending the last 3 hours of my life bored and on an airplane.

You’re welcome.

The group then decides they need to come up with a name for their friendship circle. I wish I’d been included on the conversation, and through the magic of review, I can be!

“The Vulnerable Four? Or maybe the V4?”
No, that sounds like a group of 4 vaginas. Or a vegetable drink that’s half as fortified as its competitor.

“How ’bout Krapper Sisters?”
Already taken by an Amy Poehler/Tina Fey spec script.

“What about the UL’s?”
Stands for Unfortunate-Lookings. I guess it saves the time for other people who want to mock you.

“We can take the power back. Have it mean something else. Like…Unique-Lookings.”
And now we’re clearly seeing how Tyra came up with all this crazy bullshit. Just start with a terrible idea, pop it in your mouth, roll it around for a while, and out will emerge a pearl. Or whatever you put in your mouth before, now coated in saliva.

“I kinda like it…but I hate that U and L are a big part of U-G-L-Y.”
A valid and good point. Words ARE made up of letters that are in other words. I hate that my name, Pete, has the letter P in it, as does priapism, which is a boner that won’t go away.

“What about…the Unicas?”
Pronounced like you-knee-cuhs.

Agreement all around. What a lovely name. What a good and important thing to do, name a friend group with a dumb name that doesn’t mean ANYTHING.

There we go.

I know we addressed and fixed eating disorders here, but it’s come to my attention that there are other problems in the world. So allow me to use the Modelland cure to fix everything else. I’ll just list the problem so you can scroll and find yours, and then I’ll tell you something bad, which should fix everything.

Depression:
Last night I saw a video on Youtube that had dead kittens in it. I clicked on it, and I don’t know why, and then I regretted it and it was horrible.

Obesity:
I’ll eat a fucking Kit-Kat by just biting straight into it, and my bite will cross over into multiple bars.

Cancer:
I use Qtips in my ears even though I know you’re not supposed to, but it’s like, what the fuck, why do they even sell them if it’s so bad for you, you know?

ALS:
It takes me a SUPER long time to text my mom back.

 

 

A Whole New Pile O’ Crazy

Do you feel like it’s been too long since this book had just a whole pile of crazy shit on the page? Like it’s been a spell since Tyra held a crazy pistol to her head and blew her crazy brain out all over the manuscript, and now we’re just reading ALL the crazy shit that can fit into vaguely-English words?

Good news. Welcome to the Fashion Emergency Department Store, specifically, The Drama Trauma Center.

You might remember that Tookie got scratched up by some cat women, which is why we need to make a trip to the DTC.

Now, for the first time, halfway through the book, Tookie lets us know that her mother took her to a bunch of unnecessary medical appointments to find out why her forehead was big, and why she could eat without gaining weight. I like that idea, subjecting someone to hospital visits because they have a trait you’re pissed off about. “This guy’s handsome. Tell me what to do to fix it.”

And why do shitty books and movies think not liking the hospital is a character trait? And why do the characters have to provide a dumb reason they don’t like the hospital? That’s such a book/movie thing, everything needing a specific reason. The hospital sucks! You can just hate it because it sucks! I’ve only been there a couple times, and there wasn’t anything specifically unpleasant about it, but it still sucks balls. Feel free to let me know when a character is totally into the hospital, or at least doesn’t mind it. You might as well develop a character by saying, “Our plucky protagonist is a living human female who prefers a mix of oxygen and nitrogen for breathing, would rather not have her fingers cut off than have her fingers cut off, and don’t turn away now, there’s more! Read on!”

We enter the whatever it’s called, and we meet Purse Drestookill.

Quote: “At Modelland, I guess nurses are called purses.”

Gah! Gahd Damnit! Yeah, I fucking guess so. I guess nurses are called purses, a commons is called an uncommons, and a person is called a Ci~L.

I just, I want to express my anger that this is the FIRST FUCKING TIME Tookie is like, “Gee, things sure have weird names here, huh?” And it’s for a nurse called purse. A one-letter swap that, granted, has NO purpose whatsoever, but this is like the one-billionth stupidly named fucking thing in this book, and for whatever reason, it’s the one that trips Tookie’s trigger.

You know what? Fine. Whatever.

We have to move on because Purse(! FUCK! SHIT!) Drestookill (ALSO FUCK SHIT! and hang on, one S, TWO O’s, the complete opposite of what it should be FUCKHELLFUCK) is also made out of knives. Yes, she has blades all over her body, and a pair of scissors instead of the normal, domed top of a human skull.

And then we get the doctor, who has rollerskates for feet. Why? Oh, it’s Modelland, which means there’s a completely unsatisfying and unnecessary explanation:

“All doctors here at Modelland have them…[Modelland] was a blessing for my kind, because the powers that be at Modelland recognized that skates for feet would be put to good use in emergency medical situations…they figured we could get from one patient to the next with speed and ease. So they trained us all and…here I am. They take good care of us…My daughter, Camina Marche, she’s about your age. She’s just like her mama. Got roller skates for feet too. She wouldn’t have a chance in life without this place. She’s in medical school right now.”

Wait, there’s more:

“Modelland isn’t just what you see when you go from class to class. There is a whole underground world here. Parts of it are still a mystery to even me, and I was born here.”

Okay, recap.

Freaks born with rollerskate feet and knife heads are taken in by Modelland to be doctors and whatnot, and they live underground in Modelland.

In a competent book, I would be 100% sure this was important information. I would be sure, based on this revelation, that the underground part of Modelland, this working class, would play a big part in the story at some point.

In this book, I just don’t know. I have no fucking idea.

Take my beloved Demolition Man. There’s an underground society in that movie, and they waste no time showing its existence. They allude to it, not subtly, like 3 times before the movie actually goes and checks it out. The viewer is going, “Huh, I wonder what’s going on in this underground city” as opposed to, “Wait, what? There’s an underground city of rollerskate weirdos?”

Modelland has had exactly ZERO mentions of an underground, let alone some kind of behind-the-scenes staff, thus far. Wha, guh, wouldn’t you at least mention this somehow? Make me think SOMETHING is going on? Show a hand coming out of a sewer? A Ghoulie emerging from a toilet?

Oh, wait. Can we take a break? It’s time for a PSA:

Doctor Erika: I’m a doctor, not a purse.

Zarpessa: Of course! I’m sorry Doctor, of course, Doctor. But you only handle the small stuff, right? Like knitting up cut knees and putting patches on bumps and scrapes. The big stuff is for a man’s mind. Open-heart surgery, brain trauma, that kind of thing.

Doctor Erika: It sounds like brain trauma might be something I should check YOU for.

I read it, stood up from my seat at Starbucks, and clapped. Well done. Finally, striking a blow for all the women doctors out there being berated by 14 year-old dumpster divers in bizarre modeling-based schools. It’s about time we took them down a peg. And hey, maybe this message will make a little girl think, I could be a doctor. I mean, probably not, I would hope that no doctor I ever see has read this book because I’m afraid it’s like LSD and parts of it are stored in your body, waiting to flash you back to some crazy shit.

Anyway, the fucking ER is like the place where Willy Wonka’s victims would go. There’s a girl who has Boy Withdrawal, there are two girls who are turning into horses and diagnosed with “Clothes Horse,” and Tookie get a little time with the doctor, where the doc explains why names are so important:

“Oh, and I know you heard me talking about how children grow up a certain way depending on what their parents name them. Dig deep to see if your name is something to follow or fight against. Tookie. The last syllable sounds like key. Maybe you’re searching for something, and you have the power to unlock it or set it free.”

That’s, wow. That’s like the classic Mo’Nique quote, “If you take the T off of diet, you know what that spells? Die. Which means you need that good food.”

Right. Sort of like how if you take the E off of DIME, it spells DIM, which is because if you only have a dime, your chances of success are dim. Or if you listen to the first part of my name, PEE, that makes sense because I pee sometimes.

Isn’t it amazing how words are made out of other words? There’s a real ENG400 class in this Modelland, I tell you what.

Tookie is given some Zed Meds, which have a Zed effect, which means that she starts her words with Z’s. And of course, how embarrassing, this is when the love of Tookie’s (last couple days of) life, Bravo, enters the scene…

 

 

And now, the romance between Tookie and Bravo heats up. Sort of.

I’m just going to put it out there, the problem with this romance is not one that’s exclusive to Modelland. In fact, it’s everywhere.

I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron this last summer, and the romance between the Black Widow and the Hulk, my god was that unearned.

When two characters fall in love, I think I need one of two things:

1. To be so in love with one or both of the characters that I feel like, “Duh. Who WOULDN’T be in love with this character?” To use The Office as analogous, Jim and Pam. They’re the best-looking people in the office, and they’re the most fun. Anyone in that situation would be in love with Jim and Pam. Nobody’s like, “I don’t know, I’m kind of a Bob Vance gal, myself.”

2. To not be in love myself, but to see the characters and totally understand why they would love each other. To go to The Office again, Angela and Dwight. They’re abrasive and weird, but their idiosyncrasies match up perfectly.

These two types of on-screen romances work because I either feel what the characters feel, or can understand why they feel what they feel.

For Avengers, I guess I felt the first, beauty level type of romance. The actors are pretty good-looking, although pretty much everyone in those movies is good-looking, so it’s kinda moot. But when they tried to go for the second level with the “I have a monster inside me” and “Me too, in that I don’t have a uterus, making me unable to have babies, therefore a monster,” I didn’t get there.

And not to get too nerdy, but Bruce Banner and Tony Stark. They made a robo man, TWO robo men, in fact. I think that cloning from a mixture of DNA’s would be pretty fucking easy for them. Just sayin’. Just sayin’, if Black Widow wanted to make a baby and didn’t mind making it in a lab, she has access to some pretty great resources, and could probably even pick a hair color for the kid.

Believe it or not, Modelland does an even worse job with romance than a movie about a green monster with purple pants and his robot friend and their barren Russian spy friend.

Let’s look at the romance angles in Modelland.

Tookie, I’m told, is borderline hideous. From her perspective. But at the very least, she’s an unconventional beauty. Tookie doesn’t FEEL beautiful, but probably is. The problem is, I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW what she looks like, other than to say everything about her sounds like a young Tyra Banks, with the exception of eyes that are different colors.

If this book were written in the first person, it would totally make sense. Well, let’s not go that far. It’d still be fucking nuts. But at least it would make sense for a young girl to perhaps undervalue her own looks in the face of so many pretty models. Also, if this book were written in the first person, we could always pretend that Tookie had suffered a severe head injury and that’s why the story read like this. That would be a good thing for Tyra to have kept in her back pocket. Classic unreliable narrator, victim of eyeliner-induced brain fever or something.

But the book is third-person omniscient, which means we SHOULD be hearing about what Tookie ACTUALLY looks like here and there. But we really aren’t.

I have to assume Tookie is hot. It’s a problematic, confusing assumption because everyone treats Tookie like a CHUD, but the only options are to assume she’s young Tyra or actually an uggo, and I’m going young Tyra based on, well, the entirety of the text.

This is also the only way the love story makes sense. Why would Tookie be infatuated with Bravo at this point, knowing nothing about him, unless it was a physical attraction, and what personality traits of Tookie’s could Bravo possibly be aware of?

In terms of personality, Tookie would make the most unbearable romantic partner of all time. My god, can you imagine? “Oh, I don’t know why you stay with me. I’m not very pretty.” “Oh, I don’t think I’m pretty enough to go to that Starbucks. Let’s go to the one across town.” “Oh, I speak every language ever and am the most morally perfect person ever to walk the Earth, but I can’t stop being surprised whenever someone treats me with a modicum of humanity, so get ready to have a 20-minute discussion should anyone ever hold a door for me or not just cut in front of me in line because I’m SOOOO INVISIBLEEEEEE!”

Bravo’s attractive. We know that. And I THINK we’re supposed to think he’s a good dude because he has a thing for Tookie as opposed to the hundred or so other attractive girls walking around. See WE READERS know Tookie is a good soul (not in a way where we feel it, but we’re told this fact time and again), but I don’t know how Bravo would know it

Here’s where it gets interesting. Well, it’s boring first, then interesting.

Bravo comes in to visit while Tookie is under the influence of the Zed Meds, which reduce her pain but force all her words to start with Z’s. So she says she’s Zungry, and says Zuh-huh instead of uh-huh. It’s a 90’s Zima commercial all the way. Zomezing zifferent. Zomezing Ztupid.

Bravo hand feeds Tookie for some reason. She has a cat scratch on her lip. She didn’t fall off a 4-story fucking balcony. A kitty scratched her face. Gimme a break.

Then, Bravo’s about to kiss Tookie, even though she’s currently sporting an actively bleeding lip wound, but Zarpessa jumps in to be a jerk, and we find out Tookie’s never kissed anyone before. Zarpessa’s on the attack, but luckily, Bravo shuts her down:

“Look, I told you to leave her alone. Why can’t your bitchy little brain understand that?”

And now I’m totally turned around. I’M ready to fuck the guy. How long have we been waiting for SOMEBODY to tell Zarpessa to shut the fuck up? Finally, FINALLY someone tells this character to shut her pie hole. If this were a true story, I would, at the very least, seek out the basis for this Bravo character and offer him a high five with the option to extend into a light handjob.

Zarpessa fucks off, and Tookie and Bravo play with Tookie’s magic brooch that can contain any number of items without changing size. Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s head explodes, and then Tookie is wheeled off to the OR, which is called the OR-U-OK in Modelland. OR-U-OK? Like “Are-u-okay?” “Oh, Are You Okay?” Who knows.

The doctor says, “…I think he likes you…This lip procedure’s not pretty…but you are.”

Tookie’s reaction is, of course, along the lines of “No way. Not ME. Not Queen of the CHUDS. Lord of the Sewers, Tookie de la Creme.” But her reaction isn’t the interesting part.

The interesting part is that this is probably the first confirmation that Tookie is actually good-looking. It’s fucking annoying that it’s over half way through the book, and that it comes from only one person, but so be it, confirmation that Tookie actually is attractive.

It’s clearly an ugly duckling story, right? Oh, this awkward, skinny teen ages into a beautiful woman.

The moral of that story is supposed to be that we should accept each other regardless of beauty, but the narrative moral is “Don’t worry if you’re not hot, just as long as you get hot eventually.” Wow, thanks. Was that story written by Hans Christian Anderson after his high school reunion? Was Hans a roly-poly teen who returned with abs and a sweet car to rub it in everyone’s face? “Oh, this suit? Let’s just say the emperor’s lack of clothes made old Hans more than enough to buy himself the finest.”

Ooh. You know what? Not likely. I just looked up HCA, and woof.

So what we’ve got in Modelland is an ugly duckling story, but it’s even worse because it’s purely psychological, and also it’s inexplicable why everyone else seems to think Tookie’s a CHUD when she’s not. When did everyone in Modelland, with the exception of Bravo and this doctor, get together and decide to neg on Tookie? How and why was this done?

Okay, let’s focus on the takeaways:

TAKEAWAY: Tookie is, in fact, attractive.
TAKEAWAY: Bravo is also hot.
TAKEAWAY: This is not why they’re in love, although the truth is yet to be explored.
TAKEAWAY: We couldn’t go one serious romantic chapter without some stupid bullshit having a stupid name like the OR-U-OK.

 

Double Updates. Wow.

Yes, friends, I worked the weekend, and that means there’s time for double updates. Celebrate this glorious day. Really wring the juices here.

When last we met, Tookie was being wheeled into surgery for a scratch on her lip. And in this chapter, she wakes up in an all glass building that is -gasp- the Giant M building of Modelland! The one that candidates are forbidden from entering.

Of course, Tookie’s first thought is, I’m not supposed to be here. I’d better escape. Let’s ignore the fact that I was wheeled in here while I was unconscious and a bunch of people almost certainly saw me. Let’s ignore the fact that I had nothing to do with my entry to this building. Let’s ignore that and instead, engage in an escape scene straight out of fucking Metal Gear Solid.

See, the M building is all glass, and the different glass panes fog and defog from time to time. So you can make your way around by sneaking juuuuuuust right. And if you get far enough, you might make it to the same sign Tookie found, the one that says “Emergency Exit to the M,” even though the sign means to say “FROM” the M. Not to mention that I’ve never seen an exit sign that specifies the building it’s for. “You are currently in McDonald’s. To exit McDonald’s, use this McDonald’s exit door. And hey, fuck BK. Seriously, have a great night.”

Also, if you make your escape just right, you can overhear Ci~L talking to the Belladonna (queen model of Modelland), revealing what the fuck is going on!

I’m going to make this brief.

We don’t actually know what Ci~L did to get punished so much, and we still don’t after this scene because the Belladonna and Ci~L manage to talk with some serious verbal gymnastics that completely avoid specificity. But we do learn that Ci~L knows a secret about the Belladonna. What secret? It turns out, T-DOD, The Day of Discovery, is a sham! All those girls dancing around in the streets, it turns out models aren’t selected on that day, but a pre-determined list is created, and pre-selected models are simply picked up out of the dancing crowds.

Now, this is supposed to be world shattering. My god. It’s like finding out the Super Bowl is rigged or something. Or a NASCAR thing. Whatever their big thing is for NASCAR, imagine if that thing had a predestined outcome!

Honestly, I didn’t know that this wasn’t the case. Tyra made a big point about T-DoD, but I didn’t know that WE, as readers, were supposed to assume that selection was all T-Dod based. That a girl’s performance that day is the single thing that decides whether she’s worthy for Modelland.

In fact, Tookie found the SMIZE, which was supposed to guarantee her passage to Modelland. Wasn’t that the whole point? So the SMIZE people are predetermined, but the rest are doing a 3-minute dance off or something? And people would be really upset if they found out that entrance to Modelland was actually slightly more rigorous?

I’m becoming less and less sure that Tyra is remembering what she wrote previously in her own book. Each new section makes that less and less clear to me.

But wait, now we get the real bombshell. Ci~L knows that the Belladonna violated one of the three Belladonna tenets: Do not mess with the predetermined Modelland selection list.

Who did the Belladonna put on that list?

Tookie de la Creme.

Boom.

Soooooo the big revelation here is the one that we’ve suspected as readers from the very beginning, and the one Tookie has suspected herself. It’s less a reveal than it is a fulfillment of the boringest prophecy ever, but what the hell. Let’s roll with it.

Ci~L also says she’s “experimenting” on the Unicas, Tookie, Dylan, Piper, and Shiraz, and she’s doing things to their bodies.

That’s all we get before Tookie makes her escape out the door marked “In order to exit the M, the building in which you currently stand, the door below this sign would be an acceptable route. Thank you for visiting the M. If you’re escaping and not really visiting, shame on you, but, well, you read all the stuff before THIS already, so there’s no going back now.”

Quick smash cut to the Diabolical Divide, where Myrracle and Creamy are making their way to Modelland by land. Their traveling mates have been attacked by some kind of weird creatures, and as they sleep, some kind of plant tries to kill them slowly. But Myrracle and Creamy are doing quite alright due to Creamy’s uncharacteristic preparation and knowledge. It seems she’s the Bear Grylls of the DD, knowing what to do with each kind of danger. I’m guessing we’ll find out some bullshit about how Creamy’s made the trip before, but it’s hard to say. It might not even matter.

Also worth mentioning, one of the travelers is a hunchback they’ve affectionately named “Hunchy.” Hunchy is from a race of people who eat the organs of the albinos, and he’s apparently headed to Modelland to eat the organs of Tookie’s albino friend. I don’t know why he has such a hard-on for her organs specifically, but there you go.

That’s pretty much it for the Diabolical Divide. Back to Modelland where Tookie runs back to tell her friends what happens.

On her way, Tookie wrestles with the fact that she took another girl’s spot in Modelland, maybe stealing the slot from, “…a girl who is worse off than even I was.”

Fuck me, we get it. Tookie is the most selfless person of all time. We get it, 10-4, okay.

Oh, except she runs into Bravo, and for some reason she has NO problem brushing him off and being, frankly, kind of a dick. Bravo, the ripped architect who is almost infatuated with Tookie, who’s also really nice to her, who finally told Zarpessa to fuck off, who Tookie is also very attracted to, but she keeps blowing him off because…well, if she didn’t, then they would just be romantically involved and that would wrap up that whole portion of the tale. So instead, Tookie has to literally shove Bravo out of the way when he’s about to kiss her, and she runs away to tell her gal pals about what she just learned.

Am I the only one who hopes that Bravo gives up on Tookie? That he’s like, “Whatever. I liked Tookie, but how many times can she physically shove me out of the way to go do something else before I move on?”

Tookie arrives at the D (after slapping away the best D in all of Modelland) and tells the other Unicas what’s going on, that Ci~L has been acting, to borrow a phrase from Dylan, cuh-ray-zee, and that they’re poised to be the subjects of experimentation.

Okay, okay. Let me recap this for a second.

Ci~L fucked up somehow, she’s been tortured horribly, she’s been forced to return to first-year classes. The Belladonna replaced a legit candidate with Tookie, and Ci~L knows this. Therefore, Ci~L is blackmailing the Belladonna, who is allowing Ci~L to experiment on the Unicas. “Experiment” being a very ill-defined term so far.

This leaves a lot of questions. I’ll give it up, I’m fucking confused. If Ci~L is holding the cards, why the torture? Why the return to classes? If Ci~L learned this information by working in the admissions department, wouldn’t EVERYONE in that department know this information? What’s going on here? How does any of this make any kind of sense? What sort of backwards-ass plot is developing here?

Smart money is on a Snape situation here. I’m thinking Ci~L is secretly a good guy somehow. But I guess the story could be that the Belladonna is secretly good, although she’s the Belladonna, so why the secrecy?

None of this is important. What’s important is that the Unicas decide the only thing to do is escape Modelland.

And thus we get the stupidest ever formation of an escape plan ever created in fiction.

The decision is made to escape, and by the way, includes the best joke in the book so far:

Tookie: We have to escape.
Dylan: I’ll do anything not to get tortured. Even if it means goin’ back to work in customer service.

Okay, when planning an escape, there’s certainly no one way to do it. You could say, “Alright, I want to be over there. Let’s work our way backwards.” Or you could say, “I know my immediate surroundings best. Let’s plan it from where I stand now to where I want to be.” Or you could even think about it in a different order, like hardest part first.”

Or, you could be a Unica, and decide that the first thing to do is assign roles.

Yes, assign roles before you know what you’re going to do, where you’re going, and what might be required.

This is like the best part of an action movie. Getting the team together. We’re all familiar with this trope from the Ocean’s movies, but it’s probably done best, or at least MOST, in Armageddon, a film where we had a dozen different people to pull together, all of whom run away from the authorities attempting to recruit them. One even runs away on horseback.

I’m not afraid to call Armageddon a FILM.

How does the Modelland version look:

Piper: The researcher and tech expert. She’s good with that stuff, so it’s important to have a researcher and tech expert to…I don’t know, sit in the library with a giant book called “How to Escape Stuff.”

Can we take a second? I think that it’s stupid horror movies that have created this expectation, where a student comes to the library to write a paper and is like, “I need a book about the religion in Germany before World War II,” and then when you pull down a couple books for someone and explain that they might have to synthesize the info from multiple sources, they seem disappointed that you didn’t have a book that shares the exact title of their paper. It’s always the horror movies, they go to the library and they’re like, “I need information on the hauntings at this address.” And then some dusty old broad pulls down two HUGE volumes of newspaper clippings and is all, “This is all we have.” Or we get a dictionary of the occult, open to a page and it’s like “Peak, Crimson. Definition: A scary house with haunts. You can defeat these haunts with the following methods.”

Stupid youths.

Right, back to the team.

Dylan: Bigmouth distraction. I guess she’ll just yell, or maybe gossip loudly in order to make this happen?

Shiraz: Speedy lookout. We don’t know what she’ll be looking out for where, but she’s the fastest, so it only makes sense. I guess she must also be the wuss. Everyone knows the wuss offers to be a lookout because they think they won’t get in trouble. Newsflash, wusses, you can’t be a lookout for a bank robber and get out of trouble. You’re still fucked. This is a childhood lesson we should really be incorporating into classrooms. Core Knowledge my ass.

And finally, Tookie: Well, nobody can think of what Tookie is good at. She doesn’t seem to have any real skills. So they make her leader.

Sounds like A LOT of work teams I know.

And with that, the girls think for weeks and come up with two plans:

Brilliant Plan 1 (or, as I dubbed it, Plan Alpha): There is a Zip Zap, one of those teleport things, near the new stadium being built by the boys of Bestosterone. ZhenZhen, one of the upper levels, said not to use it because it’s a 50-50 chance you’ll get where you want to go, but you might end up in the Diabolical Divide, which is just on the other side of the wall.

Brilliant Plan 2 (or, as I dubbed it, Plan Cobra Stryke): Just go over the fucking wall.

Cobra Stryke isn’t a horrible plan, but it took a few weeks to come up with that. Come on, ladies.

Okay, now an astute observer will note that the Diabolical Divide is to be avoided, and Plan 1 gives us a 50-50 chance of doing just that. Plan 2 provides absolutely no chance that we’ll avoid the DD.

And therefore, the Unicas pick Plan 2. Yep. They’re that stupid.

Imagine if you will, you are presented with two plates of food. You MUST eat one of these plates of food. Plate A has a 50-50 chance of containing spoiled meat, which would make you sick. Plate B 100%, for sure, has spoiled meat on it, and it will absolutely make you sick.

You can pick between these plates, and you pick Plate B because, hey, at least you KNOW you’re going to get sick.

Idiots.

The girls are formulating a plan, which seems to consist of going to the wall and climbing it, when a girl, totally separate from the Unicas, scales the wall herself one night in an attempt to make a daring escape.

The girl scales the wall and makes it to the other side.

Then, lightning strikes the wall, making it see-thru, and the girls watch in horror as the escapee is instantly aged 50 years. Lightning strikes the wall a second time, rendering the wall into a two-way mirror so that the escapee can marvel at the horror of her face while the girls inside Modelland can see her, and then a rollercoaster car appears to take the girl back home so that her boyfriend can see she’s become a hideous old shrew. Oh, and then a third lightning bolt hits the wall and turns it back to a regular-ass wall.

The consequence of scaling the wall is being aged 50 years, so that’s no longer going to work for the Unicas. Even though these are supposedly unattractive girls who fear they’ll be killed anyway.

But fuck that. More exciting to me was the way that Tyra managed to show what was happening on the other side of a wall. She really puzzled that one out.

“Okay, I’ve got this girl on the other side of the wall. I need the girls to SEE what happens. Hmm. Mirror. Window. Some kind of magic looking device. No, no. That’s all too farfetched. Okay, I got it. Crazy lightning will strike the wall, rendering it transparent, a thing that does not happen ever anywhere. THEN, I need the girl to see she’s aged. Hm. I got it. SECOND lightning strike, and that strike turns the wall into a two-way mirror, an EVEN MORE unlikely thing, which makes the first strike seem almost sane. And then, fuck it, just to tie up loose ends, I’ll make sure there’s a third strike that turns the wall back to normal. I don’t want to have to keep remembering that there’s a see-thru part of the wall.”

The whole thing ends with the Unicas deciding that, No, they can’t escape by climbing the wall, and Tookie writes Ci~L a letter in her T-Mail Jail, basically saying she’s confused because it seems like Ci~L cares about the girls, but she knows they’re just experiments to her.

T-Mail Jail, if it had been used consistently, could have been a way to do like the end of a Scrubs episode where the narration kinda says a little too much, but you know, most of us weren’t paying close attention that whole time. That’s kind of what TMJ does here, but goddamn is it clumsy.

Is Ci~L really a baddie? Is the Belladonna on the Unicas’ side? What will lightning turn transparent next? Stay tuned.

 

 

Modelland.
Modelland.
Modelland.

I was singing this song in my head today, and I realized it was the background vocals to the Simpsons’ monorail song, but I replaced “monorail” with “Modelland” and replaced the upbeat tone of hopefulness with a tone that’s…more like something from a Silent Hill game.

Last Time On Pete’s Exhaustive Review Of Modelland:

Oldy McOld got turned old when she jumped over the wall, and the Unicas needed to make a new escape plan.

By the way, the wall Oldy went over, the one that was struck by lightning until it turned transparent? And then struck again to be a 2-way mirror? And then struck again to go back to normal? Well, now it’s “reconfigured itself to create a collage of [Oldy] before jumping and after.”

Okay. The wall can just reconfigure itself, but before it had to be struck by lightning.

How many powers does this wall have, and how can we deploy them in the worst possible ways?

And why is a wall the most interesting character at the moment?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but the bad news is that we now must leave this fascinating wall to go into the M building, where the models are all being called for some reason.

Yes, the same M building Tookie freaked out about being in, the M building that we’re all NEVER supposed to enter. For those keeping score, we’re now entering the forbidden building twice within the same 10% of this book. For being a forbidden building, we seem to end up there a lot lately.

I’m fucking DYING to see if Tyra breaks the 4th wall. I can smell it. I feel like it’s going to happen. This would have been the perfect time. “Because in Modelland, the rules get broken out of narrative necessity, dahling.”

We go back in the building, and Tookie notices a lot of security guards and how difficult it must be to get in or out of the M, and she wonders how she could have escaped before. But thank goodness, she comes up with a solid reasoning of how it worked:

“The whole ordeal was just a blur now.”

Perfect.

You know what? I’m tired of being polite. I think Tyra Banks is stupid. I really do. Because the only explanation for having Tookie escape the M, which she never went into willingly, THEN go back in, THEN notice a bunch of security and how locked down the place is, THEN wonder how she escaped a day ago, and THEN decide she must have forgotten something from like a day ago, the only explanation for this is that Tyra is stupid. There is no other possible explanation for why you would write yourself into such a minor corner and then, upon revision, barely be able to write yourself out of it.

The Belladonna shows up, and she leads the models in a song about the girl who went over the wall. There’s nothing like a Modelland song. Shall we?

Modelland was once her home … home … home,
But foolish lust we don’t condone … done … done.
Now a cursed and cracked gemstone … stone … stone,
Modelland is not her home.

Where to begin.

Let’s try and figure out how this is, in any way, a song.

Syllabically, we’re looking at

7
8
7
7

So that doesn’t really make sense.

The third line doesn’t really seem to have a subject.

“Done” is not pronounced as “d-own.” It’s done. Like finished. This chanty thing doesn’t really work.

I don’t know why we have a space, ellipsis, and then a space.

And look at the first and last line. Modelland was once her home. Modelland is not her home. These pretty much say the same thing, and they’re two lines of a four-line song. 50% of this crappy song is the same thing.

How is she a gemstone?

How did we not use the rhyme “crone”?

How did we not- GAH! You know what? I’ll just redo it.

Oh Modelland, this was her home, home home,
she jumped the wall to jump a bone, bone, bone
and now she’s just a dusty crone, crone, crone
there you have it. Now let’s go home.

But the models didn’t have my version, they had the Belladonna’s stupid version, and she made everyone sing it 6 times. Why? Because fuck you, it’s Modelland.

That should be the motto of this book. The flap should say:

What’s the mystery?
Fuck you, it’s Modelland.
What will happen to these girls?
Fuck you, it’s Modelland.
Why are you holding this?
Fuck you. It’s Modelland.

The Belladonna gives a speech about how she’s pissed because Oldy left FOR A MAN, and we get-

WOOPWOOPWOOP! CLUMSY TYRA FEMINISM ALERT! CLUMSY TYRA FEMINISM ALERT!

Zarpessa: But Madame Belladonna, I don’t think it’s wrong to live for a man. Their intelligence is far greater than ours, and it is our duty to submit and love and-

Belladonna:…Where on earth did you manage to come up with that rubbish? So you would derail your life to be with a man, you would risk your FACE, your Modelland Intoxibella future, for that nonsense you call…love?

Yes, it seems that for the last few chapters, Zarpessa has existed to spout the dumb, anti-woman stuff, which works perfectly because we all want to see her go down a peg. Two birds with one stone. We have her say something anti-woman, and then slap her down. We deliver a message FOR THE KIDS, and we get to see Zarpessa flattened. Win-win.

Kids, I just want to say, do not read this book if you want to learn anything about equality, beauty, songs, architecture, love, family relationships, plotting, storytelling, makeup, dorm life, butts, people with hands for faces…the only thing that one walks away from this book with is a peek inside Tyra’s head, which is what I can only assume is what’s in that puzzle box from Hellraiser, and complete bafflement when it comes to the state of American book publishing.

Also, hold the phone. The Belladonna says that dating a man means you risk your face? What does that mean? Is there something I’m missing out on when it comes to dating? Is there some kind of power I possess to sap the youth from a woman’s face and draw it into my own body? Because if there is, tell me now, or so help me I’ll find out for myself and we will ALL feel the wrath of my new abilities to mummify a face. Women I date, the before and after will look like the before and after of the President, where he goes in looking young and ready and comes out of office looking like his last act was to sacrifice a turtle and a hippo who became unlikely friends, but he had to kill them by tossing them into separate volcanoes where they burned alone and sad.

Alright, so love is not cool in Modelland.

Oh, also, the scene with the Belladonna takes place in pitch dark because apparently no one actually knows what she looks like. Which I would have thought would have been more important up to now, that she’s an unknown, but I’m fucking stupid and fuck you, it’s Modelland.

I mean, fuck me, it’s Modelland, but this book is so bad that I don’t even know that the Belladonna hasn’t been SEEN yet. That seems like a big deal, and it’s a big deal in this scene, 70% of the way through the book. But up til now, I just assumed that, like everything, the Belladonna just wasn’t described because Tyra doesn’t describe things until she has a wacky idea for them.

 

Interlude. The Diabolical Divide.

The travelers are miserable. Creamy takes the fuck over. She apparently knows some kind of swamp monster whose body is made out of musical instruments.

Mmmmmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmm!

“Sideways-turned cymbals for teeth.”

The monster eats someone because Creamy is crazy as hell, and it’s pretty clear at this point that Creamy knows an awful lot about the Diabolical Divide, but we aren’t being told what why or how. This whole business with Creamy and the Diabolical Divide has all the trademarks of any good Modelland mystery. It’s confusing, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to think, and fuck you, it’s Modelland.

 

 

Night Fever

We rejoin our models in the night, and Zarpessa has a night terror thingie. She’s digging in imaginary dumpsters, and Tookie has the chance, once again, AT THE BEHEST OF A DOCTOR, to reveal anything she knows about Zarpessa.

She almost does, but then she remember’s Ci~L’s words: The girl who is sucking your blood is hurting way more than you.

So she keeps quiet, yet again.

Even though we now suspect Ci~L is a murderous crazy person, her words still hold sway, somehow.

Would it change how we felt about a big speech, like if we found out Abraham Lincoln was tripping balls or something? If the great words come from someone insane, does that matter?

Take this quote:

“I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.”

That’s a Hitler right there. It sounds almost nice, I think, but then you know who it’s from and you’re like, “Oh, I think he means something way different than what I first guessed.”

Maybe if Abraham Lincoln was tripping balls, they should just put an asterisk next to the speech’s title or something.

Anyway, that boring and pointless Zarpessa interlude leads into our next encounter with Bravo, who is also the second major Modelland character who explains to us how it’s difficult to be really beautiful.

Yeah, this is a Modelland thing.

Bravo tells Tookie his story. Well, he pretends it’s not his story. He says, “Let me tell you a story about a boy named Deco,” and then proceeds to tell us a story about a super-handsome boy who really likes architecture, handsomeness and love of architecture being the two things we know about Bravo at this point. Why he tells the story this way I do not know.

The story is like this:

Once there was a boy named Deco, and he loved architecture a whole lot. And he wanted to learn everything about architecture and to be an architect, but there was a problem. He was just so damn good-looking. Yes, people swooned. Grown women would want to marry him when he was just a young boy. Things were so out of control that a symphony conductor saw Deco in the crowd one day, and Deco’s face was so handsome that the conductor decided to create and perform a symphony for Deco’s face. Just his face. And Deco had to stand on stage the whole time, but it was worthwhile because the concert hall was a rad building and Deco likes architecture.

As Deco grew, so did his interest in architecture, but he found that no one took him seriously. Or they took him kinda seriously, but when they saw his face, they didn’t want to ask about his buildings or his designs, they just swooned.

Meanwhile, two of Deco’s heroes, both architects, attempted to hike the Diabolical Divide in order to get to Modelland and see its unusual architecture. They didn’t make it, but Deco, inspired by his heroes, decided to make his way to Modelland the only way he knew how: By being really hot and going to Bestosterone.

(By the way, not really sure if the Bestosterone guys are selected or just show up or what. Would have been a good time to find out, but here we are)

And that boy, Deco, is the man you see before you today. Bravo. I’m Bravo, but I’m also Deco. Do you understand? Can I make this more obvious?

Okay, okay. I’m sure I said something like this before, but it bears repeating.

It is possible to write a book about how it’s really hard to be attractive. About how being attractive means you don’t get to be heard the same way as the rest of us normals. I think it’s technically, philosophically possible to write something that would make a character sympathetic because they are TOO hot. I’m wracking my brains to think of something that’s done this. But…I don’t know.

What I DO know is that Modelland is not the right book to do it.

While I can see, like celebrity, super-hotness would be a burden at times, I think you have to consider that, like celebrity, it’s certainly got some distinct advantages, and it’s hard to convince anyone that good looks are worse than bad ones. I can see how the stares and overtures would be obnoxious, but I’m not really buying the idea that Bravo was too hot to be an architect. “I went into offices, and they thought I was so hot that they just wanted to talk about how hot I was.” Come on. That’s dumb.

Because seriously, when they do that thing on the news where they uglify themselves and see what it’s like, they never do it the other way, get super pretty and then be like, “WOW, it’s SO HARD to be attractive! I’ll never be attractive again. I’m going to go home and fill a sleeping bag with pepperonis and just stay in there until I’m oily and pimply 4 LYFE!!!”

Bravo doesn’t get to be an architect the way he would like, and that’s his tragedy. But I think a lot of us don’t get to do what we want, and we can’t blame super hotness for our failures.

Maybe that’s what I’m getting at. No one is going to cry for you when you say you were held back in life by hotness. Everyone is held back by something, whether it be money or geography or missing a leg. We’ve all missed out on jobs because we were underqualified or gave a shitty interview. I think that would be a lot easier to take if I genuinely thought, and it seemed genuinely true, that I couldn’t get gigs because I was so fuckable.

I’m prepared to declare being too hot a non-problem. It’s like if I declared I’m just too good at giving oral, and it’s a problem because people are constantly calling me, begging me to have sex with them. Wow. What a terrible life.

So that’s Bravo’s tragic backstory. Too hot to exist in the regular world. Up to this point, the book really got across that Bravo was good looking, but it’s only know that I realize he’s so damn brave.

At the story’s climax, Tookie and Bravo almost kiss, again, and Bravo talks about how he sees Tookie’s inner beauty, even though they’ve barely spoken, and then Bravo reveals that there’s a Zip-Zap hidden in the stadium! The Unicas can make an escape! He’s going to show it to her, take her out of Modelland so they can kiss and express their love, but it can’t happen right away because, you know, someone comes in to interrupt everything because (say it with me) FUCK YOU, IT’S MODELLAND.

Oh, also, real quick, Tookie hesitates to kiss Bravo because she “Promised [her]self to Theophilus.” Remember? That dude we haven’t seen since the first like 10 pages of this muhfucker! I completely forgot that guy existed, but I guess Tookie was planning to kiss Theo, bang him, marry him, and then they could have babies together, and together they could concoct the absolute most unholy names a child has ever been burdened with.

~Diabolical Divide Interlude~

Creamy and Myrracle fight a monster that’s a giant spider with a hundred human legs, the monster is defeated by the power of dance, and then fireballs rocket through a graveyard and incinerate a couple people.

~Back to Modelland~

What? That Diabolical Divide bit seemed rushed? Like there was some stuff missing? Welcome to my world, fuckers.

We find out that Tookie is going to be a contestant in something called ManAttack where models go up against boys from Bestostero for some reason, in some activity, in an egg-shaped stadium. And who is she matched with? Bravo. Doy.

 

 

Today is filled with some true WTFuck moments.

Today is all about Manattack.

As far as I can tell Manattack is Modelland’s Quidditch.

Quidditch was always my least favorite part of Harry Potter books. For one, it was always the clumsiest part.

“Sigh, Potter, you’ve forgotten again? You need to stop living with Muggles. Listen up, Quidditch goes like this.”

C’mon. Just put a rulebook in the back or something. It’s a made up sport. I don’t even care about real sports, let alone the made up ones. Also, there’s a team called the Quafflepunchers. C’mon. C’mon.

I never liked how Quidditch seemed like it was important even though these students/kids were magic-ing for their fucking lives. If I went to a high school where the faculty murdered my parents, and one time there was a murderous troll in the bathroom instead of just scary drug dealers, I don’t think I would have given a fuck about football. I didn’t give a fuck about football as it stood already, so if there actually was something better to do, all the more not giving a fuck. Who gives a flying broomstick up the ass about sports when your classes involve shooting magic laser wand shit at people? You can fucking fly. And the best thing you can think to do is play flying football?

And finally, the Snitch. That never made sense. If you get that, the game is just over and you win? There must be a thousand million internet articles about what a dumb thing that is, so I won’t belabor the point. I just want to say that I think Quidditch is probably the weakest aspect of Harry Potter and something I don’t care for, and I want to say that to express my surprise that Modelland finds a way to do it much worse.

Now, here’s what Manattack is, best I can decipher. This is a struggle, so don’t be a dick about it. I’m confused too. If there’s one thing Tyra is bad at, it’s description of objects and people, and if there’s another thing, it’s drawing a word picture that sets up where those objects and people are in space, and if there’s another thing, it’s describing action. Manattack involves all of these skills, so here we go.

In a stadium, a boy from Bestosterone and a girl from Modelland stand on opposite sides of a plank. I’m not entirely sure how wide this plank is, nor how long.

A buzzer sounds, and the boy and girl run towards each other and try to push each other off the plank. You can shove someone or trick them by kissing them and surprising them, or whatever. There’s some kind of antigravity that hurls someone back onto the plank if they fall, but falling costs points.

After some indeterminable interval of time on the plank, clothing comes shooting out of these holes that are somewhere, and the competitors have to assemble the best outfit, based on some kind of theme they’re given at some point, also not really clear.

I THINK they’re also still on the plank, but I don’t know.

THEN, the makeup portion. Red and blue balls appear “out of thin air.” The red balls are girl makeup, the blue ones boy makeup. The contestants touch their balls (!) and rub stuff on their faces (!), but you have to be quick about it (!) because once you touch a ball (!) it’s set to explode(!) You have to put on makeup to score points, and then if your opponent smears you with the contents of a ball (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) then you lose points.

Finally, the pair takes a photo together, and whoever dominates the photo wins points.

At the end of this competition, scores, which seem so fucking arbitrary that they rival Conan’s video game scores, are given.

Three girls go up against three boys separately, and of course, the main event is Tookie v. Bravo.

Just before the battle, we have relationship drama. For your mama.

Tookie reveals to Bravo that she and the Unicas are planning to escape through the Zip-Zap. And Bravo gets pissed because he thought Tookie wanted to go with him through the Zip-Zap so they could make out, but it turns out she just wants to escape because…she can’t say why.

And that’s why so many fictional romances are fucking stupid.

There is no reason Tookie can’t just SAY “Because Ci~L is going to murder and torture us. I can’t explain how I know, but I know, and if we don’t leave now, we will be killed, and I’m into you because you’re hot and nice and you’re the only one who is a dick to Zarpessa, which is desperately needed at all times, but I can’t stay because I’ll die horribly.” I guess there’s ONE thing preventing her from saying that, which is that she’d have to say “Ci~L” aloud, which might be impossible with that godforsaken tilde that I’m STILL not over.

And if Tookie could say all that stuff, then Bravo could easily say, “Oh, totally. I mean, I’m disappointed you’ll be leaving, but hell, you can’t stay and get killed.”

Done and done.

But instead, we can’t tell Bravo WHY we’re doing the thing that’s absolutely forbidden, just THAT we’re doing it.

It’s like Meet The Parents. I feel like every joke in that movie is something like Ben Stiller is combing his hair, then he drops his comb and the dog picks it up, and then he chases the dog and tries to get the comb, and right then DeNiro walks in and it looks like Ben Stiller is fucking the dog. And DeNiro gets all disgusted and acts like Ben Stiller is a jerk or something.

But if there was ANY reality, what would happen in the following 10 seconds would be that DeNiro would see Ben Stiller clearly isn’t fucking the dog. He’s got his pants on, he’s not erect, and the asshole dog stole his comb, and that’s it. But we cut out that stuff because it would’t be HILARIOUS if that was in there. And by “that” I mean “a modicum of reality.”

These types of setups don’t work. They don’t fucking work. Because they’re predicated on the idea that reality stops and starts based on what the viewer is seeing. Is it possible that the makers of these films are making a profound philosophical point about perception and reality? A really complex version of the tree falling in a woods question?

No, it’s not. It’s just stupid.

And so many fictional romances work this way too.

SCENE: I see my girlfriend with her ex, and I see what I think is them making out, but really it’s not my girlfriend or not her ex or there’s a really solid explanation what’s going on, and if the movie allowed for a 30-second conversation, all would be good.

But that’s not dramatic! So instead, we have a flimsy, invented problem and just make sure that no one is willing to talk about it, and then we have a tumultuous romance, and then we have Twilight. Yes, this is how Twilight happens. I blame creators of this stupid trope for Twilight.

Alright, so everything and everyone is dumb, and then Bravo’s pissed, so he tells Tookie that getting her to love him was just a bet. Which is total bullshit and the most obvious lie in the book yet, and ALSO a really fucking stupid movie thing they do. Once, just once, I want someone to make the romcom where the quarterback makes a bet that he can make anyone prom queen, and his buddies are like, “Alight, Stinky!” And then it turns out that Stinky really is awful, inside and out. Like, I don’t know, she’s really into white power or something.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with the guys in those movies who make the bets? Who should you try and make hot? How about Rachael Leigh Cook over there? Haha, good luck!

Do these dudes have eyes? Do they own eyeballs? Are the eyeballs hooked up to anything inside the skull? What the fuck?

So instead of being excited to engage in friendly competition, Bravo and Tookie are pissed at each other, and they enter the Manattack!

The competition begins with Tookie clotheslining Bravo off the plank somehow. We’ve read dozens of pages about his rippling muscles and her inability to gain a single pound, but fine, whatever, Tookie is just fueled by the rage of being a bet and being used, even though she was TOTALLY using Bravo too, but whatever, no time for thinking, the Manattack countdown has already begun (the countdown from Z to A that happens during each portion because that’s probably the worst way ever conceived to count down a thing).

Then there’s the part where wardrobe comes shooting out from everywhere. Tookie almost gets knocked off the plank, but Bravo saves her, and for his troubles he gets a full-on punch to the face.

And then the makeup phase. During which Tookie describes what her first kiss will be like in order to make Bravo jealous.

Buckle up, fuckers.

“I’m going to be under a perfect sunset, near a garden of golden flowers spreading as far as the eye can see…The lucky guy who will get to pucker with my suckers will be wearing wearing a…tuxedo…and he’s going to sing to me a song he wrote and he’ll dance to it. It needs to make me laugh and make me cry…Then he will open up his shirt like a superhero. On his chest will be written, ‘Tookie, you are the most amazing girl I have ever laid eyes on. And I can’t decide which I love more, your green or your brown eye.’ Then he’ll have to touch my face gently with both hands…and he’ll kiss my forehead, both of my cheeks, and then my nose. Then he’ll spray whipped cream straight into my mouth and then his. And then he’ll part his mouth just a little and press his lips against mine. And for me, it will feel like the kiss will never end. Because it won’t. It will go on forever. And it will be AMAZING!”

…
…
…

There’s so, so much here, and I want to pick and choose just the very best.

“I can’t decide which I love more, your green or your brown eye.” Okay. You’re still looking for your first kiss. Save the butt stuff for the pros.

“Then he’ll spray whipped cream into my mouth.” There’s absolutely nothing to say in regards to that line that you, reader, haven’t thought already.

After Tookie’s fugue, Bravo feels like shit, says he made up the bet thing. I nearly fell out of my fucking chair in disbelief. This Modelland, more twists and turns than a goddamn Twizzler Pull n Peel caught in that rotating brush on the Roomba. Not my most relatable analogy, but trust me, APT. AS. HELL.

Tookie screams that she loves Theophilus, which Zarpessa hears and is pissed about, and Bravo gets pissed all over again because he’s like, “Wait, you got a dude at home? What the fuck?”

Dude at home? They’re trapped in a modeling-themed prison camp. This is like meeting someone in Auschwitz and being like, “Oh, you made out with a dude back in Poland? Well, fuck you then.” #Smizeschwitz.

Okay, there’s a little more.

Bravo feels like shit, so he tells Tookie that she’ll win Manattack if she lets him hold the activated makeup ball bomb thingies. Tookie picks one up to activate it, and it’s a SMIZE! Remember that thing that was a little jewel with a LED display flag that came in through the water pipes at the beginning of the book? Okay, I guess somehow a makeup ball can be a SMIZE too, and Tookie activates it.

I guess a SMIZE can be anything, can show up anywhere, and has different effects depending on where it is and what’s happening and whatever, fuck it, it’s the literal, most distilled representation of deus ex machina ever committed to paper.

The description of the SMIZE’s effect here is not great, but Tookie feels like she’s a bright light in a dim room, and she hears thousands of words run through her head. So I’m 90% sure a SMIZE is crank or possibly some version of FourLoko.

The makeup ball blows up on Bravo, and Tookie takes the better picture because she’s either holding a SMIZE or is tripping balls.

Tookie wins the Manattack and is the new champion.

And I swear to all that is holy, I did not know this when I started reading/writing today, but Manattack is Quidditch, and there’s a snitch, and it’s a SMIZE. What a wondrous journey we’re on together.

Just then, the escape plan begins. Dylan pretends to faint for some reason, and all the lights go out. It’s time.

 

 

The Plan is Hatched

Dylan pretends to faint, and one of my favorite parts, someone screams something like, “That fat chick fainted.”

Oh, Modelland. Sometimes you’re just the living end.

The lights in the entire stadium turn out, and while everyone panics because, holy fuck it’s dark, the Unicas make their way into the depths of the stadium to find the ZipZap.

The Bestosteros brilliantly hid the ZipZap located in the bowels of a state-of-the-art stadium by burying it in a bunch of rocks.

I’ve been giving Tookie and her friends a lot of shit for being stupid, but I guess it didn’t really occur to me that, although they’re dumb, the baseline for dumb in Modelland is SO LOW.

This is the book that hides a thing under a pile of rocks, INSIDE of a stadium. If you want to hide a ZipZap in the floor, just put, I don’t know, a fake floor over it? Or a piece of furniture? Putting a pile of rubble on top of it, that’s too obvious, not to mention that a goddamn janitor is going to find it just by doing his job.

This is like stashing a house key in a fake rock that you then balance on top of the mailbox.

No, it’s worse. This is like hiding a $20 bill, which you really need, underneath a donut in the breakroom at my work.

The girls find the ZipZap, which you may remember as being, basically, a portal, but also a zipper. This ZipZap is different. Its sides are red hot, and the zipper pull is glowing red. Tookie touches it. I guess you have to unzip(zap) a ZipZap, but c’mon. Use your fucking brains and get an oven mitt or something. This is like one of the first things we learn. We don’t touch hot!

The girls jump in, even though it looks like the ZipZap is filled with boiling blood or something, and they’re in some kind of long, dark slide, hoping to end up in LaDorno instead of the diabolical divide. The word is, they’ve got a 50/50 shot.

Now, up to this point, I figured the ZipZap was pretty much instant, but in this case the girls are in a sort of slide, and they have to make a choice of going left or right.

They go right, and they end up in the Diabolical Divide. But no problem, the jump back in the ZipZap before random fireballs can incinerate them, and this time they end up in the city of LaDorno.

Sooooo when they were saying that there was a 50% chance they’d end up in the Diabolical Divide, what they meant was that there was a 50% chance of them ending up in the Diabolical Divide BRIEFLY, and they’d have to turn around, get back in the ZipZap, and go the other way. When there was a 50% chance of something bad happening, it was a 50% chance of a minor inconvenience. It’s like booking standby tickets, and someone says, “There’s about a 50-50 chance you’ll get on this flight.” But if you don’t get on the flight, you just get on a different one later. You don’t then remain stuck in the airport or just have to go wherever the next plane is going, be it Detroit or Beirut. It’s an inconvenience, but let’s not get crazy.

But anyway, we all come flying out of the ZipZap in LaDorno, finally safe.

At this point, the girls all discuss what to do next now that they’ve escaped Modelland.

They all independently decide that they’re going back to their awful, shitty lives in their homes. Why they decide this, I’m not sure. I would think, I don’t know, they could do something? Stick together? Get an apartment? Not just slump back to working in a country that’s literally a giant department store? Not go live with parents who didn’t seem opposed to prolicide, as a concept?

By the way, there are a bunch of fun -cide’s I didn’t know about before.

Avunculicide: killing your uncle. Does that happen enough to be its own thing?

Omnicide: the act of killing all humans.

Giganticide: The act of killing a giant. AKA HEROISM.

Enough a-cides!

Just then, Ci~L appears in the sky with, YES, her giant gossamer ballsack! It’s back! And she’s going to collect the girls and take them back to Modelland.

The girls make a run for it. Here’s the entirety of the chase, for your pleasure:

“The girls screamed and clambered out of the fountain, running down an alley, ducking under fire escapes and around garbage containers, and climbing over fences, Ci~L’s pouch in pursuit. They skidded to a stop at an open manhole cover. They scooted down the ladder and ran through a labyrinth of dark, steaming tunnels.”

And that’s how we do a getaway. Run through a New York alleyway. Don’t forget to dodge the guys moving a giant pane of glass across the street (they should really park on whatever side of the street they need to be on rather than carrying glass sheets across), and look out, that fruit vendor’s cart is ripe…for the tipping! Wuh-oh!

Okay, okay. They go into the sewers, then back up top, through an alley, knock over some dumpsters,  and then they find themselves at the exact spot where Ci~L selected Tookie to go to Modelland.

Tookie takes a moment to stand around and reflect during this fleeing for her life, when out from behind a garbage can comes…Lizzie! Yes, faithful readers will remember Lizzie as Tookie’s multiple-personality friend who delicately (horribly) handled the issue of cutting in a toughtful (no), reasonable (NO) not outrageous manner (she sees a sharp-ish rock, can’t help herself, and picks it up to cut herself with). Tookie and Lizzie hug, and they do their insane secret handshake, which involves pointing up, smelling their armpits, then a curtsy, then the phrase “What’s up, Hot Queen!”

It turns out Lizzie has been hiding out in a trash can, Oscar the Grouch style, and waiting for Tookie to come back. And she’s already forgiven Tookie for leaving because she KNEW Tookie would come back.

Then Lizzie freaks out about something that’s happening in her mind and runs away. Tookie chases her, but alas, can’t match the speed of a homeless, malnourished girl who is probably experiencing significant blood loss if her desire to cut is any indication.

THEN, Ci~L shows up again, but the other Unicas also burst onto the scene in a bus.

The group tries to escape in a bus,the ideal escape vehicle. Also, the bus driver seems really cool with flooring it down a bunch of alleys in order to make an escape. Maybe it’s his last day and he’s always wanted to be involved in a Speed scenario.

The bus even drives by Lizzie, who stares at something shiny on the ground, then picks it up and uses it to cut herself.

“‘Noooo!’ Tookie wailed.”

Haha, oh Lizzie. Can’t you stop picking up every shiny thing you see and cutting yourself with it, you silly goose?

Then the bus almost hits some dude, the driver slams on the brakes, and everyone smashes into the front windshield.

Smash cut to night. All the girls wake up, and outside the bus is Ci~L, who has resumed whipping herself bloody again, the same way she did when Tookie found her that fateful night, whenever the fuck that was.

Ci~L screams a bunch of nonsensical shit about how she could have saved someone, something about three people who were dead or maybe not dead or something, and how it’s all her fault.

Then, this:

“Tookie stared at the Intoxibella. All at once, everything she’d assumed about Ci~L flipped upside down. She still wasn’t sure what was tormenting the Intoxibella, but one thing was certain: Ci~L was not guilty of murder. The guilt she felt right now was over something far more abstract, something more like bereavement and failure.”

So, after thinking Ci~L was evil for pretty much no reason, now we’re back to thinking she’s good, also pretty much for no reason.

And of course, that mystery simmers for less than a page before Ci~L explains what happened and removes all doubt.

This is as much sense as I can make of what happened with Ci~L, and I call this story:

THE BALLAD OF SEAL [that way I don’t have to type a tilde just this once]

Ci~L became a supersupermodel. And she had these three friends from back home who looked an awful lot like the Unicas (Piper, Dylan and Shiraz). Once Ci~L was a model, she brought her friends to live in the city in her fabulous penthouse with her, and they were happy, but then one day, her friends were gone. For whatever reason, Ci~L figured her friends were in the Diabolical Divide, so she went in there to find them. She found two of their buried corpses, and she found the other one I guess, somehow. She never says she found the third one, but I guess she did. Ci~L was planning to parade the corpses through the streets of LaDorno to show how evil Modelland was, but someone from Modelland got wind of the plan, so (and this is where it gets extra confusing) all Ci~L could do was bury her friends under these three obelisks, which I THINK Ci~L made, but I’m not sure.

And then Ci~L reveals that none of the Unicas were on the list for her to pick up on TDoD. Except Tookie, that is. And when Ci~L saw how weird-looking Tookie was, she figured it was her chance to pick other weirdos like the friends she lost. This was her “experiment” that Tookie overheard her talking about and assumed was an experiment that involved dissecting and whatnot. Yes, words are hard, and sometimes a thing like “experiment,” though ominous sounding, really does just mean what it says, a test to find out whether or not something is true. And perhaps next time we won’t run off assuming we’re going to be killed when really the “experiment” in question is about as dangerous and subversive as the time I mixed Bugles and Doritos in the same bowl.

Ci~L’s brave experiment is to bring together these 4 girls who defy the normal expectations of what a model is, and she explains this to them, that they are better than all the other models there who conform to the traditional standards of beauty.

By the way, I don’t think we’ve even talked about this part yet, but why is it that in this book, most attractive people are inherently bad? That’s the opposite side of the coin that says all ugly people are good, and it’s some kind of weird, four-sided coin that has the ones about ugly=bad and pretty=good. It’s not really defying a stereotype to show that the opposite is true. It’s kind of reaffirming the stereotype, but we were just incorrect about WHICH groups were in which categories.

I’m having trouble saying this right, but what I mean is, if we assume all one type of person is smart and they go in the smart bucket, and all of one type of person is dumb and they go in the dumb bucket, it’s not doing us much good to keep those same buckets and just switch the contents of each bucket without sifting and sorting. It’s still saying that all of people X are this certain way. Modelland is still saying that beauty, whether it’s present or not, is the determining factor for personality as well.

Anyway, the girls are given an ego boost by Ci~L, and they step back inside her gossamer ballsack to head back to Modelland before anyone notices they were gone.

So the purpose of this little jaunt was to check in with Lizzie, forget about her entirely AGAIN, and then find out the real deal with Ci~L, which, as in most parts of this book, could have just come through a conversation where Ci~L explained all this stuff.

83% finished. My god are we getting close to what is sure to be a rousing conclusion.

 

 

I’m now 90% through this book, and in this last section, shit gets really, really real.

It all begins with one of Tyra’s patented narrator sections, the ones you can tell are being read by a narrator because the text is in italics and the narrative thread is EVEN MORE DIFFICULTER to follow. Oh, and she says “dahling” a lot, which makes the narrator sound like a vampire, to me.

Quote: “Oh my poor, dear dahling. You thought it was over, didn’t you?”

I didn’t really think that, but it’s a prescient assessment of my hopes.

Rather than even discuss this section, which does absolutely nothing (other than specifying that exactly 43,347 people are let into Modelland’s stadium for the 7Seven Tournament), I’d rather just say that I had a great idea about a vampire movie. The vampire? Count Dracula. The tagline: Count on…the Count.

The rest? Hollywood magic.

Okay, fine.

We land back in Modelland after our second ride in the gossamer ballsack, an item that really has paid off a lot more than I thought it would, and the girls race towards the stadium to see the 7Seven tournament on time.

I wish I’d been doing something all along, pulling a favorite line or descriptor from each chapter. But I haven’t been, so this one might seem out of place. But fuck you, it’s Modelland.

My favorite line:

“They raced past the BellaDonna statues as fast as they could. In the distance, Tookie heard the sounds of drums beating, people cheering, and a nonspecific frenzied rumble of activity.”

Aaaaa wuhhhh? Nonspecific frenzied rumble of activity? Just one of your classic, nonspecific frenzied rumbles. You know the type.

I’ve always valued specificity in writing. That’s the word I would use. Specificity. It’s just amazing that this late in the book, Tyra has managed to so acutely, so amazingly bullseye the exact opposite of everything I’ve ever wanted to read on a page.

Okay, what happens next is a whole bunch of bullshit, and what I’m going to do is sum it up. And trust me, I’m doing you a big fucking favor here, because what happens is a bunch of revelations that we’re not supposed to understand until the sentence that completes each reveal, but the reveals comes like 10 pages after you already know what’s happening, and you’re going crazy watching Tookie puzzle it out. Things get so convoluted that, at one point, Tookie passes out, thinks it’s all been a dream, then wakes up and is like, Oh, THAT dream was all a dream, and now I’m in reality.

It’s confusing, but I’ll try.

Here’s what happens:

Creamy and Myrracle scale the wall and fall into Modelland. Everyone is pretty surprised by this, including Tookie, and then Creamy demands that the BellaDonna see her and Myrracle. Which the BellaDonna does because in Modelland, when someone demands something, you either agree to do it or there is some crazy plot reason that forces you to. Motivation is not something these characters have in any form.

We have a long, drawn-out argument where Creamy says she’ll reveal the BellaDonna’s secret if she doesn’t let Myrracle into Modelland. This goes back and forth for an unbelievably long time without actually telling us anything because I guess that’s what Modelland dramatic tension is about.

Briefly, think about Hitchcock’s instructive story about dramatic tension and putting a bomb under the table. If you’re going to do a story about a couple eating breakfast who get blown up by a bomb, Hitchcock will say you have to SHOW the bomb go under the table so we viewers KNOW that the explosion is going to happen. That’s tension and suspense.

So in this scene, we have…something under the table, which will do something we can’t determine, and this something goes under the table and we TALK about how it’s going to explode for about 400 years, but it never does.

In the midst of the argument between the BellaDonna and Creamy, which mostly involves someone saying something and the BellaDonna shouting SILENCE!, Tookie runs to that weird thing in the spa where the oracle ladies can show you your memories. Remember that? It’s okay if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. Just picture those weirdos from the Tom Cruise movie where they told the future with skiballs.

Everyone follows Tookie for no reason, and then we’ve got Tookie, Creamy, the BellaDonna, and Persimmon all in the memory time machine thingie.

Oh, Persimmon is basically the BellaDonna’s slave, a Mannecant, which is a mannequin thing that failed Modelland candidates become.

Okay, we flash back, and in a series of scenes that take Tookie a painfully long time to reconcile and puzzle out, we discover that Creamy was once a Modelland candidate, and her best friends were BellaDonna and Persimmon. They’re all so happy together, until BellaDonna carries on an affair with an outsider, who Creamy also tries to bang for some reason. Now, we’re supposed to think that this outsider is Tookie’s father, Chris-Creme-Crobat, because the character is shown being graceful in weird ways and manages to walk a balance beam for no reason, but it’s not. Tyra goes to GREAT lengths to make us think it’s Chris. Which is a little unfair because, fuck, we only know what you tell us, Tyra, and if the one thing we know about young Chris is that he was an acrobat, then you show us a young man who’s an acrobat, I’ll draw the line.

The young man is not Chris. He’s Wingtip, the magical black hobo we saw like two times before this and just happened to live in Tookie’s home town.

Again, if this were a book with ANY description, wouldn’t Tookie recognize that the man in this memory was not her father right away? I might not recognize a berserk, magical black hobo right away, might not be able to place him, but I’m pretty damn sure I’d recognize my own father.

It turns out, BellaDonna got knocked up, delivered the baby in secret in a bathroom stall, and Persimmon and Creamy find her. The BellaDonna’s mom, the ORIGINAL BellaDonna, finds the scene, punishes Persimmon by making her a Mannecant for some reason, makes the baby and the man leave, and then nothing happens to Creamy and BD because, eh, we punished Persimmon, who did nothing, and that seems adequate.

Fast-forward a few months. BD can’t stand not seeing her baby, so she convinces Creamy to jump the Modelland wall with her. Yes, they age 50 years by doing so, but BD is sure she can undo the aging because, after all, she’s royalty.

They cross the Diabolical Divide and visit the baby and babydaddy. BD goes out for baby formula, and Creamy basically attacks Wingtip, pinning him down to try and have sex with him.

Tip, ladies. If you’re trying to force a man to have sex with you, kneeing him in the groin is not one of the best ways to bend him to your sexual. That’s like trying to jumpstart a car by smashing in the engine with a hammer.

Of course, BD walks in RIGHT THEN, Creamy claims Wingtip was trying to bone HER, and the Modelland police rush in and take the two girls back to Modelland.

The original BellaDonna (BellaDonnaMomma) then gives her daughter a choice. She can stay in Modelland, have her beauty restored and be famous and in charge, or she can be with her baby, remain old, and so on.

BD stays.

Creamy is pissed because the BellaDonnaMomma doesn’t de-age her, so Creamy tells the BD that she is the one who tried to bang Wingtip.

Anyway, then we cut to Wingtip, and we find out the baby he’s got is none other than Ci~L!

Recap:

Ci~L is the Belladonna’s baby with a magical black man hobo! Creamy has been to Modelland AND through the Diabolical Divide before! Tookie is, so far, not really involved in this in any way!

What will happen in the last 10% of this book? It’s anyone’s fucking guess at this point.

 

Okay, there’s one other thing we need to do here.

As part of this exhaustive review, I promised I would give a couple people their very own Modelland names. And with the revelation in this section that Creamy’s real name is Cremalatta Defacake (yep!), I feel like it’s time.

Jamie, thanks for your contribution.

You’re a handsome fella with a Hawaiian flavor, and you’re a deep thinker.

Your Modelland name: Poitein Alowenha

Alan, thanks for your contribution.

You’re a young fella with a deep voice and a blonde beard. Kinda Viking-y, but with brains.

Your Modelland name: Al-Ma-Matter Beardheart.

Silence!

 

Today, I finished fucking Modelland.

A saga that began on May 28th, the year of our lord 20 and 12.

Let’s finish up the plot on this mother and then bury it all deep within our brains, only to return again when I’m demented and in a nursing home, muttering shit about Chris-Cream-Crobat and the like.

We last left our…I want to say “heroes”, but let’s just call them people we’re following.

We last left our people we’re following when it was revealed that they all know each other from back when. Sort of how like in X-Men comics it was always like, “Let’s introduce a new character. We’ll make him Cyclops’ brother. Or his dad who lives in space. Cyclops, meet SpaceDad.”

Everyone knows each other, and then the conflict between Creamy and the Belladonna gets physical. Until a spike on the BellaDonna’s dress skewers Creamy. Bitch goes down, and the Modelland police bust in and arrest the BellaDonna. Or Modelland-arrest her, I guess. Mollest? No, let’s just stick with “arrest.”

By the way, the Modelland police, heretofore not seen, bust in and move the action along about 4 times in the last 50 pages or so. Where the fuck have they been this whole time? I wish we’d known about them earlier because, damn, they really move shit along. They really are the plot police, busting in whenever things are moving slowly and it’s time to pick up the pace. Alright, move along, nothing to see here. Seriously, there’s nothing to see here, let’s move along to where stuff happens.

For nearly killing Creamy, the BellaDonna is thrown in The Ugly Room, a room covered in mirrors that reflect the ugliest version of yourself.

Ci~L visits the BellaDonna, her mother, in The Ugly Room, and does the whole “Why did you give me up? WHYYYY?”

The BellaDonna is basically like, “I had to.” Ci~L accepts that, they embrace, and then we have what has to be one of THE stupidest reveals in the entire book.

I know I’ve said buckle up before. Get ready for some stupid shit. But seriously, strap yourself in to a gossamer ballsack, fill it with a shock absorbing fluid of your choosing, and hold your breath, cuz here we go.

BellaDonna to Ci~L:

“When I had you, I looked into your gray eyes and the first thing I said was, I see love. And Ci~L, every time I see you, even right now, I see love. That’s how I named you. Ci~L…see love.”

I don’t know if this was made up by Tyra at the end or planned all along, and I can’t decide which is worse.

Then, the Modelland police drag Ci~L out of the room to be executed because (say it with me) Fuck You, It’s Modelland.

Really, I’m not sure whey she’s being executed. Which is fine because they put her in a guillotine, drop the blade, and right before it hits, the blade stops and everyone applauds Ci~L for becoming THE NEW BELLADONNA!

Why they made the announcement this way I do not know. It would be like becoming President, and the first thing that happens is you’re kidnapped, thrown in a van with a bag over your head, they threaten you, make you beg for your life, and then pull the bag off your head and the kidnappers are all like, “JK! You’re President! Awesome job, and I’m sure there are no hard feelings for the way in which we’ve chosen to announce this!”

And that’s pretty much the end of the book. Tookie and Ci~L go flying around, ready for their next adventure.

The book doesn’t even do it the way it should, but let me do like an Animal House thing and wrap up all the characters:

The Unicas: Dylan, Piper, and Shiraz: No fucking idea. No mention of them. They seem to vanish near the end, don’t know, don’t care. Let’s say…they’re hot werewolves now. Seems reasonable.

Creamy: On life support in Modelland, in a room right next to the Ugly Room somehow. I swear to fuck, Modelland is like that movie Cube where different things must be constantly moving around and changing locations, because whenever something needs to be near something else, it’s like one door away. Tookie tries to reconcile with her mom the way Ci~L did, but her mom is unconscious, so that doesn’t really work.

Myrracle: Turned into a cat in the evil hall of cats or whatever.

Bravo: OH, I forgot the reconciliation with Bravo.

Bravo, who Tookie is still super-pissed at for no reason at all, makes up for whatever the perceived slight might be by re-creating Tookie’s insane idea for a first kiss. He writes her a message on some dudes’ chests, sings her a terrible song, shoots whipped cream in her mouth and his, and then they kiss.

In the course of this elaborate kiss, the “Pee-Wee’s Breakfast Machine” of kisses, Bravo slips Tookie the tongue, and she stops and is like, “Whoa, not THAT kind of kissing.”

Fuck you, Modelland, okay? You make us wait to see this kiss for OVER 500 PAGES, and when it comes, the dude goes for some tongue action, and it’s like “That’s taking it a bit far, don’t you think?”

I’m not going to take the stance that Tookie OWES Bravo anything, but this kiss forces us through 9 pages of setup before lips touch. This has been the unsexiest book about modeling I can imagine, and when we get one sliver of Bravo’s sweet, muscular tongue, it’s rejected outright.

For some reason, this slip of the tongue feels less like a romantic boundary has been crossed, more like…imagine you’re dating someone, and you play hooky from work to clean your shared apartment top to bottom, and when your partner comes home, first thing, she’s like, “Oh, I hope you didn’t use up all the cleaning supplies.” It’s like, can’t this dude do ANYTHING right for you, Tookie?

Anyway, if you recall, Bravo told Tookie a story about a boy named Deca, which was really Bravo’s story in disguise. Here at the end, Tookie tells the story of Tookalatta to Bravo, and we get a recap of the entirety of fucking Modelland in the final pages of the book. It’s like a book written as a 5 paragraph essay, and you have to make that page count, so you just put in a bunch of, “Remember that stuff I told you? I’ll tell you again, just to make sure.” Also, Bravo was there for like 90% of what Tookie’s talking about.

Zarpessa: You might think that after Tookie guarded Zarpessa’s secret that we’d see some growth. Especially after Tookie says she’s not at all interested in Zarpessa’s boyfriend, Theophilus Lovelaces. Zarpessa admits that Tookie did a good job keeping her secret, and then she calls her an unfortunate-looking, big-headed, crazy-eyed, forgettable bitch for her trouble. Then Zarpessa walks away. Cool. Done-sies.

Chris-Cream-Crobat: What of Tookie’s father? Eh, I guess no one gives a shit.

Lizzie: Tookie’s cutter friend, who played a big role in the beginning and then made a cameo just a scant few pages before? Well, we have time to look over the horizon or something and think, “Wherever she is, I hope she’s alright.” Not really an action or a genuine wish, it seems. I mean, god forbid you DO SOMETHING. She’s a couple miles away, and your new friend Ci~L can teleport. But I guess it’s the thought that counts?

Our narrator: Leaves us with a girl power message. Just watch Spice World.

Tookie: Will continue her “studies” in Modelland, and signs off using her T-Mail jail, where she ALSO manages to squeeze in a 4 page soliloquy about how you can do it and go get yours, girlfriend.

And then we have the acknowledgements. 14 pages of them.

Tyra thanks every place where she wrote. It turns out that Modelland was the product of fancy hotel lobbies, resorts and cafes. A trip to Morocco REALLY helped her get down the architecture of something or other, and while in Morocco, Tyra read from Modelland for a half an hour to Berber children who spoke no English. Her theory being that if she could hold their attention, the book had a good chance at success.

I’m having a hard time describing how monumentally stupid that is. Reading to a bunch of kids in a language they don’t know. But I guess, as a native English speaker, it still doesn’t make any fucking sense.

You know, my brother spent 2 years in the Peace Corps in Morocco, and one of their favored movie stars is Jean Claude Van Damme. I don’t know how these pieces fit, but they totally do.

Tyra also thanks the librarians who “let” her work in the library. You’re welcome.

And now, some of the true criminals.

There was an agent involved. There was also a separate book agent who encouraged Tyra to come up with a term better than “Supermodel,” which is how we got “Intoxibella” and perhaps catalyzed this whole thing where everything had a dumb name. Thanks, asshole.

And finally, an editor. Yes, there was an editor who took a hot mess of 1000 pages and turned it into a hot mess of 550 pages. I tried to find a picture of this editor pre and post Modelland, figuring she’d be like the President pre and post office, having aged 20 years in 4, but alas, no dice.

And that’s that.

 

Unsolved Mysteries. Cue Robert Stack And The Scariest Music Ever

I wanted to take a moment and briefly list the loose ends I found when I went back through this review. This is by no means exhaustive, just the stuff that stuck out. It’s entirely possible that some of this is answered in the book and I missed it, but I’m 90% sure that 90% of this is unraveled thread that never got wound back up.

+What happened to the one little girl who survived Shiraz’s tragic memory from the psychic ladies? The one where her whole family got killed except one little girl? Why have a little girl survive that unless she’s coming back later?

+What was the deal with Tookie’s magic corsage that she made on accident that was a portal to a pocket dimension that could contain all matter? How did that happen, why, and is no one curious about this?

+What’s going on with Theophilus?

+What’s going on with Chris-Creme-Crobat?

+What about the entire underground world of Modelland staffers, who live beneath the surface and make everything run? I fucking KNEW that wouldn’t come back, but goddamnit, what about them?

+Why did Tookie wake up from surgery in the M building? Who put her there? Why?

+Where’s Hunchy, the hunchback who was journeying through the Diabolical Divide to eat a girl’s liver? I don’t think we saw him die. I kept expecting him to show up.

+Why was the Belladonna hiding her face the whole time? Nobody but Creamy knew who she was anyway.

+Why was Creamy so secretive about her Modelland past?

+How are the Bestosterone guys selected? We know they have to be good looking, and they have to build shit, but what are the qualifications? How does that work? Where do they live?

+Why were Ci~L’s friends dead in the Diabolical Divide? They were all so happy living together, then they just vanished, and she found their corpses in the Divide? Why?

 

Last Caress 

Because I feel like there are just a few more things to cover, I’d like to just hit the FAQ on Modelland and really finish this off. By “finish this off,” I mean “finish this off” like I would talk about masturbating a horse that really does not want to be masturbated. It’s a fight.

Q: Do you really think Tyra wrote this herself?

A: I do, 100%.
A lot of people have asked me this question, and with good reason. I’m sure many a celebrity teen book has been ghostwritten. Snooki admitted to having a “coauthor,” as did Nicole Ritchie, or, at least, Nicole Ritchie’s publisher did. Hilary Duff said that she came up with the general plot of her story, and it didn’t even occur to her to credit the person who, you know, made an idea into words. The person who did, you know the writing. Which is insane and infuriating because, fuck me, doesn’t everyone have an IDEA for a book? Isn’t the writing part the thing that means not everyone has a book to his or her name?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/fas…

Young, hot, female stars definitely jumped into the publishing game, so it wouldn’t be a huge shocker to see that Tyra had done the same, slapping her name on a pile of ideas.

But. If you look up reviews by people who have read Modelland, they seem to universally agree that there’s NO WAY this was ghostwritten.

Why? Because it’s too fucking crazy.

If you were a ghostwriter, and you turned in this 550 pages of balls-out crazy, you would be fired. Correctly. If you brought this to your boss and she fired you, she would be right to do so. How can you drag Tyra through the mud like this? We’re trying to create a good relationship with celebrities, sex tape creators, people who take cleavage-y pics on Instagram, Disney stars who are turning into…whatever it is that Disney stars become when they’re not kids anymore and seem a little desperate. You can’t give us this blibble-blabble. And I’m concerned for your mental health, frankly.

If someone were ghostwriting this, it would be half as long, it would make a lot more sense, and it would not have been so hard to get through in just under a year.

I fully believe Tyra wrote every word of this thing.

 

Q: Do you think Tyra was on drugs?
A: Honestly? No.

 

Q: How did this get published?
A: Well, that’s pretty easy to understand.
At the time of this publication, we were at the confluence of a few things.
1. The boom in female celebrities writing semi-fictional teen lit.
2. Teen lit hitting big, in general.
3. The multi-part series being a primary economic force in book sales. Modelland was just after the ends of Twilight, Hunger Games, and Harry Potter.

Basically, it looks to me like Tyra signed a book contract, seeming to be the perfect combination of celebrity with ability to promote, create, and who might have an interesting story.

It’s a sad state of affairs. I heard an interview with a major publisher who said they’re economically required to publish memoir after memoir by a former wife of Hugh Hefner because that shit sells, and if they sell enough, they can publish things they like. But for every good book, there’s gotta be a Tori Spelling joint to fund the industry.

Economically, it made a lot of sense. On paper, at least. I don’t think anyone could have predicted this. But I would also say that it was pretty clear, early on, what a bomb they had on their hands. No paperback release, no foreign language releases (that I found).

 

Q: Okay, but how did no one edit this thing?
A: Honestly? When this came in at 1000 pages, I’m guessing whoever edited it just threw their hands up and said, “I’m going to edit copy and make it semi-coherent. I’m not going to make it perfect. Serenity now!” It’s like that fireman who had his face burned off. His replacement face doesn’t look great, but it’s a tiny step up from what he was working with before. Baby steps, and you have to accept it’ll never pass for normal.

 

Q: How do you think Tyra feels about it?
A: I think she’s proud as hell. I listened to a recorded Google Hangout, and she made with a lot of excitement. Honestly, she was very nice to everyone, and I felt a little bad, but then she was explaining how Tookie was her at 15 and Ci~L was her now, and it all made sense. Why the end of the book is all about Ci~L, a character we don’t really care about and haven’t followed all that closely. Well, all the people are Tyra, so it doesn’t matter which cypher we focus on here and there. It’s all Tyra.

Based on the writing, and this is harsh, but my honest assessment, I think this is written by someone who hasn’t been told No in a writing setting, ever. I think she was working in a very supportive environment, which can be good, but wasn’t what she needed.

 

Q: Where’s Modelland part 2? And part 3, for that matter?
A: I don’t think they’re happening. My theory on this is that Modelland sold enough to justify its existence, but not a whole lot more than that. I don’t think there are enough folks clamoring for more. This never got hardcore movie buzz, it hasn’t found a place with the Hunger Games and Harold Porter books. And it would seem, from my admittedly-limited POV, that the shining light of teen lit trilogies is fading a bit. I think we all got wise to the decompressed storytelling that allowed for THREE sales of hardcovers when the story warranted one. Or less. And it would also be my guess that, after turning in this hellbeast of a manuscript, a publisher might be willing to let Tyra out of her contract based on work provided.

 

Q: What’s Modelland’s future?
A: Honestly, I don’t know. This could become something of a cult classic. I’ve read some bizarro, and this shit is weirder simply because it’s not categorized as bizarro. It’s a teen girl empowerment book, but with some fucked-up, weird shit that doesn’t even work. It’s very much The Birdemic, The Fateful Findings, The Room of books.

I think the length and the fact that it’s a book, not a movie, really hold it back, though. It’s hard to enjoy the ride that long. A rollercoaster is fun when it’s crazy and makes unexpected moves, but not for 40 hours in a row.

 

Q: What’s your final judgment?
A: The true tragedy is that there IS a good book in here somewhere. It’s buried under miles of leachate, but it’s in there. There really is something to the idea of expressing how crazy it is to become a globe-hopping model at the age of 15, how nothing makes sense, how the people you encounter seem wild and strange. There’s something to ratcheting that up and making it a novel. But it didn’t happen. Modelland didn’t get there, and I think that, for me, it just plain needed more coherence for me to even recommend it as something that can be enjoyed at all, period.

 

Q: What will you read next?
A: I don’t know. Another challenge book will be in the works. I need to find something great, so if you have suggestions, comment away. I’ve already read License to Love, which was fucking awful and great, and Redeeming Love, which was vile. I’ve read some hilarious Kindle porn and Agent Cold Beer, which is probably the best/worst self-published thing I’ve ever experienced. So what’s the next Modelland? You tell me.