S2E6: Modelland by Tyra Banks

The gentlemen grab their graduation gowns after completing Tyra Banks' Modelland, an ambitious and horrifying vanity project from the supermodel, media mogul and America's Next Top Model host. 

This episode explores Tyra's ill-fated attempt to create Harry Potter for models - or maybe Hunger Games for models, or maybe House of 1000 Corpses for models - it's not totally clear.  

Transcript

Intro

SPEAKER_02 0:00

She also thanks like Moroccan children that she read the book to who can't speak English.

SPEAKER_05 0:06

While members present and worldwide, I hereby call this meeting of the Peace of Shit Book Club to order. I'm Striker Von Fierst, and I'm delighted to be chairing this meeting today. It is a pleasure to have you in attendance. Without further ado, let us introduce the Peace of Shit members assembled here. First of all, Jane Lynch. Wow. So nice to see your smiling face, Jane. Thank you for coming.

SPEAKER_04 0:34

You know me. You send me a calendar invite, and I'm gonna be there on time, on the dot, ready to go.

SPEAKER_05 0:39

Yeah. For those of you keeping score, uh Jane is batten 500 when it comes to podcast appearances in the last two meetings. Uh skip the last one, showed up for this one, so we're so happy to have him.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

You know what though? He gets on base.

SPEAKER_05 0:56

Chip Wilson, so lovely to see you.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

Hello, darling. How are you?

SPEAKER_05 1:02

Wow. For those of you not in attendance in person today, Chip Wilson, tell us who are you wearing?

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Uh uh wearing sort of the tank top of a little sailor boy. Yes, you are. Um I have my eyes painted because I joined an elite few who have finished Model Land.

SPEAKER_05 1:24

It's uh I'm in an audio medium, so it's lost on everybody who's listening to this podcast. But it's very beautiful. You've got a blue silk scarf, a lot of blue eyeshadow on. It looks like your wife is going to be furious the next time she opens up her makeup cabinet and tries to apply any kind of blue makeup.

SPEAKER_04 1:41

Uh you steal that from your wife, or did you go out and buy it?

SPEAKER_02 1:45

I went and bought this from the dollar store. It's like children's uh no, it's children's uh what you go face paint stuff.

SPEAKER_06 1:52

The way the chip looks is it's like if someone took a Sailor Boy and Blue Steel and Grizzly Adams and put them in a blender and then somehow produced chip listen.

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Okay, well, there you go. I also have a nice bottle bottle here of um, I don't know if you've ever heard of this yellowtail moscato. That's expensive stuff. That must cost at least seven or eight bucks a bottle. Yeah, I got a crystal glass here. I'm feeling fine and dandy.

SPEAKER_05 2:17

And last but not least is our resident child model and fashion expert, Dr. Bo Dashington PhD. Welcome in, Doctor.

SPEAKER_06 2:24

Sorry, I was really worried there for a second when you started saying child mu. I thought you were gonna call me resident child molester.

SPEAKER_05 2:31

No, it's it's implied, it's not explicit.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Okay, well, well, thanks, I guess. So is he a former child model or current child model?

SPEAKER_05 2:40

Let me set the stage for our lovely membership who might not be in on all of the jokes here. So in 2011, it's the absolute height of the Young Adult Dystopian Book Boom. One of the world's most famous supermodels decides to publish a sprawling and confusing fantasy epic. It was intended to be the launch pad for a massive multimedia franchise, complete with its own theme park, music, feature films, but unfortunately the franchise fizzled. The book lives on, mostly in the form of TikTok memes, though. But today we dive into the world building, the lore, and the struggle to get through all 576 pages of Tyra Banks Model Land.

SPEAKER_06 3:27

I loved it. I did not.

SPEAKER_05 3:30

Well, save save the excitement for the feature segment. Before we get into Tyra Banks Model Land, though, first

The Book Report: Biweekly Grab Bag of News & Doings

SPEAKER_05 3:38

the book reports. So the book report is our grab bag segment of news, doings, happenings, and new releases. I'll open it up to the floor.

SPEAKER_06 3:47

Book Boys, what say you? Uh well, one this is not a new release, but since Stryker, I know you're a big fan of uh Jared Fogle and all his work. Um Jared Fogle is, of course, the he was a subway spokesperson who was uh thrown in the clink for being a diddler, and he's he's about to get out, and there's a Netflix documentary about him. But I didn't realize he actually wrote a book. He wrote a book called Jared the Subway Guy Winning Through Losing. 13 Lessons for Turning Your Life Around. I mean, that might need to go on that might need to go on our list.

SPEAKER_05 4:19

I just want to correct the record. I am in no way a fan of Jared Fogle. I was a big, you know, five foot $5 foot long guy. I always got the Italian BMT mustard extra mayo. But uh, in terms of all the uh extracurricular activities, I don't I don't go in for that. So not a child molester, is that what you're saying? I'm not denying anything because then it looks like I'm hiding something. But I do think that's an interesting book that we should maybe consider for future meetings.

SPEAKER_06 4:45

We should uh read it retrospectively of like how Jared would apply these lessons to his life in prison.

SPEAKER_05 4:51

Something to think about.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

He comes out like jacked, he's been doing so many push-ups, yeah, eating eating a ton of subs. Arby's picks him up as the spokesperson now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:01

Did you guys know that uh Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is coming out soon? The Illustrated Edition. So they've been making illustrated editions. I don't know why they keep milking this, but they've been making these illustrated editions, these like high-quality versions since like 2010s. And I cannot believe how much they are milking this fucking series. I hate it so much. They've got a that HBO series coming out and like movies again.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

And that new series has like a really hot guy playing Snape. He's like a really attractive man. It seems weird to me, so I always found Snape's think of it more as a not sexy guy. It's also really good. Would you take on Potter?

SPEAKER_05 5:40

Is he looking tight? Not touching that, not taking a bait. Settle down, Jared. Striker, please. Chip Wilson, what are we looking at?

SPEAKER_02 5:50

I also wanted to talk about a show that I've been watching, Pride and Prejudice.

SPEAKER_05 5:54

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

1995 British miniseries. Wow, it's fantastic. I don't know if you heard about this book, Pride and Prejudice. I heard it's a book. No, it's a good one. But the adaptation uh is is really fun. This TV series.

SPEAKER_04 6:09

I know you guys brought this up last episode because I did listen to it, but it seems that the uh the modern relevance for this that we're bringing up here is uh classic. We're not doing great.

SPEAKER_05 6:22

It's a classic, like Jared Fogel's book. This is not Lonnie Anderson. This is you know, this is literature, buddy. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

SPEAKER_06 6:29

Don't start dragging Lottie through the mud.

SPEAKER_05 6:32

That's that's excellent. I I'm excited to maybe look into that, perhaps. You should watch it, it's really good. Yeah. Well, a couple things that uh I'm keeping an eye on here. I don't know if you guys have heard of the Commonwealth short story prize controversy.

SPEAKER_06 6:45

Well, but didn't one of the authors write their entire thing with AI? The winner.

SPEAKER_05 6:49

Right. So back in May, there was allegations and speculation that the winning story from the Caribbean region, because it's a regional prize, was AI generated. This story was called The Serpent in the Grove by a fellow named Jameer Nazir. That's a great name, by the way, Jameer Nazir. So people thought it was AI for a number of different reasons. There's some weird passages, the story features uh items arranged in threes, which sort of uh an AI tell, a lot of uh not X but Y constructions. And traditionally, the winners of this prize were published in a prestigious literature magazine called Granta. Uh just recently, though, last week, the publishers of the magazine have refused to publish any of the winners from the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and have severed all ties. The publisher of this magazine issued a statement where he said, quote, it may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism. We don't know yet, and perhaps we will never know. Uh the author, for his part, says, and this is this is from the uh observer, quote, my writing process is unusual. It is conducted entirely on an Android phone. This is a necessity driven by chronic health conditions, which makes sustained deskbound typing physically impossible. That is why I rely on speech to text to do my writing, followed by minimal keyboard editing.

SPEAKER_04 8:16

Yeah. He just dictates everything?

SPEAKER_05 8:19

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

That's not really writing.

SPEAKER_05 8:24

Not a lot of conversation sparked by that piece.

SPEAKER_02 8:27

I don't know if you remember Atlanta Night. It was a novel that one of us reviewed for the Piece of Shit Book Club. 2004, it was put together by a group of science fiction authors to get the worst thing they could possibly put together, except to buy a publishing company. They put together like uh a very basic text generator that like used previous paragraphs to put together like these nonsense sections in the middle. I'm just reminded of that as like a very early AI work that was done as like parody in 2004.

SPEAKER_04 8:57

And they did get published, right? Or they did get an offer. Yeah, they got an offer, but the whole thing was kind of a prank.

SPEAKER_05 9:03

Hot topic right now, you know, AI. It's all anyone wants to talk about. So I figure as one of the premier book podcasts on the internet, uh, it's kind of within our purview to cover the waterfront on all things AI. Continuing on with the book report, uh, a couple of books that we're keeping an eye on here. For this week, it's a special Kindle Unlimited Bargain Bin Edition. Amazon runs this all-you can read program. Most of the books, so it's a subscription program. You get books, you download them to your Kindle, and most of them are self-published. And most of the ones that are self-published are they're not that great. What really excites me though, there's a new semen retention book out, boys. So hold the phone, Mabel. The retention, the retention blueprint, a practical guide for modern men by Sebastian Cain. $2.99, 127 pages. I'm gonna read from the back cover here. The greatest men in recorded history shared a set of disciplines that modern culture has systemically dismantled. They trained their minds to be still, they conserved their vital energy with intention, they forged their bodies without apology, they ate what the human animal was designed to eat, and they understood that hunger, controlled, deliberate hunger, was a tool, not an enemy. The retention blueprint reconstructs that system for the modern man. The author described semen retention as the an ancient discipline validated by modern neuroscience. It's not. Understand that um understand how testosterone, dopamine, and neurological science behind the most transformative practice in this book. So uh we looked at uh retention before, we realized that there is no science behind it. Your testosterone peaks after five days and then naturally goes down if you continue to retain. But um, yeah, number 44 in men's health came out May 24th. And men's the men's health category on Amazon, it is a wellspring of piece of shit books, a couple other honorable mentions, 19 Habits that sabotage your libido and make you fat. And uh also recently released The Low T Pandemic, How Society Engineered the Death of Masculinity. So a lot of great books on men's health out there right now.

SPEAKER_04 11:23

Is the semen retention blueprint a different author than the semen retention Bible or whatever it was? Yeah, absolutely. Oh Jesus. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Blueprint, more like blue balls, you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_05 11:36

Nice semen retention is the most important component of a five-piece program. So he he talks about a carnivore diet. Uh I I don't know. There was like there was five of them. Really, it's it's semen retention and then a bunch of other nonsense. Look, you want to know the five ones, read the book. Uh, you know, I'm not here to tell you all about it.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

You know, it's funny. Some people may say what we're doing here is completely useless and a waste of time. But I went on a weekend with a few old friends from high school, men around our age who also have kids. We did like a father's weekend. And one of the guys is like, Have you ever heard of semen retention? Well, as a matter of fact, I have. I've read a book on it. I can actually talk about this.

SPEAKER_05 12:21

It's nice that you're able to talk shop when it comes to uh semen retention discussions. Yeah. Another new release that we're keeping an eye on here uh How to Live with a Man You Hate, a strategic guide to emotional control and personal sovereignty for women who can't leave toxic marriages by a lady named Myrna Wolf. Uh, this is also uh Amazon Unlimited release. 100 pages number 82 in anger management. And it's out uh came out April 8th, so it's available already. I'm gonna read off the back cover. In How to Live with a Man You Hate, Myrna offers a provocative field manual for the woman who is tired of being told to quote work on the relationship. This isn't a guide to reconciliation, it's a sacred blueprint for personal sovereignty, drawing on the power of the dark feminine. This book teaches you how to build an internal kingdom that no partner can touch, diminish, or claim.

SPEAKER_06 13:13

Wait, is she is she advocating staying with the man you hate?

SPEAKER_04 13:20

Or yeah. It the subtitle made it seem like it's for women that can't leave, that are like either financial reasons exactly. Yeah, kids.

SPEAKER_05 13:31

Um, you know, maybe I don't know. I I I don't know why you can't leave a marriage, but there's legitimate reasons. Maybe you're Catholic. So this is a uh a sacred blueprint for personal sovereignty.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

So you stay in the terrible relationship and you build like an internal kingdom that you hide in.

SPEAKER_05 13:49

That no partner can touch.

SPEAKER_02 13:50

Yikes. Yikes. Then eventually like back your car into a lake with the kids in the backseat or something, I assume.

SPEAKER_05 13:58

I think that's the last chapter.

SPEAKER_06 14:00

Find your internal kingdom at the bottom of the lake.

SPEAKER_05 14:04

Well, if if any of uh members are living with a man they hate, I mean I've lived with men that I hated.

SPEAKER_06 14:09

I wasn't married to them, but like you've definitely lived with some interesting men. Uh the guy who had a compost bin in his bedroom is the one that I always thought of. He composted in his bedroom.

SPEAKER_05 14:21

Yeah, that that was quite a guy. He like had a just a bare mattress on the floor, and it was like a large room in like, you know, really in the shitty mansion, as we called it. And yeah, he was composting in his room. I remember once he was he's telling me a story, this guy, and he's like, Yeah, I was I was you know, uh in this other city visiting, and at the end of the day, I just found like a nice hollow under the tree, and I just like I laid down and just slept there for the night. And like my girlfriend at times, like, you live with like a homeless guy who like sleeps in public parks.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

He was also he was a landscaper, wasn't he? The guy just loved dirt, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 14:59

Yeah, he was a grimy guy. I worked nights at the time, and I would come home, you know, five in the morning or whatever, and I'd I'd be finishing my shift, and he's sitting on the front porch of smoking a mass of blunt, getting ready to go dig holes for the next eight or ten hours. But he one of the most cheerful guys I ever met. Yeah, he's actually a really nice guy.

SPEAKER_06 15:18

He was a nice guy. Yeah, nice guy. He looked like a fully grown cherub. Like he had like nice little curly locks, like a friendly face, nice smile. And basically, he's a he's always nice to me anytime I visited. I just he always looked like he'd just been gardening for a dozen hours, including when he just woke up from his bush, I guess.

SPEAKER_05 15:39

All right, well, uh thus concludes the book report. Uh moving right along, it is my esteemed honor to pass the mic to my colleague Chip Wilson for our in-depth discussion of

Modelland: Tyra Banks, America’s Next Top Model and General Context

SPEAKER_05 15:53

Tyra Banks Model Land. Take it away, Chip.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

I don't know where to start and how we're really gonna do this conversation. Like, I don't know if the first thing about fashion or really Tyra Banks either. Uh, I don't know about you guys, but I kind of like forgot who she was. And when I when I thought about the show, even America's next top model, I had it mixed up with RuPaul's drag race.

SPEAKER_05 16:13

I've seen her syndicated show once or twice. Like she used to host a talk show.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

She achieved like supermodel status in the late 90s, and she was a little bit more, I guess, groundbreaking in that than I thought. She was like first black woman as that was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the sim swimsuit edition in like 1996, as well as like GQ. I read that stuff and I was like, really? Like 1996 is the first time they had like a black woman on the cover, which which kind of surprised me. But she also created America's Top uh next top model. Uh, I might throw it a bow here to see what you thought, because you said that you read or sorry, you watched the the recent Netflix documentary on that.

SPEAKER_06 16:51

Yeah, yeah, before we get to the book. Yeah, I'm similar similar to you. Like I was aware of Tyra Banks as a TV personality, like like Stryker said that she had that 90s style talk show where someone was very serious and brings in people with their problems and lectures them. But I'd never really watched it. But yeah, there was a recent Netflix documentary called Reality Checks, I think, which uh looks at like the history of America's America's next top model because it ran for like 24 seasons, I think, over a period of like 10-15 years. Like it's really dated, it's really a product of its time. And so part of it, yeah, the the documentary presents it is look at how awful this show was. And Tyra Banks' defense in the because she's interviewed for it, is this was a product of its time. And I I don't know how it's kind of hard to separate if what she's saying is true or not. They did lots of awful stuff. But the the basic, like her whole brand was about empowerment, like equality, especially you know, empowerment for women, but also queer representation. But the the documentary basically argues that whenever she's put to the test on that, she caved every single time. And this and the show was supposed to be about empowering women, but all it really did was recruit a bunch of naive teenagers and just publicly humiliate them, and then very few of them actually got any kind of modeling career afterwards because the show's name was basically toxic in the modeling community. But also, there was like kind of really bad like sexual assaults, like including one girl who was basically like raped on camera, and they didn't do they didn't step in because she was so intoxicated that some guy basically made a move on her and they didn't step in, they just stood there filming it, and so she's traumatized for life. They did some really dated stuff, like they did a race mixing episode where they'd paint up you know an African-American girl as a Korean and a white girl as a as a as a Native American. That that stuff obviously looks terrible now, but a lot of reality shows did that kind of shit at that time. I I don't know where where America's next top model fits in terms of other reality shows, because they were all kind of awful like that. But Tyra Banks does come across as just extremely vapid, extremely fake. For everything she says about trying to break the stereotype of models, she fits the stereotype to a fucking T, like perfectly, of just like no substance. I mean, segue to the book, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

Like so mid-2000s, she was just at this like full, I don't know what you really call, but like the girl boss mogul kind of status. I think she has an additional reputation for just being a bit of an um nutcase. Like she's really like

Modelland: Initial Reactions

SPEAKER_02 19:17

kind of campy and over the top as a performer. Seems like she has like a really like immature sense of humor, things like that as well. Um, but it was like right at that like height of her powers. She was like had the idea to write Model Land, um, which is somewhere between Harry Potter and Robocop? And Robocop. Yeah, I was gonna say like Hunger Game for Hunger Games for models, but yeah, Robocop might be better. Um but yeah, like in the promo of the books, the same thing as as you said. Like when she's describing it, she's like, it's a fun, campy, mysterious, wild adventure, and it's also ultimately a story about challenging beauty standards, that kind of thing. But what she ended up writing in Model Land is just this unbelievably incoherent, like gross, unsettling and like inaccessible, batshit, crazy tome of a book. Like you said, it's it's nearly it's nearly 600 pages long. And it it's it's an unreal read. In this conversation, we'll do our best, we'll kind of keep it to under an hour or whatever. But like if you really wanted to discuss this book, you could do it for probably like five hours because there's just so many things you could dig through and be like, what the hell was she doing at this point in time? But I wanted to hear your your initial reaction.

SPEAKER_04 20:33

So wait, so you guys, it's all it's accepted now, or you guys believe that she was the writer of it. This was definitely not a ghostwriter kind of thing.

SPEAKER_06 20:42

No, there was no there was a ghostwriter attached to it. So there was an editor attached, I thought, not a ghostwriter. Was there actually a ghostwriter?

SPEAKER_05 20:51

So the the research that I did, and and maybe I'm off base here though, was that she had put together the concepts, she had put together um the world building, and she she wrote thousands and thousands of pages in a manuscript. And this guy, Michael Salart, um, who's a screenwriter, he organized her notes and actually structured the pitch treatment and and co-wrote the final manuscript. And he was the one who, as much as the book has a plot, managed to put a through line through everything that she had written and sort of create a plot around everything.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

There's no doubt that she had help, but like it is it's like her voice is really clear throughout it. Gotcha. Like this is like completely from the mind of Tyra Banks. Uh I don't believe that, like uh yeah, coked up. I don't know, she's on acid. I don't know what she saw in writing this. Uh I think it's like kind of it reads like it's written during like an extended manic episode from someone. Um, but like Stryker said, I think she started with this like thousand, it started with this thousand page or something manuscript that was then kind of the carved whatever. They could out of that. But yeah, I was curious, like initial reactions from Bone Striker on it. Oh.

SPEAKER_06 22:07

I don't want to kind of harp on this too much, I guess. And but man, it was it was really tough. If it was like a hundred pages, it might be kind of this fun kooky read. But it's the book is nothing. I just stopped taking notes after like 200 pages because I realized none of the things I was taking notes on mattered. Talk about some of them, but it it constantly introduces new concepts, new characters, new ideas, new processes, new parts of this world that are all that I thought might be red herrings or clues, but they're all just loose ends. It's just one loose end after another. One character that you think is going to be important that just disappears. You know what it honestly reminded me of? It reminded me of reading Atlas Shrugged, um, which I I I forced myself to read at one point because I thought, oh, it's a book you should read. And it was just so boring and wooden characters that you you know, it was just it was a real struggle. Um, and getting through the last, especially the last 150, 200 pages was just I got nothing from those 200 pages, and I can't even remember really anything that happened because it's so confusing and vapid and awful.

SPEAKER_02 23:09

And it's like you said, introducing all these elements that go nowhere, but also like introducing like new words and new terms constantly.

SPEAKER_05 23:16

For me, it was a rare DNF, did not finish. I look at that as a sacred responsibility for the chair of these meetings to actually read the book that we're gonna discuss. And I got about a third of the way in and came to the same conclusion as Bo, where I realized there wasn't gonna be any payoff for any of this. I wasn't retaining much of what I was reading. It was just kind of, you know, then we're in this magic room, then we're flying to this world, then we're in this uh place. And it's like you're constantly shifting scenes, new characters, new scenarios, new fantasy rules. And and as Bo said, there's no payoff for any of it. And so I just couldn't hang with the book. Uh I, you know, I know what happens, I read up on the plot. Here's what I'll say though. I've never written a 600-page fantasy book. So, you know, who am I to shit on Tyra Banks for getting this published? You know, kudos to you. Great. I'll also recognize this. I don't like fantasy. I don't even really like fiction. I'm not a for this is uh ostensibly a YA novel, but I'm not really sure that it actually is. And I'm not a young girl, so I'm not the target market either. You know, of course I'm not gonna like the book, but I still don't think it's very well written, and I think it's a slog, and I didn't finish it.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

What are you getting at there is what I did like about it. Like, this is like just a an interesting failure. It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen often. People have very good PR teams around them, a lot of people that know when to say no when they listen to them. But once in a while, when you get something that people have, someone has a lot of resources, uh, they have some concept and they just go for it and they go way beyond their creative ability, their skill set, and they just put out this ambitious pile of shit. I that's always interesting. That's always gonna be something. Cyberapreciate.

SPEAKER_05 25:06

Cyber Yeah, yeah, it was a real swing. Like you, you know, she obviously poured her heart into it. She's not somebody who needed the money or the fame. Even if the words aren't that great, putting down 600 pages worth of words on paper is that's it's something, you know. I'll give you that. From what I understand, she had hopes or ambitions of it being a huge franchise. So there was two other books that were planned. There was a theme park attraction that was opened in some mall in California for some uh at one point. There was a song that came out that's now having a second life on on TikTok memes. So she had a lot of plans for this, and and I think it's you can't totally shit on someone's dream. It's just a stupid dream.

SPEAKER_06 25:50

I don't think we're shitting on anyone's dream, and that's why we, you know, if this if this book was written by an aspiring fantasy writer with no name, we wouldn't tackle it because we don't want to we don't want to punch downwards. But we're what we're shitting on is that this is a vanity project that it was a cash grab vanity project that had no chance of ever going anywhere unless you had a an almost Tommy Y so style ignorance and passion to push your project forward. And that's what she had in this case. And she had was surrounded by people who made it happen. And in the end, she might have still made money off it, so it might have still been a financial success, and that's kind of why it makes it a valid target for us.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_06 26:25

The book is just like overwhelming and sickening in a way.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

I was thinking, I was trying to think of like one way to sum it up, and I was like, it's it's like you were drunk being forced to eat an entire cheesecake in the middle of getting like a colonoscopy. There's just so much going on, you're so disoriented. I was pushing for us to cover this like two months ago. It's because we were retiring our game, Is It Worse Than Hitler? And I found Model Land on Goodreads. It had a score of 2.8, worse than nine cops according to the Goodreads community. And so I was like, okay, we got to get this book in the roster.

SPEAKER_06 27:07

Well, there goes my closing bit.

SPEAKER_05 27:09

Yeah. All right. Well, it's been a great podcast, everyone. Thanks for uh tuning in.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

So, first off, we're not gonna go through the

Modelland: The World of Metopia & Modelland

SPEAKER_02 27:17

whole plot, but I want to give some key details from the world, and then I want to do a reading from the beginning to sort of get a taste of what we're working with here. The book begins with this huge exposition dump from a narrator who it sounds like it's the voice of Tyra Banks, you know, italicized narrator voice that precedes several chapters in the beginning and then disappears later in the book and then like only kind of only comes back at the end. But they describe the world of Miitopia. Uh, Miitopia is this sort of universe that Modelan's set in where fashion, cosmetics, and so on are the dominant industries. Most people in these different communities in Miitopia work in factories producing things for that industry.

SPEAKER_06 28:02

Sorry, is that uh M-E or M-I? M-E. It's clever because normally it's Utopia, but this is Mietopia. You know, I didn't even get that.

SPEAKER_02 28:14

I'm gonna be honest. Yeah, there's not much to get. But up on there's there's so much fucking like attempts at wordplay and things like that, and this to the point of it like being incomprehensible. But up on a mountain in the center of Miitopia is Model Land, which is a kind of magical school for models. One day every year, there's something called the day of discovery, where in all these different towns in Miitopia, all the young girls and their parents go to the kind of town squares. A few of those girls are selected, usually around 15, sometimes younger. They're magically whisked away to model land to enter the modeling school and become Bellas.

SPEAKER_06 28:55

T excuse me, sorry. T Dodd. It's not the day of discovery. After it's introduced once, it's thereafter referred to as T Dodd. T Dodd. Day of Discovery, T Dod. Yeah, the day of discovery. And this is one of the very, very many made-up words that the book just starts using as if you as if you know the words.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Yeah. My b babe, sorry. Um, but so all the all the all the on on the day of discovery, there's some some girls that are selected, they're whisked away to model and to become bellas to enter the school. And then the best of the bellas become the seven, which is spelled the number seven, and then the word seven spelled out. Uh, and those seven have superpowers. They're the intoxabellas, right? The intoxibellas, yeah. They each have a power. There's there's usually one of them that has all seven powers, and that one is called a triple seven. For some reason, it's triple if you have all seven powers. Like none of this, as I explain this, none of this is gonna make any fucking sense. But the seven stands for stunning, statuesque, strobotronic stars with stupefying stratospheric struts. These are the these are the top the top models. I'll go through their powers really quickly. The first one is chameleone, which is the power to shape shift.

SPEAKER_06 30:16

Question How do you spell chameleon?

SPEAKER_02 30:19

C-H-A-M-E-E-L-E-O-N, uh, and then e with an exantica. Cameleone. Cameleone, I believe. Um the next power is multiplicity, which is the power to, you know, just produce multiples of yourself. The third power is called 30 never, which is the power to, if you have this power, you age to 29, and whenever you turn 30, your your looks are reverted to the age of 17 again, and then you age back up to 29, and that cycle continues until you perish. Nightmare.

SPEAKER_05 30:54

A lot of people say I look like kind of an old 28-year-old. You're a bit of a 39 yeah.

SPEAKER_06 30:59

Like a like a 48-year-old, 28-year-old, something like that. Yeah, I'm I'm more of a 50 always.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

Something like that, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 31:07

You know, I got I I I went out to a bar on the weekend to watch a World Cup match. I got ID'd, and I'd I thought I'd left my driver's license at home and they weren't gonna let me in. I couldn't.

SPEAKER_05 31:17

I was like, Is it drinking age like 15 in your place?

SPEAKER_06 31:20

Yeah, but but they're but they're British, they age really quickly. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Yeah, you look really young.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Child actor or child model, I should say. Not molester, just to be very clear. Jane was at the grocery store, and a little girl asked him if he was her grandpa.

SPEAKER_04 31:43

The funniest part about that is that was a number of years ago, too.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Walked out was like, oh, sorry, I thought you were my grandpa. Yep. Sorry. The next power is excite to buy is the ability to sell.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

The uh the indoxabella can appear when people are looking at her, they just like feel like they want to buy a bunch of products, makeup, hair, conditioner, whatever. The next power is called seduction, which is spelled S-E-D-U-K-S-H-E-E-O-N. Um, that's the power of seduction, not too much more to that. The next one's six six sensa S-I-X-X-S-E-N-S-A. This is a supernatural sixth sense where they can see the future of fashion and they can wear like next year's fashion one year ahead of time.

SPEAKER_04 32:37

That is by far the most useless power of all of them.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Yeah, because you're always out of fashion. But hold on, it also comes with enhanced sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. So you get that as well. And and the final, the final one is teleportaling. Teleportaling. Not teleportation, it's the power of teleportaling. Uh which is just as it sounds. Sorry, maybe I missed it.

SPEAKER_06 33:02

That pissed me off too. That pissed me off so much because they don't say like if throughout the rest of the book, every time they do it, they describe it as the as teleportal. Like they they then teleportal to the next location. They don't say teleported. It's every time it's they it's tele teleportaling. Sorry, maybe I missed this.

SPEAKER_04 33:20

Did did all the does everybody in in Mi Topia have powers or they only these select women or girls only got the powers once they were transported to model land, and then they got the powers?

SPEAKER_02 33:32

Only once they go to model land and graduate, and only the select few, the seven of model land, have those powers.

SPEAKER_06 33:40

Average people don't have any powers. Wait, these rules are all really inconsistent. When when do they become in the other word they keep throwing out is intoxibella? What an intoxabella is one of the models in Model Land, but not one of the seven-seven.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Is that what Intoxabella is a graduated model from Model Land, but I think the seven are the top seven of the intoxibellas.

SPEAKER_04 34:05

And they all so they all only have one power. They don't get like a mix of them.

SPEAKER_02 34:09

Except for wait, maybe that's the Intoxibella. No, no, no, sorry, that's the triple seven. The triple seven, there's one person that has all these powers, and they're called the triple seven. Her name, she's introduced a little later. Her name is C, and then a tilde and L, pronounced C L, which means C love, according to the book.

SPEAKER_05 34:29

Um to your original question, most of Mi topia is a bit of a dystopia.

SPEAKER_04 34:35

Well, it makes sense because everyone's you know, everyone's out for them themselves. They're all selfish assholes. The main character Tuki de la Crème.

SPEAKER_05 34:46

Yeah, she lives in Peppertown, which is just hot all the time. It's always hot in Peppertown and just uncomfortable. So no no special powers, just misery working at the belt factory.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

And she is our protagonist, and she's Tyra's sort of self-insert. Uh, she's a sort of average girl that you follow from the beginning. She's fairly well to do, she has a bit of a miserable home life. But I wanted to do a first reading, give you the flavor of the book. So this is just describing Tuki. Have you ever seen her? The girls whose face not even the meanest person you know would describe as yuck, but who you'd never in a million, no, a trillion years describe as alluring either. The girls whose eyes are three centimeters too far apart and whose mouth is four centimeters too wide. Not that you break out a ruler, but when you look at her, it's enough to make you say something is definitely off. She's the girl whose hair has multiple personality disorder, and can't decide whether it's supposed to be quasi-curly, silky straight, frantic, frizzy, or wet and wavy, or maybe a power to the people fro. The girl whose body is a contradiction of itself, a slightly hunched back from years of poor posture, feet the size of snowshoes, stick figure arms, and legs so fragile you think you can hear them screaming, feed me an entire grilled cow now. The girl with the humongous punch bowl-sized head, with the forehead that goes on and on and on, making her look like the weight of her cranium will topple her over and break her into a thousand pieces. Um goes on and on like this. But like the this is like an example of the description of characters and also the description of places that are like just like almost nonsensical where you can't even visualize what it what she means.

SPEAKER_04 36:36

How how did this person become selected for model land?

SPEAKER_06 36:41

Ooh, well okay, we'll we'll we'll get we'll get there.

SPEAKER_04 36:44

Can we maybe we get just maybe we're getting too deep into this, into the little into the plot here?

SPEAKER_06 36:49

That doesn't happen until like 200 pages in. Um but we we we burned through this pretty we burned past this pretty quick, but just to reiterate, the main character's name is Tuki de la Creme. That's the character. Um and to be you you mentioned like she wants to be an important, you know, important figure. But the the terminology the book uses is she considers herself a forget-a-girl, and her dream is to be a remember girl, spelt like with an you know, remember with an A. Um, and she she for some reason is constantly lying down in public, but she's so she's such a forget-a-girl that nobody notices. So she calls it her silent protest lying down, SPLD. So it constantly mentions that she's doing SPLD while she writes in a diary that she inexplicably calls T Mail Jail, where she writes all her depressing letters to herself about how much she hates herself and things like that. So it's constantly just saying like Tookie was doing an SPLD while writing in T Mail Jail about her desire to be a uh how sick she was of being a forgeta girl. If only she could become an intoxibella. And you're just like every time there's a sentence like that, you just want to fucking kill yourself. But there's like 600 pages of it.

SPEAKER_02 37:57

There's also Tyra like writes in a really disgusting way. Like her the way she describes food, there's like this horror component to the way she describes like describes bodies and things like that. Like right in the beginning, this is the same. Like this is like this page two when you first see Tuki, and she's doing one of her sorry, was it SPLD? What's her silent protest?

SPEAKER_06 38:17

Spld.

SPEAKER_02 38:19

She's doing an SPLD, she's got a can of whipped cream. Says As Tuki waited, she lifted to her face a cold canister of whipped cream, inserting the straight nozzle into her mouth. She pressed the trigger that delivered an airy sweetness to like directly onto her tongue. A bit of the cream accidentally dropped from her mouth and dripped to her chin, from her chin to her neck. With each squirt, more and more of the cream fell from her snug fitting hand-me up blue blouse, which had been her younger sister's. Another squirt landed in her hair. Then she licked her tiny baby fingers from thumb to pinky and prepared for the next squirt. It's just like, what the hell? Um, and when we're talking about like random world building, the school they look they go to, it's a former factory. And there's all this work put in describing how it has all these pipes that are like blowing out noxious fumes that are stinky and disgusting. Just listen to this. It says, Once the bell stopped, a familiar rumbling made Tuki cringe. An oily belch followed, sending a thick cloud of greenish smoke through the vents. A stench filled the air. It smelled like a mix of gasoline, mold, melted plastic, and methane gas emanating from the bowels of the building. Excruciatingly loud school bells weren't the only relics left over from when it was a factory. The school let out belches and eruptions all day and leaked fumes from every crevice. And then someone then a student walks up and he says, The B4 Institute tooted again. Jason Milano trotled, uh trotting out the school's oldest tirist and aptest joke. Everyone called the school B4 for bile, barf, belches, and butt balms. It's five. Five B's.

SPEAKER_06 40:02

It's five.

unknown 40:03

It's five Bs.

SPEAKER_06 40:05

Yeah. It's so frustrating and awful. We didn't even talk about like the other parts of Miitopia. Like you mentioned Peppertown again, where it's hot. There's Shivera, which is really cold, and Lodorno, which is very fancy. But the other we we kind of briefly talked about the magic stuff. Tuki, for no reason that's clear to me, can magically speak every language. And that's just dropped in at random points without explanation. And so it's like there's not like Chip is trying to do a great job of almost like rationalizing the world and creating like a coherent world building. But there it really isn't. People keep just suddenly becoming magic and changing for no for no apparent clear reason. Um are

Modelland: Lizzie, Self-harm, Violence – Tragic Origins and Loose Ends

SPEAKER_06 40:45

you gonna talk about Lizzie?

SPEAKER_02 40:47

Yeah, Lizzie. This is really probably like one of the more frustrating portions of the book in terms of what this character, how this character is used and like in in an exploitative way, and also from a narrative sense. Something you think is gonna be a key thread that doesn't really go anywhere. So Tuki, she's like pretty well-to-do. She speaks every language on earth for no reason in particular. Uh, she's she's kind of weird looking and ugly. Her parents don't like her very much. She sleeps walks, she sleepwalks, that's something that comes into play later. It's just sort of just a plot device to put her in different situations throughout the book so she can learn things. Um, but her only friend is this homeless girl named Lizzie, who she early on she has like a plan to run away with. Early on in the book, she's hanging out with Lizzie in like a tree house. Out of Liz, out of nowhere, Lizzie sort of just starts um mumbling about how at night she gets abducted regularly and experimented on by people at a hospital, and then grabs like a sharp rock and starts like cutting her wrists and things like that. Um Lizzie's always described as like showing up covered in wounds. So it's treat it seems to be treated as real that she's like regularly abducted and experimented on.

SPEAKER_06 41:56

That's basically it. She's a she's a friend, her best friend, she's her friend constantly self-harms in scenes that are really kind of grotesque and shocking. Like it'll jump from some silly scene of like she was doing an SPLD for T Mail gel before T-Dod, uh, and then suddenly there's a character just picking up sharp objects and slashing at their skin.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

They're like best friend handshake, is that they do like a big high five and smell each other's armpits and go like, hell yeah, sexy bitch, something like that. And then one paragraph later, the girl's like trying to trying to cut her own wrists, and you're like, What the the it's this tonal whiplash? I don't know if we'll have time to even get this this far in the plot, but the thing this is all set up with like she wants to run away with Lizzie. Tuki ends up going to Model Land, and then Lizzie's kind of just forgotten about for the rest of the book. She like doesn't play any role later on in this all there's so much time dedicated to setting up this official relationship with her, and then she's just kind of she never she never runs away. She's written out. She runs into her like at one point later, and and uh and then she sees her like again, she sees her like uh trying to cut her wrists, and but that's pretty much it.

SPEAKER_06 43:00

This is just one of the many, many, many, many, many loose ends that the book sets up. It's stuff like this constantly where you think, oh, well, obviously, from a narrative sense, Lizzie's gonna be an important character if you if you dedicate all these dozens of pages towards her backstory and her horrible self-harming habit. But no, she's just dropped.

SPEAKER_04 43:18

I'm just gonna ask for the spoiler. Does uh this grotesque, large foreheaded, weird, scraggly lady become like the mayor or something of Model Land? Is she like or the ruler?

SPEAKER_02 43:31

She doesn't become a toxbella, she's she remains a student at the school at the end of the book.

SPEAKER_04 43:36

But she doesn't get on the colour. She doesn't even fucking graduate.

SPEAKER_02 43:39

Okay, so sorry. Like really simply, she gets there's the day of discovery. Tuki has a younger sister who's much more beautiful than her. She's her parents' favorite. When they go to the day of discovery for for them for them to get scouted, T Donna. They think it's gonna be T Donna. I'm so sorry. They think it's gonna be the younger sister. The parents love the younger sister more, she's all beautiful. But then, unexpectedly, Tuki de la Creme is accepted. And she's whisked away to Model Land.

SPEAKER_04 44:07

But she's uggo.

SPEAKER_02 44:10

Yeah, well, see, this is what Tyra's doing here is breaking down barriers and expanding the definition of beauty.

SPEAKER_06 44:18

Can I say before we get to Tod? Yeah. And by by the way, at this point we're about 150 pages into the book, maybe 200 pages into the book. Um her her family, just to go back, Jip mentioned the sister, Miracle, which is spelt I think like M-Y-R-R-C-L or something like that. Horrible, just like frustrating spelling. Her father is blind because he was in Circo del Sol and had an accident where he landed face first on a sword. And there's like this horrible, grotesque, like flashback Tuki has, because she was there when it happened. And you know, she's at the circus, and and this is the flashback. Tuki had wrestled past the security barricade and run to the stage. Pools of her father's blood splattered the stage floor along with pieces of flesh. And there, staring up at her, was her father's eye, disembodied, lifeless on the stage floor, gazing at Tuki accusingly, as if asking, why?

SPEAKER_05 45:20

Wait, wait, and didn't the accident happen because one of them was eating popcorn in the audience or something, and a light glinted off their mum.

SPEAKER_06 45:28

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:29

The mum was was. It's because Tuki's really self-absorbed, like awful, mean witch of a mother was doing her makeup, and the mirror like reflected the light into the father's eyes who's on stage. He fell off. Her mother is it's established earlier. Her mother like looks he's like extremely wrinkly and like looks like a like like a seven-year-old woman, despite the fact she's like 40. Um, it comes into play later. But her mother, her mother basically like hates her.

SPEAKER_06 45:57

Do you remember his her mother's name? Her mother goes by creamy.

SPEAKER_02 46:01

Um creamy de la creme. But even though she married into the de la creme family, and then so she but she uses the nickname creamy?

SPEAKER_06 46:09

Because her name her maiden name, her full name is Cremalotta Defacake. Sorry, Cremalotta Defacake.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

Her full name of them is Creme Lotta de la Creme after the marriage.

SPEAKER_04 46:22

Wait, are you Creamy de la Creme? Sorry, you said that she shits out cakes? Defacake? Defa Cake.

SPEAKER_06 46:29

That's her name. That's just her name. She doesn't actually shit cakes. She's from the uh from the Defa Cake clan.

SPEAKER_02 46:37

Um okay, that's I I I feel like we're only getting way through the book. This is gonna be an editing mess to put together in a way. It's gonna be real fucking hard.

SPEAKER_04 46:48

I don't I don't know, guys. This book is sounding pretty great to me.

SPEAKER_02 46:51

Okay, that's the frustrating part of it, is it is fun, like Bo said in the beginning, if it were like a hundred pages, if she had if it if this was only like a 200-page thing or something, a hundred pages that she'd put out, it would be like hilarious and like something that yeah I'd recommend for anyone to read, but it's not because it's just never-ending this stuff.

SPEAKER_06 47:11

You know what I compare it to? Is it's if you compare it to the room, like because we kind of mentioned Tommy Weisso before, and how the room is like the perfect bad movie, and it's also the perfect length because it's quite short. I'm not sure if you've ever seen the documentary Shoah, which is a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. That's what that's what model land is. It's it's it's it's Shoah, Shoah made by Tommy Weisso. That's what it feels like reading the book.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

Yeah, it's so long.

SPEAKER_02 47:37

So they go to to the day of discovery. T Don. T Don. Thank you. The whole town is there, all the girls are are marching around, and then the scouts from Modeland are they're all magical, right? So they kind of like appear out of nowhere and select girls, take them away. Like I said, uh, Tuki is selected instead of Miracle, her younger sister, which really shocks her whole family. She goes, she flies in, she's put in this sort of like magical purse, flies around the whole country. They pick up three other girls who all happen to be kind of weird looking. Their names are Shiraz, shoot Piper. Piper, uh and and Dylan. Uh one is like a uh like a bigger girl, I guess you'd say. One is uh like really, really pale skinned. Uh and the third one is just can't speak English well. What's the third one's she's at least? Yeah. Right, she's like super small. She speaks in like uh a sort of uh sort of broke English.

SPEAKER_06 48:43

Yeah, like a like a bad Russian like architect. My family, big sad. They happy me come to become model in rich country with nice peoples.

SPEAKER_05 48:54

It's like footprints under the window style, a little bit of Louis. Yeah, there we go.

SPEAKER_06 48:58

Yeah, yeah. Can we I don't know if you plan to do this. During during so after CL, this the triple seven recruits Tuki de la Creme to become an intoxabella in Model Land in by interrupting her at SPLD on T Dod. Um, so then they start like they're literally just magically teleportaling uh all all over the world, and it it lists all the countries they go to. I kept a list of the name of the countries. Oh yeah, go for it. So see if you can guess which which real world countries these represent. The first one is Kremlin grad, the second one is Nordensui, obviously Scandinavia, the Italian country is called Capuccina, the place which I think is supposed to be Cuba is called Terra Bossa Nova, Pyramidian, the desert country, Chakra, which is very clearly India, uh, and Quito, the land of safaris and jungle beads. Um awful.

SPEAKER_05 49:59

Wait, I I also have Shivera and Didrido.

SPEAKER_06 50:04

Shivera, oh, I missed Didrido. Shivera is a part of the town of Miitopia. Excuse me.

SPEAKER_02 50:13

Yeah, they fly around, they pick up all those other girls, they get into Modeland, they find out when they're getting transported there that the scout who selected them is the top intoxibella, C Tilda L. When they when they're going through and they're and they're like uh kind of pressing the buttons and you know, showing their ID to actually get into Modeland,

Modelland: Hazing, Horror, Mass-Induced Puberty – Student life in Modelland

SPEAKER_02 50:36

CL is doing a little bit of magic on the side to make sure they all get in. So it's kind of uh indicated early on that the the books were cooked a little bit somehow to get these four unconventional beauties into the school. Then the rest of the book, they're in Modeland. Uh Model Land is like a horrifying fever dream of a place. Um Ira describes it in like, you know, it's it's supposed to be kind of like Harry Potter, where there's like all these different magical corridors where, you know, like there's oh, there's paintings or whatever that talk to people and stuff in it, but it's all just useless. Most of it doesn't serve the plot in any way. It's kind of scary too. Like, for example, they to travel around Model Land, they use this zipper system where they grab onto like a giant zipper and it sucks them to a different location. This is like hard for the reader because you can't visualize like the layout of of the place in any way. But also, like early on, like a girl gets her hair caught in one of the zippers and it like rips all the hair out of her head.

SPEAKER_00 51:34

She's like spat out on the other side, covered in blood.

SPEAKER_05 51:38

There also seems to be some like extreme hazing that goes on too, right? Yeah. There's these sort of these these tests of strength or um purity tests in order to see who's willing to stick with the uh the hardship of model land.

SPEAKER_02 51:54

Yeah, they're they're given like uh they're put in a class, they're given a bunch of makeup. There's these like magic makeup machines, like uh uh, you know, do them up, uh, and then mirrors are held up to them and like their faces are falling off and things like that. It's it's really crazy.

SPEAKER_04 52:11

Let me just is this the kind of thing you think that Tyra Banks like actually wanted to do in uh in Next Top Model, but she just didn't have the abilities yet, so she just wrote about it.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

Didn't quite have the budget, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:23

So this is like like all the makeup's put on them, right? And then they're shown mirrors, and this is like part of the hazing, like like uh like Stryker said to see if they have got what it takes to to tough it out and stay. Um and so this is all hallucination, but Piper's skin was so raw that it was translucent. Her blood was visible, pumping wildly through her face. She resembled a skeleton with muscles and veins, with a thin layer of clear plastic keeping it all together. Dylan's ponytails had completely fallen out, and she was cradling them in her arms. Her nose had become detached from her face and was sitting on top of the bed of hair on her lap. Shiraz's eye Shiraz's grapefruit sized eyes bulged and bulged until they were about to pop out of her head. The spot where Ruby where a ruby had been on Camel Camelina's forehead was now a gaping hole four inches wide, exposing her brain. Uh a girl with a head injury, that was the girl who got caught in the zipper and her scare her hair got ripped out. Uh her head injury was split open from the top of her head to the base of her neck. When she screamed, her exposed vocal cords, which lay in a spaghetti-like tangle at her throat, vibrated. Like all this stuff is just described so fucking like in such a horrifying way. Like it's almost like uh like 70s like horror, uh like B-movie horror kind of stuff. Yeah, just so weird in that genre, in this YA, whatever, school aspirational kind of school show. I I don't know. It's so strange.

SPEAKER_06 53:52

And it's like these are children, like they're they're teenagers. They keep what almost like you keep forgetting, or the plot seems to keep forgetting. And like on the day of discovery, T-Dod in Miitopia, like it basically when that happens, it's like a fucking mass panic of every single woman of every age turns up to the same place and all start fighting for attention and literally fighting, like beating each other up, people are getting crushed by cars, just all sorts of horrible violence is happening. And it's I guess supposed to be like it's kind of like the Hunger Games, but I suppose like of the just brutal violence and everyone killing each other, but it's it's just kind of treated as almost like it's whimsical, but when these are just like these children in this fever dream they're killing each other.

SPEAKER_02 54:33

Yeah, it's it's there's this thing with the tone where none of this like it's not like a satire, it's not like a satirical take on or criticism of like the modeling industry or or anything like that. Like, there's a little bit of it, but that's not the point of it, is not to do like a full kind of like dystopian take on like how awful this world we live in is that's that's superficial, because it's ultimately still model and is like a good thing and like just has some issues, but but overall it's a nightmare. One of the other early classes they go to, all the girls they're all around 15, they all get their period together at the first for the first time at the same time, and it's in this class that's in like a it's like a giant shark skeleton, and they're all getting photographed and and they're all like getting sick. They're trying to do poses while they're all dealing with their first like menstrual cramps. And then it's revealed to them like, oh yeah, the magic of Model Land gave all of you your your first period, and you will never have another period again for the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_05 55:31

She she cancels the Belladonna cancels periods, period forever.

SPEAKER_06 55:37

Yeah, the Belladonna, by the way, is the is basically the big boss of Model Land. She's the one who runs it.

SPEAKER_04 55:45

I know many women that would very much appreciate that. But non-consensually.

SPEAKER_05 55:50

Yeah,

Modelland: Modelland’s Message – What the Hell is Tyra Banks Trying to Say?

SPEAKER_05 55:51

I don't know. It's worth maybe digging into more uh a little bit more what you had said about the tone of the book. It's not it's it's not satire. I I couldn't tell, like, is it critical of modeling or is it uh in love with consumerism and the whole model world? That I think that's probably one of the biggest problems I had with the book is like I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say. Like, what is the larger message that it's trying to send to readers? And I don't know where you guys fell on that.

SPEAKER_06 56:22

You know what I'd compare it to? There's there's a clip in the in the documentary where Tyra Banks is basically bullying some of the contestants for being too fat, even though they're visibly extremely skinny. And Tyra Banks. Is she overweight too? She I think she was she was she's mostly not overweight, but I think originally she was considered to be curvy compared to like that heroine chic style um of like that that was popular amongst models in the 90s. But anyway, in the in these in these clips, you know, Tyra Banks is adopting this position of I'm for empowerment and we need to break down the stereotypes, but you're too fat. And it's kind of that thing of trying to have your cake and eat it too, pun, you know, not to make a food pun, where she's kind of adopting, like, I'm gonna be critical of the model industry and our I'm gonna hold a mirror up to society, but I'm also gonna benefit from it and profit from it because I think all this modeling and fashion stuff is great. So it's like there's no satire there, it's just like this really simple hypocrisy about uh about the whole thing. That's how I that's how I see the book.

SPEAKER_05 57:22

Did you guys see Devil Wears Prada 2? I saw it in theaters and actually I really enjoyed it, but it suffers from the same issue where it's trying to be critical of the modeling and fashion world, it's trying to be satirical, but it the it still loves high fashion, it loves luxury goods, it loves the aesthetic, and it's like it because of the way that it's filmed, it can't overcome the what it might be saying about uh the downfalls or the shortcomings of fashion and of uh of luxury.

SPEAKER_02 57:55

No. The issue for me with with Modeland, or I think like the one of the main contradictions of it that causes this weird tonal issue is that like it's commonly called dystopian and it's like basic it is like a fairly dystopian world, but the character Tukie is a self-insert and it's supposed to be an inspirational story. And so you can't really have those two at the same time, because if on one hand, like model land is like the hogwarts of modeling, then it's fun and magical, exciting, right? And then so all these dark elements that are in it come off is kind of strange. Well, why why does it matter that she's like succeeding there if it's just an evil world? But like she's trying to tell the story of herself as this like slightly different looking person that changed beauty standards. Like she clearly really feels that she she did. Can't do like satire and a vanity project at the same time.

SPEAKER_06 58:50

And it's it's like that clash of the narrative between like, is model land paradise or is it fucking purgatory or hell? Because there's like it's it's treated as still being like the pinnacle of society, and there's no questioning of whether society should change. It's not like Tuki de la Creme is on a quest to overturn. It's like she's not like Winston in 1984, who starts out trying that I'm gonna challenge the system. It's like, no, no, this system's awesome, and I want to be at the top of it. And it's a system that brutally oppresses children and and and women in general.

SPEAKER_02 59:18

Yeah, and then and then the critiques in it, they're not critiques of like structures or systems, it comes down to interpersonal stuff. This lady is a fucking bitch. I mean, they use that kind of terminology constantly, right? The head belladonna is a horrible bitch. Go to hell. As like, okay, she's out of there, now it's all fixed, even though you've described like a horrible world that probably doesn't matter who's at the helm of it.

SPEAKER_05 59:40

Yeah, but to your point, actually, it's it's almost the opposite because Tuki starts the book being fairly disinterested in Model Land. It's her sister who's striving to be the intoxabella, and and uh Tuki is the forget a girl. And throughout the course of the book, she becomes more infatuated with Model Land and comes to conform to its norms and comes to sort of enjoy what it offers her.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:03

Yeah, it's basically Cinderella. It's the same, it's the same like narrative as Cinderella. You have a character who at the beginning is just has their head down doing their own thing, but then it gets whisked into this world and then magically falls in love with it and then blossoms within that world. That's that's the narrative, Cinderella. It's Cinderella, but Cinderella takes place in a fucked up Hunger Games um at Hogwarts with this insane fucking Willy Wonka, uh, you know, recruiting people from around the world.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:30

It's that's about right. I think I think one of the things that maybe I'm missing as well is well, probably not, but in Hunger Games, it was like you're doing this for your, you know, like your section or whatever. Like the winner of that section got something for everybody that lived there or whatever. And it seems like this is more just like you're doing it for yourself, I guess, or like you get chosen and you get to be the top, but everyone else is still fucked. Yeah, they're left in the mud. Whereas at least in the Hunger Games, it was like, okay, at least if Katniss or whatever, like if she wins it, at least it yeah, at least there's something to come out of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:05

Well, and yeah, a hundred percent. And there are so many things also in the book that when Tyra's trying to write something that's supposed to be like nice or appealing, she still ends up writing it in a disgusting way. Like there's a first kiss that Tuki has with a guy that is like the most disgusting first kiss I think that's ever been written. So, what the reason I'm saying this is I don't think she's really even aware of like the the level of horror in the world she's writing at points. Do you know what I mean? Like of some of the parts of it, what she puts in as flavor, she might not even be aware that it

Modelland: House of 1000 Corsets – More Horrors from the Mind of Tyra Banks

SPEAKER_02 1:01:43

makes it come across as like a just a nightmare world. She thinks she's writing like just kind of stuff that's like dark fantasy.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:50

And it's nightmares. We we we we didn't even we did all the world building for for Miitopia, um, and we kind of stopped discussing the world building as if the book stops adding layers, and it doesn't, it adds them constantly. Like within Model Land, and I'm I don't think we need to go into this in detail, but just to give an example of how absurd it is like Model Land is run by the Belladonna, who has teams of gurus who are the teachers, who are basically like the judges in America's Next Top Models. There's men servants called manicants and bestosterone, who who and that's who like Tuki falls in love with. Um, but the guru teachers are all have like hideous body deformations. Like one of them has skates for feet, and some of them have knives for tits, and it's without any specific reason why.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:39

Yeah. Uh the the gurus, one of the gurus is a lizard person, another guru is described as three-quarters man, one quarter woman. Um, the skate one was I found one of the most horrifying because it's a person with permanent roller skates on their feet, but she describes in detail that the roller skates are an extension of the foot and they are made up of skin as well. Like the the wheels of them, it's these skin-based roller skates. Skin wheels. Yeah, like thinking about that, visualizing it, it's fucking awful. It's like so gross. It doesn't serve any purpose in the plot. It's just, you know, she just has, you know. Skin wheels. Skin wheels. She's got skin wheels on her feet. And I think the mannequins who are the servants are like failed members of the school who are permanently put in a man a mannequin.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:31

There's the other part as well where they go through the so one of the they they go through all these ritual tests, and Ship already mentioned one where their bodies start falling apart and they're supposed to just accept it and not panic, and the ones who freak out because their bodies are melting and they get kicked out. But one of the other ones is called the catwalk, where they have to walk down a catwalk while being attacked by cats. And the cats are the spirits of failed models who are being punished for being too catty, and they are basically condemned to exist as these cat spirits in perpetuity, basically in purgatory. That's a nightmare. It's literally a nightmare. It's not whimsical, it's a nightmare. These children who were whisked off to this Willy Wonka fucking nightmare land and are now forced to live in purgatory as cat spirits in this one.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:19

I only read a third of this book, and and everything we've discussed is included in the parts that I read. So I'm realizing that I missed nothing by skipping the you really, you really didn't.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:29

The last 200 pages are actually there's there's also like the ugly room at at the school where if people have done something wrong, they get put in the ugly room, which is just like this horrific torture chamber forever. The the woman's C C L that's introduced early, she's like done some things wrong. So she keeps reappearing, and she'll be like shackled up, and they can like see sores all over her body where she's just been like, oh, she was just being whipped before she was brought in here to do something in the class, this kind of thing. She also another character that's like uh self-harming a bunch, like whipping herself all the all the time with a read. So it's just like but and it's like persistent. So but there's all there's so many of these world-building elements about Model Land itself, but every single one is like uh an escalation of like how scary the place is.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:16

Is is there like um the is there like a face to like the the badness? Is is there like is there like an evil witch or something like that that's doing all this, or it's just like that's just the world that everyone lives in, and these are the things that happen?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:31

Kind of just the world, like the the head, the Belladonna, who which is a person that's like inhabiting like a stone statue, and she only sings opera to communicate. She can take over different stone statues within all over the campus grounds. Um, she she's like the head, she's definitely like a a villainous character. Um, but it's also kind of treated as that the that the Belladon is supposed to be like that as well.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:57

I think there's no question, it never comes. Questions whether Model N should be different. So there's questions about the Belladonna and whether or not she's a good Belladonna and she's in like a lion statue with a human face. Like it's fucking horrific and nonsensical. But it never, it's never a question of the system itself. You know, it'd be like, again, not to keep referencing 1984, but it would be as if in 1984 the character Winston just wanted a new big brother and didn't you know thought this the system is fine, but this brother is just no good. We need a new one. That's what it's like.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:28

Wanted a flat screen for the uh TV in his place.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:32

It's as if the story of 1984 was like Winston growing a mustache, a nice mustache, and then becoming uh big brother. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:40

It's a livid.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:42

Modeland also, if if they try to leave early before graduation, they're permanently changed to like 60 or 70 years old. Like their skin, they they age uh as a punishment, so they're trapped there.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:56

We're only up to about page 300 at this point, I think. 300 to 350. There's still like 200, 250 pages left.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:04

The male, the male school is like you said, it's I think what is it, bro test or protestosterone? What's it called?

SPEAKER_06 1:07:11

Protestone. It's something like that, though.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:14

Testosterone. Uh so this is where the male, yeah, that the male models are. If there's like a male model branch, but they're kind of weaker, they don't have the same powers. They and they seem to sort of work like slaves on the model land, like they're always just going around fixing it up while the girls kind of eye them up. Uh, that was one. Everything at Modeland is named, like the buildings are all just named the M building or the O building.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:40

Yeah, the D building, the the dorms, they constantly just like going back to the D.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

And it feels like that whole thing was a setup just so she could make jokes about like they're looking at the dormitories, and like one character's like, admiring the D, aren't you? Yeah, and and and and there's this like there's one point where there's a guy that's flirting with Tuki de la Creme, and this guy is an architect, he loves architecture, and he loves the way the door the D, the dorm building looks. And so he calls Tuki, he's like, You're so beautiful, you look like a D head because he loves the dorm so much. And I'm like, pretty sure she just she did all of this so she could do that joke that she thought was really funny, and it's just like the most poorly structured and stupid joke of of uh this guy calling Tuki Dillacrum a dickhead.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:30

Appreciate a D joke.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:31

It's super horny throughout as well, which is just makes you feel disgusting reading it.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:36

It's not a sexy book.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:38

No.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:38

Well, they're also like 15-year-old girls, so you're like I mean, Stryker's the only one here who has not confidently stated he's not a molester.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:45

I told you my stance on that.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:48

I don't know if it's worth like going through how things wrap up in Modeland, but basically everything wraps up in like the last four chapters, like the last 50 pages, super quickly. Uh, there's like a couple little twists. You find out that a few characters, um the Bella Donna and Tuki's mother had uh world friends back in Modeland. They've got old beef. Uh, and that's kind of what what is the background of of Tuki ending up there and things like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:19

So Tuki was chosen out of spite so that she didn't it's like, I'm not gonna take your pretty daughter, I'm gonna take your ugly daughter, but I'm still gonna make her a model.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:26

No, but yeah, but the point was to be like the four, the the four friends who call themselves the Unicas, they're all like have unique and different types of beauty, and that's like the central message is that like different types of beauty are still beautiful.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:40

That's nice.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:41

Yeah, those girls basically, while they're at model and they start to be get convinced that they might be sacrifices or something because they're like, why are we here?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:50

Um, and so they're worried that they're gonna be experimented on or there'll be some kind of sacrifice and things. Turns out that's not true. They were just selected, they were selected by these kind of competing factions in Model End that are uh trying to get one over on one another by like selecting surprise candidates, uh and that's kind of how they all how they all end up there, to put it simply. I'd love to read that kiss that I was talking about. Tuki has strikes up a romance with Bravo, one of the boys from Best Ostron.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:22

Johnny? Johnny Bravo.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:24

Um it's just such a gross kiss. So they they talk about they build up to this the whole book. Um and I'll just read it to this passage for you quickly. Uh hi, Tuki, Bravo said, staring into Tuki's eyes. Hi, Bravo. And then Bravo kissed her forehead, then her cheeks, and then her nose. He sucked on her ear lobe, sending a jolt of warmth all over her body, followed by an intense feeling of pleasure she'd never experienced before. Her back arched at the slightest touch. Tingles danced from the crown of her head down to her abdomen, she clenched her muscles, then let go. Then at the same time, they both licked their own thumbs and smoothed each other's eyebrows. Close your eyes, Bravo said, and Tuki did as she was told. She heard the sound of a whipped cream can shaking, and instinctively opened her mouth just in time for Bravo to shoot whip to shoot cold to shoot a cold stream of whip in onto her tongue. The tingles continued down to her hips. She then heard Bravo squirt some cream into his own mouth, and then slowly Bravo's soft lips touched hers. His lips parted, and then she felt something thick and slimy inside of her mouth. It was his tongue.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:50

Yeah, gross.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:52

Uh uh, we and owe an apology to that guy that wrote uh Night of the Crabs. Was that Guyan Smith? We're making fun of him for writing bad, bad romance, uh, bad intimacy.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:06

That was

Modelland: Final Thoughts

SPEAKER_05 1:12:07

real sexy compared to this.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:08

Yeah, it's just so gross.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:12

Everyone seems to have a whipped cream fetish in this imitophone.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:17

It's one of the themes of the book, is like a strange food sexual thing. Um, I don't know what's up with that.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:23

It probably, this is overthinking it.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:25

It probably could have been like a a uh commentary on like models starving themselves and craving for food, but I don't I don't think the book is that is that I think it was just Tyra just has a weird relationship with food, being a model growing up her whole life, that she probably does have some sort of sexualization fetish with it now because she's how we struggled with it.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:46

I think it's kind of a mid-2000s thing, too, for like American Piecey. Yeah. It just kind of fits with like the humor and of that time or all right.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:58

So, what what else are we looking at today? Is there a final thought, something, a summation where we can kind of tie all of this together? What uh you know, what what's the takeaway? What what can we what do we want our membership to walk away with after listening to all this? Do we recommend it? Just say a thumbs up, thumbs down. No.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:17

Would you recommend an edited version that was like a clean 150 pages or something like that?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:26

If we if you could have that, that would be great.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:30

That's my challenge. If anybody would like to take it on as doing an edited version for the rest of our listeners to then enjoy.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:39

Because I described it as it needs an editor badly because it's desperately. It's far too detailed, but nothing happens.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:47

And if she started with thousands of pages of manuscripts and this is what they ended up with, eesh. I mean, there must have been some real nonsense that ended up on the cutting room floor.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:57

I don't want to step on Chip's toes, but if I I've got one last thing I'd like to share before we get wrapped up. I'm not sure if you read the acknowledgments at the end, but there's like, I don't know why I read this, but there's like eight or ten pages of acknowledgments. Usually you've got a paragraph.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:12

Yeah, there's so many.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:14

One of them is uh she thanks her editor for taking the thousand-page draft and turning it into this, and like thanks her editor, Wendy Loggy. It's like fucking Wendy, you should have been doing a bit more editing. Um, but the main one I wanted to reference is she expresses her thanks to you, the person reading this book. Her first novel. What can I say to express my deepest gratitude? Model Land is no longer mine, it belongs to you. I hope you enjoyed reading her as much as I did writing her. Thank you for spending your precious time with my baby.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:43

Book club members don't get any ideas. This podcast is ours, not yours.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:49

She also thanks like Moroccan children that she read the book to who can't speak English. She's like, hey, shout out to you guys that let me read a few pages.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:58

You'd understand what I was saying.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:00

She thanks the Pacific Ocean as well. Yeah. Uh the Hudson Representative, I believe. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's something else. I I guess in the end, I would just say, like, the define, like, what are the defining components of model land? One is just this un undisciplined world building. Like good world building is setting up a structure, a rule set for magic or whatever, so that when you do things creatively within that, it's like really satisfying for your reader, your audience when those things come together properly. This is just everything has a uh a novel name, uh, uh a unique power, XYZ, and none of it comes together, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:15:41

There's no Chekhov's gun.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:43

No, it's it's the opposite. What would the opposite be?

SPEAKER_05 1:15:46

What's the opposite of a gun and a Russian guy?

SPEAKER_06 1:15:50

Yeah, it's not the Chekhov's gun is one prominently placed thing, and this is just like a smorgasbord of like if you took everything from the props department and put it all on the stage at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:02

And then on that same note on world building, it's like most things like they start simple. Like, even if your character's in a fantasy world, they'll be in like a small town that's that's very, very simple, and then they go and then they go on the the wild adventure, and slowly things are revealed to you. In this, it's just crazy from the first pair from the first chapter. It's an onslaught for the reader, so you never like you know, the world doesn't slowly reveal itself to you. Um 2000s juvenile humor is a huge defining component of this book. Weird food and sex stuff was a note I had, which I've mentioned a couple times. And yeah, it can't decide if it's satire or really like what it is. I do recommend anyone to read it, like you won't get far. We didn't even talk about what is it, the great plague and this like pilgrimage people go on trying to get to Modeland through a through a really precarious area filled with monsters, but that's what it's like reading the book. Like, and you won't you won't make it to the end. But I think it's in like, and you basically like if you want to understand the flavor, you'll get that within the first 20 pages, 10 pages.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:07

The last book I didn't finish for Book Club was Steven Segal's novel. I don't know if there's if there's anything that uh ties these two together, but I as I said I try to make a point of finishing every book, I just couldn't do it. So hats off to you, Chip and Bo, for uh for sticking it out. I mean that's that's really something. It shows commitment to the project. Like I said, I kind of loved it, but in a way.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:33

It's it's I'm really glad that we, you know, there's we we had a discussion kind of off off camera or off mic about uh I was almost not able to make this episode, and you guys very kindly agreed to uh to reorganize. And one of the reasons I was extremely fucking upset and pissed off about it is realizing I'd done read this 600 pages for nothing. And so like actually having this conversation, like which has been a really fun conversation, is so fucking cathartic. And I feel so much but I feel so much better now at having us like process this fucking nightmare of a book.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:05

Yeah, because like this kind of if you read this and you had no one to speak to about it, it would just sit with you, you know. Like I think at Striker, I think you you asked a while ago, like if any of our my wife listens to the podcast. What she listens to me is me while I'm reading this book, while we're sitting on the couch, like just describing parts of the books to her, or like trying to tell her about things. Yeah, and it must be a nightmare for her. It's gotta be. But really, it's just like it's like you're trying to offload drama or something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:35

All right. Well, Chip, you've you've done it all, you've said it all. As I said, thanks so much. We are forever indebted in our hearts to you for the work that you put into today's meeting. It means a lot to me. I'm sure it means a lot to all of the members. Thanks so much to uh oh, the yellowtail's coming out. Wow. One, two in the morning right now, and we're getting into the wine. I respect that.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:59

Time for this bad bitch to get her uh reward. I can't even talk anymore.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:05

You deserve it, man. Well, as as you put back that uh tall boy yellowtail. Uh shout out to all of the listeners. Tell us why you think we're idiots, why we got it all wrong. Um check out uh POSBookclub.com. I don't know, you never do they never do any of this stuff. They know they know where you can listen to us. Who cares? Whatever. Thanks so thanks for attending. See you next time. Meeting adjourned.