Jenna’s Model Life

The Louvre is the kind of museum that scares me. At 60,600 m² it’s too big to walk even briskly through in one go, and it’s too crammed with riches — from the French crown jewels to Egyptian statues to, you know, the Venus de Milo — for any trip through its corridors to feel casual. The Louvre is packed with too much art from too many periods and too many cultures for anyone on earth to feel confident or even functionally knowledgeable on every floor, or even in every wing. It’s no friendly ex-train station or purpose-built color-coded art playground; the Louvre is a former palace with absolutely no proletarian airs. The Louvre is intimidating. And last Friday, I finally screwed up enough courage to take a knock at it.

The Australian, when she was here, introduced me to a friend of hers I’ll call the Australiman. A 6′3″ Brisbane-born rower-monarchist-law-student with designs on an art history master’s from Cambridge, the Australiman is a gentleman model. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him out of his sports coat, and it is precisely because of his generosity of spirit, wicked-fly dance moves, and easy sense of humour that I’m not the least bit jealous he’s on option for not one but two massive campaigns that would mean his face plastering billboards from L.A. to Lebanon. He deserves it.

Since the Australiman is about to take the Eurostar to interview for his next degree program, he’s been making regular pilgrimages to the Louvre, and finally convinced me to take a deep breath and cross the threshold.

Visiting museums with another person is a dicey enterprise: You have to have some of the same tastes so you don’t frustrate the hell out of each other (”Why has he stopped to examine all 253 paintings of fruit?”), but not mirror each other too perfectly for fear of mutual boredom (”OMG We R so like, Goya 4-eva!”). You have to have the same baseline museum walk speed — otherwise one of you is going to be wearing game face, lapping the Japanese tourists, and the other ambling along amiably, wondering at your hurry. And you have to have the same verbal inclinations. A talker is just as annoying to a non-talker in a museum as at the movies, and sticking next to someone who stays mute to your every conversational invitation is equally burdensome.

The Australiman and I proved to be well-matched on all fronts. He wanted to see the Egyptian collection, and knew plenty about 19th Century British art, which I don’t know anything about at all. I can normally find things to say about Ancient Greek mythology, religious narratives, and early Renaissance painting. So we learned as we traipsed — at a moderate, at-the-grocery-store-but-not-in-a-hurry-to-make-dinner speed — through Denon, Sully, and parts of Richelieu.

Fridays after 6 p.m., the Louvre is free to everyone under 26. I took this about halfway through the queue — but the buildings are so beautiful, I didn’t mind the wait. Plus there was a saxophonist busking away in one of the entry halls, and his music echoed around the courtyard, which was kind of eery and cool.

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This painting was a small oil study, which hung alongside a larger finished work. You can find every single hand and gesture practiced here in the final piece, and it’s impressive. But I thought there was something interesting about seeing all the multifarious arms reaching out from the blackness, too.

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Oyster or used condom?

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Oh, Mark Antony; what a world-class douche.

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Apparently, this 1548 painting by Jacopo Bassano is the first Western portrait ever painted of domesticated animals. You can see how the artist anthropomorphised his pets — they’re all lanky and mannered and have little, human eyes. To think it only took us 459 years to go from Bassano to this:

Fashion flotsam: ladymag inspiro-collages, composite cards, cigarettes, and the right kind of hairspray. Note the colorswatched skeins of human hair, and the pile of hairpieces. You know what this means: Wigs!

My Saturday job was for internal use at a chain of hair salons. The series of images were intended to illustrate to stylists the correct diagnosis of a client’s face shape, and the transformation of that client by the application of a suitable haircut — that familiar beauty industry fiction of the incipient beauty awakened by specialised knowledge and tools. The first shots were un-made-up, pony-tailed photomat snaps; the final image in each model’s series was of a confident, extroverted Hot Chick throwing down outrageous poses. Because that’s what we women do when we are blessed with Great Haircuts. I strutted, jumped, goofed, leaned, hoisted limbs aloft, smiled with my eyes, and tossed my hair around to my heart’s content when my time came.

In the lineup of shapes, I was, I learned, the visage losange — the diamond-face. All day long, I heard conversations like this:

Assistant hairdresser: “When does the Circle get here?”

Hairdresser: “She starts at 2 p.m.”

Assistant hairdresser: “What about the Square?”

Hairdresser: “Square’s not till tomorrow.”

As if we were Platonic forms descending upon the studio according to our own inscrutable schedule. At various points, team members actually called me losange. Which makes sense, in a way: I’d been losange on a storyboard, in meetings, and in a client’s mind for months. I’d only been Jenna since 8:30 that morning.

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Like I said, the first look was very basic and natural. There’s René, the head hairdresser, waving his favourite bottle of hairspray — he caught the assistant applying some kind of inferior atomised stick to my head, and immediately made her brush it out and start again. The makeup artist was truly special — quick, and so talented I felt about five notches unprettier when I had to wash off her handiwork at the end of my day.

The studio was a big, family-run space in a town outside Paris. The photographer’s brother, mother, and various children wandered in and out all day. I like how the lighting makes it look like I selectively coloured the armchairs and the plant in the foreground, and the makeup artist on the set.

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I was nervous when René started preparing my head to be wigged.

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This mainly involved pulling my hair straight back into a tight ponytail.

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And applying a thick coat of lacquer to my crown.

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A slathering of red eyeshadow later — and I suddenly have orange Jon Bon Jovi hair!

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I tried to capture the wig’s magnificent mullet, but I couldn’t fit it in the frame.

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Wigs kind of hurt your head. But they also kind of make you feel goofy.

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My transformation was completed when they tied the mullet-fronds out of sight behind my neck, and gave me an H&M t-shirt, a bunch of necklaces, and an Alaïa skirt. I threw a memory card’s worth of ridiculous poses before the photographer said he had ‘it.’ (That means I totally out-posed the Oval, a Russian with limited English who ate half a salad for lunch while I had salmon tagliatelle and home-made tiramisu, because he had her keep going for three cardsful.)

Unfortunately I don’t have any snaps of that (and anyway, the images are proprietary). You might wonder how I have any pictures at all, given my dearly departed camera. Recently, Model Room-mate was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a French-American student, whose friendship I more or less inherited when she left the country a few weeks back. His photographic needs being well-served by his ultracompact point-n-shoot and his iPhone, he was kind enough to lend me his Lumix DMC-FZ5. Which has been pretty awesome so far.

The Turkish Giant and I found some common ground recently: Orhan Pamuk. Istanbul. And Desperate Housewives — which is, in whatever season is currently running in France, doing a cancer storyline, a fake-pregnancy storyline, a teen pregnancy storyline, two marriage storylines, and innumerable adultery storylines. I’m waiting for an evil twin to pop up to be absolutely sure it’s jumped the shark.

TG and I watched with a similar sort of bemusement, both having found the show late and enjoyed the campy, pitch-perfect first season on DVD. She shared a bottle of red wine, and I became willing to conclude that, as two somewhat strongminded types, perhaps our problem all along originated in our similarities rather than our differences. That and the problem that she hid my clothes. But she did apologise, so, you know.

The shoot last week was fun, aside from the 1-hour walking commute (pity the Scientist: He’s been walking two hours each way to the Institut Pasteur every day). This strike is making me murderous. I understand that driving a train used to involve shoveling coal and contact with dangerous machinery and other things that made retirement at 50 an earned perk: But driving a train, especially urban light rail, is now one of those ridiculous government-funded button-pushing jobs that leftists such as myself are supposed to natively want to protect. Tripling my daily walking distance for a week-plus does not endear me to your cause. Instead of supporting you and your ridiculously generous pension scheme, train drivers of France, right now I am quietly hoping that technology will (continue to) render you totally unnecessary. See: Ligne 14. You have been warned.

Last Thursday, aside from that: They took my picture. I got to be the smiling girl of the editorial — an effect achieved by the photographer and the fashion editor wearing a variety of funny hats from off the accessories table. The hairdresser combed me, mussed my fringe, told me I was beautiful and pronounced me ready to go. The makeup artist gave me a manicure which, astoundingly, is still 95% in place as I type this. My hair proved long enough to preserve my modesty (or, rather, to hide my concave chest from the world) in the requisite topless shots. I ate some delicious lamb rogan josh for lunch. And wore some killer Chanel sandals. A good day.

The Australian left yesterday, and in fact should be touching down to 30-degree weather in beautiful Brisbane in about an hour. Her trip to shoot an editorial in Morocco was wonderful — she rode a moviestar camel, slept in the desert, breakfasted on apple-orange-cinnamon jam, etc — and I only envied her a teeny bit (I have wanted to go back to Morocco basically ever since I left in 1998). Her last day here in Paris, we went out for lunch at our favourite bakery, got terrible service and wonderful food, and it was just really nice. I’m happy she gets to see her loved ones. Still miss her though.

There are two kinds of castings: small affairs in a photographer’s home or studio, where you might arrive to find no queue, an offer of a glass of orange juice or a coffee, and some conversation, and monstrosities that take place in the offices of client companies or magazines. At the big media companies, where you can have three or four castings for different publications, sometimes a single appointment can suck up two hours of your time. All so you can see a casting agent flip through your book for a minute while he carries on a phone conversation with the booker of the girl he’s already picked.

The big castings are good for getting to know models; the little castings are good for getting to know photographers. Some days you get a bit of both.

I struck up conversation with an Aussie model at a big casting recently — actually, I recognised her from an event where I noticed her because she was wearing a dress that I immediately coveted (it’s 10x more splendiferous in person than this crappy picture makes it seem). Sitting down to talk we covered the usual subjects — where were living, to what degree transit strikes suck arse, how cold Paris is this time of year compared to the antipodes. Then suddenly she started talking about dyslexia, and thimerosal, and autism spectrum disorders, and how no kid of hers is going to get vaccinated, unless perhaps the vaccines (particularly the measles/mumps/rubella one) are separated into individual doses, and each dose is tested, and her child is tested, and these tests show the vaccine will be of benefit to the kid. (To me, protection from diseases such as hepatitis B and meningitis seems like a benefit. Especially considering the latter kills dozens of, particularly, children and young people every year in New Zealand. But then…well, you’ll see.)

And then she starts talking about how the “vaccine industry” brought AIDS to the U.S. Big Pharma needed some monkey kidneys to make vaccines, so they had lackeys call up central Africa, and order a big shipment of primate organs. The organs’ former owners had, this model claimed, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (the primate equivalent of HIV); shoddy, reprehensible and criminally negligent vaccine-preparing business ensued, and AIDS was released upon the unsuspecting American populace in the form of the polio vaccine.

(Interlude: I’ve done some fact-checking, and the germ of this handy anti-vaccination morality tale is probably this real event which had nothing to do with HIV/AIDS.)

But before I came home to the aid of Google, I replied, “Really? Because I just read this thing last week that said patient zero was a Haitian immigrant.” This girl just fixed me with a look that said, Jenna, you are the reason children get autism.

My next casting, the last of the day, was a little one. I rolled up just as another model was going through the courtyard door, and she kindly held it open for me. Public transportation again featured prominently in our conversation — model pastime of the week: comparing whose walk is longest — and by the time we reached the photographer’s apartment door we were joking about how models should strike for a better deal out of retirement. (That’s what the transportation workers want — a guarantee of their right to full pensions if they elect to retire early.) Models retire early anyway, said my new friend, the Swede, we should totally do it. Yeah, show those fashion editors they won’t have models to kick around anymore, I replied.

The photographer overheard our plan and parried back the joke, and before we knew it the Swede and I were sitting on his couch, chatting with him and his assistant about yoga as a spiritual discipline, the importance of lawsuits in the pursuit of social justice in the U.S., why girls quit school for modeling, Wong Kar-Wai, women’s rights, light painting, and law school.

Turns out the photographer’s father is a well-known civil rights lawyer in the U.S., the Swede just dropped out of law school because she ran into her former modeling agent while she was leaving the law library after being told that the reason she couldn’t find any of the books and journals she needed that day was because the law students have a habit of hiding them, stealing them, or just razoring out the most pertinent pages, and I come from a country with no civil legal system or attendant right to sue, so we stayed on matters legal for some time.

I always thought movies like The Paper Chase exaggerated the exasperating, bitchy aspect of law school. Knowing someone chose the renowned competitive fashion industry as the touchy-feely alternative to law school makes me honestly glad I quit wanting to be a lawyer about six years ago.

The Swede, the photographer, the assistant and I sat there eating macadamia nuts and scaring off wide-eyed, undereducated teenaged Russians until it got dark.

I have new pictures from a photo test I did back on October 25. These are all by a photographer named Elina Bellemere. She was an impossibly cool young mum who stomped around her apartment in brown leather boots and a flannel shirt and kept on pursing her lips and looking at me through her eyelashes when she was setting up shots. She took all these in the space of maybe an hour, and it was brilliant.

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After these shots in the denim outfit, I put on Elina’s olive green chiffon Rick Owens dress. And a hat.

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Model Room-mate likes the one above.

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And, for the last look of the test, I wore a black halterneck top and leggings.

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Playing spot-the-difference between this photo and the one below, you can notice: I have a vaccination scar in black and white, but not in colour. And I have a small pimple on my chin in black and white that also does not appear in colour. We models owe so much to PhotoShop.

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This last one is my personal favourite. I will lose faith in my agent if it doesn’t make it into my book.

Tomorrow I shoot for Glamour. Wish me luck!

I just booked a job. After a terrifying four-week dry spell. Nothing now stands in the way of my smug mug getting its own editorial in Glamour Italia. I feel great!

Today is one of those winter days where the air is crisp, but the vast, clear blue sky makes bearable even the wind that scissors through your layers. I had the luck of a morning casting in the 7th arrondissement, a block or two from the south leg of the Eiffel Tower. I wanted a camera so badly, then and during my long trip on the métro line 6, which is largely above-ground, like a Chicago El, on its journey through the left bank. The casting agent put me in the “no” pile but the trip across town was worth it.

Last night, the Turkish Giant choked out an apology; she claims she put my clothes in the manchester cupboard because she thought they belonged to Shanna, our landlord’s daughter. Then she brought up the importance of communication, and when I replied that I agreed communication was important, she was talking over me by my first comma.

She also disagrees with my closet maths: Two closets, four room-mates does not equal .5 closets per person, because she really needs the space. She can’t unpack all her clothes! They are sitting in suitcases! She wants to be able to get up and go in the bathroom, open the wardrobe door and feel like she’s at home.

She also told me she wants me to shower in the second bathroom (the cramped one with horror-show lighting and no window). Her bedroom door opens onto the bathroom, and she has to go through it to get to the hallway, and she’s afraid of running into a room-mate in a state of undress. Model Room-mate and I negotiated this same architectural obstacle by talking to each other before taking a shower.

“Hey, Model Room-mate,” I’d say. “I need a shower — do you need anything out of your room first?”

“No, go right ahead, I’m just sitting here taking pictures of myself on the couch for my model-slash-rockstar boyfriend,” Model Room-mate would reply. “I foresee continuing the activity for at least the next half hour, until I get the angles right for him, you know? Did I tell you his band, which is named after him because he’s the frontman and the singer, signed with a major label? They’re going on tour with Hinder! OMG! Do you think girls with short hair are sexy? I think it’s hard to be sexy when you’re a girl with short hair. Do you want to go out tonight? I heard there’s a club.”

Turkish Giant — alternative nickname: the Great Communicator? — frowned at my suggestion that we prevent any naked scenes by actually talking.

I realise now that I never properly appreciated Dancer Room-mate. She always fed Shanna’s fish, she never ate my food — since the two new roomies came, I’ve had an apple, half a baguette, a croissant, and, just last night, a half-bottle of red wine disappear — and she spoke the most perfect French I have ever heard. I don’t know where her glorious diction came from; she’s from the South, land of twang and vocalised silent Es. But she had the clearest voice, I just loved hearing it work its way around words so quickly and carefully. Every time the Scientist would come over, after each of us had done another day’s aural combat with the twee-nasal-grating tones of Parisian French, we would just look at Dancer Room-mate, look at each other, and sigh.

Dancer Room-mate never wanted a whole closet to herself, and never liked the sound of her own voice, lovely though it was, enough to use it to interrupt and talk over others. Dancer Room-mate was graceful and funny and dressed up in goofy blue pajama pants, a white long-sleeved t-shirt, and a red singlet top for the last French match in the Rugby World Cup. During which she jumped on the couch whenever the French looked like they were going to score a try. Dancer Room-mate knew how to set the kitchen window just ajar enough so that if the pilot light blew out we wouldn’t die but also wouldn’t freeze sleeping with an open window. Dancer Room-mate compared isn’t-it-weird-what-Miguel-has-under-the-sink stories and took care of collecting the mail. Dancer Room-mate left to rent a place with her (appropriately gorgeous and polite) boyfriend, also a performer. I wish her every happiness. But if I had my druthers she’d still be here, sitting on the couch, complaining about her dance-related aches and pains and multiple foot injuries, and flipping channels till we found France’s Next Top Model or something else that would make us laugh.

This morning I experienced an event no thinking person should ever go through before ingesting morning caffeine. It has motivated me to come up with a more appropriate nickname for the second of the two new room-mates — the same woman who thought it legitimate to try and take up residence before her lease began. I’m going to call her the Turkish Giant.

In her first act after moving in, she came for my bathroom counterspace, and Model Room-mate fell on that grenade for me, agreeing to migrate to the small bathroom with the non-comittal showerhead and the absence of natural light. Turkish Giant pushed my creams and tubes way over to one side, and I finally packed Miguel’s vast miniature landscape of interestingly-shaped hotel bottles under the sink (after one month here, it is now apparent he is not coming back for them). Once all my things had been quarantined in a sector on the far right edge of the counter, the Turkish Giant plonked her enlarging mirror down in front of them. I moved it to a free spot nearer her hairbrush. She put her hairdryer next to my hair serum.

I was content to continue the bathroom-counter chess, but the Turkish Giant was obviously only buying time to think of ways to raise the stakes.

This morning I woke up, and walked to the bathroom to grab the dress I wanted to wear from the closet I now share with the Turkish Giant. There are two closets in the apartment, one in the hallway and one in the bathroom: The four of us share them. I thought the Giant’s boundaries problem only extended to her progressive and insistent extension of the halfway mark on the closet rail. I was wrong.

I reached for my best castings dress. It wasn’t there. And my clothes seemed not just more squeezed-up but actually fewer in number. I looked for my denim jacket: Missing. My coat — gone. Jeans? Nope. Blouses? None. Skirts? Down for the count. One of my favourite swap-meet silk singlet tops was lying crumpled on the floor. I saw red.

Does it even need to be said that, no matter how big your feelings of closet entitlement, and how much it bothers you to have to share, that hiding your room-mate’s clothes is a thing that should never be done, by anyone?

After a mad search through the whole apartment, I finally found my things in the sheets-and-towels cupboard, after I’d moved the Turkish Giant’s suitcases and stacks of empty boxes away from the cupboard door.

I’ve been rehearsing her talking-to since I unearthed the kidnapped clothes this morning.  I am more livid than that time I got a B+ in 19th Century European lit from the jerky Swiss professor who thought what happened to Lydia Bennet was the best joke ever. Every time I flashback to my inoffensive floral blouse lying on the floor I feel my heart thump with rage (which is because my heart is pumping blood heavily spiked with catecholamines and cortisol). That girl is going to learn not to mess with other people’s stuff.

Meet my landlord, Miguel.

Miguel’s a forty-something Portuguese interior designer (which explains why my place looks so ‘designed’). Miguel found himself in possession of a career that calls him to Montréal and Milan and Madrid as often as Paris, and a cute Marais apartment that could conceivably be rented as a three-bedroom. Solution: Rent to models. We need furnishings, we love gay neighbourhoods, and we exist in inexhaustible supply.

Miguel, naturally, is far too busy to move all at once. And in any case, moving all at once might attract unwanted attention from his landlord — a certain local department store owns the building — given that Miguel’s lease is pretty unequivocal on the no-subletting issue. So he and his adorable young daughter, Shanna, move bit by bit, and mostly don’t move at all. Which explains how I share a closet with Shanna’s toys, and how I sometimes come home to Miguel sitting on the couch, drinking one of the Red Bulls he keeps in the fridge, and airing a friendly grumble about the dishes in the sink and the bulb that blew in the hall. It’s nice to have a close relationship with the man who cashes your agency’s rent cheques. I have a working understanding of Miguel’s medical history based on the number and kind of prescription medicines he left sitting in the bathroom cabinet alone. And who would guess that people other than my parents steal and secret away every bar of hotel soap they encounter!

By prior arrangement, Miguel had promised to rent two of his rooms to women who work in his office starting November 1. Miguel told one person at my agency about this, who neglected to tell anyone else, and everyone forgot about it until last weekend, when Miguel turned up with the two new room-mates and many boxes of clothing, shoes, and architectural models-in-progress. Model Room-mate and I learned that Dancer Room-mate was intending to move out, and that we had the option of either finding a new place together or separately within the next four days, or sharing a room.

We opted for the latter, and pledged to snap up Dancer Room-mate’s sleeping quarters — the pink, Shanna-signed corner office of the apartment — as soon as she was out the door. Miguel promised to procure a fourth bed for the apartment.

October 31st rolled around, and Miguel was out of town. No bed had yet arrived, and the room-mates and I had to take a stand against one of the office women, who arrived at the apartment expecting to be lodged. Even in the hazy demi-monde of illegal subleasing, some rules are not flexible — and this includes the rule about people who are supposed to move in on November 1 not getting sympathy when they pull a no-room-at-the-inn on October 31. Mope and sigh all you want, woman, I sleep on the couch for no-one.

The next day, everyone played Musical Chairs with the sleeping quarters. No bed came. But then, finally, nor did the woman who’s moving into Model Room-mate’s chambers, the one whom we’d packed off to a friend’s place the evening before.

The other new room-mate manipulated the unfamiliar key in the lock, unpacked her share of the architectural models, chatted with her boyfriend in Italian — and by tonight she was swearing at the washing machine (which has a habit of stopping mid-cycle and disgorging water all over the kitchen floor) with the best of us. She even figured out the apartment’s complex, French, steam-driven central heat controls that had stumped me; I feel we’ve bonded.

Yet still no other new room-mate. Still no bed for Model Room-mate.

Meanwhile I’m sleeping in a hot-pink-painted little girl’s room full of boxed up toys. In a canopied four-poster bed. At least Miguel’s enough of a nice guy to let his daughter trample the studied neutral-paints-and-Aboriginal-art motif that reigns through the rest of the apartment; I’m sleeping in the exact room I would’ve gotten if I’d been thrust into the world of interior design before my tenth birthday. Even if the walls, curtains, etc, are so very pepto-bismol I sometimes wake up sweaty and close to screaming because I had another bloody pregnancy nightmare. (Do all women get those? Do they stop once you’ve given birth in real life? Please tell me they stop.)