Helpful hint: If your house looks like this, it isn’t a house.
My clients don’t cook. They entertain. They have a show kitchen outfitted in marble or other beautiful materials, and there’s a second kitchen where people can actually cook for them. They don’t want cooking in the main kitchen. I design a lot of homes with two kitchens.
‘A man … arises from the underbrush … about two hundred yards from the golfers. [It’s] evident he holds a weapon in his right hand, a semiautomatic rifle.’
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Don DeLillo already wrote this latest event, though he was off by two hundred yards:
Mr. Trump was perhaps 400 yards away from the armed man, Sheriff Bradshaw said.
An AK-47-style rifle with a scope was found…
This one I’ll write myself.
17 year old who Assaulted his Mother
for Withholding her American Express Gold Card from him
goes on to Kill his Passenger in his Mother’s BMW X3M.
‘It’s like she handed him an AR-15,’ says Victim’s Mother
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This one has it all. As you recall, the DeLillo headline must refer to at least three status markers (prior examples here), and this murder trial is absolutely bursting with them: Gold Card, $80,000 BMW, and the repeated invocation of the AR-15.
PGA Tour Golfer Committed Suicide by
Using his Land Rover to Pump $800,000
Florida Townhouse Full of Carbon Monoxide
The headline combines the one in the Daily Mail with the one in Radar. Radar made a point of mentioning the price tag of the place the player filled with gas.
Dedicated readers know the DeLillo headline (examples here) must include at least three wealth-markers — here, PGA, Land Rover, $800,000 house.
With its echt–DeLillo name and its alcohol-everywhere setting, the Phoenix Waste Management Open golf tournament has postmodern pandemonium written all over it.
I’m thinking a contingent of yesterday’s shitkickers was just coming off of the big Trump rally where he encouraged Russia to do whatever the hell it wants to NATO countries that underpay their dues. Fuck em! Kill ’em! This way-roused the crowd, a portion of which, still fired up, then moved on to the big golf game.
… SNL noticed.
VOLVO CRASHES INTO WHOLE FOODS IN BETHESDA
Just down the block from ol’ UD. For other DeLillo headlines, some eerily similar to this one, go here.
This one comes from just around the corner!
MERCEDES CRASHES INTO AMAZON FRESH STORE IN CHEVY CHASE
For details on The Don DeLillo Headline, go here.
The $3million coral art Sphinx destroyed when a 66-year-old Florida woman smashed her Rolls Royce into it was designed by British artist Damien Hirst and owned by hedge fund magnate Steven Tananbaum.
You may recall an earlier DeLilloesque headline:
Florida ferry accident off exclusive island results in deaths of 2 socialites as Mercedes rolls into water
All postmodern headlines must include:
- an accident, preferably involving cars
- the car must be a luxury car, and its make must be specified in the lead or headline
- there must be at least three wealth-markers packed into the headline (Rolls Royce, Hirst, hedge fund; exclusive, socialites, Mercedes).
Both of these headlines would have appeared in DeLillo’s White Noise had he written it more recently.
Man Jumps to his Death off
Mickey and Friends parking lot
at Disneyland
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For more Don DeLillo, postmodern, deaths, go here.
At the bar, a man who described himself as “someone who invests in things” explained that the reason the hotel could charge $28 for a cocktail is that because, after Sept. 11, many in the finance industry moved here from the Wall Street area.
This article about a new obscenely expensive hotel in New York City is echt-Don Delillo, with occult NYT argot only subscribers can understand (UD subscribes and — come to think of it — she doesn’t really understand the above sentence).
I approached two men in suits — one maybe 55, the other half his age…
What did they think of the hotel?
“Off the record, it’s fantastic,” said the older man.
When I asked for his name, he gave me a smile-smirk that seemed to imply that I should know who he was.
And this is a NYT reporter, so either she’s remarkably out of it not to know who he is, or she’s talking to someone who’s a legend in his own mind, someone with a deep need to say “off the record.” I’m thinking it was Devin Nunes.
But you see the theme in all the remarks – a paranoia which makes the elation of hiding out at a silent, closed, hotel with a servile staff the main feeling the place achieves in you. The people at the Aman New York don’t want anyone to know they’re there. People hate them because they’re obnoxiously rich; or law enforcement agents are after them because they’ve broken insider trading laws; or vindictive ex-mates have lately been showing up unannounced at charity events … Think Steven Cohen, Jacqueline Kent Cooke, Ron Perelman. New York’s clinically berserk billionaire class. The place takes their frenzied convoluted vileness, rolls it up into a ball, and transmutes it into a many-petaled temple offering.
Even if you haven’t read the novel, you’ve learned a lot about it, and DeLillo’s world view, just from reading this blog, which after all has a whole category devoted to DeLillo. The Noah Baumbach production opens August 31 at the Venice Film Festival.
A Bronx-born son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo is an entirely urban animal, yet he knowledgeably sets his novel in a small midwestern “village” (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a moment); a writer who has never had children, he sensitively places at the heart of the book the character and fate of many children in a blended family (their parents are much-divorced). As with many of my posts on the postmodern way of death, the novel first establishes the enviably, pleasantly, eventlessly “immune” life of affluent Americans, and then throws a lethal environmental catastrophe (“the airborne toxic event”) right in their faces. And lungs.
So DeLillo locates the Gladney family (glad; bland) in the cute village of Blacksmith, with its preserved nineteenth century main street and vernacular library and town hall and churches…
From its sweet pre-industrial name to its charming brick storefronts, Blacksmith could convince you you really are living a pre-modern life, before advanced technology, massive shopping malls, and endless ubiquitous streaming media; but, as White Noise makes hilariously clear, it’s all a simulacrum, a Truman-show facade behind which lies, like it or not, the late twentieth century.
When the disaster hits, Gladney’s first response is total denial:
“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornadoes. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”
The filmmakers chose Wellington, Ohio for their Blacksmith – a heartland town whose preserved main street has won national awards.
The cast?
Don DeLillo deaths – postmodern deaths – happen (you recall) when you’re having fun in a sought-after setting and something goes wrong. Here’s another one:
[An elderly woman] fell into a pond located at Boca Royale Golf and Country Club before [multiple] alligators grabbed her as she struggled in the water.
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There’s also the universally expressed shock that lurking under your smooth luxe golfy world are – should you take one false step – multiple woman-eaters.
“I mean it’s pretty horrible and it’s shocking to think that that could actually happen,” John Whitworth, a resident told WBBH. “We see alligators from time to time but never thought that anything like that could happen.”
Which is odd because franchement down there you see alligators all the time; and you certainly know lots of them lurk just under the surface. But that’s the whole DeLillo thing – the fascinating coincidence of affluent highly secure absolute eventlessness AND total catastrophe very near to one another. It’s a very strange headspace to be in, strolling the sweet paths of your immunity even as a small part of your consciousness registers alligators, hurricanes, red tide, tsunami, sea level rise, heat wave…
Read White Noise for details.