… 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:

1. an accident, preferably involving cars
2. the car must be a luxury car, and its make must be specified in the lead or headline
3. 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.

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.

As you know, this blog tracks the postmodern American way of death – described and discussed most vividly in DeLillo novels like White Noise – which takes place when something goes wrong while you’re having fun in a sought-after setting. Visual technology almost always plays a part.

This latest close-to-death is another entry:

A 23-year-old American tourist fell into Mount Vesuvius while taking a selfie and dropping his cellphone inside the volcano.

Italian police had to rescue the tourist after he climbed up without a ticket and fell inside, but authorities are now charging him and his family for trespassing.

The man and three of his relatives had decided to bypass the visitor entrance, ignoring the turnstile and taking a forbidden route to the crater at the top of the volcano that looms over the Italian city of Naples.

He scrambled down inside the crater at the top of the volcano, which is active but has not seen an eruption for almost 80 years, seemingly to try and get better photographs.

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UD likes the additional frisson, here, of cretinous American arrogance.

‘Kings Pointer Robert Levine, 74, fired five shots at an unfamiliar fellow condo resident, Herbert Merritt, 64, while he was walking his dog near the 15th hole of the golf course at Kings Point early one evening last month, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Levine, driving a golf cart, pulled up to Merritt, and confronted him about walking his dog too close to the golf course, according to the arrest report.

The verbal confrontation took a potentially life-and-death turn when Levine pointed a handgun at Merritt, who then ran, as Levine pursued him around a tree in the cart while shooting at the fleeing dog owner, the arrest report said.

One of the shots hit Merritt in the left ankle, wounding him and dropping him to the ground. Levine wasn’t done, according to the report. An eyewitness told deputies that the golfer kicked Merritt in the head, then went to golf cart, pulled out a club and began hitting the fallen dog owner with a club, while still holding the handgun in his other hand.’

November 22nd 1963 marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of catastrophes: political assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the denial of Civil Rights and the revolts that occasioned, youth revolt in American cities, right up to Watergate. When I was starting out as a writer it seemed to me that a large part of the material you could find in my novels – this sense of fatality, of widespread suspicion, of mistrust – came from the assassination of JFK.

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And baby, look at us now.

… he would definitely have found a way to use this in the novel.

This blog periodically notes echt-DeLillo deaths in this country, deaths that often involve that icon of affluent leisure, the golf ball. Read the opening pages of Players, or note the many pages of White Noise and other novels of his that mark the untimely death of someone while at play, or the mix of fatal violence and golf.

This is a very Don DeLillo photograph.

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If you doubt the cultural centrality of golf balls in America, read this front-page article in the New York Times, which ominously reports that errant golf balls breaking windows in retirement communities is “an increasingly prominent problem.”

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So a recent alleged murder at an expensive neighborhood in Atlanta seems to feature an attorney so incensed that someone threw a golf ball at his $60,000 Mercedes CLS 550 (no damage to the car was found, so it’s not clear anything was in fact thrown) that he took his massive car and ran down and killed a guy (a real estate investor) he thought threw it.

Scripted by DeLillo.

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UPDATE: A reader reminds me that DeLillo was far from the first. Many of us will recall this amazing little poem by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day 
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

[His just-purchased $240 million apartment is] not a short-term investment, but a home where [Kenneth] Griffin will spend considerable time, said Zia Ahmed, his spokesman. He added that Mr. Griffin has given … a $150 million gift to Harvard.

A small airplane crashed Monday night on the TPC Scottsdale Champions Course and police confirmed there were multiple fatalities…

[Versace] King got about 100 yards and began recording video of the fiery crash. He said emergency crews were on the scene several minutes later. He added the weather was “perfect” at the time.

…The Champions course is one of two golf courses at the TPC Scottsdale. It is just east of the TPC Stadium Course, where the annual Waste Management Phoenix Open is held.

UD‘s beloved DeLillo stars in the New Yorker’s account of the YouTube killings.

There will be a temptation to read the attack as a dark parable of the attention economy — the story of someone so hungry for views that she took a handgun to those who, in her belief, had limited them. But the truer story is that going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.

Correct. Guns are now the way America’s berserk turn down the bed and turn out the lights.

[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

A candidate running for Illinois attorney general was robbed at gunpoint while he was taking promotional photos for his campaign Thursday afternoon in the Northwest Side ward where he’s also the Democratic committeeman…

Aaron Goldstein, 42, and several members of his campaign team were in the middle of taking publicity shots when the robbery happened…

“So, as far as the campaign, we are moving forward,” [Goldstein’s campaign manager] said. “Basically, this was a totally a random act of violence in the community. But when it happens to you, of course, you’re shooken up.”