The Opposite of a Startup: a Dead Celebrity Mockup

I linked up with the marketing department of a nationwide Real Estate "sites of interest" site. I provided them access to my Improvised Creative Device and they lent me a company car and a documentary on Columbo. They like my style; hope they like it for awhile.


Jerry Garcia

Listed at just under $4 Million, who wouldn’t want to drifft dreamily onto this Gratefully Undead property? At 7,000 sq. feet, this mansion will have you channeling the Dead and throwing Cherry Garcia ice cream socials in no time.

The house was renovated in 1990 only one year after being built, likely due to the black hole Jerry is said to have created with his long-winded (and often misunderstood) dissertations on hair gel use.

The house is lovingly referred to as a “Gated Paradise,” just like Jerry’s privates sector used to be. Unique features include a water softener (for those who don’t think water is soft enough) and three fireplaces – one of which is a fireplace built to provide heat to another fireplace.

The expansive property boasts room enough for both a Helipad and a Bong Shelter. Running through the foothills on the south end of the property is a scorpion highway and a sparkling stream of ruggedly clad illegal immigrants. It’s the kind of place you can threaten to send your kids to… for Spring Break.

Frank Sinatra

Like many other places in the world, Frank’s former property features air, access to sunlight, square feet, and the unmistakable smell of crime swept under an ugly but expensive Persian rug.

The house’s rooms look like something a misanthropic Grandmother would weave into a 1960’s quilt while tripping on a Robotussin and Crisco lard smoothie. If you’re feeling nostalgic, throw on some cool-blue contacts, put a cancer-stick in your mouth, and look into the mirror; but please, don’t bother looking at the interior pictures of this house.

The internet is abuzz with the abundance of grass this property offers, conveniently overlooking the classless fog choking the property’s aura. The courtyard looks like a perfect host arena for a Mayan basketbrawl game, but is otherwise useless. However, the property does have hidden perks in that the ghost hookers floating through the guest quarters only charge a dime for laissez-faire treatment and a mere nickel to upgrade to the Rack Pack package.

Frank had two hobbies: cooing to doves on Sunday mornings and crooning lullabies to mob bosses during the Italian New Year. The only proof the FBI could produce on Sinatra’s mafia connection was a scratchy audio file featuring Frankie whistling “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Scarface” during an especially missle-toed celebration in 1984.

Michael Jackson

Experts contend that Michael Jackson had at least five dedicated fans. Pick a random person from this demographic and search their apartment and this is what you’d find:      

• Stuffed animals with beady eyes and duct-taped wrists
• Popped bubble packaging smeared with melted maturity and Canola oil
• A box labeled “Shower Drain Trezures”
• Actual VHS tapes

Science tells us that MJ had the brain of a tabby cat, the countenance of a middle school janitor, and the soul of a wildcat offense. Born with nine lives, Michael accidentally dropped several off a balcony in Berlin, but managed to die with at least two lives saved up in a Swiss bank account.

Unfortunately, no one who truly cared about Michael can afford his $28 million house. But between Michael’s two unspent lives and his five adoring fans – coupled with the fact that the house is owned by Hubert Guez (CEO of Ed Hardly) - a solution can surely be reached.

Target market: New Joysey’s young adults and Cuba’s fashion-unconscious Fidel Ca$tro.

Action Plan:

1. Sell a 12-month calendar picturing stuffed animals wearing Ed Hardy t-shirts.
2. Use the calendar money to bribe entrance to the mansion.
3. Set fire to the bubble packaging, Trezures, and VHS tapes, releasing mass amounts of Chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere.
4. Auction off the right to douse the fire to the Sierra Club of Hollywood..
5. Pay for the mansion.
6. Help celebrate Michael’s life by calling Ricky Martin and telling him you’re not just sure you have AIDS… you’re HIV positive. It might help infect Ricky with a little of Michael’s talent.

Ted Kennedy

From the center of America’s East Coast, the Diet Crack capitol of the U.S.A., comes this White House replica built in the likeness of God and Ted Kennedy, in reverse order. The air in the house is said to be frozen in time, iced permanently from light-hearted conversations such as:

Ted:       “Victoria, where is my whiskey?” Slap.

              Silence. Slap.

Victoria: Crying, “You’ve got it clutched under your left-wing, Ted, you faithless bird.”

ChappaQudditch was Ted’s favorite sport, but many of his friends admitted that he was apt to get rough while playing. He would sometimes get so worked up he would drive off midgame, only to later confess that he should have stayed and seen things through to the end.

Ted was as well received as the Senate Majority Whip as George W. Bush was at Kayne’s 25^th birthday sleepover. Kennedy’s Whip skills were unofficially certified by Indiana Jones because Harrison Ford was emotionally unavailable at the time.

Ted publically refused to let the butler use the house’s Butler’s Pantry. After his death, the pantry was found to be overflowing with Twizzlers and Boston Red Sox batting gloves. And confusingly, pictures of Todd Palin.

Edward’s unapologetic support for universal healthcare led to the liberalization of many aliens in urgent need of medical care, though their inability to reach Earth within the next 15 light years complicated net benefit calculations.

Jim Morrison

The realtor for Jim Morrison’s listing has an easy job. He simply had to memorize this easily ingestible historical account and rehearse it as the sales pitch for the house:

“This caramel-calm hallway is where James first learned that he looked better with his shirt off than on. Next, this majestic entrance to the living room is where the world first became entranced with the dark punctuality of Jim’s nipples.

Here then is the room where one of Jim’s many lady friends asked him to please put on a shirt. He simply cocked his head and tweeted (vocally) ‘Is this a cover up?’ and continued burning “long” words out of the dictionary.

Lastly, this mid-century example of arched architectural ambiancery is where Jim first accessorized for murder: the leather wristlet he first put on here helped him assassinate the psychological chastity of a nation’s women.”

Jim had all The Doors removed from his home as a symbolic act of emotional embolism that kept all the windows honest. He was tired of his friends saying he made a better Door than a Woman in the Window. Jim’s last words to the house, while melting his own eardrums with a recording of passive-aggressive dolphin mating calls, were:

What once was loved

and found undone

freebased assumption

jet-setting sun

eat your weedies

cock your gun

universal jail

house of fun

Truman Capote

The pictures of Truman’s former residence look like the work of an amateur surveillance officer with an inverted sense of the relationship between what is being captured and what exists in reality. We see the outside of the house from the space inside what is likely a speeding Kia Sorrento. The kitchen picture was probably captured with a purse cam and a cross-dresser’s lipstick trigger. The backyard: memorialized with a satellite snapshot reflected off the crying eyes of a homeless dog.

Truman didn’t own this house. He bought the right to rent it from Oliver Smith with wordy logic and a handful of chocolate raisins. Capote penciled Breakfast at Tiffany’s at this house despite Tiffany’s lack of interest in ever meeting before brunch. Truman also wrote two essays about the house: A House on the Heights and The Forever Running Toilet is Oliver’s Fault.

Sharing Truman’s love of Brooklyn’s broken social scene, traipsing bullet parades and expansive rug trade should hardly prequalify one to live in this house. To ensure longevity here, one must enmesh with the house’s soul. Broker a helicopter. Take a defensive driving lesson. Paint a self-portrait with invisible ink. Google yourself. It won’t be easy, but then again life never was for Truman. He learned the hard way that flambuoyancy doesn’t ensure flotation; only a true man can rise to the top.

Aaron Spelling

Aaron Spelling was a lover; a lover of candy, Candy, and mansion expansion. Aaron left the world the leftovers of a TV-dinner empire. Much of what he left us we accept as is. Tori he could’ve had back, but her return date was smudged and she forgot how to spell her last name so we couldn’t send her home.

Even in death, Aaron one-up’s the world on a consistent basis. He can’t help it. He was the 11^th-highest earner among dead celebrities last year. Only Bob Saget is more revered among deceased actors. The Holmby Hills mansion is the MOST EXPENSIVE PROPERTY IN THE WORLD. A golden goose could eat a dozen platinum Mastercards and lay golden karats on Pamela Anderson’s silicone chest, and the Spelling property would still be more expensive ounce for ounce.

Candy is considered the penultimate socialite. The meaning of socialite is nebulous, but can be loosely traced back to the concurrent emergence of chilled glasses and soft hotel towels. It can really only be defined relatively: given the choice between spending four hours at an art gallery or dedicating a national park, Candy will disregard both choices and invariably choose to eat braised baby geese and smoke somebody else’s cigarillo.

Candy is moving out because Aaron failed to provide her an alternate version of himself after checking-in to 7^th Heaven. She says the house is just too big for her alone. She wants to downgrade to a quaint little place that only has 50-foot vaulted ceilings. She is sick of having central cooling powered by an army of Emperor penguins blowing synchronously over a field of icy diamonds. She says she wants to live before she dies, but really, she just wants to be able to get to the front door without calling a cab.

Maharishi Yogi

Never has a house been so enhanced by a former inhabitant. The walls sing peaceful hymns in the silent vibrato of transcendence. Calling out from what few shadows exist are the murmured susurrations of two hundred acute angels scared of becoming enlightened. The gathered chant in unison: Yogi come home. Marharishi, come home and turn off the light in the kitchen, it’s been on for years and it’s just too bright. The house is supposedly “Neoclassical” and “prestigious” and “historic,” but Marharishi never spoke to any of these points and so such words should be replaced by “unmounted” and “soulless” and “perceptibly existing.”

Marharishi, who can be identified easiest as the man with a startled pack of river rats swimming up the side of his head, was known to be a source of abundant energy. 

The Beetles - a somewhat popular British band from sometime in the 1900’s - were said to have nibbled at Maharishi’s crumbs; his wisdom crumbs. Hiking steadily up this trail of crumbs is said to have led them to a blissful meditative state with a side effect of one Yoko O-no-get-out-of-here.

Marharishi defied age by throwing away his birth certificate and replacing it with a gift certificate for The GAP. To further supplement his boyishly old looks, he did copious amounts of yoga and was always sweaty. Followers could drink his sweat to achieve full-body paralyzation and the realization that yoga sweat can be toxic if taken in any dosage... unless ingested with a grain of salt.

Groucho Marx

The listing claims the property is “emotionally Spanish.” If is truly the case, bring a Kleenex and a spare road shoulder to cry on, because this is a house that likes to party – though it will probably end up drinking too much and sobbing about previous owners and wondering why the baroque 10-bedroom from a few years back hasn’t been returning house calls. Groucho Marx, the property’s most famously mustachioed owner, always knew he wanted a home with “the square footage of a warehouse and the ample edges of a whorehouse.” Well, Groucho always got what he wanted. Now, you too can have what Groucho always wanted.

Groucho would often invite over the Vlasic Pickle Stork to float in the pool water, and then take shots at its inability to relate to cucumbers and the young adult demographic. There are certainly stork tears in the pool, which is sure to be a draw for wildlife and nature enthusiasts.

Groucho’s puns were said to have been delivered more ruthlessly and unabashedly than bare-knuckled justice in Juvenile detention halls. However, no amount of custom puns or homespun cussing could get him out of explaining why on earth he could hold onto a beautiful house but not a beautiful wife. Each of his three women would likely agree: he was just emotionally Spanish.

Ed McMahon

Who was Ed McMahon? Johnny Carson’s excuse to practice side-kicks. What is Ed McMahon’s house? A wooden floor’s poignant essay on hotel conference rooms. What do you get when you put the two together under one roof? An excuse to kick every crappy conference room out of the first floor of every hotel in America into one house and call it “Mediterranean” style.

Everybody loved Ed, then, but Everybody loves Raymond, now. Ed went through the same foreclosure mess as the rest of the nation, which solidified his claim that he was in fact human. He succumbed to the same fallacy that we all did: four letter words are all bad; why rent when you can OWN! Or maybe he just hid his money in a subprime location and covered it with a TARP. It can happen to anybody?

Is Chinatown in San Francisco? Maybe. But no one can argue that Ed McMahon is in heaven, chasing bunnies and breathing pure oxygen. God’s modest hunting pup; The Eternal Sidekick.