At Jennifer Lopez's former home in Bel-Air, which recently resold for $10 million, an arched footbridge and a cobblestone driveway cross a stone-lined waterway that encircles the French-style villa.
In Brentwood, supermodel Gisele Bundchen and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady included the water element at their newly completed European-style estate. Luckily for the neighbors, the couple's moat looks more like a winding stream than a means of defense.
And at a Beverly Hills contemporary built on a promontory, a narrow one serves a practical purpose. The moat around the $36-million property takes the place of a guardrail, which would have obstructed the stellar city views.The comments are a mix of "eat the rich!" and criticism of the hypocrisy of rich liberals (and there are almost no other kind) spending money on this mixture of Capitol City ostentation and pre-French Revolutionary paranoia.
I really don't mind if people spend their money on stuff like this -- it generally ends up in the hands of contractors, construction workers, and others who are not necessarily obscenely rich. I do get pretty upset at the hypocrisy of rich liberals whining about the 1%, while spending money like this. And I get even more upset about Republicans continuing to help the 1% get even richer. I would love to see Republicans introduce maximum wage laws for the movie industry, rather like the million dollar maximum wage for corporate officers that the Democrats passed in 1993, not because I believe that such laws need to exist, but just to force Hollyweird's liberals to spend the time and energy justifying why they deserve to make several million dollars for a few weeks of work.
In a related story, one of the latest fads for godzillion-dollar homes is...moats.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newser.com/story/179749/hot-new-feature-for-luxury-homes-moat.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=alltop&utm_campaign=home_rss
My house is cheap, but I have a pretty big corner lot...
"Nothing is more annoying to sophisticated people to see someone who is rich enough to know better being tacky--unless it is to realize, a moment later, that they probably know they are tacky and they simply don't care and they are going to go on being tacky, and rich, and happy, forever.
ReplyDelete...This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments."
--Neal Stephenson
I don't mind entertainers being paid so much.
ReplyDeleteWhat I mind is taxpayer money SUBSIDIZING the film makers and the overpaid help.
Billionaire director James Cameron will receive 25% of the funding for the next Avatar movies from the New Zealand taxpayers, roughly $30 each from every man, woman, and child there.