Photos: LAT/Spencer Weiner
I was reminded of the title of James Howard Kunstler’s satire of Las Vegas, “Utopia of Clowns” when I saw today’s LA TIMES article about the newest excesses in swimming pools.
“Today homeowners have moved well beyond the simple requirement of a hole in the ground. Instead, they crave Las Vegas-style amusements: remote-controlled flames, sound-activated dancing lights and the illusion of endless water. They want custom tile and real stone, architectural lines that match the house, and artwork and antiques near the waterline.”
These pools are made for show, not for swim.
There is the Mel Blumenthal family of Newport Beach and Santa Monica. They live next to a swimming pool with a glass wall that is visible from their “aquarium room” inside the house. When the family is finished with their huge Sunday breakfast, the kids can jump in the pool, and the parents can watch them while sitting on the couch.
“So fixated on water is this attorney and art connoisseur that he added to his weekend getaway a serpentine pool that coils from the entrance to the back gate, a 14-foot-long aquarium, an oversized spa, and koi ponds with mini Old Faithful-like fountains and five arcing water jets.”
In the Matt Parsons’ home you can find “a 2-ton, 16th century bronze cannon, pulled from a shipwreck and craned into place on a grassy slice of his Newport Coast home.
Three connecting lagoons stretch out 57 feet — and are surrounded by river rock, making his yard look as if it were spliced from the Kern River. On the outside edges, water slips over the tawny stones, leaving them perpetually glistening. In the deepest pool, stone walls descend 11 feet to the bottom. On the top, there are manhole-sized stone disks to step across. Behind it all is a view of the Santa Ana Mountains.”
This arrangement only cost $600,000.
While praising the “fun” of these funhouse swimming pools, the visuals show these creations to be ugly, excessive, gross, gargantuan, pompous and juvenile. They are badly proportioned and anything but relaxing. You need a sedative after taking a swim under the dancing waterfalls.
To stretch the psychological analogy a bit further: What kind of people would turn the once lovely backyard swimming pool into a Donald Trump travesty in travertine?
Here in Van Nuys 
It took me some time to find these great resources – Great site and content – Thanks
Will bookmark it
Thanks
http://hckpublishing.com/aquarium/
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that is, in Dubai’s masturbation….
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Mike and Wad, I do think that in the fierce egp-competition of design jack-offs, we in the U.S., are really under the shadow of all these new beach-front erections, jerking around like loser teenagers.
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Wad – I applaud your lengthy post. And I won’t debate whether maturbatory pool building is the cause of or result of a falling civilization.
My point (which, reading my previous is entirely unclear) is that your initial criticism (re: the inability to find allies) was ill-founded because of the decadence present in the countries where we might find allies.
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Mike, this masturbatory behavior is inexcusable anywhere, anytime by anybody. I’d really hate to have to rank which society’s behavior is more craven. It just takes too much time and I have too many good arguments for each one.
And I made the allusion to chaos theory to tie something as minuscule as pool building to a world-changing event such as the collapse of a nation. Just as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings is a small, seemingly inconsequential event in itself, it combines with other events and chain reactions that could possibly cause a devastating hurricane. Here’s the chaos theory scenario of how pool building led to the fall of the American Empire:
1. Rich bozo decides to build the most garish pool ever conceived. It costs over half a million, and since that kind of scratch is seldom paid for in cash, it is charged on credit.
2. Rich bozo’s wealth is mostly paper anyway, so he adds just a small sum to the American debt load.
3. Treasury securities become even more unattractive to buy from foreign investors. (On a side note: the “trade deficit” you often hear about is nonsense. Our government conscientiously maintains a trade deficit in exchange for other nations to buy our securities and re-invest them through American finance channels. Most nations do not want our products and services flooding their markets, but they know we have a rock-solid monetary system.)
4. The U.S. government, realizing that a catastrophe results when other nations reduce buying treasuries, adopts a belligerent stance and finds another nation to “make an example of” to overwhelm militarily.
5. This in turn leads more nations (and people) to spite us.
6. For those nations with functioning democracies that respond to people’s needs, regimes that collaborate with the U.S. will be dispatches. For the rest of the world that doesn’t have that luxury, the people have reputations for taking matters into their own hands.
7. Panic sets in throughout world markets, destabilizing economies and causing social upheval.
8. If the U.S. manages to survive this economic cyclone unscathed, the American economy will be over-invested and eventually collapse under its own weight.
8a. But, the U.S. might not be so lucky. The economic destabilization becomes too might for even America to overcome and the whole world looks like the Third World.
9. The world is back into survival mode. All notions of truth, beauty, justice and morality go out the window, and the strongest military faction becomes the new empire.
It’s all so obvious. :>
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Wad – we certainly do a lot of “masturbatory” things in the US, and one of them is housing. But it’s not like we’re unique. Have you seen what the Saudi royal family builds for itself?
The problem is decadent personalities with lots of (relative) cash – we don’t have a monoply on that.
And building these pools will not lead to the collapse of a nation. Who knows, maybe the marginal costs really is not that much. But I would certainly say that such decadence is evidence that a collapse (or slow decline over many years) is well on its way.
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Andrew, what I meant was to connect your “Pools for Clowns” item with the largest issue gripping the U.S.
The U.S. is the richest nation in the history of the world, and it’s things like those garish swimming pools that we build with our money. The theory in winning a war on terror is that once we have won it, we can continue to waste money on such masturbatory swimming pools and other garish monuments to conspicuous consumption.
If we are the richest nation in the world, then it follows that other nations are comparatively poorer. So, other nations have their own pressing issues and they are expected to commit money, energy and lives in order to keep Americans rich and wasting money and water on theme park pools.
Just as the principle of chaos theory has often boasted that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another, building an excessive swimming pool will lead to the most spectacular collapse of a nation in history.
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Fat people, fat houses.
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Wad-
I laughed..even though I don’t quite understand what you mean.
Andrew
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And you wonder why the U.S. can’t find allies in the terror war.
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