In a Q&A sidebar in Sunday's Tennessean Arts & Entertainment section, celebrity narcissist John Rich spins an egomaniacal fantasy regarding neighborhood attitudes toward the urban atrocity he is building near Love Circle:
Q: There was lots of controversy when you started building your mansion near Love Circle in downtown Nashville. Where does that stand now?A: It's not lots of controversy now, but it was. I thought neighbors would think it was cool. But I built it, and a lot of people got upset. They were like, "Good Lord, what is that guy doing?" But Mayor Dean has thanked me multiple times for building my house in Nashville, not out in the country somewhere where no one could see it, because he feels like it's a good thing for the town.
Yeah, who cares what neighbors think as long as the mayor likes it. No word yet on how hizzoner would feel about having a 73-foot high edifice next to his own Green Hills crib. Rich, meanwhile, fancies himself as quite the environmentalist:
They are getting ready to top out the roof and put the swimming pool up there. There's a swimming pool and salsa garden on my roof. It's an extremely efficient house on energy. Instead of putting in regular heat, for instance, because the ceilings are really tall and it would be inefficient to have heat blowing in...we have radiant heat coming through the floor. The roof is green, so it's 12 inches of soil holding the temperature down in the house. It's very well thought out, and for its size, it's extremely efficient.
If an 11,000 square foot monstrosity nestled in a city neighborhood of houses a quarter its size qualifies as "well thought out," we'd hate to see what Rich's idea of "not so well thought out" looks like.
(n.b. The Tennessean pushes hard for this week's irony award, with editor Mark Silverman boasting in Sunday's Issues section that his paper is "producing important journalism that no one in Middle Tennessee is better positioned to produce" while his writer Cindy Watts, who did the John Rich story, seems blissfully unaware that Love Circle is not in "downtown Nashville.")
