We drove up yesterday after work to see Jon Batiste perform in Bentonville. It's about a 2.5 hour drive, so it was a long day, but very do-able. I tend to forget Northwest Arkansas exists, which is funny because it has a lot going on. It's also getting paved within an inch of its life - it's clearly what happens when you put people who think driving to do recreational activities makes sense in charge of a virtually unlimited budget.
The concert series, at the Momentary, was sponsored by Tyson and Walmart. The museum was built by those same powers, in some other combination. The town was also built by them, and obviously still controlled by them in all the ways that matter. It makes me think a bit of Cooperstown, NY - even if you like what the shadowy cabal is doing, it's still a shadowy cabal.
So we enjoyed our time up there, and we'll probably go again. Would I want to live there? Not more than here, I think, and maybe less - for all the things that are immediately obvious there's also a lot going on that I think is less nice - the area next to the museum is being developed at a scale that reminds me of Chinese government building scale - which I expect is because a similar steamroller effect is happening, getting things done efficiently, without a lot of oversight.