I wasn’t in Southern Nevada at all in February, so February weather was apparently moved into all of March. Wet, cloudy, cool and windy intermixed with the occasional sunny and almost warm days that are more typical of March down here. Something to do with that whole el nino and la nina thing I guess. I have high hopes for April, and both Nevada and Utah have much need for all this extra water. Lake Mead still looks pretty low relative to the old high water level markings along the shore, but better, considerably better.
The weekend before last was quite the weekend. A Bruce Springsteen show at the T-Mobile venue in Las Vegas on Friday night, and then heading down to Phoenix for a Spring-training Cubs game in Mesa on Saturday, then a tasty dinner and breakfast in Tempe followed by a Sunday afternoon in the Phoenix Botanical Gardens also in Tempe, and then the drive back to southern Nevada.
The Bruce Springsteen concert involved another trip into the strip. It was a little crazy in terms of cost. Although not that different from pre-pandemic prices for similar shows. But it was the first Springsteen show that I have seen and he and his e-street band have been playing in the background for most of my life. They played one of my most enduring favorite songs:
Now, some guys they just give up livin’
Bruce Springsteen
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
Then go racin’ in the street
I’ve known a few Springsteen fans who are basically deadheads of a different stripe. Traveling the world to catch another jam. I was surprised, and then not that surprised, after thinking about it, by the lack of diversity in the crowd. Median age probably around 50 with a tight range from -1 to + 1 standard deviations. Almost all white. Approaching an equal measure of women to men. The most significant outlier, white couples in their early and mid thirties. So pretty much the Jimmy Buffet crowd. The one notable exception was Flavor Flav formerly of Public Enemy. He ended up on the floor on one side of the stage and was darting back and forth with great enthusiasm. He apparently lives in Las Vegas and had been invited to the concert by Steven Van Zandt, and had met with Springsteen before the show. At the time I didn’t know it was him, although he still has the clock. Another couple of surprises were the stature of Nils Lofren. He is a small fellow. And how exactly perfectly Jake Clemons, nephew of the now departed Clarence, fits in with the band. The stamina of Springsteen, the well done choreography of the show, and the spirit of it all were noteworthy but also expected.
It was, simply put, very good. I’m not sure I would have ever become a devout world-wise Springsteen concert follower but I am thrilled that I saw him once, if a tad belatedly. A few images of the concert are located toward the end of my las vegas nevada usa galleries in my photography galleries.
My new WTF, so far, for this year: the Arizona highway system. The connection between Las Vegas and Phoenix has always been inexplicably poorly developed. But they have made a great deal of progress over the last fifteen years or so. The new bridge at the Hoover Dam, the steady growth in the percentage of highway that is four lane versus two lane, and new large sections of highway that go around metro Phoenix on the West and then on the South have all reduced travel time and increased safety considerably. But somebody forgot to maintain big sections of the roads between Wickenburg and the Hoover Dam. We had one typical old-school near-death experience of the frustrated-driver-attempting-to-pass-ten-trucks-and-RV’s-as-rapidly-as-possible-on-a-two-lane-section-of-highway variety. Zipping ferociously towards us in our lane with no way of reentering his own lane. He just barely made it. That was awful but brief. Wills were discussed shortly thereafter. The longer and equally unpleasant thing was the ongoing thought of what all of the potholes might do to our tires or the tires of others and when one might explode. One of the potholes of note was several layers deep and contained a yellow stripe on the asphalt at its base which had once been the center stripe of a two lane section of highway but was now a two lane half of a four lane section. In Nevada, of course, everything is hunky dory.
We arrived at Sloan Park in Mesa, actually just a tiny smidge outside of Tempe, a little stressed from the drive and trying to get to the game on time. The Cubs prospect who is now beginning his major league career, Ben Brown was pitching well. It was eighty degrees. We sat on the grass that is a substitute for bleachers. All was right and good with the world. Dinner found us at Caffe Boa in Tempe, probably my favorite restaurant in the Phoenix area. I had been there often related to all sorts of trips to and through Phoenix before the Pandemic. I was both surprised and pleased to find it was still around. I few items on the menu featured Point Judith Rhode Island calamari. This I found to be particularly intriguing because we lived in this tiny Rhode Island fishing village while at Graduate School. If you are fond of shellfish, their Sicilian Cioppino is well worth trying.
Then on Sunday we headed to the Phoenix Botanical Gardens which has been one of my favorite places since having to attend work meetings in Phoenix back in the early 90’s. What to do with a spare few hours in Phoenix. Yep. Check out these gardens. I found a couple things to be especially interesting this time around. One was that after almost ten years of desert gardening, the gardens appeared far less exotic than they had years ago. So many of the plants are actually quite normal to me now. The gardens then become special not because of their exotic nature but because of the arranging and juxtapositioning of the various, often quite normal, plants.
The second thing was the Botero show. The gardens often have events of various kinds. The Chihuly exhibit of a few years before the Pandemic was my favorite. All of that wild looking glass out and about among the wild looking cacti. The Christmas-time las noches de las luminarias is also a favorite, bags containing candles placed along the garden walkways and frequent stops with Hispanic influenced live music.
In this case we happened upon a Botero show which was great. Although a little shy on the sculpture front. But a fun thing to run into anyway. I keep running into Botero. So far Bogota, Barcelona, Paris, San Antonio and now Phoenix. Other spots as well. I remember the work but not the where. His work is fun and a fine example of Brand. You certainly know a Botero when you see one. The show consisted of a couple large sculptures in the gardens and quite a few paintings and smaller sculptures in a gallery space. There may have been more out in the gardens but we couldn’t find them. We felt quite lucky to have happened upon the event just a few days before it closed. Several images of the Botero show and from this trip to the gardens are located at the end of my arizona usa galleries in my photography galleries. Other large groups of images of the gardens are located here and there thoughout the arizona usa galleries.
The gardens hadn’t reached their peak of Spring color, but many of the flowering plants and cacti were well on their way. It even rained a bit while we were there, and was chilly. This was interesting because it had been so hot the day before. It also worked out well when we hit that terrible road, to have no anguish about leaving Phoenix weather, in mid-afternoon, rolling and bumping, often violently, along on our way back to southern Nevada.
In the past month or so, I’ve spent some time studying up on branding and marketing. Several years ago I did extensively read up on branding along with user experience, how it is measured, and how it relates to branding. So this was a brief revisit to a subject that I’m already familiar with. A few books in which I found quite a bit of insight were the collective works of Deb Gabor, just straightforward explanation of looking at branding through the inclusion of reputation or perceived reputation as a large part of brand, and how that can be maintained, destroyed or amplified beyond what is reasonable.
The Erotic History of Advertising by Tom Reichert gave me a better understanding of that wide topic, much more than titillation as a way to draw male attention. Consider the soap and beauty products sold to American women of the last century which were branded as a way to increase the sexual interest of marital partners. Finding satisfactory mates was a matter of something akin to survival for women of that era. They generally weren’t allowed to go out and make their own living. The promise of increased sex appeal to women was a huge part of the branding for most of that century and this century as well. Just one of the many insights from the very interesting category of “sex sells”.
The Gabor books articulate the concept, among many others, that the holy grail is irrational customer loyalty which is built on branding and in which customer vanity plays not a small part. Something that, to me at least, spells Apple over the past twenty or so years. I also have been an Apple owner and user but with an awareness of what is best done where. How many times over those years have I produced an enormous file with Photoshop or Illustrator on Windows only to see it overwhelm the computational capacity of a higher-end Apple. The standard take on the part of the Apple faithful is that there must be something wrong with the file because it was produced on Windows. I just use a bunch of tricks to lower the file size and the problems disappear.
My biggest realization from Gabor came from my applying what she has to say to the immediate concern facing many successful businesses and especially the contemporary tech titans, those who have established irrational loyalty via performance related branding over many years in a time of free spending.
Now they must increase revenue, profitability, stock prices, product users and productivity while decreasing payroll, spending, research and development, and availability and capability of expensive features. All in an era where money is no longer cheap. All of this can take a toll on brand. The normal solutions to the problem would be either large increases in efficiency or innovation or both. These could be accomplished without negatively impacting brand. But instead we are living in an age of shrinkflation and price increases. Shrinkflation in the consumer-facing tech sector can take all sorts of forms. For instance: a sudden removal of features, dropping support for older models of gadgets or versions of apps or other software, a lowering of capabilities of base features combined with the offering of paid upgrades that return the features that have been removed, enforcement of policies that reduce the capability available to the user, changing contract terms to allow for greater use of personal data and reduction of protection of other privacy issues, and lobbying of politicians to eliminate competition from both similar companies and entirely new and innovative approaches.
And the final question is: At what expense? I suspect the cost will be the abrupt long-term reduction of value in branding that may have taken decades to build. And when that is combined with the availability of new disrupting technologies things could get a tad dicey. Hello AI. Smaller and less profitable companies may have to take these risks as a matter of survival. Larger companies with huge balance sheets appear to be doing it because they can.
And enough of all that. Depressing. Many find the subject boring. I find it fascinating. More on branding in later posts.