Harmony Voyages is booking 200 paying guests for the August 2025 Richard Thompson cruise, whereas the Saipan transported nearly 3,000 paid sailors, Marines, and midshipmen like me, along with a squadron of fighting helicopters and big boats to take Marines ashore.
Herzog is not my “favorite” director, but I have followed his art and career with interest. Even as a fan it is sometimes hard to know if he is being brilliant in this, banal, or manipulative.
Real emotional labor is not about fragility, just humanity. It does not make us snowflakes; it keeps us resilient. It should not require a false self, only a considerate one that refrains from inflicting its internal dissatisfactions on others. And if more of us did emotional labor, that extra compassion and thoughtfulness would become a lovely habit.
Drunks and babies fall softly because they are not arrogant. The rest of us fall hard—in love, off the wagon, from glory—and fall so often, you would think we would learn how.
The fact that a composer such as Steve Hackman has folded Radiohead’s music into that of Brahms successfully enough to land in a performance hall is probably proof that time, alas, has at last caught up with Radiohead.
The delight and danger of swaying others
Appropriation art has not only outraged artists over the unauthorized and lucrative exploitation of their artwork but has been the subject of high-stakes lawsuits for decades. Appropriation artists defiantly operate under the flag of “fair use,” which some have described as a copyright lawyer’s full-employment act.
As the father of a ten-year-old, I find myself talking constantly with teachers and therapists, joining autism groups, attending school board meetings, speaking out against the censorship of school library books. I taught Vance to hold a fork; he taught me how to stay connected with the rest of humanity.
How did our bland city become a hot spot for national ad campaigns? Overhead was low, flights were easy in any direction, and smart, creative talent was abundant. Between the two world wars, Winston Churchill himself, speaking at an international advertising conference, pronounced the St. Louis Ad Club “far ahead of other cities.” By midcentury, the Midwest was the obvious place to study middle America.
Who is winning the old nature-versus-nature debate? Which of these influencers has the upper hand? Are we mostly preprogrammed, acting out what has been inside us since Day One, or do we go in the direction life blows us?