Isegoria

The bestselling title on Amazon is not a novel. It’s not a piece of non-fiction, either. It’s a coloring book — for adults:

Basford’s intricately drawn pictures of flora and fauna in Secret Garden have sold 1.4m copies worldwide to date, with the newly released follow-up Enchanted Forest selling just under 226,000 copies already. They have drawn fans from Zooey Deschanel, who shared a link about the book with her Facebook followers, to the South Korean pop star Kim Ki-Bum, who posted an image on Instagram for his 1.6 million followers.

“It’s been crazy. The last few weeks since Enchanted Forest came out have been utter madness, but fantastic madness,” said Eleanor Blatherwick, head of sales and marketing at the books’ publisher, small British press Laurence King. “We knew the books would be beautiful but we didn’t realise it would be such a phenomenal success.”

And it is not just Basford who is reaping the benefits of the hordes of adults who, it turns out, just wanted something to colour in. In the UK, Richard Merritt’s Art Therapy Colouring Book sits in fourth spot on Amazon’s bestseller lists, Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom — detailed pictures of animals to colour – sits in seventh, and a mindfulness colouring book sits in ninth. Basford’s titles are in second and eighth place — that’s half of Amazon.co.uk’s top 10 taken up by colouring books for adults.

At independent UK publisher Michael O’Mara, which has sold almost 340,000 adult colouring books to date, head of publicity, marketing and online, Ana McLaughlin, attributes the craze to the way the category has been reimagined as a means of relaxation. “The first one we did was in 2012, Creative Colouring for Grown-Ups. It sold strongly and reprinted, but it was last year that it all really mushroomed with Art Therapy, in June. It really took off for us — selling the anti-stress angle gave people permission to enjoy something they might have felt was quite childish,” she said.

If you spend any time around kids, you probably already know how soothing coloring can be.

It’s time to raise the curtain on the Muppet Show again:

ABC is filming a proof of concept for a revival of The Muppets, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady is co-writing the script for a pilot presentation that sources say could be unspooled at May’s upfront presentation to Madison Avenue advertisers.

[...]

For Prady, the revived Muppets — which landed at ABC after initial interest from Netflix — marks a return to his roots. The producer, who currently does not have an overall deal, started his career working for Henson in 1982 and ultimately started writing for The Jim Henson Hour, remaining on the series until a year after Henson’s death in 1990.

This marks the second time Prady has attempted to revive The Muppets. The writer-producer shot some test footage before CBS’ The Big Bang Theory that Disney ultimately passed on. For his part, Prady earned an Emmy nomination in 1991 for writing tribute The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson in 1990 and has contributed writing to Disney’s Muppet-themed attractions. Should ABC order Muppets to series, Prady would juggle both that project and CBS’ The Big Bang Theory, which he exec produces.

Brooklyn hipsters are now embracing the centuries-old tradition of contra dancing:

Derived from English country dancing — think of the long paired lines of couples crisscrossing and partner-swapping in all those Jane Austen country-manor balls, now press fast forward — contra offers young urbanites an inclusive atmosphere where they can work up a little sweat away from the gym and touch human beings instead of screens.

[...]

For those more accustomed to socializing in dark clubs with exotic cocktails and pounding music, contra’s wholesome, folksy culture can come as a bit of a shock.

“The first thing I thought when I walked in the door is, where is the bar?” said Dakota Kim, 34, an event producer who recently attended her first contra dance in Brooklyn. “But then it’s so fun you don’t care.”

On the dance floor, partners start out facing each other in long lines while a live band plays jigs and reels. With the cadences of a comforting auctioneer, the caller calls out moves to dancers on the floor. Partners clasp hands, spin and look into each other’s eyes.

We are talking about Brooklyn hipsters though:

Another change lies with the historical terms for partners—traditionally called “ladies” and “gents.” These days, when Mr. Isaacs introduces the dance, he says, “ladies and gents is a dance role, not a gender.”

Paul Johnson (MightyOtaking) produced his TIE Fighter short film over four years of weekends:

He describes it as “an Empire-focussed short Star Wars animation, drawn with the crazy detail and shading of classic 80s anime that’s all but vanished from Japan nowadays.”

With Zak Rahman’s guitar soundtrack, it has a very Heavy Metal vibe.

I never played the 1994 TIE Fighter game, but the project proposal references it.

Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” — formally titled “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” from the woodblock series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” — is about the size of a piece of legal paper and wasn’t originally held in especially high regard in its home country:

The image is a mix of east and west — a blending of techniques that Hokusai picked up from Japanese artists and his own knowledge of European prints. The woodblock depicts Mount Fuji, a hallowed place in Japan, but pushes the peak deep into the distance using western perspective. The wave was printed on Japanese mulberry paper but marked by a color new to Japan — a vibrant Prussian blue created from synthetic dye in Germany.

“The prints were a popular art, they were not something intellectual connoisseurs really admired at the fine-art level,” said Ms. Thompson. “They were discovered by the Europeans before the Japanese.”

Ms. Guth hypothesizes in her book that a devastating tsunami in Japan in 1896 helped give the woodcut its international renown. Hokusai’s print was becoming more familiar just as the word tsunami was working its way into the English language, she wrote, and the word and image soon became linked.

The print, which does not depict a tsunami, shows fishermen rowing frantically across a stormy Tokyo Bay after delivering their cargo to the city. Fingers of sea foam curl over their heads. It’s unclear if they’re going to make it home alive, though some scholars believe the presence of the sacred Mount Fuji works in their favor.

Roughly 100 impressions of “The Great Wave” exist today from an original print run estimated by some experts at more than 5,000.

Watching films has become so profoundly familiar that we’ve lost sight of just how consequential this activity truly is:

We have come to take cinema so for granted, we don’t wonder how we might use it to benefit our lives in a properly profound way. Ideally, we would get more ambitious about the role of cinema in the world. We would try to pin down more accurately what films can actually do for us, then make sure we’re reliably making, and finding our way to seeing, the best (that is, the most useful) kinds of films: the films that really do help us with our struggles and pains. We would, ideally, learn that film – like all the other art forms – best reveals its power when we conceive of it as a kind of therapy.

This idea isn’t new. It comes from the Ancient Greeks who brought maturity to the predecessor of cinema: theatre. Fascinatingly, they didn’t just file going to the theatre under ‘entertainment’ and leave it at that. They thought very deeply about what the point of sitting in a theatre might be and concluded that it should be a therapeía, a resource to help us grow into better, wiser, more mature kinds of people. It belonged, together with religion and philosophy, to the forces that could develop our souls. Aristotle proposed that watching tragedies was highly useful in shaking us free of self-righteousness. Seeing how easily a hero might make a small error and then pay a huge price for it could induce fear and pity in the audience, leaving us readier to forgive others and better able to examine our own consciences.

[...]

Film has an enormous power to glamourise. It can put in front of our eyes delightful images many metres in size, shot in extraordinary colours, vivid and immediate. Because so many films glamourise the wrong things, we’re used to thinking that an element of alienation and corruption is a generic rather than an incidental danger of cinema.

But in fact, film is well able to show us the less obvious but real charms of everyday life. Whereas the worst sort of films eject us back into our lives full of longing and disenchantment, the best ones leave us ready to re-engage with circumstances with which we had unfairly grown bored. Cinema can help us love and appreciate what we already have.

Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) has a more interesting family history than I realized. He opens his TED Talk with a sad story about solar eclipses:

In the summer of 1974, Chris Stein wrote a song with the catchy feel of “Rock the Boat”. Debbie Harry wrote some lyrics about falling in and out of love and threw in a 1960s R&B girl group-style “Ooo-ooo, ohhh-oh” fill when they started performing the song at CBGB. This became the disco song, which became Blondie’s first hit — but only after Mike Chapman produced it:

Mr. Stein: Originally, Debbie’s second line of the song was, “Soon turned out, he was a pain in the ass.” Mike thought that might not play well on the radio, so I threw out a phrase, “heart of glass,” which everyone liked. Debbie worked it in as “Soon turned out, had a heart of glass.” That’s the title we used on the song.

Mr. Chapman: I asked Debbie which singer she liked most in the music business. She said, “Donna Summer,” particularly on “I Feel Love.” I never expected that. I said to her and Chris, “Why don’t we give this song a Giorgio Moroder feel?” Giorgio had produced Donna’s great albums.

Movies and books form a mental structure in your head of what is possible and what is not, Scott Adams says, but these are artificial structures based on the rules of fiction, not reality:

Our brains like to force things into familiar boxes. If you have the world’s greatest idea to feed the poor, but it reminds people of The Hunger Games, you can count on folks saying it won’t work. Our brains run to the nearest analogy and stick to it like glue. That might be a problem if the nearest analogy is based on fiction.

I would like to see a study of decision-making based on how much fiction one consumes. My hypothesis is that consumers of fiction will draw their “experience” in part from fiction and it will warp their understanding of what is practical or possible in the real world.

When I was a teen, adults started yapping about how our hippy music was warping our minds. We laughed at how stupid that was. But as an educated adult I can see that music rewires our brains, just as any other experience does. So listening to angry music should, according to everything we understand about human behavior and the brain, rewire a kid to be more like the people singing the songs. Influence of that sort only requires a combination of identification with the singer’s message, repetition, and emotion; Popular music provide that in abundance.

My hypothesis is that reading anything raises your intelligence in a variety of ways, as one might imagine. But I think exposure to fiction makes you less grounded in the real world (subconsciously) and more likely to make decisions the way the captain of the Enterprise would have done it, for example.

And I also think music is reprogramming the brains of kids in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways. To believe otherwise is to believe that music is somehow the one thing in our environment that does not rewire us through repetition and emotion.

I think you all agree that our environment influences us in small ways all the time. Everything you see and learn rewires your brain. If you think fiction and music have only trivial impacts on us, you probably have a different frame of reference from me. As a trained hobbyist-hypnotist I have a unique impression of how easily we moist robots can be rewired. And as a cartoonist/blogger I see a huge volume of human reactions to what I produce; that’s how I noticed a fiction-thinking pattern, or so I think.

This isn’t an opinion piece. I’m just offering a hypothesis that fiction and music are reprogramming us to the point of influencing our happiness and our decisions. And we let that rewiring happen according to our cravings for entertainment, not our intelligence.

My guess is that on a scale from 1 to 10, you think this negative impact of fiction and music is closer to a 2, and not something to worry about in a free society. My vantage point on this topic is different from that of most of you, and my observation is that the problem is closer to an 8.

Personally, I stopped consuming angry, violent, or unhappy fiction long ago. My anecdotal observation is that it makes a gigantic difference in my mental state. But everyone is different.

My question of the day is whether you choose your fiction and music based on how it will rewire your mood and your mind, or do you select it based on its entertainment value. To put it another way, do you let your environment program you any way it wants, or do you try to manage that process?

What is the most played song ever?

Nobody famous sang this tune. It was never a hit single and got almost no play on Top 40 radio. There’s even a dispute over the exact title. Yet “It’s a Small World,” also known as “It’s a Small, Small World” and “It’s a Small World (After All),” is very likely the most played song in music history — nearly 50 million times. And it was first heard 50 years ago this month [April, 2014].

Various sources cite the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” (1964) as having more than eight million plays on radio and TV, and The Beatles’ “Yesterday” (1965) with at least seven million in the U.S. alone, and many more in the rest of the world. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” introduced by Bing Crosby in 1942, has inundated the airwaves ever since, but for only a few weeks each year. There’s little debate that Patty and Mildred Hill’s “Happy Birthday to You” (originally “Good Morning to You”) has been performed more than any other song, but not in public; if you do, and don’t pay royalties, the possessive copyright holders at Warner/Chappell Music will sue your pants off — and take all your birthday gifts, too.

That leaves “It’s a Small World,” composed by Disney staff writers Richard and Robert Sherman for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair pavilion ride officially known as “PEPSI Present’s Walt Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ — a Salute to UNICEF and the World’s Children.” In his authoritative 1998 book Songwriters: A Biographical Dictionary with Discographies, Nigel Harrison proclaims the song “the most performed composition in the world.” Richard Sherman, the surviving brother, thinks so too.