Gavin Scott's Blog, page 11

A Hard Day’s Beatle Sculpture

Here is my fourth miniature found-objects Beatles assemblage, celebrating the wonderful movie and album A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, which is when at 13 in deepest New Zealand, Beatlemania finally swept me away. #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks

Beatles Sculpture Number 3

This is my third miniature Beatles sculpture, which I’ve put together to celebrate their third album, With the Beatles. Love their little bobbling heads! #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks

The Age Of Olympus arrives!

My author copies of the new Duncan Forrester adventure, The Age of Olympus, have now arrived and I’m going around with a huge grin on my face because they look so great! Titan Books have done a great job and Los Angeles’ best independent bookstore, Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, have agreed to host the official launch at 7pm on April 20th. All welcome! PS: it’s set in Greece in 1946! #AgeOfOlympus #Book Soup @TitanBooks

Beatles Sculpture Number Two: Please Please Me.

Here’s the second in my series of miniature Beatles assemblage sculptures using found Beatles figurines. This one commemorates their first album, Please Please Me from 1963. #Beatles #AgeOfOlypmus @TitanBooks

Avocados vs the Robots

According to the Times, the inventor of a robot salad maker designed to replace restaurant staff has admitted defeat because robots can’t handle avocados. Who knew humans would be saved from the rise of the robots by a Mexican fruit?!#Robots #AgeOfOlympus #TitanBooks

Faking Michelangelo

There’s a delicious story in today’s London Times giving pretty conclusive evidence that the “1520” portrait of Michelangelo as painted by Sebastiano now being shown as part of a big exhibition in Britain’s National Gallery was actually created in about 1959! Egg (tempera) on faces all round, I suspect … but great fun. And I gather the exhibition itself is terrific too, telling the story of how Michelangelo teamed up with younger inferior painter Sebastiano, to do down Michelangelo’s rival Raphael! Good that this kind of feuding doesn’t affect the art world...

Miniature Beatles in the Cavern

Here is the first of a series of cigar-box style sculptures I have begun to make, incorporating Beatles figurines I have collected over the years, many of them wonderfully bad! I got these models of the early Beatles, which are made of some kind of metal, in a shop, long since disappeared, in an alley behind Regent Street. No idea who made them, but they fit the Cavern perfectly.

The Beatles Revolutionary Year

I’ve just read Beatles ’66, The Revolutionary Year, a terrific book by Steve Turner about what changed the Beatles between December 1965 and December 1966 as they made the leap from Rubber Soul (1965) via Revolver (1966) to the extraordinary achievements of Sergeant Pepper in 1967. On Rubber Soul, Turner points out, 13 of the 14 songs were about love: but on Revolver, 9 of the 14 were about other things entirely, starting, of course, with Taxman. And then came Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields … Most of the book...

18th Century Movie Mogul

This amazing drawing by an eighteenth century French artist called Edme Bouchardon reveals a woman who was clearly going around Paris in the reign of Louis the Fifteenth showing movies. She’s winding a barrel organ and carrying a portable projector on her back – and presumably a portable screen in the box. Here’s one of the actual projectors from that era she might be using, and another with the slides inserted. And we are talking about movies: if you slid the glass plate back and forward it did look as...

The New Duncan Forrester

I’m pleased to announce that in two months’ time Titan Books will be publishing the sequel to last year’s Duncan Forrester novel, The Age of Treachery. This one is called The Age of Olympus and it’s set in Greece in 1946. Forrester has gone back there to retrieve the mysterious Minoan stele he came across in a cave in the Gorge of Acharius during the war, and finds himself in the run-up to the Greek civil war. A famous poet is murdered, a heroic general is implicated, and Forrester and Countess Sophie...