'The Tyranny of Heav'n' Spot the deliberate mistake competition

This is a real competition, and you can win a Mars bar. Yes, it's that serious. A real Mars bar. (What did you expect? Golden elephants?) But the said sweet is there, sitting on my shelf at Hudson Towers, waiting to be given to the first person who solves the riddle. First reply by Facebook gets it.

This is all because when designing the front cover of 'The Tyranny of Heav'n' using Microsoft's Paint3D software, let's just say... I got a bit carried away.  Images can be imported, 3D items selected, assembled, rotated, brought closer and moved further away. There's a variety of paintbrushes, colours and textures at your fingertips, and tutorials explaining how to use them.

So having sketched out on paper an approximation of what I wanted for the book cover, I started playing with all the possibilities. Space. Robots. That sort of thing. The software had some ready-made examples, and sundry bits that could be assembled rather like an Airfix kit.

 Once I was happy with the 'thing', it could be rotated, tilted, painted, shadowed, then saved, ready for insertion on a background.

Ah, the background. We're looking for a landscape that could believably 'fit' for the surface of a comet, which is a giant ball of dirty ice and rock, flying through space. Then the idea came. We'd been to the Canadian Rockies a few years ago, and travelled up an ice glacier. I dug out the photos. This one seemed to fit.

Using Paint3D, I fiddled with the sky.

It still needed a bit of shadow and contrast adjustment, but we were getting there. I just needed to add the robot and give him a book. 

All well and good, it's ready to upload on the Amazon Kindle author page.

But then I spotted the mistake. No, it's not in the title. (That's John Milton's spelling from Paradise Lost', a deliberate reference because the poem is part of the story.) And it's not to do with the idea of the robot having a physical book out there on a comet, when in the story he's actually reading the thing online. (The book's a deliberate incongruity.)

Something else is wrong with this cover, and the only way you'll spot it is by reading the free sample on the Amazon kindle page.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tyranny-Heavn-CK-Hudson-ebook/dp/B089B535H6/ref=zg_bsnr_277560_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=R24CT98P99P36XREXM9N  

Like I said, the first person to spot it and tell me on Facebook, gets the Mars bar. I'd love to say it was deliberate, but it wasn't. Go on, then.

Unbelievable?

It's a tough life, visiting exotic locales, taking in the sun on a foreign shore, tasting the local brews and wandering the winding streets of a mediaeval city- but someone's got to do it. Venice can be a frantic buzz, bursting full of other people just like me who have the cheek to be there at the same time, and looking at the same things ... but there are quieter places where hardly anyone gets mugged, you rarely tread in something awful, and a sense of history echoes back to the sound of your own footsteps.

Sunday was my chance to see Damien Hurst's latest offering: his new exhibition staged for the Venice Biennialle, 'Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable'. 

The Guardian loves it... 

(https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/06/damien-hirst-treasures-from-the-wreck-of-the-unbelievable-review-titanic-return...)

... the Telegraph sort-of-hates it, (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/damien-hirst-treasures-wreck-unbelievable-review-spectacular/)

….  but if you're not popping over to Venice in the next 6 months, then here's wot Our Damien has been up to, using his millions to create some Big Art about Truth, Lies. Faith, Belief, and Remembering. As you enter, 'authentic' film footage recounts the story of a fabulous treasure ship from the second century, newly discovered on the bed of the Indian Ocean. The museum entrance sports the following quote over the entrance:

With that we're off, wandering around displays of 'discovered' objects from the sea-bed that owe more to the stop-motion cinematic genius of Ray Harryhausen ('Clash of the Titans', 'Jason and the Argonauts'...) than real history- but never mind. There are monsters,  heroes, heroines, gods and demi-gods. Amidst the swords and sorcery, there’s occasionally a hint of real human feeling lurking inside all the cleverness- but let's start with the awesome stuff. Imagine an 18 metre-tall cast-metal giant demon, headless, bursting with muscular malevolence. It's a colossus, a gob-smackingly big piece of engineering that makes you wonder how they even got it into the building (through the roof, apparently).

There's a horse-rider under attack from an enormous sea-serpent, and evidently not enjoying the experience.

Here's a magnificently resplendent mermaid, blasting up from the waves accompanied by sundry crustaceans, molluscs and other assorted denizens of the deep.

Clash of the Titans-territory again. Andromeda, menaced by the approaching Kraken without a rescuer in sight.

A Warrior-woman rides into battle astride a rearing Grizzly.

The Hindu goddess Kali meets the Hydra of Greek myth in a celebrity death-match- underwater.

A massive Sun-disc from the time of the Incas- and Indiana Jones.

But Our Damien is throwing in clues all the time. Can you spot one here?

Third one down. I probably bought my grandson one when he was six. Now check out these helmets.

Nobody ever made winged helmets like that. (They get knocked off too easily in battle, unless you're an extra in Lord of the Rings.) As for the goddess Kali's swords- they're mediaeval two-handed broadswords from North-Western Europe, not the usual tableware for a Hindu deity. 

This 'Proteus' is actually based on John Merrick, the original Elephant Man of the Victorian era (a gentle human being).

And this? The original lab-rat from a rather dubious experiment appeared on Have I Got News For You as the end-of-show caption competition. (Paul Merton: 'Pardon?')

This is Quexacoatl, the Mexican snake god. Or is it Optimus Prime?

So by the time you get to this one, you know that Damian Hurst is truly taking the Michael.

Sometimes, it's banal. A jade Buddha, a mocked up sculpture of Durer's Praying Hands, the phallic Chinese Drummers, a busted Bacchus. Is Hurst saying that the Disney organisation repackage ancient myths for modern consumption?  (So what's new?) That's him with Mickey, by the way, best buddies by the look of it.

One particular piece is horribly real- of a life-size Minotaur raping an Athenian girl. No, I'm not showing the picture. The outrage on the girl's face, the pain and disgust... is that art, or pornography of the worst kind? Is it an attempt to portray sexual assault for what it really is...  or just bad art? I can't decide. Looking back over the whole show, you can see Hurst is trying to provoke reactions. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. There's Pride... Horror ... Sorrow... Awe... Mystery... Pathos.. But curiously, we see nothing about Love.

The gallery's first opening to the general public (on two sites) came on Palm Sunday. Around Venice that morning, worshippers had processed through the city waving palm branches, celebrating a divinity and humanity that was more down-to-earth than the flash-bang mythology of the exhibition. Palm Sunday remembers a wild parade through an excited crowd wanting a Messiah. They sing their Hosannas. A Temple market is trashed. Protests are made, and broken bodies mended. Children sing in delight. In that story there are no monsters, the only swords are wielded by ignorant disciples, soldiers and Temple guards. The lurking horrors don't have teeth or scales- just clubs and whips. Does this story contain any more truth than the tales told by Damien, Donald or Mickey? Historically yes- but curiously, there seems to be more human compassion in it, too. 

Believable? Unbelievable? This Easter, as we see what's happening in the world, what do you and I want to believe in- and Why?

Nature- Nice or Nasty? (Or... HR Giger vs. Antonin Gaudi- the Ultimate Smackdown)

Ridley Scott’s next ‘Alien’ film (Alien Covenant: Prometheus 2) is soon going to be hitting the big screen. Hopefully it’ll be better than ‘Prometheus’, whose many plot holes left us wondering whether the Alien had secretly been laying waste to Ridley’s intrepid little group of scriptwriters. The next instalment apparently features more explorers arriving on a deserted planet, who discover a crashed spaceship, some eggs and then… well, you can guess a lot of the rest. It’s probably best not watched on a full stomach.

‘We’re all Doomed!’ (… or why the remake of Dad’s Army was never going to work)

This evening, my wife and I wasted some hard-earned money going to see a film that was so bad, we walked out after 35 minutes, a new personal record. What’s puzzling is that:

a    1) In all the hype and publicity and nostalgia for the original show, no-one in the 2016 film  production team thought that giving a bit of time to creating a new decent script was worth it, because:

      2) They hoped that enough idiots like us who enjoyed the original would pay out hard-earned cash, and what’s worse,

c     3) Those hard-bitten cynics and bean-counters were absolutely right, curse them.