Kester Brewin

Occasionally an article catches one’s eye that genuinely opens a raft of interesting new thoughts. That happened to the other day when I read this Guardian piece about a new area of Pirate Bay that offers templates for 3D printers to clone figures for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Lord of the Rings table-top games. Up [...]

I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis. Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ [...]

Good to see the comments on the previous post, in which I was trying to open up a bit about the prevalence of depression among writers. I’ve been mulling on that a bit, and thinking about why teachers (curses – I’m that too) also rank as professionals with some of the highest rates of depression. [...]

I’ve been wondering about writing something on this for a while, but haven’t been sure how much to say, or what might be wise. But I thought it might be helpful to others to open the door just a crack and see if there’s some light that could get in on what’s a terrifically difficult [...]

There are so many technology stories every week it can be hard to know what’s significant or not. But this piece on the BBC about a new sort of camera has kept me thinking all day, so I thought I’d blog something about it. Put simply, the ‘Lytro’ camera – available for pre-order, but not [...]

As part of the book I’m writing at the moment I’ve been reading and thinking quite a lot about the idea of what ‘property’ is, and how this relates to the arts – and music in particular. Just the other day a new legal ruling was passed that ensured that ageing crooners like Sir Cliff [...]

  I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV [...]

Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is back in the news again after Christian fundamentalists took a hammer to a print of it in a gallery in France. If you’ve never seen the photograph ‘up close’ then I’d highly recommend it. It’s far more beautiful than the title suggests, and a subtle piece of trickster-work. It is [...]

I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare at the moment. It’s a brilliant book, grounding the often mythic character of the bard into his real world of Elizabethan London. I’d highly recommend it. One quote that jumped out at me the other day in within a discussion of Anthony and [...]

Spring always makes me look back. Been listening to quite a lot of music recently, some new, some old… Reminded of my times way back playing in a band, Caned and Able, which took the Bristol jazz-funk scene by storm in a hash-enveloped cloud for a while. Recorded with Massive Attack, supported James Taylor Quartet [...]