Kester Brewin

Storyquest is the national festival of story-telling and the spoken word, and runs for the whole of November. Alongside many keynote events, the organizers – the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Children & the Arts – are simply encouraging families to ‘fill their homes with stories, capturing the moment when a story gets inside you [...]

Last night I went to see Iron and Wine at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, where we were up in the gods rather; the night before I’d been looking for some theatre tickets for a Christmas show, and was shocked at how much it was going to cost to be anywhere near where we might see. [...]

I love the look of fierce concentration on the faces of musicians, playing live, struggling to hear the foldback, straining to keep within the bounds of the beat… The rush of performance and I think of my own struggles to live life, playing live, no click track. This is not a recording. The energy and [...]

The graduate with a Mathematics degree asks, “Why does it work?” The graduate with a Science degree asks, “How does it work?” The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, “How does one build it?” The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?” The graduate with an Arts degree asks, “Do you [...]

Last night I went to hear Peter Ackroyd speak on the South Bank (pictured here), ostensibly about his new book: Thames, Sacred River. It was a fine lecture on the thread of the sacred throughout the history of humanity’s interaction with London’s river, followed by a hilarious Q&A led by the Times’ Literary Editor, who [...]

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been really enjoying Roger Deakin’s meditation on trees ‘Wildwood‘. In one passage on ‘The Sacred Groves of Devon’, Deakin goes in search of the ‘Green Man‘ – the woodland spirit of rebirth often seen carved into beams in old churches – in various villages. He notes the [...]

Just what everyone has been waiting for: a well kerned, beautifully cut doc about the world’s most ubiquitous greatest font. Helvetica. Showing at the ICA Anyone up for a pilgrimage? Technorati: Helvetica | ICA

I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Tate Modern on Monday, and caught the Oiticica exhibition. If you’re in London, I highly recommend it. I thought the curation was excellent: a full sense of progression in the artist’s ideas. In the case of Oiticica, whose native Brazil is so famous for it’s colour and flamboyance, [...]

Mika Brzezinski recently refused to lead with a story about P@&i$ Hi%ton over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a similar vein, Wired reported in ‘A Tale of Two Cities‘ that a trawl of the web revealed more interest in the iPhone than the recent triple-attempted bombing on London and Glasgow. Celebrity::Security::Gossip::War :: These [...]

Last night I went with my good friend and doctor of film Gareth Higgins to see Werner Herzog’s latest film ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. It’s a deeply comic, deeply environmental parable about space travel, aliens, shopping malls, complex math and hyperspace. And quite wonderful for it. Speaking to Gareth afterwards, I mentioned that the path of the [...]