Kester Brewin

Tag: Arts

  • Gravity and Grace (1) ¦ Wild Blue Yonder ¦ Living Between Two Oceans

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    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…

  • London Olympics Logo | Newness Disturbs?

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    So, the debate over the new London Olympics brand has raged on for more days than a debate about a graphic really ought to… Hasn’t it? Initially it was just the aesthetics, but, while many people mentioned it made them feel sick, but then some of the video pieces really did. The Mayor has waded…

  • Jesus, The Guantanamo Years

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    “From an American security point of view, it’s not that reassuring to find a single male Palestinian with no hand luggage, traveling alone. I’m guessing Mossad has a file on me. It probably says I’m a bit of a troublemaker, and it almost definitely says I’m lying about who my real father is.” Abie Philbin…

  • It Was 40 Years Ago Today…

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    Sgt. Pepper was released 40 years ago today. As I mentioned at a ‘God’s iPod’ interview at Greenbelt last year, it’s an album that has great memories for me. After various Thomas the Tank Engine LPs, Sgt. Pepper was the first record I really liked. I don’t know how my dad let me, but I…

  • Dave Eggers | Valentino Achak Deng | Sudan

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    I went to hear Dave Eggers in conversation with Valentino Achak Deng at the ICA this evening. It was wonderful, moving and sad and funny. Deng was one of the Lost Boys in Sudan. After his town was pillaged by militias, he got separated from his family and joined 4000 or so other young boys…

  • Divine Comedy vs Divine Tragedy

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    In a great piece of polemic, Julian Gough has written in Prospect this month about the tendency for Western literature to express itself in the tragic, rather than the comic: “Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely…