The Engine

CAVE of FORGOTTEN DREAMS (dir Werner Herzog) I went to see 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' by Werner Herzog yesterday with a friend from Belfast. It’s an interesting work in 3D but becomes a bit predictable after the initial impact although I'd recommend it, but cautiously. Interestingly those early men played the flute (constructed from a vulture's hollow wing bone) and understood the pentatonic scale. One of the researchers played The Star Spangled Banner (just like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble...). The cave was littered with the skulls of cave bears that lived there long after those cave men came to make their cave paintings but, honestly, I was a bit confused about the time scale. Herzog was at pains to point out that the cave wasn't a fraud and that he hadn't completed the paint job an hour or so before with his many bemused Igor’s but that it was actually done tens of thousand of years ago. The lime scale that covered everything could be accurately da

KELVIN CORCORAN: HOTEL SHADOW: SHEARSMAN BOOKS: 2010 Kelvin Corcoran is possessed of several preoccupations in his new collection Hotel Shadow. He's clearly a fan of Ezra Pound, mostly he attempts Poundian effects, assembling arcane knowledge of ancient Greek civilisation or poems just loosely imitating and/or praising Pound. It seemed to me that Corcoran is a writer with nothing to say, witless, styless with no really original style or content. The Greek stuff (Corcoran namedrops Greek thinkers and poets as if merely repeating the names Pythagoras, Socrates, Hesiod actually impresses us that Corcoran knows their thoughts or books. Why does he do this? His strategy is predictable, vain and meaningless.) is very tedious indeed and has been done better by a plethora of orthodox scholars. Furthermore, it never seems that anything happens to Corcoran the man. Does he fall in love, feel bitter ennui or even enjoy a good meal? Is he connected at all to the lives of others?

WATERCOLOURS: TATE BRITAIN   Watercolours are usually accorded the status of a conservative medium as opposed to oils that achieve permanence and magnificent tones and lustre. Watercolours are known for their portability, immediacy, durability.   Watercolour is a kind of early pre-camera, extending the possiblities of paint into fulfilling cartographic functions as well as depictions of terrain and fortifications. Their usage for military purposes from the late Medieval period onwards is documented in this exhibition as is their use by naturalists. Naturalists also found watercolours a convenient medium for use in the field, abroad in inhospitable or difficult terrain for pragmatic, functional purposes but they could also be quintessentially painterly in their expressive usages beyond simply mapping terrain or depicting an orchid. Watercolours also documents the use of the medium by war artists, paintings of soldiers (after Waterloo and World War 1) with grim wounds and also of bat