WEIRD and WONDERFUL

Welcome to the intricate and amazing mechanical found junk sculptures of Belgian artist Stephane Halleux.

Are they not way cool?

There I was, previewing the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts program over the weekend, when I was beguiled by French filmmaker Laurent Witz's Mr. Hublot.

It's a delirious steampunk fantasy in which Halleux's wacky world of stitched leather cars, mechanical insects, toaster dogs, keypad clothing and serenely winged humanoids comes to life onscreen.

When I looked up Halleux online, I was delighted by the variety and sheer ingenuity of his work. The time it would take just to assemble all these gears, springs, sprockets, rotary blades, clockface dials, bits of pipe, random handles, and grilles is daunting enough.

Then consider the unfettered imagination required to put them all together in such weird and wonderful ways!


Some exhibition sites refer to Halleux's work as "toys," and there is certainly an element of that in their 3D solidity. Maybe it's my misspent past as a doll collector and dollmaker (mine were scrap fabric dolls) that makes me so responsive to these little guys.

Who could resist the urge to pose them and play with them? Let alone the urge to make up stories about them! (Although that might be strictly a writer's thing...)

Now imagine them animated and moving around in an entire retro-urban, slightly crumbling mechanical landscape inspired by the Halleux aesthetic. That's Mr. Hublot.

The Oscar Nominated Shorts programs (one live-action, one animated) opens Friday. (Read my Good Times review here.) But in the meantime, feast your eyes on Halleux's work!

Visit his website (Luddite Alert: it's tricky, so remember to hit every tiny blank square on the Home page to see a selection of work).

Or just Google his name and hit Images.

Prepare to be amazed!

GEARING UP

Strap on your goggles and lace for the Steampunk exhibit at the new Santa Cruz Institute for Contemporary Arts  Gallery at the Tannery.

Long a gleam in arts entrepreneur Kirby Scudder's eye, the SCICA has been a floating world of artistic ideas, a cyclone of creative energy that finally has a permanent place to touch down, a brand new gallery in the Tannery studio complex. Kirby has partnered with Co-Director, artist and arts administrator Ann Hazels in the new SCICA venture, which also includes office space and a gift shop adjoining the spacious gallery.

The inaugural exhibit, Steampunk, launched earlier this month and runs through the end of December. It's a back-to-the-future, retro fantasy exhibition of sculpture, prints, painting, photography, and wearable art celebrating the merger of Victorian/Edwardian sensibilities (Machine Age clockwork, gears and cogs; top hats and corsets) with futuristic fantasy. (The shorthand definition of "steampunk" is Victorian sci-fi.)

The alcove at the gallery entrance gets you in the mood with these two displays of fantasy headgear from an artist calling himself killbuck. What I found especially cool about the piece on the left is that it contains no real metal (except, possibly, those eyepiece dials); it's constructed entirely out of found and recycled objects like plastic and foam.

The diverse pieces inside include fanciful photography and found-object sculpture from Robbie Schoen, and woodwork gear box wall pieces by Michael Zelver.

I loved metal sculptor Thomas Ramey's "Piston Bat," a wall piece made of recycled metal. In Ramey's elegant  3D sculpture, "Drilling," a globe of the world is suspended in a man-made cage; the piece is made out of recycled auto parts.

(Recycled materials is also a running theme throughout the show, from Jack Howe's found object-studded bedspring piece, "At the Gates of Redemption," to Geoffrey Nelson's life-sized "Steampunk Starfighter" outfit.)

Some pieces have only a tenuous connection to the theme. Diego Rios' graphic angel prints in muted colors are beautiful, but don't necessarily convey a steampunk ethic. Outside of a few corsets, neither do Nelson's "Storyville Series" of contemporary photos of women posed in the style of the notorious turn-of-the-century New Orleans red-light district.

Jenny Markowitz's painting on a recycled door, "The Visionary,"doesn't really mesh with the theme either.

But her companion painted door, "The Lovers," is spot-on with its image on an embracing couple in full regalia; it could easily be the Tarot card of that name in a steampunk deck!

The SCICA Gallery is located at #127 in The Tannery, the front corner space in the commercial studio building across from the live-work artists lofts.  The Steampunk show runs through December 30. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm.

And if you like what you see, consider signing up for an inaugural membership in the SCICA.

CLASSICAL GAS

So, a couple of weekends ago, Art Boy and I invented an impromptu holiday. We called it National Goof-Off Day. It was a Sunday morning, and we decided to celebrate by doing nothing of any significance—he took a day off from his art commissions, I performed a keyboard-ectomy, and we took off for the illicit thrill of a morning matinée at the Aptos Cinema.

In case you hadn't noticed, Aptos is now in the sixth month of its wonderful Weekend Movie Classics matinée series. Showtime is 11 a. m., Saturday and Sunday (and Monday, on long holiday weekends). A mere $6 gets you in the door, but the unalloyed delight of seeing a vintage movie as God intended, on a great big screen in the dark, is, as they say, priceless.

We went to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with James Mason as Victorian-era mad genius, Captain Nemo, prowling the ocean in his hand-built submarine. Jules Verne is the godfather of Steampunk, and the folks at Disney spent plenty on the lavish interiors and steaming, pumping mechanics of the good ship Nautilus, and all her underwater adventures (including an eerie, pre-CGI giant squid attack). And who can blame Nemo for his sacred mission of blasting the evil, death-dealing warships of mankind out of the pristine oceans?

Of course, time changes perspective, which is part of what makes watching old movies so much fun. When I saw 20,000 Leagues on late-night TV once, as a 20-year-old college student, I remember thinking Kirk Douglas was kind of sexy in his striped Spandex T-shirt. This time, I found his hammy, eye-rolling machismo a bit much, as the shipwrecked Yank harpooner (although to be fair, he didn't get much help from the script typing him as the two-fisted Ugly American who'd rather fight than think—and yes, he is the hero— but, forget it, Jake, it's Disney, and you can't expect emotional depth). Even less PC is a tribe of black cannibals on a tropical island, shaking their spears and shields. Ugh. And while it's cool that Nemo's crew farms the ocean floor for their food, I hated to see the Nautilus divers herding magnificent sea turtles off to the galley.

It's also kind of funny in a ghoulish way, how the movie appropriates the idea of nuclear energy as the power source for the Nautilus. Released in 1954 (less than a decade after Hiroshima), it includes a scene where a man gazes into the atomic energy core of the ship's engine, "protected" by an old-fashioned diving helmet. In the climactic nuclear blast, our heroes, fleeing in a rowboat, gaze up placidly at the mushroom cloud like they were watching fireworks on the 4th of July. Well, this was the era of "duck and cover" drills, after all.

It's interesting to see how Disney cannibalizes its own over the years. Parts of 20,000 Leagues seem to have resurfaced in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Nemo at his organ obviously inspired the scene of Bill Nighy's great, squid-headed Davy Jones in PotC 2, playing the keyboard with his tentacles. (Although both hark back to Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, so there's nothing new under the sun—or the sea.) And haven't we seen Johnny Depp hot-footing it over the sand pursued by a tribe of irate natives, as Douglas does in this film?

Another fun thing about Aptos' Weekend Classics series is the sense of community among the intrepid audience members. It's like we're a cult. Out in the lobby before the show, one guy cheerfully explained how 20,000 Leagues, Thunderball, and Sea Hunt on TV inspired him to become a lifelong scuba diver. As the lights were coming back up at the end, a woman in back called out, "Who else was rooting for the squid?"

Coming up this weekend is The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of my all-time favorite swashbucklers, with the incomparable Errol Flynn. (Captain Blood is my absolute favorite Flynn movie, But this is a close second!) Shot in 1938, in a lavish early color process called Three-strip Technicolor, it's jam-packed with action, romance, noble ideals, forest skulldugery, boisterous camaraderie, and some of the most rip-roaring nose-to-nose swordfights ever filmed between Flynn and villain Basil Rathbone. (In real life, Rathbone was the expert swordsman; he excelled in making Flynn look good!)

Robin Hood plays at 11 a. m. on Saturday, Sunday, AND Monday this Labor Day weekend, so don't you dare miss it on the big screen; you'll never forgive yourself.