The remastered version of the 1965 classic Repulsion is playing almost everyday throughout January for the Polanski season at the BFI.

Check the dates and book your tickets here!

Sylvia Sleigh , Paul Rosana Reclining 1974

What a woman, Sleigh’s first UK retrospective is on at the Tate Liverpool from now until May the 30th and it is FREE!.

Synopsis:

Lake is an unusual boy: he is a young man with an old soul who discovers he has an odd fixation on the elderly. Although Lake has a girlfriend his own age, named Desiree, he wonders sometimes if his fixation on old men is unnatural and unhealthy – perhaps even sexual.

When his mother, who is a nurse, takes on a management job at an old folks home, Lake jumps at her offer of a summer job as an orderly there. Gradually, Lake comes to discover that the old people in the institution are being given psychotropic drugs to keep them in a catatonic state. Lake befriends one old man in particular, Mr. Peabody, who still seems to have some fight left in him. They begin to form a strong bond. Mr. Peabody charms Lake with romantic stories of his youth and confesses his dreams of seeing the ocean one last time. Avoiding the vigilant eye of Nurse Stonehenge, who administers shots and pills to the old folks, Lake starts to wean Mr. Peabody off his medication.

Eventually, Lake springs Mr. Peabody from the institution. Together they embark on a road trip telling everyone they meet that the old man is his grandfather and that they’re driving to the ocean. After numerous life- changing escapades, Lake is finally ready to accept his true feelings for Mr. Peabody, but everything changes when the trip takes an unexpected turn.

Donate here to Sang Bleu 6 contributor and iconic film maker Bruce Labruce’s new film! There are now 23 days left to help this film flourish in all of its exceptional potential!

The Zebra Man is a short film made by Channel Four in 1992 depicting the life of Horace Ridler transforming himself in to The Great Omi. George Burchett the iconic tattooer is portrayed and ‘asks for written permission from his solicitor’ before he begins to tattoo Ridler. A young Minnie Driver plays his prospective lover who as much as she tries she can never get too intimate with him in case she reveals his secretive growing body suit underneath his clothes. The acting verges on the hilarious but considering how the film could have been made far more scandalously there are a lot of historic accuracies down to the details of the tattoo machines and Burchett’s studio. The strangeness of Ridler’s decision to cover his entire body in stripes considering his aristocratic and military background at the time was something that could have been investigated in much more detail. However the accuracy of his own life has been debated to the point of becoming one large, fascinating ostentatious myth.

And thanks to Caleb for finding this!

On The Satanic Verses by Salman Ushdie, 1988. (Viking Publishers)

by Lynn Hatzius

by Metal Faust

In the early 1990s, as the furore raged, the following letter of support was written to Rushdie by novelist Norman Mailer.

Dear Salman Rushdie,

I have thought of you often over the last few years. Many of us begin writing with the inner temerity that if we keep searching for the most dangerous of our voices, why then, sooner or later we will outrage something fundamental in the world. and our lives will be in danger. That is what I thought when I started out, and so have many others, but you, however, are the only one of us who gave proof that this intimation was not ungrounded. Now you live what must me a living prison of contained paranoia, and the toughening of the will is imperative, no matter the cost to the poetry in yourself. It is no happy position for a serious and talented writer to become a living martyr. One does not need that. It is hard enough to write at one’s best without wearing a hundred pounds on one’s back each day, but such is your condition, and if I were a man who believed that prayer was productive of results, I might wish to send some sort of vigor and encouragement to you, for if you can transcend this situation, more difficult than any of us have known, if you can come up with a major piece of literary work, then you will rejuvenate all of us, and literature, to that degree, will flower.

So, my best to you, old man, wherever you are ensconced, and may the muses embrace you.

Cheers,

Norman Mailer

SOURCE: The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write (Stages)

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