Thirsty work

What with it being Hallowe'en and all, I thought it appropriate to toddle off with my friend D. to watch a vampire movie.


Thirst is part of that one-man wave of delightful Korean films directed by Chan-wook Park, whose Old Boy and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance are among the best films of the last decade.


But Thirst follows hard on the heels of exquisite Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In -- is it up to it?


The answer is a resounding yes: much, much darker than the Swedish film, Thirst is at times blackly funny.


It's a strange mix of Touch, Near Dark and a splatterfest Tarantino.


If that doesn't sound appetising then I have done Thirst a huge disservice.

Repentance

These photos are not great quality, but I can forgive them because the chap depicted is so cute:


No sign of airs and graces.


Just a simple chap, showing us his bits.


And mighty fine bits they are too.


Chunky but not too large, perky, even.


Yeah, I could forgive him almost anything.

Heavens above

This is the delightful St Nicholas' Chapel, in my evil Hell-hole of a home town, King's Lynn.


Built (or, rather, rebuilt) in about 1400 in the English Perpendicular style, it features an architectural specialism of East Anglia: a ceiling decorated with carved wooden angels:


"Angel roofs" are not common, but nor are they rare as hen's teeth. Lynn's example is particularly fine.


Each of the individually carved angels has its own personality:


Each is a delightful late Medieval sculpture in its own right:


However, I have to concede that my home town's angel roof is by no means the finest in the land. That honour may well go to St Wendreda's, in the heart of The Fens in the tiny town of March:


I have to say, from the outside St Wendreda's looks like a bog standard High Victorian lumpen confection, but from the inside...


Yeah, that angel roof is in a different league:


While the individual carvings at Lynn may be finer, the sheer volume of March's Heavenly Host simply overwhelms the opposition -- there are no fewer than 120 carved angels here.


John Betjeman described the roof as being worth cycling 40 miles against a head-wind to see. I think he was right.

Let me explain

For me there's some inextricable linkage between modesty, embarrassment, nakedness and sexual thrills.


Which I suspect is why cfnm scenarios do something for me.


It's not the women, delightful though I am sure they are.


It's the man who is the focus of my attention.


This great-looking and nominally straight guy is, according to the story, desperate for promotion, and his women bosses decided to use that as a lever to humiliate him.


As in all good porn stories, the details of the fantasy are not particularly important.


Although there is also something infantilising about his nakedness, it serving to make them appear super-adult (and, therefore, sexual/sexually dominant beings).


He is reduced to a plaything, but that's something which also removes from him some responsibility for expressing his sexuality (something I suspect a lot of gay men experience as they grow up, attempting to reconcile their own feelings with the perceived disapproval of their family and peers).


The women praise him for carrying out his bodily function to their command (potty training parallels, anyone?).


And then they force him to confront the reality of his actions.


Adult secretions, from an organ children are taught again and again is "dirty", can be horrifying:


To ingest them is an act of profound rebellion, a defiance of the clean/dirty binary opposite so rigidly enforced in our society (and, especially, on children as they grow up).


He is left, laid out like a naked baby waiting to be changed:


Before a final act of ritual humiliation:


After all that he is refused promotion and leaves, head hung in shame.


I dunno. It doesn't feel like such a turn on after all that analysis.

Minor historical interlude

Until relatively recently, the majority of freight trains in the UK largely consisted of wagons without brakes -- braking power was provided by the locomotive and a "brake van" (the latter usually coupled to the rear of the train).


But as locomotives got more powerful, freight trains got heavier, and they soon exceeded the safe braking capacity of the locomotive+brake van. So a new piece of kit was constructed that was, effectively, a brake wagon -- the low wagon seen next to the locomotive:


These brake wagons increased the braking capacity of the train, enabling heavier freight to be hauled:


They were soon superceded by the introduction of "fully fitted" freight trains, trains in which every wagon had its own set of brakes. Fully fitted freight trains could go faster because they could stop in a shorter distance.

Classic beauty

I first saw these pictures of this guy about a thousand years ago.


They were startling to me then, long before I'd become jaded by the, well, millions of porno images that now flood through the digital portals of Reciprocating Motion.


Despite all those pleasures -- all the lower depths of decadence to which, over the intervening years, I have sunk -- there is still something about this guy which gets my attention.


His musculature is, of course, near perfect.


He is shaved in a way I don't find particularly appealling.


Ah, but he has a perfect winkie.


And, bizarrely, there's something about the manly chunkiness of his watch which makes him very desirable.


Yeah, some porn stands the test of time. This guy does it for me.

Strapping

Having experienced a number of tradesman/deliveryman related incidents over the last couple of days, I feel totally familiar with the dungaree.


Although I have to tell you that real life never seems to look anything like this.


There's something about that side opening which is wholly seductive.


And while this fine-looking chap is by no means my usual cup of tea, there's something rather natural about him that is pretty enticing.


These images have been taken from a site which never seems to be very generous in what they give away.


So apologies for both the small size of the picture and the mostly coy approach to posing.


Notwithstanding these serious flaws, I thought they were worth sharing.


Although, when it comes to the last picture, it looks a bit suspicious to me...


... is he in fact the possessor of a Giant Mutant Winkie, the first to appear on Reciprocating Motion?