Where am I?

With apologies for the hiatus -- things have got a bit out of control.

For example, am about to disappear for a three-day trip to Canada. Which is completely absurd.

God knows what my carbon footprint is like at the moment.

But I hope this sequence of a particularly lovely muscled God-ette will provide some compensation for my absence.

Yes, he's mighty fine-looking, I would have said.

See -- he's so lovely that you've forgotten I've not been around much, haven't you? Back next week sometime.

What?!

This is Nick McCrory and he is apparently a famous swimmer. Completely absurd: in any sane society he would be famous for his beauty and for the luscious attractiveness of his staggeringly wonderful body. It would be a criminal offence for him at any time to wear any clothing.

Alas, our society is not sane, and I therefore need to take a break. Am off for a few days into the deepest wilds of The Country, Oop North somewhere (but with a trip on the Settle & Carlisle line on the way, to which I'm hugely looking forward!). See you next week.

PS: Have you noticed the position of the logo on his swimming costume? How sweet of him to dedicate his cock to his country. Or perhaps he has given his cock the pet name of an entire nation which, now I come to think of it, is either weird or boastful. You decide.

What's in a name?

There are talented photographers, and then there are talented photographers who have a genius for titles.

That wonderfully unsettling image is made even more disturbing by its title, Mother and Son.

This guy also does great classical references, too, including Adonis and Nymphs (above), and The Judgement of Paris (below):

But it's his family portraits that I find almost unbearably chilling -- like this one, Aunt and Nephew:

The intensity of her fixed smile somehow makes it utterly disturbing.

Whereas his Beauty and the Beast is actually rather lovely:

Echo and Narcissus is much more relaxing than the similarly-themed shot with which I opened this post:

His Two Beauties feels to me like an homage to John and Yoko:

This next one is Prince and Queen, an image of middling upset:

And let's end here, with Dialogue, which appears to be an uncharacteristic shot but, to me, is suffused with the same sense of playfulness and simple visual inventiveness:

This photographer is an utter genius and I don't think I'd ever tire of staring long and hard at his work.

He's a Star

There are times when a terrific synchronicity means that I stumble across one image after another of the same glorious model, in apparently wildly unconnected places.

This is just such an occasion.

Can I introduce the extraordinary physique of Star Jnr?

He is clearly a favoured photographic model of a number of, er, photographers.

It's easy to see why: that extraordinary musculature provides a stunning frame over which the deep, beautiful skin is stretched taut.

Star overdoes the baby oil/sweat thing a bit for my taste, though there's no denying the sheer physical sexiness of the result...

He's even adventurous enough to do interesting outdoors shots...

Let's end here, with an intense look...

And have you noticed how I've completed the entire post without having banged on about the sheer massive mutant turgidity of his bulky winky? I'm so proud of me. Oh, wait a minute...

Help!

A reader is in some distress at his inability to identify this model. Anyone know?

More importantly, can anyone point me in the direction of more images of him? He's lovely, he is!

Where's Ozymandias?

Detroit has attracted the attentions of a significant number of really rather good photographers.

The reason is, of course, that it is probably the most significant example of a major, prosperous American city whose economy has collapsed.

Vast, ornate buildings, put up at the time of Detroit's most successful era in the first half of the twentieth century, now lie empty and abandoned or converted into car parking structures.

Places that were previously bustling with the success of human endeavours now stand abandoned, the bank vaults empty and rusting...

Vast factories, many associated with vehicle manufacturing, sink into dereliction, the mighty works crumbling.

Even sacred spaces are affected, so vast has been the city's decline into poverty and despair...

Detroit might make a salutory holiday destination, for those inclined to remind themselves of the fundamentally transitory nature of any human structures.

Happy stumbles

I stumbled across a cache of images of this long-haired lovely...

A model in a long-running series by a photographer whose name I have completely forgotten.

In fairness to me, I have also forgotten the name of the model (although it might be Cory?).

After the early beefcake/cheesecake shots, there's something rather documentarian about the approach of the photographer. Which I like very much.

Not at all hurt by the easiness of this model on the eye...

Yes, very nice find indeed. I want to see more. So, so much more.

Over-investment?

Some people think too large a share of the UK's public transport spending is lavished on London, so I thought it might be instructive to have a look at a typical railway station.

Queenstown Road is on the mainline out of Waterloo, just a couple of stops from the terminus: pretty much everything that leaves Waterloo passes through this station. From the street, the original London & South Western Railway facade (with the old name of Queens Road) has been nicely preserved.

The mean-looking stairs from street level to the platforms suggest that all may not be lovely at this (unstaffed) station, though, and when you reach the platforms you realise you are in the middle of a massive railway junction with trains flying over both ends of this station as well as through it -- here we see one zooming away from Victoria:

Another railway bridge closes off the other end of the station and, underneath it, two non-stoppers from Waterloo accelerate through:

Everywhere you look is hardcore Victoria infrastructure, most of it not having seen even a whiff of paint for many decades:

Six tracks pass through this station, with four more overhead. But many of the passenger facilities have been boarded-up and fenced-in:

This is at the very heart of London (a spit from the massive new development site at Battersea Power Station, one of the biggest in Europe), yet all looks bleak and forlorn:

It's no surprise that this was the site chosen to film those wonderful scenes in My Beautiful Laundrette, where the father's flat is constantly assaulted by the rhythmic thunder of commuter trains rushing past.

Envy

My favourite pornographer has come up with yet another triumphant sequence.

My God, this man knows how to take naked portraits...

The subject is, apparently, a paramedic, and the photographer says he was struck by how much horror this man deals with every day.

It's clear the photographer was smitten.

And it's easy to see why.

Damnit: why can't I take photos that are as revealing and thoughtful as those?

More Brutalism

Wandering around an unpromising part of the north London suburbs, I stumbled across 1255 High Road in Barnet:

Looking very out of place in a sea of unpleasant highways and very superior suburbs (all vast, detached, interwar villas behind amazingly well kept gardens), this is the headquarters of the London Borough of Barnet.

Designed by Richard Seifert & Partners in 1966, the complex consists of a 12-storey tower in grey terrazo, and a three-storey block at right angles dominated by blue panels.

Everything is raised up above ground level on rather elegant, pointed concrete legs (hugely reminiscent of Seifert's most famous building, London's Centre Point).

Featuring this building also gives me a rare chance to point out an error in Pevsner, who describes the composition as being on a "T" plan when, clearly, it is on an "L" plan.

Adventures in Beige 1, Pevsner 0!

Sorry, that was very childish. Let's end with the observation that the windows do not appear to have been cleaned in this block for months and probably years. I couldn't decide if it had been closed and abandoned or was just completely neglected. If the latter, it's rather shameful that, apparently, we are no longer able to afford to keep our civic headquarters buildings clean.