Back in the Arena

Unfortunately, I was too ill to go to BoundCon for extended periods of time two weeks ago. I was there for a couple of hours on Friday evening with a friend, because she had come all the way to Munich and I really wanted to show her the convention. On my own, I certainly wouldn't have gone. I still felt pretty awful in my stomach. It got even worse over the weekend, so I didn't go out again. Ah well. There is always next year.


Still, I'm happy that I at least got to make a round on the first day and have a quick chat with my friends from SM-Circus, including Herr Direktor Sands, resident pet girl Marlin and the Gladiator from Hell. We almost had the whole team from the shoot back in March together again, minus Pandora Blake. She was at BoundCon, too, but already crashed out in the hotel by the time I came on Friday. I was sorry to not see her again. Alas, like I said, there is always next year, and who knows where my path will lead me the next time I'm in the UK...

For now, I still have a behind-the-scenes report to write, anyway, about the aforementioned shoot. It was my second visit to the pet girl masters. The first was in July last year, when I did German-English translations for Niki Flynn and Amelia-Jane Rutherford (and had an infamous cameo as Amelia-Jane's gambling addict boyfriend, who lost her to the Direktor in a game of dice!). It had been a great experience, so I immediately said yes when SM-Circus contacted me in February and asked if I wanted to do another shoot. They would be filming with Pandora Blake and could use my services as a translator again. I was always a big fan of Pandora - her writing, her modelling work, her smexy brain (not a typo - just read the linked post!). She was at the very top of my "spanking video actresses I still have to meet" list, rivalled only by Leia-Ann Woods (position 1a and 1b, these two). I couldn't wait to finally meet her in person and say hello.


If you ever read Pandora's blog, you will know that she is structured and clear in her writing like few others in our community. From that and from her emails, I expected her to be intriguing to talk to and also very nice as a human being, but perhaps a little reserved at first. Actually, it's an assumption people often make about me, for much the same reasons, so I guess I should have known that it isn't quite accurate! As it turned out, Pandora was open and cordial from the first moment onwards. When we met the evening before the shoot, she gave me a hug for greetings, which set the tone for the rest of the weekend. And, needless to say, she is just as interesting to chat with as I thought she would be.

The work at the circus was great, too. As usual, the scenes were filmed in non-chronological order, starting with one where Pandora was locked up in a cage and simply had to bark aggressively at the camera. She was alone with Direktor Sands to reduce her self-consciousness a bit - after all, this was her first shoot as a pet girl. I was outside with the rest of the team, listening to Pandora's growls and "Arf! Arf!" sounds. They were quite convincing, and I remarked: "Hmm, very talented, I would say..." Suddenly, there was a huge crash and we looked at each other, puzzled. But after a short moment of silence, the "Arf! Arf, arf...!" resumed. Eventually, the director came out and grinned at us: "Well, she was the first one who managed to knock over the cage..." Things had certainly got off to an auspicious start.


Marlin had injured her knee the week before and was restricted in her movement, so she only took part in a couple of scenes. In one of them, she and Pandora were cat girls, meowing and playing with a computer mouse (har har!). Pandora had been solid as a dog (as it were), but I thought that this performance was even better. She seems to be a cat person after all, like me. Isn't it funny how we are all either cat people or dog people? Of course, you can like both kinds of animals. But at the end of the day, there is one camp you belong to. I suppose it is one of those "Beatles man or Elvis man" things which Uma Thurman and John Travolta talk about in Pulp Fiction (I'm a Beatles man, by the way).

Anyway, before I digress completely, let's get on with the report. Step by step, Miss Blake was put through the rigorous SM-Circus training regiment. I loved watching the hyper-focused look on her face while she juggled with first two, then three oranges. For a novice pet girl, she made a pretty good job of it, too, but missed enough catches to earn some correction from Direktor Sands - on the palms... I mean, paws with a riding crop, and on the bottom with his gloves. The empty, heavy leather gloves are quite an interesting spanking implement. Like Niki and Amelia-Jane before her, Pandora noted that they don't hurt all that much. The marks they leave are also negligible. The loud thwacking sound, on the other hand, is all the more impressive. A really nice, attention-grabbing effect. In summary, while the instrument may not be well-suited for an actual, formal punishment, it seems ideal as a "motivational tool" in a lengthy training session like this.


(I'm still feeling a bit under the weather and catching up with a lot of work at the same time, so I'm splitting this into two parts. You're getting the next one on Wednesday. I have some other things in the pipeline, too. June will see more blogging activity from me than May did, that's for sure!)

Movie Review: Discipline Within the Home

Producer:
Calstar (released in 2003)

Entire Story In Fewer Words Than Are In This Sentence:
Man spanks niece, wife

Victim Appeal:
I'm not a die-hard fan of domestic discipline. My preference goes towards more institutionalised, more ritualistic settings like schools, prisons, the military, mad scientist laboratories and virgin sacrifices. However, California Star produce some domestic-type videos which I find fairly watchable, because they are so unpretentious and unsophisticated, which in my mind suits this particular sub-genre very well. It's one kind of scenario where the usual weaknesses of this company, the lack of elaborate props and costumes, the amateurish technical quality, work in their favour. You feel like watching someone's home videos, and despite all the faux serious scolding, the overall impression is one of light-heartedness and merriment. In this form, I have nothing against the occasional "husband and wife" story.

Of course, for a home video to be entertaining, the people in it have to be entertaining. This is the case here. "Discipline Within the Home" stars two spankees, Natalie and Angela (as usual, Calstar don't give any credits, so I'm calling them by their character names). Angela, playing the wife of the domestic disciplinarian, is a mature brunette. The niece, Natalie, is a tall and slender sexpot with straight blonde hair, a shapely bottom and spectacularly long legs. Very easy on the eyes, that girl (and to be perfectly honest, the main, shamelessly superficial inspiration for this review).

Gratuitous Sadism:
As the movie opens, Natalie is confronted by her "Uncle Joey" about an email he received from her college. In the role, we get the familiar wild-haired bloke who does a lot of Calstar's male topping (he was in the last segment from Lady Vernon's Caning Heaven, for instance). I like him well enough, so it's an auspicious start. Anyway, the message says that the young lady under his guardianship stole the teacher's purse, dropped pins on the teacher's chair... You know, normal schoolgirl shenanigans (at least in CP video land!). It also says that she could benefit from a good spanking, the only trouble is, spanking was abolished at the school ten years ago, so they suggest Uncle Joey take care of it himself. Needless to say, he feels bound to oblige, and so, after some customary lecturing, protesting and surrendering, it's knickers down for Natalie.

Actually, it's "skirt up for Natalie" first, because California Star have their standard progression which they invariably follow. No surprises, never, but at least you know exactly what you're going to get for your money's worth. To start things off, a hand spanking over the knee, over the underwear. The knickers come down for the second part. Next, Natalie bends over the sofa so he can thrash her arse with a leather paddle. After a few minutes of that, Uncle Joey switches to a crop, which is actually a departure from the usual "hand, paddle, cane" formula. Its tip is shaped like the palm of a hand - which raises the question, why does he have this obviously kinky sex shop item lying around in his house? Is it really from his wife's cupboard, as he claims? Never mind. After only four strokes, he goes on to the next implement, another paddle. Last but not least, the cane makes its mark. Some of the strokes are repeated from different camera angles, but by my count, she gets ten "real" ones in total. By the end, Natalie is in tears and has some pretty nice welts.

In the second, somewhat shorter scene of the video, Uncle Joey thrashes his wife for over-spending money on clothes (another perennial favourite among spanko scriptwriters). She goes over his knee and gets smacked over the knickers, then on the bare. The paddle is next and finally the cane, thirteen strokes, some of them from different angles. Like the first segment, it is medium in terms of severity, the normal level for Calstar.

Best Reactions:
Natalie by a country mile. She offers a whole palette of delightful reactions, including long, protracted "Ooows!" and "Aaahs!", high-pitched yelps, surprised hysterical giggling (not an uncommon response when a spankee is on the limit), angry growling through clenched teeth, and quite a bit of swearing ("Fucking hell!"), which she gets properly admonished for. In a word, she suffers beautifully, grimacing and writhing a lot. Halfway through the paddling, Natalie moans "I'm gonna cry!" in a tone that is equal parts apology and plea for mercy. Uncle Joey retorts: "I don't mind. I did expect you to!"

But my favourite moment is when, during the caning, he makes a couple of feint strokes in the air (something I like to do on occasion, too). She flinches in fear, realises that it was just a feint, and angrily hisses: "You fucking bastard!"

Best Line:
When the wife, Angela, is told off about her over-spending, she points out that she didn't just buy clothes for herself, but also for the husband. Running a hand through his hair, she adds: "And while we're about it, we'll get your hair cut and a new pair of shoes as well!" It was a nice jest at the expense of the top, I thought, who really looks a tad out of place in stereotypical "rich guy" roles with his wild mane. Indignant, he replies: "How rude! I have to look like this, you know, for my job. I can't be looking like a straight head all the time!"

I wonder what job that is, where he can't look like a "straight head"? Evidently not a banker or a manager. Maybe he's supposed to be a famous concert pianist.

Nice Psychological Touch:
Uncle Joey keeps reminding his niece that it was all the school's idea, that he doesn't enjoy punishing her, that they suggested he should do it and he's basically bound to carry it out. Now, normally, I'm not fond of tops delegating their responsibility like that (stand up for your own decisions, man!). But in this case, it's kinda funny, because the girl uses the very same tactic, claiming that the mischief with the teacher wasn't really her own idea, that she gets dragged into it by "the crowd", yadda yadda... Like uncle, like niece.

How Good Is It Really?
As Calstar titles go, this one is very good. Obviously, it can't rival the famous Eastern European producers (or some UK producers, for that matter) in terms of professionalism and production values, but there is one wonderfully erotic spanking, paddling and caning session with Natalie, and that is enough to make it a highly enjoyable little video. The girl is gorgeous and her reactions are textbook material on how to make a sadist happy. The other half with Angela is merely average.

What You Learned:
According to one of the countless minions whom I pay to trawl the internet for potentially useful tidbits of information, Natalie aka Natalia also had a career in mainstream porn. My gosh, she looks dumb and bimbo-ish on that photograph! Not nearly as attractive as over Uncle Joey's knee. Good thing she kept her shirt on in "Discipline Within the Home", those tits are just too ridiculously and threateningly huge for this critic's taste.

Bound By Illness

Murphy's law, according to which "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong", seems to have a firm grip over my life these past two and a half weeks. To start with, I was extremely - and I mean extremely - busy with work. The next thing I know, I encounter two separate and persistent computer problems, one with the PC itself and another with my internet connection - as if I didn't have enough to do already! That took a while to fix And to top it all off, on Wednesday, just as I finally have some free time to return to blogging and write my behind-the-scenes report about the pet girl shoot with SM-Circus and Pandora Blake back in March, I get ill. Within one or two hours, I suddenly feel so sick in my stomach that I can hardly move, and I spend the rest of the day in bed instead of at the keyboard. Same thing today. It must have been something I ate, even though I have no idea what it could have been.

Anyway, enough yammering. I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up and let you know what is going on - or rather, what isn't going on. The illness comes at a very inconvenient moment (doesn't it always?), because the BoundCon fetish convention which is annually held here in Munich starts tomorrow, and I'm supposed to meet a lot of friends there. Including Direktor Sands and company, my partners in crime from the circus, Pandora, as well as pet girl Marlin and the Gladiator from Hell, who were also at the shoot. My original plan was to introduce them all here on the blog before I see them again at BoundCon, but obviously, that didn't work out, so I'll have to write about it all afterwards, one thing after the other.

I'm lucky if I can go to the convention at all. After a bit of "chemical warfare" the last two days, resting a lot and consuming only tea and zwieback, I feel a little bit better - well enough to crawl out of bed and make this post at least. I still feel the sickness in my stomach, though, so I'll keep this short and I'll go back to sleep. Hopefully, I will feel another little bit better tomorrow, and I'll be able to make a short appearance at BoundCon at least. Murphy willing, normal blogging service will finally resume next week.

Klingon Invasion

Oh well. A whole week has passed since the last post. So much for my recently published plan to be back on schedule by May 1st! I will still get there eventually and fulfil my quota of posts for 2009 - sooner or later. I'm no longer going to make predictions about the exact point in time, though. Even without the blog and the email correspondence that accompanies it, my life is pretty busy at the moment.

The lastest delay was mainly caused by two things. First, a discussion on an online spanking forum, involving a bunch of rather hysterical characters who asserted (with lots of emotional venting, but very little in the way of actual argument or evidence) that severe CP videos are inherently immoral, that they probably feature loads of drugged, trafficked girls and that everyone who watches such vile material - or, God forbid, stars in it! - must be a borderline sociopath. I tried to inject some facts and a bit of calm, rational thinking into the debate, but to no avail. Waste of effort, really. I should have known better than to try and reason with people who proclaim their own subjective tastes and feelings as moral absolutes and scientific truth.

(As Adele Haze once told me, speaking with all the wisdom that comes with having been a spanking model for several years: "I won't get into [these discussions]. When people are being stupid, I tend to want to tell them they're stupid. Rudeness doesn't win arguments, but is so hard to keep from... Sigh!" I know how she feels. Still, I tried to stay polite, and I hope that some of the people from the "undecided" faction read my posts and found them somewhat useful at least...)

The other event pushing this post back was far more pleasant, though: a friendly little Klingon invasion over the weekend. Actually, they are a regular feature of my life these days. Only half a year or so ago, that would have been unimaginable - see, I may be a fairly typical geek in many ways (horror films, fantasy role-playing games, heavy metal music...), but I was never a Star Trek fan. For some reason, I never got into that. But now, in recent months, I've become something of a Trekkie by association. It seems that my rampant geekdom has reached its next and ultimate stage.

It fits well with my spanko-ness. Did you know that the Klingons, the famous fictional warrior race from the Star Trek universe, have rituals that involve "pain sticks" and other cool, kinky devices? They do! I swear, some of the writers behind this stuff must be perverts like us. One of my blog readers, who has been a Trekkie far longer than me, alerted me to the fact that the "Encyclopaedia of Klingon Culture" - a non-canonical resource, but very popular among fans - actually mentions a "Rite of Span'qIng". Get it? "Span'qIng", I kid you not! At first, I thought someone was pulling my leg, but I checked out a copy of the encyclopaedia at my local geeky gaming shop, and that entry really exists (p. 222-227).

("Kinky" excerpt from the "Encyclopaedia of Klingon Culture")

It describes, in great detail, how a "female Klingon warrior" must search for an "experienced arms master" to perform this important initiation ritual with her (apparently, it is supposed to be the counterpart to the "Second Rite of Ascention", which is for men only). The "Master of Ceremonies" introduces the female aspirant to several Klingon weapons, including the "nonelectric wooden" version of the pain stick, by demonstrating their effect on her body. Once she has sufficiently proven her bravery and her resistance to pain in the master's eyes, the rite of passage is complete and the two of them "celebrate the initiation of the young warrior" by drinking tea together (a Japanese-style tea ceremony marks the beginning and the end of the ritual - nice touch!).

Obviously, this glorious piece of fan fiction comes straight from a fellow spankophile's brain, and it's quite well-written, too. I scanned it and made a .pdf document for those of you who want to read the whole thing. You can download it here. Who knows, it might revolutionise your idea of Star Trek - no one said that being a geek can't have its sexy sides!

Next week, I will tell you more about the mysterious, life-changing invasion hinted at in this post. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this wonderful excerpt from the Klingon Encyclopaedia. And if anyone has more information about the article or about who the author might be, I'd be delighted to hear it.

Movie Review: Schizo - The Black Part

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Kentucky Fried Flogging

I'm back from a week of Easter holidays and pleased to see that the text I wrote titled Monks and Roses was successfully posted during my absence. You see, some readers have speculated in the past that I have an automated posting machine (see the comments section here), or that I am, in fact, a machine myself (as Rachel once remarked on Niki Flynn's blog: "It is sometimes quite difficult to tell the difference between Ludwig and a computer."). But this was the first time ever that I didn't publish a post "live", while sitting at the PC. I simply put it in the queue before my departure, and by the time it went up on Saturday morning, I was already in the Eifel mountains, looking at ancient German castles.

It was great to spend a few days totally incommunicado, without emails or internet, but with a new and very special companion. In the meantime, the "future posts" queue allowed me to keep up with my blogging schedule. Maybe it will keep people from starting silly rumours about my whereabouts! Still, now that I'm home again, there is a lot to catch up on. In the comments to Part IV of the Hostel Trilogy: Communion, the debate continued about how moral or immoral it is to thrash Hungarian vanilla girls in a super-severe CP movie. It's a question I answered for myself a long time ago, otherwise I wouldn't have wielded the cane for Mood Pictures in the first place. But while the subject is old news in one way, it was a long and fairly interesting discussion, and you might find food for thought in what I and others had to say.

With the Mood shoot, the extended multi-part report about it and a few more journeys in recent weeks, I didn't always meet my posting quota. If I had unfailingly stuck to my every-four-days routine from new year's day onwards, the 31st post of 2009 would be coming on May 1st. Now, what I'm going to do is this: because the final part of my Budapest travelogue was twice the length of an average text, at over 3,500 words, I'm going to count it as two posts. Furthermore, starting today, I will switch to a temporary every-three-days schedule, and this will take me to post number 30 of the year on May 1st. Then, the cosmic spheres of my universe will be in harmony again.

What you can expect in the coming month-and-a-half: another behind-the-scenes report, about an SM-Circus shoot I did in late March with Pandora Blake. Followed by an account of my adventures with the "special companion" I mentioned before. Third, if everything goes as planned, I'll visit another CP video producer soon and I'll write about the experience (hint: it's one of the websites I reviewed last year). And in mid-May, it's time for the BoundCon VI fetish convention here in Munich, where I'll meet old and new friends. Looks like there will be some lengthy texts to write, plus the usual movie and paysite critiques.

While I'm getting on the job, I leave you for today with a humorous little clip from the big screen. It's from The Kentucky Fried Movie, the first collaboration by Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ), the team responsible for popular anarcho-slapstick classics like Airplane!, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun series. In my opinion, their earliest effort is also their best. KFM is just a collection of sketches, basically, spoofing everything from TV commercials to news programs to high school science films. It's a hit and miss affair, with some parts that are clearly better than others, but the hits are riotously funny - raunchy, irreverent and in wonderfully bad taste. The main feature, a longer segment called "A Fistful of Yen", still stands as the best Bruce Lee parody of all time.

My other favourite sketches include the trailers for the exploitation flicks of mythical producer "Samuel L. Bronkowitz" (a pun on Samuel Bronston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz). They lampoon 1970's disaster movies ("That's Armageddon!"), blaxploitation cinema ("Cleopatra Schwartz") and pornography ("Catholic High School Girls in Trouble"). The porn film spoof also includes a bit of whipping, the "crazed clown" at 1:23, which is why I'm posting it here. It's much too brief and silly, of course, to be of any erotic interest, but I thought it's fairly entertaining in its way.

As a porn trivia footnote: the big-breasted woman in the shower is Uschi Digard, a Swedish-born softcore model who was quite famous at the time. She has a whipping scene of her own in a (rightfully) forgotten 1973 sexploitation movie named Superchick.

Monks and Roses

And I asked myself, frightened and rapt,
who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata...

- UMBERTO ECO, The Name of the Rose

Sometimes on this blog, or in conversation with my friends, I refer to myself as a "monk". It isn't even that much of a joke - when I'm not on the road filming spanking porn, I lead a perfectly austere and reclusive lifestyle. I live off simple food and water, I rarely drink alcohol, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs and I only go out once in a blue moon. My dwellings are small and spartan, just the way I like it. My day is rigidly regimented. More than anything, I enjoy spending time with my books whenever I can. All I really need in life is a bed, a chair, a table, a bookshelf and a PC (just another big book, really).

I haven't taken an oath of celibacy, but I can go for months or even years as if I had and not miss anything at all (it helps if you're an imaginative person). I'm also not a religious man, as I mentioned in Penitentiam Agite!, my Easter post last year. But I am not anti-religious or a militant atheist, either - merely an agnostic, one with a profound scholarly interest in religions as systems of thought and important cultural forces. If I had lived during the Middle Ages, I probably would have been a monk - why not, it certainly beats being a peasant or a man-at-arms. Medieval monks were the scholars of their age, preserving, copying and commenting the wisdom of the ancient world. It's pretty much the same job I do today.

I daydream of being a writer or illustrator, always locked up in the scriptorium while his brothers are gardening or brewing beer. It's nice to dream of being a library monk. Of course, I would have been too much of a pig-headed individualist to fit into the monastic life, not to mention that I'm not big on getting up before sunrise. But as an idealised fantasy, it attracts me immensely. In some of my less sociable daydreams, I have made an oath of silence so I don't have to talk to anyone. Or I have been walled in altogether - they only pass me food, drink and books through a small opening.

Since I'm a straight spanko and neither completely celibate nor interested in M/M action, I can't keep other, more outlandish elements from creeping into my fantasies. In the monastery I envision, there are both monks and nuns, living together. The nuns are equal in terms of gender roles and do pretty much the same stuff the men do. Not at all realistic, I know, but the idea undoubtedly has its charm. I sometimes make up for the historical and social inaccuracy by imagining an alternate scenario where the nuns are little more than slaves. However, I find that one less appealing.

Either way, there are plenty of M/F spankings, and in the main, egalitarian universe, there is F/M, too. As we all know, a life of devotion to God and prayer requires strict, unfailing discipline! So that is what the brothers and sisters are enforcing on each other with birches, canes and whips. Sometimes one-on-one, sometimes in smaller groups, sometimes perhaps in front of the whole assembly - for the truly serious cases. Corporal punishment certainly existed in real monasteries and there is no shortage of historical accounts for inspiration. As well as that, a top dressed in monk's robes simply tends to look good - just watch the fabulous, opening caning scene in Special Case: The Colonel by Elitepain for confirmation.

But let's go back to something a bit more restrained and reality-based. My favourite monk story in book form is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and while it is very much a work of erudite postmodernist fiction, mixing an Arthur Conan Doyle-style murder mystery with references to Borge and semiotics, it is set in a Benedictine abbey in the early 14th century. Two visitors, a Franciscan friar named William of Baskerville (Eco's version of Sherlock Holmes) and his apprentice Adso (Dr. Watson), investigate a series of mysterious deaths at the abbey, sneak around its labyrinthine library at night and search for a lost book of Aristotle which seems to lie at the heart of the riddle. Along the way, Adso has an erotic encounter with a nameless peasant girl, and falls in love with her. She could be the "rose" in the title, even though I prefer a less obvious interpretation.

It's a great little novel, rich in layers and textures, also describing in detail the monastic life and the various religious conflicts of the time (which is swell, I'm always fond of heresies). The holy inquisition makes an appearance, too. A couple of Latin passages add fodder for the patient and classically educated reader as the book goes on, but translations are provided, of course. There is also a well-known movie version from 1986, starring Sean Connery as brother William, Christian Slater as Adso and Valentina Vargas as the girl. It takes some liberties with the book, but is pretty good as a medieval detective story - the true complexity of Eco's work is impossible to capture on film, anyway.

A scene of self-flagellation is included in the film, but unfortunately, the monk performing it is bald, pastry-skinned and weighs approximately 700 pounds! Not to sound superficial, but even if you like guys, it's probably hard to eroticise. The love scene between Adso and the girl is more inspiring, I remember that it kept my adolescent imagination pretty busy all those years ago. She makes some cute little sounds.

Parts of the movie were shot at Eberbach Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery in Hesse, Germany. I'm told that the people there get somewhat annoyed when tourists ask about it, because it's a question they get to hear all the time. The library maze was built in a studio in Rome, though, and the exteriors of the abbey are apparently a movie set as well. In any case, the look and the architecture of the whole thing has significantly shaped my kinky monk CP fantasies. I shall have to travel to Eberbach one day, to at least see some of the locations first-hand.

Maybe in 2010. This year, I'm spending the Easter holidays in the Eifel mountains. As I'm with a newfound spanko friend, I will undoubtedly have much to tell about that as well - unless she manages to cut down on the smart-ass remarks and behaves like a proper young lady for once, in which case I won't have to take her over my knee. But I doubt it. Ah well, we can't always live like monks and nuns! Not like real ones, anyway.

I wish you all a happy Easter, and see you next week.