Label: Boss.
Year: unknown - 1995 maybe?
Pattern: tight pink and pale yellow check, on a white background.
Artist: Heather Chontos.
Mood of model: ruminative.

Asta, this is your very last chance. Do you fancy looking pretty in pink this festive season?

Just when you think you've exhausted your supply of Paul Smith stripey shirts, out pops another one. In real life, it's considerably greener than this. Arguably a bit too green, in fact. I'm not altogether sure that green is one of my better colours.

May I draw your attention to the considerably more interesting painting behind me? It's by the stratospherically talented Nina Murdoch, and it's my favourite of all the paintings we own (although yesterday's Dan Perfect painting runs a close second).

So funny that I've had to stop reading it, for fear of drawing unwelcome attention to myself in the office. You know you're in trouble when the tears actually start coursing down your cheeks, and you find yourself trying to dab them away with the emergency scrap of bog paper in your pocket. (via Green Fairy)

And this is almost as funny: Windows RG, via Bitful.

"Oh - so this thing has a built-in flash gun, does it?"



"Oh yes! Much better!"

It's the bashful little camera-shy shirt who just didn't want to be snapped. I've photographed myself in this particular DKNY number several times over during the course of this project, but every time I downloaded the image, it would emerge as too blurry to use. Even when K took over the snapping duties, it still took about four attempts to get a halfway decent snap.

Pesky little varmint. I've a good mind to give you away, do you hear?

Lozette debates the pros and cons of heterosexual marriage as it relates to her own situation...

...as does Ultrasparky on the gay side.

Oh, and do check the comments on yesterday's piece - because I for one have found them fascinating.

I have rediscovered the joys of listening to hard, banging dance music. But only when I’m working through rather dull self-study training courses, or when I’m engaged in a complex but repetitive task, such as reeling off zillions of pie charts in Excel. In both cases, the music concentrates the mind wonderfully, in a way that song-based music fails to do. There is too much potential intellectual distraction in a song, whereas an insistently thumping instrumental dance track contains just enough information to stop the mind from wandering off into extended idle meditations.

In the toilets of Frankie & Bennys Diner (on the corner of King Street and Upper Parliament Street), Teach Yourself Italian lessons are helpfully piped through to you as you go about your business.

Scusi, per andare al Duomo?
A destra.

Scusi, per andare alla stazione?
A sinistra.

You see? It works!

The Dining Room, St. John Street, Ashbourne. After two visits on two consecutive weekends, we can now confirm this as a fantastically good place to eat. A small scale operation: just six tables, one chef and two staff. As the chef cooks every meal entirely single-handedly, table reservations are placed in strict half-hour intervals, so book well in advance. Proper food, superbly well executed, and served in a simple, comfortable environment. I particularly liked the wild pigeon broth with truffle oil and pearl barley, and also the hotch-potch of game. Not cheap, but I didn't begrudge them a single penny.

Groove Armada / Dirty Vegas, Rock City. For a support act, Dirty Vegas were received almost as well as the headliners, and deservedly so. My prior reservations about their smooth and polished brand of “dad-house” duly melted away. Meanwhile, Groove Armada have clearly turned their back on the coffee table / dinner party chillout set, and have returned to their dance roots with a vengeance. They sounded all the better for it. A thumping good set which rocked the house, and with barely a downtempo track to be found (excepting At The River, of course). I just don’t understand why their current album (Lovebox) has received such lukewarm reviews – to my ears, its joyful eclecticism marks a major return to form.

Revolution at The Palais. First Mondays in the month have been might as well let the poofs in on a quiet night Big Gay Nights Out in Nottingham for the past 18 years, with only one change of venue in all that time. Not having been along since the final weeks at MGM a couple of years ago, when the night seemed to be dying a slow death, I was surprised to find that it is once again packing them in at The Palais. In an ever-changing world, it is almost reassuring to realise that there will always be a place where you can still find Peter “Sleaze Sisters” Martine prancing about on a little stage and intoning the sacred catechisms of the Nottingham commerical gay scene:

”Hello…hello…hello…hello…”
"OO-WA OO-WA! OO-WA OO-WA!"
"Go girl, you go girl, you go you go you go girl…"
"Let’s whip it up! Let’s whip it up!"

You don't know what on earth I'm going on about? Well, I think that's probably for the best. Trust me.

4550 Miles From Delhi, Maid Marian Way. I’m sorry to report that this was the worst meal I have eaten in Nottingham in living memory. Painfully slow: it took an hour and twenty minutes before we received our starters, despite the fact that for most of that time, we were the only customers in the restaurant. No proper papadums to keep us going, either – we were given tiny little circular papadum crisps instead. When the food did arrive, most of the dishes were swimming in excess oil and grease, which had seeped out of the sauce and had begun to separate. My curried cod had an unpleasantly rank smell and a suspiciously strong fishy taste to it, which cast severe doubts as to its freshness. In fact, the smell was so bad that the person sitting next to me felt quite nauseated by it – as was K, when I returned home and he immediately caught it on my breath. Finally, at least three of us suffered stomach problems after the meal, either that night or the morning after. Not recommended.

Badly Drawn Boy, Rock City. With over two and a half hours on stage, with just a quick five minute break halfway through, Damon Gough must be the hardest working man in showbusiness. To be honest, I was expecting a mumbling, charisma-free grouchbag in a tea-cosy hat, noodling away interminably. Instead, we got a funny, engaging, rather charming fellow in a tea-cosy hat, delivering a disciplined, varied, well-paced set which never palled. It was almost enough to make me re-evaluate his disappointing recent album.

The Thrills, Nottingham Social. Just before the gig, I discovered that this supposedly up-and-coming hot new band, with just one single to their name thus far, were actually staying in the classiest hotel in the city – the one that all the big stars stay at. Add this to the sight of the massed ranks of gleaming new top-of-the-range guitars stacked up at the side of the stage, and the carefully distressed grooming of the band themselves, and you quickly realised that an awful lot of money is being invested in The Thrills. Constant approving mentions in the NME…Jo Whiley’s single of the week on Radio One…a track on the most recent NME cover CD…a slot on the prestigious NME Awards Tour in the new year…and now a carefully chosen gig at one of the country’s hottest small venues for new bands, just to build up the buzz. The Social may only hold two or three hundred people, but it has an astonishing knack of booking bands who end up being massively successful a few months later: Coldplay, The Doves, Starsailor, The Strokes and the White Stripes have all played here in the past couple of years. It is therefore clearly anticipated that The Thrills will be next in line. And who still says that “indie” music isn’t as carefully marketed as pop? The only difference: the pop kids know they’re being manipulated.

Oh, sorry – what were they like? Proficiently executed melodic soft-rock, with a pronounced Neil Young style country-ish twang to it and a slight obsession for name-checking American cities in the lyrics (Santa Cruz, Las Vegas, San Diego.) All very well put together, with plenty of strong, radio-friendly hooks – but utterly lacking in passion. A remote, distanced performance which never engaged with the audience on any emotional level, receiving only polite applause, and no call-back for an encore. The weakest link was the singer – good looking in an “interesting” way, but with a thin, strained, weedy voice which failed to carry the material.

Still, they’ll no doubt sound great on the radio. I forsee the Saturday late afternoon slot at Glastonbury, and the debut album to be in the Top 20 a year from now. If you like Travis, Coldplay, The Stereophonics, Texas and David Gray…then you’ll probably like The Thrills. Ho-hum.

(Yeah yeah, I know. When I'm not being an irrepressibly chirpy little f***ing Pollyana, I can be a right Little Miss Snootyknickers when I want to be.)

The big red Anish Kapoor thing at Tate Modern. Awesome, spectacular, unmissable. How did they do that, exactly? How does the thing stand up like that? And how did they know it was going to work?

Eva Hesse, Tate Modern. We knew nothing about her before seeing the show, which turned out to be a major revelation. The deceptively intricate early paintings were utterly captivating, and the late sculptures were just stunning. A hugely influential figure – we could draw clear links between Hesse’s work and that of Joseph Beuys, Rachel Whiteread and even Ralph Steadman, to name but three. Hard to believe that her career spanned just ten years, before her untimely illness and death at the age of 34.

Douglas Gordon, Hayward Gallery. The less that you know in advance about this exhibition, the more impact it will have. So I’m not going to say anything much about it, other than to recommend that you pick a quiet time to visit – on a crowded weekend afternoon, I would imagine that its impact would be severely weakened. I’m no great fan of conceptual video-based installation art, but this is the sort of conceptual video-based installation art which actually threatens to give conceptual video-based installation art a good name. Dark, atmospheric, thought-provoking – but it requires concentration, an open attitude, and a certain amount of work on the part of the viewer.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg, Flowers East. Luscious, expansive, yet tightly observed portrait paintings – we liked the The Psychiatrist best of all. Also some brightly hued landscapes, which were nice to look at but ultimately less convincing, retaining a tell-tale urban sensibility. Pictures of the countryside made by a city type on a day trip, to be hung on the walls of other city types. And oh my dears, the prices! Twenty-five grand a pop, if you please! He’s bloody good, but he’s not twenty-five grand’s worth of good. At least, not yet.

(Because states of sudden and intense cheerfulness should not always go unrecorded.)
(And because, at heart, I'm an irrepressibly chirpy little f***ing Pollyanna.)
(Yeah, well. Someone's got to be, right?)

1. After fretting about possible redundancy all week, I've still got my job.

2. I've just completed an estimated two to three weeks' worth of detailed statistical analysis in a liitle over two days, to a higher standard than was expected, and have received glowing plaudits for it from on high. Which, after all that worry and stress, is something I badly needed to restore my confidence in my abilities.

3. At long last, partnership registration has become a tangible (if still distant) possibility for the future.

4. After 17 years together, my relationship with K continues to grow. Which is the weirdest, most wonderful thing. But we don't do soppy, so enough about that.

5. I arranged a blind date for a friend, and it worked, and he's happy right now.

6. I've got my blogging mojo back.

7. I've now decided what I'm getting all my relatives for Christmas. God bless Amazon!

8. For once, I'm not dreading Christmas. It might even be quite good this year.

9. All things considered, I've had a bloody good 2002.

10. I'm seeing the Manic Street Preachers tonight! WOO!

The only trouble with this whole Reverse Chronology thing - it can make life awfully confusing if you decide to post a follow-up piece to something you've recently written.

So, if you haven't yet read yesterday's piece on attitudes to gay partnership registrations and the concept of "gay marriage", then please go and do so forthwith. Then come back here and read on.

I was talking about the notion of gay couples achieving parity with heterosexual couples in the eyes of the law. However, even when the proposed partnership legislation does finally become law, then I can still see complications ahead.

Warning: what follows will inevitably involve a fair degree of conjecture and over-simplification, so please bear with me.

So far as I can tell, the registration of a gay partnership will not be the equivalent of a wedding ceremony. Which, as I have already explained in the earlier piece, is good news where K and I are concerned, as we have a strong desire not to get "married". However, this option of partnership registration will not be available to heterosexual couples, who will still only have the option of marriage if they wish to accrue the same legal and financial benefits. Thus, a new situation will occur where - viewed in a certain light - gay couples will actually end up with an advantage over heterosexual couples. (After all, there's nothing to stop a gay couple also arranging a "blessing" with a sympathetic priest, or constructing their own vow-exchanging ceremony - complete with marquee, cake, matching white suits, elaborate floral arrangements, turtle doves, weeping mothers, the lot.) Therefore, if I were in a committed heterosexual relationship, with no desire to get married, I might well have a legitimate grievance at that stage.

How could this new inequality be redressed? By granting the option of partnership registration to heterosexual couples, of course. But if that option were granted, how many heterosexual couples would then choose registration in favour of marriage? I'm guessing that this would be a sizeable proportion. And if this were the case, then what would this do to the institution of marriage? Would it not be severely weakened - marginalised, even? And how would religious groups react to that? Not very well, I would guess.

Which leads me to think that opposition to the proposed legislation may well be much stiffer than expected. Religious groups could argue, with some force, and without laying themselves open to overt charges of homophobia, that this legislation would severely undermine the sacred traditions of marriage. I think that there could be a rough battle ahead.

Alternatively, what if the government is currently adopting a tactic of deliberately playing down the idea of introducing "gay marriage", so as not to scare the traditionalist lobby? What if the formal wording of the actual act of partnership registration, once drafted and agreed upon, does in fact contain the exchanging of certain solemn vows, bringing it broadly into line with a civil marriage ceremony? Would K and I, and others who feel the same way, really want to partake in that sort of ceremony? Would we abstain on principle, thereby denying ourselves the tangible benefits of a legally registered partnership - or would we merely shrug our shoulders, swallow our pride, and recite the ill-fitting vows with our fingers crossed behind our backs? I honestly don't know what we would do.

It's all going to be...interesting, to say the least.

When it comes to Effective Meme Propagation, you can forget your Daypops, your Blogdexes, and even your Popdexes. Because we're aiming higher than that now. We're aiming for nothing less than altering the shape of European politics.

From yesterday's Guardian (click here for the full story, then scroll down):Does Dortmund have any Troubled Diva readers, one wonders?

The same story can also be found on Ananova: (via Blogadoon)And as if that wasn't enough, people are now starting to dream about the Project. All of a sudden, we do rather appear to be invading the collective consciousness. Where will it all end? And more importantly - when?

Onto today's shirt, then. It's Blazer, it's pale blue (the lighting on the photo is a bit misleading), it's five or six years old at least, and I haven't worn it all year. Does this mean that we're getting towards the bottom of the ironing pile? Or are there many more where this came from?

Stay tuned.

Stop Press: I've still got a job. Redundancies are elsewhere. Phew.

This (from Austin Reed) is the only shirt over which K and I have joint ownership. Mainly because we couldn't agree who saw it first in the shop. As it's primarily a business shirt, K now wears it a lot more than I do. In felt, it felt a little strange to be putting it back on after all this time.

Coming up tomorrow - is the meme spreading? Could the Shirt Off My Back Project be about to change the face of German politics? All will be revealed.

Metaphorically speaking, that is. Ooh, I'm such a tease.

We loved the Jake & Dinos Chapman exhibition at White Cube. Really, really loved it.

Until he started looking at the exhibits, K had no idea that the extensive, tightly packed collection of wonderfully pastiched "tribal relics" all contained subversive references to a certain multinational hamburger chain - and his delighted astonishment was infectious. Having seen plenty of Coca-Cola logos painted on the sides of mud huts in remote African villages, this juxtaposition of traditional tribal culture with globally homogenised culture struck me as entirely apposite. It was witty, playful, knowing, ingenious, aesthetically pleasing and surprisingly well executed.

The big photomontage thingy upstairs was a pile of juvenile, self-conscious, pseudo-trendy crap, though. But then it wasn't by the Chapman brothers.

Realising that it was getting late, and that Bodyworlds was within easy walking distance, we shuffled off towards Brick Lane.

After the morning's shock "proposal", I have been intermittently teasing K all day about the whole Gay Marriage thing.

"I want us in matching white suits, reading our favourite poetry to each other! I want a marquee! I want a string quartet! I want f***ing turtle doves! I want two weeks in the Seychelles! You can bring your bit on the side, and I'll bring one of mine! You're my fiancé now! Ha-haa!"

Talk about jumping the gun, though. The bill hasn't even been drafted yet - and even then, we can surely expect a rocky passage through the House of Lords. If the Lords reject the bill twice, the government might even have to resort to invoking the Parliament Act in order to force it through. This could all take a few more years yet.

But what of "marriage", then? My perception is that there is a world of difference between a partnership registration and a wedding ceremony, be it religious or civil. A wedding is designed to represent the final binding act of commitment to a shared future, in which a standard, pre-ordained set of vows are publically made. Conversely, a partnership registration is designed to record the details, for legal and financial purposes, of a private commitment that has already been made. The two should not be confused.

Although I think they will be, by those who will view a partnership registration as their binding act of commitment, without which their relationship will feel incomplete and insecure. I can even see this introducing a new set of associated pressures, as hordes of silly queens rush to get hitched for all the wrong reasons. But then again, maybe that's the price you have to pay for equality.

As you may have deduced by now - and without wishing in any way to denigrate the entirely justifiable choices freely made by others - neither K nor I have ever entertained the slightest desire for any sort of marriage ceremony. The nature of our particular relationship, and of our commitment to each other, is essentially a self-invented and private affair, which exists purely on its own terms. It therefore has no need of state sanctioned blessing, or indeed of any public form of celebration. The introduction of gay partnership rights would not change any of that.

However, we most certainly do want parity in the eyes of the law. If one of us goes into hospital with a serious illness, then the other should be treated as his partner. When one of us dies, then the other should be able to assume sole ownership of our shared property, without being clobbered with so much inheritance tax that an immediate sale would be forced upon him. Our pensions should pass freely to each other. So yes - we'll be first in the queue at the registry office. But nobody will need to buy a hat, or bake a cake, or book a disco. Sorry about that.

To read some follow-up thoughts on the above piece, follow this link.

We hated Bodyworlds. Really, really hated it.

First of all, it was the cheap shoddiness that rankled. The plinths were made from ordinary house bricks, roughly shoved together. The signs were bits of folded paper, printed off from MS Word and shoved under perspex. Overhead fluorescent strip lighting. Potted houseplants plonked down to form dividers. Filthy, smelly toilets: flooded, missing their seats, and covered in obscene graffiti. For a tenner a ticket, you would have expected some degree of care and attention. As it was, there was absolutely no aesthetic sensibility at work whatsoever.

The further we went round the exhibition, the more we were struck by the underlying disingenuousness of its intentions. This was neither art, nor science, nor education - merely spectacle. A grotesque spectacle, which betrayed an arrogant disregard for the humanity of its "plastinates". There was no back story on these corpses - not even the scantest of details on their backgrounds, their nationalities, or even the circumstances of their deaths. Instead, their plastinated body parts had been snipped, stretched, mangled and contorted into pieces of breathtakingly tasteless whimsy.

Here: a corpse riding a bicycle, a ludicrous pair of spectacles perched on its nose. There: a leering warlock on a broomstick, in a stupid hat. A "basketball player" - a "goalkeeper" - a "swimmer" - and most notably of all, a "pole vaulter". The pole vaulter was suspended upside down on a steel pole, well above head height. His entire gut system had comically "fallen out" of its torso, and had slid down the pole to eye level. People were actually standing round and chuckling at the gag.

In another room, a plastinate was kneeling in front of a makeshift altar, its facial features arranged into a crude caricature of beseeching piety, holding up a human heart on a tacky velvet plinth. The accompanying sign said: "In Memory Of All Our Donors". Anger and disgust rose up inside us like bile.

There was worse to come, in the form of a woman in the eighth month of pregnancy, her womb slit open to show the almost fully developed foetus still curled up inside her. Astonishingly - unforgiveably - she had been arranged in a semi-recumbent, coquettish pose: turned on her side towards the viewer, her head propped up on one elbow, her lips artificially reddened and pouting, her pale, rubbery nipples crudely stuck back onto her plastinated breasts. Tragedy reduced to burlesque.

She was the sole adult female plastinate in the entire exhibition. Adjacent to her were a series of deformed foetuses in specimen jars: cleft palates, misshapen skulls, conjoined at the hip. We hurried past them as quickly as we could.

Before leaving, we scanned the comments books. Apart from the occasional gripe about the state of the toilets, there was almost nothing but fulsome praise for the show. Fascinating...educational...an amazing experience...didn't feel squeamish in the slightest...wish I had brought my family with me...cool!...awesome!...wicked! Baffled and incredulous, we flicked through page after page, searching in vain for a dissenting view.

God knows, I have no religious axe to grind here. Neither does the idea of placing a naked corpse on public display offend me per se, so long as the donor has given their full consent. But did these people really know that they would end up like this? As utterly dehumanised objects of curiosity in a highly profitable modern day freak show, carted around from city to city by an egocentric self-publicist with deluded pretensions to high-minded scholarship?

Sigh. Whatever. Four fantastic exhibtions and one dud, then...

...but at least this means we can grab a decent curry on Brick Lane, before catching the 19:55 back to Nottingham. They're all unlicensed, so K nips to the offy for a couple of large bottles of Indian beer. He has never had the Brick Lane experience before, and is delighted with it. We spend a pleasant 45 minutes or so, noshing and critiquing. The day has gone awfully well. A perfect blend of pre-planning and spontaneity. We should do this much more often.

I had never brokered a blind date before. But in my head, they seemed quite well matched. And A liked my photos of B. And B saw A's profile, and recognised him. And I wasn't on hand to effect a proper introduction - all those gigs, all that art. And so numbers were passed, and phone calls made, and a rendezvous arranged.

And now here they both are, a day and a night later, drinking tea in the cottage in front of the fire, beaming at us, beaming at each other, and I am feeling so benevolent, and just so goddammed pleased with myself.

Before breakfast, before a proper wash, before conversation, before the seven o'clock headlines...as dawn breaks over Carsington Water, DJ Shadow is just the ticket. Abstract, moody atmospherics for a freezing Monday morning. As we hurtle back to town to beat the traffic, I give thanks for heated seating, and begin to unclench a little.

So I was thinking about this site over the weekend, and what I wanted to do with it, and whether I had already achieved everything that could reasonably be done with it, and whether I was suffering from the blogging equivalent of Second Album Syndrome, and whether I should drop it down a notch, or gear it up a notch, and what was my motivation for it these days anyway, and hadn't I become bored of the cutesy personality cult side of things, and wasn't it time to turn another corner, and to become less inanely pseudo-conversational and more, I dunno, "literary"...and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was time to re-commit, to stop complacently surfing on the stats, to try a little bit harder, to get my "edge" back, to get the hunger and the necessity back, to push things forwards...

...and I came into work today and got the Urgent Briefing To All Employees e-mail about possible redundancies and imminent interviews with those who are most at risk, and decisions that haven't yet been made but will be soon...

...and all that fresh air instantly slumped out of my sails.

(photo by Chig)

It's good to see that the guy on the left is blogging regularly again. Welcome back to Dave, Live In London...

And it's a warm welcome back to Week Ten of the Shirt Off My Back Project. Yeesh. Now I have some idea of what it must be like to be a game show host, stuck presenting the same tired old format for month after month. Richard Whiteley, I feel your pain.



K and I are wandering around the house now, randomly matching shirts with art. Yesterday, Carharrt met Cecilia Vargas. Today, Versace meets Andrew Stewart. Some unusual stitching down the front panels makes this shirt an absolute bugger to iron, so it tends to get forgotten about as it slowly sinks down the ironing pile. In fact, I don't think it got worn at all this summer. Which is a shame, as it's quite a dinky little number.

Todd in San Francisco, recently returned from London, and with a smart new domain of your own, you too are now...Off The Project. Catch ya later!Asta, you've got a nice long run, with no less than five chances to win the shirt off my back. Or will you be chucked off the project on Saturday? Time alone will tell.

And so, as K takes up the camera on my behalf, my face miraculously elongates itself. We're back with Carharrt here, this being a particular favourite over the summer.

Martijn, you too are now...Off The Project. Tot ziens!