This design takes its inspiration from the old ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ slogo (yes I’ve just invented a new word… logo + slogan = slogo). Essentially it comments on the lack of love in the modern world. I’ve been with my partner for years and as yet neither of us has run off or tried to kill the other. Yet when you take a look at current divorce rates you’d be hard pressed to find a marriage that lasts as long as fifteen years, by the way we didn’t get married. Maybe that’s the trick. Al that legal mumbo jumbo probably puts a dampener on most marriages to be, plus there’s the cost, the heightened expectation, and the final realization that married life sucks.

I believe most peopled get married out of boredom, exhaustion, and even just to escape the dating scene, which from over here seems to be more nightmarish than ever. Sure you can do loads more people, but none of them give a damn about you, what goes round… It’s been commercialized - dating is a scene - an act, a long drawn out and badly written play. Almost everyone under thirty is on stage and performing, and a lot of older divorcees  are starting to do the same.

A guy has to get on a bit before he realizes there’s more to it than sex, a lot of women are following suit now, in fact one day I doubt there will be anything other than f*ck buddies and lifelong partners,  I can’t see marriage lasting in the West. Sure you have your strongholds,  religion plays a big part in it.  Catholics  will always give it a go, for most religions  believe there’s no way getting around it. Their whole society is based on the foundation of marriage. I’ve noticed a lack of that reverance in UK politics ever since Blair left… phew. Society isn’t based on marriage, my parents hated each other. Society should be based on mutual respect. But what do I know?

Heartbreaker as with all my tees is available in over 30 styles and shades. Sweats, Tees, Hoodies, come and see the whole collection at www.retrogod.com

It’s true, I never kept a diary as a kid (way b4 this old blogging thingy started.). You know I’ve tried a couple of times at submitting this blog to that bloody awful site www.blogexplosion.com - it’s totally duff but I thought hey some traffic might help raise the profile for Retro God but oh no… it just won’t do at all - B.E say that my blog is too commercial - well duh! I do make and sell t-shirts. Anyway if anyone knows anyone at www.blogexplosion.com - tell them I’m slagging them off and maybe they’ll change their totally dumb regulations. Hey I don’t use Adsense so I’m less commercial than any blogs they do favor.

Phew - take that as an apology (yet again) for not keeping up. I’ve been working on more music for www.onemanbrand.co.uk but nope I’m not happy with any of it so you’ll all have to wait a little longer (thank god I hear you say).

Okay on with the tees! I’ll post what I can when I can, to be honest I would rather you bought the tees than read about them, but if you have to know more, keep those eyes peeled for new posts very soon!.

Party Pooper

I confess - I am a party pooper. It must be part of the ageing process. I wasn’t exactly Fun Time Bobby, but my catchphrase throughout my late teens was ‘Where’s the party?’. It was a sincere expression, I truly wanted to party every weekend. I know that means screwing in the USA, but I just meant house parties. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t like your Fresh Prince kinda house party, all I needed was a house, booze, attractive girls and music. That constituted a house party. I loved it, just when the whole concept went tits up.

I had a house party once, it was awful, my family returned home early, everyone was bored to tears, the music was, shall we say limited to a bunch of miserable records I’d stumbled across in 2nd hand vinylshops, and yes they were all badly scratched. It made me realize that no one who has regular house parties has a home. My place was trashed like everyone else’s. It was just nice for a while to be somewhere more personal than the dingy pubs and clubs around at the time.

These days there’s more atmosphere at a supermarket or an airport than some clubs I could mention. Super clubs are the worst. Vast warehouses, that unless you’re on some kind of mind altering substance, you soon notice just how ugly the whole place is, the girders, the rafters, the pidgeons in the eaves. I’ve worked in a few factories in my time, and to tell the truth, they were friendlier places.

These days it’s almost impossible to find a real good quality party run by amateurs, out of the goodness of their hearts, just for the kicks. Nope. There’s always some agenda, networking usually. I’ve been drawn into conversations on all sorts of crap, but costume jewellery and health products, that really is the pits. You can get Ann Summers parties, now they could be more interesting if they actually invited the blokes along too, but they know that business would be pushed aside and everyone would end up drunk as usual. Shame that.

There are swingers parties (god forbid), I’ve seen a Channel 4 doc on that whole scene, and if you are over fifty, sex mad, sport thongs, and enjoy rolling around in a dark room full of oily bodies, then good luck to you. S&M parties, why on earth anyone can enjoy pain, I don’t know, I was caned at school (corporal punishment incase you are a confused stoner). I didn’t enjoy it. Being punished doesn’t sound like a fun night out to me.

I suppose I must resign myself to the prospect of dinner parties (now they are not parties) and restaurants, theatre, film, art, the usual haunts of the reserved. I miss the party people, but unless you’re off your face you don’t want to bump into them anymore. Most of them are far uglier than I remember, but their hearts are as good as gold, as long as the drugs don’t wear off.

The people who scare me the most say they are ‘High on Life’, that sounds absurd to me, then again I am a miserable git. Who knows - perhaps they have a enjoyably toxic reaction to breathing air, or smiling makes them orgasm, their brains must be wired in a completely different way, an alien way, perhaps they are the future. I am certainly not. You can’t get me excited anymore, I’ve had my share, I’m a party pooper now, if you do invite me I am guaranteed to stand in the corner of your kitchen for ten minutes before making my excuses.

A massive Escape Button surrounded by crowds of tourists. It would be nice if we all could really get away. Another planet, another dimension, somewhere where you’ll meet few if any humans.

My partner would always point out beauty spots of the countryside whenever we travelled on a motorway. Not so much now though. I heaped a debate on her, and she wasn’t really asking for one, but I did anyway. It went something like this…

What actually enabled us to see these beautiful places, from afar, from a car. The motorway (or freeway if you want me to go all American on you - besides that’s probably a misnomer by now anyway… I mean with the amount of toll roads these days I doubt few of them are actually free anymore.).

If you can see a beautiful place from somewhere as ugly as hell, you are spoiling the view. It’s kinda difficult to quantify what spoils a view. I have no problem with Wind Turbines for instance, I know a lot of nimbys do (nimby = not in my backyard). A blott on the landscape for me has more to do with function than form. It’s not how it looks so much as what it does, or rather how efficiently. All the Post Modernists back me up on this, form and function is a symbiosis of two essential disciplines. Anything that strips one from the other is a failure as far as design is concerned.

A wind turbine is essentially a beautifully ugly thing. It’s beauty comes from the knowledge that it does little if any damage to the environment in as efficient way as possible. From the belief that it is the way of the future, anon-polluting one at that. There are areas of the UK that won’t let you put up a satellite dish because it spoils the look of a listed village, a historical town, a heritage centre. I love history, but if it meant isolating myself from the present then I’d rather give it the heave-ho. Imagine what all those nimby council planners think about solar panels and wind turbines. Here’s a quickie, how about a wind turbine on every church steeple (how many are left now?) and disguise the top with a weather vane. It would be ugly, it would be inefficient, but if it gets past the beady eye of a planning officer with a heavy historical bias then it would be worth it.

Motorways are ugly. Cars can be beautiful in their own way, from a design perspective I mean. But get a thousand in a tailback with a cloud of smog overhead and you’re not painting a Turner are you? Until cars can hover we are stuffed. Let’s face it, we won’t have any countryside to tear through within fifty years. Even if we do learn to hover, we’ll still have difficulty seeing anything through that smog. How many years does it take to clean the sky anyway?

Getting back to the point, you can’t see beauty without ruining it, if man get’s his dirty mitts on anything beautiful, whatever his intentions, he does usually end up ruining it. I know we’ve got a few National Trust parks, they still get the smog but at least they’re not twelve lane bypasses for nearby cities. But what about the rest. It takes millions of years to form a landscape, man has always played with it, digging a tunnel here, building a bridge there. But now he can flatten it, raise it, put it out to sea, you name it. By the way - how long will those ornamental islands in Dubai last now that we know the world’s sea levels are rising?

Yes, yes, this has entry has turned in to one of those awful eco-rants you read just about everywhere. I’ll stop badgering you, I’m no better. Sure I recycle, I don’t even drive, but this old house we live in could never be described as ‘ecologically efficient’. I could do a lot more to help, but as the years have passed I’ve come to accept that what I remember is so drastically different from what the next can recall that soon a tree will be a surprise for the kids growing up these days.

I was on a plane recently, first time in years, I didn’t plant a tree, I didn’t carbon offset. But when I saw all those businessmen who use planes the way I used to use buses (get a bike), it kinda knocked me back for six. There is no great escape, no getaway. Next time you think you’ve managed to get away from the world, look up, that guy in the plane staring back, he’s thinking of putting a Starbucks franchise just where you’re standing.

The Great Escape

PRIVACY - Well this is a rather straight forward design, based on an old and tatty motel door sign. Simply called privacy, it hints at more than just the insane overcrowding and over-population of so many of our cities today, but the absolute lack of privacy, what could once have been called a human right, and now, well now I suppose it is considered something of a luxury.

Get rich, buy an island, but a pod on the Moon, no doubt you’ll still be spied on by a satellite for some dodgy reality show, I’m sure some TV executive can crowbar a mention of ‘Moonies’ just to add some frission to the whole idea. Maybe not.

The only thing I can say is don’t get famous, get rich, not famous. Fame certainly must suck. Sure some crazies need that much attention, but I doubt many want it for the rest of their lives.

There sure are a lot of trailer trash (to be succint) who’d love to be famous. If you live without privacy, in a trailer, with god knows how many people peering over your shoulder, it probably is a step up. Still no ‘me time’ but at least I’m rich.

It’s all back to my old argument, too many people on this planet. When the time is right and the money is available I guarantee they’ll be building tax-free casinos and health spas on the Moon. It’s quiet up there right now, cold dark and quiet. If only I didn’t need to breathe air and was restricted by the laws of gravity, sounds a great place for a vacation. In fact anywhere that the rest of you six billion busy people have failed to notice would do me, it’s nothing personal, it’s just we all need a break from our vastly extended primordial family - once in a while.

Nuclear power was seen as the be all and end all then. It vanquishes all your enemies at once plus it makes for a perfect society. I know the phrase isn’t an exact reference to nuclear power per se. But it does seem an awfully big coincidence. 

A Nuclear Family  - ‘The family is a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction. It contains adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults’.  George Murdoch .  

It’s an appropriation of scientific language, referring to the nucleus of a cell as opposed to nuclear energy. But somehow it still really gets my goat, it was that blind belief in science that has got society in the mess it is now. Sure we have tons of gadgets and can even pay to hang around in space for a while, but the place is a mess, and god knows who will clear it up.

No matter what size or make-up of your family, if it is happy, you are a rarity. Divorce rates continue to climb, marriages decline, the world is becoming a singles bar, no make that a single  parent bar. Work first, life later. The ethics of the fifties were seriously damaged by the wave of rebellion and revolt of the 1960’s (god bless them all). Since then it’s been money all the way. For a perfect life you have to pay for it. Don’t expect ma, pa to come running, they will more than likely be off having yet another second chance with god knows who.

Life is short, the life of the family even shorter, appreciate it, whatever shape and size it comes in.

.

Welcome! At last Retro God has its own blog, and I’ve a lot of work ahead of me. Let me introduce myself, I’m Paul Baines, a UK based fashion designer, and I am Retro God! OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous, but it caught your eye, or you wouldn’t be here. Now, I’m not your usual T-Shirt designer (god bless them, one and all ;p ) - I’m not a design snob - well, perhaps I am - but I do come from a very different background than your usual pick. Way back in the early 90’s I graduated with a Ba Hons in Conceptual Arts & Design.

Now you may ask what the hell is it? Good question, and one I’m still trying to answer myself. Take a peek at Marcel Duchamp, there’s a great start, work your way along the arts time-line, looking for the freaks and you’ll find yourself in Andy Warhol’s Factory. Keep going, there’s Jeff Koons, and hey how about chucking in Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin for good measure. They, however much they might deny it, are all conceptual artists. Right… so why fashion, why mass-made, why the on line store? Why not a gallery? Why not? It seems the greatest gallery system in the world is right here and it’s on line.

It’s my site, it’s yours, it’s every forum and blog out there. I was taught to artistically justify every idea, every action, every piece. I’m still doing it now. In fact, that’s just about the best reason to blog every design I’ve created. I am using the medium of kitsch, of mass production, to subvert social comment, to disable the enabler, inject discourse with street style philosophies, pour them back into the streets via fashion, thereby intensifying further debate on line.

A wonderful loop, something I’m fascinated by, the entropy of discourse. This may all seem very high and mighty for a lowly t-shirt designer, but in all honesty, I try to maintain a low-brow veneer for all my designs, this increases the effectiveness of the subversion.

Take a look at the designs and perhaps you’ll get a clearer idea of my overall line of inquiry. Using common sayings and urban myths, everyday people with unglamorous lives, utilitarian objects, word play and surrealist effect, to convey the current Zeitgeist of the most psychologically damaged culture in history.