Why are we so excited about a recreation of a vintage movement like the Omega 321? Has digital social media and the ensuing crisis of truth prompted some of us to seek analog expressions of our authentic selves? Can a mechanical watch help us maintain authenticity?
How do booze and pot affect your perception of time? Your sense perceptions? Your impulsivity? Find out as your host, Allen, brings his personal experiences up alongside phenomenology and medical research to form a theory of how watches connect us to eternity.
Allen's birthday watch is a Grand Seiko Limited Edition SGBH269, a watch that explores the turning of the seasons from Spring to Fall, just as Allen is turning to the autumn of his life. This episode is a meditation on mortality, nature, dying, living, and being true to your self, all in relation to this fascinating Grand Seiko.
Allen sits down with best selling novelist Gary Shteyngart to talk about how watches have figured into Gary's writing. From his New Yorker article called "Confessions of a Watch Geek" to his novel Lake Success Gary has used watches as literary devices that become windows into the internal lives of characters both real and fictional. Gary's command of watches as a topic is impeccable, and he is as fluent as anyone in going into "why they're so fascinating."
Grand Central Watch's 3rd generation leader, Steve Kivel, has turned his family's business into a high-tech service center with seven full-time watchmakers working full-time in a brand new state of the art facility. Allen and Steve sit down to discuss the ins and outs of proper watch servicing, how to vet your watchmaker, and why spending the extra money on proper servicing should be the norm but, alas, is not.
Allen's colleague Cait Bazemore comes on for a lively discussion of the emerging trend of women wearing more complex mechanical tool watches, and how the watch industry is shedding it's old-school attitudes toward so-called lady's watches. From Serena Williams to Cate Blacnhett and Lindsey Vonn, badass women are wearing some seriously badass watches these days.
Allen returns from a week in Italy having toured Tuscani on a Ducati motorcycle while wearing his Bremont Supermarine, lapped on a race track in a Ferrari, sported Hublots, and having accidentally bumped into the representative for Nims who just climbed 14 of the world's largest mountains as part of the Bremont-sponsored Project Possible. The birthday watch saga continues.
Allen's account of his trip to the Longines factory in Switzerland starts with an explanation of how one ends up on such a trip in the first place. He then recounts hanging with Longines' CEO Walter von Känel (a.k.a. The Chef), a dream like factory with shipping robots and worker-determined schedules, and of course some beautiful Longines watches.
Why do mechanical watches seem so calming and down to earth? Why does the Apple Watch seem so intrusive? In this episode, we travel in time to consider old and new technologies up against each other, and how a mechanical watch once felt oppressive, and how the Apple Watch may one day seem disconnected and archaic. James Bond and Marlon Brando make a guest appearance via a listener essay at the end.
A colleague once told Allen that women's watches don't get as much coverage because, "Women's watches suck." Let's complicate the topic of gendered watches, and let's get past some of our ingrained attitudes about what makes a watch right for a man or a woman. Also, the birthday watch gets a break-thru!
When watches are truly designed as tools and do their job without kowtowing to fashion trends, our aesthetically fussy attitudes can give way to a far more grounded affection for the designs. Many watches, old and new, are considered from this functional perspective.
Allen goes after the notion of "microbrands" and calls for a change of thinking around the role of independent watch brands of all sizes. He discusses independent record labels as an analogous notion, gets into the importance of regionalism and diversity, talks us through a number of examples of regionally-oriented indie watch brands, and reviews two indie dive watches, one from Greece, and one from Croatia.
In Episode 4, Allen is visited by a fox while record his account of a one-watch experiment. Unexpected results include feeling great about the one watch even though his time in it was hellish, and realizing that his personal collecting habits need to follow a wholly different set of concerns than those that govern his work writing professionally about watches. A lovely listener essay closes out the episode.
Allen ponders how watch diameter and wrist circumference became the main measurements of watches when, in fact, those two dimensions hardly matter when it comes to how a watch works on your wrist. He recommends a few different strategies for estimating how a watch will fit. This episode's listener essay inspires a contemplation of journalistic integrity in the age of so-called advertorial content, and Allen reads from The Rake magazine's editor Wei Koh's thoughts on the matter.
In this episode, Allen talks with Watch Desk Editor at Gear Patrol Magazine, Oren Hartov. They discuss the ins and outs of working in a bustling news room, the history of Israeli military watches, escaping the Nazis, making music, and a number of fascinating stories about Oren's family's watches going back five generations.
Host Allen Farmelo discusses various conceptual frameworks that we can use in attempting to understand watches. These include a mechanical perspective, cultural, social, historical, design, phenomenological, and (out on a limb here) New Age. This overview provides a set of possible frameworks that the ensuing episodes will use interchangeably. Think of this as the Metasode. SHOW NOTES The Mechanical Perspective Jens Koch's Article in Watch Time about the Rolex DEEPSEA The Social & Cultural P...
Your host Allen Farmelo says hello and gives a short introduction and guide to Beyond The Dial.
