#grand seiko

I’ve fallen into the world of wristwatch enthusiasm and I’m pasting below (with a few edits) something that I wrote two weeks ago in a watch forum of sorts, some writing that I want to preserve here and that touches on frequent topics of this Tumblr like how we learn, wealth inequality, internet culture, etc. There will likely be additional watch content here in the near future.

William Gibson’s “My Obsession” from 1999 is something of a classic essay on eBay and collecting, and it’s specifically about his dive into watches. When I became interested in watches about a year ago, the product of research for a gift, I recalled reading Gibson’s piece (in print, no less!) when it was published and I looked it up. It’s a nice time machine to an earlier experience on the internet in addition to being a great story about watch enthusiasm. I’ll post two passages to bait you into reading the whole thing before moving on to some additional thoughts and a 2015 interview with Gibson about the essay.

Bait one:

But I didn’t really want to have to buy this very large watch. Which was in Uruguay. And now I was still high bidder, and the auction would be run off before I got back to Vancouver. I thought about having to resell the Zenith.

When I did get back, though, I discovered, to mixed emotions, that I’d been “sniped.” Someone, or rather their automated bidding software, had swooped in, in the last few seconds, and scooped the Zenith for only the least allowable increment over my bid.

Bait two:

Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They’re pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they’re comforting precisely because they require tending.

And vintage mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of the pre-digital age. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are, in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond, Tamagotchi-like, to “love,” in the form, usually, of the expensive ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly restored from virtually any stage of ruin.

And, as with the rest of the contents of the world’s attic, most of the really good ones are already in someone’s collection.

But the best of what’s still available, below the spookily expensive level of a Sotheby’s watch auction, can still be had for a few thousand dollars at most. At the time of this writing, the most desirable vintage Rolex on one New York dealer’s Web site, a stainless steel “bubble back” automatic, is priced at $3,800, a fraction of the cost of many contemporary watches by the same maker. (And it’s so much cooler, possesses so much more virtu, than one of those gold-and-diamond Pimpomatic numbers!)

Yes, “they require tending.” See Cortázar(ororiginal Spanish). Also Pimpomatic! I guess we know what Gibson thinks about iced-out watches.

I hope you enjoy that essay as much as I do, and if you just read the essay and stop here, I will be happy to have shared that joy. But I am also posting about Gibson’s essay because I think it provides some insight into what is going on with Rolex (and to a great extent much of the watch world) right now and it helps expand on what I wrote in response (elsewhere) to a Jenni Elle video addressing accusations about Rolex collectors being “inauthentic”:

I enjoyed that video and agree with a lot within. I particularly like the insights about “cheating” and I’d love to see that point explored more because I think a lot of the resentment and subsequently the overuse (I’d say misuse, as Jenni implies) of the term authenticity is a reflection of the vast inequality in the world and the rapid acceleration of inequality through the pandemic. That goes for not only capital wealth, but also attention and status. Jenni used the word deserve (in air quotes) and I think that’s the big clue – people are sensing, as they do in many different ways, that society is rigged. It is. No one deserves to have vastly more than other people and no one deserves to have nothing. And all of this inequality has become more apparent in the watch world as new and wealthy watch collectors have arrived during the pandemic.

I love how in so many was the watch world reflects the wider world. I’ve only been an enthusiast for about a year now, and as I explain to people who are not, my watch explorations, readings, studies, what-have-you overlap with pretty much anything and everything. The watch world is like a caricature of the greater world in many ways.

Back to Gibson, here’s the part that relates to the Jenni Elle video and my repsonse:

an ongoing democratization of connoisseurship, in which curatorial privilege is available at every level of society

and

But the main driving force in the tidying of the world’s attic, the drying up of random, “innocent” sources of rarities, is information technology. We are mapping literally everything, from the human genome to Jaeger two-register chronographs, and our search engines grind increasingly fine.

More people have access to information that was once required a lot of effort to come by. Before this “map,” people who worked at acquiring that information, but had limited funds could still participate. It leveled the playing field to some extent. But now with the information so easily available, people with lots of funds have a nearly complete advantage. And that makes people resentful leading to those accusations of “lack of authenticity” that Jenni Elle talks about in her video.

And maybe I am less bothered than other watch fans in part because my interest in watches is more about learning than about accumulation. Again, Gibson brings some great insight here because his dive into watches was similar (although he did actually purchase some expensive watches, unlike me). In 2015, for WatchPaper, Michael Vinovich followed up with Gibson about his essay (another great read!), and Gibson said this:

People who’ve read this piece often assume that I subsequently became a collector of watches. I didn’t, at least not in my own view. Collections of things, and their collectors, have generally tended to give me the willies. I sometimes, usually only temporarily, accumulate things in some one category, but the real pursuit is in the learning curve. The dive into esoterica. The quest for expertise. This one lasted, in its purest form, for five or six years. None of the eBay purchases documented [in the essay] proved to be “keepers.” Not even close.

and

I actively enjoy having fewer, preferably better things. So I never deliberately accumulated watches, except as the temporary by-product of a learning curve, as I searched for my own understanding of watches, and for the ones I’d turn out to particularly like. I wanted an education, rather than a collection. But there’s always a residuum: the keepers. (And editing is as satisfying as acquiring, for me.”

“The real pursuit is in the learning curve.” Yup, that’s me. All of this is also further evidence of why William Gibson is paid to write – the man has a way with words.

To close this already long post, here is one more great passage from that interview that also resonates with me, particularly the point about “power-jewelry exclusivity”:

With a very few exceptions, contemporary luxury Swiss doesn’t appeal to me. I feel those watches have become power-jewelry exclusively, a class of archaic luxury item. Your phone tells more accurate time. I respond most to watches from the century in which they were utterly necessary. If someone offered me any free contemporary watch of my choosing, provided I’d promise never to resell it, I’d probably choose a Grand Seiko. I find their product, this century, more appealing than that of the Swiss.”

That’s a pretty great perspective and a good argument for collections to be more about vintage with one contemporary piece for wearing that reflects something truly new.

PS: If you are wondering what watches Gibson did keep, at least until 2015, check out the rest of the interview.