Christopher Halcrow, who created "William Gibson's Yardshow," an "official" home page. So I kept having to go into my kids' bedrooms and beg for Web access to look at it, which bugged them.
Then Chris, who knows a bargain when he sees one, happened to buy this Performa 5200CD from someone who was leaving town. He passed the Performa on to me for what he'd paid for it, and suddenly I had this video-ready machine I could look at my site on, and the video-ready part brought cable into the office, so I got a cable modem, because it was faster, and I already had a hole drilled in the wall, and then I discovered that, damn, I had an e-mail address. It was part of the deal. So e-mail, overthe course of about fifteen minutes, replaced the faxes I'd been using to keep in touch with certain people.
In the way of things, very shortly, I no longer had a website, Chris having found it necessary to get a life. But there was the rest of the Web, waiting to be explored. And I did, and promptly got bored. It was fun, at first, but then gradually I found that there wasn't really anywhere in particular I wanted to go. I went a lot of places, but I seldom went back.
Then I found eBay. And I wanted to go back. Because eBay is, basically, just a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff you can look at and wonder if you want--or let yourself want and then bid on.
Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.
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 predigital 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 website, 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!)
My father bought a stainless-steel Rolex Oyster with a stainless band at a duty-free in Bermuda in the early Fifties.
After his death, not very long after, my mother put it away in a bank vault, from whence I wheedled it when I was eighteen or so. I had a Rolex dealer in Tucson replace its white dial with a black one, so that it would be more like the one James Bond wore in Fleming's novels. I loved it, and, one very sad night a few years later, I sold it for very little to a classmate of mine, in order to pay for a hotel room in which to enjoy, if that's the word, a final bitter tryst with my high school sweetheart. It was one of those dumb-ass, basically self-destructive gestures, and I actually don't regret it. I needed that hotel room. But I've always missed that watch, that Rolex Oyster Precision, and have always had it in the back of my mind to replace it one day with another of similar vintage. I had never done anything about it, though, and made do quite happily with quartz. My last quartz watch was a French faux-military job I bought at the airport in Cannes, on my way home from
Then Chris, who knows a bargain when he sees one, happened to buy this Performa 5200CD from someone who was leaving town. He passed the Performa on to me for what he'd paid for it, and suddenly I had this video-ready machine I could look at my site on, and the video-ready part brought cable into the office, so I got a cable modem, because it was faster, and I already had a hole drilled in the wall, and then I discovered that, damn, I had an e-mail address. It was part of the deal. So e-mail, overthe course of about fifteen minutes, replaced the faxes I'd been using to keep in touch with certain people.
In the way of things, very shortly, I no longer had a website, Chris having found it necessary to get a life. But there was the rest of the Web, waiting to be explored. And I did, and promptly got bored. It was fun, at first, but then gradually I found that there wasn't really anywhere in particular I wanted to go. I went a lot of places, but I seldom went back.
Then I found eBay. And I wanted to go back. Because eBay is, basically, just a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff you can look at and wonder if you want--or let yourself want and then bid on.
Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.
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 predigital 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 website, 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!)
My father bought a stainless-steel Rolex Oyster with a stainless band at a duty-free in Bermuda in the early Fifties.
After his death, not very long after, my mother put it away in a bank vault, from whence I wheedled it when I was eighteen or so. I had a Rolex dealer in Tucson replace its white dial with a black one, so that it would be more like the one James Bond wore in Fleming's novels. I loved it, and, one very sad night a few years later, I sold it for very little to a classmate of mine, in order to pay for a hotel room in which to enjoy, if that's the word, a final bitter tryst with my high school sweetheart. It was one of those dumb-ass, basically self-destructive gestures, and I actually don't regret it. I needed that hotel room. But I've always missed that watch, that Rolex Oyster Precision, and have always had it in the back of my mind to replace it one day with another of similar vintage. I had never done anything about it, though, and made do quite happily with quartz. My last quartz watch was a French faux-military job I bought at the airport in Cannes, on my way home from
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