The Hodinkee John Mayer G-Shock

Hodinkee, the nearest thing I've found to a horological periodical I can take seriously, narrowly beating out Time + Tide, put a post on Facebook with a huge headline about an upcoming release of a collaboration between John Mayer, G-Shock and Hodinkee. It's not even a link to a story about the new John Mayer G-Shock. Just a huge banner headline saying that it's coming soon.

My G-Shock cost under $50 on Amazon back in May. I'm pleased with it, although most days I wear a mechanical, or 2 mechanicals, one on each wrist. An expensive G-Shock (by which I mean, priced between $200 and many thousands) seems to me to be a contradiction of what a G-Shock is: superior basic function and no frills. It seems silly, like a solid gold Seiko 5 or a $200,000 deluxe Volkswagen Bug. 

John Mayer? A disappointment to me, but it's not his fault that such big expectations were set upon him. A disappointment MUSICALLY. As any kind of horological expert, he's not a disappointment, he's a joke. Or maybe not even a joke, but just a punchline. 

Hodinkee? Easier for me to take seriously when they're not involved in this sort of thing. 

But I have to remember that it's a mistake to take anything to do with watches too seriously. For about 40 years, quartz watches -- such as the G-Shock -- have been more accurate than mechanical watches. But we watch fanciers fancy mechanical watches almost all of the time. The biggest exception being the G-Shock, a very popular option among military special forces. 

 

But most of us who buy G-Shocks are just pretending to be commandos. (Do even commandos still actually need any sort of watches, or is that need now covered by phones and other computers, as it is with the rest of us? I have no idea.) The way that most people who buy diver's watches, which are mostly mechanical and can be extremely expensive, never go diving, and the way that most people who wear pilot's watches are not pilots -- and so forth. It's a big game which is all in our heads, the same way that most people who own Porsches which can go 200mph never drive them as fast as 100mph. The same way that very, very many things are just games in our heads.

It's all very, very silly, this business with watches. Whenever I forget that, I become even sillier.

An Open Letter to Hodinkee re: the Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical

You want me to get excited about the Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical, a new item in your online shop.

And maybe I should be very excited about it, I don't know.

I know that the Hamilton 992b pocket watch, made from 1940 to 1969 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was an outstanding watch in its time, maybe the one truly outstanding model made by the American company (the 992 and 992a, as well as most of the other models made by American Hamilton since the late 19th century, didn't quite get it right). But 1969 was a long time ago, and I don't know squat about the current Swiss Hamilton brand except that it's one of the many brands owned by the Swatch Group. Does it really have anything in common with the old American brand except the name and the look of the dial?

And even if it has a lot in common with the old American brand, does that mean that a new Hamilton is as good as a new watch from a quality Swiss brand? Horological technology hasn't stood still for the last 50 years. A good new watch tends to be much more durable, reliable and waterproof, to name just 3 things, than a good watch made in 1969.

If all of you watch journalists didn't tell me to get excited over each and every watch you write about -- with the lone exception, as far as I know, of the Watch Snob® at askmen, who goes perhaps too far in the other direction -- then I actually might get excited about watches even more often than I already do, which is very often.

Just not about every single watch. Your recent rave review of the new overpriced mechanical piece of crap from Timex, to name one egregious example, was not helpful in this regard. You wrote that even if it's not a great watch, hey, it's only $200. For some of us, $200 is actually a lot of money which we'd rather not throw away if we can help it, especially not when $200 will get us several perfectly good mechanical watches from Seiko. And for a watch enthusiast for whom $200 really isn't a lot, it still could be $200 toward the price of something like a nice Longines, which might cost 5 or 10 times as much as the new mechanical Timex, but will look much nicer (because it's the actual item which the Timex [American English for "fake Rolex"] is trying to resemble), keep much better time, last far longer than 10 times as long as the Timex, etc, etc.

But that's the sort of advice one never gets from watch journalists, with the exception of the Watch Snob, and for all I know, he has to remain anonymous because if any of you wrote what you really think and it were known who you were, the entire industry would banish you and you'd never be able to write about any new watch again unless you bought it, and, unfortunately, not all of you can afford to spend a million Euros a year on watches, year in and year out, because life is unfair. I realize there must be reasons for the current state of affairs, and I don't think that people who write about watches are bad people.

But until some of you buck the trend and start writing in a much more straightforward manner, how will things ever change?

Journalism Devoted To Watches

First of all, there's the Watch Snob. Or should I say first, last and everything in between? I'm new at this, I've been really looking for quality horological journalism for a matter of mere months, and I certainly hope there are are worlds of quality writing about watches as yet unimagined by me, but at the present time, the Watch Snob is the only writer about watches I feel I can trust, because he's the only one -- the only one! -- who writes openly negative things about watches he doesn't like. The only one who has openly negative headlines on some of his columns.

Everybody else I've encountered so far -- everybody! -- seems to me like a more or less obvious part of the advertising branch of the watch industry. Websites such as WatchTime and Hodinkee are interesting, but I can't recall a single article on either site which was even faintly negative, overall, about any watch. And those two sites are interesting in part because they're not nearly as obvious about it as a lot of other sites claiming to be magazines. All of these sites have big, expensive-looking ads on them, and it seems that they are competing for watchmakers' ad revenue by flattering them, as opposed to giving the reader some usefully unfiltered opinions.

I don't agree with the Watch Snob about everything -- if when I get rich I'm going to get the watches I want to have, and not spoil my own enjoyment by worrying about whether the Watch Snob approves or rolls his eyes or openly ridicules me or whatever -- and he actually is quite a snob in general, not just about watches, and that certainly is a bore -- but unless I'm drastically mistaken, he is actually quite honest and unabashedly frank in his columns, and that is a service to the reader. For just one example, in his latest column, a report from Baselworld 2017, he states that Cartier, which has been making jewelry for a long time and watches for a short time, is "still struggling" to gain credibility as a watchmaker.

Up until I read that column today, I was under the impression -- the surprising impression, to me -- that Cartier had been generally accepted as one of the world's finest watchmakers, because up until today, that had been the tone of absolutely everything I had read about their watches from absolutely everyone whom I suspected of possibly being some sort of expert. Thank you, Watch Snob!

Besides what we generally think of as journalists (including bloggers), there is one major online source of information about watches, and it is a source which is in no way lacking in negative reactions to this or that watch. I'm talking about online forums where watch enthusiasts gather to talk about watches. The biggest such gathering place of which I currently know is at the website Watchuseek. But I'm not sure what to make of the information I get from such forums. A lot of the participants there seem to be biased in favor of a particular brand or model which they happen to own -- I've been guilty of the very same sort of biased writing on this very blog. By the way, this is my Seiko 5:

There are many like it, but this one is mine -- or against some brand with which they seem to have had some completely atypical bad luck: for example, they may have owned a particular model which kept terrible time and broke down very soon after they got it, when the model in general is famous for its precision and reliability.

I hear that in some such cases, the person writing about such bad experience actually has had no such experience with the brand or model in question, but happens to own a store which sells a brand or model which competes in the marketplace which the one they're denigrating. I hear that in some cases, manufacturers actually encourage their employees go online and slander the competition.

I repeat: I HEAR such things, I have no idea how often they actually happen.

Maybe if I spent a huge amount of time in such forums, I would gradually get a sense for which of the participants was knowledgeable and frank, and start to be able to sift the signal from the noise. Maybe. It seems like a huge investment to make, for a questionable possibility of an eventual payoff of unknown proportions.

In the meantime, other then the Watch Snob, where are the honest horological writers at the world's magazines and newspapers? Are there any? Does the Watch Snob publish under a pseudonym because the entire watch industry would snub him if they knew who he was, making it difficult or impossible for him to do his job?