Allgemein, Culture

Split seconds

When you least expect it, a split second becomes years. Anders Modig sits down for a coffee and makes an imaginary and takes a plunge into the ephemeral construction called time.

He looks down on me as he walks past my café table on Gerbergasse, holding hands with a beautiful woman. She is taller than him, and he is wearing pressed shiny dark pants, a blue shirt with pecacocky details like coloured buttonhole and a chequered muster on the inside of his collar.  A junior banker, a salesman? His face has not quite smoothened out the pimply stage, and he parading his new girlfriend in an obvious way.

His head slightly tilted backward, in a fascinating way. Is he trying to be as tall as her? Is he trying to hide his post-adolescent insecurity, or is it just to physically balance his long-strided, rather ridiculous bouncy gait with overly outwardly pointing feet? Within a split second he will tilt it back even more. But not just yet.

Within a split second he will tilt it back even more. But not just yet.

Her white tee and blue jeans with a rip over the right knee, the large, brown soft leather bag nonchalantly slung over her left shoulder and a face with no make-up, tells a story of a different, more relaxed, more individual path.

Look closer, and you will find that a split second can can contain an overwhelming amount of information. Photo: Anders Modig

At the moment he is trying to convince the world about feeling bees knees, but his insecurities shine through. He doesn’t know it yet, but she will leave him in a few weeks. When she will look back she will know that it was because he was disrespectful to her. It happened a few times in private, which made her a bit insecure. But it was not until it happened in public, when he made a really crude joke on her expense in her favourite bar, that she had had enough. Some years and boyfriends later she will remember the feeling, but not what the joke was all about. She will remember that nobody laughed at it, and that she without a word simply walked out from the bar and never looked back. He didn’t even try to follow her. Nor did her so-called friends. It will however take her another few years to realise that his behaviour was due to the same insecurities that give him the stupid wide gait she mocked him for from time to time. Not that her realisation will change anything though – understanding doesn’t necessarily equal forgiveness.

He doesn’t know it yet, but she will leave him in a few weeks.

But at the moment everything is still fine. As I look up from my book I first see their hands lovingly clenched together, before I see her. Her beauty momentarily stuns me; I must come across like an old elephant being hit by a tranquilizer dart the moment before it realizes what just happened. The young banker sees my reaction in the corner of his eye, and he tilts his head a couple more degrees and looks down on me. His eyes glaze over with aggression, as were his pupils entering a gladiator arena, they shout out ‘fuck off, she’s mine!’.

They shout out ‘fuck off, she’s mine!’.

But I am no threat; I am not even remotely interested in her. And he has no idea how wrong his possessive behaviour towards her is, even though he will soon find out. And he will learn. Not immediately, thanks to his predominantly male peer group, which will go on to keep reinforcing bullshit values and sexist jokes for another few years. But as they eventually grow up they will, at least, cut down on it. And once the young banker will realise what he actually did to her, how he fucked it up, then he will regret it. Regret and learn from it. Regret and learn – that’s what we do; I don’t care about what Édith Piaf says.

Regret and learn – that’s what we do.

The Triple Split Second Chronograph from A- Lange & Söhne. (press images)

Of course there are different kind of regrets, but there is at least one that belong in the good books. The one that you feel with a pang of bad consciousness just as you experience the enlightening ‘oh no moment’ about your mistake. The one that makes you think: “I regret that I acted that way, and I will try not to do it again”. You store that lesson in your brain’s limbic system and you do your best to move on, but you don’t flog yourself over what you just did –you honestly try to see clearly beyond yourself, and learn from it. We all want to see more clearly from our mistakes, but oftentimes once is not enough. Blinded by blood trickling into our eyes from banging our head into a brick wall, we will try ever harder, before we realise that it is more comfortable and clever to use the door. Or simply walk around that brick wall.

You honestly try to see clearly beyond yourself, and learn from it.

But today, at this very moment, in time, during the split seconds that the young couple passes my table, he is completely oblivious about what is soon to come.  Today he is on top of the world. Today he is the one walking towards Barfüsserplatz holding the hand of a beautiful woman taller than him.

 

– Anders Modig

Anders Modig, based in Basel since 2013, has been a journalist for 15 years. He writes about watches and design for titles like Vanity Fair on Time, Hodinkee, Café and South China Morning Post.

He has been editor in chief of seven magazines and books, including the current annual design magazine True Design by Rado, and his company also organises events for clients like TAG Heuer, Zenith and Patek Philippe.

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Allgemein, blog, Fashion, Lifestyle

Viennese Walls

Is it because time is such an ephemeral illusion that we are obsessed with watches?

The glamorous jazz singer may be well past her due date, but the décolletage removes the attention from her crooked back, and her lips are redder than a blood moon. Accompanied by a Filipino band in bright red ties and purple too-large suit jackets, the voice has echoed between these Viennese walls of Eden Bar for 28 years, a voice that prior to that shared a stage with no one and everybody, including Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Swedish jazz legend Monica Zetterlund. And, as if untouched by time, the voice of Vera Love can still carry a tune from a bottomless well of sorrow straight to a bleeding heart.

Despite the fin-de-siècle luxury men’s club appearance of Eden Bar having remained more or less the same for 100 years, it would be a cliché to say that time in here has stood still – or at least to say only that. As I get older I realise that every moment in time is both forever frozen and a mere step towards the next moment and the next. 1-2-3, 1-2-3, like a relentless, never-ending and at the same time eternally pausing Viennese waltz.

Perhaps that is why we are obsessed with watches: they try to make sense of the unfathomable illusion we call time. Counting time makes it possible to look back, experience the now and predict the future – all at a glance! Thus the watch becomes an impossible paradox: a safe harbour in the middle of a furious ocean.

“Time has no undo button,” says Viennese industrial designer Rainer Mutsch, who calls Eden a “classic, to be experienced at least once.”

Time has no undo button

At the end of September he presents the Rado True Stratum, the first watch he has designed. With archaic materials and case and band made of ceramics, the dial shaped as an amphitheatre, the sweeping circular movement of a yellow second hand and a light-reflecting and shadowing black circle attached to the inside of the sapphire glass through vapour deposition, this product is very much a reminder that the new is always only a combination of old past efforts. A more or less scratch-free, without a doubt contemporary minimalist creation, it is nevertheless flirting not only with the boundaries of humanly possible industrial processes, but also with Greek architectural ideas of public spaces as well as 3,000-year-old Mesopotamian methods of measuring the movement of the sun, not forgetting the yellow handshake with 1960s designs by Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs for Braun.

Rainer Mutsch wearing the Rado True Stratum

The black True Stratum plays with the symbolic, but watches can also be explicit beyond our realm. Take a perpetual calendar, which is mechanically aware of leap years and thus shows you the right date for hundreds of years. There are many versions of these, but my favourite would be the Ochs and Junior Perpetual Calendar by Ludwig Oechslin in Lucerne. A lifelong experience with watches opened his doors of mechanical perception; a horological equivalence of Aldous Huxley or Archimedes, Oechslin around a decade ago realised that it would be enough to add only nine parts to a normal calendar movement to transform it into a perpetual calendar. But as he is Swiss and not Greek, he didn’t run naked through the streets screaming “Eureka!” Nor did he drop chemical substances to develop his work.

No, he just quietly placed the loupe over his right eye and kept on perfecting the idea. And in doing so he also multiplied the value of his simple-looking steel watches – mechanical alchemy, if you ask me. Watches’ ability to predict the future comes not only by showing the date.

Watches’ ability to predict the future comes not only by showing the date.

The Urwerk Zeit Device has a 1,000-year counter moving 22 millimetres in one millennium, and there are moon phases that show the exact position of this silvery celestial for thousands of years – which, by the way, is quite a feat given that a moon cycle lasts on average 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.8016 seconds. Andreas Strehler in Sirnach, canton Thurgau, has taken it even further – his strictly mechanical Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle 2M shows the right position of the moon for 2 million years.

The little snippets of information from our watches give us a frame for what was then, what is now and what is yet to come. And perhaps having a solid frame clarifies the illusion of time, thus increasing the possibilities for us to truly enjoy the canvas, perhaps even remove the notion of due dates?

– Anders Modig

Anders Modig, based in Basel since 2013, has been a journalist for 15 years. He writes about watches and design for titles like Vanity Fair on Time, Hodinkee, Café and South China Morning Post.

He has been editor in chief of seven magazines and books, including the current annual design magazine True Design by Rado, and his company also organises events for clients like TAG Heuer, Zenith and Patek Philippe.

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