Horological Meandering

bernard cheong
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3 Macromania "to have a future 2015 Masterpiece below $5,000"

Macromania is more than big pictures.

Answers to why I like Dufour, who remains a personal and family friend since 1998 or so.
I recognise his skilled work, just like a collector will recognise a Bertone or a PininFarina.
It's not the brand.
For work of Dufour, exceeding his known ones...they can be found and seen. I have what I want.

For a man who answers to a boardroom or to an auction market, he is as honest as his employers will allow.

Next. During the 10 years when I taught clinical medicine, I said " Do not confuse quality of work, with beauty of work."
One emphazises discipline, the other is an ability, a gift, to deliver and to express joy and happiness to the observer, and to the owner often 100x more.

Judgment will divide, as it is designed to be. There is a right and a wrong, but there is also a time when such is right or wrong. It's called singularity in continuum, in my foolishness.

In the classic film  "The Eiger Sanction", Clint Eastwood's character of a history professor alias CIA asassin almost pays the ultimate price for beauty...100 year old canvass/wood with a 1/2 inch of emotionally applied paint from linseed.
Greubel Forseys brought that to reality.

An aging professor, assassin and climber, fights the most dangerous face of Eiger to do his job. Kill a man who will bring death to hundreds...and be paid a painting.

Big macros changed the world when people could share them for free.

Most of all, it seeded changes to watch making from 1998.

WHY?
Some people began switching to digital, it was very hard.
I mean, it was 30 over years from film.

It took alot of convincing.
But, it created the watch industry...because we could see.

Sight brought so much into the watch. Imagine if nobody ever drew or painted. Just for the heck of making a picture.
Not for study or working or building or science....but just to make a picture.

Up till the late 90s, we bought watches for the way they worked to deliver time.
There was status, some small hobby, some small image projection.

But there were no arguments over issues.
Debates over what is beauty versus quality.
Much more on this later.

A better man, Anthony Whiten, once said that any cloack/watch examined (before macro digital) was nothing more than a lack of precision as we understand the word.

Noisy...a waste of energy, vibrations...similar, shafts of visible light...similar.
Macromania ( my word), Dufour, the web, digital resolution, forums online, Japanese Seiko philosophy and now in a smaller way Greubel Forsey...bring us closer to precision.

Let me have one word. I must state that I write to share, not to influence.
It's an honor when people introduce me as the "Rainmaker" as long ago as 2004.
But I don't deserve that.

It's people who create economies.
I was relevant enough to have people waste their energy to dislike me, I am grateful.

So, back to the Sony 707.

The 2 megapixel DSC-F505 was revealed back in August 1999. Then in April 2000 Sony announced an upgraded DSC-F505V, it was essentially the same but with a 3.3 megapixel sensor.
And some two years since the F505, Sony has revealed the 5 megapixel F707. This digital camera has the same lens / swivelled body design of the F505, indeed at first glance their are a lot of similarities, it is an impressive evolution
in the best sense of the word.

The F707 still features a 'Carl Zeiss' lens, uses a larger 2/3" CCD.

The Sony F707 created a collector called "bernard cheong", me. It allowed me to speak thru technology I never dreamed of.

Most of all, it allowed me to share personal pursuits. Passions that, like doing static yoga stretching, were secret since I always thought they bored people.
See how wrong I was.

By 2000, I had already bought a whole era of Langes, the Blumlein era. Even being so anal as to buy all the versions of the Lange 1...even a bracelet Lange 1 platinum I own.

Yes, by 2000, I sort of got the idea some people liked watches, but I think they like Pateks and Rolex...like I did/do till now.

I was from a lower class background, and the more or less inexpensive watches were what I could afford. I had also 2 kids aged 10 and 8 by 2001.

There were only budding forums, Timezone and later thepurists.

The one thing people didn't see in me, but I believed I was, is that I am a thug. Yep. By age 21, I had fought barefisted, broke at least 1 table by falling on it, thrashed a 2,000 sq feet pub in a 4 by4 man fight...all of that.

The strange thing was that I collected watches, stamps, old comic books, old leather bound books of first ditions, newspaper event cuttings from the shot from the knoll to the footprint on the moon.
I was a funny guy.
But a thug.

There is one thing about thugs...we don't like people who feel as if they are better than others, especially when it's not me...strange. I have no issues about people who feel they are better than I. But man, my hair would rise when I sense the
feeling of "the privileged".

In 2004, an unknown man called Wei Koh called to interview me...for Hong Kong Tatler.
I liked the guy, I don't talk to him any more because he recorded confidential information, and represented it out of context, without consulting or telling me.

The thug in me had already grown tired. I guess he liked money, and spoke better to epople with money.
The watch making world brought out so many more of these insincere people, in my eyes...which are mine.

There was also Matthew Morse. Wei used him. Matthew was a funny guy who immediately struck me as a person who doubted me, how on earth will or would a punk like me, own such watches?

So, he asked for an interview, and because in those days Watchtime didn't have the budget, told me to send him my own "photoshoot", but unlike (I suspect) other refined collectors, this china man had to get my shoot done on 6x6 transparencies.

Those *#@%ing kodachromes cost money.

OK. I know the deal. I am, was not hard up to appear on magazines, if I did, I would buy branded watches....but nonetheless..I hired a photographer, used my trusty Hassy..which I doubt Matthew uses for rough play...and shot the damned thing.

Matthew...it was a different world then.

Forgive me....I was being unkind to you.

I didn't own enough unbranded watches yet in 2004, so I borrowed them from The Hour Glass...I later owned in excess of all that, so it does not go down as BS.

Revo was born earlier, not premature, I was nicely in the first few issues.

But brands were kings, rulers and dictators. I used Revo devoiusly to help Dufour, Vianney,Lange, IWC and a few others to rise up against Patek and Rolex. But fairly...in my eyes.

Revo, I knew, could not resist temptation to be the best, make money and fame...hell, I can't!

If you brought weapons of advertisement, previously unaffordable to the independents, Patek and Rolex will kneel.

My game worked to a T.

To test it, I used HWRT's project Opus. Goldpfeil had failed, but in my own game, I made the equalizer.

I completed 3 books, UN, Dufour and Vianney...published them myself, made enough money to finance the better independents by buying or leveraging retailers to buy. I raised a small army of previously unknown, unsupported people.

Hucksters soon came...but I will not go into that.

My bigger plan was a personal challenge with Mike Tay of TheHourGlass...I like the guy.

I proposed that we could help build an economy that previously didn't exist. It was called making the industry of watchmaking into art.

I know Mike feels watchmaking is never art at all...because it's mass produced.

Well. I feel, that if cars and planes could be so..."art", so would machines, I had been around in 1976 with some olympus camera designers, and they had shown me that light could bend thru a scope, to insert into the body...wow...1976.
I recall, the word...industrial design....I said it was art.

My second MR s Spyder almost made it to installation art, and I was in the car...survived.

Convincing Micheal Tay was much harder.

Today...Micheal says its art.

I hope he allows me into his shops again.

So..with my limited finances, I saved for a Japanese sports car...I must have had the right taste, because I chose the Datsun SSS sports sedan, one of history's most significant inexpensive cars to fight Porsche.
I bought the Toyota MR2 T bar, the first model....it was not allowed to be brought into Singapore...but I raised a ruckus, and soon, I was the first to own it.

Sadly...by 1990s, my first generation ground zero, self made wealth cracked under sucess....I bought a Mercedes SL, also the 1st in Singapore. Those days, no one will buy a cabrio. But my T bar toyota was a good teacher.

The lesson was....I lost sight of the cars, I bought brands, adverts, etc....in 1990 or so...my many antique buying trips to UK, brought me to one LJK Setright, an old funny guy, who liked me.

But more...I met, once, a man called Jeremy Clarkson..curly hair, a thug...like me...I think he sort of liked the way I spoke english...which was badly.

He told me to start writting for CAR...in asia. I took his advice, and I was a motor journalist, and again...I only reviewed cars I owned. The car business turned worse...making cars cost$450,000 USD for a basic Porsche 911,
and $100,000 USD ffor my Toyota MR2.

So...I have to buy less cars.
I own only 4 today. Inexpensive ones. But for a new 911 Cab bought oct 2013....in spore, we can keep the cars only 10 years....so the watch market blossomed.

Imagine..this was 1998...18 years ago.

This cheap Spacewagon, which I loved so much....cost me $116,000 sgd ?!? Crazy..now it is crushed and could be a part of the Patek Nautilus you own, or one of mine!

At the same time or so...this older Hublot Subaquaneous...is a 2000m watch, its as thin as the Patek below, and is the same size.

Imagine the HUGE 2000m watches we have today...now...what is beauty and what is quality?

We must have improved on one.

My 20 year or so old Patek!!! I had, still have, this old version of Patek...that it should have a flip open half hunter, hobnail like looking rim, and some meaningless subdials on dial, which must be emaculately white...enamel, painted enamel white,

Not serviced. No trouble.

Beauty.

However, it looses out on quality and beauty, after I saw all or any Greubel Forsey. It's the extreme use of over the top finish as well as materials as well as the cut.

They should have used it for the King'smen.

People saw the "art" in watches so quickly.

My own employees complex watches which MDs and CEOs wear in the UK....but the depth of knowledge is not there. If cars cost the same, they will not buy watches. Period.
An entry level condo 900 sq foot here costs 1 million bucks sgd....99 leasehold.

Landed homes, freehold begin at 4 million for 2300 sq feet.
But packed into narrow lanes.

I live in the forested hilltop, 471 feet sea level. No buildings behind, for 3 miles. Useable land area 16,000 sq feet. Freehold.
Average prices go into the 12 to 18 million.

How can I pay for anything like that, with zero in bank account, and parents and kids to look after? Plus wife, also with poor parents.

Honestly. It was my interest in watches second, and GOD..Jesus...FIRST.
No doctors who start at ground zero live, or even grow bigger, like buying Greubel Forseys.

People always ask..how come they cant do the same?
I don't know.

But I do know 2 things:

(1) I made money when no one wanted to buy Panerais. Enough to push me into the "zone".

(2) All gamblers, but I don't gamble, are very particular about my watches. And to a lesser extent, businessmen. I am talking about a sample of 2004 to 2013....that within the limits of $10,000 to $200,000 sgd,

they are willing to buy my watch, not FS but they will offer me, that I cant refuse, a price no one will do. Painfully, I sold at over 100% profits, a few of my treasured watches to them....so that I could buy my first Greubel second hand.
    The fact that "good luck" became a legend in my part of this world helped me to move yet into another zone.

I will stop here.

There is so much I don't understand about my own life.

Again.

My thanks to Vianney Halter, Dufour, Gunther Blumlein and Max Busser for believing in me.

And to John Werner of Richemont for believing in my long term vision, that Cartier, Bulgari, Hermes and all I have written about will become art and even more valued...portable, sustainable and tough...and on reflection, costs as much as canvass or any emotional creation that takes valued time.

I hope I have not hurt anyone...even Wei Koh.

And answered a part of some kind posters questions.

MacCallan Whiskey will be celebrating an anniversary, and a rare threesome of Greubel Forseys, all in platinum, from the first series will be there to illustrate that some things last....forever..not just diamonds.

Oh..before I forget.

You will enjoy this SEIKO. I bought it.

I love it.

I love it even more than the RM whatever.

Plus...it costs so little..comparatively ly.

There is beauty everywhere.

NOW...if the industry simply stops making watches...all over the world, for 12 months...all in 2016...retailers will breathe.

Customers will learn.

Prices will normalize. Maybe stable. Stocks will clear. Workers can tidy the factories up. Retailers can audit.

I think it will...call it Bernard's blunder nomics.
 

Look at the gold one, and the white quartz one.

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