WorldTempus Rant #1 - I Love Watches
Hello there and welcome to "Rants" on WorldTempus. I am pleased that WorldTempus has allowed me to have a forum to speak about the watch industry. After 25 years in this business, I have seen and done a lot, and this gives me a unique perspective to be able to comment on what is happening today.
Though I am a journalist writing about watches, what fuels my work is that I really and truly love watches. I don't consider myself a "watch snob," however. I know people who only like mechanical watches, or only like watches with complications, or only like watches over a certain price threshold.
Not me.
I love all sorts of watches. Though I definitely am impressed by a highly complicated watch, I get equally excited about the latest quartz watches with cool designs or interesting features. For example, in my own personal collection, I have a real mixture of fine timepieces, like Bovet, Carl F. Bucherer and Zenith, but I also have entry-level watches from a number of other brands, both mechanical and quartz. And I love, and wear, them all.
My love affair with watches started early. When I was making action/martial arts feature films with Hong Kong's Seasonal Film Corporation, I bought what I considered a nice watch each time we wrapped a movie. Back then, I was buying Citizen watches, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Citizen to this day (one of my favorite watches in my small collection is my Citizen Minute Repeater).
While living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, home to Hamilton Watch, I began to learn more about watches. My father-in-law at the time had been a master watchmaker for Hamilton (and helped to design the watch Hamilton made for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey), and the more I learned, the more I found I loved watches. I bought a few Hamilton mechanical watches and then started writing about watches on the side - my speciality then was film work and law enforcement writing.
Between writing and producing films, I began to grow my clients in the watch business, and became a regular writer for InSync Magazine (which is now Watch Journal, and I am still its international editor). I covered the industry for National Jeweler, and that parlayed into becoming international editor for the bible of the watch industry, Europa Star (for which I continue to write). Today, most of my writing is about watches for magazines around the world. While I still do some film work, I teach writing and film at Webster University in Geneva and I still write about law enforcement from time to time.
Watches continue to be a love of mine, and I look forward to sharing my thoughts about watches and the watch industry on WorldTempus. In future Rants, I will pull no punches when talking about what is right and wrong with the watch industry.
Watch this space - I will be back soon.