Mini-review: Ming Worldtimer 29.01

 

After almost two years of waiting, my Worldtimer 29.01 is finally here. There is a lot to like: Firstly, it’s a true Worldtimer, which means that you can tell the time in every time zone (as indicated by different city names in the outer rings of the dial) at all times, in one glance, without pressing any pushers or touching the crown.  While the pictures available online show a full black "city ring" (which was accurate for the prototype) the production version comes with some kind of black and blue gradient ring that rotates in the direction of the sun in order to serve as one of the coolest night/day indicators I have seen.  This bonus feature was a very cool surprise when the watch finally arrived.  

The Schwarz-Etienne movement designed for Ming is a sight to behold: it has a lot of depth for the size, it comes with a gold micro-rotor and a skeletonized barrel and just the right level of decoration to suit the overall aesthetics. The hands are made of sapphire. The lume is incredible: every single city name (pretty much every element of the dial) is coated in super-luminova, so it can be easily read in the dark. The size is perfect: it is big enough to be legible and to command the right wrist presence yet it’s also the kind of piece that you can slide under the cuff with ease. All of the above makes it an extremely wearable watch yet a relatively odd one: some kind of distant relative to the archetypical world timer that Patek has deeply implanted in our imagination. What is it really? A sports watch or a dress watch? Well, it is very wearable in its own right, but it is not the classic mapa-mundi world timer with the kind of design language preferred by 90-year-old Swiss bankers (you would probably never find lume in one of those). In the style of Ming, it does away with all those old-world design elements that speak of understated wealth in favour of contemporary versatility: It is a watch that you can wear under the cuff or in plain sight, with a business suit at a board room or with your sneakers at a Sunday soirée. It probably wouldn’t work too well at a ballroom gala, but it doesn’t need any type of Swiss-banker regalia to fit in on your daily life. It’s just extremely easy to wear. 

The Ming Worldtimer 29.01 is not a bargain by any means, but released in a limited edition of 100 (excluding the 25 pieces of the Dubai edition with arabic city names) it seems to me that Ming has stayed true to its motto of making watches for connoisseurs. This is not the watch that you buy to impress your Tinder dates, but a piece of horology for real watch geeks. For people who are deeply lost in this rabbit hole, for the kind of oddballs who don’t need to be explained what a worldtimer or a micro-rotor are. For the type of dudes who want those two elusive complications in their collections and realise that having them packed in a limited edition of 100 by a very promising independent watchmaker is something special. Not a bad deal after all, even at the price point. 

Nitpicks: (1) No way to account for daylight savings, but hey, Patek doesn’t do that either. (2) The Ming signature lugs are also not my favorite thing but they are growing on me.

Flying Back to Casablanca

Flying Emirates has its perks. One of my favorites is being able to watch the classics: Many fellow travellers gravitate towards Gone with the wind, but I tend to prefer Casablanca.  For starters, it’s not a story about spoiled beautiful southerners and their struggles to find a husband. This is the story of Rick Blaine, a salon-owner, a gunrunner and a roulette-fixer who finds himself faced with exacting choices at the edge of a world dominated by the third reich.

Rhett Butler has its memorable lines, but Rick’s drunken admonition: “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine” is really the kind of conjuration that all gentlemen may have used on certain days when the past comes back to haunt them in the form of a painfully beautiful woman. It’s hand down one of the coolest lines in the history of Cinema. Yet Rick has no proclivity for the lachrymose: Casablanca is not a cheap tale of impossible love, it is a story about what it means to be a man when the going gets tough. It is a story about staying true to oneself at virtually any cost. 

It brings us to a lawless Casablanca that is the last stop and gateway out of a world that has gone to hell. All its denizens are there in passing and most of them seem to be plotting an escape. The planet seems to be crumbling as we witness all this. Or not: The nazis seem to be finally losing the war. But for some, like Rick, there is no escape possible, the rumour goes that he is wanted for a dire crime somewhere in New York.

All the right images are there: A loyal friend who warns her about all the water under the bridge and refuses to play that song that reminds you of her. A quick-witted policeman who has everything for sale and never pays for his drinks. A resistance hero who escaped a concentration camp and now looks impeccable on a double-breasted jacket. A hauntingly beautiful woman who left you waiting one day by the train station, as the nazis marched into Paris. In Rick’s words: “A guy standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look in his face because his insides have been kicked out”. ¨Not an easy day to forget. I remember every detail. The germans wore grey, you wore blue”.

If Godard was right about great movies and tragic endings, Casablanca is also great on that count: It closes with a half fatal finale comparable to those in good westerns, where cowboys ride into the sunset. Rick knows that he won’t be able to live with any other choice. And it is in that sense that Casablanca is a master tale about finding the courage to do the right thing at any cost and without flinching, a grand work (full of great music) about masculinity, about being vulnerable and strong at the same time. It’s been more than 80 years and we should all still be a little more like Rick. I certainly hope so.

Red Flag Hunting

-“He would need to look like Kurt Cobain”, said a good female friend back in the day about Juan, another friend in his early 20s who seemed to have come to the conclusion that a good way to get in girls’ pants was to play love songs for them in his acoustic guitar. And so it was, vicariously through Juan, that I learned very early on an important lesson that can be easily translated into many other scenarios: Don’t be the guitar guy. (At least not if you don’t look like Cobain).


One would expect this sort of emotional education to be relatively easy to come by in the age of dating apps. Practice makes the master and it almost seems that anyone with some sensible selfies to upload can go on a dating rampage for four weekends straight. There is even a sort of parlance amongst experienced daters to talk about this: Red flags.


A guy who describes all their exes as “crazy”, a person who just can’t be nice to the waiter, the guy who picks up the tab but makes sure you notice how much he is paying. The emotionally immature narcissist who pulls out his/her guitar to grab the fix of attention he/she so desperately craves. We all have our red flags, but it should be easier to educate oneself out of them in the times of Bumble.


But there's places amongst places.


The trendy red flag in these coordinates could be easily confused with the notion of gold-diggerism or the myth of the sugar daddy. In fact, a couple of good friends who have spent some years in this part of the world tend to explain the rise of this -phenomena- by simply pointing out that there is many a rich man around who is willing to offer financial incentives to a lady (or a few, depending on his budget) in exchange for the illusion of having a girlfriend. The most pragmatic ones, the anecdote goes, are in it simply for regular sex: coitus at will, without much questions, under what we could describe as some kind of subscription model.


However, while I partly agree that the red flag I am talking about is enabled by this kind of masculine willingness and cash availability to exchange money for sexual or emotional favours (or both), I think there is a big flip-side to all this. Yes: There is of course your professional gold-digger and your happy-chappy 65-year-old sugar daddy here and there. But I think the issue is slightly more complex.  


What worries me is the cognitive dissonance of some sisters I have met on the way who are genuinely looking for the companionship and partnership of a sensible man but are also too ready to suggest that he should make disproportionate financial -investments- on her or her wellbeing during the dating stage. Let me paint the picture more accurately: She is beautiful, she dresses well, she smells fine, she is somewhat witty and cultured, she has a normal job. But boom: I really love this bag she says, giving you the puppy eyes, on the second or third date, as you pass by the Prada boutique.


The easy answer is to dismiss these sisters as amateurish gold-diggers or more compassionately: As gold-diggers who haven’t discovered themselves just yet. And at this point I must confess that I despise that word to the point that I have never used it to refer to any woman regardless of whether I thought she fits the description. But don’t get me wrong: That could be the case for many, they might just be missing a therapist who helps them realise that deep down they really hate men and that their GD instinct stems from a subconscious need to take revenge for all the bad things their fathers did in their childhoods. Be it what it may, I think men-and-woman provider-receiver relations are much more complicated and fascinating than this. In other words, I (perhaps naively) think there is a few of these ladies who still have some possibility for redemption and that’s the public service I feel like making today at the risk of sounding preachy.


Take it from a self-proclaimed feminist who picks up all the tabs in all the dates: No decent, self-respecting man whose company you would really enjoy for a significant amount of time is very eager to establish any relationship in which there is such a vulgar quid-pro-quo of emotions and/or sex for anything else. I don’t mean any superhuman, I mean the decent self-respecting man that you claim you want to have: The one that is soft but also rough, the one who plays love songs in his guitar but is not needy (and perhaps looks a bit like Kurt), the financially independent man who is ready to raise those kids that you want to have, the one who actually likes you, not just your private parts. Yes: We are providers by nature, providing for a loved one is one of the most fulfilling masculine experiences to be had, but no: we don’t even remotely want to feel like your sugar daddy nor enter into a one-side-pays-all sort of contract.


Again, no decent man with basic self-respect would ever accept that sort of arrangement or anything that resembles it too closely, but here is a more practical tip for the day-to-day that one might share with zero resentment and in the form of tough love: Regardless of how gorgeous you think you look on this date, if you really start feeling the urge of a present or anything expensive that is not paid with your own money, no matter how rich you think your romantic suitor is, keep in mind that the only scenario in which you can get away with even hinting or suggesting anything that resembles the sort of -deal- that we have been discussing without insulting the gentleman in question is if you look like a Victoria Secret model and (please note that this is an AND, not an OR) if you are as good in bed (and other places) as a p$%nstar. If you were to meet those  two conditions and he doesn’t take the deal (and many of my fellow men actually have that level of self-respect) it’s OK, at least you won’t come across as pathetic as Juan.