Poor man's watch thread

[DorianGreen]

Dreyfuss&Co 1925 DGS00016-25
Quite a poor man's watch, £150 or so from sale.

Nice watch, I especially like salmon dials. Looking like a much more expensive timekeeper.

Also attractive on this bracelet.

 

[Kaplan]

I'm happy to be able to inform @am55 a little known fact: American Psycho was actually a book before the more widely known movie adaptation! No, really.

And in that, Patrick wears a Rolex. It's mentioned. A lot.

Was he written today I guess he might wear a Royal Oak or a Patek, but for the book and the time it takes place in, Rolex works perfectly among the other recognizable name droppings, like Armani, Oliver Peoples, etc.

 

[yorkshire pud]

Assuming this isn't a massive bait which I'm biting with full force, Rolex allegedly didn't want the negative association and so Christian Bale wore a similar looking (from afar) 2 tone Seiko 5.

Turns out Christian Bale wasn't wearing a Rolex in American Psycho

Among all the leading roles Christian Bale has played, most required a hefty watch be strapped to his wrist. Though it turns out for American Psycho – the most iconic of all – there was a case of mistaken identity

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

That being said the generic answer would be whatever is hot at the moment. That period of history is sort of over, or rather the bubble has shifted to other markets post 2008. A kind of cycle of discovery of underregulation, rapid growth, and slow growing but mammoth eventual regulator interest (currently happening to crypto). One thing is sure whatever "it" is, will look super dated in one cycle or two, just like any fashion. But this creates the layered diversity of mindsets that makes society interesting.

Ah, the magic of Hollywood??

 

[Jazzmenco]

I had a Dreyfuss&Co watch. Sold it. Loved the design but the crystal had a terrible glare that made it hard to read and impossible to photograph.

 

[yorkshire pud]

I'm happy to be able to inform @am55 a little known fact: American Psycho was actually a book before the more widely known movie adaptation! No, really.

And in that, Patrick wears a Rolex. It's mentioned. A lot.

Was he written today I guess he might wear a Royal Oak or a Patek, but for the book and the time it takes place in, Rolex works perfectly among the other recognizable name droppings, like Armani, Oliver Peoples, etc.

I once tried to read it, much prefer the movie though. Bale was a great bit of casting. He manages to make a truly loathsome character kind of likeable and funny 👍

 

[Jazzmenco]

I once tried to read it, much prefer the movie though. Bale was a great bit of casting. He manages to make a truly loathsome character kind of likeable and funny 👍

Kind of like the guy that played Escobar on Narcos. I felt guilty liking him.

 

[Michigan Planner]

Now availble on pre-order on the Yema website, the Urban Field.

View attachment 1965433


Something about this watch rather appealing to me.

Yema does have some nice looking watches but I had such a horrible experience with the accuracy of my Navygraf that I've been sort of turned off to them.

I will say that that was about 5 or 6 years ago now and there was enough backlash against their CS and quality back then that maybe they've cleaned up their act considerably since then. If were to buy a Yema again, I'd be sure to check some more recent posts over on WUS and/or buy from an AD like Gnomon who usually has pretty good customer service.

 

[Michigan Planner]

I once tried to read it, much prefer the movie though. Bale was a great bit of casting. He manages to make a truly loathsome character kind of likeable and funny 👍

I've read it a couple times. If you can get past Bret Easton Ellis's style of writing with massive blocks of text it really is an interesting book. I had seen the movie in the theatre when it first came out and really enjoyed it but after finally reading it I could see it in a different light - the dark humor of it all and Patrick's unraveling comes across so much better in the book than in the film which seems to focus much more on the horror. All that said, the book and the movie are still both great.

 

[Michigan Planner]

The thread is a reference to a defunct (literally) forum of the same name. It carries a little of the same spirit.

I think it interesting in that discussion that the PMWF members moved not to its replacement but to other mega-forums (Reddit, WUS, SF), which were simply nicer to use. I do decry the consolidation somewhat; it was nice having fragmented, tailored identities on the internet even if the tools have always been there to link them. It was also nice to be sure that kudos had been accumulated in a relevant manner, being therefore more meaningful to that particular hobby, as a mark of having added some value to members thereof in the past.

Speaking of the original PMWF forum, here's my MKII Graywater that was put together as a group buy for some of the members over there years ago!

 

[am55]

Speaking of the original PMWF forum, here's my MKII Graywater that was put together as a group buy for some of the members over there years ago!

Really interesting watch and one of the first times a diver makes me look twice.

 

[yorkshire pud]

Kind of like the guy that played Escobar on Narcos. I felt guilty liking him.

Apparently that's the thing with Psychopaths, they can appear quite charming and affable (but it's superficial).

I think the attraction of characters like Bateman, Escobar, Tommy in Goodfellas, Hannibal Lecter and Tom Ripley is that mostly they stick to murdering unlikeable people (but not exclusively)

In Batemans case he sometimes targets colleagues and acquaintances out of pure "snobbery" which makes him especially interesting.

 

[yorkshire pud]

I've read it a couple times. If you can get past Bret Easton Ellis's style of writing with massive blocks of text it really is an interesting book. I had seen the movie in the theatre when it first came out and really enjoyed it but after finally reading it I could see it in a different light - the dark humor of it all and Patrick's unraveling comes across so much better in the book than in the film which seems to focus much more on the horror. All that said, the book and the movie are still both great.

I like the Movie and I'm sure it's a great book but I just struggled to get engrossed in it for some reason. I still have it somewhere I might try again now I'm a little older.

If you can get hold of a copy, you might like "Judas Pig" (a thinly veiled true crime novel about a still active Psychopathic London Criminal)

Mystery of Judas Pig: Stranger-than-fiction story behind cult crime classic

It’s the turn of the millennium and one of East London’s greatest true crime stories, Judas Pig, is being written. Its anonymous author, a former gangster, has a bone to pick with the criminal underworld who want him dead.

www.rollingstone.co.uk

 

[Alan74]

"Judas Pig" looks interesting. Thanks for the rec. Personally, I love the American Psycho novel (I have a first British edition just for a bit of snobbish fun) but, probably for that reason, I couldn't stand the movie. It's just not American Psycho without the Habi-trail. IYKYK

 

[am55]

Apparently that's the thing with Psychopaths, they can appear quite charming and affable (but it's superficial).

I think the attraction of characters like Bateman, Escobar, Tommy in Goodfellas, Hannibal Lecter and Tom Ripley is that mostly they stick to murdering unlikeable people (but not exclusively)

In Batemans case he sometimes targets colleagues and acquaintances out of pure "snobbery" which makes him especially interesting.

Whether or not it was intended, I think that, as with Wall Street, having a prime, talented, great looking actor has changed the spirit of the work completely. It's not the first time that a director would apply their take on a work (we discussed Starship Troopers and Verhoeven in the other thread).

How I experienced it was not how people here describe their experience of the book. The film itself makes it ambiguous if the murders in fact happened or not so on the first degree you have the "it was all a dream" but on the second degree this is a sort of reverse Walter Mitty. Either because he gets away with a lot, or just because his life is "generally awesome and I wouldn't do the crazy stuff, myself, anyway", which is how I think an absolute ton of business school or even university graduates then interpreted it and still interpret it. Just like with Wall Street, whose greed is good speech used to be quoted in the corridors by the more capitalist undergrads, dreaming to emerge from the tolerable but dull and limited world that their working or lower middle class parents worked so hard to create for them, into a world of ease, lack of consequence, hedonism, and seemingly eternal youth. Ungrateful youth not heeding warnings, just like Socrates whinged.

For an example, see Alexis Vayner, who sent this video to get hired by UBS. He was publicly ridiculed as his application was swiftly circulated; the video was not in fact a parody but shows how people did (do?) buy into this mythos which I think is really sad for all the wasted youths of extraordinarily promising minds. When I grew up contrast collars were for the headmasters; by the time I hit the workforce Gordon Gekko had made them endemic in every bar of every financial district.

We don't really have a modern equivalent to either the 1980s or 2000s finance booms; closest might be the tech booms in the 2010s which let a lot of people take up overpaid positions as mediocre PM types and take up hopped IPAs whilst wearing Yeezys (these people are now posting photos of their Facebook/Google/etc. badge next to a laptop with 3-4 breezy paragraphs about fate intersecting the economy). I think generally the increased competitiveness of the global economy, in all sectors including the sclerotic financial industry of globalism and Empire, has diminished the importance of semiotics. And so the movie is a fantasy also in that respect, of a world where you don't have to do hard *work* but can simply just know the right moves, and glide through a gilded life thanks to gatekeeping, and that is part of its enduring appeal.

 

[DorianGreen]

Yema does have some nice looking watches but I had such a horrible experience with the accuracy of my Navygraf that I've been sort of turned off to them.

I will say that that was about 5 or 6 years ago now and there was enough backlash against their CS and quality back then that maybe they've cleaned up their act considerably since then. If were to buy a Yema again, I'd be sure to check some more recent posts over on WUS and/or buy from an AD like Gnomon who usually has pretty good customer service.

I only have one watch from Yema, this Flygraf Pilot M2: while not the most accurate, it's not disappointing either in time keeping, especially if you consider that I bought it on sale for under €500.