WATCH ME BITCH!!!

 
or Apple makes you looking smart but won't get you smart!
or The first week with my Chinese Smart Watch

First there is two kind of watches, the ones with French names made in Geneva, Switzerland, and the others, all made in China, iWatch included.

There were times where cheap watches were never on time and then appeared quartz. We could have "made in China" a watch for few francs which would be always exact. Some buttons might get loose, the display could fall off and the bracelet eventually would break but the time would never be wrong anymore. Next step was the smart phone, a device permanently connected to the internet and some "Atomic Clock" on some satellite gravitating around earth.
It is clear, if you own a smartphone, you don't need anything smarter on the top, it would be just a useless accessory. And that's the problem, watches are the only expected jewelry and accessory for a man. You got it girls, save your money for beautiful diamonds on your ears or on your neck, your wrist should be free from anything related to unglamorous work!
Back to the boys, you want to show off, seduce, or impress, can you do it with the iWatch? The answer is yes,... for a little while. I would say six months, and then Rolex will shine again brighter than ever! 2.000 euros for an old vintage and 5.000 for a major vintage in good state. You better start to save those 350 euros you planned to give to Apple, and you will get faster your "timeless" piece of jewelry!
Some would say that expensive watches look like the fake but it is not true, it is YOU who look fake wearing cheap copies! If you spend a fortune on a watch, it shows!
Some would speak about the technology, so I bought me a real smart watch who does 10 times more things than the iWatch, costs a quarter of the price and is available since last year, so two years before the iWatch.
After one week, and the annonce of the Cupertino product, I have to admit I really enjoyed the attention on the gadget, and it is really fun. The battery stays for four days, I put a 32 gigabytes micro sd card and a Sim card (Apple inconditionnels, just dream of that) and after many hours of settings, it worked a kind of well. At the end it does almost as much as my smartphone. I can listen to endless music, watch porns, read sms and even phone. Everything the same but in much more complicated because the screen is too small, the speakers and the microphone too. The sound started to make sense only with the bluetooth headset. It means, if you do not have a sim card in your watch, why don't you hear your music directly from your phone which has to stay anyway always less than ten meters close. On the top, you can't connect a headset and a watch on the same bluetooth cell phone.
So, is there any real use for a smart watch for me when I think a Rolex looks better on my wrist? First I don't have a Rolex yet (but I feel it coming), and then I started to perceive as ugly the omnipresence of the smartphones. Everybody in the street with these screens on the ear and all my friends listening to me with a distracted ear when they are simultaneously grindering, facebooking or just googling. To reinvent the way I communicate, I got me a seven inches tablet with usb, sd card and... a sim card and it will be my new phone. In the competition on the biggest phone, we have a winner: Philippe Claude! No I won't put the huge screen on my ears, I just said it is ugly, I will use the bluetooth headset. The headset is from Sennheiser of course and will be replaced with an almost invisible bluetooth microphone to pin on the jacket when less technology should be seen. Then finally the black tie situations with no room in the pockets for a tablet and even less possibility for a man purse. Only there the watch will make sense because it has a sim; emergency calls (with the pin mic) will be still possible but not welcomed.

At the end, all this advanced technology should make design disappear, your body should be the nicest thing about you. Accessories should accentuate your person, not distract from it!

I remember my telephones

I remember everything.
I remember not having telephone until 1973.
I rememeber the queue at the payphone after 6p.m because communications would be cheaper.
I remember the cable from rotary phone would come directly from the wall. "couper le téléphone" would be done with scisors!
I remembered all the numbers of my friends (maybe 10) by heart, of course it took five minutes to dial each time!
I remember paying 2500 francs for the first answering machine from France Telecom in 1986 and it was as big as a computer tower
I remember my first cordless Sony SPP-50 brought back illegally from New York in 1989
All that to stay three years without telephone in former East Berlin between 1993 and 1996. We would have a note block on the door as an anwering machine.
Cell phones would get popular shortly after that...

The toothbrush philosophy.

If you share your life with a toothbrush collector (collection and obsession are also sometimes very close), some aspect of your life will be different. For example, before leaving for holidays and visiting the nearby drugstore, you will be asked if you have enough humor for German flagged toothbrushes. I answered: “As long as they stay in their packaging, everything is OK, but my humor stop at the second they come out of it!”

Few days later, I read this:

“So, the toothbrush, trivial by definition, because belonging to the intimate register of personal hygiene, with Philippe Starck, comes out of the bathroom, without losing its role over there. Pleasing for the dentist, it stays interesting also for its esthetic.

Beauty doesn't participate to an external essence of the object, it flows and emanate from it. Ironically, the object frees itself from the classical surrounding of expensive and rare to be immediately accessible through its direct, efficient and seductive shape on the intellectual and esthetic level. Triumphing in the most unexpected area for art, the toothbrush works as a manifesto for the transformation of the trivial use in real pleasure.”

(Michel Onfray - Écrits sur Starck)

I read this to the toothbrush collector at the breakfast table and he wonders if Ai Weiwei is close to Philippe Stark in the perception of the common object. I have to tell that it is a totally opposite approach. Ai Weiwei takes a common object (the Chinese stool) and put it in a wonderful frame (the Martin-Gropius Museum) and does a “ready-made” à la Marcel Duchamp. The frame makes the art. Stark conceive a beautiful object (a design toothbrush) and put it in a very common frame (the bathroom).

Ai Weiwei use crystal, bronze or marble (classic materials for art) to design common objects (the cloth hanger), when Starck favorite material is the plastic. 

The German toothbrushes will lose the whole soccer mania aura which surround them once they will be used, so the packaging (the frame) transcends them as an art object.

The packaging of it doesn’t define my humor but my art perception!