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Welcome to a very special bonus episode dug up from the archives, especially for your ears, from the nomos forum in 2023. Back then, Gary Steingart, famous New York author, was the special guest. The guest of honor. As a Nomos owner himself, he told us some of his stories and his own personal journey through watchmaking and and how he became an avid collector and a fan of the Saxon Maestro. So we're going to play this for you. It took me a while to find the audio and to clean it up well enough so that it could be heard, but I hope you enjoy it because it is another intimate and revealing take on the hobby of watchmaking and his passion for it.

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One day In February of 2016, I took a ride on the subway. This was a rare occurrence since turning 40. I started to suffer from a heightened sense of claustrophobia. A few years ago, I was stuck for an hour in an elevator with a man who weighed about 350 pounds, and his two grocery carts crammed the bags of nacho chips and bottles of ginger ale, an experience both frightening and lonely. The elevator, under all that weight, had simply given up. What if a subway train also refused to move? I began walking 70 blocks at a time, or splurging on taxis. But on this day I had taken the entry, suburbing 49th street and 42nd Street. A signal failed, and we ground to a horse. For 40 minutes we stood still. An old man yelled at the conductor at full value in English and Spanish. Time and space began to collapse around me. The orange seats began to march toward each other. I was no longer breathing with any regularity. This is not going to end well, I thought. None of this will end well. We will never leave here. We will always be underground. This right here is the rest of my life. I walked over the conductor's cabin. Sir, I said to him, I think I'm dying. City Hall. City Hall. We got a sick passenger, he said into his radio. I repeat, a sick passenger. Can you send a rescue train? A rescue train? My whole life I've been waiting for one. Sensing the excitement of someone suffering more than they were, the other passengers moved to my end of the car to offer advice, crowding in on me and making me panic all the more. One man was particularly insistent. I'm a retired firefighter, he said. I've been doing this 20 years, folks. Seen it all. This man here is hyperventilated. That's what he's doing. 20 years of firefighter, now retired. Going to take an Ativan now, I said. Reaching into my breast pocket. Do not do that, the retired firefighter said. They will only make you hyperventilate more. Trust me, I know what I'm doing. A middle aged woman approached me. You have to imagine, she said to me in a Polish accent, that eventually the train will move, that eventually we will come out of the tunnel. Shamed into not taking the Ativan by the retired firefighter, I looked down at my wrist. I was wearing a new watch, the first mechanical watch I have ever owned. Looking at the smooth, antiquated mechanical glide of my watches secondhand, I felt it, thought, calm them, ready for whatever happened next. As the conductor's radio flare on and off of promises from City hall, my recipe train never came. As the passengers around me discussed my fate, I wondered, can you hold your own world together while the greater world falls apart? The visible passing of time, second by second, seemed to provide a kind of escape route even as my body remained within the metal shell of the Spricken entry. Three seconds inhale. Three seconds exhale. The watch was a Jonghans from Germany, derived from a design by the Bauhaus influenced Swiss architect, artist, and industrial designer Max Bil. I had bought it at the MoMA shop for what in my early Innocence watch days seemed like the fantastic astronomical price of a thousand dollars. Its no frills. Form follow function, shape evoked civility in a tide of chaos, a ticking intelligence in the face of a new inhumanity. The train slowly moved again. The Polish woman smiled at me, we shuddered into Times Square, and I was, for a few minutes in time, safe. Every watch geek has an origin story. During childhood, my first best friend was a watch, a Casio H108 12 Melody Alarm. True to its name, the digital watch played 12 melodies, including Santa Lucia, Happy Birthday, the Wedding March, Jingle Bells, and even a song from my native Russian, Aliyunka, roughly red little berry, and I listened to that song every hour on the hour to make myself feel less homesick and scared. I spoke English miserably, but the watch had its own language, a computerized series of squeaks issuing from a tiny Japanese speaker to form passable melodies. My parents had bought the watch for me for $39.99 at a department store in Queens, a significant part of their net worth at the time, and it was easily my favorite possession until it caught the eye of a Hebrew bully my grandmother marked into the principal's office and used a hundred or so English words at her disposal. Bad boy chick. Take watch to lobby for its safe return. Eventually I made human friends and my musical Casio disappeared for good. My relationship with watches from that point on coincided with the women in my life. In high school my mother bought me a quartz Sako which pinched my wrist there with its ruse gold plated bracelets and was a bit out of place at my next stop, the very Marxist Oberlin College, where comrades were not encouraged to have gold things. After college, girlfriend bought me a diesel watch with the image of at least six continents on its dial to indicate just how worldly I was, and a subsequent girlfriend had it prepared after we had broken up, a gesture of unusual kindness. But by this time I thought of myself as a writer, and for a writer the money you make can be traded in for your creative independence. Hence what is permanently donate a rainy day fund. I've always tried to keep on hand enough cash to cover at least two years of expenses in case the public stops being interested in my books while plowing the rest into low cost index funds. Drift was comforting material goods uninteresting, bordering on gauche. And yet on April 12, 2016, I walked out of the Torlo Time Machine store on Nazen avenue in Gypty 7th street with a receipt for $4,137.25 and a new Lowe's Minimatique Champagneer on my wrist. Only in a watch forum do people clap when you spend money, Fiddler. The sales clerks bid me farewell with a cheerful lusty cry of dangratulations. By the standard of luxury watches, the amount I spent with small ide than entry level Rolex, it is about $6,000, or it was in 2016. With Pazeon's standard, I had just thrown away a small chunk, roughly 4.3 grinding days of MIT. And yet I was happy. The watch was the most beautiful object I'd ever seen. After mechanic attack on the subway, the urge for another Bauhaus inspired watch had become overwhelming and I compared many brands. The winner was a relatively new watchmaker called Normos, based in the Titus Saxon tile. An early spring sun glinted off my watch as I walked down Lexington Avenue. I took a photograph of the Minimati Calais, as if at any moment I would be forced to give it back. There is an entire genre of watch aficionados who take photos of themselves wearing their timepieces in front of landmarks and post them on watch forums. Well, that way it's the brand. Would I become one of these creatures? I ducked into a Pakistani place to eat a quail, but was worried about splashing grease on the vegetable tanned natural leather strap. The dial was champagne colored with an unexpected circle of neon orange around the second sub dial. These are wild colors, but in homeopathic doses. One of Knowlos's marketing texts reads pretty good, right? The dulled sapphire crystal are sharp rebuke to the thinner plate aesthetics you see on so many watches meant for men. The hour markers were pearled and and milled into the champagne dial to pick up its brass hue. The watch seemed to absorb and reflect light in its own way, storing it under its arched sapphire, making it golden. I took the watch off and turned it over. Some of the more interesting watches have an exhibition case back, allowing you to see the inner workings. The Nomos caliber, assembled almost entirely from hundreds of minuscule parts made in Germany, is a riot of sunburst decoration, tempered blue screws and a small constellation of rupees. A tiny golden ballast wheel spills and spins back and forth, regulating the type. Think of a pendulum swinging at a grandfather clock. Put a tremendously fast clip and this action to many viewers gives the watch the appearance of being alive. It is not uncommon for some watch enthusiasts to call this part of the watch its heart or even its soul. The Nomos was not a quartz watch built by robots in a giant factory in Asia. A German man or woman with real German problems had constructed this piece. Blues Gru by Russer. I was obsessed and I had time to indulge my obsession. I believe that a novelist should write for no more than four hours a day, after which returns truly diminish. Four hours a day, of course, leaves many hours for idle play and contemplation. Usually such a schedule results in alcoholism, but sometimes a hobby comes along, especially in middle age. For us so called wisps or watch idiot savants, all rogues lead to one Internet site, Hodinkee, the name being a slightly misspelled take on hodinki, the Czech word for watch. Hours of my days were now spent refreshing the sights, looking at elaborate timepieces, surrounded by wrist hair and vrooks brothers shirt cuffs and learning an entirely new language in nomenclature. By this point in 2016 it was becoming clear that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee. Hodinkee became a natural refuge, a place where I could watch videos of celebrity watch idiot savants talking about their obsession in terms that made me feel less obsessive myself. The rapper Prose the Fuji's fame for example. Yeah, I think about my watches like when I get up in the morning. Well, Dickie's the brainchild of a Ben Kleiner, a 34 year old back then Watch impresario In the outside world, no one really understood me or the value of tempered through screws. My sister in law pointed out, not incorrectly, that I might be suffering a midlife crisis. But in watch world you enter a room and everybody wants to discuss micro rotors with you. As Kara Barrett, one of the few women writers of Hodiki's staff and now Ben's wife, told me, microrutters are pretty damn adorable. Ed Hodeki's headquarters would occupy a lot of space in Lolita. Every object is taste, much like the 20 some mostly young people working there. In addition to publishing the most passionate watch journalism on the web and the most incensed readers comments, the site sells its own watch bands and vintage watches. Well now everything else too. Screwdriver Hodinkee's statistics reflect the often rarefied world of watch collecting. The average visitor has an income of $300,000, owns five to seven watches, and buys two or three more a year at an average cost of $7,000 each. I wonder what the statistics though. I spoke with Clymer at Hotinki's offices after I launched into a long soliloquy on a certain Zenith gold filled chronograph. He said, wow, you're in deep. I took this as a huge calderas. It was also a sign of how my life was unraveling. Hillary Clinton had just collapsed at a 911 ceremony, the website FiveThirtyEight was showing the election tightening, and my shrink, also a watch collector, had just been telling me about the toll the election was taking on his patients. Yeah, I was in deep. But weren't we all? Houthiki's influences felt throughout the watch industry. Clyburn has helped Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Z pick out their wristwear. Jay Z wanted the least wrapper watch possible. The shrinking size of some of the more retrieving watches for men can arguably be traced back to Hodinkee and its assault on what some in the watch world call penis extenders, those opera art testosterone timepieces pumped out by newer brands like Hublot, but also by old stalwarts like Patek and Rolex. If you want a watch that looks like a Russian oligarch just curled up around your wrist and died, you might be interested in the latest model of Sky Doll to no offense to Boex. I keep running shit about you until you give me a watch. As the election approached, I started going to meetings at the Horological Society of New York on the streets of Manhattan. I never have any idea which celebrity is which they all seem to be Matt Damon. But at the Horological Society I could identify all of my new heroes, many with full lush Portlandian beards. They were scattered across the hall of the library of the General Society Mechanics and Tradesmen in Midtown while they waited in line for their free coffee and Royal Dansk Butter cookies. There was the Natalie dress. Yes, the Kiran Sherpkhar, noted collector, author and proprietor of the independent watch purveyor Contrapante. I ran over to introduce myself and a few moments later he gave me this watch to hold and a few weeks later he arranged for me to attend a secret red bar. A meeting of the Watch elects at a bar in Korea tells you need a regular to invite you to a meeting, and the idea that I would soon be welcomed into this exclusive world kept me from sleeping. At night I lay in bed practicing what I might say about perlage 3 quarter plates and the rare lackeys lazuli dials on some 70s Rolex Datejusts Sexy Crip. At the gathering of the Red Bark Frou there was a bruggling watchmaker apprentice from Australia, a woman from Latin America carefully taking pictures of a prized Rolex Daytona, a guy from Helsinki with his old grand at massive watches, and a young man with $150 citizen. No watch, I was told, is rejected here and there is no hierarchy. Just as at the Horological Society, the attendees queue young, a surprise considering youth's supposed slavishness to all those digital and there are a growing number of women. The Red Bar's chief operating officer is the collector Kathleen McGipy. There was a boozy meat market scene in the rest of the bar, which was filled with loud music and 20 something Koreans on the mate. But in the section reserved for the watch idiot savant crowd, we sipped whiskey as we stripped off our watches at our small, brightly lit safe space. I threw my nose on a long cover table and an exuberantly bearded dude pawed at it for a while and I got my hands on a cheap but sturdy Seiko diver and an honest Omega Speedpest. Swiss luxury watches may be made with a 1% in Yona, but true aficionados know that the hegemony of the Swiss is over. Some of the most interesting watches now come through German brands like those and the Lange and Japan's Grand Seiko. I miss that on the culmination of the evening where all the watches were piled up for an Instagram photo with the hashtag sexpo pile. But as I wandered into the autumn night my nose beat warmly against my wrist. After Trump won, I went to Jordan, specifically to Glasute, in the remote Uglitz Valley in Saxony, between Dresden and Prague, where my nonpos minimatik was born. The journey from Dresden by suburban train took me past churches and boxy GDR era tachas, a perfect Russian motif for a city that once hosted the Vading KGB spy Vladimir Putin. Lassuti, where German watchmakers began working in the 19th century, is now home to at least eight companies. The town, surrounded by the Ore Mountains appears suddenly, its string platforms hugged by buildings of cement, steel and glass. Lesout does not have so much as a proper restaurant, although now there is an in the place. But back then, La Sutes at Haselmis is a proper restaurant, although every Tuesday a chicken mayor comes with a truck full of roasting birds and pensioners dutifully line up as if the Berlin Wall has never fallen. Caring for machines is as essential as caring for yourself, an old East German poster proclaims in Webdo Olse's workplaces. The company operates at La Sutez old train station and also a well kept building stuffed with the latest Vitra furnitures, situated on a hill overlooking the town. There's also a design bureau in Berlin on the Mondebar canal. The watches are marketed thus to the 1%, but to the creative classes. If an editor's career is on the rise, a German publishing friend said, they don't get a nose. Another quote too many Swiss watch Companies have become NBA'd and are run like Crocker and Game Gamble, the watch collector Kiyan Shekar has told me in New York. Knowles is the opposite of that. And there's a political element, too. Saxony has not been immune to the racist stirrings of the Alternativan Fruteau party challenging Angela Merkel's ruling coalition. When an AfD march was planned for Lesotho, the company put up a sign reading, in Germany we tick internationally. No to right wing propaganda, yes to tolerance and cosmopolitanism and to people who need our help. Now, visiting a watch manufactory is a sudden experience during chaotic times, and the pinkly slow assembly of these beautiful objects may well fall into the heading of Kah's work. At the Nomos workshop, a monastic silence prevailed as men and women there, more of the latter than the former, sat at desks wearing what looked like pink finger condoms and sifting through parts, some of them thinner than a human hair. The work is difficult and takes a toll because their hands need to be steady. Watchmakers cannot drink profusely. According to Nadia Weissweiler, who works for the German retailer and watch manufacturer Vempe, they are encouraged to take up musical instruments or horseback riding. What a life I observed with special delight as a watchmaker inserted a balance wheel into a new watch and it came to life for the first time At Nuhl's. The dignity of work is still celebrated, and the company provides an example of what a creative manufacturing workplace could look like at a time when making things is rarely the problems of human beings. Knowles of design guru in Berlin, is light filled and cheery. The minimally bearded designers turn to everyday objects for inspiration. We're recording heritage with contemporary influences from Berlin, one of them told me. The neon orange that adds such cosmopolitan charm to my minimatique, for example, came from the orange of warning signs seen in technical instruments and on the streets of the city. The avant garde files for the numbers on the dial are stretched and opened up for better legibility. The intelligence of the design never proclaims the watch to be anything more than an instrument. We know there are more important things than watches, judith Borrosty, the company's chief brand officer, told me. As Trump's inauguration approached, I bought another watch in addition to another watch, a vintage Rolex Air King I had found on the Internet for just $1,500. I knew I had to stop, but I had an excuse for this. With a fourth watch, I desperately needed a waterproof watch for swimming, which is my only form of exercise. By my hopeless logic, the watch would make me healthier. I went to Vanpei's Emporium on Fifth Avenue, which is just a few doors down from Trump Tower. It was early in the day, but already some gentlemen had stumbled in for their morning watch fondling. Tell me which watch you like and I'll tell you how long I gotta work for it, one man was telling his five year old son. I was served in espresso and a limp chocolate by a young man who also presented me with a Tudor Heritage Black Bay 36, a glowing black dial water resistant watch bearing the famous snowflake hour of Tudor. Shortly afterwards I met with a well known collector and the editor of the WSI Time Salute, who goes by the nom de plume William Massima and First Sign man with a strong Continental accent and even stronger horological opinions I used to get death threats. The timepieces in his collection were subtle yet striking, as Messina showed me the gorgeous faded brown dial of a Rolex submanor akin to a model issued to members of the British Navy. I told them how I had got into the watches at the start of 2016, when our nation was vulnerable but still whole. Ah, he said in a burst of European tributism. But you are a little Russian emigre, you know, if you need to, you can put these watches in your pocket and sneak across the border to Canada. You could survive. A memory Arrived at Lebanon. The year was 1978, and my family and I were at Pulkova Airport in Leningrad, about to become Soviet refugees in America. A stern customs officer took off my furry shopka and poked at the still warm lining, looking for diamonds my parents might have hidden there. In talking to collectors, I have heard tales of have heard the tale of a grandfather who was able to escape Occupy France because he gave a gold Omega to a station master. Is this it, dad? Is this what my obsession is about? I will stop by watches, but allow me one last purchase. It comes via ebay from San Luis Potosi, a city in north central Mexico. It's a Casio H108 12 Melody alarm, the kite I had lost to the Hebrew school bully and my grandmother had reclaimed. The watch feels small, digital, innocent. It dutifully plays all the songs I remember. The word happy appears in 80s letters as the birthday song plays, and for a moment I am it.