Beyond The Dial

Allen sold his 50th Birthday Grand Seiko, and now he's run out and bought a sweet 33mm platinum 1984 Vacheron Constantin Historique and a Unimatic U4, which he feels embodies Milanese Brutalism. Find out why he's in The Horological Flow State.

Allen explores his decision to sell his BIG 50th BIRTHDAY WATCH just one year later. This one is all about aligning one's true passion with one's budget, or lack thereof. And Allen explores how modern watch marketing can come between an owner and his watch.

Allen return from an epic cross-country motorcycle trip with reservations about his Grand Seiko birthday watch and a head full of American Weirdness.

Allen goes into the ideas behind the Alsta Motoscaphe 120, one of a very few purpose built motorcycling watches. Not branded to match this or that bike, nor just a clever facelift, the Motoscaphe 120 is the culmination of Allen spending the last 30 years or so riding motorcycles with mechanical watches.

Why do the rich get away with all kinds of bizarre quirky behavior while the rest of us are made to look silly when we express our little kinks? The answer is complicated, and when we bring watches into the picture, it only gets more complicated.

Walt Odets is, by most accounts, the first person to blog about watches, thus creating a template for how watch journalism evolved over the past 20 years. His work, however, never resembled modern watch journalism; his was critical, mechanically minded, and decidedly unconcerned with fashion and trends. Allen and Walt discuss his journey in watches and much more.

Allen grabs the mic and speaks for an hour with zero edits on topics ranging from his dream of playing with The Grateful Dead (#letallenplay) to OEM straps to how mechanical ignorance leads to silly horological obsessions, and more...

Horology Inc. provides us with a vast array of dial colors able to splash dopamine onto our opiate receptors. We often dismiss new colors as a superficial trend lacking horological innovation, but Allen argues that - because splashy dials spontaneously inspire joy, beauty, and emotions that, science has shown, replicate our experience of Love - great dials may be closer to the center of The Aesthetic Revolution than we ever imagined.

Allen breaks form on his approach to the hands-on review while exploring how Moser creates what is, in his opinion, one of the most beautiful watches currently being produced.

Can irony reconcile the cynical Gen X world view with a luxury hobby? Does the Swiss watch industry sell us "Vintage Nationalism" along with our watches? Did Jean-Claude Biver leverage anti-establishment tendencies with his anti-electronic rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s? Allen takes a stab at these topics and more in this essay episode.