Distrust That Particular Flavor

This is still the closest I’ve gotten to explaining why Japan fascinates me.

I actually feel I shouldn’t have to. It’s like being asked to explain why London fascinates me. Who asks a question like that?

Were Japanese girls the first power texters? They were the first I encountered.

I saw my first fax machine in Tokyo. Katsuhiro Otomo had several in his house, when he was making Akira. Joi Ito and his friends, in Tokyo, were the first people I saw using those tiny little newfangled cellphones to coordinate smoothly frenetic urban evenings. A fashionably dressed man in Floral Street, outside Paul Smith, was the first headset-equipped cellphone user I ever mistook for a talkative madman.

Thus is the future distributed.

My Obsession

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, traversing the Seventies in whatever post-hippie, preslacker mode I could manage, I made a substantial part of my living, such as it was, in a myriad of minuscule supply-and-demand gaps that have now largely closed. I was what antique dealers call a “picker,” a semi-savvy haunter of Salvation Army thrift shops, from which I would extract objects of obscure desire that I knew were upmarketable to specialist dealers, who sold in turn to collectors. To this day I am often unable to resist a professionally quick, carefully dispassionate scan over the contents of any thrift shop, though I almost never buy anything there. Mainly because the cut-rate treasures, the “scores” of legend, are long gone. The market has been rationalized. We have become a nation, a world, of pickers.

There are several reasons for this. One has to do with boomer demographics and the cult of nostalgia. There are now more fiftysomethings than there are primo childhood artifacts of a similar vintage. Most of our toys, unlike the wood and pot-metal of yore, were extrusion-molded ephemera, fragile styrene simulacra, highly unlikely to survive the random insults of time. A great deal of the boomer’s remembered world has been melted down, or crushed into unreadable fragments in forgotten strata of landfill. What remains, particularly if it’s “mint in box,” becomes increasingly rarefied.

Another reason, and this one is more mysterious, has to do with an ongoing democratization of connoisseurship, in which curatorial privilege is available at every level of society. Whether one collects Warhol prints or Beanie Babies becomes, well, a matter of taste.

The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce.

But the main driving force in the tidying of the world’s attic, the drying up of random, “innocent” sources of rarities, is information technology. We are mapping literally everything, from the human genome to Jaeger two- register chronographs, and our search engines grind increasingly fine.

“Surely you haven’t been bitten by the eBay bug,” said my publishing friend Patrick. We were in the lobby of a particularly bland hotel somewhere within the confines of a New England technology park, and I was in fact feeling twinges of withdrawal.

eBay, which bills itself as Your Personal Trading Community^TM, is a site that hosts well over 800,000 online auctions per day, in 1,086 categories. eBay gets around 140 million hits per week, and, for the previous few months, a certain number of those hits had been from me.

And, in the process of adding to eBay’s gargantuan hit-pile, several days before, I had gotten myself in trouble. In Uruguay.

How this happened: I’m home in Vancouver, midway through that first cup of morning coffee, in front of the computer, ready to work straight from the dreamstate.

I am deep into eBay, half awake, staring at a scan of this huge-ass Zenith diver’s watch. And I am, mind you, a practicing ectomorph. I have wrists like pipe stems. I am not going to get too much wear out of a watch that’s actually wider than my wrist.

But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I know, having already become a habitue of eBay’s Clocks, Timepieces: Wristwatches, that the movement in this particular Zenith is the very one Rolex installs in the big- ticket Daytona. Making this both a precision timepiece and possibly an undervalued one — the identical thing having sold on eBay, the week before, albeit in better cosmetic condition, for around two grand.

“I didn’t even know you had Web access,” Patrick said. “You mean you’ve overcome your infamous resistance to using the Net, but only in order to service an eBay addiction?”

Well, yes. Sort of. Not exactly.

eBay is simply the only thing I’ve found on the Web that keeps me coming back. It is, for me anyway, the first “real” virtual place.

In Patrick’s hotel room, we used his laptop to get onto eBay, where I discovered that, yes, I was still high bidder for the damned Zenith: $500 American. This bid, you see, was the result of Fiddling Around. I’d sat there in my office, not quite awake yet, and had poked around with modest but increasingly higher bids, assuming that the seller’s hidden “reserve,” the lowest bid he’d accept, would be quite high. But no, at $500 I hit it, and suddenly I was listed there as high bidder. This had happened before, and I had always been outbid later. So I didn’t worry.

But I didn’t really want to have to buy this very large watch. Which was in Uruguay. And now I was still high bidder, and the auction would be run off before I got back to Vancouver. I thought about having to resell the Zenith.

When I did get back, though, I discovered, to mixed emotions, that I’d been “sniped.” Someone, or rather their automated bidding software, had swooped in, in the last few seconds, and scooped the Zenith for only the least allowable increment over my bid.

How did I get into this, anyway?

I went happily along for years, smugly avoiding anything that involved a modem. E-mail address? Sorry. Don’t have one.

And then I got a website. Had one foisted upon me, actually, and quite brilliantly, by Christopher Halcrow, who created “William Gibson’s Yardshow,” an “official” home page. So I kept having to go into my kids’ bedrooms and beg for Web access to look at it, which bugged them.

Then Chris, who knows a bargain when he sees one, happened to buy this Performa 520 °CD from someone who was leaving town. He passed the Performa on to me for what he’d paid for it, and suddenly I had this video- ready machine I could look at my site on, and the video-ready part brought cable into the office, so I got a cable modem, because it was faster, and I already had a hole drilled in the wall, and then I discovered that, damn, I had an e-mail address. It was part of the deal. So e-mail, over the course of about fifteen minutes, replaced the faxes I’d been using to keep in touch with certain people.

In the way of things, very shortly, I no longer had a website, Chris having found it necessary to get a life. But there was the rest of the Web, waiting to be explored. And I did, and promptly got bored. It was fun, at first, but then gradually I found that there wasn’t really anywhere in particular I wanted to go. I went a lot of places, but I seldom went back.

Then I found eBay. And I wanted to go back. Because eBay is, basically, just a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff you can look at and wonder if you want — or let yourself want and then bid on.

Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.

Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars.