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Last Words
Mine's a brickbat
Forget your pocket-sized state-of-the-art mobile phone.
The eighties "brick" is back and people are paying more than £6,000 to have one
By Simon Mills, Times Online
29 October 02
HERE IS A BOAST you don’t hear often these days: “My mobile phone is bigger than your mobile phone.” Unlike your wafer-thin, scaredy-cat handset, timidly squirrelled away in your pocket, mine is a phone that refuses to hide — a thunking great analogue apparatus which is charged with enough latent power to fry my brains and sear the inner ear of the guy on the next table.
In the yuppie lunchtime amnesty, where business warheads are laid down in surrender on the table top before a meal, my phone is king. A master of the mobile universe. You, my friend, have a namby-pamby, silver-coated Saturday night special. I have a big, black thermonuclear device.
Do not bother trying to buy one, either. You will have to search the internet and pay $10,000 (£6,669) like an online shopper did earlier this year, if you want one in mint condition like mine.
After a couple of years mincing around, Derek Zoolander-style, with girly, fiddly, flip phones I have decided to swap my trendy, twist- action Motorola v70 circa 2002 for a brick-sized Motorola DynaTAC circa 1990 — an impossibly cool and vigorously contrapuntal, contemporary move, I am reliably informed.
You see, retro-technology items, such as my brick phone, are red hot. A trend, says Michael Kopelman, a fashion retailer and hip-hop culture archivist, is the inevitable culmination of a fast-moving “global village” where only recently obsolete technological wonders are imbued with classic status at an increasingly alarming velocity.
“What you have to remember is that we don’t view these things with the same eyes as young kids,” says Kopelman, the UK distributor of fashion labels A Bathing Ape, Stussy and Hysteric Glamour, and a keen collector of 20th-century technology. “Where we might see outdated junk they see classic, lost treasure.”
In Japan, he explains, collectors are prepared to pay up to £400 for a Soundburger, a gimmicky portable record player that cost only £20 when it was launched in the Eighties.
The JVC boom box, as seen on the cover of LL Cool J’s first album, and early Sony walkmans, are also much coveted. “Vintage Altec and Tannoy hi-fi might be big and ugly but they sound great and there is a super-sexy, pure kind of beauty to them,” says Kopelman. “I think that the Motorola brick phone is sexy in the same way.”
What a refreshingly macho, big boys’ toy the DynaTAC blower has proved to be. Its construction feels substantial, no-nonsense, black and, most importantly, manly.
But is it fashionable? I was dubious. A brick is hell for any man who likes his tailoring. It is an obdurately conspicuous object meant for display purposes only.
It won’t stash away discreetly into one’s breast pocket. In other pockets it bulges out like a Smith & Wesson. Now I understand why people were so embarrassed to use mobiles in the Eighties — there was simply nowhere to hide them.
In the end I carried the phone in its case, its rubber aerial (almost five inches long) protruding hostilely from the zip. Men loved it.
“I used to have one of those,” cooed one smart fortysomething City type when he first caught sight of it. “Brilliant! Such power. My windscreen wipers used to start going every time it rang in the car.”
My photographer was not so impressed. He had once been the proud owner of the previous model. “Mine was much, much bigger,” he told me. “The same one that Gordon Gekko had on Wall Street. It was this strange off-white colour, more of a breeze block than a brick, and it was louder than a Motorhead concert. You didn’t need it to be hands-free because if you just sat it on the car seat next to you, it was entirely possible to carry on a conversation from the voice booming out of the ear end of the handset.”
Suddenly my phone felt small and insignificant. I was suffering from phone envy. But it was not to last. While mobile phones may arouse admiration among normal men, they prompt narrow-eyed suspicion among 20-stone (127kg) bouncers. As far as they are concerned, an Eighties mobile is second only to a sawn-off shotgun in havoc-wreaking potential.
The brick was soon wrestled off me. “This item is capable of causing grievous bodily harm to someone inside the building,” the bouncer told me.
There was a pause while he observed the unfamiliar object he now held in his hand. “Very old-fashioned these are now. If I was you I would go for something a bit more modern, a bit more glamorous.”
The Mobile exhibition is at The Glass Gallery, Old Truman Brewery, 15 Hanbury Street, Shoreditch, London E1, from November 7 to November 23, every day from 11am to 7pm.
Four of the most desirable
Classic Motorola DynaTAC
Large and chunky, it separates the geeks from the men. That’s men with muscles, by the way: only weight- lifters will be capable of lugging this baby around.
Nokia Vertu
How much? Surely even the "Rolex of mobile phones" can't cost £3,500. Actually, you are right. You'll have to fork out at least three times that amount for this solid gold or platinum "communication instrument." Hi-fi quality ringtone included.
Motorola v70
And why would anyone want a Swarovski-crystal studded mobile phone? Ask Kate Moss. Ever since she was photographed with one of these, they have flown out of the shops.
The Nokia 8890
Discontinued, yet still desirable.
Read the full article at TimesOnline
Links:
Glass Gallery, The Old Truman Brewery
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