Latest / The Culture Club: Books, Art, Film, Music & Entertainment / Why Broken Clocks Hold the Best Stories (And How I Learned to Listen) | The Culture Club
Transcript
- I found a grandfather clock in an alley behind a thrift store that hadn’t ticked since 1974, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to fix it. I just wanted to sit with its silence. There is something deeply seductive about objects that have lost their primary function. We live in a world that demands utility, where everything must work, perform, or deliver a result. If your phone doesn’t connect, you’re anxious. If your coffee maker breaks, your morning routine collapses into chaos. But when I walk into my studio, which currently looks less like a creative workspace and more like a hoarder’s dream of vintage hardware, I am surrounded by things that are beautifully, defiantly useless. Specifically, clocks. Dozens of them. Pocket watches with glass faces cracked like spiderwebs, cuckoo clocks with missing birds, grandfathers standing tall and silent as sentinels. And let’s be honest, most of them don’t tell the correct hour. Some don’t tell any hour at all. They are monuments to stopped time. When I bought this specific grandfather clock, the wood was dark walnut, heavy with the weight of decades, and the pendulum hung still. My instinct, trained by years of trying to make things 'work' in the corporate world I fled, was to immediately reach for tools. To disassemble, to clean, to replace the mainspring. But something held me back. Maybe it was the dust motes dancing in the shaft of afternoon light that seemed to settle differently around that silent tower. Maybe it was the memory of my grandmother’s house, where time felt thick and slow, unrelated to the hands on the wall. So I sat there. I touched the cold brass. I listened to the absence of ticking. And I realized I wasn’t looking for a mechanism to repair; I was looking for a vessel to hold a feeling. Let’s dig into the velvet of what neglect actually feels like. We tend to view broken things as failures, but I’ve started to see them as archives. A working clock is a promise kept. It says, 'I will continue to move forward.' It is linear, relentless, and often oppressive. But a broken clock? It’s a question. What happened here? Who wound it last? Why did they stop? The texture of neglect is soft, almost fuzzy. It’s the patina on silver that no polish can remove without erasing history. It’s the slight warp in a wooden frame caused by humidity from a century ago. When I restore these clocks, not to make them tell time, but to stabilize their beauty, I am engaging in a very different kind of craft. I’m not fixing a machine; I’m preserving a story. Take the mantle clock with the chipped porcelain face. It doesn’t keep time, but if you look closely at the crack running through the mother’s face on the painted dial, you can see how someone tried to glue it back together in the 1950s with crude, yellowing adhesive. That mistake is part of its charm now. It shows care. It shows that someone loved this object enough to try to save it, even if they failed. In my line of work, we obsess over perfection, over the seamless finish. But there is so much more humanity in the visible repair. There is a warmth in knowing that an object has been lived with, mishandled, dropped, saved, and abandoned. These clocks have witnessed divorces, births, quiet mornings, and loud arguments. Their silence is not empty; it is full of echoes. And my job isn’t to fill that silence with noise. My job is to ensure the echo remains clear. What’s the texture of this? When I say I’m restoring them, I mean I’m cleaning the gears just enough so they don’t seize up further, applying oil to prevent rust, and securing loose joints so they don’t collapse under their own weight. But I leave the escapement—the part that makes the ticking—disengaged or stuck. I refuse to force the rhythm. Why? Because I believe that some things are meant to be paused. Think about your own life. How many times have you rushed to 'fix' a moment of sadness, a period of stagnation, a creative block? You grab the tools. You try to get back on schedule. You treat your emotional state like a malfunctioning appliance. But what if that pause is the point? What if the stillness is where the insight lives? These clocks teach me to respect the pause. They remind me that time is not just a resource to be managed, but a landscape to be inhabited. When I hold a pocket watch that hasn’t worked in forty years, I feel a strange kinship. We are both out of sync with the modern demand for constant productivity. And there is a radical act of rebellion in choosing to be out of sync. It’s a way of saying, 'I am here, in this moment, regardless of whether it is 2:00 PM or 2:03 AM.' The value of the object shifts from its function to its presence. It becomes a sculpture of time rather than a tool of it. And honestly, that is far more interesting. I find myself checking my watch less and looking at the shadows on the floor more. The light moves. The air changes. The day unfolds. The clock just sits there, watching with me. Tell me more about that feeling of listening to silence. It’s not passive. It’s active. It requires attention. When you remove the ticking, you hear the room. You hear the fridge humming in the other apartment. You hear traffic three streets away. You hear your own breath. For people who thrive on background noise, this can be terrifying. But for those of us who are tired, it’s a relief. It’s a sensory reset. I remember working in theater production, where sound design was always about layering, about creating an immersive sonic environment. But the most powerful moments were often the ones with no sound at all. The blackout. The gasp. The collective intake of breath before the climax. That silence is electric. It’s charged with anticipation. These clocks create a similar charge. They create a space for anticipation. Will it start again? No. But the possibility hangs in the air. It keeps you present. You are waiting for something that won’t happen, and in that waiting, you become fully aware of your current reality. It’s a meditation practice disguised as antique restoration. I’ve had clients ask me why I don’t just sell the working ones and donate the broken ones to charity bins. They see waste. I see treasure. They see inefficiency. I see poetry. There is a marginalized voice in the creative industries that celebrates the imperfect, the wabi-sabi, the broken. We are told to hide our cracks, to filter our photos, to curate a life that looks effortless. But these clocks wear their damage openly. The scratched glass. The faded paint. The bent hands. They are unapologetically subjective artifacts. They don’t apologize for being outdated. They don’t try to be smart devices. They just are. And in their being, they offer a model for how we might treat ourselves—with gentler hands, with an eye for history, with a willingness to let some parts remain still. So, how do we bring this into our daily lives? You don’t need a grandfather clock to practice the art of the stopped time. You need permission to pause. Maybe it’s turning off your phone for an hour. Maybe it’s sitting on your porch and watching the clouds move without naming them. Maybe it’s allowing yourself to feel stuck without immediately reaching for a solution. Let’s call it a ritual of stillness. Choose one object in your home that is beautiful but non-functional. A vase with no water. A book with unread pages. A candle that never burns. Sit with it. Notice its form. Its color. Its weight. Acknowledge that it does not serve a practical purpose, and yet, it adds value to your space simply by existing. This is a counter-cultural act. In a society that values output, choosing to value presence is a radical statement. It reconnects us to the material world. We spend so much time in the digital ether, scrolling, consuming, reacting. Physical objects anchor us. They have mass. They have temperature. They occupy space. When we engage with them mindfully, we ground ourselves. I find that my creativity flows better when I allow periods of non-doing. When I stop trying to force ideas and instead let them marinate in the silence. The clocks in my studio are my partners in this process. They don’t give me answers. They don’t provide motivation quotes. They just exist. And their existence gives me permission to exist too, exactly as I am, right now, in this imperfect, un-ticked moment. So, go find your broken clock. Or make one. Break a habit. Stop a routine. Just for a minute. See what you hear when the noise stops. I want to leave you with this thought: Not everything needs to be fixed. Some things just need to be witnessed. As I wrap up this episode, I’m looking at the mantle clock with the chipped face again. The sun is setting, casting long, golden shadows across its dial. It doesn’t matter that it’s not telling the correct time. It is telling the truest time: the time of now. The time of light and shadow. The time of memory. We are all collections of broken pieces, held together by love and habit and hope. We are all out of sync with someone else’s rhythm. And that is okay. In fact, it’s necessary. Diversity of experience, diversity of pace, diversity of repair. That is what makes the culture rich. That is what makes the club welcoming. So, be gentle with your own mechanisms. Allow yourself to wind down. Let some springs stay unwound. Find beauty in the pause. And remember, I’m here with you, in the silence, listening to the echoes. Until next time, keep your heart open, your hands curious, and your time your own. Take a deep breath. Feel your feet on the floor. You’re doing just fine. I’ll talk to you soon.