At some point in the middle of a conversation with the black watch founder John Andrew Fredrick and producer Rob Campanella the subject shifts to Fredrick’s flip phone. Or, really, it shifts to Fredrick’s unease with technology. “I’m a very right brained kind of person who thinks that technology is killing us,” he says as we sit on the back patio of the Echo Park bookstore/cafe Stories, “and I don’t want to be the sort of person who is staring at a phone all the time or going on Tinder or anything along those lines at all.”
That’s fair. Technology probably is killing us and scrolling is tedious. Plus, Fredrick’s flip phone has become a conversation-starter in its own right. “It’s a way to make people chuckle. They want to touch it and consider me a relic, which is fine. I don’t care,” he says.
“Brian Wilson isn’t the only guy who just wasn’t made for these times,” he adds. “I was not either.”
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