Inside Joke -- or, the British cognate to Republicanism

In a typically wide-ranging and thoughtful piece, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how innovation is found in groups:

"We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves:the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses."

And thus, like Gregg Easterbrook's review of Norman Podhoretz' Ex-Friends in the Washington Monthly a few years back, we see a non-fannish reflection of fandom.

But that's not what I want to talk to you about.

Gladwell also relates the pleasures of the inside joke:

"The successful inside joke, however, can never last. In A Great Silly Grin (Public Affairs; $27.50), a history of nineteen-sixties British satire, Humphrey Carpenter relates a routine done at the comedy club the Establishment early in the decade. The sketch was about the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed in the war, and the speaker was supposed to be the Cathedral's architect, Sir Basil Spence:

First of all, of course, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the German people for making this whole project possible in the first place. Second, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Coventry itself, who when asked to choose between having a cathedral and having hospitals, schools and houses, plumped immediately (I'm glad to say) for the cathedral, recognizing, I think, the need of any community to have a place where the whole community can gather together and pray for such things as hospitals, schools and houses."

This is about as perfect a summation of the current priorities of the Republican Party as I can think of.

Mister Glasses

Kottke pointed to a lovely set of illustrations based on Mad Men. Poking about Dyna Moe's (the artist's) Flickr account, I found she's been involved in videos by Mitch Magee, including a very odd but funny pastiche of Philip Johnson called Mister Glasses. Dyna Moe has her own Mister Glasses images.

The whole thing was inspired by this 55 minute interview of Johnson by Charlie Rose from 1996. I'm not a fan of Johnson's buildings as such, but early on -- minute 5 -- he says this, and I was nodding in agreement (given my recent posts):

"God better see to it that I have until 106... I have projects on the front burner that I need to get done to see whether they're any good or not. See, you can't see a model and say, "That's a beautiful building." Doesn't make any sense at all -- you've got to build a building, and go inside it, and have it wrap itself around you, you see... That's the only test."

Alas, Philip Johnson died at 98. Showing yet again that building projects never meet their schedule.