Tuesday 29 December 2009

The People's Will-i-am

Happy 200th birthday, William Gladstone. Apparently the four-times prime minister read over 20,000 books in his lifetime and wrote copiously: a 19th-century polymath.

Flicking over to news from Amazon.com, which has apparently sold something like 500,000 units of the Kinder 2 since its launch. For the first time in history, more e-books were sold in a day than traditional paper-based books: on Christmas Day 2009. A rubicon has been crossed.

And in another corner of the jungle, Jerry Mitchell says that theatre directors watch DVDs of films for their inspiration rather than reading books, or even synopses of books. The result? Loads of new musicals are now adaptations of movies, the latest examples being Billy Elliot, Legally Blonde and Hairspray. Maybe short stories, poems, children's picture books and magazine articles might fit into musical creatives' mind-space for future inspiration?

Our culture is eating itself at warp speed as creative people are too time-poor and/or lazy to seek out fantastic yet unhyped books to adapt or, whisper it, to create something fabulous from scratch (Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber being the exception that proves the rule).

The upside is that any credible author with a great story that gets made into a successful film may be sitting in the first-class carriage of a gravy train heading towards extended shelf-life as a long-running musical.

William Gladstone's legacy as a representative of Victorian culture is in danger of turning into a derivative rap by the Black-Eyed Peas: pop culture for the Stepford generation The great man would be glad he didn't live to see the day.

Do the math, not the polymath: natch.

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