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Peter Kafka’s Media Memo has another media company’s take on the tablet computer. This time, Time, Inc’s Sports Illustrated is given the tablet makeover. Just like Wired’s concept, we’re huge fans of the new medium. These concepts show that the media companies are serious about the tablet and that maybe…just maybe…Apple has given the word out to a few companies to gather their content up for a new medium.

Because, like it or not, it sounds like 2010 will be about the tablet.

[the famous shot - now immortalised in a video game. Every day, tourists queue up to have their picture taken in situ]

Reuters and www.2Oceansvibe.com report this morning that the debt-laden EMI Music Group has put the iconic Abbey Road recording studios up for sale.

Abbey Road, which began life as a Georgian town house built in 1831, has an impressive history aside from the Beatles, who recorded most of their 1960s hit singles and albums there under the direction of EMI house producer George Martin.

Its walls have also echoed to music performed by classical composer Edward Elgar, rock bands Pink Floyd and Radiohead, violin maestro Yehudi Menuhin, 1980s bands Spandau Ballet and Simple Minds, as well as Mike Oldfield and Jeff Beck.

It is projected that a sale that, includes the brand (horror!) could raise 25 to 30 million pounds ($39 million to $47 million). Private Equity owners (them folk again) of EMI, Terra Firma recently told investors it needed more than 100 million pounds to stop EMI breaching banking covenants.

We hope no-one buys, or, if they do, maintains the sanctity of Abbey Roadhistory

Resisting the urge to add to the millions of words written about MJ, one has to comment on the inappropriate placement of this pic advertising a parenting forum in Fairfax publications.

Pink dots are where it’s at and blue is ‘possible’.

To-day is William Shakespeare birthday. He was born in 1564 - making him 445 years old.

Critic Peter Craven has some insightful words about the event:

“He’s still the yardstick for the sort of people who make The Bill (thousands of British actors make the jump from playing a crim or a cop to mouthing blank verse). Neil Armfield told me that Heath Ledger a couple of years before his death was talking about playing Hamlet in Australia. (He apparently caused quite a stir when he did it at school in Perth.)

And there is nothing like Shakespeare to indicate to a young actor the elasticity and grandeur that acting can effect if the actor has the equipment. In January, Cate Blanchett was absolutely compelling in Sydney as Richard II in Benedict Andrews’ The War of the Roses (despite the gender bend) and then turned up hours later in the midst of a hit and miss and remorselessly cutting edge abridgement of the History Plays — sometimes with chaps like Benedict so much edge is cut you wonder what’s left — and gave as fine a performance as Lady Anne in Richard III as the world has seen.

Two years ago Melbourne got see Ian McKellen’s King Lear, directed by Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company, with all the savagery and music that a great actor can bring to that most exacting of all the great tragic roles.

Lear’s Howl over the body of Cordelia is like the death of the family and of every human hope. When I was a child, a lifetime ago, I saw John Gielgud do the last scene of King Lear with the tears pouring down his face. It taught me, in a way nothing else could, that there was more to Shakespeare than eloquence.

That was a one-man show, an actor and bare boards. Anyone who saw John Stanton do his one-hander about Shakespeare’s Kings, And When He Falls, which he was doing at 45 Downstairs in Melbourne a few weeks ago would have felt the dazzle of the greatest range of moods and machinations behind the rhetoric and poetry of the language.

Of course you have to surrender to eloquence in the first place which is why kids should be subjected to the Ian McKellens of this world. As John Cleese said once, no one would know how Shakespeare was done unless they saw it. More particularly, unless they heard it. If you want kids to cotton on to Shakespeare encourage them to listen to the Gielguds and Oliviers, the Vanessa Redgraves and the Judi Denchs. The story goes that when Marlon Brando was lined up to play Marc Antony in the old MGM film of Julius Caesar (with James Mason as Brutus and John Gielgud as Cassius) he shut himself in his trailer and the man who made Stanley Kowalski part of modern memory proceeded to listen over and over to recordings of Laurence Olivier. The upshot in the film is staggering and absolutely classical for all its apparent iconoclasm.

Brando learnt to feel Shakespeare by learning to hear him. It’s something we can give our children. It’s easy to shy away from being blimpish about this kind of thing and think that every young teenager should be left to her Twilight and her Gossip Girl or whatever comes in its wake. In fact, Shakespeare is the essence of the glamour of our entire dramatic tradition.

Even though glamour is something he can always transcend. Think of Miriam Margolyes (performing in the new Australian play Realism for the Melbourne Theatre Company at the moment). In Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, Leo and Clare Daines don’t sound as if they’ve been paying any mind to the cadences of Gielgud or Maggie Smith but Miriam as the Nurse was completely undeterred by the Mexicano accent she had to assume and gave a wonderful performance as that sublime garrulous dolt of a woman. In fact, if you want a kid to get intimate with the music and drama of Romeo and Juliet you might try them out on that late sixties version that Zeffirelli put on celluloid. A few years later Peter Brook made a film (shot by Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist) of Paul Scofield’s King Lear.

And you can get God’s plenty of Shakespeare on DVD: Ken Branagh or Mel Gibson as Hamlet, Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Al Pacino as Shylock, the Branagh/Emma Thompson Much Ado About Nothing, Burton and Taylor in Taming of the Shrew, Olivier or McKellen as Richard III. Two recent additions to the catalogue are Maggie Smith as Portia in The Merchant of Venice and a DVD of the McKellen/Nunn Lear.

Or, if you want to invest in the Complete Works and you’re willing to shop around on the net, you can get the whole BBC Shakespeare for about $300. You’ll need to ensure that your DVD player is zoneless but assuming this you’ll get everything in this 1980’s recapitulation of Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus from the young Helen Mirren in As You Like It and a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anthony Hopkins as one of the last white Othellos, Derek Jacobi as Hamlet and Richard II, Elijah Moshinsky directing a superb Coriolanus with Alan Howard.

It’s a steal and the thing really is the greatest sentimental education the English language has on offer.

Remember Cleopatra saying, the asp at her breast, “Peace, see you not my baby that sucks the nurse asleep. Or Hotspur — I always hear Sean Connery’s voice say the words, as I first heard them in childhood — “Die all, die merrily”. Or Falstaff saying to his old tiresome friend, “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.”

We tip our hat to the Bard.

Pranksters changed all of the street signs on Bush Street in San Francisco to read “Obama” before uploading evidence to Flickr.

“In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.”

Kevin, are you listening?

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