Madonna seems to have a case of Girls Gone Wild-itis. Five years after swapping spit with Britney and X-tina, The Material Mom has proven again there’s an insecure college freshman in all of us….. Doing her seemingly bored jaunt hyping her new collection of quickly-thrown-together dance tunes, Madonna indulged in an onstage girl-on-girl kiss while performing in Paris. Turns out all the money and success in the world can’t buy better judgment – no judgment, of course.

Once upon a time this was totally Madonna’s thing. Her image was sex and it worked. That’s it. From her cone-shaped bras to those onstage simulated sex antics, Madonna was not only controversial, but captivating too. We couldn’t look away.

That was then. One marriage and three children later have changed things. Earth to Madonna, this stuff no longer shocks or amuses us. It’s confusing. Not the good kind of confusing. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but things have changed.

Her last book was a children’s book, not a sex book (there is a G-d), and she has replaced the likes of Sandra Bernhard with Lourdes, Rocco and the one she stole from Africa (how on earth did Access Hollywood manage to get that guy to talk?).

Madonna is married to Guy Ritchie. Last time I checked, publicly kissing another person is cheating. Male, female, on or offstage – remember this, Madge, a kiss is still a kiss.

How does Mr. Madonna feel watching his wife declare to her audience, “I’m always drawn to working with French people - and frenching French people. Vive la France!” Her awkward declaration led to a make out with her not-so-French back up dancer. Hmmm. Yeah. As if the guy doesn’t feel emasculated enough.

Point is, Madonna should be passed this by now. Yes, sexuality has always been a part of her image. She’s done enough of everything to forever cement that not only in our minds, but also in history. We get it.

What we love(d) about Madonna is her ever evolving, reinventing self – please, let’s have the sex stuff follow that. It’s icky.

Even if we weren’t so weirded out by her behavior, without having to go into this more—it’s simply old. This too needs to evolve. We’re not captivated, we’re bored. There’s no greater sin than boredom, M.

Instead of approaching the Big 50 like a 19-year-old desperately seeking attention, welcome it as an icon. Think of what Roseanne said at the TV Land Awards: “This is awesome! In old age you are congratulated, no longer that obnoxious bitch.”

Some things you see in the news make you go “Oh please.” Let’s get into it:

After years of Hangin’ Tough, watching the varying worlds of pop culture pass them by, the New Kids on the Block are gearing up for a comeback, returning to their old stomping grounds, which I suppose is… the Block. (Does J. Lo owe them a licensing fee?)

NKOTB deserves credit for appearing on Today Show to announce their reunion. I found myself thinking about the late 80s. I saw the huge crowd, screaming girls, even some crying fans, all I imagine hired by the NK’s desperate chieftains. But you got to hand it to them—they did it right.

Young Gen-Xers and old Yers are ready to re-embrace the Kids Who Have Been Around the Block Quite a Few Times (now KWHBATBQAFT). Road to retro has not been easy. They were has beens for more than a minute and had to endure embarrassing solo careers, some attempts at serious acting, and no doubt at least one abortive stab as a real estate agent. Which leads me to think we can blame the subprime mess for this too!

The actor of the group, ole Donnie Wahlberg has been on the rise since the group disbanded in ‘94. He toured with little bro Marky and that nutty Funky Bunch, and by 1996 he was already on the big screen. He really worked for it! “I didn’t have big movie offers, or any big agents wanting to work with me,” he said. “I had to go grassroots, start at the bottom and go on 150 auditions before someone finally gave me a shot.” From The Sixth Sense to NBC’s brilliant but cancelled Boomtown, to a lead in HBO’s Emmy-winning Band of Brothers, Donnie managed to stay employed and relevant. He even has two projects in post-production in 2008. He’s smart, he’s building momentum and putting himself out there.

Others not so much. Danny Wood, aka, the one everyone forgot about, blogged to his fans, “I want to start off by saying I am so thankful and feel blessed to have this opportunity again.” Followed by”I feel like I have won the lottery twice.” Well, dude, you totally have.

He totally went one step too far then. “We finally have the chance to give all you guys what you have always deserved.” Didn’t you guys do that when you broke up in 1994?

The Backstreet Boys are what-happened-tos, too, but they’re only about six years removed from their peak. The Spice Girls? Check cashed. Between the two they’ve logged three comebacks, but the nicest way to put it is that one fizzled while two failed. As 70s nights fade, 80s nights are ruling, while 90s nights are still too fresh in our memories. To that, NKOTB provide an interesting lesson in nostalgia. There is value in carefully resurrecting old brands with a retro-cool feel that can draw from the well of pop culture’s goodwill.

Take Boones Farm Wine. No longer such a joke, right? What used to be down-market even by Kwiki Mart standards has T-shirts selling with the moniker at Saks; a fan site populated with photos of hipsters hitting the retro sauce (at boonesfarm.net), and more than a few celebrity endorsements by way of the groovier-than-thou tabloids.

Marketers have used old logos, promos, and slogans to reestablish emotional connections between brands and consumers for a while now. The smart ones, however, know the limits of this particular tactic. These must be short-lived, meant to give a jolt to a brand, not take the place of a genuine branding/rebranding effort. With that, you will note how McDonald’s may dust off old commercials every so often—but you will never see them completely going backward.

And that, my friends, is why this is the end for the Kids—quicker than you can say “blow your mind.” A quick splash of nostalgia-fueled fun, a couple of kitchsy (and well-covered) concerts, maybe even a new single grafted to a rerelease of a greatest hits collection…but that, folks, is it. Six months from now, it’s time to dust off the real estate licenses and go back to work.

As Linda Richmond might mutter: New Kids on the Block! Not new! Not kids! Discuss!

If you live in New York and have left your home since the middle of March - a safe bet unless your governorship ended then - you’ve seen messages everywhere. Harsh little missives scribbled in black on a white background. On bus stops and taxis, billboards and buildings. They’re everywhere. And they’ve blanketed Los Angeles and Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco, too. The petty taunts of a scorned lover.

“My Mother Always Hated You, Sarah Marshall.”

“You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall.”

“I’m SO Over you, Sarah Marshall.”

“Wow!,” you think. “Someone really pissed off her boyfriend and, hoo boy, he is NOT shy about airing their dirty laundry! The claws have come out!! Also: he must have remarkable reserves of disposable income and a great deal of free time. Hey, wait . . . I have disposable income! Just about eleven dollars and fifty cents. I wonder if there’s an easy way to spend it, quickly and mechanically . . .”

Of course, that isn’t what happens. Among the sentient, or at least among those young, gorgeously media savvy who got wise when they got born, “mysterious messages” mean only one thing: a bit of viral marketing. I’ve seen cryptic things plastered on bus stops and subway stations. They don’t carry trademarks or even directions to a Web presence.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is the latest movie to emerge from the Judd Apatow comedy industrial complex. To build buzz, Universal hit major cities with the signs. The goal: get people to ask, “Who is this freaky Sarah Marshall?” Read her official bio on http://www.sarahmarshallfan.com/. And then, presumably, to ask: “When will my local multiplex answer this question, as it has so many others for me?”

I’m going to see it, yeah. You know why? Because it’s Judd Apatow and I get his style. Also because most of the people I know will see it (again, ONLY because it’s Judd Apatow - not because it stars the dude from “How I Met My Mom” who strangely is NAMED Marshall on that show…). Anyway, you know that we all tend to see movies that other people see. I, like you, can predict the “Marshall” plot with 85% accuracy from the 2-minute trailer. I can also probably predict with 85% accuracy how much I’m going to enjoy it. There’s very little about the movie that can be described as intriguing. It’s a romantic comedy. There will be dirty jokes. It’ll be kind of like Knocked Up and Superbad, and then we’ll all wait for the next one and wonder what new “taboo” will be discussed (bro-mantic love? pregnancy between a beauty and a beast?).

Anyone who plops down in the stadium-style seating on Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s opening night does so after seeing “wacky, cutting-edge” buzz scheme and shrugged “Oh.” Its core audience is too “alternative marketing”-bombarded to pull double takes at a major motion picture studio’s carpet bombing of focus grouped ad copy, no matter where that copy shows up. And the people who see the movie on its second weekend do so merely because their friends’ kids said it was a riot.

And oh yeah if you go to SarahMarshall.com, you see an allegedly “self-made” Web page with YOU ARE THE 17280th PERSON TO HATE SARAH MARSHALL. We’re naive to believe it…. But at least it isn’t smacking us over the head like so much bad advertising.

We all know the saying keep your friends close and your enemies closer. For celebrities and the press, it’s more cardinal law than old saw. There ain’t much choice.

But in the TMZ Era – which makes the US Weekly Era years back seem like a Norman Rockwell portrait of tranquility –savvy celebs are more creative in how they manage that schizoid relationship.

Today’s lesson, girls and boys and trannies, is the fake wedding.

George Clooney ambled by Today Show yesterday to promote his new movie, the one about leather. While talking shop with Meredith V, Clooney admitted gloriously loving all of the false rumors and media fodder. His favorite rumor? False one about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were slated to marry at his house a couple of years ago.

In order to really bring the story to life, Clooney ordered tables and chairs to be placed in his backyard. Oh, that guy! The paparassholes, along with the rest of the world except me, waited with baited breath to catch a glimpse, even a peak at the couple. The wedding never happened but the story sure did.

Just this past week nearly every tabloid EVER and those in the seemingly bored bloggy-sphere tattled about Brangelina having tied the knot in New Orleans. According to Star’s site, “Sources in a position to have information regarding a secret wedding ceremony between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had confirmed to Star that the couple married in the French Quarter Wedding Chapel on Saturday, March 29.”

Pitt’s publicist played on the rumors claiming she had “no idea” as to whether or not the story was actually true. Hmmmm, likely. Of course, Star along with every other weekly, gossip show and online mag had to retract the story. Double the coverage! (Let me put this into context, those sites got more hits from this story than Amy Winehouse from a crack pipe. That’s a lotta hits.) Another wedding is set to launch, rather is scheduled for TODAY, and this time it’s Jay-Z and

Beyonce—both of whom have launches currently occurring that need heat behind ‘em. Perez Hilton suspects they chose April 4^th because they are both born on the fourth day of their respective months – put it together, you get 4/4. I know…sham or leaked plan or just way too much thought for two future Trivial Pursuit answers…we shall need to wait and see. And finally, while A-listers like Brangelina and Jay-B lead the pack, the rest of Hollywood isn’t too far behind. Heard of a promise ring? Young Hollywood is so crazy for these. They are tokens of love to put Eliot Spitzer’s hooker-tab to shame. Celebrities wave to the paps, new bling ablaze and gee is it an engagement or a marriage or a baby or whah? Everyone wins here. We’re entertained, they’re famous and the media makes money. It’s fun, right. And ridiculous. What more can America in its Mediocre Period want?

Captain Planet, he’s our hero
Gonna take pollution down to zero
 
He’s our powers magnified
And he’s fighting on the planet’s side
 
Gonna help him put asunder
Bad guys who like to loot and plunder
 
Remember him?  He was a super hero, who, along with a posse of kids, aimed to save the environment.  CP is still around — he goes by a different alias and that is Al Gore.  And his posse of kids? They have grown up to become the Green Collar workers – out to save the world and maybe even the economy.
 
(I had a neighbor that got arrested for being a green collar worker in the 90s – different kind of green though…. More on that another time.)
 
Before the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” the concept of global warming was still up for debate.  Science was clear, but yet doubters persisted.  Dubya didn’t believe in the issue.  In his circle it was a cause for the liberals, the hippies, and the liberal hippy media.  Nothing serious.  Remember The Kyoto Protocol?  Don’t feel bad, neither do they.
 
But when that movie rose up, things changed.  Everyone seemed to take notice, and what environmentalists and scientists had been saying for years became almost overnight the new conventional wisdom.  Gore wasn’t that boring suit who awkwardly smooched Tipper, he was – yep - Captain Planet, the voice that moved the world.
 
The film itself made around 25 million domestically.  Great for a documentary, but that many Americans saw it.  The publicity more than the movie itself changed the zeitgeist so dramatically that even Bush didn’t have a choice and soon he had to cop that global warming was pretty real.
 
Just like Styrofoam, that publicity for Gore’s movement isn’t going anywhere – it’s spreading everywhere.  Now everyone wants the green seal of approval, and what’s fascinating to trend watchers is that, like the film, it’s the PR that’s leading the change.  When a company says it’s easy for it to be green, it takes increasingly large steps to be green.  Actions are now catching up with the branding.
 
Time Warner Cable tells customers “Going green is simple when your bills are paperless.” GE even launched Ecomagination campaign years ago to promote, among other things, how it works with wind turbines. Now even that monolith is doing more to maintain the momentum and integrity of those earlier promotional promises.  From NBC Universal’s Green Week – hardy har har – to the new Ecomagination.com site, GE’s own slogans are motivating behavior.
 
Frito-Lay and PepsiCo are flexing green in a funny way too: The product SunChips is about to transition into a “green brand” by transforming one of the seven plants that manufactures the chips into a “sun” or solar powered operation.  Their brand always seemed (a/k/a were branded as) earth friendly, now their policies are following suit.
 
The economy?  Well, stupid, who is making all of these changes?  In the wake of economic recession, the Prez candidates are talking about the promise of a “green collar” workforce. Urban groups are watching this as a way out of poverty, corporations see it as a the path to environmental favor (and a little bit of street cred) and environmentalists see it as the path to a better tomorrow!  Everyone is happy.  Thanks Captain!
 
The negative side to the environmental craze? Let’s quote Lewis Black: “President Bush said that he now believes there’s global warming.  As a result, I’m not sure anymore.”