Rushfield Babylon

“Today, Google unveiled its latest social innovation, called +1. Now stick with us, here, because after the botched launches of  and, it’s clear that the search giant doesn’t excel at explaining why users should care about its new products.

To put it simply, +1 is designed to help guide you through search results by pointing you toward what your friends and family have found useful. Once the system launches across the country, a +1 button will appear next to every search result. Ideally, users will click +1 on results they find useful. Similar to Facebook’s "like” button, Google will keep track of everyone’s +1 marks and alert their friends when they stumble upon it.“

You know what Google:  For years you sat there and did nothing while people built massive companies like Demand Media and HuffPo, bragging that they could create an empire that could wipe away all media before it based simply on gaming your algorithm.  

Forget about the effect it had on media, but you let your users get crummy, preposterous, factory-produced results, let every kind of media company shell out to search consultants who could game their way to the top, letting the world know producing better content was beside the point. You let an entire generation grow up seeing that "relevance” was just a World of Warcraft-like game of tech prowess and had nothing to do with the quality of the material.  

And now, years later, you’re waking up to the fact that your whole paradigm has become a lot of hooey, and after the flops of Buzz and Wave, this is your solution to it?  A little button that I can go back and press to show my friends I liked my search of used mattress locations near me?  This is your solution? 

Google, my friend, it’s time to wake up.

Life & Style can exclusively reveal that Emily Maynard has decided to make the move from North Carolina to Texas with her 5-year-old daughter, Ricki, to be with her fiancé Brad Womack.

“She feels like the best thing to do is to give this a real shot and put her heart into it by moving to Austin for the summer,” an insider close to Emily tells Life & Style. “She’s going to get her own condo there. She’s not moving in with him.”

…Her own condo…For the summer.

This is not the fairy tale we were promised?

It makes one start to doubt if love is even possible on game shows anymore.

source

We’re about midway through the first season of the rest of American Idol’s life, and it seemed a good moment to pause and take stock; a moment to reflect and come to some grandiose semi-defensible conclusions about that state of the most critical season of the most most influential show in the history of the most dominant medium of entertainment in history of the human race.

And basically it’s a moment for Yes, Buts.

Yes, the torch was successfully carried over the river Jordan to the promised land of a post-Cowell destiny.  None said Idol could make it.  Most predicted doom.  Some even ignominy,  or worse.  But they did it and fueled by the Tyler sensation and a better than average line-up of singers, the show survived and ratings are incredibly, amazingly, without precedentally, up in the show’s 10th Season, after the departure of its signature star. 

So huzzahs to them.  And no one likes to throw cold water on a miracle….But….

First of all,  it does seem that at last, after the excitement about the new toy, the absence of Cowell is finally being felt.  What is missing is that key dramatic moment when after singing for their very lives, when the contestant’s fates are pronounced by one who brings the certitude of Jehovah to his every pronouncement.   

There isn’t really any need, structurally, for the show to have judges at all.  After the semi-finals they play no official role.  Their last formal act - using the save - was dispensed with last week and from here on they are just bystanders. But when the show was created, it was felt that without that real time feedback, the audience would have no filter through which to view the performances.   The audiences were free to ignore the judge’s advice, or to rebel against it and they often did.  By the time they got to the top 6 or so, the audience had settled around its favorites and pretty much ignored the judges’ rulings.  Will Young the first winner of Idol’s forerunner, UK’s Pop Idol, was propelled to victory after he stood up to Cowell’s slams against him.

Nonetheless, the judges’ rulings gave the audience something to respond to, for or against.   And in the finality of Cowell’s “That. Was. Terrible.” or “That was absolutely brilliant” the audiences had that dramatic pivot and rallying point. 

Now that we’ve gotten used to Tyler’s zanyness and being reminded that Jlo is pretty, now that we are onto the high stakes big stage, that moment simply isn’t there.  It’s not that they are all being too positive, Jlo and Randy at least are trying to be critical. But neither of them have the dramatic heft to deliver the verdicts like the hammer of God.    

The bet in this season was that America had had enough of meanness, that they were ready for judges to be constructive, supportive, positive.  And I think there’s something to that as far as it goes.  The meanness was becoming a shtick and America’s in a slightly less nasty mood than it was ten years ago, or at least it pretends it is.    But the thing about constructive is, as helpful as that may be, this is still a TV show not a knitting bee.  It’s great to know that they have singing coaches working with them, but is that really what the show should be?  When a battle for career life or death lies on the line?

Worse still, what we seem to be missing is that vital BS detector role that Cowell played.  One of the things that was so revolutionary about Idol when it launched was this presence of a judge willing to say that acts on his own show, entire nights of his own show were abominable.  In an entertainment world where everything felt packaged and controlled by corporate overlords, this was breathtaking and stunning. 

Now it feels there is no one playing that role.  And in its absence…the other side of mean is hype.  And it has felt, I hate to say it, on some of these nights, that the show is actively trying to sell us a bill of goods on some of these singers, something I’ve never felt before on Idol.  

And that brings us to the contestants.  Definitely better than last year in that they are more energetic, bigger personalities.  But the fact that there is no frontrunner, or even cluster of front runners is worrying.  On the one hand, this can mean that there are a bunch of people the audience is excited about.  On the other it can mean there is no one, or no ones, that they are really excited about. 

The big super, sine qua non of this year was to produce a winner that went on the become a major mega seller. It’s been five years since Idol has done that, and the promise of stardom conferred is becoming extremely wobbly.  

The only one of these I see with that sort of potential frankly is Pia Toscano, who can ride this weird Glee wave in some way. 

The biggest question I have is why Jimmy Iovine and his producers are not being more aggressive thus far in shaping the arrangements.  The thought, coming into this was that we were going to be forcing them to be contemporary.  But few of these nights sound like anything I hear on the radio today.  And the girls in particular are still getting away with just playing the safe preposterous Celine Dion card.    So step it up Iovine!  We don’t need one more person just hanging around to tell these kids, and tell us about these kids, how fantastic they are.  

Thus concludes my halftime report.   Overall, obviously, the news is far far more good than bad.  But clouds a'gather quick in entertainment and I urge Idol to take heed.

So Mad Men didn’t take it’s ball and go home after all.  After another endless haggle, Matthew Weiner has reluctantly agreed to grace the world with a fifth season of the well dressed office drama.  But not until sometime next year.  And maybe not if they cant straighten out all kinds of other issues still on the table.

Still one has to believe this will be the very last season, our farewell to Sterling Cooper Draper Price and their band of merry men. The price is just going to be out of line for a show that despite being celebrated by everyone you know, still only gets ratings akin to Full House reruns.

MM remains one of my five - seven favorite shows on TV. I’m all for it and wish it would run forever.  

But then there are quotes like these in The Daily’s piece on the negotiations.  

“‘Weiner is being completely screwed by AMC.’ said one source on the creative side. 'Nobody would have heard of AMC if it were not for Matthew Weiner and Mad Men. But they will not renew the show unless he accedes to all their demands.”“

The demands are said, by the piece to be make each episode three minutes shorter to squeeze in another couple ads and lighten the payroll by a couple actors.

See, quotes like this really make me almost hate the show.  

I have done the math and never in entertainment history, since Aeschylus, has the disparity between the entertainment of the elite and the entertainment of the masses been greater.  Mad Men has been on the cover of every magazine in the Universe from Vanity Fair to Cat Fancy and still remains a program for the nichest of niche audiences. Just because the niche is you and your friends doesn’t mean you’re not a niche.  And a niche of the over-educated, over-paid, over-unbanized no less, so smoke that for a while.

But when you hear the biennial round of Weiner demands and grievances, you would think that AMC was about to sell the Statue of Liberty back to the French for a vat of truffle oil.    And behind all this, since every time AMC executives go to a dinner party they must have to listen to all their friends kvell about Roger Sterling, they must be terrified that if they don’t renew the show and give Weiner his three minutes their homes will be burned to the ground and their children will become pariah at their fancy schools. It’s negotiating at gunpoint!

As for the "put AMC on the map” complaint, well, Father Junipero Serra put my home state of California on the map and you don’t see me writing him checks.   Especially when Walking Dead draws vastly more viewers than Mad Men ever will.

 So, to sum up, I’m all for Matthew Weiner getting as much money for himself and his crew as he possibly can.  Between that advertising money being in the hands of a network or being in the hands of a producer, I’m delighted for them to sort that out for themselves and good luck to them both I say!  But when one side starts kvetching like he’s being abused by this network that continues to subsidize his no doubt money losing show, I say send him to his room without supper and maybe we’ll see how indispensable to our democracy Mad Men really is.

Average Number of Superhero Films By Year/Decade: 

1950’s: 1 per Decade

1960’s: 1 per Decade

1970’s: 1 per Decade

1980’s: .7 per year

1990’s" 2.2 per year

00’s: 3.8 per year

HISTORIC AVERAGE*:

Percent of Superhero Movies The Are Good or Better - 31 percent

Percent of Superhero Movies That are Forgettable or Worse 69 percent

SINCE 2005*: 

Percent of Superhero Movies That Are Good or Better - 18 percent

Percent of Superhero Movies That are Forgettable or Worse - 82 percent

*(Scientifically calculated based on the films I liked)

This marks the third installment of my attempt to read the complete Shakespeare plays in a year or so.  Note to readers: After this installment we will switch from reading in alphabetical order to a more traditional chronological sceme.

THOUGHTS: So who am I to throw stones William Shakespeare?  I haven’t written dozens of plays that have been beloved for hundreds of years. I haven’t coined so many phrases and words that have become standard usage that people don’t even remember they were my inventions.  My name is not synonymous with the theater. My books have been read by hundreds of people, not hundreds of millions over centuries.   And until that changes, many would say, where do you get off, mister?

And I can’t really argue.

But be that as it may, I could’ve written a better play than As You Like It in my sleep.

In my defense, I will say, I do not stand alone.  Wikipedia informs me that “Critics from Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw have complained thatAs You Like It is lacking in the high artistry of which Shakespeare was capable.”  So normally I wouldn’t want to be on a team against the bard, but if I can have Johnson and Shaw backing me up, I’ll take those odds.

Basically the problems with AYLI are these:

• Clowns.  You feel like the fools are the thing you have to put up with in Shakespeare to get to the good stuff. Well you’re in for a heckuva treat with this play then which comes close at points to being an ALL CLOWN drama.  The Clown, Touchstone is everywhere…Swallowing whole acts in one merry breath.    

So I’m not really a believer in progress. I don’t think the world improves over time. I think it ebbs and flows. I don’t think people get smarter, we just accumulate more information that gets swept away when the next dark age or OCD plague comes.  Yes, we have sciences that have doubled our lifespan and all, but those same sciences and industry no doubt are at work now on things that will kill us all, so that kinda cancels that out.

But with comedy, it’s hard not to feel like the world has taken a few big steps forward since Shakespeare’s time.  Especially when one spends page after page with that irrepressible card Touchstone.  

• Cross Dressing.  There have been two funny uses of cross dressing in art, and this isn’t one of them. They are Some Like It Hot and Victor, Victoria.  As You Like It on the other hand stands with Big Momma’s House, Sorority Boys and Mrs. Doubtfire in the pantheon of works that thought it was so hilarious to see a man dressed as a woman or vice-verse, they just couldn’t get over themselves.

• Creaky plot devices.  Oh the places you can go when the man you’re in love with to believes you are a young boy and you can gain his confidence, and convince him to use you as a substitute to practice wooing you!  What hi-jinx ensue. And then when a shepardess believes you are a lad and falls for you….oh you can just imagine.   Meanwhile the whole thing about the Duke being overthrown by his scheming brother gets brushed under the rug until the final moments when a Fool or a lady dressed as a lad can step in to make it all right.

I won’t go to hard on the Bard for this one.  After all, he went on to some not bad stuff before he hung it up. But he and I and George Bernard Shaw all know, he’s had better days than one when he turned in this script.

THE RUSHFIELD BABYLON RECOMMENDATION: Don’t