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Television

Kill Your TV: New Year’s Eve 2009

By Doug Schrashun on

As the Negative Nancies at Gawker noted earlier this week, New Year’s Eve is a polarizing holiday. In pursuit of the mythic ultimate best time ever, partygoers find disappointment and drunken embarrassment as often as euphoria. And if you’re in New York, you’re probably already freaking out about the inevitable choice between the self loathing of paying out your last few dollars at a lavish party and the crushing resignation of watching the ball drop from the confines of your living room.

Of course, there are any number of ways to go with option three, actual fun, and we’ve got 4-1-1 on all of them at Flavorpill. But just in case you needed any more reason to separate yourself from the TV, here’s a summary of what the networks have lined up. And yes, Dick Clark is alive (at 79!) and involved. … Read More

Music

Lost in Translation: The Mysterious Case of GReeeeN

By Doug Schrashun on

In an effort to distract you from the hellish sales numbers and less than stellar content of today’s pop charts, we try to put a brighter spin on things by looking at it all through the eyes of our Eastern counterparts in Japan. As much as we’d love to use this space to shed some Japanese light on 808′s and Heartbreaks or Sasha Fierce, this week we’ve discovered a Japanese band so heretical in their approach to pop music, we couldn’t help but comment. … Read More

Web

Google Shows Us What We’ve Been Searching For: Making Sense of the Zeitgeist

By Doug Schrashun on

Google released its annual Zeitgeist report this week, giving the world a chance to view 2008 through the lens of our search habits. Data geeks that they are, they’ve formatted their version of a year-end report not as an easy to read (read: easy to ignore) list, but rather as a collection of numbers, charts, regional segmentations and other showy stuff that we don’t know how to do in Excel.

While we know that the point of the Zeitgeist is to help us understand the state of the Internet world — and be extension, society at large — our first reaction to it was a resounding “Huh? What does this all mean? What’s a ‘nasza klasa’? Where are we? We’re scared.” After the jump, we try our best to sort it all out for you. … Read More

Music

The Pitchfork 500: Obscure Enough For You?

By Doug Schrashun on

Pitchfork released The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present a few weeks ago, and it’s designed to be a perfect argument starter. No matter how you feel about Pitchfork (“where else would I get all my Beach House news?”, “not emo enough!”), their choices for this list are sure to raise some eyebrows.

From the over-abundance of ’70s reggae and ’90s dance tracks to a relatively lackluster showing for hip-hop, there are any number of battlegrounds among these 500 songs. For now, though, we’ll stick to one particular quibble — Pitchfork’s enduring tendency to arbitrarily over promote obscure music.

We think they might do it just to make us feel stupid.

After the jump are five songs that sent our obscure-o-meter especially deep into the red. … Read More