Well, the TechCrunch “Disrupt” conference in San Francisco has ended. And no one is talking about the drama surrounding TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s sort-of dismissal any more, because a legal agreement was clearly made with AOL, his former employer, and everyone’s obeying the NDA. Plus the vaguely promised self-immolation of the staff of TechCrunch didn’t materialize in the slightest. But wait, who won TechCrunch Disrupt???

Of 31 startups competing to be the “winner,” they came up with… this thing. “Shaker is a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks…. Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Prism Skylabs and is a pending investor in Shaker.”

What a lot of hot garbage! Facebook 2D virtual reality party chat? BUYING PEOPLE VIRTUAL DRINKS ON FACEBOOK??? Makes me miss the heady days of the end of quarter one, when Color got a bazillion dollars and nothing happened. Back when a bubble really meant something. Oh well. It’s been fun. Meanwhile, this quote from a 22-year-old at the TechCrunch conference, regarding whether there’s a bubble or not, IS SOLID GOLD: “I don’t think it’ll be anything like what I read about happening when I was 9 years old.”

“I don’t know of any architects out there who want to kill birds.”
 — Oh, they do, with their great glass facades and alluring skyscrapers. They just won’t admit it in public, because of America’s strident bird sympathizers in our long war against our avian enemies. For now, New York City remains a bird death mill in which we slaughter 90,000 evil birds each year. It’s a good beginning. But we won’t truly be safe until we kill ALL the birds. Just remember: for every bird we nab with our attractive see-through buildings, two more birds circle our airports, desperate to crawl inside our jet engines.

by “David Shapiro”

Some of my friends were going to the Tavi Gevinson fashion party, so I took the 6 uptown after work and walked over to the Ace Hotel. I was expecting a crazy line because earlier today Joe texted his little sister and asked if she wanted to go to the Tavi Gevinson fashion party and she said, “I’m already going!!!” and if word of this party had already spread to the 18-year-old little sisters, it signaled that this was probably going to be one of those parties where you stand on line outside with a thousand people for a while and then never get in, like a Vice party or that MTV Skins party on the West Side Highway last year. But then I got here and there wasn’t much of a line! I’m gonna think twice about using Joe’s little sister as a bellwether of party inclusivity in the future.

Anyway so now we are standing on line outside the hotel. I catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a closed storefront and put on my cap because my hair is sticking up on the sides more than I’m comfortable with, and then we go inside the Ace Hotel and stand in the lobby.

The Ace Hotel is a luxury lifestyle hotel designed to appeal to creative-class jetsetters. There’s an Opening Ceremony and a Stumptown Coffee, very dim light, black walls, a general den-of-sin/debauchery vibe as filtered through a corporate imagination, and also a lot of stylish Nordic people. Sometimes brands like Converse get hotel rooms here and have invite-only, hotel-sanctioned sales on exclusive items inside the rooms. We are the generation who bought more shoes and we’re getting great deals on exclusive items at the creative class luxury lifestyle hotel.

So there are a lot of people using their laptops around the communal WiFi table in the middle of the lobby, and as we walk to the bar, I discreetly peep over their shoulders to see what they’re working on. One guy is editing a blog post about the Congressional Special Election for the seat that Anthony Weiner vacated, but the text is too small to read anything but the headline and still appear to be not overtly reading over someone’s shoulder in public, so I move on. A woman near him is shopping for shoes online with the brightness way down, and a man next to her is reblogging a picture of a model on a runway on his Tumblr.

We go over to the bar and I order a Guinness and then the bartender brings over one of those Guinness cans with the plastic ball inside it that maintains a draught-like consistency in the beer, and he says, “Eleven dollars,” which is when I realize that the open bar is in the downstairs room, not this room. How many issues of AdBusters will I have to read to atone for pumping $11 into the creative class luxury lifestyle hotel economy? ¹

Then we walk downstairs, through a hallway filled with elderly women wearing extravagant couture, and into the basement ballroom, which is called Liberty Hall. The walls down here are black too, and the ceiling is very low. There is a woman standing in the corner who looks like Frau Farbissina, including the gelled curl stuck to the face.

Tavi Gevinson is sitting on a couch a few feet from the entrance and talking to a man in his 30s who we think is the style blogger who is co-hosting this party with Tavi. Then someone comes to interview her and she sounds, as you’d expect, more thoughtful and mature and humble than at least everyone on TV and every elected official. What else is there to say about Tavi? Later I will be standing outside with a young adult novelist who will wistfully say that Tavi is an ideal version of his younger self.

Then I come over and say, “Hi, I’m David, we hung out at Pitchfork,” because Tavi was my friend Angelica’s +1 at the Pitchfork Festival in July and the three of us hung out one afternoon there. I don’t know if she’d remember me because she meets thousands of people, and I don’t want her to not remember me, but I don’t want to introduce myself as if we’ve never met before because then she might think I am doing that thing where you knowingly introduce yourself to someone you’ve already met and pretend you don’t remember them to show them that they’re not important to you and consequently you are cooler than they are. But Tavi was really friendly at Pitchfork, and also, she is 15.

So I stand there for a moment, with a slice of ego on the line, while Tavi scrutinizes my face and then she smiles and says, “Oh, hi! I remember you!” I suspect she is telling the truth but once someone tells you that they’ve met you, there really is no tactful way to say, “Oh, well I don’t remember you.” I push that consideration to the back of my mind and then we talk about the party for a minute and eventually I say, “Have you seen Austin Powers?” She nods and looks at me quizzically and I say, “There’s a woman here who is a dead ringer for Frau Farbissina,” and I show her the headshot on Frau Farbissina’s Wikipedia page and she laughs, and then we say bye because she has 500 other people to talk to tonight, and also there’s not really very much conversational common ground between me and Tavi Gevinson that I know of, and then I go to the bar where I get a cup of Stoli with ice.

Later someone will ask Tavi about the possibility of a romantic relationship with the blogger she’s co-hosting the party with and she will tell them, “It’s really weird that you would say that to me.” I think she responded appropriately because if she’d sarcastically responded in the affirmative, the sarcasm probably wouldn’t show up in print.

So we stand near the bar and admire the people at this fashion party. There are a lot of women in their seventies and eighties, maybe more than half of the crowd, all of them wearing outrageous fashions. A woman who looks like she’s 85 and is about 4’7″, standing at the bar, has spiky gelled platinum blonde hair. Another woman is sitting on an armchair and playing with her primary fashion accessory, a puppet that looks like it’s from 1890, next to a woman who is wearing an asymmetrical cone-shaped black hat that covers one of her eyes. At least one of these women is named Beatrix, and at least a few smell like mothballs. The blogger Jenna Sauers suggests that the ones who smell like mothballs must have recently excavated the finery they’re wearing from the closet.

The Frau Farbissina is standing behind a table that has a sign on it offering fashion advice for 5 cents, which I guess hasn’t recently been adjusted for inflation. A man walks past us wearing a floor-length leopard-print trenchcoat over a t-shirt that says ACCEPT THE MYSTERY across the chest.

Everyone is taking pictures each of other and complimenting each other on their outfits, but one older women walks past me and I can overhear her as she reveals the dark undercurrent that must be swirling around at a lot of fashion parties. She says to another woman, “She’s just BEGGING to get her picture taken.” Unrelated, I get another cup of Stoli.

Then Ira Glass walks in, wearing a green Crumpler messenger bag, and orders two glasses of champagne at the bar. He is wearing Levi’s 501 jeans, size 34×32. Eventually he finds Tavi and sits down next to her on a couch, and they chat but I can’t hear them and am not trying to listen, and then I realize I am drunk enough to be a liability in conversation, so I text my friend that I am ready to leave and to meet me outside when he’s ready. I stand outside for a while and Tavi comes out of the hotel, surrounded by a pack of women and girls. Then my friend hails a cab to a party on 44th Street. We get out of the car steps away from The Sofitel, the hotel where Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly didn’t rape a chamber maid, and stand on the street looking up at it. Is this oddly fitting, somehow related to what the rest of this story is about, a reflection of a larger cosmic conflict, or a meaningless coincidence? I think probably meaningless coincidence. But I’ve never seen The Sofitel before, even after living in New York for 5 years, and now it’s maybe the most internationally known hotel in New York. Here is a picture of it!

Sent from my BlackBerry

¹ ∞

David “Shapiro” is 23 and lives in New York City and has a Tumblr.

“Now, if we have a more decentralized mass transit system using buses, if the terrorists blow up a single bus, we can work around that. When they blow up a rail, that just brings the system to a grinding halt. So how much security are we going to have on this rail system, and how much will it cost?”
 — That’s J.D. Van Brink, of the Georgia Tea Party, explaining why trains shouldn’t be built in the US of A. So, I guess the terrorists won? Also, I would like to report that I saw the movie Unstoppable recently, because I was sure the “runaway train” concept was just like an organizing idea or a plot device? NO. It is literally about a runaway train, and it is terrible, and boring, and annoyingly shot, and poorly edited. That is all. (via)

“For most, a good soak in the bath is a chance to relax, unwind and let your troubles float away in peaceful surroundings. But clearly no-one told Joe the baby gorilla, who, like all youngsters his age, used his bathtime to have a good splash around and generally create chaos. In newsreel footage by British Pathe, Joe the gorilla frolics in the bath while being cleaned at Twycross Zoo, Leicestershire. The film was created in 1967 but has only recently been unveiled by the multimedia company.”

While the lawsuit apparently filed today by the parent company of Nikki Finke’s Deadline against the parent company of the Hollywood Reporter is largely about “misappropriating wholesale content” from Deadline, the fun begins when you see they accused the Reporter of straight up stealing code from their site TVLine. (The copyright infringement on the code seems pretty cut and dry. [PDF]) BUT THEN there’s also a section on how the Reporter tried to “lure away” Deadline’s employee, Ms. Finke, with a decent salary and a “ONE MILLION DOLLAR MALIBU HOME.” Then there are like a thousand examples of stories that Deadline posted first and then the Reporter posted 42 minutes later.

Annnnd they’re asking for $5 million for “actual damages” for each instance of infringement. AND MUCH MUCH MORE. Never have the words “demands a jury trial” been more exciting.

“The word comes from a Norse monster but the troll is a very modern menace. For some it’s the internet equivalent of road rage, vandalising a grave, or kicking a man when he’s down. Trolling is a phenomenon that has swept across websites in recent years. Online forums, Facebook pages and newspaper comment forms are bombarded with insults, provocations or threats. Supporters argue it’s about humour, mischief and freedom of speech. But for many the ferocity and personal nature of the abuse verges on hate speech.”

“Silvio Berlusconi was at the centre of fresh controversy tonight after claims emerged he had insulted Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Italian prime minister, 74, is accused of making a disgusting comment about her during a telephone conversation with a newspaper editor. The alleged remarks — too vulgar to repeat but referred to sex and Mrs Merkel’s physique — were picked up by investigators probing a £660,000 blackmail plot against Mr Berlusconi.”

Viewed through the unripe eyes of Calhoun’s 13-year-olds, the collapse of the Twin Towers might have been a natural disaster. Captions tell us that the “The loss was sudden and great”; “Smoke and dust were everywhere”; and “The streets were empty.” For all the project’s pretense to chronicle, nothing indicates why. “People donated blood.” So? Blood drives are commonplace. “The people were afraid.” But of what? Yes, “people still miss the Twin Towers.” But why are they gone? Did they just fall down of their own accord? Might their destruction have had something to do with the lethal ideology of Islamist jihadists? Or with Islam’s theological imperative toward war with the infidel and the religiously sanctioned violence of classic Islamic jurisprudence? The display keeps mum on the critical matter of responsibility.

— 9/11: Through Young Eyes is on view through October 8, 2011, at DC Moore Gallery in West Chelsea. The exhibition consists of work made in 2001 by an eighth grade class at the Calhoun School, after seeing an exhibition by Jacob Lawrence at the Whitney (oh and, I guess, also the devastation of downtown). It is also, according to this absolutely scathing review, a heaping pile of ahistorical garbage. Also: “An oddly truncated exercise in sanitized storytelling that sacrifices historical understanding to a bien pensant avoidance of the obvious.” HAHA WOW.

Congratulations to Awl pal Jessica Grose, who has sold her debut novel to William Morrow. (That link is subscription-only, so know this: Sad Desk Salad is “told from the voice of a popular blogger who chronicles the rise and fall of her big scoop, where she must reconcile her values with the growing (ruthless) demands of a gossip- and reality-obsessed culture,” but Jess assures us it is not a Devil Wears Prada kind of thing.)