Media-Whore D'Oeuvres

"When I think about Occupy Wall Street, I picture a bunch of pissed off people who feel left out of a critical conversation, one that will have impact on the rest of their lives. Decisions are being made and policy debated by the same people who got us into this mess with no clue on how to get us out. When you feel like your chosen leaders have lost the script, it's hard to just sit there and do nothing. It only takes a small group of people to light the fire that taps into the deep discontent that's been simmering below the surface. Of course, none of this would be happening if the economy were bubbling along, but it isn't. What Occupy Wall Street is protesting is the general fucked-up-ness of the world we live in where governments and corporations appear to conspire against the interests of the general population. Unlike the anti-war and civil rights movements of the '60s, there is no unifying cry to End the War in Vietnam, for example. It's much broader than that, part of a general malaise and disgust with government that spans the right and the left, from the Tea Party to the Occupy Wall Street party people. For many, it's protest for its own sake, a chance to express one's anger against the politics-as-usual approach taken by leaders who can't get themselves to take meaningful action. Rather than watching unemployment continue to climb while the rich get richer, Occupy Wall Street is making noise in the media with the 'we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore' message." (David Hershkovits/Paper)

"Daniel Yergin's latest book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, would have been essential reading for energy industry insiders simply as a consequence of Yergin's status as one of the field's foremost commentators and analysts ... Daniel Yergin: 'We have gone through periods of great optimism about how quickly a transition to a different kind of energy system can come about. But our $65 trillion global economy rests on a very big and complex energy foundation. And it's governed by two laws. One is the law of long lead-times. Because of the scale and nature of energy, it doesn't change overnight. And the second is the law of scale. To be significant, it has to be large. And the renewable sector, the alternative sector, is still developing within those constraints. It's certainly a lot farther ahead than it was a decade ago, and indeed it has become a big business and a global business in its own right. But, when you look out 15 or 20 years based on what we know, our energy mix won't change too dramatically. It's really around 2030 that we could see the really significant changes.'" (Foreign Policy)

"'I don’t know why I’m telling you this story,' Fred Wilson told The Observer in a recent interview, interrupting his own yarn with a laugh. 'I’m not an investor in GroupMe and I wasn’t at South by Southwest.' Mr. Wilson, principal at Union Square Ventures was second-guessing an anecdote about a party at the annual Austin festival. (Brew Media Relations) decided to rent out a burger stand across the street from the convention center and call it the 'GroupMe Grill.' It was a bid to win what tech bloggers were calling “the group messaging wars” waging between five startups at the convention all pursuing a similar concept. Over three days Brew gave away 2,500 free grilled cheese sandwiches encrisped with the company logo and 13 kegs of Shiner Bock—in exchange for downloading GroupMe’s new mobile app, of course. GroupMe left Austin with the SXSW Breakout award. The TechCrunch headline? “How GroupMe Won SXSW: Grilled Cheese.” Five months later, Skype acquired GroupMe for $85 million." (BeatBeat)

"'Mad? Ya think?! If he came back right now I’d have to kill him, for what he did to us. I’d fucking kill him. I’d fuck him, and then I’d kill him,' 47-year-old Courtney Love shouted at Vanity Fair contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales, asked if she was angry with her husband, Kurt Cobain, for killing himself. 'He tried to kill himself three times!' And then there were the drugs. 'He OD’d at least five times. I was the fucking E.M.S. I was always sticking pins in his balls. I carried around Narcan!'—a drug used to jolt OD-ing heroin users back to life. At the singer’s rented West Village town house, Love shows Sales a book from her estranged daughter Frances Bean’s 'hope chest.' 'This is her diary,' Love explains. 'I just want you to look at this one page,' which contains a list titled, 'Things That Make Me Smile.' Love, distraught, asks Sales, 'Why am I not on it? Why doesn’t she put ‘watching old movies with my mom’?' Frances Bean emancipated herself from her mother two years ago, a decision that is clearly still bewildering and hurtful to Love. 'All I can feel is how much I love her,' Love tells Sales. 'I’d give anything to hear the sound of her heels walking down the hall past my bedroom.' The relationship between Love and her daughter has been rough from the start, as Frances was placed in protective custody when she was born. 'There were no drugs in my urine, no drugs in her urine when she was born,' Love says. She laments a number of her parenting failures, such as Frances’s inability to read until she was seven: 'It was my fault! I never read to her! ... Why didn’t I ever take her to a Broadway show? She fucking loved those Broadway musicals!'" (VanityFair)

"My sister wrote me from Cape Cod to tell me that the leaves were falling a lot, helped by the storms. Here in Manhattan, the leaves have yet to even show signs of turning. It takes much longer, I guess because the city is warm, still self-heating. The apartment buildings usually don’t turn on the heat until it hits 55 degrees. I think. It’s somewhere along there. When I lived in Los Angeles, I didn’t miss the foliage back here the way a lot of people claim to. But when I am here in New York, I look forward to it. I see hope even when it’s hard to see, when the leaves turn color. It’s too beautiful to deny.The social scene – at least the one you’re going to hear most about on New York Social Diary, is beginning to heat up. Three, four, five events a day. Yesterday I missed the Silver Hill Hospital Gala kick-off at the home of Shafi Roepers. Disappointed; because I had wanted to see the house of the lady I’ve heard so much about. Ms. Roepers is not new on the scene but she is On The Scene Now. There’s a slight difference. The emergence of a personality in New York is always interesting to observe." (NYSocialDiary)

"George Clooney will bring his upcoming Oscar hopeful, 'The Ides of March,' to New York again tonight for a Ziegfeld Theatre premiere. Sony has methodically been pumping the political drama at the Venice and Toronto film festivals and for tastemakers at MoMA. This time, Sir Howard Stringer hosts, and expected guests include George Stephanopoulos, Jon Corzine, Michael Moore, Christopher Cuomo, Tom Brokaw and Lesley Stahl." (PageSix)