Igor Stravinsky

It’s opening night for the New York Philharmonic—finally, our fall is in full swing! We’ll be celebrating a different season, though, as music director Alan Gilbert opens the season with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a piece of music that once moved audiences to riot and is now the center of a lovely evening at Lincoln Center. Coming later in the season, Mr. Gilbert conducts Scheherezade, and Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos comes in to conduct Mozart and Mahler.

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, 7:30pm, tickets and information can be found at nyphil.org

Lena Dunham (Getty Images)

Lena Dunham was having a bad Friday night. The Girls star and director was filming an exterior scene in Williamsburg (observers described it as—spoiler ahoy!—a fight between her character and her love interest played by Adam Driver). But a nearby house party—a birthday celebration attended by the sort of early-20s liberal-arts graduate Brooklynites whose lives she was attempting to chronicle on film—was making a great deal of noise and interrupting her shoot. She took to Twitter: “Dear party preventing us from shooting in Williamsburg- I get it! Your party seems so fun! I hate having to be such a kill joy! [sic] I am young!”

Fifty-nine retweets and 78 favorites couldn’t stop the birthday bash, though, and Ms. Dunham tweeted twice more about the party, first asking “why’d you throw a bottle and call us commies?” Then, 42 minutes after first mentioning the party, the HBO auteur wrote: “We monstrously appreciate the quiet you have given us you cool kids. Just found out the function of the party- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARIA!”

But the quiet was not easily won. Two guests at the party indicated to Transom that Ms. Dunham’s producers had bought the party’s silence by setting up a bar tab for the revelers at the nearby Pedros Kitchen and Brew on Hope Street. To strike the deal, a producer entered the party—“He had a walkie-talkie on and, like, Crocs and cargo shorts,” said a male guest. “He kind of stuck out.” At first, the producer simply asked for the partiers to keep the volume down out of courtesy.

“That lasted about a minute,” said the male guest.

After the producer returned to the party to plead, cajole or yell, Maria the birthday girl negotiated the terms of the bar tab. “There was an idea of trying to inflict monetary harm on HBO for ruining our fun,” said the male guest. And once the group of about 60 got to Pedros, “People were just ordering cocktails. You could watch the bar tab go up. It was an incentive to drink, to beat up HBO’s American Express.”

An HBO employee stood guard outside the bar’s door to ensure no noise got out—a sensible decision, since the deal the production team set up with the bar allowed the revelers to act as DJs and select their own music. A female guest said she asked the door guard how often this happened to the Girls crew. The answer: not often.

The Girls production staff said, in a statement to Transom: “In our best efforts to be neighborly and complete our day’s work we relocated Maria’s birthday party from the loft across the street from our location to a bar down the block. Lena Dunham added ‘we hope everyone had satisfying sexual encounters.’”

As for that thrown bottle? Both guests say that the party interacted minimally with Ms. Dunham and her crew. “There were already so many people gawking at them filming,” said the male guest.

“Someone started a ‘LEE-NA’ chant," said the female guest of the brief walk to the bar, “and someone else tried to start a ‘VOICE OF OUR GENERATION’ chant, but it didn’t catch on.”

Katie Couric (Getty Images)

Katie Couric's new talk show, Katie, has announced some of its first guests--and it tends toward supermarket-checkout celebrities. Ms. Couric's first show is to feature Jessica Simpson's first TV interview since giving birth to daughter Maxwell, reports Deadline, with a performance by mom-friendly act Sheryl Crow. Other big names booked for the fall include the press-friendly--Jennifer Lopez, Chelsea Handler--and the press-shy--Barbra Streisand and Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James. Ms. Couric's new show, to begin September 10, has also reached out to Sarah Palin, who infamously accused the host of "gotcha journalism" for an interview conducted in the 2008 presidential campaign, to "no response."

The late Anna Piaggi (Patrick McMullan)

A glance at Twitter these days might prompt one to wonder why all of our celebrities are suddenly expiring en masse. It used to be said that deaths come in threes—now the daily news cycle arrives like a plague, cutting down one cultural luminary after another.

Of course, notable deaths aren’t on the upswing—but chatter about them certainly is. We perform our grief on social media, the personal tributes flooding Twitter in the moments after each passing. To the traditional accoutrements of mourning (the mountains of stuffed animals, the candles and roses, the dimming of the lights on Broadway), we have added the tweet, the retweet and the "like."

This past week, composer Marvin Hamlisch, fashion editor Anna Piaggi, art critic Robert Hughes, and author and raconteur Gore Vidal all passed away. Then, even as we were writing this, film critic Judith Crist joined them. In a past era, their deaths would have have merited a Times obit and a mention, if time allowed, at the end of the evening news.

In the age of Twitter, though, there is no such thing as a muted response to a celebrity passing. At press time, the top trending topics included Hamlisch, Hughes and Piaggi, as well as A Chorus Line and The Sting, Hamlisch’s two best-loved works. “Rest in peace, Good man. #ChorusLinealldaybaby” wrote one Twitter user apparently planning to enjoy Hamlisch’s work. “My cat loves this one,” wrote another user, of a track Hamlisch wrote for The Informant! Piaggi and Hughes earned tributes no less heartfelt, with a Canadian reporter speculating all three were together in heaven, “trading stories over a plateau de fruits de mer and rosé.”

Twitter is perhaps the ultimate tool for celebrity death announcements—better, even, than celebritydeathbeeper.com (“Now checking for deaths every 10 minutes”). The collective digital keening represented by the subject’s ascension to trending topic-hood opens up a realm of deeply personal and hyper-specific emotional projection. For instance, it allows those who once personally encountered the subject to advertise that fact. As one devastated tweeter noted of Hamlisch, “I rode a hotel elevator with him in Phoenix once.”

It also imparts which of the celebrity’s books, characters or songs is the most beloved among one’s circle. Turns out, everyone has read Crazy Salad and The City and the Pillar, and adores “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”

These days, failing to retweet a celebrity’s passing, ideally with a hastily assembled Spotify playlist, an animated GIF or a lovingly curated series of YouTube clips, is a sign of one’s heartlessness. Chiming in, after all, is how we know we’re still alive (for now); to sit one out is to risk irrelevance. While eulogies are still rightly offered by those who loved the deceased, Twitter conveys death’s effect on those who “liked” him.

Wading through the sheer volume of remembrances of Hamlisch or Piaggi, one feels as though it could go on forever—or at least until the next celebrity dies. And with every tweet fired off, staking out the sender’s claim to a very fleeting and high-tech grief, one feels the tweeter’s anxiety, as though his enthusiasm could stave off the inevitable.

And someday, the tweeter no doubt hopes, his own followers will eulogize him—something appropriate, just a few characters and a shortened link, in memoriam.