11/02/2011

Valentine`s Day> Video> Science of Love: Attraction



Science of Love: Attraction

My dear Valentine...

Valentine`s Day is coming!!! Feb 14!!!!


Every February 14, across the United States and in other places around the world, candy, flowers and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint, and where did these traditions come from?

Did You Know?
Approximately 141 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged annually, making Valentine's Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas

The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.
One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.
According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first "valentine" greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed "From your Valentine," an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.
While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to "christianize" celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.
The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman "lottery" system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.
In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.
According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)
Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.
Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap."

http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day

HISTORY`S ROMANTICS

From poets and presidents to kings and courtesans, history is filled with great romances and timeless love stories.  This Valentine's Day, discover some of history's most famous tales of love and loss. From historic figures like Casanova, whose name has become synonymous with romance, to India's Shah Jahan, who built one of the world's most manificent buildings to honor his wife, to modern love affairs like that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, history's romantics have long had a place in the popular imagination.



Sappho

Much uncertainty surrounds the life story of the celebrated Greek lyric poet Sappho, a woman Plato called "the tenth Muse." Born around 610 B.C. on the island of Lesbos, now part of Greece, she was said to have been married to Cercylas, a wealthy man. Many legends have long existed about Sappho's life, including a prevalent one — now believed to be untrue — that she leaped into the sea to her death because of her unrequited love of a younger man, the sailor Phaon. It is not known how much work she published during her lifetime, but by the 8th or 9th century Sappho's known work was limited to quotations made by other authors. In the majority of her poems, Sappho wrote about love — and the accompanying emotions of hatred, anger and jealousy — among the members of her largely young and female circle. Sappho gave her female acolytes educational and religious instruction as part of the preparation for marriage; the group was dedicated to and inspired by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Her focus on the relationships between women and girls has led many to assume that Sappho was a lesbian — a word derived from the island and the communities of women that lived there — but it is also true that the existence of strong emotions and attractions between members of the same sex was considered far more common and less taboo than in later years.

Vatsyayana, author of the Kama Sutra

This ascetic, probably celibate scholar who lived in classical India (around the 5th century A.D.) is an unlikely candidate to have written history's best known book on erotic love. Little is known about Vatsyayana's life, but in his famous book — actually a collection of notes on hundreds of years of spiritual wisdom passed down by the ancient sages — he wrote that he intended the Kama Sutra as the ultimate love manual and a tribute to Kama, the Indian god of love. Though it has become famous for its sections on sexual instruction, the book actually deals much more with the pursuit of fulfilling relationships, and provided a blueprint for courtship and marriage in upper-class Indian society at the time. In addition to his classic work on love, Vatsyayana also transcribed the Nyaya Sutras, an ancient philosophical text composed by Gautama in the 2nd century B.C. that examined questions of logic and epistemology. The Kama Sutra has been translated into hundreds of languages and has won millions of devotees around the world.

Shah Jahan

Emperor of India from 1628 to 1658, Shah Jahan has gone down in history for commissioning one of history's most spectacular buildings, the Taj Mahal, in honor of his much beloved wife. Born Prince Khurram, the fifth son of the Emperor Jahangir of India, he became his father's favored son after leading several successful military campaigns to consolidate his family's empire. As a special honor, Jahangir gave him the title of Shah Jahan, or "King of the World." After his father's death in 1627, Shah Jahan won power after a struggle with his brothers, crowning himself emperor at Agra in 1628. At his side was Mumtaz Mahal, or "Chosen One of the Palace," Shah Jahan's wife since 1612 and the favorite of his three queens. In 1631, Mumtaz died after giving birth to the couple's 14th child. Legend has it that with her dying breaths, she asked her husband to promise to build the world's most beautiful mausoleum for her. Six months after her death, the deeply grieving emperor ordered construction to begin. Set across the Jamuna River from the royal palace in Agra, the white marble fade of the Taj Mahal reflects differing hues of light throughout the day, glowing pink at sunrise and pearly white in the moonlight. At its center, surrounded by delicate screens filtering light, lies the cenotaph, or coffin, containing the remains of the Shah's beloved queen.

Giacomo Casanova

The name "Casanova" has long since come to conjure up the romantic image of the prototypical libertine and seducer, thanks to the success of Giacomo Casanova's posthumously published 12-volume autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, which chronicled with vivid detail — as well as some exaggeration — his many sexual and romantic exploits in 18th-century Europe. Born in Venice in 1725 to actor parents, Casanova was expelled from a seminary for scandalous conduct and embarked on a varied career, including a stint working for a cardinal in Rome, as a violinist, and as a magician, while traveling all around the continent. Fleeing from creditors, he changed his name to Chevalier de Seingalt, under which he published a number of literary works, most importantly his autobiography. Casanova's celebration of pleasure seeking and much-professed love of women — he maintained that a woman's conversation was at least as captivating as her body — made him the leading champion of a movement towards sexual freedom, and the model for the famous Don Juan of literature. After working as a diplomat in Berlin, Russia, and Poland and a spy for the Venetian inquisitors, Casanova spent the final years of his life working on his autobiography in the library of a Bohemian count. He died in 1798.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The only child of the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher and novelist William Godwin, both influential voices in Romantic-Era England, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was only 16; he was 21 and unhappily married. In the summer of 1816, the couple was living with Shelley's friend and fellow poet, the dashing and scandalous Lord Byron, in Byron's villa in Switzerland when Mary came up with the idea for what would become her masterpiece — and one of the most famous novels in history — Frankenstein (1818). After Shelley's wife committed suicide, he and Mary were married, but public hostility to the match forced them to move to Italy. When Mary was only 24, Percy Shelley was caught in a storm while at sea and drowned, leaving her alone with a two-year-old son (three previous children had died young). Alongside her husband, Byron, and John Keats, Mary was one of the principal members of the second generation of Romanticism; unlike the three poets, who all died during the 1820s, she lived long enough to see the dawn of a new era, the Victorian Age. Still somewhat of a social outcast for her liaison with Shelley, she worked as a writer to support her father and son, and maintained connections to the artistic, literary and political circles of London until her death in 1851.

Richard Wagner

One of history's most revered composers, Richard Wagner set his work on the famous Ring cycle aside in 1858 to work on his most romantic opera, Tristan and Isolde. He was inspired to do so partially because of his thwarted passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant and patron of Wagner's. While at work on the opera, the unhappily married Wagner met Cosima von Bulow, daughter of the celebrated pianist and composer Franz Liszt and wife of Hans von Bulow, one of Liszt's disciples. They later became lovers, and their relationship was an open secret in the music world for several years. Wagner's wife died in 1866, but Cosima was still married and the mother of two children with von Bulow, who knew of the relationship and worshiped Wagner's music (he even conducted the premiere of Tristan and Isolde). After having two daughters, Isolde and Eva, by Wagner, Cosima finally left her husband; she and Wagner married and settled into an idyllic villa in Switzerland, near Lucerne. On Cosima's 33rd birthday, Christmas Day 1870, Wagner brought an orchestra in to play a symphony he had written for her, named the Triebschen Idyll after their villa. Though the music was later renamed the Siegfried Idyll after the couple's son, the supremely romantic gesture was a powerful symbol of the strength of Wagner and Cosima's marriage, which lasted until the composer's death in 1883.

King Edward VIII

Edward, then Prince of Wales, was introduced to Wallis Simpson in 1931, when she was married to her second husband; they soon began a relationship that would rock Britain's most prominent institutions — Parliament, the monarchy and the Church of England — to their cores. Edward called Simpson, whom others criticized as a financially unstable social climber, "the perfect woman." Just months after being crowned king in January 1936, after the death of his father, George V, Edward proposed to Simpson, precipitating a huge scandal and prompting Britain's prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to say he would resign if the marriage went ahead. Not wanting to push his country into an electoral crisis, but unwilling to give Simpson up, Edward made the decision to abdicate the throne. In a public radio address, he told the world of his love for Simpson, saying that "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love." Married and given the titles of Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the couple lived in exile in France, where they became fixtures of cafe society.

Edith Piaf

Though her life was marked by sickness, tragedy and other hardships from beginning to end, the famous French chanteuse with the throaty voice became the epitome of classic Parisian-style romance for her legions of fans. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion in 1915, she was abandoned by her mother and reared by her grandmother; while traveling with her father, a circus acrobat, she began singing for pennies on the street. Discovered by a cabaret promoter who renamed her Piaf, or "sparrow," (and was later brutally murdered), Edith enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom and by 1935 was singing in the grandest concert halls in Paris. Piaf was married twice, but her great love was the boxer Marcel Cerdan, a world middleweight champion who was killed in a plane crash en route from Europe to New York in 1949. It was for Cerdan that Piaf sang the achingly romantic "Hymne a l'amour," celebrated all over the world as one of her best loved ballads. After a near lifelong struggle with drug and alcohol addictions, Piaf died of liver cancer on the French Riviera in 1963. Her grave is one of the most visited in Paris's world famous Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Kathleen Woodiwiss

Born in 1939 in Alexandria, Louisiana, Kathleen Woodiwiss was a young wife and mother when she began writing romantic fiction as a response to her dissatisfaction with the existing "women's fiction" of the time. In 1972, she published her first novel, The Flame and the Flower, set on a Southern plantation in the late 18th century. Its historical setting and theme, florid prose style and steamy sex scenes inspired a legion of imitators, and its smashing commercial success sparked a new boom in romance fiction. Woodiwiss was given credit for inventing the modern romance novel in its current form: thick period melodramas packed with an array of dashing and dangerous men and bosomy women in low-cut dresses. She herself wrote 13 of these so-called "bodice-rippers," including "Shanna" (1977), "A Rose in Winter" (1982), "Come Love a Stranger" (1984) and "The Reluctant Suitor" (2003). In an interview with Publisher's Weekly, Woodiwiss firmly denied the characterization of her books as erotic, maintaining that she wrote only "love stories, — with a little spice." By the time of her death in 2006, Woodiwiss's spicy love stories had sold more than 36 million copies in 13 countries.

Elizabeth Taylor

An actress since early childhood, the dark haired, violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor has won two Best Actress Oscars (for "Butterfield 8" in 1960 and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 1966) but is perhaps best known for her rare beauty — and her epic love life. She has been married a total of eight times — twice to the same man, the actor Richard Burton, whom she has called "one of the two great loves of my life." The first was the film producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash in 1958. Taylor and Burton met on the set of "Cleopatra," when both were married to other people; their affair soon made headlines around the world and earned a public rebuke from no lesser authority than the Vatican. Their own married life together was a study in extremes, soaked in alcohol and characterized by a passion that was no less intense when they were fighting than when they were getting along. After divorcing in 1973, they found it impossible to stay apart and remarried in 1975, only to break up four months later. Barred from Burton's funeral in 1984 by his last wife, Taylor still received legions of condolences, honoring her and Burton's place in the pantheon of history's most celebrated love stories.

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BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet May Cost $500, Hit Shelves in April

Despite RIM's best attempts to dodge pricing and availability information for its BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet, it looks like Office Depot may have spilled the beans in an internal screen shot apparently leaked to CrackBerry.com.
If it's legit, it details a selling price of $499.99 for the 16GB version and an in-store date of "week 17," which lines up with mid-April.
That's actually not a bad price for the tablet at all, especially if you also own a BlackBerry phone to take advantage of the PlayBook's ability to share cellular data connections with BlackBerry handsets.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/02/10/blackberry-playbook-tablet-may-cost-500-hit-shelves-in-april/#ixzz1Dep3dbrv

For those of you who think that your iPhone will thwart any criminal, we've got news for you: Someone can find your password in less than six minutes without any password cracking.
Researchers Jens Heider and Matthias Boll at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute Secure Information Technology (Fraunhofer SIT) performed a fast jailbreak and installed an SSH server (which is not allowed by Apple, hence the necessity for the jailbreak). Then , they ran a short keychain access script which popped out the passwords and screen names. It wasn't only the security code for your phone: The researchers were able to get Google Mail, VPN and MS Exchange passwords among others stored on your phone.
Heider and Boll suggest that if you lose your iPhone you begin to immediately change all your passwords since it is so easy to get access to work email and other personal accounts.


Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/02/10/it-only-takes-six-minutes-to-steal-stored-passwords-on-the-iphone/#ixzz1Depbm7XF
 

Already Started Churning

By Doug Aamoth on February 10, 2011

The iPad 3 Rumor Mill Has Already Started Churning

The next iPad hasn't even been officially announced yet and there's already some loose talk about yet another iPad hitting shelves later in the year.
Whether he meant it or not, the spark was lit by John Gruber, a blogger with access to sources inside Apple.
In a post reflecting on yesterday's HP TouchPad announcement, Gruber points out that although he's "built a stable of good sources" inside Apple, his predictions of an iPad release later in the year are simply guesses—nothing's been rooted in fact or gleaned from anyone inside Apple.
The basic tenets of Gruber's guesses are interesting to consider, though. The main argument is that the iPad was announced in January and released in April because Apple "had no competition, and because they wanted to give iPhone developers time to write native iPad apps."
But a September release schedule for future iPads would give Apple better push going into the holiday season. Apple traditionally introduces new iPods in September, so adding iPads to the same press event would be trivial.
Apple's dilemma this year, though, is that we're coming up on the one-year mark of the first iPad's availability and Apple—working on a yearly launch cycle for its product lines—is expected to reveal the next iPad soon.
So if the company wants to shift the iPad to a September release schedule, it'd have to put out the second iPad in the next couple months, followed by yet another iPad later in the year.
Says Gruber:
"How could Apple release a third-generation iPad just six months or so after the second one? Maybe it won't be an actual next generation model. Maybe it's more like an iPad 2.5, or iPad 2 Pro — a new higher-end model that sits atop the iPad product family, not a replacement for the iPad 2 models (which, of course, haven't even been released yet).
Or: an iPad 2 HD. What if that's the source of the conflicting reports of a retina display next-gen iPad? I am nearly dead certain the iPad 2 is going to have the same display resolution and size as the current iPad. I am not so sure at all, though, that there won't be a double-resolution 2048 × 1536 iPad in 2011. Is that a technically aggressive release schedule? Absolutely. But Apple has invested $4 billion on some sort of unspecified components for future products."
That'd lend some credence to earlier rumors of an insanely hi-res iPad screen while addressing more recent rumors that the iPad 2 will feature the same screen resolution as the first iPad.
What's also worth considering is that we'll have a market full of Android tablets by September, many of which have already had their technical specifications announced. The iPad 2 will still beat many of these tablets to market but the mythical iPad 3, if released in the fall, could already be in development with Apple's full knowledge of what it'll be up against by then.


Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/02/10/the-ipad-3-rumor-mill-has-already-started-churning/#ixzz1DeplFFYV

Do You Want the World's Lightest Netbook?

VIDEO: Techland's Doug Aamoth gets his hands on an early copy of the new 8-inch netbook the Sony VAIO P, and lets you know whether it's worth it or not to take the plunge when it comes out in June.

Watch it on http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,86881155001_1990822,00.html

Read more: http://techland.time.com/

The New Music Biz: Letting Fans Direct the Band

The New Music Biz: Letting Fans Direct the Band

Watch the video: http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,114797669001_2025840,00.html

Progressive rock band Umphrey's McGee gives fans a chance to take part in its live shows. All they need is a cell phone and an idea
 
Related:

The Music Biz: Murder or Suicide?

Click here to find out more!
  • : The Spectacular Crash
    of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
    Steve Knopper
    Free Pressr; 301 pages
The Gist:
Music isn't the only formerly flush — now flagging — industry out there (hello automobiles, journalism, finance, retail, publishing, etc.), but it might be the most stubbornly responsible for its own demise. As Steve Knopper writes in Appetite for Self-Destruction, his chronicle of the music business' downfall, it's not as if record labels hadn't seen this sort of thing before. In the early 80's, the industry. hurting from the collapse of disco, was saved by the advent of compact discs, which prompted fans everywhere to repurchase crisp, digital copies of albums they already owned on tape or vinyl. Record labels notched record profits and everyone went money mad. Then came the Internet, and instead of responding creatively and inclusively to this new threat, the industry decided to go to war. And it lost.
(See photos from two decades of Guns n' Roses — from Appetite for Destruction to Chinese Democracy: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1861278,00.html)

Highlight Reel:
1. On the turn-of-the-century teen pop craze: "The moment Erik Bradley knew boy bands were taking over the world came on June 28, 1998 at the New World Music Theater near Chicago. 'NSync, the hunky young pop stars who'd just had a radio hit with 'I Want You Back' were opening the outdoor show. Bradley was backstage. The band was hanging out in its trailer before its brief set. Bradley smelled something odd. It seemed to be coming from a large metal fence, covered with a blue plastic tarp, which separated the bands from the performers. Then he realized desperate fans were using lighters to burn holes in the tarp so they could get a better look at Justin Timberlake, Lance Bass, and the rest."
2. On Apple's Steve Jobs: "At one point, [EMI's top new-media exec Ted] Cohen remembers John Rose, then an EMI vice president, writing demographic sales statistics on a thirty-foot-long whiteboard in an Apple conference room. Afterward, Jobs stood up, walked to the whiteboard, which was entirely empty save for the one square foot where Rose had scribbled, and erased it completely. Rose was undeterred by this blatant power maneuver. 'John, God bless him, erased what Steve Jobs wrote and wrote something else over that,' Cohen recalls. 'They were erasing each other's words for about ten minutes. It was funny to watch, but it was very telling — Steve wants to do it his way and that's it.'"
3. On how record labels screwed themselves: "After almost eight years of stonewalling MP3s and Napster, major label employees gradually accepted the fact that freely selling digital music was the blueprint for survival. EMI's decision to sell MP3s was a step in this direction — as would be Amazon's MP3 store, MySpace Music, and the Radiohead model of giving away music online. But labels were still a long way from overcoming their outdated ideas. They clung stubbornly to long held beliefs that selling millions of pieces of plastic would return them to massive profits."

The Lowdown:
Technology saved the music industry in the '80s. Technology also destroyed it less than 20 years later. The advent of file sharing programs like Napster, the industy's refusal to adopt new distribution methods, free-spending executives, the shrinking of radio and the increasing power of big-box retailers over devoted record stores — all have led to the present situation, where many consumers would rather steal music than pay for it. Knopper's analysis of the situation is pretty insular, however. Rather than attempting to draw parallels between music and other entertainment industries that have been rocked by the Internet — and explain how that has changed our relationship to art — he keeps his focus narrow.
The book ping-pongs between a series of miniature, magazine-like profiles and intricate accounts of lawsuits and record company financial transactions. That's fine if you're dying to get the nitty-gritty on the rise and fall of Napster, or the way that Apple grew to dominate the music industry (both well-trod stories at any rate). but if you're looking for some novel conclusions or recommendations as to how the music industry can save itself, you might need to wait for Knopper's next book.

The Verdict: Toss

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1873265,00.html#ixzz1Dents3Ky

Music>Africa> Grammy Nominee Angélique Kidjo on Africa and Influences

Grammy Nominee Angélique Kidjo on Africa and Influences

Watch the videohttp://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,736818368001_2048152,00.html
 
2010 Grammy nominee Angélique Kidjo talks about her new album, her childhood in Africa and her eclectic musical influences.

Egypt: Wounded, But Not Defeated, in Liberation Square

Watch the video: http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,776462684001_2046304,00.html

In Cairo's Tahrir Square, reporter Vivienne Walt finds protesters tired and wounded, but resilient. And volunteer doctors have turned a mosque into a makeshift hospital

Justin Bieber: ‘My World’ and Welcome to It

‘My World’ and Welcome to It
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Justin Bieber with fans at a screening of his film, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” in Times Square.
Scooter Braun, the stubble-cheeked 29-year-old who serves officially as Justin Bieber’s manager and sometimes unofficially as the baby sitter of his legions of young admirers, was having trouble getting them to behave on Wednesday night.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Fans waiting in Times Square for tickets to the screening.

Standing in front of a theater packed with tween- and teenage girls at the Regal E-Walk Stadium 13 cinemas in Times Square, Mr. Braun was attempting to cajole or threaten them to take their seats promptly. If they did not, he warned, the evening’s preview screening of “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” a 3-D concert documentary, would not begin, and the floppy-haired 16-year-old pop-music sensation of its title would not join them in the theater.
“If you spend the entire movie turned around staring at Justin, he’s going to get really weirded out,” Mr. Braun said. “I promise if you watch the screen, you’re going to see him a lot.”
Mr. Bieber, who according to Nielsen Soundscan has sold more than 4.5 million copies of his albums “My World,” “My World 2.0” and “My Worlds Acoustic,” and more than 10 million digitally downloaded singles, did finally make a brief appearance before the film. Dressed in black D&G designer clothes and a purple bow tie, he shouted a quick “Wassup?” to the stunned, squealing masses and said, “I just want this movie to, um — to start.”
True to Mr. Braun’s promise, Mr. Bieber was visible throughout the night, in on-screen incarnations that were sometimes as revealing as the differing versions of him that showed up at the movie theater.
In “Never Say Never,” which is directed by Jon M. Chu and will be released by Paramount on Friday, Mr. Bieber is shown during his recent United States tour, singing innocuous hits like “Baby” and “One Less Lonely Girl” in 3-D performances as he seems to extend his hand directly to you or your daughter.
The home movies, documentary footage and YouTube clips that make up the rest of the film reveal more intimate facets of Mr. Bieber: the infant raised by a teenage mother in Stratford, Ontario; the 5- or 6-year-old whose innate sense of percussion is revealed by the Christmas gift of a bongo drum; the 12-year-old commanding sizable crowds as he busks around town with a guitar and a yearning little boy’s voice; and a 16-year-old traveling the United States at the center of an entourage of grown-ups.
At a red-carpet event held in a narrow cinema hallway before Wednesday’s screening, Mr. Bieber was exhibiting the same kind of preternatural poise he would show throughout the week on comedy programs like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live.” Facing a firing squad of paparazzi, he stared down the cameras one by one, shaking out his famous coif and blinking his eyes in rapid, robotic succession.
Yet sitting with Mr. Chu in an empty theater adjacent to the boisterous “Never Say Never” screening, Mr. Bieber seemed more like a typically restless adolescent who is very much on the edge of 17. He fumbled with his iPhone, field-stripped his 3-D glasses, relieving them of their lenses, and occasionally answered a reporter’s questions.
“You saw the movie yet?” he wanted to know. “You loved it?”
Mr. Chu, a 31-year-old director of the “Step Up” dance movie franchise, described his first meeting with the subject of “Never Say Never,” which occurred during Mr. Bieber’s summer tour.
“Justin doesn’t have any idea who I was,” Mr. Chu said. “So I walk in, I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making your movie.’ And he’s like, ‘What movie?’ ”
Mr. Bieber offered a slightly different account. “I knew they were making a movie about me,” he said. “I just didn’t know who was doing it or what it was all about.”
Though he is followed by cameras nearly everywhere he goes, Mr. Bieber acknowledged the documentary process took some getting used to.
“It was really weird at first to have someone I didn’t know all up in my space, trying to video me,” he said of Mr. Chu. “But we got comfortable with each other, and it was good.”
Though Mr. Bieber said he trusted Mr. Chu to depict him as he hoped to be seen — “I wanted people to know that I’m not just some product, that I’m just a regular person, and I’ve been a musician my whole life” — Mr. Chu indicated that Mr. Bieber had some say over the final product.
“He would text me and be like, ‘Yo, I don’t want that picture in the bathtub,’ ” Mr. Chu said. He quickly changed his answer: “There’s no pictures of him in the bathtub. They do not exist.”
Mr. Bieber described several sequences in “Never Say Never” as “pretty crazy” (his performances with Miley Cyrus and Boyz II Men) or “pretty cool” (a brief appearance by his father, Jeremy, who is seen wiping away tears during his son’s concert in Toronto).
He seemed less interested in talking about the hometown friends he has known since childhood, who are seen early in the film but whose continued presence in Mr. Bieber’s life remains unclear.
“I mean, they support me,” Mr. Bieber said. “I don’t think they sit home and blast my music.”
Mr. Bieber was momentarily engaged when conversation turned to his impending March 1 birthday. Turning 16, he said, was “big because you get your driver’s license.” He added, “21’s big because you can legally go out and, like, party and stuff.” (Also: “Thirty is a big year. That’s when everyone just feels old.”)
But turning 17? “You’re just like another year,” he said.
Then Mr. Bieber let out a small yawn and said: “All right. We’re done, right?” His interview was over.
Remaining behind, Mr. Chu said the months he spent filming “Never Say Never” had made him more aware of the grueling schedule kept by Mr. Bieber, who will perform at the Grammy Awards on Sunday before resuming a world tour that runs through May.
“It can change you as a human being and make you a monster, and he’s not a monster,” Mr. Chu said. “He struggles days when he gets tired, but he really cares about the fans.”
Mr. Braun, who discovered Mr. Bieber on YouTube in 2008 and persuaded his mother to bring him to Atlanta to begin a professional music career, said in a telephone interview that the moment was right for Mr. Bieber to make his transition into films.
“People are asking, ‘Why do you want to do the movie already?’ ” Mr. Braun said. “I said, ‘Because Elvis did many movies.’ You know?”
Asked if he thought Mr. Bieber appreciated the work that went into making “Never Say Never,” Mr. Chu answered immediately that he did. Then he paused and reflected on the question.
“He shows you his appreciation in different ways,” Mr. Chu added. “Yesterday he punched me in the stomach and he said, ‘You’re a beast.’ In Justin’s world, that means, ‘You are amazing and thank you very much.’ So I take that.”