This afternoon I’ll be leaving to study in Berlin. Before I go, I thought this would be the perfect time to let my friends know how much they have meant to me. This year, each morning, coffee in hand, I began my day posting a daily bloom on the Kierkegaarden, often before sunrise. Next I began reading and sharing the news on various topics that I found interesting on Twitter, Friendfeed & Facebook. Apparently, many others shared my interests and found my posts to be of value and followed them.

Since I posted so frequently, I avoided posting too many personal comments, but that did not stop me from getting to know you. I’ve read yur posts and enjoyed them immensely. I’ve learned so much from you. Many of you responded to me and we got to know each other via DM’s and email. I really appreciate the connection and thought you should know . I hesitate to mention names here for fear of missing someone, but @ YOU and I know who you are. Some of you greeted me with a sun filled hello every morning. Some of us communicated personally by phone & email. Many of you sent tweets of gratitude and encouragement, confirming the value of my efforts by oh so frequent retweets. You have brought me great joy, and it has been a pleasure to ferret through the news and choose from a plethora of headlines to determine what may be of mutual interest and import. We’ve shared so muc together.

While I am away, although I will have internet access, I’m unsure how much time I wil have to continue as it has been my custom. However, I do plan to keep in touch as I can and take up where I left off upon returning. I’ll be taking my camera and Flip Mino with me and intend to blog about my travels.

I hope that you will stay and virtually join me on my European Journey. This represents a lifelong dream for me and has been a long time coming. I’m so excited, I can hardly breathe. I’m looking forward with great anticipation not only to the travel and study experience, but to meeting new friends and reuniting with those I’ve had the privilege of meeting on my last brief visit. I can’t wait to see them! That’s the best part of all.

Meanwhile, don’t let anyone tell you that Social Media is silly or meaningless. I’ve made some wonderful and VERY meaningful business and personal relationships here. It’s whatever you make it. My two cents to newbies… be honest, be open, be yourself, be kind & considerate. There are wonderful people in the world just waiting to get to know you.

Again, many, many thanks. Hang in there with me. Soon I’ll be greeting you from the other side…of the Atlantic, that is!!! Have a lovely summer. I’m sure I’ll be having a blast. Life is good.

Sarah Wade, Cavalier Daily Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, March 18 2009
Human history is as much a product of forgetting as it is of remembering. What actually goes down in the pages of history can be unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary.

Listen to Beethoven’s famed Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47, commonly called the Kreutzer Sonata after the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. It is sometimes assumed that Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to Kreutzer. In reality, Kreutzer never could perform the sonata.

Instead, he reportedly told Beethoven the piece was “impossible to play” — a notable complaint, given that Kreutzer was considered one of Europe’s top violinists at the time.

But it was not impossible. By this time, Afro-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower had already played the sonata, said Creative Writing Prof. Rita Dove, who recently wrote a book about the musician.

Bridgetower was a Mulatto violin virtuoso. His musical talent was so impressive that Beethoven originally wrote the piece for him, not Kreutzer, Dove said. Why, then, did Beethoven rededicate the sonata to Kreutzer, a violinist who refused to play it? Also, why did history subsequently forget George Polgreen Bridgetower?

Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, said she aims to recover Bridgetower’s lost significance in her latest book of poetry. “Sonata Mulattica” dramatizes in lyric verse the life of the violinist and the different factors that led him to historical obscurity rather than fame.
“I wanted to discover [Bridgetower], Dove said, “and poetry was the way I wanted to discover him.”

In a joint concert with Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley, Dove will celebrate the release of “Sonata Mulattica”  Friday evening as part of the 15th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book. The blending of poetry, music and conversation will begin at 8 p.m. in the Paramount Theater.

“[When] Dove mentioned that Boyd Tinsley was cited in one of her poems … we all agreed that it would be fantastic if there could be a joint program,” said Nancy Damon, program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Kevin McFadden, the festival’s associate director and a former University student, said he felt that there would be “large interest” in the program, and eventually the festival invited Dove and Tinsley to perform together at the Paramount. Dove used Tinsley’s name in her poem, “The Bridgetower,” describing him as one of today’s gifted people forgotten by time. She said she contacted him after finishing writing “Sonata Mulattica” to let him know he was featured in it.

Dove and Tinsley enjoyed working together on the upcoming event, Dove said. “He works similarly [as] I do … on improvisation,” Dove said, adding that both are artists who experiment with their craft to expand its scope and range of expression. Combining the two crafts of poetry and violin music to share one message is in itself a chance for improvisation.

“It’s been a great process of getting to know one another,” Dove said of her collaboration with Tinsley, who, like Dove, is a Charlottesville resident. Dove added that Tinsley wants people to remember what happened between Beethoven and Bridgetower in 1803. Both Tinsley and her aim to “connect the dots from Bridgetower all the way up to Tinsley,” Dove said.

Damon said she anticipates that the event will be “a very exciting combination of words and music which fits perfectly into [the festival’s] goal of encouraging people to read.” She added that “with any success, the story contained in Dove’s book and Tinsley’s music — the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower — will encourage people to explore what they read more deeply, to examine the personal significance every story offers them.”

Dove said her initial decision to versify Bridgetower’s 200-year-old story happened largely by chance. As a former cellist, she heard Bridgetower’s name long ago but did not give it much thought. That changed years later when she glimpsed a portrayal of Bridgewater’s genius in the 1994 film, “Immortal Beloved.”

By the age of 10, Bridgewater, already a prodigy, was on the road performing.

“That was really interesting — a little boy, half-black and half-white, playing in concert halls across Europe,” she said.

As a young man, Bridgetower came to Vienna, where he impressed and befriended the already legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. The friendship, however, was short-lived.

“The Bridgetower,” which was printed last November in the New Yorker, explains why: In May 1803, Beethoven and his new friend first performed their new sonata together with the German on pianoforte and the Afro-European on violin. The performance moved the composer so deeply that he “leapt up to embrace his ‘lunatic mulatto,’ the playful nickname he had given Bridgetower.

“[But then they had a] falling out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.”

Bridgetower apparently insulted a woman who was one of Beethoven’s acquaintances. In response, the composer chose to dedicate the sonata to another musician. The pair would never renew the friendship.

How might racial categorization both in and beyond classical music be different if Bridgetower’s fame had survived the first round of history’s cuts? How many more figures like Bridgetower might there be today if their names were better remembered? His own mulatto identity literally bridged African and European cultures, and his technical abilities surpassed even those of the famous Kreutzer. Beethoven’s sole reason for renouncing Bridgetower had nothing to do with music and everything to do with emotion. But because of a chance combination of factors, Bridgetower “has kind of dropped out of history,” Dove said. Remembered here and there, maybe, but more as an interesting detail than as anyone historically influential, she added.

For Dove, obscure stories like Bridgetower’s history point out the shortcomings of history and the need for something beyond it that can be used to remember human life.

Around every famous historical figure, there are countless other people — “living, breathing people,” Dove said — who were just as significant. Perhaps these nameless contributors would be the ones in history books instead if a few circumstances had worked out differently.

For those select few that history does remember, it seems to do so incompletely, which offers the world only small, scattered windows into past lives as vibrant as the ones that people are living now, Dove noted.

“What has always fascinated me [is] the realization that we all have interior lives,” Dove said. “What history does is to point out, rather graphically, just how little of that interiority can be passed down through generations.”

This is one of Dove’s main reasons for writing poetry, she said. She aims to acknowledge and explore that interiority with the intent to expose the personal, emotional side of history.

“History … tells us what happened. It doesn’t tell us why it was worth it,” Dove said. “That’s the job of poetry.”

via Cavalier Daily.

Bollywood to Hollywood: A.R.Rahman : AVS TV Network | Watch more clips at www.avstv.com!.

Charles Ommanney / Getty Images for Newsweek

Therapist-in-Chief: The President explains the details of his $778 billion stimulus package to a crowd in Mesa, Arizona

If Ralph Waldo emerson had a 19th-century Facebook page, his “Favorite Quotation” (or maybe I should say my favorite Emerson quote) would likely be: “Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.”

For the last six months, events have been in the saddle of the world economy and they might ride us for quite a while. Every day seems to bring bad news, with more on the way. Will commercial real estate crash next? Is General Motors toast? Dow 5,000, anyone?

When President Obama was sworn in, the stock market dropped. When he signed the largest economic recovery package in American history last week, the Dow plunged nearly 300 points. His widely panned bank rescue plan and even his better-received housing rescue plan both laid eggs on the Street.

Obama says he doesn’t worry too much about short-term market swoons, and he’s right not to. Who elected greedy gamblers to represent us? But the market is now based less on assessments of specific companies than on reaction to the federal government. And that reaction, cascading down to Main Street, is a fair reflection of the nation’s pessimistic mood. The new president is popular and refreshing, but still well short of transformative. For all of the legislative achievements of his first month in office, Americans have not yet had their faith in the future restored.

What’s a president to do? If he starts in with the happy talk, he sounds like John McCain saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” which is what sealed the election for Obama in the first place. But if he gets too gloomy, he’ll scare the bejesus out of the entire world. The balance Obama strikes is to say that things will get worse before they get better, but that they will get better. Now he must convince us that’s true.

Conservatives smell blood. The Republican National Committee issued a press release saying Obama’s first month was all about “wasteful spending, failed bipartisanship and questionable ethics.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer called the $787 billion stimulus package “a legislative abomination,” and Karl Rove wrote that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.”

Polls say otherwise. The public likes the signs of action, respects that the new president is willing to admit error and appreciates his constant reminders that there are no easy cures to what ails us.

Read full article…

Alter: Barack Obama, Bringer of Confidence | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com.

Valentine’s Day History: Roman Roots

Cherubs float like balloons in an 1880s Valentine’s Day card produced by a Boston, Massachusetts, company. Valentine’s Day cards–then mostly handwritten notes–gained popularity in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Mass production started in earnest in the early 1900s.

More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine’s Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying. (See “Halloween Facts: Costumes, History, Urban Legends, More.”)

The lovers’ holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

“It is clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the Christians are trying to close it down,” Lenski said. “So there’s reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we’ll just call this a Christian festival.”

The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.

According to the story, in the third century A.D. Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.

For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.D. 270—on February 14, the story goes.

While it’s not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, “it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia.”

Valentine’s Day 2009: What Recession?

Even as the economy crumbles, today’s relatively tame Valentine’s Day celebration is expected to generate some $14.7 billion in retail sales in the United States.

The average U.S. consumer is expected to spend $102.50 on Valentine’s Day gifts, meals, and entertainment, according to an annual U.S. National Retail Federation survey—down from $122.98 per person in 2008. “If anything, [people] are probably scaling back on more discretionary purchases, so that they can feel comfortable spending on Valentine’s Day,” said Ellen Davis, the federation’s vice president.

About 92 percent of married Americans with children will spend the most money on their spouses: $67.22.

The remainder goes to Valentine’s Day gifts for kids, friends, co-workers, and pets, according to the survey.

Valentine’s Day Cards

Greeting cards, as usual, will be the most common Valentine’s Day purchases. Fifty-eight percent of American consumers plan to send at least one, according to the survey.

The Greeting Card Association, an industry trade group, says 190 million Valentine’s Day cards will be sent. And that figure does not include the hundreds of millions of cards schoolchildren exchange.

“Giving your sweetheart or someone [else] a Valentine’s Day card is a deep-seated cultural tradition in the United States,” said association spokesperson Barbara Miller. “We don’t see that changing.”

The first Valentine’s Day card was sent in 1415 from France’s Duke of Orléans to his wife when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt, according to the association.

Valentine’s Day cards—mostly handwritten notes—gained popularity in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Mass production started in the early 1900s.

Hallmark got in the game in 1913, according to spokesperson Sarah Kolell. Since then—perhaps not coincidentally—the market for Valentine’s Day cards has blossomed beyond lovers to include parents, children, siblings, and friends.

Valentine’s Day Candy: Cash Cow

An estimated 45.8 percent of U.S. consumers will exchange Valentine’s Day candy, according to the retail federation survey—adding up to a sweet billion dollars in sales, the National Confectioners Association says.

About 75 percent of that billion is from sales of chocolate, which has been associated with romance at least since Mexico’s Aztec Empire, according to Susan Fussell, a spokesperson with the association.

Fifteenth-century Aztec emperor Moctezuma I believed “eating chocolate on a regular basis made him more virile and better able to serve his harem,” she said.

(Related: secrets of ancient candy.)

But there’s nothing chocolaty about Valentine’s Day’s most iconic candy: those demanding, chalky little hearts emblazoned “BE MINE,” “KISS ME,” “CALL ME.”

About eight billion candy hearts will be made in 2009, the association says—enough to stretch from Rome, Italy, to Valentine, Arizona, and back again 20 times.

(Also see in Traveler magazine’s Valentine’s Day special: best U.S. cupcake bakeries.)

What Is Love? Evolution and Infatuation

Valentine’s Day is all about love. But what, exactly, is that?

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on love, including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.

Fisher breaks love into three distinct brain systems that enable mating and reproduction:

• Sex drive
• Romantic love (obsession, passion, infatuation)
• Attachment (calmness and security with a long-term partner)

These are brain systems, not phases, Fisher emphasized, and all three play a role in love. They can operate independently, but people crave all three for an ideal relationship.

“I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a range of partners,” she said.

“I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, and attachment evolved to tolerate that person at least long enough to raise a child together as a team.”

Valentine’s Day, Fisher added, used to encompass only two of these three brain systems: sex drive and romantic love.

But “once you start giving the dog a valentine, you are talking about a real expression of attachment as well as romantic love.”

WATCH VALENTINE’S DAY VIDEO: LOVE ON THE BRAIN:

Valentine’s Day Facts: Gifts, History, and Love Science.

Love & Kindness are universal.

At 100, NAACP fights to keep struggle alive – Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com.

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama paid tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, at a celebration for the reopening of the theater where he was slain.

“Despite all that divided us — North and South, black and white — he had an unyielding belief that we were, at heart, one nation, and one people,” Obama said last night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. “And because of Abraham Lincoln, and all who carried on his work in the generations since, that is what we remain today.”

Obama, the nation’s first black commander-in-chief, often invokes the name and symbols of the assassinated president who ended slavery and brought the U.S. through the Civil War. Both men rose from the Illinois state legislature to the highest office in the land and both built reputations as skilled political orators.

The reopening of Ford’s Theatre after an 18-month refurbishment coincides with a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Obama, 47, who took the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible, will travel to Springfield, Illinois, today to mark the bicentennial.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, joined politicians and Ford’s Theatre donors to watch a series of songs, readings and speeches performed by celebrities such as Ben Vereen and Kelsey Grammer.

The theater also unveiled a videotape, to be shown at its museum, in which the four living past-presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, accompanied by Matthew Brady’s Civil War images.

Empty Presidential Box

The Obamas watched from the front row alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. None of the nation’s leaders have sat in the presidential box since John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln there during a performance of “Our American Cousin” on the evening of April 14, 1865.

The event was a retrospective of Lincoln’s life, from his humble beginnings described by James Earl Jones’s baritone to Vereen’s impassioned reading of the Emancipation Proclamation without the prompter, which broke mid-show.

The highlight for the audience of about 650 was classical violinist Joshua Bell’s “Variations on Yankee Doodle,” which was by turns playful and mournful.

Broadway singer Cheryl Freeman gave an electrifying rendition of a song from the play “The Civil War,” followed by Audra McDonald, Jessye Norman and Joshua Bell for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which earned a standing ovation.

Host and actor Richard Thomas called the facility the most-famous theater in America, which had morphed from a scene of tragedy into a symbol of Lincoln’s legacy.

Lincoln Medal

The gala event included the presentation of the Lincoln Medal given each year to someone whose work, accomplishments and attributes “exemplify the lasting legacy and mettle of character embodied by the most beloved president in our nation’s history,” Ford’s Theatre said. This year, the recipients were filmmaker George Lucas and actor Sidney Poitier.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the government bought the theater, which dates to 1861, from Ford for $100,000 and gave it to the War Department for use as storage space and an Army Medical Museum.

At one point, the interior collapsed, so now only the exterior walls are original. In the 1960s, the theater was rededicated as a memorial to Lincoln, and the National Park Service used historic photographs and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the box and the theater as it looked that night. Almost a million visitors pass through every year.

Red Upholstery

The theater has just 658 seats, done up in red upholstery. Lincoln’s box sits just above stage left. On the balustrade is one of the few surviving artifacts from that time, an engraving of George Washington.

The renovation was part of a larger $50 million fundraising effort known as the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign that’s also supporting the building of a new education center. The campaign benefited from a $5 million donation from Exxon Mobil Corp. and $2.5 million from the State of Qatar, the theater said.

Other donors included AT&T Inc., BP America Inc., General Dynamics Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and Lockheed Martin Corp., according to Ford’s Theatre.

Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture.