Volume 100 Issue 44
Thursday, March 24, 2016
www.studentprintz.com
Nation’s second GRAMMY Museum opens in Delta Hiba Tahir Printz Reporter
Cleveland celebrated the grand opening of the state’s official GRAMMY Museum, the second of its kind in the U.S. Events celebrating the small delta town and the new museum filled the weekend, attracting 14,000 patrons. “It doesn’t matter who we are, what we are or where we are, we all love music,” said Lucy Janoush, president of the Cleveland Music Foundation, during the event. A prominently-placed sign in the museum reads, “Mississippi is synonymous with music.” Cleveland Mayor Billy Nowell said the state’s musical heritage made it the obvious choice to house the first official GRAMMY Museum to be built outside of Los Angeles. “There are many reasons why Smithsonian Magazine named Cleveland, Mississippi No. 2 on the list of ‘The Top 20 Small Towns to Visit in 2013,’” said Nowell in a public letter. “But chief among them is the fact that for a city our size, Cleveland offers a wide variety of cultural, culinary, recreational and entertainment experiences.” These experiences exist within Cleveland’s Delta State University, home of the Delta Music Institute’s Entertainment Industry Studies program. The close proximity of DMI’s audio recording space facilitate a special partnership between the GRAMMY Museum and DSU. “First and foremost, the GRAMMY Museum is meant to be an educational institution,” said Bob Santelli, GRAMMY Museum executive director. “It’s a place for information and inspiration. In the end, we want to
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make an impact on young people.” The museum’s expansive array of features provides plenty of opportunity for educational enrichment. Its 28,000 square-foot space and $20 million estimated cost allow cutting-edge technology that has granted it the right to crown itself as the “most technologicallyadvanced music-themed museum in the South.” In addition to its interactive exhibits, the museum also offers a wide variety of permanent and traveling GRAMMY exhibits. Upon entering, visitors have the opportunity to watch GRAMMY video footage in the Sanders Sound Stage. The 140-seat theater hosts a wide array of public programs that complement the museum’s exhibits and include artist interviews, live performances, film screenings, lectures, featured artist-in-residence, education classes and more. The museum also features more than 300 artifacts, including everything from Bob Dylan’s guitar to Beyoncé’s 2014 GRAMMY gown. Visitors have the opportunity to listen to a highlights reel of past GRAMMY Awards telecast performances and acceptance speeches as they observe the noticeable differences in the GRAMMY award trophy over the years. Other features include a large, colorful dance floor where GRAMMY winner Ne-Yo teaches visitors dance moves; songwriter/producer pods where visitors can write and record their own blues song before mixing it and storing it in the Museum’s archives; an expansive array of instruments visitors can play as long as they desire; and a small acoustically enhanced room where visitors can trace the evolution of recorded
Printz Reporter
Students from USM’S Department of Nutrition and Food Systems will provide the final nutrition education session to parents and teachers participating in the Healthy Hawkins program on March 29 . The Healthy Hawkins program, a four-week course held every Tuesday in March, is an initiative promoted by The Office of Health. Jodi Ryder, Health is Golden Initiative director, believes there is massive need for the program. “We need to work better to educate our surrounding community about nutrition and fitness,” she said. Through the Healthy Hawkins program, staff from the Health is Golden Initiative and students
from the College of Health bring awareness to nutrition and fitness, and educate attendees on good nutrition and fitness choices.
We need to work better to educate our surrounding community about nutrition and fitness. Jodi Ryder,
Although attendance has not been close to what was originally expected, the response from those who have participated has been positive. “I feel that they’ve received very usable knowledge,” Ryder said. Participants learned how to eat
Miss. lags in recent report Elizabeth Lee Printz Reporter
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sound by listening to various artists on wax cylinder, gramophone, vinyl records and stereo vinyl, cassette, 5.1 surround and MP3 headphones. “[At the GRAMMY international level] you’ll get the blues, you’ll get alternative. You’ll get all of those pieces, those things that a lot of people say even generated from styles from Mississippi,” said GRAMMY external affairs manager Vickie Jackson. “That’s the thread that runs through all American music.” Despite comprising only 15 percent of the total exhibits, the Mississippi section is immediately distinguishable thanks to the giant interactive table in its center. This Mississippi Music Table, the most technologically advanced exhibit the museum has to offer, allows visitors to browse through Mississippi artists and view their lineages, photos, songs, awards and more. Across from it rests the Mississippi Music Bar, where users can sit on bar stools, put on headphones and scroll through an endless selection of hit songs performed or written
by Mississippians. Organizers hope that these exhibits will encourage tourists from all over to come to Mississippi. “We’re really focused on working with Visit Mississippi and bringing people not just from around the United States, but a lot of international travelers as well,” Jackson said. “People typically come from Memphis and go the New Orleans track. We want to make sure that they make the Delta a stop.” In attempts to appeal to a large variety of patrons, the museum also regularly hosts traveling exhibits curated by the GRAMMY Museum at L.A. LIVE. Their first is “Ladies and Gentlemen… The Beatles!” which will be on display through June 12 and has already drawn large crowds of enthused fans. From April 1-2, the Museum and Delta State University will present “Beatles Symposium 2016: From The Cavern To Candlestick,” an exciting event featuring discussions with noted Beatles historians, live music, film screenings and more.
‘Healthy Hawkins’ programs impact community lifestyles Hiba Tahir
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well on a budget. They went shopping with $10 and made healthy choices like fresh fruits and vegetables. “It became a mini-competition,” said USM instructor LaShaundrea Crook. “They really enjoyed that.” Although the Healthy Hawkins program will soon end, there is speculation that similar programs will be introduced in the fall. “Right now, we’re just talking to adults, but one of the Hawkins Elementary coordinators asked if our dietetic students were interested in coming back and offering it to the students in the classroom and we think we can,” Crook said. Mississippi is one of only six states that require physical education in every grade. Yet according to data from the President’s Council on Fitness, only one in three children
are physically active every day. Additionally, only one in three adults receive the recommended amount of physical activity each week, more than 80 percent of adults do not meet the guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities and more than 80 percent of adolescents do not do enough aerobic physical activity to meet the guidelines for youth. The council’s statistics regarding nutrition and obesity are just as dire: The number of fast food restaurants has more than doubled since the 1970s, and in 2008, an estimated 49.1 million people, including 16.7 million children, experienced food insecurity – or limited availability to safe and nutritionally adequate foods – multiple times throughout the year.
A new study from Loyola University’s Jesuit Social Research Institute reported that the five Gulf South states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — rank the lowest among U.S. states and Washington D.C. on issues like poverty, race relations and immigrant exclusion. Mississippi ranked 50th. Louisiana trailed at 51st, Texas at 49th, Alabama at 48th and Florida slightly higher than the rest at 41st. The rankings, published in the JSRI’s quarterly report, JustSouth Index, provide policymakers, employers and residents a better understanding of where the Gulf South stands in terms of social issues. “Our purposes are to educate the people of this region and to point out how we together can make the kind of changes that promote far greater social justice, equity and inclusion for all of us who live here,” said Fred Kammer, JSRI executive director. The index includes factors such as average income, health insurance coverage, housing, public school segregation, wage and employment equity and immigrant youth outcomes. According to the index, the average income of poor households in Mississippi is $9,891 per year, which is less than half of the income needed to meet the federal poverty level. Thirty-five percent of the poor in Mississippi do not have health insurance, and 89 percent are burdened by high housing costs. Both figures are well above the national average. In terms of exclusion, 23 percent of Mississippi public schools are still segregated, and 31 percent of immigrants have difficulty speaking English. The index recommends steps to ameliorate conditions of the poor include increasing wages, expanding Medicaid, supplementing federal aid programs for income and housing with state programs, investing more into poor school districts and expanding English-as-a-secondlanguage programs. The JSRI exists primarily to promote social research and analysis under the paradigm of theological reflection. The research group also used their findings to develop strategies for improving social conditions in the Gulf South, one of the poorest and most racially disparate regions in the country, according to their website.