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(02/19/14 4:16am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It took months to prepare for the 10 minutes Kacie Swierk would play for her audition. Months spent practicing, for hours a day, alone.In the fall, Swierk, a freshman, arrived at IU to study business. A major in entrepreneurship. Maybe marketing or sales.But ever since the car accident her junior year of high school, playing the piano became more than a hobby for her. And as a business major, she didn’t have time to play. Something in her life had to change, she said.Around Thanksgiving, Swierk decided she would audition for the Jacobs School of Music jazz studies program.“I’ve never auditioned before, for anything,” Swierk said. “And so I have no clue if I’m going to be nervous, if I’m going to be totally chill, if my hands are going to be shaking, if I’m not going to be able to play.”On a normal day, Swierk wakes up in Ashton Center at 7:30 a.m. With her first class not for another two hours, she eats breakfast and sits down at a piano.For the audition, she was asked to perform three jazz tunes, to execute a few scales and to perform a movement from a Beethoven sonata, which Swierk, not classically trained, said she dreaded. She tries to practice at least four hours a day, but with a full, 18-credit-hour course load, Swierk will find a piano to practice anywhere on campus any spare moment she has.She usually won’t finish her day until about midnight.About 25 percent of those who audition will make it into the music school, said Ben Smith, graduate assistant for the Jacobs School of Music office of admissions and financial aid. Every year, he said, thousands of graduate and undergraduate students from around the world come to Bloomington for a spot in the music school.“We are consistently ranked in the top three to five music schools in the nation,” Smith said.Swierk said she never thought she was worthy of Jacobs.“I feel like I’m not the regular student that Jacobs looks for,” she said. “I feel like they look for people who have been playing all their life and are really committed to it forever, not just like, I don’t know, a year.”Her attitude toward music changed after she survived a car accident.The car that struck Swierk almost two years ago could of ended her life. Instead, it altered its course.Yet all she can remember from the accident is a blinding wash of white light. She doesn’t remember the car hitting her, or how her bicycle wound up more than 10 feet away.“This insane calmness and peacefulness came totally over me,” Swierk said. “Maybe I was out on the ground for, like, four seconds. It wasn’t a long time, but it felt like I was in that forever.”Bruised and cut, with a concussion from a 35-mile-per-hour impact to the left side of her head, the then-junior at New Trier High School from Winnetka, Ill., lay unconscious in the street.“I should have broken bones, for sure,” she said.As she recovered, her head aching almost constantly, a few things changed in herself soon after the accident, she said. She felt smarter. She said she was able to grasp concepts easier. Her ACT score rose.While playing a piano, she said she experienced something she hadn’t felt before when playing.“I just found myself really, really feelin’ it,” Swierk said. “And I was getting so into it and getting all of these ideas that I had never been taught. And so I just really, really quickly got so much better.”The events of the accident and the white light, Swierk said, didn’t begin to make sense to her until years later.“It was this November that I started piecing everything together,” Swierk said. “And personally, I believe that whether it be heaven or not, it was some supernatural place that I was in. Like you don’t find this peace, or this whiteness, anywhere in this world. It was like this divine light. And at that point I really didn’t believe in anything.”Swierk was raised Catholic, but attending mass didn’t mean much to her, she said.Recently Swierk has been spending Sunday mornings at Evangelical Community Church on Third Street, playing guitar in their band. She also participates and plays keyboard for Cru, a Christian student group on campus.“The fact that I’ve wanted to run away from religion all my life — and that was my plan coming to college — I didn’t want anything to do with this stuff,” Swierk said. “And then it just all hit me.”The first thing Swierk did when she left the Music Addition building Feb. 8, her audition behind her, was change out of her black dress and stuff it in her backpack.“I thought I was going to be way more nervous than I was,” she said.She would have to wait anywhere between two weeks and two months to find out if she was accepted into the jazz studies program. She’s still waiting, but she said she looks forward to the wait on the decision being over.“I’m super excited for the stress to be over and to be out of my hands,” Swierk said. “I did what I did. It’s over.”While Swierk will have some extra time to spend with friends, she is not finished practicing her instrument. She said she will practice for herself, though, not for Jacobs.“I’m kind of getting my life back a little bit,” she said.But already, Swierk has accepted a new challenge. A runner, she will be competing in the Little Fifty relay race in April and plans to train six days a week for it.“Yes, I’m competitive,” Swierk said. “Hopefully a nice competitive. I’m competitive with other people, but I feel like I’m more competitive with myself. I always want to push myself to do better.”
(12/04/13 3:07am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Experts gathered for a panel at IU on Tuesday to explore the state and future of anthropology museums. The panel, titled, “A Discussion on the Future of Museum Ethnography,” took place at the DeVault Gallery and classroom in the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and was coordinated by Jason Jackson, director of the Mathers Museum.The panel included three speakers: Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology Director Candace Greene, SIMA Program Assistant and IU doctoral candidate Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe and University of Colorado Cultural Anthropology Curator Jen Shannon.“Well, it’s an exciting time,” Jackson said before the event. “There’s a number of factors which have changed the landscape of museum anthropology. Globalization, new information technologies, those kinds of forces which cause us to intensify our contact with one another around the world, inevitably change the way that museums that focus on cultural diversity do their work.”This is Jackson’s first year as director of the Mathers Museum and the 50th year since the museum’s opening. “We’re spending a year thinking hard about how we will do our work at the beginning of our next 50 years,” he said.The discussion, led by Jackson, was conversational, and the about 30 people in the audience were invited to contribute. Topics such as the role of technology, recognition of the field among other academics and funding for museum research were discussed. “If you look at the literature on museums, they’re considered one of the most trusted sources of information by people,” Shannon said. “What we represent in museums is really important because there’s a lot of power in the authority of museums to the public.”Shannon said collaboration among museums, and also between museums and the people they represent, is an important way of understanding and advancing knowledge of material culture and life experiences. Shannon works closely with the Native American communities on documenting and researching collections, as well as identifying objects which are sacred and inappropriate for museum displays.“If you’re going to represent a people, you need to collaborate with them,” Shannon said. Several IU students who had participated in the Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology were in attendance. SIMA, a research training program, accepts 12 students every year from across the country. Seven IU students have participated in the program over the six years it has existed. “We’re a teaching museum,” Shannon said of UC’s Museum of Natural History. “And that allows us some leeway to experiment, to support student-generated ideas and to bring contemporary ongoing anthropological research to our displays.”Jim Seaver, a doctoral candidate in history, said learning can happen on campus as well.“For people who are interested in working with objects and seeing what kind of relevance they have for our lives, there’s no better place than the Mathers Museum at IU to do that,” Seaver said. “You roll up your sleeves, and they put you to work on projects that you’re interested in.”
(11/21/13 4:55am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The bowling alley appears empty, but a man cheers at every strike.He curses every gutter ball. In front of a camera fixed on a tripod, he bowls alone.After 15 minutes, the closing credits roll.“‘The Bowling Practice Show,’ starring Lennon Beasley. Written by Lennon Beasley. The views expressed in this program represent the following individual, Lennon Beasley.”Lennon Beasley, the man both behind and in front of the camera, has produced more than 2,300 shows for Community Access Television Services, a Bloomington station. “This guy, as far as we know, is certainly the greatest local producer in CATS history,” said Beasley’s friend Adam Stillwell, programming manager at CATS. “Over the last 10 years, I haven’t met anyone like him.”A janitor at Bloomington Hardware and an employee at McDonald’s, the 31-year-old Bloomington resident carries a black briefcase with him almost everywhere.It contains a clutter of tapes and wires, a camera and an external hard drive, all which CATS has provided for him.Beasley has autism. He speaks deliberately, answering questions often with one or two-word answers.He has an extraordinary memory — an ability to recall dates, places and days of the week from any given year.Though he knows the date of every time he’s ever moved and the first day of every job he’s ever had, he doesn’t know when he found out he was autistic.“I love to come and record in various places,” Beasley said. “When there’s a drum show, it’d be at my house. When there’s a jam session, I’ll be recording at Rewind. Now I’m filming church services on Sunday nights, so I definitely set up a video camera before church even starts.”Shows ranging from “The Lennon Beasley Drum Show” to “Inspirational Today” and “Guitar Studio” are all filmed with a video camera on a tripod, with the lens focused on Beasley himself, the star of each show.“He takes an album he likes, I assume listens to it once or twice, but I don’t think he needs to hear it much,” Stillwell said about the drum show. “Then he can play along with the entire album from start to finish and just trains a camera on himself in his house and goes to town.”Aaron Chandler, owner of Rewind Records — the studio where Beasley has recorded nine albums — said Beasley is a solid drummer.“He has a good time when he’s playing,” Chandler said. “He really gets into it.”When Beasley hit his first thousand shows, Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan declared Sept. 24, 2010, Lennon Beasley Day.When Beasley reached his next thousand, Stillwell had a plaque made for his friend.“We used to have a producer of the month category,” Stillwell said. “We eliminated it, in part because it was him every single month. Certainly no one could outpace him.”The shelves of the CATS archive room house every one of Beasley’s tapes in perfect order.Each tape has a label with Lennon’s meticulous handwriting recording the show’s title, season and first-aired date. By next year, Beasley said he expects to hit 2,500. Every show is cataloged into the CATS database, but for Beasley, there is hardly a need for one.He knows exactly how many shows he has produced.About a year ago, Stillwell suggested to Beasley that he try writing down his feelings as songs.Before he knew it, Beasley was spending every day recording music at Rewind Records, which meant less time at CATS.Just as he once started producing three-minute shows to drive his numbers up, Beasley started recording 30-minute songs.“I’ve had jam bands do an eight-minute song, and it’s like a little bit more work, but it’s not really that big of a deal,” Chandler said. “But Lennon did a 37-minute song, and I’m like, ‘OK, this is like a whole album here.’”“Romance Is a 7 Letter Word” debuted in fall 2012.Beasley played all the instruments on the record and kept copies in his briefcase to sell to anyone for $10 a disc. “The more you get to know Lennon, the more you realize that he’s a public figure,” said Beasley’s friend Tim Thompson, worship minister at Sherwood Oaks Christian Church. “Everyone knows him. He has friends everywhere. When he comes here, he has a large circle of people that know him and that he connects with and he looks for.”For many years, Beasley would bring his camera into Sherwood Oaks, set up his camera and record, Thompson said. “He didn’t broadcast them. They were just sort of his way of just documenting some part of his life,” Thompson said. “I think for many filmmakers it’s a way of making sense of their life. They’re making sense of the world they live in. And I don’t think Lennon’s any exception to that.”Thompson said given his circumstances, Beasley’s achievements are remarkable.“He records music. He records programs,” Thompson said. “He bowls. He maintains friendships from so many different spectrums of life in the community and age groups that I look at him and I’m really amazed. He amazes me at times.”There is no end in sight to Beasley’s marathon of productivity. His ninth CD, “Ladies Night,” hits the shelves at Rewind Records early next year. “Can’t touch him,” Stillwell said.