Indigenous Milk Medicine Week is August 8th thru 14th this year. It’s a part of a series of observances celebrating breastfeeding during the month of August. Camie Goldhammer is a Social Worker, Lactation Consultant and Founder of the Native American Breastfeeding Coalition of Washington. She shares this year’s theme for Indigenous Milk Medicine Week.
We have kicked off our new fiscal year at KBCS this month with a renewed focus on our ongoing infrastructure project to advance the technological evolution of the station. Our goal is to reach more potential listeners with a clearer, cleaner, and more consistent broadcast signal and more reliable online streaming quality and options. These upgrades will further both our academic and community outreach mission with greater programming diversity designed to attract and serve an even more diverse audience across the Puget Sound. Thanks to your reliable and generous financial support, we have secured the part-time services of a talented broadcast engineer to work with our Chief Engineer to complete the installation and activation of these new broadcast hardware and software upgrades.
The past fiscal year was a fundraising challenge for many nonprofit radio and television stations as our nation’s resilient economy continues to recover from the COVID pandemic shutdown and the chronic supply chain issues it created. Despite this challenge, KBCS was able to end the fiscal year on June 30th just shy of our ambitious fundraising goal but still respectable and in a much better place than I had originally feared. I want to personally thank everyone that stepped forward to contribute to KBCS this past fiscal year. It’s your regular donations, along with those of other listeners, that keep KBCS on the air.
I hope that you will be able to help us kick off this new fiscal year with a strong showing of support for KBCS and our 50-year tradition of local programming that informs, educates, and entertains everyone in our listening audience. You can make your donation online anytime online at kbcs.fm. Please consider setting up a monthly donation to help ensure a more consistent and reliable revenue stream for KBCS.
Quality is conformance to clearly defined requirements and I promise that we will continue to manage all aspects of KBCS services for continuous improvement. That is the hallmark of all successful nonprofit as well as for-profit businesses. At KBCS you can trust that we are good stewards of your financial donations. Remember; it takes a village of likeminded citizens, like you, to keep this fifty-year tradition of nonprofit educational radio on the air.
Again, thank you for your support.
Dana Lee Buckingham
General Manager and Proud Sustaining Contributor of Community Radio KBCS
Gratitude gatherings are held for urban trees in the Seattle area. It’s to honor these elder plants, and to resist the aggressive removal of urban trees for building development.
On Friday, July 14th, a group of concerned community members rallied around a western red cedar named Luma in Seattle’s Wedgewood neighborhood. They hope to preserve the tree since aggressive development activity in Seattle has led to increased loss of large trees in the city. The developer, Legacy Group Capital has a permit to take down the tree within the next 60 days.
KBCS’s Martha Baskin spoke with Droplet, one of the advocates for the tree, and Yuko Kodama spoke with Sandy Shettler of The Last 6,000.
Martha Baskin will be working on another story on Luma next week.
We just had a rollicking and free-wheelin’ conversation with singer-songwriter Carl Christensen. Everything from George Orwell’s treatise on loneliness to how to play the talkin’ blues to whether or not an artist can actually write collaboratively with an audience was discussed. Carl also played 3 songs!
We recently had a great conversation with Her Mountain Majesty. Her Mountain Majesty is gutsy stomping band fronted by Andi Lee Scher. We chatted about making (and taking) space as a performer, building community, and how to harmonize by smart phone. She was joined in the studio by the talented Katrina Burrows and they performed 3 songs live for us. Check it out!
Not being able to quite reach my cup of coffee from where I sit I suppose I will write. I believe I’ll use this space to write about problems and, hopefully, offer a few solutions. Or if that’s an overswing, then at the very least a bit of breezy lucidity.
There’s a moment in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice when the lazy joy of magic badly used becomes terror. Mickey awakes to find himself awash in the water of his overzealous broom creation and, in a wildly savage sequence, takes care of his little wooden problem with an axe. Of course, that’s just the beginning of the mouse’s troubles.
Fred Moore, 1938
At around 9:30 this morning I received an email from a local musician with a song attached. He mused that I must receive dozens of these each day. He wasn’t wrong. In fact, by that time I had already received 32 new albums. Seriously.
Wo ist meine axt?
But before I get to chopping, I should say that the above mentioned song – which I did listen to – was lovely. It was a sad country beaut and gave me goosebumps.
When I was a kid I had small Superstar radio/cassette player, and I could simultaneously jam down the record and play button way faster than you. That’s it. That’s my only true gift given from god. But it’s enough.
With the patience of Job (I mean, discounting that part of the story where he really flies off the handle and lets Jehovah have it) I would sit in my room, door shut, and listen and wait with twitching fingers hovering over the plastic buttons for a song I needed to come over the FM.
Sure, every song on those cassettes was missing the first note or two, but love is love and it is not perfect.
Have you written a song so good that if you heard it on the radio you’d mash down the record button to capture it? I got one today. I know that’s not many out of the many songs I’ve already received and what I will inevitably still receive, but – and for me this is true –
Another thought: It’s best to attach a download link to the original email, which will cut down on unnecessary back and forth.
I don’t reply to every email. Accept this as a non-apologetic acknowledgment of my inadequate supply of time and energy. That’s blunt, I know, but it’s also true.
A final thought.
How did you answer the above question about your songwriting? I’m reminded of a story G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy where a publisher pal of his said about another writer “that man will get on; he believes in himself.” Chesterton then remarked that he knew his publishing friend hid himself away from a drunken poet and his dreary tragedies and an elderly minister and his dry epics, both of whom believed in themselves. He went on to write that “believing in one’s self” is “hysterical and superstitious,” and “is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.”
We should ponder those bold assertions on the weakness of self-confidence.
All this to say, you might love your song, but I might think it needs a re-write (and probably a bridge), before my fingers twitch with that old adolescent urge to hit record.
None of this is to suggest that my lack of reply, were you to send me music, is an avoidance – it’s not – nor am I at all insinuating that you’re a boring drunk – as if!
N= (A x B) / T + E + (or -) C
Iaan’s Neglect equals Albums received by 9:30 AM divided by Time plus Energy plus (or minus) Coffee.
But – and this is the important part – you might write beauts which you rarely share. And maybe your song would give us all goosebumps, were we so lucky to hear it on some Wednesday morning when the coffee is just out of reach. So go ahead. Send it in.
We were thrilled to have Paula Boggs Band return to the KBCS Studio for an in-studio performance. Paula and KBCS Music Director, Iaan Hughes, talked about her latest album Janus, and as the album title might imply, delved into beginnings and transitions. Janus is a personal and potent album pulling from Paula’s own history, yet through her exceptional songcraft the music comes alive for all of us in profound ways.
Brian Park is a Korean American artist and software developer. He read this poem he penned on May 28th, during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The reading was at Valley and Mountain fellowship’s Set Us Free From Fear event featuring Dr. Cornel West with an address on Table Turning: The Prophetic Tradition in a time of NeoFascism.
