June 3, 2023 Full Moon Edition
jampags.com Blog
Culture and Counterculture
These beautifully painted tipis are such a classic image of Plains Indians. The Indigenous peoples who lived in them, their feather bonnets, quilled or beaded clothing, herds of fleet ponies in pursuit of the buffalo are iconic in the popular imagination of Native American history and culture.
Most of us know of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Sacagawea, Chief Joseph, Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, Geronimo and Cochise (Apaches were a Plains tribe, too, before the Comanche drove them to the desert). That’s all well and good. They’re historic figures worth learning about and learning from.
Who among us though knows Justin Gauthier, Tommy Orange, the Echo Hawk family, Earl Old Person, Joy Harjo, Wilma Mankiller, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, John Herrington, Sacheen Littlefeather, Sharice Davids, or any of the millions of lesser known Indigenous peoples of this country? Despite the travesty we have visited on them over several hundred years, they’re not going away. They are surviving and in very challenging circumstances beginning to prosper again.
There are Native American people today doing great things, interesting things, everyday run-of-the-mill things. They aren’t invisible. You just have to look for them, show them the respect they deserve as people, and be aware of the terrible mistreatment we’ve given them. You may even get to know each other.
Their past is American history and their culture today is a vital part of American culture. We can’t change the past, nor can we in good conscience ignore it, but we can do better now and work in good faith to unburden the future.
www.RadicalRadio.media
David Fenimore of KSML-FM
I’ve been a little behind on material for www.radicalradio.media of late, but that will be caught up before long. In fact, we just wrapped a great interview with David Fenimore of KSML-FM radio, the famed Secret Mountain Laboratory in Lake Tahoe, California circa 1974-1977. It’s a story well worth telling.
KSML was a magnet for freeform radio talent at a time when so many great deejays had highly developed their curatorial skills, but the medium itself was devolving into Classic Rock or Album-Oriented corruptions of the true Freeform Radio artistry they made and wanted to keep making.
Along came Dwight Tindle, David’s best friend in Philadelphia, who loved good music of every genre and at age 21, fresh from the Woodstock Festival, learned he had inherited a modest fortune. What to do? Why not buy a radio station?
He did. And so the adventure began. It’s freeform at its best and worst, the ecstasy of excess and eventually the agony of drought. You can catch it HERE.
Newsletter
Corporate Greed: Yet Another Tale of Our Times
This newsletter has come your way for the past couple of years. I enjoy writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it. At the least, it’s easy enough to delete and move on. And it’s been mostly free of cost to us. Those are the upsides.
The downside is that corporate America in its insatiable avarice has intervened. Mailchimp, which is the very clumsy but, with perseverance, serviceable venue for creating and distributing this newsletter, has – Voila! – been purchased by Intuit, who just paid a hefty fine for deceptive TurboTax marketing practices. Can you belive it? Corporations screwing their customers? Shocking, I know!
Perhaps to pay their fine, Intuit has begun screwing its Mailchimp customers, not simply by charging for what was formerly free, but through the shameless duplicity of pushing accounts into the Pay or Die category by charging for email they DO NOT distribute, as well as those they do. If your address bounces, you unsubscribe, or whatever gets you to the No Send file, they still charge me.
Long story of corporate greed made short, this newsletter is now costing me $40 per month to send your way, which distinctly lessens the pleasure of the activity, particularly so because the venue is so egregiously dishonest.
I’m looking for an alternative and wanted to advise Three Quick Things may look different when it comes knocking on your email door in the future. Hopefully, it will still bring you the same thrills and chills as always, and even if it costs me to send, at least it will get to you through a more honest purveyor.