June 25-26, 2014, was a two-day window in which same-sex marriage was legal in Indiana. (More on the history here.) On June 25, the United States District Court struck down Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriage. Licenses began to be issued that day and continued to be issued the next day. On June 27, the Seventh Circuit court brought the licensing to a halt while the case was appealed by the State of Indiana. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on October 6, 2014, which legalized same-sex marriage in Indiana. The Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage for the entire country came a few months later in June 2015.

Our local public radio station has produced a podcast episode telling the stories of couples who were married in that two-day window. The final story is of a couple from my hometown, which the narrator correctly describes as not the most progressive town in the country.

I remember those two days. We all knew that then-governor Mike Pence would appeal the decision and likely get a temporary stay. But the fact that it had happened in Indiana was truly exciting. On my drive home from work on June 25th, I came across a gay pride flag flying from the top of some apartments in my hometown of Bedford. In Bedford! I was amazed - and took this picture to capture the moment.

Dan Olson’s video “Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs” is an excellent critique of crypto generally and NFTs in particular. It is well worth its two-hour runtime. The crypto economy, he argues, is just replacing a bad system with a worse one. NFTs represent another step toward the financialization of everything.

What I really appreciate about the video, though, is the context in which he places the crypto phenomenon. The true believers, he says, are those who saw the enormous clusterfuck of the Great Recession and turned against the financial system - not in order to liberate people from the power of finance but in order to take Wall Street’s power for themselves. To “be the boot.” History feels like it is narrowing and the crypto evangelists intend to grab what they can while they can.

He concludes:

Our systems are breaking or broken, straining under neglect or sabotage, and our leaders seem, at best, complacent, willing to coast out the collapse. We need something better. But a system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that distills all interaction into transaction, that determines the value of something by how sellable it is and whether or not it can be gambled on as a fractional token sold by a micro-auction - that’s not it.

The Black Belt was a region in the American South known for its rich, black soil. It was home to many cotton plantations and, consequently, enslaved black people. During the Great Migration, large numbers of black people moved out of the South into northern cities, taking the blues and other cultural creations with them. Not all moved, though. Alabama Blackbelt Blues is a documentary by Alabama Public Television on the continuing blues tradition in Alabama’s portion of the Black Belt. (Watch the trailer here.)

If you like the blues, you’ll like this documentary - simple as that. It’s given me a whole list of singers and musicians to listen to. And, unsurprisingly, the names of John and Alan Lomax come up regularly as collectors and preservers of this music. I plan to explore their collections more thoroughly soon.

Listen: “Trouble So Hard” by Vera Hall

Once (2007) causes me such exquisite emotional pain that I have to put a few years between each viewing.

🎵 Sister Rosetta Tharpe - “God Leads Us Along” 🎵

I’m on a sixteen day streak with Day One. I’ve never been able to maintain a daily journaling habit but Day One is helping me do that. I had never heard of it before I saw several people on Micro.Blog talking about it, so thanks y’all.

I’ve finished all of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

This is an excellent video on how Amazon can afford to offer free shipping to Prime members. Basically, it hides the cost of shipping by raising prices across the internet. And that, folks, is monopoly power.

I’ve now watched the first two films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology and both have been exceptional. But Lovers Rock … that was something special. If I tried to explain the plot to you (there isn’t much to it!) you would never believe it would work. Yet I was entranced. The “Silly Games” scene in particular was pure magic. I agree with this LA Times article (which gives the background to “Silly Games”) which calls it is “one of the most patient and loving celebrations of music ever captured on film.”