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Picture of the Day

Wednesday
  December 30, 2015

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Who's that toiling in sepulchral 19th century gloom?
Is it Abe Lincoln trying to get the 13th Amendment passed?
Close, but not quite, though the task was almost as difficult.

It's Bill Kavage trying to thread aged celluloid through
a recalcitrant projector. Twelve short years ago we
watched old home movies in this same living room.
Those films seemed so long ago then, but in a way
they seemed closer now as time fast forwards and
rewinds like an infant mashing the remote control.

There's a chainsaw Lincoln stump sculpture in the
yard, a signed Lincoln letter in the study, and we
watched Spielberg's treacly take on the moment
when slavery was nominally ended in the USA.

That film overstayed its welcome and could've
ended more gracefully had it not belabored its
gratuitous vision of Marat-like martyrdom, but
sadly we never got our own reels up and running.
Something in the mechanism refused to catch. Too
bad. It's fun comparing memories to our memories
of them. Nothing changes faster than the past.    
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