The History of Thanksgiving

The roots of Thanksgiving are some when in 1621, when the Plymouth colonists and native Indians shared a big harvest celebration. This first harvest meal has become a symbol of cooperation between the colonists and the native Indians. Although people thought that this was the very first Thanks giving ever, historians found out that the native Indians had a big harvest feast, ceremonial dances all the years before, in 1621 it was only the first one that the colonists and the Indians had together, the first one ever that they shared. The food they had this time of course was not pumkin pie or mashed potatoes, instead it was fowls, deeres, lobster, seal and swans. The colonists didn’t use forks, they used spoons, knifes and their fingers. They mostly were eaten in two courses, it was mostly meat and later sweets like puddings. Vegetable was not always available during these days. Because the pilgrims and Indians had no refrigeration, they dried lots of their food, such as meet, fish but also corn and herbs. They had their most important and biggest meal of the day at noontime. The woman this time spent almost the whole mornings cooking. Dinner this time was a much smaller meal at the end of the day and breakfast was mostly the previous day’s leftovers.

Source: Kathleen Curtin, Food Historian at Plimoth Plantation

Riding the Bullet (by Steven King)

Some weeks ago we had to read the story Riding the Bullet by Steven King. The short story tells about 21 year old student Alan Parker. He is at the University of Maine when the neighbor Mrs. Mc Curdy calls and tells that his Mom, Jean Parker had a stroke. To get home he does thumb riding, the first car is driven by an elderly man. After many miles, when he gets out of his car it is nighttime and he walkes to the cemetery nearby to have a little rest. When he wakes up he reads one of the names on a graveyard, George Staub. After a while, standing on the road again, an old Mustang-car stops. The driver, a young man, is a weird character, he tells Alan that his name is George Staub, like the one on the graceyard. Alan notices that the driver has black marks on his body and stitches around his neck like someone had put his head back on his body. George Staub asks Alan about “Riding the Bullet” and says that he has come back from death and that he will take either Alan Parker or his mother with him. Alan tells him to take his mother. Then he wakes up, because he just had banged his head on a marker. When he finally comes to the hospital he finds out that his mother is well. He finds a sticker “Riding the Bullet” and keeps it. His mother recovers soon, she lives 7 more years and they have a very warm relationship. But he always keeps the sticker “Riding the Bullet”.

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997) was born in the Netherlands. He was an expressionist, doing abstract paintings, action painting and he followed the so called New York School. This was the time of Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell and others.In 1926 De Kooning emigrated to the United States, working on a ship. When he finally arrived New Jersey, he first started working as a house painter. In 1927 he moved to a studio in Manhattan. In 1929 he met the painter Arshile Gorky, they worked together and became good friends. In 1935 De Kooning won the Logan Medal of the Arts, later, in 1938 under the influence of Gorky, De Kooning did series of male figures, later, in the early 1940 he started his famous series of Woman in a geometrical style. What was figurative in the beginnings became more and more abstract during the years.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly – his real name is Edwin Parker(CY) Twombly Jr.- (born 1928)- is a wellknown american painter. He is doing his paintings in a calligraphic style, many of them are graffiti paintings with mostly grey background. He has his exhibitions worldwide. In his work he crosses the lines between drawing and painting. For example in some of his best known paintings from the late 1950s to early 1960s he practiced cursive “e”s on a school blackboard. Twombly also did many paintings with classical myths and allegories as background, for example his painting “Apollo and The Artist”. He did his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), later at Washingtonand Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. In 1950 to 1951 he studied at the Art Students League of New York and met Robert Rauschenberg. He had his first solo exhibition at the Kootz Gallery in New York. His paintings during these years were influenced by Kline and Paul Klee. In 1952 he travelled to Spain, France, Italy and North Africa. In 2008 Twombly had an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, his first solo retrospective in 15 years. This high talented artist is aged 81 years, he lives in Lexington, Virginia and Italy where he still is active.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) was a successful, irish figurative painter. His paintings became popular because of its violent, erotic character that often show masculine figures in isolation, such as glass, steel or in geometrical cages with scarying backgrounds. It is known that Bacon often visited slaughterhouses to get his inspirations. In his beginnings he worked as an interior decorator and designer of furniture. Once he said that he started his career so late because he didn’t find any subject that really interested him in his early years. His first big success was in 1944 when he did the triptych ”Tree Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”. Because of this work, in 1940-1960s he got the reputation as a world famous painter. In the middle of 1960 he mainly did portraits of heads of his friends. He used to say that he imagines like in series and he focused on single themes for longer periods of time (like Papal heads, crucifixion and later single and triptych heads series.) In 1971 his lover George Dyer became suicide and after that his paintings became more and more personal, like looking inside and focusing on the different sides of death. His masterpiece in 1985-1986 is called “Study for a Self Portrait-Triptych. In the late 1940s he did the great series of portraits – inspired by Velazquez- of Pope Innocent X. Bacon, famous for his dreadful paintings, had two big Tate retrospectives during his life time.

Velázquez

The spanish painter Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, (1599-1660) was very successful in his period, he was one of the most important and famous artists at this time. He did his paintings in the baroque period. Most of his themes were kind of historical and cultural, he painted many portraits of the spanish royal family. His masterpiece was Las Meninas (1656). Another prove of the importance of Velázquez's art even today is the fact that Pablo Picasso, as a homage to Velazquez, in 1957 did 58 variations of Las Meninas in his typically cubistic style. In the beginnings of the nineteenth century Velázquez’paintings mainly were taken as a model from realistic and impressionistic painters, for example Edouard Manet. But also other modern painters were influenced by Velazquez, such as Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali. One of his most important paintings is the portrait of Pope Innocent X in 1650. Many decades later, in 1950, the irish painter Francis Bacon did another portrait of Pope Innocent X, inspired by this amazing artist. So- in this sense, this extraordinary artist is still alive.

“Finding Forrester” by James W. Ellison

We just finished the novel “Finding Forrester” by James W. Ellison in our English class. Our teacher wants us to focus on characters now, to do some exercises. So I focus on the character of Jamal, the main character in the book. Jamal, a sixteen year old black male teenager is raised by his mother, the father left the family years ago. That’s when Jamal, he felt betrayed of not having a strong, guiding father- the ideal of every young boy. Someone to look up, someone to ask a little boy’s questions. Questions his mother never would be able to answer. At the same time he was desperate because of the agony his beloved mother was going through, her loneliness without a husband, the heavy load of raising two children all by herself without any support. “God knows it wasn’t easy bringing up a young male in the South Bronx without a father-especially a young black male.” Because Jamal can sense how much also his mother suffered. It seems like Jamal never forgave his Father for leaving, when thinking of him it always was full of bitterness or resentment, full of dark thoughts. Reading and writing was his way to escape, his way out of his sad reality.