Post for December 4 2022
# 1583
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Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving, the First at Plymouth
Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914, Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Jennie Augusta Brownscombe - Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal
http://www.lakenhal.nl/persberichtendetail.php?id=144
"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe
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Commentary
This was a fine Thanksgiving for daughter Kat and I. She arrived the night before and we stayed up late just talking. We were excited to have so much time together.
Thanksgiving Day we left for Ogunquit. We’ve done this trip at holiday time about ten times in our lives together.
Here are three happy pictures of Kat and I arriving in Ogunquit, just before we walked the Marginal Way, a one mile walk at the top of the cliffs that add much to the area’s beauty.
I love the excitement before we leave Boston.
The tradition of stopping at the rest stop in New Hampshire.
I love driving through the tiny windy roads to Perkins Cove.
And I love walking the Marginal Way with its cliffs and sky and ocean.
Whee!!
Dad, another one?
How did you spend your Turkey Day?
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Mail and other Conversation
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Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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Here’s a slice of holiday life at the Getty’s:
Thanksgiving at Colleen G’s house, with four young children plus parents, by definition is warm and active. Our writing pal took time to try a new recipe. She was excited at the way it turned out and sent us this:
Happy Thanksgiving Dom!!
The day that all of we who absolutely love to eat have waited for:)
You'd be proud of me, Dom--yesterday I found a reasonable dinner roll recipe and did a test run and THEY WORKED!! I actually made hot, pull apart and slather with butter rolls that were devoured. Sometimes it's those little things:) I'm not a big dinner roll person at Thanksgiving. I'd rather dig into all the other stuff, but my brother likes them and his wife is vegetarian and so I thought if I was vegetarian one of the simple pleasures is a homemade roll or loaf of bread. I'm always in too much of a rush to bake, but yesterday was the first time I've slowed down in a long time and as you can likely guess I'm not good at slowing down, so I decided to try to make some rolls. I'll attach the recipe if you're interested. It doesn't take hours or greasing bowls, etc.And it only makes 12 which is a much more reasonable amount. I don't need 24 rolls and to waste all that flour for one batch.
So, if you feel like doing something easy-going and that will require some dough kneading, which is nice here's a good Recipe:
Classic Dinner Rolls Recipe (allrecipes.com)
I had to use regular yeast I had in a jar (so activated it before mixing it by combining it with the very warm water and then a teaspoon of sugar and waited ten minutes) and then just followed the recipe and let it "proof" for more like 1 hour than 30 minutes, but still they were really fast as far as homemade bread goes and didn't brush them with anything before baking and they came out golden brown. I'll attach a couple photos--because I had to take some photos. Anyway, aside from yeast you likely have everything in your cabinets.
Have a happy thanksgiving! #recipe
Cheers,
Colleen:)
Yummy!
Blog meister responds: Can’t you just smell that bread? Feel the slathered butter in your mouth? Colleen’s a gem!
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts, including links.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
Tucker J spent at least some of his time at the movies. Here’s his report.
This is a poster for The Fabelmans. The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the item promoted, the publisher of the item promoted or the graphic artist.
Hi Dom,
I hope you had a lovely holiday! I went with Scout on Friday to see Steven Spielberg’s newest – The Fabelmans and it might be both of our favorite film of the year. I had to write something!
Because of the scope and spectacle present in most of Steven Spielberg’s films it may be difficult for the casual observer to realize how personal so much of the man’s work actually is. Spielberg made E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial to exorcise the emotional trauma of his parents’ divorce decades earlier. When he directed Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, he channeled the misanthropic energy from his first marriage into its depiction of Indie’s love interest Willie Scott. Schindler’s List was a reckoning with his Jewish heritage. War Of The Worlds was the reaction through his work to 9/11. Munich sees him debating the morality of supporting Israel while the country’s conflict with Palestine rages on. Spielberg’s newest film The Fabelmans leans even more autobiographically than any of these and brings full circle that commingling of his life and his art in a way that celebrates both the medium to which he’s devoted himself and the experiences that inspired his creative endeavors.
Unsurprisingly, it’s fantastic. The Fabelmans is a measured and incredibly intimate look at Spielberg’s upbringing as he developed his aptitude for storytelling through a medium that mesmerized him since the night he went to see The Greatest Show On Earth as a child. It also spotlights cinema as an extraordinary device that not only unveils powerful truths, but often shapes them as well.
From that fateful movie screening he was almost too afraid to attend, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a 7-year-old, Gabriel LaBelle at 16) is obsessed with moviemaking. He recreates Greatest Show’s crash with his Hannukah gift of a train set, and quickly graduates to amateur productions starring his younger sisters Reggie (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten), and Lisa (Sophia Kopera) in a variety of genres. His mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a concert pianist-turned-housewife, nurtures his gifts and loves his films, while his father Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer, politely tolerates them as a hobby before expecting him to move on to more serious endeavors. As Sammy gets older, the art-versus-science rift in his household only grows, especially after Burt lands a series of promotions that force the family to move to Arizona.
Burt placates a restless Mitzi by inviting his co-worker and both his and Mitzi’s best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen) to join them in Arizona as he ascends the corporate ladder. Even so, it becomes increasingly clear that Sammy’s parents are drifting further apart from one another, even as he develops some inventive techniques to make his amateur productions look bigger and more expansive. But when Burt asks him to edit together a film about a family trip to alleviate Mitzi’s grief over the loss of a loved one, Sammy discovers details about his mother that shatters his already-uneven sense of comfort in the dysfunctional Fabelman household.
The survival of a marriage led by two people of opposite dispositions is hardly the stuff of superhero mythmaking—at least as far as spoilers are concerned—but Spielberg allows its deterioration to unfold with desperate, suspenseful disbelief through Sammy’s eyes. As the oldest child, his understanding of the adult world develops earlier than his siblings’, but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared to deal maturely with the information that he learns. Retracing the footage of a fateful camping trip, Sammy cycles through it like it’s the Zapruder film, watching each moment unfold with horror and confusion. His astute, intuitive camera captures a lot more than he was expecting, and in fact something he never wanted, and develops a more complicated relationship with his art as a consequence of what it teaches him.
That he eventually uses that knowledge to shape the experience he wants viewers of his films to have is not only exhilarating for cinephiles, but it showcases the relationship between the audience and the images on screen better almost than any film in years. Specifically—although not necessarily uniquely to this film, of all of Spielberg’s—he repeatedly films the reactions of the audience first, before showing us what they are watching (if ever). This sense of spectatorship, of communal viewing, undoubtedly feels nostalgic, even outdated in an era of streaming, but he’s not simply evangelizing the theatrical experience. He’s depicting a relationship between image and observer that is every bit as vital as the ones between characters, as an invisible but crucial conveyance for communicating emotion—which again is something Spielberg has mastered better than almost any living filmmaker.
As Mitzi, Williams creates a character who’s flighty and unpredictable enough to justify young Sammy’s frustrations with her, and yet grounded and earnest enough for us to understand her frustrations with, well, the life to which she’s become shackled. She’s both a good and supportive parent and someone who deprioritized her own ambitions to raise her children, and Williams makes her complex and lovable even as she’s driving her family crazy. Dano, meanwhile, makes being smart, subdued, and devoted look good; whether or not he’s truly oblivious to the changing dynamic in his familial relationships, Burt leans on his job and his math skills as a finite solution to the larger existential problems of life, and Dano gives him a depth and humanity that’s multidimensional.
But it’s LaBelle as teenage Sammy who anchors the film with his suitably mercurial responses to the world changing around him, and also conveys the thrill that young Spielberg must have felt to cut images together and take audiences on a journey. Enabled by a supporting turn from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood scene-stealer Julia Butters as his younger sister (proving she’s going to steal many more for years to come), LaBelle communicates in both his joy and his outrage how tight-knit a family Spielberg’s must have felt like when he was a child, and how disruptive (and deep-rooted) the friction would become.
Then again, as skillful and authoritative as the actors are in their roles, you watch the opening scenes where seven-year-old Sammy stages a miniature train wreck for the camera and realize that they’re the exact same kind of playthings to him—a method since all the way back then to control something that in life he simply cannot. Longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski is thankfully still on the muted high of his work from West Side Story, and he mostly lights their lives in naturalistic tones instead of the blown-out, sub-Robert Richardson style he employed in recent years. But from the first frame to the last, this film feels like both the one that Spielberg controlled most closely, and also was in control while making.
There’s a scene in which young Sammy, after being bullied at his new school for being Jewish, valorizes his athletic, popular classmate, Logan (Sam Rechner) in a student film about a senior class trip. The young man should be thrilled—his friends and fellow students justifiably look at him like a hero—but he’s unsettled enough to confront Sammy about it afterwards, almost feeling bad for the saint like depiction. Sammy can’t explain why he cut the film that way, but the fact that he turned a triumphant moment into a mirror reflecting Logan’s own insecurities speaks to how Spielberg, and film itself, can capture the essence of a character or a moment, and cut into it further than a critique. The Fabelmans is a nostalgic depiction of his family that unearths pain and discomfort, and a refashioning of real events to extract more profound truths. We should all be so lucky, and fearless, to be able to look at our lives in the same way, but until then Spielberg is thankfully here to do it for us.
Tucker
Steven Spielberg (above) directed and co-produced the film, and co-wrote the screenplay with Tony Kushner.
Gage Skidmore
Steven Spielberg speaking at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.
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Commentary
Former President Donald Trump announces he is running for president for the third time at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Nov. 15, 2022. Trump had dinner Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, at his Mar-a-Lago club with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who is now known as Ye, as well as Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist who has used his online platform to spew antisemitic and white supremacist rhetoric. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Suffering from indigestion following his dinner with an anti-semite.
Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the annual leadership meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Friday, Nov. 18, 2022, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Mike Pence called for Trump to apologize for hosting a dinner with an infamous anti-semite
Nick Fuentes, far-right activist, holds a rally at the Lansing Capitol, in Lansing, Mich., Nov. 11, 2020. Former President Donald Trump had dinner Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, at his Mar-a-Lago club with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who is now known as Ye, as well as Nick Fuentes, who has used his online platform to spew antisemitic and white supremacist rhetoric. (Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP, File)
Wellness: Of course, the joy of the holidays is sometimes marred by sickness or injury.
We have family that isn’t doing so well.
And yet, he was made happier by Kat’s two loving visits over the holiday weekend.
Sweet.
Social Life: A healthy Social Life adds considerably to one’s health, especially important as one ages.
The holidays give us a chance to hang with those in need of companionship.
This is Kat at our Thanksgiving table in Ogunquit.
Anyone in the company of that smile would be warmed.
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Dr. Mike shares:
'The onslaught just keeps coming': Hospitals scramble to for children with RSV
WBUR
At hospitals in the Mass General Brigham system, some teenage patients are staying in adult units. And some older babies are being treated in ICUs typically reserved for newborns in their first days of life. Boston Children’s Hospital is keeping some patients overnight in rooms normally used for short-term recovery from surgery. And the pediatric wing at UMass Memorial is borrowing a few beds from a nearby unit for adults.
Pediatric ICU @ Umass Memorial Medical Center
Mail from the desk of a Gen Z:
Dad,
This link “captures what I was saying about why we lost Congress in NY”
And here’s another one:
New York Democrats didn’t defend their bail law changes. It bit them at the polls. - POLITICO
Love,
Kat
Blog meister responds: The politically active change things.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.
Nativity scenes are known from 10th-century Rome. They were popularized by Saint Francis of Assisi from 1223, quickly spreading across Europe.
Philip Fruytiers, St. Francis of Assisi, oil on canvas, 259.5 x 169.3 cm, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
Philip Fruytiers - http://www.kmska.be
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, better known as Saint Francis of Assisi (Italian: Francesco d'Assisi; c. 1181 – 3 October 1226), was a mystic Italian Catholic friar, founder of the Franciscans, and one of the most venerated figures in Christianity. He was inspired to lead a life of poverty and itinerant preaching. Pope Gregory IX canonized him on 16 July 1228. He is usually depicted in a robe with a rope as belt.
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Dinner/Food
Eataly ran a terrific sale on truffles, for one day, almost 50% off.
I bit and bought a tiny truffle, plenty to infuse a single plate of pasta.
Here are three pictures of the truffle in my kitchen.
There was little aroma out of the intact truffle but I didn’t worry: “When I cut into it I’ll smell it,” I told myself. It was too small to slice so I chopped it expecting an explosion of aroma. Expecting, not getting. What a disappointment.
But I went ahead with my recipe, a variation of Cacio e Pepe.
Truffle Basil Sauce
Truffle chopped
Truffle from Eataly
This truffle cost about $30.00.
Its smell was muted to say the most.
The truffle being too small to slice, I chopped it.
Sadly, very little aroma arose from the mushroom.
The pasta sauce was delicious but the truffle bombed, adding little to the taste of the dish.
What a disappointment.
In their defense, Eataly’s assortment of shrimp is always splendid and I post this picture to help redeem them.
Of course, if you are price conscious, the shrimp may not look attractive.
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Travel
Having absorbed our trip to Japan, we are reviving plans made just before covid to visit Tuscany.
Our primary goals are twofold: a leisurely, spontaneous trip through the incomparable Tuscany countryside, highlighted by planned moments unforgettable.
While there are a number of towns with which we can begin the trip, we’ve opted to drive from Rome to Assisi where we will encounter the first of those brilliant highlights: Cimabue’s and Giotto’s (or school of) frescoes in the basilica of St. Francis. These late-medieval artists impacted the art world in ways that led directly, if not immediately, to the Renaissance.
Giotto’s frescoes in St Francis Basilica in Assisi
Giotto’s drawing from life was a decisive break with Medieval and Byzantine art and paved the way for the Renaissance.
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Short Essay*
Prayers of thanks and special thanksgiving ceremonies are common among most religions after harvests and at other times of the year. The Thanksgiving holiday's history in North America is rooted in English traditions dating from the Protestant Reformation. It also has aspects of a harvest festival, even though the harvest in New England occurs well before the late-November date on which the modern Thanksgiving holiday is celebrated.
In the English tradition, days of thanksgiving and special thanksgiving religious services became important during the English Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII. Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work. Though the 1536 reforms in the Church of England reduced the number of holidays in the liturgical calendar to 27, the Puritan party in the Anglican Church wished to eliminate all Church holidays apart from the weekly Lord's Day, including the evangelical feasts of Christmas and Easter (cf. Puritan Sabbatarianism). The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence. Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting.
Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving, which were observed through Christian church services and other gatherings. For example, Days of thanksgiving were called following the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 and following the deliverance of Queen Anne in 1605. An unusual annual Day of Thanksgiving began in 1606 following the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and developed into Guy Fawkes Day on November 5. Days of Fasting were called on account of plagues in 1604 and 1622, drought in 1611, and floods in 1613. Annual Thanksgiving prayers were dictated by the charter of English settlers upon their safe landing in America in 1619 at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia.
Home to Thanksgiving, lithograph by Currier and Ives (1867)
George Henry Durrie - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pga.00780. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.
Home To Thanksgiving lithograph after George H. Durrie published by Currier and Ives.
*The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Community Pictures with Captions are sent in by our followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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