Eating in Golders Green and Idea #192 is Symbolism

Café Also Golder's Green Road

It's generally a good thing to try different eateries and on Saturday evening following an invitation from  (brother) Nick we went to Café Also in Golders Green  for a group celebratory meal.
Café Also is joined physically and literally to the bookshop Joseph's Bookstore  which specialises in Jewish interest books.
The Café is certainly different with  a challenging  menu that is exclusively fish and vegetables so
don't go there when you're in the mood for red meat.
I couldn't fault the service and the quality of the food I had was excellent, here's the Independent's review.

Beatles' White Album Acoustics

For me my favourite Beatles Album is a changeable selection generally Abbey Road would be my fist choice but for diversity and lo-fi chic 'The Beatles' (commonly known as the white album after the art work of Richard Hamilton)  takes a bit of beating.
Interestingly an amazing collection of acoustic demos of many of the songs on the album has
surfaced -the performances are great less the (truly) amazing drumming of Ringo though.

Big Idea Number 192 is Symbolism

As mentioned before Art movements (or movements in art) are about what went before them and symbolism can be seen as a reaction to Realism and Naturalism.

Symbolism was hugely influential  around the turn of the 20th century and elements of it affected the visual arts, as well as literary and theatrical works.

Symbolism began in French and Belgian poetry towards the end of the 19th century with the poetry of Mallarmé, Valéry, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, and sought   to express states of mind rather than objective reality by making use of the power of words and images to suggest as well as denote.

Symbolism can be considered an idealistic movement that was created by artists discontented from their culture. The style was refined, elegant, subtle, intellectual, and elitist.
If there is one central tenet held by Symbolist artists, it is that life is fundamentally mysterious, and the artist must respect and preserve this mystery and for this reason  they insisted on suggestion rather than explicitness, symbols or equivalents rather than description, in both painting and poetry. Choosing music as their model, Symbolists found the creation of a mood to be essential.  The recognition that there was a major portion of mental activity that is closed to the conscious mind confirmed the Symbolists' conviction that there is more to life than can be explained through positivist science.

Here's a video about the history of the Symbolism movement.