Today was Linda's pick - the West Queen West neighborhood which feels a little like the old Soho or the old Dumbo in NYC with a dash of San Francisco's Mission District. The further west you go, the more edgy and scrambled the shops and galleries are. As you move east, closer to Bathurst St, the chichier stores predominate, but few chain stores and a lot of very different points of view. Along the way we encountered a place that sells crocheted "plants you can't kill", a store that has everything you could possibly want for a bar (who knew there were sooo many varieties of bitters?), a doorway that invites you to shake hands,and a whole lot of other stuff. There's a brand new Shinola store we popped into (I was surprised to see a Shinola bocce set - or was it lawn bowling?). Then there was the place that will turn your selfie into an action figure (selftraits). [I still haven't figured out how to control the order of the photos so they're a little scrambled- the last one is the action-figure selfies].
We also stopped for a while at the Stephen Bulger Gallery which has a show of about 40 of Vivian Maier's photos. For those who don't know the story, she grew up in NYC, was a nanny employed in the suburbs of Chicago, and made one trip around the world in 1959. No one knew she was a street photographer until a fellow named Maloof and two other fellows came across negatives of her photos at about the same time and one of them posted some the photos on his blog in 2008-2009. Suddenly she was a sensation posthumously. We spent some time looking at books of her photos as well as the ones in the gallery. Photos were forbidden, but you can see some at this link. http://vivianmaier.blogspot.ca/. They're black and white, mostly street scenes and people. Fascinating story and interesting show.
