A nice ride: the near west end for the galleries and whatnots
Or, do as Bill Nighy on your leisure days
Last year, a fan took a shot of Bill Nighy on his day off reading in a cafe and posted it on Twitter/X.
Who doesn’t like Bill Nighy? He improves every movie he’s in. He’s here all alone, but obviously some thought went into the clothes. Bill Nighy dresses impeccably for the activity of being alone in a cafe, reading a book. 3500 likes and 500+ retweets later, people could name the book (Natalia Ginzburg) and the London cafe, and the WorkWearGuy if memory serves descended to analyze his dress style, and on and on.
What do you wear on your day off? I realized, on looking Bill Nighy in a cafe, that my leisurewear couldn’t remotely compare. My leisure-day-wear is in a different galaxy (circa Victoria Wood’s As Seen on TV.) Let me not describe it further.
So Bill Nighy is a kick in the pants. A reminder that we should all up our game.
Therefore, I didn’t put on one of the many pairs on sneakers that I own today before going out on the bike. I put on the Chukka boots from LLBean which I like very much though they’re not as bendy as running shoes. And a RL shirt bought on sale at Hudson’s Bay years ago (RIP HBC). And various other, shabbier things, and off I went.
Every minute matters, Bill Nighy teaches us just as much as Sam Harris. I’m not sure I’m a convert, but today was a little less shabbily dressed. First low-double-digit day and sunny since November 2024, quoi.
That’s it for the fashion advice. To the meat of the matter.
Route
Ben McNally Books
I started off at Queen E and Jarvis, with a visit to the Ben McNally’s. I went in to buy a classic which I pretended for many years that I’d read, and now intend to. It’s English nineteenth century, of course, the home of many of my lacunae. (I am not sure why South-East Europeans didn’t read English classics as much; ‘the novel’ meant the French and the Russians where I was growing up. It could be that literary criticism was Marxist, and Marxist critics were snobby about the English novel? It’s too individualist, too trivial, too bourgeois? Too many women? Too reactionary-Romantic? At any rate, the Brontës and Austen were almost seen as romance novels and the best translators probably didn’t flock to English - outside the ever attractive Shakespeare. Dickens was soppy sentimental. It’s a miracle I found my way to Jane Eyre in my early twenties and enjoyed it. I mean, yes, Virginia Woolf made me gay and a Bloomsbury obsessive, but that was an exception that proved the rule. Anyway, I did buy the classic in paperback for the fair price of $26 plus tax. No you may not know what it is.)
Will the shop extend its open hours past 5 pm maybe, sometimes, I asked the clerk? Oh they’re not sure, but one other customer also asked. You should, I suggest? The facade is still unappealing at Ben McN’s, and there’s work now being done on the sign - I presume to have a permanent sign of some sort put there.
Westward ho!
401 Richmond
I realized when it was too late that half of the galleries at 401 Richmond don’t open on Tuesday. Fine, one of my favourite, Abozzo, was open, showing the work by two people: multidisciplinary artist Vladimir Kanic and painter Miles Ingrassia. Kanic has most of the space, which he filled with the living algae sculptures and various other eco-bio-art items. What is a living algae sculpture? It’s something to do with the CO2 you exhale: “a suspended, breathing installation that actively captures atmospheric carbon. As algae grow, they absorb CO₂ from the air, transforming human breath into a tangible act of climate resilience”. With time, “the living sculpture thickens, deepens in color, and produces fresh oxygen” - I mean, yay? The smaller, textile-like items are interesting to look at and that would be enough for me, but I’m also told they are “light-based textiles woven from algal carbon fibers, transforming atmospheric pollution into material form”.
Kanic is Croatian and there’s lots of sea and water in Croatian imaginary - Croatian coast is long - and bits of Croatian folklore were woven into the eco-experimental art. But I felt the call for homework was not insignificant in this exhibit. I didn’t answer it.
(Just wait till you see what’s on at Mercer Union.)
Miles Ingrassia paints, hyper-realistically, adolescent men in their adolescent men weirdness/glory/activities. Touch is very important - many of the paintings depict situations when young men are allowed to touch without opprobrium (the pre- and post-game sports rituals feature).
Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1356 Dundas St West
From Richmond I turned to Palmerston and rode north to Dundas continuing west to the Stephen Bulger Gallery. The career retrospective by the Canadian photojournalist Larry Towell is all well and good - the range of places he was sent to is extraordinary - but I spent most of the time in the corner where the gallery displayed some of its secondary market items, i.e. old prints and ‘found’ items and antiques. I agree with Sarah Waters: there’s something about the nineteenth-century erotica.
