Life, luck and iron

So over the weekend, I got this great picture of our niece Danielle as she was about to go to her first homecoming in high school with a bunch of girl friends. This young woman is 14 and looks like a million dollars in her homecoming dress. Back in my day, you had to be asked by a boy to be able to go the homecoming and if you weren't asked, you just could not go. It was horrible when I think about it now. Girls were pretty repressed back then. It wasn't until the 1970s that we began to demand our rights and think differently. Society pretty much forced us into a model that would not work at all today and thank goodness for that. Danielle and her friends probably just had a fine time and enjoyed themselves with no thought about dates.

When the workers were cleaning off the ironwork on the front of our building to ready it to paint this week, they discovered that the detail in the iron was extraordinary but had been covered for probably 100+ years with layers and layers of paint. A few pieces are missing from these pictures but will be back on when the place gets its painting done. The interesting part is that the work was made by L. Schreiber and Sons from 521 & 523 Walnut Street in Cincinnati. That would be roughly at Walnut and 5th which is the corner of Fountain Square. The company was there from 1854 to 1887 when it moved to larger spaces on Eggleston Ave with access to the railway. Our bases have the early stamp of the company rather than the logo stamp found on later castings.

You can see in the images where there is paint still on the ornate parts that so much of the detail was covered up and we had no idea how really beautiful it was. I am so anxious to see it when they complete the paint removal and repaint it to show off its details. The background on the iron will be a very dark charcoal grey and the recessed area will be a color called stolen kiss, a beautiful rich dark red.

This building keeps getting better and better. The neighbor directly east of us removed the ironwork at some point in the years that followed its installation. The front on that building looks like the 1950s but the one just beyond has a similar ironwork front although not as much as ours since ours goes around a corner.

Our FotoFocus exhibitions continue to throw us curves. Chloe did not send the movie and I had to remind her to get it to me. She uploaded it and it took overnight to download it. I attempted to put the movie for Nick's show onto the mac mini that I brought home over the weekend. However, I could not do that because the thing would not recognize my bluetooth keyboard, and mouse and I did not have the password to open it up in the first place. So that foiled me and then David discovered we did not have the correct size poles to hang the show. We figured out an alternative method to replace the missing poles. However, the folks at Look3 continue to frustrate me. We did print a beautiful Sartore elephant print this morning for the back wall of his gallery. The show will look great but never do I want to do something like this again when the logistics are so complicated by snotty folks who think they are doing us a favor to cooperate.

thoughts on FotoFocus, staining, and my knee.

So, we are a few weeks into the semester and I had knee surgery because I could not make it without. No way could I walk that far, stand that long, and be paying attention to anything but my throbbing knee. So, I bit the bullet and it's just over a week later. I can walk again, no cane, no crutches and no walker but I forget to take it easy on the thing and every one in a while push a bit too hard. Like now, I am icing it because I just spent about a half hour leaning over the vanity I tried to stain and finish in a one coat process and it was a failure - a complete failure. So today I am using Stripeeze to rid the piece of the mess I applied yesterday. I should have stopped immediately after the first brushes, but thought my technique was the issue not the material.

I have stained and varnished all the doors and windows in this house and tons more things. But this MinWax Polyshades is the worst product on the market for refinishing or finishing for the first time. I followed the instructions to a T and it looked worse than if a 5 year old had been mucking about.
So, after stripping for a while, I must rest my knee with ice.

School is going ok. Classes are fine. Maybe better than fine. FotoFocus can be over soon enough for me. The banners are up around campus and look terrific. We got snubbed by Enquirer and FotoFocus for the article in last week's Sunday edition. That was disappointing but we have blitzed them with pictures, tweets, Facebook postings and I don't think they can miss that. I think we are going to have the jumbotron sign along 471 announce us so more folks will see that than the newspaper anyway. The ongoing issue is the uneasy relationship with the guy who runs Greaves. He is a bit of a prick, young and knows every so much more than anyone else. He makes snide comments about our use of another projector rather than their $40,000 one that is set to the wrong aspect ratio for the images and doesn't change easily. Anyway, that is a long story of a man peeing on all the bushes vs some one who wants to get things done well. I guess he is afraid that if he helps us do an event that looks spectacular, he will somehow look bad rather than be praised for a job so well done. Beats me. So little power, so little landscape and such a big fight. Academia.

Anyway, the shows should be wonderful, the work load is probably manageable if no one lets their head get too big and then lots will enjoy. I want to say, wow, wasn't that great. I have another nagging idea that the big FotoFocus folks think National Geographic photographers shows are not highbrow enough for the ART crowd from NYC, LA or themselves. My favorite photographers in the world do not work for Nat Geo, nor are those the books I collect, but and this is a big BUT, to do a show that will draw others to the galleries that would not normally set foot inside, to do transdisciplinary work that could be incorporated into curricula all over campus, you are not going to do a show of one of my favorites, won't happen. We are trying to be inclusive, not exclusive. We can teach about sustainability, world politics, global warming, other lands, other species and of course photography all in one place. That is what we chose to do. I only wish the main folks at FotoFocus could understand the shows and give us the credit we deserve because some folks have worked their asses off for over a year to have this happen. And one has given her energy and her wealth to support these efforts. I hate for her to be snubbed.