Downtown Buildings in the Rain (as seen from my office)

I’m sorry this week got away from me and there were fewer posts than there should have been. I’ll see if I can put up a rare Saturday post tomorrow, but first here is a post about spring rain. Today there was a great monsoon-like storm which swept through New York and though it was gray and cold and filled the streets with water it was strangely beautiful too. I took these pictures from my office (I work on Wall Street, but believe me I am no overpaid master of finance: I think I might have fallen out of the middle class—through the bottom).

Anyway, in the picture at the top you can see the very beautiful and somewhat haunting City Bank-Farmers Trust Building, with its great sad art-deco faces. The building is underappreciated, but I think it is one of New York’s unheralded gems. If I look out the window to the right there is a sliver of the astonishingly beautiful portico of the stock exchange which features Mercury, fickle god of commerce conning the entire world (since my picture is pretty terrible I included a different picture which I stole from the internet immediately below it).

Finally, here is a picture of the National City Bank Building which is currently owned by Cipriani. They regularly have obnoxious events with lots of red carpets and celebrities I don’t know, but I like the sheer number of heavy columns on their building. All of the Wall Street buildings look sort of good in the gray rain. I wish my pictures were better so you could feel the morose charm.

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Three Abstract Cardboard Blossom Monsters

Chartreuse Cloud Monster (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, cardboard and paint)

Hypothetically, sometimes, at one’s day job one has a pushy colleague who loudly demands things and stridently lobbies for oh say…all new office furniture.  It is a conundrum whether to simply bow to the wishes of the assertive colleague who demands a credenza from the internet, or whether one should go to one’s superiors and assess whether this is the right use for the office credit card.  One could potentially be caught between bickering superiors fighting over a cheap credenza. Hypothetically.

In unrelated news, office credenzas come packed in extremely heavy cardboard boxes.  This cardboard seemed perfect for building something, so instead of throwing it into a landfill, I cut it out and brought it home to build into strange new life (thereby erasing any unpleasant office politics which may or may not have been involved in its acquisition).

Tawny Elder Monster (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, cardboard and paint)

Last year I crafted a three-dimensional anglerfish/horse type monster in bright fluorescent colors to go with the blooming cherry tree.  This year I decided to build three ambiguously shaped blossom monsters out of the heavy cardboard from some, uh, office furniture.   The first monster (chartreuse, at the top), was meant to represent the life giving power of spring clouds.  He is a cloud creature squirming with tadpoles–or maybe Yin/Yang spirit energy…however the guests at my party thought he was a three eyed camel with sperm on him (which I guess is also true, from a certain point of view).  I wonder if Henry Moore had to deal with this sort of rough-and-ready interpretation of his abstract sculptures.

The second statue, which may be the best, is an orange figurine somewhere between a wise bird and a tribal warrior.  It has the cleanest lines and the best paint job and it is only marred by a slight tendency to curl up (there is always something!  Especially if one is dealing with cardboard sculpture).

Pink Sphinx Figure(s?) (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, cardboard and paint)

Finally I made a sort of pink octopus/sphinx with a glowing pink interior. Again one friend looked at it and said “It’s a Pierson’s puppeteer!” (this being a meddlesome three-footed, two-headed extraterrestrial super-being from Larry Niven science fiction novels).

Another friend looked at it and said “Why is it so explicit?  I can’t believe you would show such violent erotic ravishment at your cherry festival!”

So, I guess my blossom monsters are more evocative and more ambiguous than I meant for them to be (I was sort of thinking of them as a cross between Dr. Seuss and African carvings).  Please let me know what you think!  Oh and here is a colored pencil drawing of the orange one cavorting beneath the cherry tree!

Blooming Cherry Tree (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink)

Breaking the Bank

When I was younger and happier I worked as a drudge in an Investment Bank.  Actually, remove the happiness from that first sentence—the place was one of the most toxic & unpleasant environments ever.  Nobody there was happy.  The bank sucked away human life force…and so I destroyed it from within!  It’s gone now.  You’re welcome, world.

That all sounds pretty bad-ass, but unfortunately this story reads less like a John Grisham thriller and more like a Russian folktale about a slow witted bumpkin who kills a sorcerer by accident.  Although I worked at the investment bank, I was in no way an investment banker (thank goodness).  The bankers and analysts were all stressed-out type-A personalities who spent 14-18 hours a day currying favor and staring at columns of numbers.  A great many of them were hooked on amphetamines or other drugs.

I worked as a temp in the legal department where my job was to redline legal documents–a sort of grown-up “spot-the-difference” puzzle where one compares two nearly identical legal documents to see if the opposing bank has treacherously slipped new provisions into the contract (legal jobs tend to involve this kind of drudgery).  I also helped update and distribute officers and directors lists—a task which was especially onerous since the officers and directors changed with blinding speed.  Also the bank was really dozens of different legal entities and shell-corporations, each of which had its own board and officers all of whom overlapped considerably.  I completed these monotonous tasks in a freezing cold plastic workstation visible to everyone from all sides. My only joy was to surreptitiously cut arctic animals out of post-it notes with a pair of office scissors.  I had an entire Siberian ecosystem by the time I left.

The bank was on a 30somethingeth floor of a dull 80’s skyscraper in midtown.  The bankers were forever trying to modify the office to suit the whim of the latest leaders (who were always changing—see above), so what should have been a simple series of embedded corridors was instead a shifting warren of slate-green upholstery, sharp glass edges, faux mahogany, injured egos, and construction detritus.  The only constant (other than cold and fear) was an arrhythmic grandfather clock, which wheezed away the interminable hours.  Once I was sent to deliver a document to an obscure department on the far side of the bank.  On the way back, I got lost in a newly created hallway swathed with plastic sheets and plywood.  As I scurried along the passage I heard loud impatient footsteps behind me.  I turned and was horrified to see the president of the bank, a cold bossy woman, walking immediately behind me.  Why was she walking so fast?  How could I escape her? Then it occurred to me: there should be a doorway to the kitchen/breakroom ahead. I flung open the door to escape, but the president had ceased her rapid walking and was staring directly at me, her mouth hanging open in an “O” of surprise. With a touch of élan, I opened the door wider in order to let her pass (I was surprised she knew about the shortcut through the kitchen) and then I noticed the room beyond the door had pink tiles!  It was the women’s bathroom!  I screamed shrilly, dropped the door, and ran away down the hall.  It was not my best career moment… fortunately a new president was appointed shortly afterwards, and then another new president after him!

Anyway you want to hear about the destruction of the bank.

Above the little cubicle I was stuck in, there was a big air vent.  It roared incessantly all day, continuously delivering a stream of cold stale air on my shoulders.  One day, when the legal department was unexpectedly empty, I decided to try to do something about the vent.  Balancing precariously on top of my workspace I reached up into the evil grate and found a tiny rusted lever which would not budge, no matter how I pulled at it.  Desperate not to be caught, I swung my whole weight at the lever.  There was a rusty scream, a shower of dirty particles and a great dull “BOOM”.  I sprang down into my chair and looked busy, as martinets in pinstripes manifested from nowhere, but I heard an alveolar shift up inside the ducts of the skyscraper.   The hateful cold air was now directed somewhere else!

My moment of triumph it was short-lived.  The top boss of the legal department (famous for OCD & prickly disposition) came back to find that her fancy office was unbearably cold.  A normal person would have summoned the building engineers–who probably would have traced the problem back to the closed vent.  Fortunately that was not the way she did business.  Her first action was to have her paralegals find the contract with the building and flag the engineering/maintenance section.  Armed with contractual righteousness, she called the property firm and ordered them to raise the temperature on the floor by 15 degrees.

The legal department was on the cold dark side of the building.  The important bankers and financiers were portly men with window offices on the sunny side of the skyscraper.  While the rest of the bank suddenly became hot, their offices became ovens.  To lower the temperature, the bankers started working their way through successive levels of workmen, technicians, and engineers (I heard the angry conversations in the lobby) only to find that the temperature had already been changed by the legal department.  Both sides then began a violent squabble about the thermostat.

"...maybe I should go. You guys settle this on your own."

One day I just didn’t go back to the bank—in fact that was the only job I quit outright with no other prospects.  Later on I found out that, a few months after I left, the bank was gobbled up in its entirety by a huge New York capital management firm.  Perhaps it is wrong not to assume that some other factor was responsible for that place’s demise (its dysfunctional office culture or rapidly changing leadership, for example…or maybe the wave of banking mergers in the nineties) but I think anyone who has worked at an office where everyone is fighting about the temperature can correctly assign credit to me.

Anniversary Announcement (with Doodles)

Root Doodle (Wayne Ferrebee, ink and colored pencil)

I’m going to steer clear of April Fool’s hijinks because today marks Ferrebeekeeper’s one year anniversary! Happy anniversary to all readers!  To celebrate, I am posting doodles which I drew during business meetings during the previous year.  Hopefully their silly nature will satisfy your funnybone and provide an adequate anniversary celebration.

Doodle of Dynastic Egypt (Wayne Ferrebee, pen and colored pencil)

This one year anniversary also provides an excellent occasion for the announcement of exciting future plans and for some remarks concerning the overarching structure and themes of this blog.  First, the announcement: I am going to launch my online gallery of my own artworks by the beginning of May.  I always intended this blog as an interdisciplinary means to provide context and meaning to my visual art—and yet I have never even shown any of my paintings or drawings to you!  For shame! So it’s time to grasp the chimera by the horns and post digital images of the finished paintings and drawings I currently have on hand. I hope to smoothly integrate the gallery of images with the daily blog:  ideally the two will combine to form a powerful and unique synthesis.  However,  the project is liable to be chaotic–and so I apologize in advance for disruptions and confusion.  On the plus side, I have been growing and improving as an artist so I am excited to share my works with you.  As always I am eagerly looking forward to your remarks and comments.  As proof of my earnestness I am publishing some scans of doodles I made during office meetings—but be assured these are only scribbles I made to pass the time.  I don’t have digital images of my real work yet, but my real oeuvre is coming soon to this space.

Blue urban caprice (Wayne Ferrebee, Colored pencil and pen)

OK…onward to some remarks about this blog itself:

The categories I have chosen for Ferrebeekeeper are the symbols I cling to in my quest for meaning. I’m going to explain better how they relate to one another. In the era before computers, people writing research papers or other large nonfiction works would keep relevant facts on notecards indexed by subject.  The daily posts which I put here are rather like such collected notecards.  I truly hope that each one is intriguing in its own right and provides you a daily moment of wonder at the beauty and strangeness of Greek monsters or wombats or the planet Mercury. But the interdisciplinary subjects serve a larger purpose.  There is a relationship between serpents, gothic art, and chthonic gods.  There are commonalities underpinning the lives of mollusks, turkeys, catfish, and mammals as they compete for resources and strive to reproduce themselves. As I put up my art gallery I will try to explain why I post about crowns (the short answer is I think they are funny) and how these jeweled hats actually represent certain important aspects of history and politics.  I will attempt to underline the relationships between these disparate subjects and explain how they provide meaningful frames of reference about the larger world.

Whimsical Doodle of City and Sweets (Wayne Ferrebee, pen and colored pencil)

I will leave you with the funniest of my doodles.  It portrays a handsome young mollusk cyclops wondering through a world of possibilities and enticements.  Things might not be perfect, but it still looks like he/she/it is having fun! I certainly am as I write this and I hope you are enjoying reading. Happy Bloggiversary and Happy April Fool’s Day! Here’s looking forward to another good year!

Casual sketch of a One-eyed Mollusk on Holiday (Wayne Ferrebee, pen and ink with crayon)