Let’s Go Met
Happy May. This is the fifth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it arrives once a month, just like your gas bill, except it can’t keep your house warm or help you cook an egg.
Just under the wire, here’s a quick trip through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and thoughts on the 2003, 2013, and 2023 Red Sox.
All the beauty in the world
Patrick Bringley spent 10 years working as a guard at the Met and has stories to tell. He tells them in his book All the Beauty in the World, on the Bowery Boys podcast, and on guided tours. Here’s a little bit of his story from a piece in the New Yorker:
In 2008, Patrick Bringley was twenty-five and grieving his older brother, Tom, who had died of cancer that June. Bringley had quit his event-planning job at a magazine (this one) and longed to “commune with things that felt fundamental,” he said recently. After a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where his mother wept in front of a Pietà, he was riding the subway in Brooklyn when a thought hit him: he should become a security guard at the Met. “I was attracted by this idea of doing something straightforward and honest and useful, like keeping people’s hands off of some of the most beautiful things human hands have made,” he said.
He answered an ad in the Times and went to an open house. “They tell you the hours” — for beginners, twelve hours on Fridays and Saturdays and eight hours on Sundays — “and half the people leave,” he recalled. After a week of training (“Protect life and property, in that order,” he was told), he joined the Met’s largest department: some five hundred guards, who work in rotating “platoons.” Bringley spent the next decade at the museum, and has now written a guard’s-eye memoir, “All the Beauty in the World,” detailing a job that is equal parts dreamy, dull, and pragmatic.
I don’t know how many times I’ve been to the Met in the twenty or so years I’ve lived in New York. Maybe a dozen? That seems like plenty, but I always mean to go more often. Anyway, I usually just wander around aimlessly, in a perpetual state of vaguely lost, just like I do in any other museum, except more so, because of the Met’s vastness.
It’s not unpleasant, being overwhelmed by all that random stuff, surprised at what’s around each corner. But last month, I decided to take one of Bringley’s group tours. It was great. Even better than walking around with Nate DiMeo in your ears.
Here are some fun facts and photos from my first trip back to the Met since the pandemic. (With a couple of pics that I snuck in from previous trips.)
The first thought that crosses my mind whenever I’m faced with the majesty of the Great Hall is: How little can I get away with paying for admission without feeling like a jerk? For New York residents, the Met is pay what you want. Oh, sure, I should do my part to support the arts, but c’mon. Let’s leave this one to the tourists, the estate of J.P. Morgan, and those other New Yorkers, the ones living in those ridiculously tall skyscrapers. This time, the admission fee was included in the price of the tour. I’m sure that means I overpaid, but OK.
First stop: the European Paintings gallery — which is closed off for renovations until the Fall. No Goyas for you!
A velvet rope separated me and this lady, who was enjoying a members-only preview of a new exhibition featuring seventeenth-century Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja:
Largely known today as the subject of The Met’s iconic portrait by Diego Velázquez, Pareja — who was born in Antequera, Spain — was enslaved in Velázquez’s studio for over two decades before becoming an artist in his own right. This presentation is the first to tell his story and examine the ways in which enslaved artisanal labor and a multiracial society are inextricably linked with the art and material culture of Spain’s “Golden Age.”
Sitting to the left of this reliquary was another reliquary — housing Mary Magdalene’s tooth. Both pieces were donated to the museum by J.P. Morgan, who, Bringley notes, was a collector of some wacky stuff. Bringley also contends that billionaires and robber barons don’t have access to the best art like they used to — most of it is in museums, not auction houses — which is what makes places like the Met even more special. The good stuff is available to the public, not holed away in penthouses and warehouses.
Just out of frame to the left is the Temple of Dendur, completed in 10 B.C and moved from Egypt to the Upper East Side, block by block, after it was gifted to the Met in 1967 A.D. Bringley notes that the temple was built 2,000 years ago — but the pyramids were built 3,000 years before that. So we are closer in time to the Temple of Dendur — by about a thousand years — than it was to the pyramids. But also, what Bringley failed to note was that When Harry Met Sally was filmed in this same room over 34 damn years ago. Now that is crazy.
Bringley wears a Mets cap at the Met, which is right and good.
Check out those classic keisters.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Bringley’s tour skipped the American Wing, but I made my way back at the end.
This portrait was painted by her husband who died a few weeks later.
Wut.
The New Yorker article mentions how, in addition to people asking Bringley for the Mona Lisa, “Michael Stipe once asked Bringley for directions to Madame X.” I still get lost within two minutes of stepping into the Met. But her and the other Sargents, I can find all by myself (with only one or two wrong turns).
Is it dorky to have a favorite painting at the Met? Anyway, this might be mine.
So here’s my feeling from this latest trip. The Mayans, Egyptians, Chinese Dynastic Emperors, Japanese Shogunates, Greeks, Romans, Medicis, dinosaurs — all thought they would live forever, that they were it, the height of life on Earth.
And when I was a kid I used to think of all this old stuff in museums as ossified — these paintings, these rugs, these worn clay pots, and these marble butts — all this old stuff was always here and will always be here, preserved, unchanging, forever.
But now I, myself, am old stuff. And so now when I look at these other old things, I feel the same way as when as I think about the vastness of the universe or the impending planetary meltdown, and suddenly all these objects feel less immutable, more precious. What a brief moment in time we occupy. It’s a miracle any of this stuff survives our clumsiness, our hubris, our stupidity. Let’s appreciate all the beauty we have while we can. Maybe I’ll get a membership.
2003–2013–2023
Speaking of feeling old.
Twenty-ish years ago on April 27, 2003, David Ortiz hit his first home run as a member of the Boston Red Sox. Cast off by the Minnesota Twins during the offseason, he made the Red Sox opening day roster but was fighting for playing time against the likes of teammates Jason Giambi and Shea Hillenbrand. After a crushing end to the season, he’d secure himself a spot on the Red Sox roster forever.
This April, the Sox celebrated the 2013 World Series championship team while also honoring the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings. I was at that first game at Fenway after the bombings, less than 24 hours after the second bomber had been apprehended. The Red Sox won the game 4-3, Clay Buchholz pitched eight solid innings, Papi went 2-for-4 with one RBI, and Daniel Nava hit a three-run, go-ahead dinger in the bottom of the eighth. But, of course, that’s not what everyone remembers about that day. They seemed like a team of destiny after that.
Today, after the first full month of the 2023 MLB season, the Boston Red Sox are neck and neck with the New York Yankees — tied for dead last in the American League East standings. It’s a tough division to be sure, but alas, what a difference a decade or two makes.
I do not have high hopes for the Red Sox this season. But then again, it’s baseball, so you never know.
Other rabbit holes
Bobby Dalbec’s cup of coffee. After not making the opening day roster, Dalbec was called up for all of four games, going 2-for-9 with two walks and five strikeouts, before he was sent back down to Worcester. I’m still rooting for the fellow Sadaharu Oh admirer. The team called up the speedy Jarren Duran, who’s been doing a pretty good job.
Ben Lindbergh on The Mandalorian. Last month I shared some of Sam Miller’s baseball writing. Lindbergh is one of my other favorite baseball writers — he’s also one of my favorite Star Wars writers.
Netflix DVD RIP. I’m still getting those shiny discs in the mail, and I still will until the service stops sending them at the end of September. My favorite transportation writer, Aaron Gordon, also wrote two pieces on why Netflix DVDs are/were great: “Netflix DVDs Are Still the Best Way to Watch Movies” and “Goodbye to Netflix DVDs, The Last Good Tech Company.”
OK, that’s all for this one. Have a good month.