patrickbringley

Hey thanks so much! I'm sure I'll see you around many times more, mystery guard. Favorite section art-wise: the old master paintings, though there are many close seconds. Favorite for people watching: probably Egyptian, because EVERYONE goes to Egyptian, everyone from schoolkids to tweedy professors to weird new agey healers.

One writes and writes and writes and chews up pencils with anxiety until one has something that kind of sort of looks like 2/3 of a book draft. Then one uses it to find an agent, cold querying a couple of dozens until one bites. Then one works with said agent (the wonderful Farley Chase) for damn near a year to write an 80 page book proposal. Then one is very very very lucky to have a publisher like Simon & Schuster bid on it, providing the services of an editor, the wonderful Eamon Dolan, to continue shaping it. Then one writes it and boy it's hard.

Everyone has this issue confused. It isn't the art that comes to life. It's the guards who turn back into works of art.

I think people would be shocked by just how extensive the museum is behind the scenes. The Met sits on 12 acres of Central Park, and it's every bit as big below ground as it is above. 2000 people work there. More than 500 guards. And down below it's practically a little village, with offices, conservation studios, wood shops, plexi glass shops, a printer, a working armory....

THank you! Yeah man, Tom loved the Met. I remember we went and saw an El Greco show together, also the Manet/Velasquez show. He was a man of few words, which is what you want from a companion in an art museum. You don't want to be with a person where you're always having to prove your aesthetic sensabilities by saying something insightful! Usually there's nothing insightful to say except, "wow" with a slow head shake. "My God..." more headshaking. He was that kind of guy. Didn't have to say it. We knew how each other felt.