The Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine is cutting 13 positions due to the lingering finance impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, local news outlets report. 

The layoffs will include salaried and part-time employees, as museum management is seeking to reduce the nearly 70 percent of its operating budget dedicated to wages. 

“The museum was fortunate to receive ERC credits and PPP loans to maintain staffing and programmatic growth during unprecedented times, but the multi-year positive impact of this support will soon expire,” the PMA said in a statement. “As expenses continue to remain high and unpredictable, the real and persisting negative effects of this historic moment have necessitated changes in the PMA’s operations.”

The announcement follows two years of contentious relations between the museum and its employees over wages and job security. Last month, gallery ambassadors and security workers unionized, marking the second second successful union campaign at the museum, following the 70 or so employees who joined United Auto Workers Local 2110, the Technical, Office and Professional Union in 2021. Unionized employees will be not be affected by the layoffs. 

The museum reported that attendance numbers have dropped by 35 percent since the 2020, raising concerns for the sustainability of its programming. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Thursday its co-chairs for the 2024 Met Gala. 

Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth will join Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour as co-chairs for this year’s Costume Institute Benefit, which will have “The Garden of Time” as its theme.   

The theme is inspired by the upcoming “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” spring exhibition, which will open to the public on May 10. As previously reported by WWD, this year’s exhibition will feature 250 pieces that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their fragility. The pieces are part of the Costume Institute’s collection of 33,000-plus items.

“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will also feature artificial intelligence, video animation, light projection and diverse technologies to create a sensorial experience. 

Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya and Bad Bunny have attended the Met Gala multiple times before. Zendaya famously dressed up as Cinderella for the 2019 edition of the event, posing with stylist Law Roach as her fairy godmother on the red carpet.

6 min read

The first mention of an ‘Oxford Sauce’

When it comes to describing what ‘Oxford Sauce’ is, many would likely differ in their answers, if they were aware of its existence at all. Some seasoned foodies might point to Georges Auguste Escoffier’s Oxford Sauce, mentioned in the last book he ever wrote himself, titled Ma Cuisine (1934). Escoffier is widely celebrated for his contributions as a chef, known amongst French media as the ’king of chefs and chef of kings’. He popularised and modernised the French haute cuisine style of cooking and brought it with him to London, where he lived for 32 years. He began his apprenticeship in the kitchen at the young age of 14 and by 27 he was already chef de cuisine in the Parisian restaurant Le Petit Moulin Rouge.

A few years later he began to work with the famous hotelier Cesar Ritz at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo. From 1890 to 1898 the pair both worked at the Savoy hotel in London, until dismissed for ‘gross negligence and breaches of duty and mismanagement’.

However, the duo had already established the Ritz Hotel development Company, which went on to open Paris’ Ritz Hotel in 1898 and London’s new Carlton Hotel the following year.

 Ma Cuisine (1934), written post World War II, when high dining and haute cuisine were in decline, focused more on recipes developed in modest kitchens using local ingredients and became a staple for French family cooking. In this book Oxford Sauce is described as a cold table sauce, based on fruit, similar to Cumberland sauce, but eliminating citrus peel. According to him it is: ‘A British sauce of red currant jelly dissolved with port and flavoured with shallots, orange zest and mustard; usually served with game.’

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the hedge fund analyst knew me better than I knew myself. It was his job to predict distant developments, covert motives, hidden risks, and shortly into our brief relationship he turned his powers of divination on me. After I told him I was writing a novel about finance, he suggested that I’d been drawn to him partly for mercenary reasons: that I was, in a word, dating him for research. He took it in stride—he lived and breathed all things mercenary—but he did issue a polite warning.

“Never put anything I tell you in writing,” he said.

I’d like to think that, in his predictive genius, he also knew I would eventually ignore this warning.

***

I like the ashes on Ash Wednesday. I am at best a lapsed Catholic though it would be more accurate to say that I never really began, just that I was raised against the backdrop of already-faded-Catholicism and its associated traumas, now transmuted and passed on in their mysterious ways to me. I inherited also the pining and the predilection that many Americans have for certain things to do with Ireland. In San Francisco, I used to drink afternoons after I got off work at an Irish bar in Noe Valley, the Valley Tavern, or a different Irish bar downtown, the Chieftain, or sometimes come to think of it an Irish bar on Guerrero with big windows where my friend Graham and I used to like to watch the rain. San Francisco is a more Catholic city than most people think, and more Irish too. More Irish American, which is really what I am talking about: girls in red school uniforms and tennis shoes outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart, looking forward to football games Friday nights at St. Ignatius, the high school by the church where my feet were washed as a kid on Holy Thursday. The gold beads strewn on the street after St. Patrick’s Day parades, orange-and-green bumper stickers for a united Ireland overlaid with 49ers insignia. There are things like that everywhere, I know. But then there is the way the fog rolls in in the afternoon, bone-chillingly damp, and the washed-up light on the pink facades in the Richmond, the looming lonesome palm trees lining the meridians. And the illuminated signs for old-school strip clubs as you drive into North Beach and the Tenderloin—or the one I always liked that read JOEY’S ICE CREAM ESPRESSO SAUSAGE WASH AND DRY. Now I have lost the thread of religion. Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again. I have a memory of dust motes floating around in a shaft of light and trying to catch them in my hands, one long afternoon, or maybe many afternoons, or never. It’s just an image.

The ashes are an image too—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Images like those that appear in Cheever’s journals, which are essentially liturgical, always marking the coming and going of Lent and Easter, because that is what gives a year order. He makes lists: “The calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones.” I meant to say something about sacrifice and self-denial, but I am also just making lists of things I have seen. Another year has gone by and it has not been an easy one. Many times I think of those Irish bars in San Francisco, their promise of interior and quiet and calm, and the allure of darkness in the afternoon. Cheever writes about the way the impulse toward self-destruction can be, at the beginning, as small as a grain of sand. “Do not drink. Do not et cetera, et cetera.” So there is something about self-denial after all. Last February, this time, I was driving south from Mendocino, past surf motels with vacancy signs. California feels washed out this time of year, eucalyptus bark stripped off all the trees, the sensation of erosion present. Yet there is effulgence too, even in this season, when it rains or is supposed to. One year in the hills north of the city: remarkable yellow blooms coating the hills like a carpet and everything brown for once astounding green. In “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot writes of those “who walked between the violet and the violet / Who walked between / The various ranks of varied green.” I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—a phrase that comes to mind, strangely, all the time, though I must remind myself of its coda: I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. (Are you, after all?) I picture a valley between two steep jagged cliffs, maybe I saw one in an illustrated children’s Bible, and between the cliffs in shadow, a long stretch of grass on a long road with no clear end, but it is after all a vibrant endless green.

When I was another boy, I was the boy next door. He was Jase, short for Jason: generic, but with a nickname just off enough to seem real. My lover—I call him Famous, which he is to me—became Jase’s best friend, Chris, a name that needs no explanation. Jase and Chris weren’t quite boyfriends, not like we were in real life, in which we worked very hard to be boyfriends. In real life, we had to stay below the radar of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We had to figure out what domestic meant, as in home and as in argument. We were known to many for being adorable and codependent. IRL, we were gay. Because the way we were identified became an identity. Maybe that’s how it works, for me anyway: I don’t seek out identity but consider my position and articulate it like a mime feels their box.

Online, I could shake it off altogether.

Jase was just a body organized around his lickable ass, thick and juicy. If you could smell over the internet, you’d get high off the fumes. He did not have mammoth pores on his nose, like real me, or baroque ingrown hairs. He did not lose his erections. He was either unavailable or rock hard.

I claimed I was nineteen and that Chris had just turned eighteen. We were maybe six years older, and mid-twenties is a long haul from teens. We did not live in San Francisco—too fruity. I said somewhere near Santa Cruz. Lying close to the truth helped me feel convincing.

How British and American quietly luxurious styles have merged over the centuries

January 5 – February 17, 2024