Charles Simic on American Identity

"Chicago was like a coffee-table edition of the Communist Manifesto, with glossy pictures of lakefront mansions and inner-city slums. On one side you had Michigan Avenue with its swanky hotels and luxury stores and, a few blocks away, the rest of the city wrapped up in smoke where factory workers, their faces covered with grime, waited for buses. An immigrant’s paradise, you might say. Everyone was employed. There were huge factories humming twenty-four hours a day short distances from beautiful beaches where beautiful young couples sat reading Camus and Sartre. I had Swedes, Poles, Germans, Italians, Jews, and blacks for friends, who all took turns trying to explain America to me. Chicago, where I only spent three years, gave me my first American identity."

- Charles Simic, The Paris Review

Killer Heels

Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels) by artist and designer Sputniko! with shoe designer Masaya Kushino. Created in response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster,  the seeds of the flowers on the shoe are known to absorb radioactive substances from the soil. As one walks, these seeds in the high heel are planted into the ground.

This September's New York Fashion Week is over but high fashion lives on at Brooklyn Museum's new exhibit: Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe. What I learned at this recently-opened exhibit: high heels were first worn by aristocratic men in the sixteenth century; in both East and West high heels were worn by the powerful and wealthy to show prestige and communicate power and to signify their "life of leisure rather than labor"; Salvatore Ferragamo is recognized for inventing the wedge heel; and fashion photographer Steven Klein makes some really interesting films--in his short film, one of six inspired by high heels specifically commissioned for the exhibition, a woman in very expensive high heels walks over the chest and face of an attractive and muscled man who is lying on his back, another woman scrapes the hood of car with her stiletto, and a third uses her very beautiful heels (Manolo Blahnik's, I believe) to stomp on a motorized toy car. Featuring over 160 heels from such designers as Balenciaga, Chanel, Tom Ford, and Marc Jacobs (as well as one of my favorites, surrealistic wool "heel hat" meant to be worn on the head by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Salvador Dali), the exhibit shows the evolution of the high heel from 17th century Italian chopines made of silk, leather, and wood to Iris van Herpen's 3-D printed heel. Check out the exhibit through February 15, 2015--just follow the sound of high heels clicking on floors coming over the speaker at the exhibit's entrance.

Tribute in Light

"Visible within a sixty-mile radius on a clear night, [Tribute In Light] has become a world-renowned icon of remembrance, honoring those who were lost, as well as those who worked so hard to get our city through that terrible trial."

State Department: Huge Fee Increase for Renunciation of US Citizenship

Effective September 12, 2014, the State Department is adjusting the processing fees for certain nonimmigrant and immigrant visa applications, special visa services, and certain citizenship services fees; most dramatically, the fee for renouncing US citizenship is increasing significantly from $450 to $2,350. The reason for these changes, as the US Embassy in London explains, is to reflect the true cost of providing the service:

The Fiscal Year 2012 Cost of Service Model update reflected that documenting a U.S. citizen’s renunciation of citizenship is extremely costly, requiring U.S. consular officers overseas to spend substantial amounts of time to accept, process, and adjudicate cases.  For example, consular officers must confirm that the potential renunciant fully understands and intends the consequences of renunciation, including losing the right to reside in the United States without documentation as an alien. This fee was first introduced in 2010 and was initially set below true cost.

Many are pointing out the huge increase in the renunciation fee coincides with the record number of Americans living abroad who are renouncing their citizenship and a five-year campaign by the Internal Revenue Service to track down tax evasion by Americans hiding money overseas, which has led to "increasingly onerous tax-filing requirements" for "many middle-income Americans living abroad who pay taxes in their host country and say they weren’t trying to dodge U.S. taxes."

On the upside: the fee for E-1, E-2, and E-3 visa applicants is decreasing from $270 to $205.

New York Fashion Week S/S 2015

Alexander Wang "nudged his active-wear aesthetic from hip to haute" resulting in "a few really lovely floor-length silk satin T-shirt dresses" while Altuzarra had a "finale of flowing handkerchief dresses with deep V-necks in impressionist flower prints, the edges trimmed in pearls, that was unexpected." Instead of a traditional runway show, Opening Ceremony had a one-act play called 100% Lost Cotton by Spike Jonze and Jonah Hill that featured the spring ready-to-wear collection while actresses Dree Hemingway and Elle Fanning "conducted an ongoing dialogue about how awful the modeling industry can be."

"I feel pressure to try to--not reinvent--but for our brand to move on, to keep it moving forward," says Vera Wang. To deal with this pressure, she likes to retreat to her private office, a “haven-slash-disco-slash-mental hospital” with orchids arranged by her Feng Shui expert and a crystal from her psychic to bring "love and peace" to her life. Meanwhile, Diane von Furstenberg, whose S/S 2015 collection made use of the black and white gingham checks trending this year, says in her memoir excerpted in Vogue: "Youth is wonderful; it’s exciting because it is the beginning of life. But it is essential to learn from the past and look into the future without resentment."

Writer and museum director Olivier Saillard talks about his show Models Never Talk, which had its world premier during fashion week. Elle captures fashion week street style. Comedian Abbi Crutchfield went to Lincoln Center in a SpongeBob suit. Vogue is live. And: shoe porn.

"Fashion week is chaos," says stylist and blogger Natalie Joos. Also: "I think Fashion week is just an excuse in general to have a party."

White Teeth

“These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started...but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers--who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact...it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere.”

― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Unisphere

The incredible view from Arthur Ashe Stadium of the 1964 World Fair's Unisphere and Observation Towers of the New York State Pavilion in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

CBP: "Implied Departure"

As members of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the attorneys of D&B receive updates on trends and problems that sometimes arise within the various government agencies handling immigration matters. The most recent involves the denial of some adjustment of status (AOS) and change-of-status applications by US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) when the applicant has purchased, but not used, an airline ticket to depart the US. The denial reason: the applicant's alleged intention to depart from the US and consequent abandonment of the application (applicants for AOS and COS applications must remain in the US until travel parole is granted or the application is approved, respectively, and so leaving the US before either of these is considered abandonment of the application).
 
How is this happening? US Customs and Border Protection reports that when a foreign national buys a ticket departing the US, this information is uploaded into their system and shared with USCIS. This "implied departure" is displayed on a preliminary screen, and unless officers clicks to a "deeper level" of the record, they will be unaware whether the foreign national departed the US or not. Denials for this reason, when the foreign national did not in fact depart the US, are due to officer error, and should be corrected with additional training.