PARA VIVIR

Katrina Kepule: Sit Silently

The series “Sit Silently” examines the signs of time in the rites of subcultures surrounding the capital of Latvia, Riga. It captures the places where “modern Europe” meets the elements of the Soviet times, which conflict and overlap at the same time. These overlapping elements appear creatively in interiors, exteriors, portraits and still-life images depicting the everyday and leisurely pastimes.

The pictures capture the author’s search for a slower time zone that contains more vivid and open expressions, as well as a sense of home and creativity of daily routines beyond the usual urban experience.

The series is also an author’s journey of recreation—escaping from “focus” and looking for her own (Latvian) identity or core, while admiring peripheral moments with their own significance, values and feeling. If, for example, one looks from the East, Kengarags is on the periphery of Riga, Latgale is the periphery of Latvia, and Latvia is the periphery of Europe.

The series’ title is an abbreviation of a piece from “Google Poetics” and consists of phrases that are popularly searched on internet and are associated with sitting: “Sit silently /sit silently doing nothing / we sit silently and watch the world / we sit silently and watch.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Groundbreaking Hip-Hop Musical,Hamilton, Hits Broadway

One of the hallmarks of genius is an ability to spot connections between seemingly disparate things and then go on to create something that reveals the world in a new light. The young lyricist-composer-performer Lin-Manuel Miranda made such a connection about seven years ago, during a break from the Broadway run of his musical In the Heights, in which he was also starring. Miranda was, he says, “just chilling” in Mexico, reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, when suddenly: “I was like, This is an album—no, this is a show. How has no one done this? It was the fact that Hamilton wrote his way off the island where he grew up. That’s the hip-hop narrative. So I Googled ‘Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical’ and totally expected to see that someone had already written it. But no. So I got to work.”

I appreciate the attempt, I do. I appreciate the attempt at bridging hip-hop culture with the history of the U.S. But whatever it is, I cannot freely glorify the founding of this country as it continues to perpetuate the erasure of other cultures that it has engulfed and trampled over. The history of the U.S. is indeed rich, but this story is one that I am not interested in hearing. Nor do I feel comfortable with the author’s comment on Hamilton as “the original immigrant.”

Jeremy Radin - “Ode to the Slice of Chocolate Cake…”

“And perhaps she needs to give me that cake. Certainly more than I need it, and certainly she is not thinking eating disorder. Because who ever thinks eating disorder?”