It’s been the year of living dangerously, a year of being acknowledged, and it will be the year of the long-awaited court case. The national conscience has been hard at work in this, his latest collection, But Will It Stand Up In Court?  Zapiro has been tackling the state of the nation, and what a state it’s been in!  President Zuma launched a R5 million court case against Zapiro which comes to trial on 25 October 2012. This, combined with the ANC’s court action against Brett Murray, informs the title of this year’s collection.  Zapiro won the prestigious 2012 International Publishers Association (IPA) Freedom to Publish Prize for his exemplary courage in upholding freedom to publish. In August he was named Editorial Cartoonist of the Year in the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards.

A brand new regular event at Arts on Main, brought to you in collaboration with David Krut Projects.

Meet the artists, see the spaces, find out more about the creative process in Visual art, artisanal production and culinary arts.  With demonstrations, artists walkabouts and open studios happening throughout the day.

Saturday 25 May 11:00 – 15:30

Participating Spaces

David Krut Projects

Nirox Projects

Studio 23

Parts and Labour

I Was Shot in Jo’Burg

Goethe on Main

Collen Alborough

JHB Culinary School

Love Jozi

Black Coffee

Smak Republic Brewing Co.

Amos Elon, an Israeli historian born in Europe, has written a beautifully balanced history of a tragic, one-sided love affair.In this important work of historical restoration, Amos Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons, and activists. In engaging, brilliantly etched portraits of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and many others, Elon traces how a small minority came to be perceived as a deadly threat  to German intergrity.

Moeletsi Mbeki discusses the entrapment of an estimated 1 billion people in the Sub-Saharan Africa in cycle of grinding poverty and despair.This is an  innovative and challenging account of Moeletsi Mbeki’s analysis in the plight of Africa concludes that the fault lies not with the mass of its people but with its rulers.He tells a tale of lost opportunities  and extinguished hopes and dreams of Africans .Mbeki concerntrates mainly on South Africa, his country of birth and Zimbabwe, his home while he was in exhile.He also offers some suggestions about what is needs to be done to break the strangle holds of African elites on political power and to set sub -Saharan Africa once more on the road to development.

The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. At first, film was a waking dream, the gift of appearance delivered for a nickel to huddled masses sitting in the dark. But soon, and abruptly, movies began transforming our societies and our perceptions of the world. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media—moving from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs, from Sunrise to I Love Lucy, from John Wayne to George Clooney, from television commercials to streaming video—to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of life—the stories, the stars, the look—and how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time, movies, offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room.

Does the big screen take us out into the world, or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson’s question in this grand adventure of a book. Books about the movies are oft

My ‘Funny’ Brother is that rare thing in South African literature: a teen novel for all ages. It’s rare in another respect: it’s a novel for all teens in which a couple of the characters happen to be gay.  Author and publisher Robin Malan says that the book is not only intended for gay teens but for a wider audience.

“Gay teens will find in it lots of moments of recognition, as well as affirmation. They’ll ‘understand’ a lot of what happens in the book. But my hope is that all teen readers will enjoy the story and perhaps discover a few things they didn’t know about gay people and about themselves,” he explains.

Face painting was a huge success!

This week we had the Stanford Rotary Club come and visit us. They handed out warm hand-knitted and fleece jerseys for winter to the small children whose families are part of the ‘family in focus’ programme that is run by the SCW in Stanford. Jenny October who runs the soup kitchen is the coordinator of this family programme. Jenny educates families on early childhood development and helps the parents prepare their children for grade R. Stanford creative works offered role playing exercises, dress up parties and face painting for the kids to make it a special day focussed on family and fun.

Thank you to the Stanford Rotary Club for their involvement in a successful day.

All the children received warm jerseys for the approaching winter.

It was a marvelous day.

Not No Place is a volume that brings together a vast array of texts, essays, poetry, illustrations and photographs, which vividly portray the depth and identity of the city of Johannesburg.

However, the lived experience of Johannesburg enters Not No Place not only as something textual but as something present and irreducible. The subjective relationship of the contributors to the city over time forms the main fabric of the work and thus is interwoven with selected excerpts, citations, and reflective pieces. The themes vary between the poetic and the concrete, associative and descriptive. Many contain spatial designations, or references to movement: Much of the personal narrative of the city takes the form of a conversation, in letters, recollections and emails. Thus, the book offers a series of personal thick descriptions and a survey of historical and contemporary representations of the city collected over the course of its making.

This inspirational collection brings together poetry, novels, songs, and letters that motivated Ahmed Kathrada during his 26 years of imprisonment in Apartheid-era South Africa. Despite the draconian censorship practices and heavily restricted access to the written word at the maximum security prison, Kathrada found strength, hope, and escape in the works of writers such as Bertold Brecht, Mahatma Gandhi, Emily Brontë, and Karl Marx.