The following post is by Myer Taub. Currently Potlatch is going to sit on the main blog as a kind of monthly guest column until we can sort ourselves out to produce it as a separate blog. Till then, welcome Myer and enjoy. -RS

Potlatch was a blog (see Potlatch) I began during my doctorate: a kind of stream of consciousness, irregular column of essays, thoughts and unpredictability’s. I let it go, once I graduated. Its return via ArtHeat means something similar and hopefully different. It is not just the second album; but also a series of contemplations, of journeying where no one else will go–towards critical adventures and cultural misadventures. For now, I hope it to be a monthly contribution… Just some updated info, I am presently a Research Fellow
at the Research Centre for Visual Identities in Art and Design, University of Johannesburg.

NONE SHALL SLEEP TONIGHT (Joburg, June+July 2009)
Joburg since June; there is this acrimonious cold: thick and bitter, but in between its icy topology there’s something less chilling. Life/Memories/People/Dialogue/Curiosity/
A willingness to continue beyond the enclosure. It is like a twilight zone of activity in the crust of coldness, that is Joburg in June+July.

Now I break the poetry:
To avoid comparativeness, I start with this comparison. In leaving Cape Town and arriving in Joburg I confirmed my suspicion that Cape Town is the model with a nasty drug habit that will not go to rehab and in fact denies ever doing it. Whereas Joburg is the whore, who is a clumsy drug addict and is forever in rehab telling everyone about it. There are breaks and new beginnings. Through luck (serendipity) and me showing off my intellectual prowess to a Joburg crowd, I was awarded a residency at The Bag Factory, Fordsburg. It is an islet of urban Utopia. I am probably the only alien-in-house resident, meaning foreign-born-Joburger who is not from here but living here and everyone thinks is ‘other’ -- as in from Cape Town. ‘He is from Cape Town’, they say. As if that explains everything. ‘I am not from Cape Town’, I respond, meaning just dislocated and disconnected, on a new sort of pilgrimage that begins in my hometown, born a long time ago, in the seventies.

Back to poetry:
‘It’s raining men hallelujah it’s raining men’ (The Weather Girls 2001)
Well its not–even if it is raining...

The other resident at the Bag Factory is really foreign. He is Alejandro and he is an artist. From Argentina, I think that is what he says or as it was translated as such on Google translator. Alejandro Contreras Moraghi (pronounced Allesandro; nice as in not nasty. Ok, he can be rude but maybe that is because it seems that are no ‘Mays’, or ‘Pleases’ or ‘Thank yous’ in Spanish.) I like him a lot. We do not understand each other. However, we talk a lot, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea/coffee/beer. He makes sculpture: little men like-remember-Morphs and made like-as if by Norman Catherine and they are Moraghi’s own in his paintings and are also his objects. While working on his upcoming exhibition at the Bag Factory, he has decided to make one of them, surrounded by electric fencing and has asked me what comes first, the electric fence or the body? I couldn’t say?

I have seen some cool things in Joburg and met some wonderful people. Its like we live in this parallel world of friendship, if I had never left this city, they would be my friends, a city that is flung with junk, and soot and trees. A city that has no centre. A city that is really a rhizome. A city whose magic gold dust is an unexplained phenomenon that is both violent and strangely exhilarating. In the last week, before my first month ended, I paid a second visit to the Eveready-Read in Rosebank, which is a strange gallery like a curio shop, an eclectic mix of tradition A-list South African art and “something else”, I am still not sure what it is yet. (Perhaps it is a left over from an avant garde, never fully realized here.) Anyhow, on this particular night, it’s Anthea Moys’ exhibition,, called: ‘At my own risk’ (2009). Its satisfying to be there; the energy is furious. Outside the gallery’s entrance are ‘The Fast Arts Girls’, Anthea’s mock–roadie support group who now seem to follow her everywhere as she follows herself in this very sophisticated re-staging of irony. Moys’ work is her self, as performed and then photographed, archiving volatility in performing in places in a city, where the feminine is reconextualised and reconstructed for surviving the everyday. Moys plays out this theme while boxing Black Men in Hilbrow and also acts muddied like an rejected Ophelia as she bellows tunelessly down the Gaut-train tunnel and sets up a bed in a rose garden in Joubert Park in the inner city so she can get a good night’s rest and while sleeping, she is accompanied by security guards who nestle her rest like thorns amongst the roses. That particular work bristles with wonderful immediacy although now it is not live, it is ironic. Moys’ archived performances consume and interrogate the importance of safety in a city whose reputation in regards to safety is a strange bedfellow, tossing and turning restlessly in a stream of familiar dreams.

BORAT, BRUNO, BARON COHEN AND BEING A POST ZIONIST
How do you post a Zionist? Easy just pick up the bombed up pieces and post. Sascha Baron Cohen’s filmic delivery of Borat has often been framed as tactless whereas I hope to frame it as tactic because like de Certeau explained tactics are like ambush and Borat caught us all unawares. Bruno is less successful because it a strategy. A strategy, I would like to suggest that is more about Zionism then Queer Theory. Although both are linked by their humane intellectual inter-connections to Judaism. Zionism is humane in its aspirations but it has become cruel because of these aspirations. Queer Theory, I know less about. But as a queer, I was encouraged by my own open progressive sexuality on seeing the film Bruno. I like how homosexuality has become so sophisticated that it can perform irony and decrypt perversion much like how Bruno as Baron-Cohen himself portrays queerness. Baron Cohen does look good as Bruno, but I think has become the best when he is surprised by what his tactless tactics reveals. Has Baron-Cohen exploded like Zionism internally–within. This has been made apparent by his interview on Letterman (CNN July 2009). So suddenly there’s going to be a court-case probably in Tel Aviv. Perhaps the plaintiff and lawyers should ask for Palestinian Authority Law to be taken into account during the impending hearing. Palestinian honor has been broken, Funny that–[very funny]. More will follow, watch this space. Perhaps I will post it.

TOUCH MY BEING
the middle class
the exile
extrapolating in the past
and memory plays memory so that the middle class are paid in kind. Oh Fuck, where did they go?
(after seeing Fred Khumalo’s theatrical adaptation of his autobiography:Touch My Blood. (2009)
Market Theatre Matinees.)