Loving and hating Jozi

GUS SILBER

In turn, I shrugged my shoulders, and pointed at the red light, but it was too late for my cardinal sin to be redeemed.

I had obeyed an injunction to pause amid the rush, in a city where nothing is ever lukewarm or in-between; where it is always either hot or cold, fast or slow, green for go, or red for HOOT.

Joburg can drive you crazy, and it can drive you to despair, but love it and hate it (there is no either/or) it drives you. This is the thesis at the heart of I love you I hate you, a remarkable work of book-art by Love Jozi, the t-shirt and design company founded by proto-Joburger Bradley Kirshenbaum, and housed at 44 Stanley on the edge of Braamfontein.

Part mock-guidebook, part “tongue-in-chic” fashion and lifestyle catalogue, the book is above all a testament, in words and pictures, to the dualities of life in our schizotopian metropolis.

Here, interspersed with short essays by 34 Joburg writers, we see Love Jozi’s witty and minimalistic t-shirt designs from over the years, flirting with such icons as the hadeda ibis, the Parktown Prawn, the freeway interchanges, the minibus taxis, and the Hillbrow and Brixton towers, bracketing that pulse-quickening District 9 skyline.

But the first thing you notice about the book, is the book. From the seductively embossed lettering on the cover, to the lacquered sheen of the paper, to the rat-tat-tat of the pages as you flip them by, it has a solid, satisfying heft.

It feels like it could be used as a weapon under the right circumstances, and indeed, a weapon it is, against restfulness, against complacency, against the lull of the ebb tide of history.

Rarely have I held in my hands a book that feels so vital, so alive, so a-bristle with creative energy, and a good part of the reason is the tactile prank that Bradley, the designer, plays on the reader.

Blessed with a sharp and sly design sensibility, he has laid out the photo-spreads, which are beautifully styled, posed with swagger, and lit with a gold-bar gloss, in counterpoint to the essays, so that you have to flip the book on its edges and steer it sideways every now and again, as if you’re negotiating your way through the Joburg traffic.

The effect is disorienting at first, but as a user’s note explains upfront, this is design as metaphor. “The flipping motion calls to mind the way most Joburgers feel about their city. One day, you’re up, and the next day, you’re upside down.”

This, therefore, is not a book to be read in linear sequence, at one sitting, nor is it a book to rest on your coffee-table; rather, it is a book to grapple and engage with, to shake your head at, to fall in Love Jozi with, whether you’re crazy enough to live here, or whether you’ve ever wondered how and why people do.

• I love you I hate you, designed by Bradley Kirshenbaum and edited by Laurice Taitz, with contributing essays by 34 Joburg writers, is available from Love Jozi at 44 Stanley, or from good bookstores everywhere, especially Love Books in Melville.