Let’s do Launch

April 30th, 2008 by Lauren Beukes

Correspondence from Moxyland by guest columnist Lauren Beukes.

Most writers are happy to transmute reality into fiction, sampling pieces of the real world and snatches of their experiences and remixing them into story. There’s a very good reason they don’t do it the other way round.

Making stuff up is a lot easier than making it real – not real as in credible, which I’d like to think I pull off in my writing anyway, but actual, real-life real. Which is what we set out to do with the launch of Moxyland at the Book Lounge last Friday.

The process required inveigling thirteen friends to play out roles from the book from “Door Bitch” to “The Vaccinator”, learning graffiti 101 to create the stencilled window mountings, organising African Dope’s Fletcher to spin up some ambiance (or rather ill-bience) on the decks upstairs to promote the Moxyland soundtrack album coming out in the next six weeks or so, and manufacturing and planting sinister evidence.

We also ordered up a batch of chemicals and test-tubes and fat syringes (a process which nearly had me mistaken for an amateur bombmaker), spawned a batch of Moxy mutant toys made by a women’s collective in Montagu* and created a visual mixtape of stills, all to evoke a sense of the world under a corporate apartheid system, pandemic consumerism, scary viruses, alternate reality gaming and biotechnology.

It was an absurdly, crazily ambitious plan and, somehow, surprisingly, it worked, although the free booze probably helped a lot.

As guests arrived at the door, they were met by Door Bitch in shades and an earpiece and wielding a faux guest list, who randomly assigned them to be Corporates or Non-corporates. Corporates were swished inside through the main entrance, stamped with a Ghost logo, and welcomed effusively by hip young things. Non-corporates were sent round to the side entrance to be abused by the bouncer (perhaps a little overzealously – sincere apologies to anyone who was stranded on the pavement in the cold for longer than two minutes).

Outside, animal rights activists distributed flyers, protesting bio-engineered police dogs as “sick puppies”. Inside, guests were handed a mini test-tube, informed that they may have been infected and advised to take their specimen for immediate testing downstairs.

The keen-eyed and conspiracy-minded may have picked up that the sick puppies flyer was the first of four clues in an evidence game to win a Moxy toy and book set. The evidence (you can check it out on the Moxyland website) comprised the animal rights flyer, an SAPS public service announcement on cell phone defusers, a Ghost sponsor baby application form and a police file on one of the characters.

Downstairs, near the bar sponsored by Red Bull (who appreciated the irony of being involved with a book about a girl addicted to a soft-drink) a digital projector spilled evocative images** onto the wall from the Moxyland police files.

In the corner, people thronged around the Inatec Biologica emergency medical testing station to get their specimens evaluated. Those who tested negative were sent on their way with a stern warning to keep it that way. The unfortunates who proved positive when their specimen turned an alarming pink, were directed to the vaccine centre behind a medical screen nearby to receive an intoxicatingly sour (and quite possibly alcoholic) dose of medication administered orally via syringe.

It all got a little out of control.

There were eventually more than 200 people packed into the venue, so that Rob van Vuuren, playing a slick representative from the novel’s fictitious marketing agency, Vukani Media, had to jump on the till counter to be seen as he introduced the equally fictitious (sorry) Ghost Sponsorship Programme that would play patron to young artists, writers and musicians and give them a biological booster shot through the wonders of nanotech.

It was all amazing.

And exhausting.

And unrepeatable.

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* Author Sarah Lotz (whose blackly hilarious novel Pompidou Posse is out in June) and her mother, Carol Walters, brought together a group of women living below the breadline in Montagu in the Klein Karoo especially to make a range of Moxy mutant toys. The toys, based on Michelle Son’s pattern for the original cover monster, are currently only available from The Book Lounge in Cape Town. R100 of the R150 retail price goes directly to the women involved. Contact +27 21-462-2425 or booklounge@gmail.com to order.

** A number of the most shocking images in our slideshow were sourced, with permission, from Zimbabwean advocacy group, Sokwanele. The repressive regime of the future fiction of Moxyland is happening right now in Zimbabwe, and Sokwanele’s Flickr photostream provides a devastating insight into what it really means that we are letting Mugabe get away with the calculated murder of democracy.

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