In sync with the closing of the Beijing Olympics 2008
Seems a smart collaboration between the BBC
And the Gorillaz.
What will they cook up for LONDON 2012?
I originally posted a blog at my myspace account Thursday, June 28, 2007 titled.... MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST. I was very excited about Jamie Hewlett and the Gorillaz working on one of the great CHINESE CLASSICS of literature and also that my mate CHU had worked with Jamie on a promotional painted MONKEY TRAIN! (A virgin train decorated with characters from MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST) see CHU's YOUTUBE video!
Best known for their collaborative music project, Gorillaz’s Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn have been commissioned by BBC Sports to create a short animated film for the upcoming Beijing Olympics. Based on the classic Chinese tale, “Journey to the West,” the new story is entitled “Journey to the East” and features a more modern-looking Monkey King, who must travel on a cloud to the newly opened Bird’s Nest. -- www.psfk.com
I hope that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett get around to re-producing some more of the great Chinese Classics, and other healthy cross-cultural exchanges can proceeed.
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CHINESE GORILLAZ AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY.
By Steven James Pratt.
Thursday, June 28, 2007.
"Well, it's about Ezra Pound and James Joyce, whom I regard as the two major innovators of twentieth century literature. And oddly they both had a very powerful influence on Marshall McLuhan who has influenced how we think about all media, especially internet, even though internet didn't begin to develop until after McLuhan was dead. - Robert Anton Wilson, speaking of his "Tale of The Tribe." - RAW Utopia Interview 2001
Classic Oriental theatre and picture/poems rendered into a Hip Opera. Monkey: Journey to the West, in (2007), and so on through the emerald jungle of Orientalism and Modernism, now glossed with wind and rain of Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Google maps, blogs, hyperlight communications. Next maybe the Vedas, the Sutras, the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Popol Vuh, Finnegans Wake i hope, the classics are made KNU. The entire Worlds classics of literature REANIMATED. A new paradigm shift, equivalent to mass enlightenment in some kind of Buddhist sense, illumination, lights, simply new light. If we could just choose to see it that way and awaken to the lower powered lights. Greet these holographic entities and make them welcome, they are here to stay with the tech support mist of mind. Monkeys in the mist. Fresh air rushes in-coming, the virus of language sneezed from outerspice. The end of word. burp!
Monkey: Journey to the West Provides a new kind of band, and a new kind of Opera, a backdrop this week upon which to hang a bunch of important yellow colored questions facing mankind: Virtual Reality and Oriental Reality. Stereotypes. Race. Individuality. Statemanship? Who distributes it, how?
"Peace comes of communication."-- Ezra Pound
Every-things happening everywhere nowadays! Like in Finnegans Wake. So Knu pist modem to to show a bit of gnu-historical glow and knu-contextual flowing relationships sailing to our subject matter of eve're:thing. See "Google", "Wikipedia" etc. (The internet of things). The Oracle of surprise information.
"We have speculated that the vacuum fluctuation of space-time is a holographic modular hierarchy whose individual levels posses properties in common with the King Wen sequence of the I Ching and morphology of DNA. - Terence and Dennis Mckenna, Invisible Landscape. mckenna.psychedelic-library
The Epic tale Journey to the West, both in the 1580's and the 2007's spills out of the conventional stage box with wet and wild light-spewings from all quarters, metamorphoses, telepathy, sympathetic magic, levitation, spells, Sacred Elixirs, Autopoiesis,love potions, telekinesis, sign language, teleportation, Crypto-zoological nightmares, wild psychedelic visions and alien voices, transbutation, animism, direct communication with space Gods, weather gods, insect gods, mountain Gods and MONKEY gods, Gorilla "Gods" all sorts of Nature "gods" often called AVATARS in the more Easterly quarters. Interplanetary sentient web 3, a flurry of Angels, a paradigm shift, a re-orientation and redefinition of our collective internet of things, our reality engines. Identity? Am i google now? If i think of it?
"The idea of representative government after we overthrew the monarchy was: we'll have representatives who will represent us. In the first place, they don't represent us! They represent the corporations who pay their campaign finance. And in the second place we don't need anybody to represent us. Now that we've got internet we can represent ourselves. So I think all those people should be thrown the hell out of office and forced to make a living as honest men and women do, rather than by lying to the gullible and selling them out to the corporations, and we can represent ourselves through internet.
As a matter of fact, Buckminster Fuller--one of the most brilliant people of the twentieth century, often compared to Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin for the extent of the fields in which he was an expert, he was an expert in at least a dozen fields--one of his last books has that theme. He calls it desovereignization: getting rid of human representatives and representing ourselves though electronic media. So I am not as original as I sometimes think I am. - RAW Utopia Interview 2001
Gorillaz are not the first virtual band they are one of the first really enlightened band, literally. They are light beings. Part human origin, part non-human, for the most part-unknown, artificially represented as present, being there. (avatar): Spooks, Phantoms, Projections, alien hyperlight beings etc. Not of the word. Beings of Monkey magic-LIGHT. Gorillaz are Aliens from another dimension. They have landed again. They are mythical magical beings; they have a strange new hemisemi-fictionalized history, partly based on real flesh and bloody humans but humans who sometimes pretend and imitate themselves and so making them also satisfactorily "unreal" and so falsifyable, and so "Real" again! and around we go! but they make up for this confusion with a very convincingly real presence when on the stage communicating through sound-waves and music. But writing about music is like blowing smoke rings about architecture so i'll leave that for crumbling music press. Monkey: Journey to the West seems more Real and interactive and present NOW than most political Puppets on the world stage in 2007. The hologramic projection equipment and the magic (Peppers Ghost Technology) provide Gorillaz with Monkey Magic, new creation engines, partly programmed by a real Chinese master - Chen Shi-Zheng. Gorrilaz' combine with the incredibly rich and incredibly vast portal of new discovery and rediscovery of The Orient, via Chen Shi-Zheng.
Joyce's Epiphany, McLuhan's "Electronic Orientalism" and the human tech-support team helping to translate and propagate a new hyperlite from a newBudust'" Sutra. Follow the journey of Wu Cheng'en and his experiences with a totalitarian Chinese culture intolerant of great poetry in a similar way to how totalitarian America was mostly Intolerant of Ezra Pound and totalitarian Great Britain was Intolerant of Oscar Wilde and other great genius of world literature.
Monsters and demons are trying to obtain immortality by eating flesh! This provides a large part of the plot in Monkey: Journey to the West. I am familiar with Immortality themes within some mythological contexts and some cannibalism in mythology and fairy lore may can be glossed as the trickery of prankster drug cultists who created "False" etymologies for certain species of sacred fruits to keep them hidden and hidden. Entheogens are chemical and biological candidates in for real ingredients within real wet dazzling "Immortality Elixirs" like Ayahuasca or other psychoactive brews, teas and snuffs. In both the (biological) reality of the damp forest and the freshly perfumed hillside and in the digitally remodeled virtual reality of the myth space/time including history Also see RAW's essay on why Hannibal Lector would make a better President than George W. Bush!
"The forces which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half curbing the out-pressing vitalities, govern the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which communication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. - Ernest Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
Monkey teached me to revisit the relationship between words and images and things. Poetry in the print media world now a unique kind of bridge-space between words and images. A GLUE that binds cultures, languages, history, religion, Law and science all together, a tale of a tribe, a modern verse epic, a cultural encyclopedia. See "The Cantos and Finnegans Wake! Something more than the sentencing masses. Monkey: Journey to the West has some of the qualities of a Modern verse epic and due to its 2007 web 2 re-release and digital transmission by hyperlight communication around the globe millions of times in a minute into outer-space/time; Monkey: Journey to the West (An OPERA feat. The Gorillaz), is something the pre-internet poets such as Joyce, Pound, Po and Crowley and hundreds more seemed to be dreaming of in their folded up catapillar form. The crystal ball of freely available classics.,
Classics of world literature, poetry and tribal encyclopedias, e-post, e-modernism and the beginning of a new Global Theatre perhaps, the electronic age as the coming of the hyperlight age, youtube, facebook, myspace, google, wikipedia, flikr, photobucket, e-bay, and bluetoothing wireless "everyware" (Sterling 2006).
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. -- Henry Louis Mencken
Imagism in the early 20th Century was heavily influenced by the relatively unknown, Ernest Fenollosa partly revived by Robert Anton Wilson and more directly by Ezra Pound who famously included many pictograms or word/images in his grand synthesis "The Cantos": A Globally oriented praxis of language and culture including Oriental cultures, especially Chinese languages. (which was a center study text in Wilson's course "The Tale of the Tribe" at Maybelogic Academy in 2004. I have come around and around to thinking that uncle Bob encouraged others to read and re-read Pounds Cantos so as to be sufficiently equipped with a single bound poetic guide (an oracle) to help us and our new emerging multicultural global community (VILLAGE) and our own relative comprehension of "reality" and "History" to boot as we crawl through the sewage of the 20th into the new 21st century e.v.Finnegans Wake is the other single bound Oracle that Robert Anton Wilson recommends. I would add his "Illuminatus!" to make three blinding bound Oracles for better processing 21st century life.
"For centuries, the epic tale of the Monkey King's journey of enlightenment has been an omnipresent part of Chinese culture, delighting young and old with its heady mix of adventure, mystery and magic," said the Manchester International Festival's website. - cartridgemonkey.com
Alphabet and ideogram meat again stuck in web 2, Finn again for humanity to move forwards again and to get around the obstacles and roadblocks blocking our communication canals again.
I use the term Gorillaz' to mean Human beings and alien light beings, a part of the many collaborators who are Gorillaz tech-support mist in some sense, the production crew, the multiple personalities behind the metaphorical curtain of a 21st Century virtual band.
Monkey: Journey to the West maybe a knu catalyst for a new paradigm shift in the western lands if we see it clearly due to the new means of community within which classic literature from the Orient and all over thw world can begin to weave its magic "binding" qualities. Everyware! And catalyze the sort of cultural exchange and feedback the modernists would have liked, i guess. The classics of Oriental culture translated for a Western world word 3 experiencing alphabet psychosis.
"You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It is always available, but it does not belong to anyone." - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Fly Agaric 23 Wed 27 June 2007.
"Internet belongs to the people that use it. Nobody has found an effective way of policing it, and they never will as far as I can see. Any way of controlling internet would involve creating a world government and the people who most want to censor opinions are the most opposed to world government. So they can't do it that way. If they try to do it any other way they'll wreck most major corporations that depend so much on internet to do business. So it can't be done.
Internet is going to remain free, and I believe, I've believed since I was in my early twenties, that everything that accelerates the flow of information and communication benefits the human race, and every communication jam damages us. So internet is the greatest tool, or device, or gimmick, or whatever you want to call it, for accelerating the flow of information between peoples. It is, I think, the most revolutionary force in the history of humanity since the invention of the wheel--especially when Asia and Africa get online in a major way. That's what I really look forward to." -RAW Utopia Interview 2001
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