Clay

"Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art." Tom Robbins, Raymond Carver, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Paradise Burning, CrimethInc., L'Enfant De Sable, Radix, Helen Caldicott, The God of Small Things, Fast-Food Nation, Reefer Madness, A Scanner Darkly, Phillip K Dick, Autobiography of a Yogi, Joyce Carol Oates, Italo Calvino, Strange News From Another Star, Borges, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Junichiro Tanizaki, Vonnegut, A Confederacy of Dunces, Geek Love, The Fuck-Up, City of Quartz, Oliver Saks, Terry Eagleton, Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Content, Les Nuits Fauves, Tripmaster Monkey, 1421 The Year China Discovered America, Octavia E. Butler, T.C. Boyle, Germaine Greer, The Fermata, Stanislaw Lem, Assia Djebar, Cruddy, The Master and Margarita, Ceremony, Things Fall Apart, Red Azalea, Richard Brautigan, Kafka, Octavio Paz, Rilke, Fortunate Son, Waxpoetics Magazine, yaddee-yaddee-yaddee... ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE "I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace." --Richard Brautigan