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I spend part of each year in South Africa, literally the other side of the world. The contrasts between Third World and First World cultures is all the more appalling when you witness first-hand economic inequities and the social ills arising from them, including the disease of U.S. celebrity culture. "Quell the Mayhem Night" is part of a multimodal fiction collection, in progress, that explores the synapse between text + image, while simultaneously addressing the physiological synapse of the reader. (Another of these works, "Sprung Up In the Years Since," is included in the anthology Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Women Writers in the 21st Century, Spuyten Duyvil, 2008). All stories are bifurcated or trifurcated fictions that incorporate images and/or audio, original and appropriated. Critical in the reading of these texts is the visual, textual and conceptual intersections between parallel narratives, for it highlights the fallibility of the linear perspective, whether in literature or global society. Likewise, these mixed media fictions also explore the idiosyncrasies of first-world and third-world news lexicons by appropriating phrases directly from the press, thus titles like "Quell the Mayhem Night."