The Terrible Now is Coming !   Jul 01, 2009

 A new collection of Po, Prose and Short Stories entitled The Terrible Now  is in the final production stages. Details to be posted here this weekend. Have some great readings coming up in NYC in early July. Check out the Cold Millers for updated info. What are we listening to ? Elvis Costello- Secret, Profane & Sugercane YA +9 and Hank Mobley Workout 1962 on Blue Note 37771

...... CyberStein. (2007) ......Bored and cold in 1816, which was known as “The Year without a Summer”, Percy & Mary Shelly were on chilly holiday with their good friend the poet Byron. Remanded to the indoors, huddling around the fire, they challenged each other to write the scariest ghost story to pass the time. Mary Shelly composed a strange visionary cautionary tale based impart upon the Prometheus legend where in the hero steals Zeus’s fire from the center of the Sun. Now this is a big deal. The acquisition of fire allowed for the development of weapons and tools. Elevated and separated the human from the animals and maybe just a step closer to the gods. Vincent Quatroche’s latest collection of Poetry/Prose and Short Stories takes another look at both the ramifications and implications of the Prometheus legend and an emerging contemporary mutation of Mary Shelly’ dark vision of a menacing creation brought to life by science and technology. Primarily metaphorical in content and form, Quatroche’s voice evokes the individual experience as a shattered mirror reflecting back the shards of daily fragmentation and offers narratives reflecting upon the emergence of a new experimental byproduct of our technological age; Cyberstein; an entity neither dead nor alive in a human sense of the reality, but a lurking "ghost in the machine” force to reckoned with that is aggressively transforming the human experience in life with society, personal life, relationships and perhaps ultimately with fate itself. CyberStein is Poet Vincent Quatroche’s latest addition to the Rubber Eden. Unleashed and allowed free range in your Attitude House. It could be argued that your life will certainly be changed forever. There will be no locking the doors in Gridville to try and keep CyberStein out. In fact most of you have all ready allowed CyberStein in with open arms. You have become dependent upon systems you no longer understand, control or perhaps could live without. CyberStein is everywhere, all the time. CyberStien does not sleep. Vincent Quatroche, a career adult educator presently residing in Western NY has discovered of late, that he has a new pupil or perhaps more accurately, a new teacher. The latest lesson plan de jour seems to indicate that everyone, even himself, is going to have learn something very new, real and undeniably true about these modern times. The hard way. Here in the Terrible Now. Ordering information in the Cold Miller's section.

The 2006 Fall release CD collection of 18 spoken word/audio soundscape entitled In Dreamthink is now available directly through this website in and other usual internet venues, i.e. CDBaby, Amazon, Tower Records. Ordering directly through the "contact section" of this site will be cheaper & faster. The Significant, talented and generous contributions are from NYC based Jazz Pianist Matt Clark and Buffalo Guitarist & Sonic Artist/Composer Mark Hiestand with the steady ear/hand of Adirondack Folk Artist/Sleeping Giant Producer Dan Berggren at the controls.

In Dreamthink is an audio artifact of the sonic subconscious of the dreams and nightmares that prowl the nocturnal landscape of the urban citizens of Gridville. Intended to be a random sample or sub-section of the individual?s emotional terrain In Dreamthink slices away the daylight hours of daily routine and negotiation with an increasing complex and perplexing system. It is in those small hours of the night that we see each other as we really are; drifters in the temporary confinement of the flesh, awaiting the release from corporeal reality to a more certain implied fate that in sleep we get to taste a small dollop of infinity.

In Dreamthink you will hear the stories that only the night can release. While these vignettes offer little direction or answers to either the destination or final resolution to our brief existence in Gridville, In Dreamthink offers perhaps the only true gift, after love, one human being can hope to give to another; Escape.

Gridville is located here in the Rubber Eden just on the outskirts of any major post-modern population center. The time is in the "The Terrible Now". While the relative palatal atmosphere of the more affluent suburbs or the bucolic expanse of the rural countryside may escape some of the more intense effects of this microchip concentration; increasingly the "threads" of Gridville permeate most aspects of a system dependent infer-structure. The lifeblood of Gridville of course is energy. Produced by mega sized corporations who provide this "commodity" of a shrinking fossil fuel pool which is located in one of the most dangerous, highly contested areas on the face of Rubber Eden, supplies will continue to dwindle, become increasingly more difficult to procure and of course, more expensive. Service interruptions are to expected and the population at large will have this reality to face more and more on a daily basis.

Greetings from Gridville is chronicle of one consumer/citizen's account of life from a highly subjective basis. These perspectives are shaped and rendered in the "newspeak" of the individual. The ability of the connection or value of the poems and stories to the reader will be in direct relation to their economic status, position or role in society and perhaps most importantly the nature and disposition of current and/or past life experience. Collectively and increasingly the "hive" grows more complex, perplexing and fragmented. We live on the zenith of a cyber/fiber optic "house of cards." Each passing day we add to the precarious balance of this fragile edifice just by the mere act of living.

All essential systems of life sustaining distribution of goods and services in virtually every aspect of existence have grown more and more entangled, entwined and inbred. The example of an incredibly immense ball of twine thread throughout virtually all aspects of this edition of contemporary existence is as apropos as it is chilling. We don't understand it. We are addicted to it. And those who provide, maintain and oversee it doesn't care. Except when we fail to pay for it.

As of this writing there are two new fundamental commandments that consumer citizens must be aware of and abide by: Thou shall not run a foul the legal system and thou shall not have a catastrophic illness. Translation: don't go to jail or get sick in Gridville.

Now at this point, you might be asking yourself, why would I want to read anything written by someone with such a negative message coming from such a depressing place called Gridville ? And of course I see your point. And there's only one problem with using that rational as an "out" or point of dismissal; that is, we are all in the same boat. The good ship "I've got mine" as suddenly sprung a leak. There is no getting off the "grid." It's been tried. Many, many different ways. Alternative lifestyles, communities, communes, dogma, dope, booze and compulsive binge and purge shopping.

There is no escape. The exit doors have been bolted shut. And I'm afraid as Captain Beefheart once wailed, "There ain't no Santa Clause on the evening stage."

I have no way of knowing what the future holds for all the Gridvilles spread across the Rubber Eden. But I do sense a couple of things about our current situation. There is no way to return to what life was life in our country a mere hundred years ago. The future dawns every day and we are not leaving so much as breadcrumbs to ever find our way back to somewhat saner, simpler times. Yet each Attitude House of Gridville still contains humanity at its best and worst, humble and self-important. Just people. Fragile. Vibrant... Newly born or those near time to depart. As it has always been here in the Rubber Eden since before all the rubber and merely the Eden.

I think it's time to get to know your fellow citizens here in the Rubber Eden. The nature of their day to day dreams, joys, loves and fears. Greeting from Gridville contains the voices of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, lost lovers and current mistresses. Turn off the "Reality TV" with its' debasing vanity iris and read the poetry, the stories, memories and secret hidden sub consciousness of the great collective "nobody" from "nowhere" who dares still to express "anything" to "anyone" just because they the desire to express and still can.

You might find more of yourself or someone you know in Gridville than you bargained for. Greetings from Gridville is an extended series of postcard like word-picture images in which enigmatic prose narratives appear on the reverse side in an archaic language scrawled in a difficult font sent from a country that either no longer exists or has declined to such a degree that not only do the citizens fail to recognize their national identity any longer; they seem to be embracing their cultural vacuity with open arms. Meanwhile the rest of the world regards their nation as a menace or some sort of surreal punch line to a bad cosmic joke delivered in the poorest of taste. In Gridville mind numbing complex systems struggle to regulate and maintain order in a cyber-optic spider web where lust and greed are lynchpins for celebrity obsessed, creature comfort driven, image conscious consumers. Dreams of power and nightmares of paranoia permeate the major urban population centers; while in the vast empty spaces of the heartland the core of the countries populace regard themselves as the "chosen elite" spiritual gatekeepers and moral jury masters of the collective soul. For those who come of age and fall in love in Gridville, the William Butler Yeats quote from the "Second Coming" can truly be appreciated, "...The ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Vincent Quatroche's Greetings from Gridville is his third book of prose, poetry and stories. Pervious collections include Another Rubber Eden (1997) and Attitude House (2002). For ordering info visit the "Cold Millers" section on this website

Vincent Quatroche persists still in writing, publishing, recording and performing his rather askew worldview. The rational mind would think after thirty some odd years he might have gotten the message that not only does the literary world not even consider him a after thought and that perhaps if he insists upon annoying the general population of Gridville with his creative efforts that a knock at the door from the proper authorities wishing to interview him and ask a few questions regarding his personal political views and nationalistic loyalties is the best he might hope for. Vincent still resides on the outskirts of domestic strangulation in Western New York, with his wife and children, who with the passage of time have come to the ultimate realization that that their beloved father and husband is no doubt a couple of baloney slices short of a complete sandwich and who will not cease or desist insisting he hears the Sirens of Titan until it's time for that long dirt nap in the wooden kimono. At press time collaborating comments from his students at nearby correctional facilities and local colleges were unavailable for legal reasons.