M. Stefan Strozier

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

This article is so misguided, it’s pitiful or rather comical.

Here’s an interesting article in the New Yorker and a funny video. I must say, I fall on the side of the NY Times on this one (never thought I’d say that).

Sony has new readers. I must say, of all the ebook readers selling World Audience titles, Sony is, by far, the lowest performer.

President Obama delivered a speech to the American public in prime time today and said the Iraq War is over, in terms of combat but that support operations will continue. I listened to the commentators and it occurs to me that they are not saying anything that I am not. Read my blog and you will be wiser. The main line in Obama’s speech is when he said, “Turn the page.” I suddenly realized that I have not downloaded that Metallica song yet and went immediately to do that. Otherwise, Obama’s speech was shapeless. But I am glad that a) the Iraq War is over because my President said it is and b) Obama finally and for the first time said he wants the US economy to succeed; in other words, he sounded like a leader—sort of—taking charge in this subject; albeit briefly.

Google and AP agree to let Google use news highlights on Google News and elsewhere, which is already covered by the Free Use Clause. That old law lets anyone use part of another person’s work without permission. But because it’s Google, Google News was all but dominating the news and related advertising dollars. This is an example of “traditional” print media caving to Google and the power of the Internet. And, by doing so, this deal is going to strike another blow to “traditional” print media that is trying to migrate to the Web and are implementing the wrong-headed idea of pay walls.

And, in yet another dying dinosaur, Newsweek is losing editors right and left. Here’s a major US newspaper selling out to save its hiney.

–

My one-act play, Belzac December Night is the first of 9 one-act plays about America. I’ve written a good amount of the other 8 plays and at this rate I just may be able to produce them all in the near-future and then publish the book. It’s the kind of book that might sell well and these plays might just connect with universities and regional theater. And, I have another connection for La Revolucion to a theater company out West that will, it seems, produce that play.

Guns, Shackles & Winter Coats is about a veteran with PTSD who goes homeless. Everyone loves this play. Belzac December Night is about 24 hours during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and it alternates from there to modern America and the grand-daughter of a husband and wife who do not survive. It had a reading at an old folks home in Teaneck, NJ and was very well-liked. And finally, the big momma, La Revolucion.

I put out one advert at Mandy.com, which was free because they give you one per month if you’re a non-profit like my theater company: La Muse Venale, Inc. I am amazed at how many actors send me their headshot/resumes. I place one tiny advert and it flies out everywhere. And I wrote some actors I worked with before and they wrote back and wanted to play roles in these plays again. Jimmy Gary is going to be Sgt. John Brown. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is this is so very EASY. With 3 productions, I am all but guaranteed to cover the cost of the theater. I have free rehearsal space and all the props for GUNS. And, when I write these plays they are massively SPARTAN—that’s my style. Spartan in words and spartan in sets. Spartan but POWERFUL.

Word is out, my plays are good. I could keep doing this, I think, sort of corner the market, squash the competition. I sort of have my own little repertory theater company, even David Mamet can’t do that!

You got your Candlestick park tickets? Forget about it. Mohegan Sun Arena? Yo! What’s up with you? What about Mellon Arena? Now here’s the thing. If you click each of these links to these Web sites, you will see that they are all to the same Web site. Oh-my-God! How-ever, the sub-title lists the title that matches PRECISELY what I have written above.

All that you got to do it just click around here and there and go where you need. It’s just that simple.

Candlestick park tickets and Mohegan Sun Arena is the place to be. Mellon Arena too is splendid, bandit.

I reserved the Producer’s Club (358 West 44th at 9th Avenue) for La Muse Venale, Inc.‘s production of La Revolucion Nov. 15th to 21st. Then I realized that I can produce 2 shows! I have the theater all day long and the weekend. So I am going to produce my tried and true Guns, Shackles & Winter Coats—and I think starring Jimmy Gary, Jr. I have the rehearsal space and I know this play very well now and how to make it great, and I have all the props and sounds. Finally, I can fit in a couple of matinées of my new one-act play, Belzac December Night. I stand to break even at the very least, and sell a lot of tickets. This is going to be a blast! All of this work is finally reaping benefits.

I am watching the the Emmys, where World Audience author Dr. Jack Kevorkian is. The movie You Don’t Know Jack, starring Al Pacino, is nominated. Meanwhile, last week I signed the contract for Between the Dying and the Dead, which is the book that made the movie. I sent Dr. Kevorkian copies of his new book that is in hard cover now and our new hard cover of glimmerIQs.

I’m scheduling another audition next week for the remaining characters I need to fill the cast for La Revolucion, details coming soon. And I’m signing up for critics, they always review my plays—that’s not true for all plays or even some of them. In any event, it’s great to be producing a play again and directing too—it’s a lot of fun.

La Muse Venale, Inc. is a 501c3, non-profit, New York theater company. LMV presents La Revolucion, a 5-act play about the Mexican Revolution by M. Stefan Strozier, with a cast of 21, at The Producer’s Club 358 W 44th St, NY, NY November 15th-21st, 2010. We are doing a staged reading Oct. 10th at Kairos Café 201 W. 13th Street at 7th Ave. Nov. 20th is the 100th anniversary of the Revolution and 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence. Buy Tickets

–Big New York author agent not as powerful as he thought in New Publishing. I blogged about this cat a while back and all but said this in my post (if you read me). Let me be blunt: any author age, say, 50-99 is of a forgotten age—and we ain’t going to remember you. Unless I’ve personally pulled you on board my ship, I am going to do NADA to help you. In fact, you’re still somewhat in my way. Let this be a lesson (though it’s a bit too late): when your big and fat, or arrogant, be sure to watch your margins for the tiny sharks.

—CBS at an all-time low. I was going to explain why in a long post; I’ll give you the highlights: CBS is all Leftist, all the time. And size does matter. A full-page NY Times advert was taken out by some bozo saying the 9-11 mosque would only be slightly lower than the Empire State Bld. I know, I know, I’ve sworn off of writing about this subject; but I can’t resist, it is a fascinating study of American culture. The Freedom Tower will dwarf both buildings, let’s not forget. They are still protesting about this mosque on both sides in New York. One Leftist said, “It makes no sense. [My side is right, blah, blah.].” The Left is “so right” in this argument and yet they are so very wrong. The reality is the building will go forward and to oppose it is foolish. But this building is still wildly foolish on any number of levels even as it does move forward and that is not going to “fade away” because “the Left is right here”—unless America itself fades away. In fact, the 9-11 mosque will only get worse as a controversy.

–Don’t buy newspapers; help the economy! Plus, get rid of Murdoch.

Click to buy tickets!

La Muse Venale, Inc. is a 501c3, non-profit, New York theater company. LMV presents La Revolucion, a 5-act play about the Mexican Revolution, with a cast of 21, at The Producer’s Club 358 W 44th St, NY, NY November 15th-21st, 2010. We are doing a staged reading Oct. 10th at Kairos Café 201 W. 13th Street at 7th Ave.

Nov. 20th is the 100th anniversary of the Revolution and 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence. There is no other theater piece like this in New York or all of America celebrating this milestone. That is amazing and fairly sub-standard, to say the least.

Yesterday, I listed to more of the music that has been composed for the production of Trump the Musical. It was exquisite! The entire score for the 1st act is written and part of the second act. We have an incredible team and our lead producer is amazing! We are putting together a staged reading, with union Equity actors, in New York in the very near future. Then we will invite Broadway producers and others and forget about it!

In this WSJ article, a major writer is going it alone. Great, I say, undercut the “major” publishers. This only helps World Audience, Inc.. Plus, he is using what technology to do it?—print-on-demand and ebooks—the very business model of World Audience. But a word of caution: he’s only able to do it because he already has a huge following through his previous 12 books, marketed by “major” publishers. His timing is perfect. For the rest of us, this is not the future of publishing or being a career writer. In fact, recently I’ve noticed a trend whereby customers are returning to buy more than one World Audience title; especially—and this is crucial—ebooks. I’ll let you chew on that curd.

—

Perhaps partially inspired by the 9-11 mosque controversy, my writing of the my epic poem about 9-11 and related events continues. Again, I realize the Left is drooling in glee at the “teachable moment” of being on the right side of history concerning the mosque but mark my words, this is a losable moment for the Left. Americans and America are none of the things the Left describes—not in the slightest. And when this debate finally ends, the Leftists will be seen as intolerant and just plain wrong. It’s as if the Left is trying to gin up the politically correct environment of the 1990s. It’s not working because that is non-applicable. But enough of this; I will watch and see what happens next.

Meanwhile, if I thought I was going into uncharted lands in writing my memoir about a 16-year old schizophrenic lost in his own visions, The Citadel is proving to be something like Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan. Interestingly, as I just now went to Google that (to check the spelling) I see the subtitle is “A Vision in a Dream”. Yes, exactly! That is where I am. Now, Coleridge was known to take opium and other drugs and this is according to Wikipedia:

“According to Coleridge’s Preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work describing the Tartar king Kublai khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a person from Porlock. The poem could not be completed according to its original 200-300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines.”

Well, A) I don’t need opium to get to Kubba Khan, my simple imagination and DREAMS (which I roll out of bed to write down every morning now with discipline) are more than enough, thank you, and B) I’ve already BEEN to Kubba Khan, bitch, and I got the T-shirt, and C) Coleridge’s poem is a puny few lines. I am going on and on for days and weeks and YEARS—and now one decade.

So my writing of my memoir was the warm-up, now I am rolling (but I will return to the memoir soon enough). What is happening is I am finding that writing an epic poem by necessity means you write these wild things that you invent. Read any of the major epic poems and you will find vast, invented lands. If you can’t do that for a prolonged spell, then you ain’t got the chops, Jack. Leave it to the pros.

I’m looking at booking The Producer’s Club November 15th-21st to produce La Revolucion, with it’s cast of 21 characters. We may get some real support from a few theater outfits in the City.

Check out the new issue of Skive Magazine in PDF! Matt Ward is World Audience’s partner Down Under. Skive has been around forever and is one of the premiere literary journals in the world, even as a lot of the old ones are dead and gone now and the remaining ones, such as Paris Review, are holding on for dear life through subsidies or government handouts—Matt just produces an excellent magazine that sells well.

The debate between Left-wing free range radicals and the rest of America over the mosque I find amazing. And it’s not going away; it’s only getting bigger. Perhaps the Left has not won the debate yet, as I had thought. Or maybe, they could have won but instead of simply declaring victory, the Left has chosen to make a “teachable moment”. Leftists can be very vicious when they want; I know, I understand them all too well. But both sides are not at all comprehending each other. Here are the facts as I understand them.

Most of America is against the mosque, as in 75%. Polls are always lowered or raised to bolster media’s argument. Therefore, if the press reports 60% or 55% support it, that means it’s about 75% because the media always, always lies. You have to adjust, like Kentuky Windage. The media is now saying that America has become Islamaphobic—the cover of Time Magazine says just that. I think the Left is doing a disservice in this. The Left is reacting to a serious and contentious issue by politicizing it. We are in a war with Islamic terrorists, not Islam. But that is a fine line to walk and the Left is acting dangerously. Jon Stewart says the problem is one of location. Stewart is a fool (Cobert is funny). The issue here is timing. One counter-argument I hear is how close is too close? It doesn’t matter where the mosque is. It could be next door to 9-11—in 2015. But in 2010, this building to too close. To be honest, I could care less about the mosque. I just want the Left to lose this debate. And, as a result, prove that their way of thinking simply is not always as principled as Leftists and the Left-wing media (all of it) would have you think.

This debate is fine example of what is wrong with America. This mosque question is a valid one yet it’s been exploited by the media. But people still feel the same way about it. You can’t simply have an opinoin about a subject; your opinoin must fit into one camp or the other. As a publisher and writer, I don’t care about politics. In fact, as a playwright, I seek controversy—such as with this issue. This is what writers should be doing, not shying away and writing safe work. But in America, the writer must either be a Leftist, write safe, politically-correct work—or be ostrasized; except that I must admit lately I am finding that if you stick to your principles, you will eventually win, if only because the poorer work is simply so weak in the end.

For a good time, click here. (I want to do this every  time I get on the subway.)

More on the mosque issue in a moment.

And here are a couple of articles about dead newspapers, useless journalists and irrelevant magazines trying to survive.