— read write play

I’m going to be down in London next week to work (The Penny Dreadfuls‘ two Greenwich theatre gigs) and, more importantly, to play – at the Hide and Seek festival.

I’ll be playing Jane McGonigal’s Lost Sport of Olympia on Sunday afternoon, and hand-carrying a secret message to one of the participants (games within games for extra fun). Anyone around in the city want to join me?

Jackson Publick – interviewed at The AV Club about the new series of The Venture Brothers – says something that chimes with the arguments Lawrence Lessig has repeatedly made about the way our culture has evolved until extremely recently:

Our characters were part of the world that we were, and they love and remember and hate the same things that we did, and it’s affected their lives. That’s why it kills me when we get legal notes about some of this stuff, because you’re just like, “I don’t understand why I can’t use that, or talk about that, or reference it. I was bombarded with this on television when I was 6. Somebody spent a lot of money making sure that I would never forget this, and now when I act like it’s a household word, I’m not allowed to use it.” There’s your irony!

The relentless, unthinking pursuit of copyright – unlimited by any time limit or condition of fair use – is the death of culture.

A few days of head-to-desk pounding and I think I’ve finalised the plays and playwrights I’ll be teaching on my new Honours course. I’ve listed the current line-up after the jump. A small prize if you can guess the topic of the course..