Curator Adam Budak has invited me to take part in Manifesta 7 in Italy next year. Adam is organising the exhibition in Rovereto. Site visit coming soon.

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Tom McCarthy's new book Men In Space has a nice review in The Observer here. Looking forward to reading it. Tom's taking part in this weekend's Long Relay event hosted by Serpentine gallery (see below). Also confirmed for Long Relay now are Simon Bayly (Roehampton University/Theatre Pur) and Shelley Jackson whose as yet incomplete Skin project - a story published (as single-word tattoos) on the skin of 2095 volunteers - looks pretty amazing.

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Audio from the recent Live Art Development Agency discussion event around Barbara Campbell's 1001 Nights Cast is on-line here.

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My performance/lecture in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago jumped from its supposed topic of dramaturgy to a story about an inexplicable bout of crying that I'd experienced last year in front of a Cy Twombly painting at Guggenheim NY. As a follow up my friend Christine Peters just sent me info on a book called Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings by James Elkins, an art historian at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Great title at least - will have to track it down. Amazon calling.

Found the fragment below (via Boing Boing) in some New York Magazine collected 'Top Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time'. It's from an interview with Playboy, February 1966 and Dylan's speaking about how he chose his career. Nice text.

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

In the same place there's a link to a clip from D.A. Pennebaker's brilliant 1966 Don't Look Back in which Dylan lays into a Time magazine journalist with a barrage of questions and statements. "Will you see the concert? But are you going to hear it?"

Now looking forward to Todd Haynes's forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic - I'm Not There — in which Dylan is played variously by Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale and an 11-year old boy (amongst others).

This coming Saturday I'm writing in a project called Long Relay that Adrian Heathfield and I have set up for the Serpentine Gallery in London as part of their Experiment Marathon.

Long Relay is a kind of real-time call-and-response writing project conducted over the internet in which an initial text (written by me and frequently updated online as I write) is then re-worked, re-written or entirely re-invented by the next writer, and whose work in-turn in re-written by the next and so on, continuously over a 24 hour period. I start writing at 1pm Saturday 13th October and the project closes at the same time on Sunday 14th with a final piece by Adrian. In between (and working three hour shifts) are Tom McCarthy, Deborah Levy, Mike Harrison and Fiona Templeton (plus two more in final process of confirmation!). You'll be able to follow the whole project, live on the internet as well as being able to access the individual parts/chapters as they are completed. I'll publish the URL here as soon as I have it.

I'm looking forward to the project and nervous about it in a way, although, it being a live thing and something I want to approach very much as live there's nothing I can really do to prepare. I plan to sit down with no plan and simply see where I go. If things work out I will have one thing to guide or inspire me me - a question provided by Olafur Eliasson whose Pavilion with architect Kjetil Thorsen is the physical base for Experiment Marathon.

It's great to be joined in Long Relay by Tom McCarthy who I've met just a couple of times and whose Remainder I liked a lot and wrote about here. As well as Fiona Templeton whose You - The City was a huge inspiration when I saw it maybe 20 years ago, I'm also really happy to have writers whose contributions to Barabra Campbell's ongoing 1001 Nights Cast have been so great. Long Relay definitely wouldn't have been in my mind as a concept without the inspiring introduction to live writing, and text as call and response that Barbara's project has been. I'll be writing again for 1001 in a month or so.

More details on Experiment Marathon which also features work and presentations by Marina Abramović; Simon Baron-Cohen; John Brockman; Peter Cook; Sophie Fiennes; Armand Leroi; Gustav Metzger; Steven Pinker; Pedro Reyes; Matthew Ritchie; Israel Rosenfield; Tomas Saraceno; Angela Sirigu; Andreas Slominski; Luc Steels; and Lewis Wolpert, at the link above.

And finally if anyone happens to be in London for Frieze my video show One Hundred and Three People is still running at Sketch until 3 November. More details here.

"First just one came out, then two, then three, four, five, six, seven, but there were more than that in total. We had a dozen machetes, a dozen knives and some axes and pots with us. We gave these to them. Not by hand, but by leaving them on the beach. We said to them, 'Come closer' but they didn't want to. They said to us, 'Go further back, further back,' so we did."

John Vidal in The Guardian on the Earth's 'lost tribes' here. 

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Also, here Chavez epic tv. 

"The fierce morning heat was a memory. The afternoon haze had come and gone. It was the cool of dusk, with shadows stretching as the sun dipped below the Andes. And Hugo Chávez was still talking. The clock showed it was just after 7pm. The Venezuelan president had started at 11am, more than eight hours earlier - a new record. He looked into the camera and grinned: 'The first time in history'."