Seems the Sienese Shredder launched their fourth issue by walking around Chelsea with a home-made hot dog cart. Editors Brice Brown and Mark Shortliffe gave away cookies and sold copies of their full-color, phone-bookish sized arts annual to highly amused and at times slightly bewildered passersby and strollers in the gallery district. To add to the amusement (and of course the bewilderment, too) the day was punctuated with performances by artists associated with the magazine. David Coggins stood at 24th street just off tenth avenue, and invited all comers to "Ask the Expert!" Then the cart moved down tenth avenue, where between 23rd and 22nd, Nayland Blake raffled off a piece of original art. All you had to do to earn a raffle ticket was record a thirty-second on-the-spot critique of the artwork being raffled. On 22nd the cart hung a left, and in a spot of shade between tenth and eleventh avenues Martin Wilner took notes and pressed stamps onto vintage metrocards. He called this project The Journal of Evidence Weekly, and gave them away as fast as he could make them. Finally, at the corner of tenth avenue and 20th street, the writer Justin Taylor read poetry. Taylor read from a series he calls his "Student Paper" poems, as they are the product of collaging, erasing, quoting and scrambling the English 101 papers he read and graded over the course of three semester as an adjunct composition teacher. Taylor said later that he always imagined the poems as quiet, almost affectless, but they adapted themselves surprisingly well to the evangelical format required to be heard over the traffic on tenth avenue. Taylor soapboxed for nearly 45 minutes.
-- Thanks, Bill.
