by Andrew Piccone

Tell me about your job.
I spend the majority of my time here. I do a lot of front of the house managing work. I do all the scheduling and design the menus, basically the whole appearance of the place. The bar’s been open since August 2009, I’ve been here since the beginning. It took us nine months to build the place, we bought in November of 2008. Before this I owned an irrigation business on Long Island. I decided to sell it; I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I met my partner here, Drew, and got into the business with him. From there, I don’t know, here I am.

What were some of the difficulties you encountered in opening the bar?
Just the hurdles of building it, construction, renovation. We took over an old Irish bar, we ripped everything out of it and we had basically a skeleton, we threw everything out in it. We had to get permits for everything, from the buildings department, any department in the city you can think of. That was a huge hurdle getting through all that stuff, took us about nine months. Once we were open, well we are in the Bronx, but before we settled here we had been looking in Manhattan. The availability of this space was what brought us here, to Kingsbridge. We saw a couple places in Manhattan, and someone tipped us off about this spot. I’m from Long Island so the first thing I thought was ‘Bronx? I don’t know.’ The only time I had been to the Bronx was to go to Yankee Stadium. I checked out the neighborhood, I was still a bit wary about it. Everyone was on board so I figured I should definitely go for it.

The Bronx isn’t known for its beer or foodie culture. How have you been received so far?
Right off the bat we’ve been received pretty well. As soon as we opened people would come in and see our beer selection and say ‘what is this?’ But people responded very well, they got over the Bud Lights and the mixed drinks and were pretty open minded about trying something new. We’re not trying to convert the Bronx to a bunch of beer snobs, just give them something different. People come in all the time and ask for a Bud and ask about all the other stuff we have on draft. If someone likes Bud I might suggest a Gaffel Koelsch, a German beer. Then they might drink the Gaffel Koelsch and then try something else new. Our reviews have been pretty great so far on Yelp and whatnot. We’ve got a decent local crowd of people from Kingsbridge and Riverdale. It’s just getting better and better, we’re getting more people from Northern Manhattan right off the 1 train, we’re close to the Metro North, we’re getting people coming down from Westchester, from Yonkers, some Yankee Stadium traffic. It’s convenient for a lot of people. We did a Groupon recently and we had people coming up from Brooklyn, even.

Were you into beer culture before starting the bar?
I kind of jumped into it by opening a beer bar. I wasn’t a Bud Light guy, but beer culture is continuing to grow and people all over the place are starting to try new stuff and it just keeps getting bigger. Maybe you could call me a Bud Light guy, I am from Long Island. My favorite beer now is probably La Fin du Monde, a Canadian beer. There’s always new stuff coming out, I’m always trying beers that I like more and more so it’s hard to keep track. My favorite type of beer is probably IPA, and a lot of it depends on the season.

Your menu is a bit more upscale than most bar food, what went into creating that?
We are a beer bar, we’re not a restaurant. Our idea is that we’re a beer bar and the food comes with the beer, not the other way around. We started out more average pub food, still a bit more upscale. Now we have a great guy who works for us, Eric, our chef, he worked at the Mandarin Oriental for a while. Now he’s up here and he’ll experiment, have some fun with it. He came from a high end restaurant to here so he’s taking our style of food and making it gradually more upscale. We run with everything, we let him try what he wants, experiment in the kitchen. We’re starting brunch back up next week and he’s getting very creative with the brunch menu. We do specials everyday, today it’s chicken Souvlaki, recently it was a stuffed burger with Brie. We’ve got a downtown chef uptown. We’re very lucky.

Any plans for a second Bronx Ale House?
We’ve been talking about it. We’re pretty established now that we’re getting to where we could go and do another one. What happens to a lot of people they open up something and it’s successful right off the bat and they feel like they gotta open something new as soon as possible. They’ll forget about the original place. You can’t spread yourself too thin. We could almost say we’re getting to that place. I don’t want to open 10 of them, but I could do a couple more.

What are some of your favorite food and beer spots when you’re not here?
Outside here? I live in Astoria now, there’s a good place there called Sweet Afton which, I wouldn’t really call it a hipster crowd, but it’s a good crowd, good drink menu, good food. The other spot I really like is Irish Rover, which is a typical Irish bar. As far as Manhattan, probably my partner’s other bars, which are The Dead Poet and George Keeley’s. That would really be it, I mean I check out the other beer bars, I’ll go to the beer garden in Astoria, a good reason to look forward to spring.

What advice do you have for people getting into this business?
If you want to do something; go for it. Don’t give up. It’s not easy to open a bar. If you want it, just go for it. Come up with a good idea, work hard at it, and the money will follow. Opening this place was so hard and there were so many hurdles to go through and at times it was so discouraging. But we weren’t going to give up. Don’t expect it to open tomorrow. Be realistic. Don’t give up.

Did you watch the State of the Union on Tuesday night?
Yeah, well I DVR’d it and watched half of it, I haven’t gotten a chance to watch the whole thing yet. I’m a Democrat, I would say the President is on the right track. He’s got a good mindset. What people don’t realize is that he can’t make a decision and just run with it, you’ve got to go through the Senate and the House and what have you. With Arizona and all of this stuff, I think staying positive is the best thing right now and I’m hoping for the best.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.

Oh sure, this gorilla’s minder acts blasé and dismissive over his charge’s method of perambulation, but don’t be fooled: The gorillas are evolving. Soon they will all be walking upright, and we will be forced to toil in their banana mines until Charlton Heston comes from the past to liberate us. This guy is just hoping that if he keeps quiet about it for now he will get some kind of supervisory role in the new regime. Consider yourselves warned.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Blackout

What’s left open but booze and pin-up,
a generator humming that called your car to park.

We’re finished with beauty: inner beauty, sloppy beauty, my beauty.
Once upon a time you fashioned a collapse

and called it us, what we would have called living
had there been less cocaine.

Is rage what felled the power line, what strapped us to these seats?
Truth is, you did love me more.

We’re close enough to home to die here, and I have known you too long
to wither flashlit in the passenger seat.

How long will you plead me brute and fearless,
when each time I stop just before dawn.

Everybody In!
It’s not much of a lie to say I hate the outdoors.
Something about discomfort.

But it’s a lie when I say that I don’t, spitting
on my arm to rub off the layers, what failed to wash.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,
but if I were asked again I’d say, Let’s skip

the hot drive down, the mockingbird, the digging,
cold coffee with radical strangers, fellow Americans,

wrong-headed love, dunes, rocks, retro round eyewear,
nudity, big ideas, destitute children,

overwhelming stucco suburbs, dubious rafts,
cold waiting, makeshift dinners, communal bathrooms,

piles of quarters, and all the lying.
I spent one hundred dollars on a camera that would document this.

Is there a California I don’t know about?
Smaller, I finished a day floating after everyone left the pool.

There was barking and laughter. I can’t tread water,
but I can master flotation to save myself.

Casino

Here it’s so hot we burn without sunlight:
a misstep on the pavement, purple-faced and heaving.

Here is winning up ahead, extra-everlasting
what winning there is! Here water spouts dazzle

fixed to music overwhelming, and it overwhelms.
Here most flesh is overflesh mammoth or rawhide

crawling aswarm. Example: “Do you think
that girl will dance with me?” Answer: “Go for broke!”

So follow an aspect to the bottom with silver,
say we are lesser. In legend we are lesser. Here

there is no fervor anymore if ever there was, only
wholly dazed craving. We are catastrophe, let’s say it

together. Here we cannot leave more fairly beyond neon.
We could run for the roof beams unhinged with prospect.

We could devote our entirety to the glamorous void.
Example: “To be successful is to decide exactly

what you want. Go, then, for broke.” We sink to the center
with cups, slots, quarters. Vampiric, conquered.

If the center opens, an arrow runs through with a maze
back to center. What dread in our slaughtered selves,

this brilliant illness years on end. Here twenty-three
of each one hundred thousand take their lives.

This is expected after an evening, though we surprise
ourselves showing in the clanging smoke. What dream

we had, what they said was such. A push from the bed
toward the night-crawlers stiff with indoor element,

wildest lark. Example: “Sure as you are sure, are you sure
you want all your money on a pony?” Answer:

“Yes. I am broken!” We walk the most astonishing carpet
now each time underground, where the cooler species

gather, the sorts seize to all look sad. We remain only
more towards dawn in gross proximity of skins

that whirl around the masts. Here we are adapting, greenhouse,
a jingling theater of torso or we don’t know who we are,

want less of what we don’t know but go on stunned.
Anger replaces fear replaces hunger, being so twinkly

grand. Yards of Technicolor beverage, decaying spread of
backside slapped to a barstool when the glass and the

gloss and the barstool tumble and we’ve jumped, boy, we’ve
jumped our very stake listen what plunged our heart.

Lynn Melnick’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Paris Review, jubilat, Guernica, and LIT. Poems are forthcoming in A Public Space and Narrative. She was born in Indianapolis, grew up in Los Angeles, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two daughters.

Mystery solved. Sixteen-year-old Miami resident Nicholas Harrington says he put a grand piano on the sandbar in the middle of Biscayne Bay because he “wanted to create a whimsical, surreal experience.” And also make a video for his application to college (where he will be totally stressed out.) Nicholas and his family came forward yesterday after local film-makers Billy and Anais Yaeger falsely claimed credit for the stunt that became a world-wide phenomenon. But there’s someone else who deserves credit for the inspiration. His name is Dwayne Smith.

And he’s been putting pianos on beaches since way back in 1978.

by Paul Adam

31. Weeping Wall

30. Moss Garden

29. V-2 Schneider

28. Move On

27. Suberraneans

26. The Secret Life of Arabia

25. Be My Wife

24. Heroes

23. Repetition

22. Warszawa

21. African Night Flight

20. D.J.

19. Sons of the Silent Age

18. Boys Keep Swinging

17. Yassassin

16. Blackout

15. Art Decade

14. Joe the Lion

13. Speed of Life

12. Red Sails

11. Neuköln

10. Fantastic Voyage

9. Sense of Doubt

8. What in the World

7. Always Crashing in the Same Car

6. Look Back in Anger

5. Breaking Glass

4. Red Money

3. Beauty and the Beast

2. Sound and Vision

1. A New Career In A New Town

Paul Adam is such a wonderful person. But he’s got problems.

I had no idea that “yellow fever” (and its opposite syndrome, “white blood disease”) had reached epidemic proportions! Thank God for the folks at New Media Animation, who have filed this very important report on the story. (“Sunny Tzu” is a nice touch, by the way.)

Pro Bowl week. Concussion-recovery week. There is not a lot of football to talk this week, so Jeff and I will not be talking football in our usual fashion. That said, I’m still thinking about it, and the success of Yakkin’ About Football has afforded us unparalleled and unprecedented access to some of the NFL’s elite. And so, mostly because I could, I did a few short interviews with some Yakkin’ About Football favorites about how they will spend the offseason, and deal with the possible work stoppage.

Mike Singletary, Unemployed

Q:

A: I don’t understand that question.

Q:

A: The same way you communicate with any athlete. Unblinking stare, full-spectrum sternness, period. I’m not concerned about it. I’m not concerned about it. Because I feel like I can win with anyone who wants to win, and it doesn’t really matter how many feet that particular person has, is that person housebroken, is that person a Shih Tzu mix or an actual person. It’s a question of do they want to win. If they don’t want to win, I don’t want them on my team. That’s simple. That’s universal. And I didn’t make that up. Read Corinthians.

Q:

A: Because I was looking for something new. Because I missed coaching and because at a lot of the places I applied to work I was told I was, personally, too frightening. But also this is a great opportunity, and I’m excited to be coaching in the Puppy Bowl. For one simple reason: because the Puppy Bowl runs a tight ship, it’s an organization that is well-run, and their approach just really fits with the way I want to do things. So my job now is to take this group of, I don’t want to call them puppies, but this bunch of young dogs and I want to teach them how to play the right way. I want to take these young dogs and I want to make them a team.

Q:

A: Well, it seems like they know “how to play” because they’re playful. But this is what I said to Mr. Colucci at Animal Planet when we first started talking about this — there’s a big difference between being playful and knowing how to play. Any puppy is playful. That’s not hard to find, that’s a dime a dozen. What you want to do is take a puppy that’s playful and teach him how to play the right way. Are there challenges? Yes. Yes there are challenges. They will really only ever understand the world through their sense of smell. They, in many cases, do not respond to coaching the way you might hope. Duncan, and I don’t want to single anyone out because there’s a lot of work to do in the next week, absolutely, but Duncan will pretty much take dumps wherever.

Q:

A: To a certain extent, yes. Yes, to a certain extent. But I’m a cat person.

Q:

A: Absolutely. Eric Mangini’s a great coach and a good man, and I’m sure he’s going to have some really interesting looks to throw at us. I trust Chih to take care of the ball, because we’ve been working on that in practice. I trust Big Red to make good decisions. But I know Coach Mangini, I coached against him in the NFL, and I know he’s going to make it tough. He’s going to make it a battle. That’s the way I like it.

Bart Scott, Linebacker, New York Jets

Q:

A: Because it’s court-ordered, is why. You know I wouldn’t be going to that shit if it wasn’t court-ordered. Don’t need it, don’t want to do it, would not be doing it if I wasn’t put in a position to the point where I had to do it.

Q:

A: The fuck you think. Because there are people that believe I have a rage problem. Because there’s people that don’t want to see me out there doing what I do. Because some people just want to pull you down, and because some people evidently have not straight-up stolen a parking spot from another person in a Safeway and come back to find a shopping cart put through their windshield and their car filled with bleach. There are people like that, always has been people like that. Look, end of discussion. We’re not talking about this anymore.

Q:

A: Oh, probably spend some time with my kids.

Q:

A: Mostly just be a dad, you know. Be a dad and seek vengeance on my enemies and maybe play some golf. And I own a couple Red Lobster franchises, one in Scottsdale and one in Phoenix proper, so I’ll probably stop in at them and see what’s up, keep an eye on things. And like the usual offseason stuff. Hit the weights, scream at the laundry and punch couches apart at Ikea.

Q:

A: Can’t wait. I fucking hate Ikea couches.

Jeremy Shockey, TE, New Orleans Saints

Q:

A: No brainer, bro. Just a total no-brainer. Guy Fieri asks, you say yes. “Want to do a line of signature appetizers with me?” Answer is yes.

Q:

A: I wouldn’t say there’s a focus, no. We don’t, and this is where Guy and I were really like on the same page, and where Houlihan’s was really awesome to work with, but look. Obviously there’s a reason why Guy Fieri’s calling Jeremy Shockey for this, right? And why Houlihan’s wants to be a part of it. Houlihan’s and me and Guy are not into labels. That’s why he’s Guy Fieri, you know? I see, like, a green pepper. Just as an example, I see a green pepper and I’m like “This green pepper fucking sucks balls, this green pepper is for faggots.” Or, actually, edit that out. PC police. Say I’m like, okay, “Fuck this stupid green pepper.” Use that. But this is where it’s amazing because Guy sees the pepper and he’s like, “why don’t we make this pepper rock balls, you know? Let’s fill this pepper with fettucine alfredo and KC Masterpiece chips, let’s fucking dip it in Caesar salad dressing, and then fry that bad boy. Do that, boom, hit it off with some thousand island dipping sauce, shred some pepper jack on it and there it is, right, the Pep In Your Step.

Q:

A: It’s one of his signature appetizers. You didn’t know that?

Q:

A: Well you should know that. It’s a fucking interview about me and Guy Fieri.

Q:

A: I’m just saying that you weren’t prepared and that reflects badly on you, and that could reflect badly on me. Whatever, the point being, the dude just sees things differently. Guy sees, like, two plays ahead. He’s already thinking, like, before you even are like “southwestern egg rolls” he’s like, DIPPED WITH WASABI CREAM CHEESE BRO. You see what I mean? Guy just understands it at a deeper level. And the energy is just so high, and you can’t be around the dude without getting psyched about appetizers.

Q:

A: Yeah, obviously it’s rubbed off. Do I not seem psyched about appetizers? I’ve never been more psyched. It’s just… you don’t get a chance to work with a guy like Guy Fieri that much. I’ve been around a long time. I’ve worked with some great people, lot of great experiences, but this is really special. It’s been really special and I’m really just proud to…

Q:

A: I’m not crying.

Q:

A: If I’m crying it’s because these wings are really spicy. But I’m not crying.

Albert Haynesworth, DT, Washington Redskins

Q:

A: Any kind of snack food, doesn’t matter.

Q:

A: Ranch dressing.

Q:

A: I believe that was asked and answered.

Q:

A: I told you, man, ranch dressing. What do you make your smoothies with?

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Awl pal Katie Baker-Bakes tells all about her scandalous Internet past.

by Julian Hattem

Twenty-one-year-old Bay Area native Brandon McCartney is a rapper of an odd sort. For the better part of five years, since he was in high school, he’s been rapping under the moniker Lil B. First he performed with three other high schoolers in the hip hop group the Pack, but he is now probably best known on his own, as a darling of music bloggers and readers of the Fader.

In addition to Lil B, he also calls himself the Based God because he plays Based music — a style he invented and which he is alone in performing. He’s biggest on the internet, where his presence is unparalleled; he has created more than 100 Myspace accounts in his name, each with a half-dozen unique songs and freestyles (here’s a sampling). On an average day, he updates his Twitter account a dozen times an hour. He is also, perhaps, primarily responsible for the entrance of “swag” into the vernacular of teenagers across the country. Instead of Air Maxes or the latest Yohji Yamamoto, he’s notorious for wearing dirty, years-old Vans that seem more suited to his skateboarding Bay Area neighbors.

He’s never had a real hit single, much less anything that reached the Billboard charts. His albums are released on tiny, no-name labels and last year he released an ambient and spoken word record called Rain In England, praised by British avant garde music magazine Wire for its “sheer weirdness.” The notion of albums seems obsolete for him, though; Lil B’s music exists best as clips on YouTube and Myspace, where the content goes on forever. (He’s not unique in this, of course. Before Lil’ Wayne was a mega-star he, too, existed best in the realm of mixtapes and featured appearances, pumping out new songs on a daily basis. But then he got famous, and now he doesn’t really do that any more, unfortunately.) Oh, and Lil B also has a self-help book, Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive, in which he extols the values of positive thought, encouragement and support. But he’s also on the cover of magazines and recently sold out out New York’s Highline Ballroom.

All of this, taken together, makes Lil B a weird celebrity. He’s weird because he’s not quite famous off the internet. But also because his music isn’t really good, in many conventional interpretations of the word. It’s challenging, though, in that it sometimes seems too simplistic to be listenable. What has generated most of his internet fame is a series of hundreds of Based Freestyles where he delivers mumbled half-rhymes over his own homemade beats. Each of them and the dozens of homemade “music videos” would be forgettable on their own, if they weren’t part of a larger body of work with hundreds of other freestyles and songs, Myspace pages and all-out social media domination. Like pointillism, the true breadth of Lil B’s creation can only be understood when you take a few steps back and put everything he’s done into perspective.

*****

The first time I played for a friend the opening tracks of T.I.’s Trap Muzik he called it psychedelia, and it’s a fitting description. Trap Muzik, like Lil B, is as disorienting as anything Amon Duul II ever did. Lil B is all about the estrangement of language, largely because his rapping isn’t really “good,” per se. It’s more of a stream of consciousness that kind of rhymes, sometimes, often with simple hooks repeated over and over and over. And the word “swag,” which he yells nonstop in every song.

Let’s take a look at “Wonton Soup,” a song about getting and eating wonton soup. I think. Kind of. Actually, like most of Lil B’s songs, it’s not really about anything. It sounds like if a 12-year-old told you the story of getting wonton soup, which would go something like, “So, I parked my car, I got wonton soup, I fucked your girlfriend, and then I ate the wonton soup.” Except it doesn’t sound stupid, surprisingly.

Or does it? Maybe it does sound stupid. Maybe Lil B just has a whole cohort of music bloggers confused.

But I don’t think so. By abandoning narrative, traditional verse structure and the major recognizable trappings of hip-hop (and pop music writ large, really), he isn’t making psych, nor rap, nor even techno, as his beats have been described. Like Kanye West but, perhaps with the freedom of being not-famous, Lil B is proving that outmoded concepts of genre and celebrity are, well, outmoded. Watch the “short film” “Am I Even A Rapper Anymore?” and, like, think about it. What is going on here? I don’t even know. Do you know? Can you help me out?

Bizarrely, that’s one of the most persistent tropes to describe Lil B: that no one really understands what’s going on half the time. It’s as if everyone is looking at this phenomenon, aware that it’s meaningful and worthwhile for some reason, but not sure why. “A lot of people don’t really understand and I’m not sure that we do either,” says Vice’s Ryan Duffy. Which, for a person being paid money to cover Lil B as a journalist and critic, is a weird statement. But only in the music world can an artist like Lil B exist, because in that press the oddities that we can’t understand are more valuable that the ones we’ve seen before. In conceptual art, where Lil B is actually maybe better suited, everyone would have an idea of what was going on with him, and then all the fun would be gone.

Or listen to this song, “I’m Miley Cyrus,” one of a, um, series of songs, each of which references the others, in which Lil B says that he is a different celebrity. The majority of the lyrics to this song are, appropriately, “I’m Miley Cyrus/ Swag” repeated ad infinitum.

The similarities between this track and any of Warhol’s works on the reproducibility of celebrity are pretty easy to spot. It’s about forming meanings from an over-abundance of stimuli. It’s about reducing the syllables of the names of famous people into nonsense words, and divorcing words from their meanings altogether, which is what happens when you say “Miley Cyrus” or “Ellen Degeneres” over and over for four minutes straight. (Do it, say those words over and over again right now. They’re weird words, right? “Miley”? What is that?)

It could be a project by a student at Bard if it weren’t made by a kid in the Bay who joined a rap group when he was in high school.

Or maybe it is the same thing. As characters like Andrew W.K., James Franco and Kanye West push against traditional notions of “celebrity,” “performance” and “art,” Lil B is building a career off of breaking a new artistic mold, instead of building a career and then, later, using his fame to do something new. Only an outsider rapper, in other words, can tell us to fuck it all, because all our shit is dumb and played out. But also that “you are a shining star,” as he does on “We Are The World” and in his book.

As workers in a capitalist system become alienated from the products of their labor, maybe Lil B shows us that artists and audiences in the supermodern world become alienated from artwork, even when it’s a not-tongue-in-cheek self-help book. Lil B’s style is somewhat of a regression of form, in that lyricism is presented as a byproduct of production, even in the over-cheesy video above. He makes a song, one of literally thousands of others, puts it on the internet and then it’s done. Just like that, he has created an artwork, quickly and easily, no more difficult than signing onto Twitter for an afternoon. It is not his, just as it is not ours. The songs becomes YouTube’s and Myspace’s, where they will live out the rest of their digital life. Surely Lil B has already forgotten hundreds of them.

Because with Lil B, it’s the method that matters. The medium is so much more than the message, because the message, often, is that there is no message. No one needs some arcane mystery about who the “real” Andrew W.K. is. We just need a rapper to yell that he is someone else, that he is cool no matter who he is and that he is, now and forever, fucking your bitch. For him, the primary element of rap music — lyricism — is superseded by form, to the point where the lyrics don’t matter as long as the object — the song — is birthed. And the songs are only valuable because of the pure fact that they exist as part of a larger whole, that they are ones of thousands of other tracks out there. Lil B’s songs serve mainly as a testament to the creative powers of Lil B, just as the Myspace pages and endless tweeting do. In that process of creation wherein he makes those thousands of songs and forms for himself a new life on the internet, Lil B himself becomes the art piece.

Or maybe it’s all a joke. I don’t know. I don’t get it, really. But he had an album that came out last week called Angels Exodus. And another one, Glass Face, is coming out soon. Probably a million other mixtapes and videos came out in the time it took you to read this.

Julian Hattem lives in Washington, D.C. and writes about pop music and politics. He has a twitter and a blog that you can read.

I mean: “The government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who is involved in a sex scandal many say fosters a demeaning image of Italian women, took action Wednesday against ads that use vulgar images of the female body. The initiative drew praise in a country where scantily-clad women are used to promote just about everything. But it also attracted sarcasm, after widespread reports that parties at a Berlusconi villa involved scores of young girls, sometimes topless, drinking and dancing.”