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BY EMILY CRAWFORD

In print | Published January 29, 2009

Last Friday, as I had cheap beer sloshed on me by some guy I see every day on my walk to class while struggling to weasel my way through the writhing mass that is Olde Club on a concert night, a thought struck me: “This is so Swarthmore … and it’s actually kinda fun.”

A unique Swat-ness lay in that horde of people, all so different, yet united in their eagerness to nod their heads to the music in the correctly appreciative manner. Like that crowd, we are a delightful medley of the unaffected and the über-hip, the pseudo-intellectual and the slightly neurotic, the inebriated and the sober, all with a surprisingly good taste in music. Our social habits are strange and extremely variant, but altogether fascinating and worthy of examination.

That is what this column is meant to be: a critical study of the social behavior of the Swarthmore student, except hopefully marginally more amusing than your average Soc/Anth paper. I hope to provide you with some insight, probably not at all valuable, into Swarthmore social life and all its various manifestations.

I can’t promise you that it will be anything other than unproductive, irrelevant and inappropriate, but it should provide valuable procrastination material. I shall present my findings in a style resembling a series of case studies – if case studies were completely unorganized and written on really asinine topics – each one examining a different branch of the stunted shrubbery that is our party scene. My first subject shall be Olde Club, and on that note, there is an issue of immense gravity that needs to be addressed — what happened to the PBR?

For those who may not be familiar with Olde Club or its beer, I will clarify. Olde Club, Swarthmore’s concert venue and general party space, used to serve the most delightful of inexpensive beverages at its concerts: Pabst Blue Ribbon. By serve, I mean leave a few cases in the grungy basement for lucky music fans to stumble upon.

This year, for reasons unknown by me, the PBR has been replaced with beer that misleadingly advertises “the High Life,” and worse yet, Milwaukee’s greatest, also known as “the Beast.”

This is a travesty. Overall, I have been highly pleased with the management of Olde Club this year. But this grievance demands to be addressed. How can I be expected to accessorize my uniform of skinny jeans and a loose-fitting American Apparel t-shirt if not with a can of PBR? How can I achieve the right attitude of despondent unrestraint without that shiny first-place trophy in my hand? In all seriousness, I just genuinely prefer the taste, but I also think it was delightful icon of Swarthmore’s emerging hipster population. For the many people I know who hate the term hipster, I apologize. But you know you miss the PBR too.

I believe that the controversy surrounding the term hipster, its viability as a label and anything that it may or may not mean is very much reflected in the various attitudes that people have towards Olde Club as an institution.

Like it or not, there is a direct correlation between the tightness of your pants (or leggings) around your ankles and your proximity to the building. There are people who do not go to Olde Club because they feel suffocated by the dense airs of music snobbery that can emanate from it, or because they simply feel out of place in a setting where vintage clothing is of such prevalence. Others love decking themselves in their alternative-chic best just to be seen there. Others still insist that they don’t know what hipster means and don’t know what I’m talking about.

A completely unrelated reason that one of my friends has for disliking Olde Club is the dirtiness. Again, for those unfamiliar with said dirt: it’s really, really dirty there. The basement floods on a regular basis, sometimes with toilet water and the place seems to have been cleaned so infrequently over the years that you could soak the building in bleach and it would still smell like smoke. Then there are the delightful details like those inexplicable globs of dried paint all over the sofas in the basement, which at least distract you from the encrustation of cigarette-and-other ash between the cushions. However, unlike my friend, I have grown to embrace the dirt. If I had ever gone to really cool garage-rock concerts when I was younger, I imagine the dirtiness would make me nostalgic for them.

I have clearly digressed, as I am likely to do in this column. But if there is any message I should leave you with, it is this: go to Olde Club. It’s fun. Even if the moshing gets out of hand at times, you can always go up to the balcony and lean condescendingly over all of us thrashing around beneath you. Depending on what shoes I’m wearing, I may be hiding in a corner protecting my toes from being crushed.

But please, go out and enjoy social life at Swarthmore! Or at least mock it in a sarcastic yet loving manner, as you are more likely to do. Or better still, stay inside, read my column and get a very subjective and scatterbrained view of what parties are like at your college. I, for my part, will chronicle my findings here, and I will try very, very hard to limit how much I talk about how awkward Swarthmore is. It’s tempting, but I feel like you might have heard it before.

Emily is a sophomore. She can be reached at ecrawfo1@swarthmore.edu.

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