Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz in their natural habitat
Photo: Courtesy of Stuff Hipsters Hate
After they moved to the “axis of hipster evil,” ’08 NU grads Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich took an anthropologic approach to analyzing their indifferent, anti-mainstream Brooklyn co-eds. The result? A blog-to-book fairytale, in which their website, Stuff Hipsters Hate, took off. The duo published a book version in September. They’ve kept their day jobs—Ehrlich is an associate editor at Mashable.com and Bartz is an editor at Psychology Today—but in honor of Sex Week, they’ll be speaking about hipster mating rituals. We caught up with them beforehand to talk about first dates with the “I hate everything hipster,” Northwestern hipsters, and unhipster college memories. Just don’t call them hipsters.
How did you guys get started with the blog?
Andrea Bartz: It actually kind of started through the lens of dating because we were both sort of dating hipster guys of the sort we hadn’t really encountered in Chicago, and we’re just sort of noticing these ridiculous things about the way that they behave and the way everyone talks to each other and the way that everyone rolls their eyes at everything, and so we were always emailing each other at work about the funny stories of the night before, or the party we were at, or the things we saw, and we thought it was pretty funny. Then Brenna went on a very fateful date in July of 2009 with the guy that we very quickly dubbed the “I hate everything hipster” because on their one date, everything he talked about was hating something. He talked about how he hated children, birthdays, jeans, fluorescent lights, pugs, riding bikes, going to shows, he just thought everything was such a scene and he was so over it.
Brenna Ehrlich: Again, we’ve encountered people who who were film snobs, or music snobs, or foodie snobs, or whatever, but I’ve never met anyone who just kind of didn’t like anything. It was never a reason that was actually reasonable. So the next day I wrote Andi an email and I was like “I’ve encountered a new kind of hipster. It’s the I hate everything hipster,” and from that Andi emailed me and was like, you know, we should do a blog not what hipsters like, but what hipsters hate.
You guys are coming for Sex Week, very exciting. Can you give me a little preview about what you’ll be talking about?
AB: We’re basically giving a lecture, an anthropological lecture, on the mating habits of the hipsters.
So did you do a lot of field research for this book?
BE: When we started writing, Andrea was living in Spanish Harlem but would come to Brooklyn every weekend, and I lived in Greenpoint for two years, which is one of three axes of hipster evil in Brooklyn—which are Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint—so basically this is where we live, the people we hang out with, we go to a lot of shows, we hang out at a lot of bars that could be classified on Yelp as hipster bars. Yeah, I guess we’re gonzo journalists.
AB: The field reporting is pretty much constant. Like at any point we could overhear something funny or see something ridiculous that we need to incorporate into, previously, the blog post or the book; in this case, the lecture. Everything has been personally researched and pretty much experienced that we will be presenting.
In your presentation tomorrow will there be more of these anecdotes?
BE: It’s not like a Sex and the City kind of us sitting up there talking in lurid detail about dates just because the ‘I hate everything hipster’ story. I think for one thing, he hated the Internet—so it’s not like he’s ever going to see it—but he’s so general that a lot of people we know could look at that and say “that’s me.” We’re not memoir writers. We really try not to put anybody out there and degrade anyone we’ve gone out with because we don’t hate everyone we’ve gone out with. We respect people, and it’s not like we just date people for material. Some of it is based on stuff that we dislike, or our friends dislike, or random people overheard in the street dislike. Tomorrow I wouldn’t expect us sitting up on stage wearing black lace talking about screwing someone in the back of a Winnebago in Arizona after doing a lot of acid because that never happened and also we’d never do that [laughs].
Tomorrow I wouldn’t expect us sitting up on stage wearing black lace talking about screwing someone in the back of a Winnebago in Arizona after doing a lot of acid because that never happened and also we’d never do that.
AB: Brenna started laughing like that happened. That actually never did happen. Why are you making that sound like it’s an actual anecdote?
BE: People might expect that.
So how is writing a book different than blogging? Does it make you feel more legit in any way?
BE: We got paid, that’s cool. That’s actually like a legit observation, like if you’re a blogger you don’t get paid unless you’re owned by the cheeseburger network. It’s nice to actually get that level of legitimacy. You have an editor, you have a publisher, you have a designer actually laying things out rather than just Tumblr and a wider audience, which is nice because fortunately blogging is getting a lot more legitimacy. I obviously work for a website, but the rest of the world is kind of slow to catch up on the fact that just because something isn’t tangible doesn’t make it mean less than something that’s on paper.
So you probably get asked this a lot, but do you identify as hipsters? I mean, because if you do, that is wonderfully ironic.
BE: We don’t because we generally maintain that most people who identify themselves as hipsters are probably annoying, terrible people, but I mean, you know, my work identifies me as one.
AB: Brenna is more uncomfortable with the term than I am. Like, yes, I live in Williamsburg, and Brenna lived in Greenpoint, and we wear clothes that we found in thrift shops and weird things, and go to live shows and dive bars. So yes, to most of the world we’d be identified as hipsters, but we don’t self-identify that way. There’s such a negative connotation with the label that we don’t want to call ourselves something that is negative.
When you were here at Northwestern, did you make any observations about Northwestern’s hipster scene, or maybe the Chicago hipster scene in comparison to New York?
BE: There are no hipsters at Northwestern.
AB: Certainly when we were here, we would sometimes find ourselves, even together, feeling miserable about it in Wrigleyville, at like John Barleycorn, and we couldn’t quite put our finger on why this was like the worst place that had ever happened to us. But I think if we hadn’t come from the backdrop of Northwestern—where, like, hello, the greek scene reigns supreme and everyone plays beer pong on weekends—if we hadn’t come from that contrast when we found ourselves in Brooklyn, we probably wouldn’t have been able to objectively observe it the way that we did, which is what allowed us to find so much humor in it.
What would be one of the best memories you have from Northwestern?
AB: Honestly, one of my favorite memories was so unhipster in every way, and maybe that’s why it’s delightful, but during one of my first few weeks of freshman year, I was at the epic game where the Northwestern football team beat Ohio State, and this was back when Northwestern was really terrible at every sport imaginable. So we beat Ohio State, and I was like in the stands with all of my new freshman friends from Allison Hall and, you know, we’re like “College is the best thing ever!” and we all won and we all rushed the field, and my roommate and I gave high-fives to all the football players and it was very, like, “College!”. That really stands out because it marked the beginning of a fun four years at Northwestern.
BE: Wow, mine is really different. So I was a theater major, I only got into one play—either I was really bad or I didn’t go to enough theater parties. So instead I started writing for this publication and got to interview the lead singer of Man Man before his show at the Logan Square Auditorium, and I got to go up into the green room and sit on this little folding chair, and I was like 19, and he’s like, “Do you want some whiskey?” And I was like no! And I guess it’s my first realization of my hipster types because I was like, this guy’s really hot, he has, like, an ironic mustache, he’s wearing face paint, and he’s trying to give an underage girl whiskey, this guy’s awesome. So it’s my downfall and my uprising all in one right there.
AB: Her love for Man Man continues.
You didn’t mention when the event was! 7pm, McCormick Tribune Center Forum, TONIGHT!!
[...] for Northwestern University’s Sex Week. Though we managed to sound delirious in a preview in NU Intel and rambly in an event article in North By Northwestern, the talk really was a blast — the [...]