Thanks to all the members, new members, non-members, exhibitors, speakers and Philadelphia City Paper staffers and volunteers who made our Philly convention possible. There were some awesome sessions, memorable events and tons of photos and a least one assault on nerdom. The AAN staff hopes to see y’all next year in Tucson!

BTW, Extra thanks to the blog contributors for sharing their experiences with us.

The Memphis Flyer’s Bruce VanWyngarden loved Reading Market, but found the attitude not quite as laid-back and friendly as in Memphis.

There was a different vibe in the air. As we pulled up to the hotel, we heard cursing, yelling, and sustained honking. Some poor sucker had had the nerve to park in the taxi-waiting line to help his wife (who was on crutches!) get out of his car. You would have thought someone’s mother had been stabbed. “Move that fookin’ car!” they screamed. “Moooove it!!!!” Nice. …

Still, Philly has many charms, and I recommend it you, even though, on the whole, I’d rather be living in Memphis.

The Independent Weekly’s Jennifer Strom was struck by the juxtaposition of the American history she soaked up visiting Independence Hall, and the stark reality of America in 2008 hammered home by Seymour Hersh in the First Amendment lunch — “a speech that made the hair on the back of our necks prickle.”

Philadelphia City Paper’s Mary Patel reports on Gov. Ed Rendell’s comments at the closing night party, including his comment that “Howard [Dean] should lighten up”

And Reno News & Review’s D. Brian Burghart shares his thoughts on the Convention:

I like these conventions of like-minded journalists because they’re inspirational, and I can bring nuts and bolts stuff back home to Reno that’ll help us put out a higher quality product. At least, that’s my hope and the hopes of the ownership of this company, which pays through the nose so we can fly across the country to attend workshops and get hammered with people we only see once a year.

It was Evan Tuchinsky’s first visit to Philly, and “the city is a lot cooler than we expected, heat and humidity notwithstanding,” he writes in a column. “I say that after seeing a side that’s not quite like the brochures, thanks to a decidedly unofficial guide.”

As Thursday turned to Friday, between the opening-night parties and the nightly nightcap in the hotel bar, I stepped out onto Market Street for a leisurely stroll. I like to do this in a new city—there’s no better way to find the real nightlife than to look for yourself.

I walked a half-block, and as I surveyed 13th Street in both directions, I heard, “What street are you looking for?”

Turning, I saw a man about my height and build, black, toting a hefty backpack, wearing a T-shirt, pants and sneakers. He was a few yards away—not in my personal space.

“None in particular,” I replied, “just looking around.”

“Let me give you a tour,” he said. “Don’t be afraid; this is the city of brotherly love. Love ya, brother!”

He introduced himself as “Scoop.” He’s a true man of the streets—he said he, his wife and son sleep near City Hall, two blocks from the Marriott and the convention center. He has a job waiting for him in New Orleans, where he’ll make $40 an hour working construction … when he can get down there.

Did he really? Who knows. He also told me he shook the mayor’s hand that night, and a few days earlier Donald Trump gave him $100 and took his family to dinner at Maggiano’s.

Even if those tales were tall, his tour tidbits were on the level. …

Scoop took me to nearby landmarks, pointed out others and told me which streets to avoid at night. We parted ways after a half-hour, but not before I gave him $20—the hourly rate he’s counting on, and money well spent.

In his AANtastic wrap-up of the Convention, Brian Howard riffs on the “Declaration of IndependAANts” — (”The punning is something the AAN folks get off on. Last year’s was held in PortlAANd,” he writes) — and goes on to AANalyze other uses for such puns.

He says Senior editor Pat Rapa wanted to call the Philly conference “AAN Get Your Gun,” but was shot down, then refers to folks who’ve been to a lot of these confabs as veterAANs. But my favorite is his word for attending the convention: getting AAN-handled.

Moving past wordplay, Howard gets to the heart of the matter. How was hosting the Convention for his Philly City Paper folks?

If our hazy memories and blurry Flickr pics are to be believed, it was a blast.

Sounds about right.

Chris Haire, in a column this week, notes that he had some TSA troubles on the way home from the Convention, due to his driver’s license being split in half.

I knew that it might be a problem.

And it was. The TSA agent marked my ticket for Delta Flight 1021 with a red pen and called over a fellow agent to take me aside to be felt up like a Japanese school girl in a tightly packed train headed to Harajuku Station.

After a surface-level pat down and a thorough search of my backpack, wallet, and shoes, the agent sent me on my merry way to down a few pints before the flight out of Philly. No blood. No foul. They were just doing their jobs as protectors of America’s skies, and I was doing mine as a devil-may-care adventurer.

But that was on the way home. On the way up, he passed through unnoticed, with this 3.5 inch knife in his backpack. He says he found it shortly after checking into the Marriott:

For some reason I needed to write something down, so I took off the pack, placed it on the bed, and reached into the middle pocket to grab a pen. I didn’t find one. Instead I found a knife, the 3.5 inch beastie pictured here in all of its serrated, gut-you-from-ear-to-ear glory. I had put it there a couple of weeks back when I moved from one house to another, and I had forgotten to take it out.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s a dumbass. And that’s not a good thing.

Other than the ending of the Clinton campaign, it’s hard to find much to be optimistic about. But journalist Seymour Hersh has added to my gloom.

Hersh was a speaker last weekend at the convention of our trade organization, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, in Philadelphia. Hersh is an Obama supporter, but he sees plenty of pain ahead, regardless of who is elected president.

Read the rest of her dispatch — where she also discusses Gov. Ed Rendell’s appearance at the closing night party, here.

More photos: flickr.com/altweeklies

Got pictures? Send ‘em to PHILLY (at) AAN.org. [Please include your name in the body of your email as a photo credit.]

*Updated, with new info on the bottom

There we were: three journalism icons–New York Times media critic David Carr, Times culture editor Sam Sifton, Village Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega–and your humble scribe walking back to the Downtown Marriot a bit after midnight, returning from an evening of boozin’ at the Pen & Pencil, a bar-cum-press club for Philly’s reporters. All of us were in various stages of inebriation (from nothing to Jim Beam-ing), all of us were living life.

A big mook passed us by, hot chick in tow. “Nerd!” he yelled in a tone befitting Ogre from the Revenge of the Nerds series. “Nerd! Nerd! Nerd!” Carr, Sifton, Ortega and I were so out of it we didn’t initially realize the guy was chanting at us. Finally, Sifton said something: “Was he yelling at us?”

We looked around downtown Philly. Around us were the city’s beautiful people. We were the only nerds in sight. We were shocked–then Sifton noticed I was the only one of us wearing glasses and a lanyard.

“If the guy said it to my face, I’da kick his ass!” I announced with the false bravado only a nerd can possess. Carr, Sifton, and Ortega made similar threats. We headed to the Marriot’s bar for a nightcapper
and laughed with the knowledge our nerdish ways have rewarded us with lives of leisure, while that assaulting asshole could only look forward to trimming his precious goatee.

*UPDATE: To make things clear, the strongest thing Carr drank that night was water with a squirt of lemon.

At the AltWeekly Awards lunch Saturday afternoon, host Gustavo Arellano, the OC Weekly staff writer and author of the popular humor column “Ask a Mexican!,” instructed winners to shout out their favorite Spanish words after he announced their names. But he didn’t follow this rule when he accepted his own award for best column in the circulation of 55,000 and over category.

“I’m not gonna say a Spanish word, I’m gonna say an English sentence,” said Arellano, who’s won best column two times in the past three years. “Syndicate my column, please!”

So instead, an audience member asked him what his favorite swearword was. He quickly rattled off a jumbled series of Spanish expletives.

“It translates as, ‘Fucking, fucking, fucking asshole,’” he explained, to the crowd’s amusement. “Wonderful word!”

Indeed, Arellano’s presentation was filled with lots of swearing and humor. AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel joked that he’d managed to squeeze in more curses than the foul-mouthed sex columnist Dan Savage, a previous awards lunch host.

He concluded by encouraging AAN papers to hire writers through the association’s diversity internship program. (Arellano, who is also a food critic and investigative journalist, was one of the first people to make his way up through the program, Karpel noted.)

“The last time I was in a room with so many white people was when I infiltrated the KKK,” Arellano joked. “Please diversify your newsrooms!”

As for the awards, some high profile winners included Arellano, Rob Harvilla of the Village Voice, and LA Weekly’s Nikke Finke, the fierce media blogger behind Deadline Hollywood Daily who’s coverage dominated the Hollywood writer’s strike earlier this year. Finke, who Arellano described as the most-Drudged of any AAN journo, won first place for the media reporting/criticism and best blog categories.

A full list of this year’s winners after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

More photos: flickr.com/altweeklies

Got pictures? Send ‘em to PHILLY (at) AAN.org. [Please include your name in the body of your email as a photo credit.]