Gatsby is cipher
Even though The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel (and I’ve read it three times) I have always been left a little cold by Gatsby himself. I didn’t fall in love with him like his obsession Daisy did, and I didn’t become utterly enamored with him like the book’s narrator Nick Carraway did. This was the case for me with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 book, arguably the greatest written in English in the 20th century, in Jack Clayton and Francis Ford Coppola’s failed 1974 film with Robert Redford in the title role, and again in Baz Luhrmann’s ecstatic new adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Gatsby is cipher; not only is everything about him concealed until the end of the book (or two-thirds of the film) but everything about his character – his affect, his accent, his trappings – are an elaborate and astonishing act. He has created a palace of wealth and excitement on Long Island across the bay from his lost love, Daisy (a luminous Carey Mulligan), all to draw her to him; he charms his much poorer next door neighbor, our narrator Nick (a most excellent Tobey Maguire), because he is Daisy’s cousin; he has constructed a false life story of well-born privilege and war heroism to give him the respectability a woman like Daisy needs. And all of it is a lie except for his desperate love for Daisy, who is married to a brute of an American aristocrat, Tom Buchanan, who Joel Edgerton’s amazingly makes more fully realized than even Fitzgerald did. Tom, after all, is the only one who sees through Gatsby’s veneer, though he of course hates what is actually underneath.
Better than anyone else has in the myriad adaptations, Dicaprio manages to play Gatsby’s complexity, by acting fake and acting real in strategic succession. His charisma, both Gatsby’s and Dicaprio’s, is admittedly powerful, but perhaps because I knew how it all would end, I couldn’t quite succumb. Perhaps it’s because Gatsby encapsulates the American Dream: the capacity for reinvention, for hope, to offer the shimmering promise of wealth, and to send us on a pursuit for happiness. And for many of us, that American Dream is bunk. Gatsby, however, never gives up hope, never sees that the green light on Daisy’s dock across the bay symbolizes too much for him, that it’s not, in the end, worth it. That’s what makes him so tragic. Fitzgerald, a heartbroken drunk, wasn’t a cheerful man.
Baz Luhrmann, however, has no such affliction. His films, the best of which are Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, are, like Gatsby, tragedies. But they are ebullient, gorgeous, lush, and enrapt tragedies, full of fauvist color, baroque styling, and anachronistic music that is less an attempt at post-modern disjuncture than a manipulation of the audience’s capacity to recall the emotional resonance they feel for some songs. In this case, it’s Beyoncé and Andre 3000 covering Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” Jack White doing U2’s “Love is Blindness,” and Jay-Z, the film’s music supervisor and executive producer, throwing in such iconic songs as his “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and his, Frank Ocean’s, and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” as well as a new, but probably soon to be iconic, “100$ Bill.”
The music is combined with Luhrmann’s sets, costumes, 3-D cinematography and CGI, and the results are simply outrageous. To me, this works so well because unlike Clayton and Coppola’s dully naturalistic version, Luhrmann treats Fitzgerald’s lyrical, astonishingly beautiful language with the reverence it deserves. When Nick isn’t narrating in voiceover, Luhrmann transforms Fitzgerald’s words into indelible images bursting with almost garish color and ostentatious detail. This is the first adaptation of a Fitzgerald work that seems to be as in love with Fitzgerald’s writing as Gatsby is with Daisy. Unlike Fitzgerald, whose novel is perfectly tempered and constructed, Luhrmann makes errors of both under-emphasis and exaggeration, but the end result is still a wondrous experience, unlike anything you will see on screen this year.
The Great Gatsby
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan
Rated PG-13
In 3-D
At your local multiplex
The City of San Diego is trying to steal $250.84 from me
[Note: Updates appended below.]
Dear Meredith Dibden Brown:
Yesterday, I received a letter from you (at the Office of Small Business) informing me that I had to register my “business” with the City of San Diego, pay a $34 yearly fee to be registered with the City, pay an unexplained $17 fee for “zoning,” and pay $250.84 in late fees for not having registered for the three years previously. I am writing to complain about the City’s unethical behavior and to demand that all late fees be removed from my bill.
As ridiculous as it is that I have to pay $34 so that I may be allowed to earn a couple thousand dollars a year as a freelance writer and editor – yes, I’m taxed before I even earn a dime — I understand that the City’s coffers are empty after decades of incompetence and mismanagement, and someone has to pay! Why not force the victims of said incompetence and mismanagement?
That said, never informing self-employed residents that they had to register with the City and then using that lack of knowledge as way to force them to accrue late fees for three years is a gross abuse of taxation power. It is unethical and unconscionable.
I have lived in San Diego for nearly four years. I have paid my California taxes every year. I have declared myself as self-employed each year. When I called your office and asked why I was only informed now that I was supposed to register in 2006, I was told it was because the City only bothered to look for the information now. So, I am paying $250.84 because the City could not be bothered to ask the State who was declaring themselves self-employed and then to cross-reference those names with the City’s registry and then to inform those un-registered persons in a timely fashion that they owed registration fees. I am paying late fees because the City is incompetent in its collection of taxes.
Speaking of incompetence, the letter that you sent to me claims that San Diego Municipal Code §31.0110 “requires all business within its City limits to obtain a Business Tax Certificate.” This is not true. §31.0110 defines the terms of the code concerning Business Taxes. §31.0121 is the section of the code that “requires all business within its City limits to obtain a Business Tax Certificate.”
I would appreciate your swift response.
Sincerely,
Theodore K. Gideonse
Cc:
Councilmember Sherri Lightner
Mayor Jerry Sanders
City Attorney Jan Goldsmith
UPDATE: This blog post was twittered by none other than the local government editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune. He referenced Carl DeMaio’s opposition to the way the City is dealing with the tax, so I forwarded my letter to DeMaio. DeMaio wrote back within a couple days to say that he was hoping to create an amnesty program or make really small businesses, like mine, exempt. And: “You shouldn’t be fined for not knowing you need to register.” Lightner’s assistant wrote back to say they were looking into it.
I finally received an email back from the Office of Small Business last week. It was, to say the least, defensive. Here it is in its entirety:
Dear Mr. Gideonse:
Thank you for contacting the Office of the City Treasurer.
Section 31.0135 of the San Diego Municipal Code (SDMC) states:
The City Treasurer is not required to send a notice or bill to any person subject to the provisions of this Article, and the failure to send such notice or bill shall not affect the validity of any fee or penalty due hereunder, or the duty of such person to pay required taxes.
Hence, it is the business owner’s/independent contractor’s responsibility to register with the Office of the City Treasurer prior to commencing business. Since the Business Tax assessment is a self-reporting tax, the City is not required to send notification to new businesses stating the tax is due. However, the City does provide business owners helpful information pertaining to the Business Tax application process. This information is available at the Office of the City Treasurer downtown, the six Community Service Centers located throughout the City, and the Office of Small Business which offers business start-up seminars, including information regarding the Business Tax certification process. In addition, IRS instructions to the Schedule C inform taxpayers of the potential tax liability. The fourth paragraph of the Schedule C instructions (see attachment) state: You may be subject to state and local taxes and other requirements such as business licenses and fees. Check with your state and local governments for more information.
Section 31.0131 of the SDMC also states the City can bill retroactively for up to three years with penalties for each year that the business was in operation. In addition to the penalties for delinquent payment, all small businesses (12 employees or less) that do not register or pay their taxes pay a non-compliance surcharge of $68.00, while large businesses (13 or more employees) pay $250.00. Note: Your account was not assessed the $68.00 surcharge.
All that considered, in order to more accurately assess whether you have a tax liability with the City, please address the following questions.
1. For how long have you been filing Form Schedule C – Profit or Loss From Business? Please specify year.
2. How often do you perform these freelance writing services within the City of San Diego on an annual basis? Please specify the average number of hours accrued annually?
3. Will you be filing Form Schedule C for the 2008 & 2009 tax years to report similar activities performed within the city limits of San Diego?
I look forward to your reply so I may assist you further.
Regards,
John R. Zurita
Business Tax Compliance Supervisor
Office of the City Treasurer
The City of San Diego
(619) 615-1516 (Phone)
(619) 533-3274 (Fax)
There are so many problems with Zurita’s letter, most glaring being its “you don’t know what you’re talking about, you stupid taxpayer” tone. This is how I responded:
Dear Mr. Zurita,
Thank you for your email.
As my email clearly shows, I have read the municipal code. I am well aware that your office did not break the law. But your reliance on the vague fine print of the Schedule C form is a rather disingenuous way of claiming that we were told of the law when we were clearly not. I have also read Lambert v. California, 355 U.S. 225 (1957), and your office should, too, since it states that punishing someone for the lack of knowledge of a municipal law for which knowledge of cannot reasonably be expected is a violation of the 14th Amendment. [Thanks, Jeff! --Ed.]
If your office actually wanted taxpayers to know about the law, it would have made sure that California tax forms clearly stated the law and it would have made sure that tax preparation software programs all collected the tax. But it did not. And the most popular, TurboTax, which I use, is made by a San Diego company, Intuit!
The law is written in such a way, and it is enforced in such a way, as to create the nonpayment of taxes in order for late fees to be accrued. So, I stand by my assertion that the tax collection behavior of your office is unethical and an abuse of taxation power.
That said, here are my answers to your questions:
1. For how long have you been filing Form Schedule C – Profit or Loss From Business? Please specify year.
I have been filing a Schedule C since 1997.
2. How often do you perform these freelance writing services within the City of San Diego on an annual basis? Please specify the average number of hours accrued annually?
Since I moved to San Diego, I have never spent more than 20 to 30 hours a year writing, editing, or teaching writing on a freelance basis. I am a full-time graduate student, and rarely make more than $20,000 a year. The only year that I made a profit from my 1099s was 2006, when I received $xxx in royalties for work done in previous years. For that year, my net profit was $xxx. In 2007, my net loss was $xxx. In 2008, my net loss was $xxx.
3. Will you be filing Form Schedule C for the 2008 & 2009 tax years to report similar activities performed within the city limits of San Diego?
Yes.
Sincerely,
Ted Gideonse
I do not expect the City to voluntarily do the right thing. I can only hope that DeMaio is able to change the policy.
UPDATE #2: I win! I win!
Dear Mr. Gideonse:
Based on the information you have provided, you do not have a tax liability with the City. Since you have stated that you have never spent more than 20-30 hours per year providing these services, you qualified for an exemption under SDMC § 31.0202 (Exceptions — Limited Duration Activities). Therefore, we have canceled Notice Number – B2009006659.
In an effort to increase Business Tax Compliance, the City of San Diego recently began utilizing data from the State Franchise Tax Board (FTB). The City presumes that a taxpayer is conducting business within its jurisdiction if the taxpayer filed a business return/form with the Franchise Tax Board and or Internal Revenue Service using a City of San Diego address. This data is an effective means for tax enforcement and is used by a majority of California municipalities. However, there are situations that arise where an income tax filer does not qualify as a business.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the receipt of the Notice of Tax Liability billing statement.
Should you have further questions, please feel free to contact me.
Regards,
John R. Zurita
And by the way, he cc-ed the email to Lightner’s assistant. Ha.
Read More#AmazonFail: Simmer down now. Or not.
I think I’ve pissed off some of my friends and colleagues over the last couple days by not being as quick to boycott Amazon for their newly discovered “policy” concerning “adult” books. Well, it probably wasn’t my reticence that annoyed. I may have pissed off some folks by playing Devil’s advocate with my typical Internet snark. (Sorry, Alex! I love you!) But I want to explain in a central place my feelings on the matter, and I want to provide some evidence to back up my assertions that this new policy is not a policy whatsoever, but rather an actual glitch, if one very wacky — and deeply problematic. In other words: Folks, simmer down now. Or not.
Here’s the background:
Over the weekend, the writer Mark Probst wrote a blog post that exposed a strange situation at Amazon.com. His sales rank no longer showed up on the page for his books. Weird. So, he emailed Amazon and asked why. The following is the customer service email heard ’round the world:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage
Oh, Ashlyn. This sounds bad. Very, very bad. Because Probst does not write porn. He writes tame gay romance. And it turns out that other books affected by this “policy” are, basically, every gay and lesbian themed book on Amazon. Meanwhile, Hitler’s work and every straight and sexy book remain unaffected. There’s a fabulous list of the books de-ranked and not de-ranked (and a rundown of the events) over at Jezebel, which managed to be all over this story on Easter.
Probst’s post resulted in a firestorm on the Internet, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. On the latter, the hashtag #amazonfail became the number one tag in the Twitterverse. And when an actual PR rep at Amazon told Publishers Weekly that it was not a policy but rather a “glitch,” the harshtag #glitchmyass became increasingly popular.
I first read about this via DogPoet’s feed, which led me to this blog post, which is full of unfounded hysteria about Amazon killing literature. Oh, the conspiracy theories! Oh, the nonsense. I got annoyed and started doing searches to see if books were actually missing. I discovered that a bunch of the famous books that were de-ranked were still very easily found; I posted a bunch of screengrabs to prove that. Read through the comments to see how some people reacted to my questioning of the hysteria; it is reminiscent of when I was called a collaborator during the Prop 8 campaign. (Go here and scroll down to “Anti-Ted Flaming.”)
As the day wore on, it became clear that the searches were turning up totally bizarre results, and they were different for everyone, logged in or out. And they made no sense. For example, if you type in “boys men,” the results had softcore gay porn as the #5 result, and the Kindle version of our book was #27. But the print version of the book was nowhere to be found. It had been de-ranked, and pretty much hidden.
The fact that only print books were affected by this “policy” tells me — being a rather rational person — that this was not an anti-gay policy, but rather a glitch. A weird one, but a glitch nonetheless. And there’s growing evidence that this is the case. On the list-serv for LGBT anthropologists, a professor sent out an email about the situation and pointed out that all of the queer studies books — basically any academic book about LGBT issues, including Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet — had been de-ranked. And he linked to the rationally written petition (which I’ve signed, by the way).
The first response on the list-serv was very interesting. C. Todd White, whose Pre-Gay LA: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights is forthcoming, had discovered his book was de-ranked and now hidden. So, he called Amazon:
After being routed to three different people, I at last had a very interesting discussion with a woman on Amazon’s customer service team who said that the entire organization had been blindsided by this. It seems that they had reconfigured their system to isolate erotica, and the new program or “algorithm” has caught far more in its net than they had intended.
I was assured that Amazon was on the problem and that they had not intended for academic books, esp., to have been so affected. I pointed out that censorship in any form is always a slippery slope; the woman answered that she totally agreed and then informed me that she was “a member of the club.” She assured me that she will be working very hard within Amazon to see that works such as those Tom has listed will be included in the sales rankings and in “best of” lists, as they were before. She also said, however, that she was afraid for her job if indeed it WAS a policy from higher ups; but she doubted that was the case as no one in her division had heard that such a “policy” was being implemented. She was pretty amazed, though, that when she tried, even searching my book by its title failed to yield the text. She had to search by my name to find it. [NOTE: I had to google the book to find it. When I typed the title into Amazon, it didn't come up.]
For what it is worth. I still think we should shout LOUDLY and sign the petition. However, it might indeed have been an accident. Let us hope!
Unless Amazon has an incredibly devious staff capable of amazing amounts of manipulation, I find it very, very hard to believe that this event was the result of a new “policy.” It sounds much weirder. I think there are two possibilities. One is that the algorithm was so wacky that all the gay books were actually tagged as “adult.” Another is that there’s a homobigot at Amazon who had access to the databases. (Or a hacker! Also, here.) I do not think it is possible that Amazon has anti-gay corporate agenda. It simply does not make sense considering its long history as a progressive company and its high scores on the Human Rights Campaign’s corporate index.
So, I think a boycott is a ridiculous over-reaction to this situation. If it remains as a “glitch” for more than a few days, then, yes, we should act. But many people in the Twitter mob are acting as if Amazon should be put in the same club as, say, Exxon or Wal-Mart. And before we even have any facts beyond the email to Probst, the “glitch” comment, and a bunch of weird search results. In a moment of exasperation, I wrote a comment that said, “I hope everyone deleting their Amazon accounts also never buy gas at Exxon, never buy anything at Urban Outfitters, never watch anything made by a network or studio owned by News Corp, and didn’t vote for Obama because he was for civil unions, not marriage. Purity above all!” (And, yeah, I know I screwed up the subject-verb agreement. It was late.)
As I write this, it looks like some of this is being fixed. For example, Heather Has Two Mommies has a ranking again. Others do not. However, there are a couple lessons to be learned here. One is that, WOW, Twitter can make shit happen. Here’s a good, brief article on that. Two is that, ruh-oh, algorithms can be result of homophobic practices and ideologies. The esteemed Mary Gray, of Indiana University, wrote a couple of great emails to the aforemention list-serv that she has allowed me to reprint:
Actually, I love thinking about the “glitch” question in relation to filtering software often bundled with K-12 computer facilities in U.S. schools: The majority of commercial filtering software programs on the market tag and block websites with the word “sex”–this is a default setting of these programs. Blocking access to porn or “adult content” usually means filtering “gay” “lesbian” “bi” “trans” and a host of other words that produce porn when you plug them into a search engine. Ironically, one of the ways young people get to info about LGBT issues is by searching sites like Amazon (the filtering software doesn’t limit access to Amazon’s search engine).
Amazon’s ability to remove the sales rankings on books it deems “adult” is, effectively, bound by the same filtering logic — it probably couldn’t do a systemwide “filter” of adult content without ensnaring LGBT titles because it likely linked LGBT titles to sexuality (their way of sorting us in the HQ section of their libraries).
Glitches are arguably the residue of politics and policies meant to manage inclusion/exclusion (what I’m starting to call the “cyberinfrastructures of subjectivity). As interesting as the intentions of Amazon in this case might be (did they mean to distance themselves from “Heather has Two Mommies” by tagging it as adult
content?) odds are the associative labeling that linked “Heather” with “erotica” in their massive relational database happened 14 years ago when Amazon launched in 1995.I just checked: “Heather” has its ranking back on Amazon.
I wrote back mentioning that, among other things, “I hope someone is looking at the reaction to this from an anthropological point of view. The speed at the which Twitter made this into a now international internet/business event is amazing.”
And then Mary wrote another email:
I’m arguing that the glitch itself is a manifestation and circulation of structural heterosexism/sex-negative cultural mores (I’m hesitant to use “homophobia” for reasons that I hope will make sense in a second).
So, like Stuart Hall’s argument (in the essay, Whites of Their Eyes) that racism operates through individual intentions but more powerfully through institutional structures (including language) that privilege whiteness, I’m arguing that the “glitch” is both/and (to paraphrase Burke)–it’s both a culturally influenced algorithm and an act of policy–intentional or not. At any time in it’s database management, Amazon could have chosen to prioritize changing its tags to avoid this “glitch.” Priority lists in information management are as political as any policy statement (at least that’s my argument).
In fact, I’d argue that the mundane story of databases and why Kindle might not have filtered these titles while Amazon’s print book market did is a much more rich terrain for investigation than the popularity of this tweet on twitter. Twitter, after all, is watched closely by newsmakers (bloggers, publishers, and journalists) to see “what’s hot” in the hopes of breaking the next “big story.” Is it really that surprising that authors and publishers concerned with their sales rankings and the implications of content-filtering came out in force (on twitter) to push back and make this news (the industry writing about itself)? That’s interesting (and important) but twitter is still a relatively underutilized social media tool. Amazon and the consequences of its database management impact far more folks.
So, just like every other small moment of discrimination, the “glitch” is actually part of a vast cultural problem rich for analysis. How has the embedded heterocentrism (etc.!) of our language become embedded in our oh-so-important information systems? Amazon as a company may not be trying to hurt gay people, but the cultural remnants of homophobia have found their way into its databases, somehow. How do we fix that? By not simmering down, I guess. That said, I’d prefer that we fought the power with a little more intelligent boil. And that said, the boil of the last few days exposed what Mary eloquently explained. So I guess it was useful after all…
UPDATE: Amazon has put out an actual “oops!” press release. But, as you can tell from the comments on the Seattle PI, nothing short of a guillotine will suffice. You’d think Jeff Bezos was behind Prop 8 or something.
UPDATE #2: It’s looking more and more like a programming/management glitch. Really. Here’s Jezebel’s damn fine round up. The Seattle PI’s blog has the details:
Read MoreOn Sunday afternoon at least 20 Amazon.com employees were paged alerting them that items, possibly many, were incorrectly being flagged as adult. The employees also received links to the Twitter discussion AmazonFail.
Thousands of people were angry that gay-themed books had disappeared from Amazon’s sales rankings and search algorithms. The number of Tweets on Sunday afternoon that had the term “AmazonFail” surpassed even those with the words “Easter” or “Jesus.”
By this time, Amazon.com had upgraded the problem to Sev-1. (Amazon.com breaks down its operational issues in terms of severity levels. Sev-3 means a problem affects a single user. Sev-2 is a problem that affects a company, or a lot of people. Sev-1 is reserved for the most critical operational issues and often are sent up the management chain to the senior vice president level.)
“People got pulled away from their Easter thing when this whole thing broke,” the employee said. “It was just a screwup.”
Amazon.com employees are on call 24/7, and many began working on the problem from home. It didn’t take much digging to realize that there was a data error.
Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as “adult,” the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from ‘false’ to ‘true.’)
“It’s no big policy change, just some field that’s been around forever filled out incorrectly,” the source said.
The 2008 Golden Teddy Awards for Most Excellence in Books
This is going to be like the Tonys, when the four nominees for each category are chosen from usually about eight shows. Sometimes only five new musicals open, and four get the benefit of claiming that they were nominated for Best Musical. Ridiculous. Just like the winners of the 2008 Golden Teddy Awards for Most Excellence in Books. I only read seven works of fiction this year; I started four others and plan on finishing two of those. As for nonfiction, I read a heck of a lot of academic stuff but only a couple books that someone might read for, say, fun. So, take these Golden Teddy Awards for Most Excellence in Books with a grain of salt, whatever that means.
Most Excellent Book That I Wish I’d Never Read.
Rob and I joined an ill-fated book group last year, and three of the books we read are on this list. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the best book I read in the last 12 months. But I wish I could forget it. This is what I wrote in my Goodreads review: “When I was about 100 pages in, I wrote on here, “This book is freaking me out.” It continued to. McCarthy constructed some of the most disturbing images I’ve ever read, but what most, I think, upset me was how seemingly plausible his imagined post-nuclear war world is. And as personalized through the story of the father and the son, this world becomes emotionally, not just intellectually, real. I finished it at 2:30 am, and burst into tears. I will probably be haunted by the book for some time. ”
Most Excellently Awful Use of Authorial Branding.
Michael Chabon is the Prince of modern American fiction. I don’t mean he’s royalty; I mean he’s like Prince Rogers Nelson, who cannot stop recording and releasing music and has no ability to judge whether something should be released with fanfare or deleted from the hard drive forever. Last year, Chabon published The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which is a fantastic postmodern hard-boiled detective novel that belongs on the same shelf as Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Unfortunately, Chabon has another shelf with pretty crappy genre stuff, like retread of Sherlock Holmes, a weird and awful Harry Potter wannabe, and not-so-good comic books. On that second shelf, we will put Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure, which I read last winter simply because Chabon wrote it. Dumb of me. What a truly terrible book. Chabon’s elaborate prose was un-edited and out of control, his pacing and plotting weird and lazy. It felt like something he spit out one weekend after watching “The 13th Warrior” on Showtime in the middle of the night.
Most Excellent Wish Fulfilment.
Perry Moore’s Hero is about a gay teen-ager who becomes a superhero. I mean, dude, I wish that had been my life. Well, except for the death and destruction. But still. A relatively well-written, well-paced YA novel, it’s not really “good,” but, boy, did I like reading it. The other folks in the book group loathed it. Of course, they all liked A Thousand Splendid Suns. So whatevs.
Announcing the 2008 Golden Teddy Awards
[UPDATE: My Golden Teddy Awards have nothing to do with the Golden Teddy Awards handed out by, ha, The Teddy Bear Review (a magazine that "embraces the joy of Teddy Bear and soft scultpure collecting"). Really. I didn't know those awards existed until I saw people googling "Golden Teddy Bear Awards" on my site meter. And there was no reason why anyone would know about my awards in, say, Dunkirk.]
It’s that time of year again! Yes, it’s late December, when critics, unions, and amorphous over-funded foundations hand out laurels to sometimes deserving people. And I’ve been meaning to do the same thing, but like so many “regular” features on this blog, it never got off the ground. And it probably won’t last beyond this year. But who cares? Awards are fun!
Here is the FAQ for the Golden Teddy Awards:
What is a Golden Teddy Award?
It is small bear item — figurine, stuffed animal, action figure, etc. — spray-painted gold (GOLD!) by me, Ted(dy) Gideonse. Said Golden Teddy will be given to the winner of a Golden Teddy Award by me, provided that the winner sends me a self-addressed, postage-affixed, padded box or envelope.
For what does one win a Golden Teddy Award?
Excellence.
Excellence in what?
What I deem to be excellent. This year, there will be Golden Teddys given in such things as Television (ex. Most Excellent Use of Audience Ignorance of the Geography of a Setting), Film (ex. Most Excellent Hairy Chest — Male), Music (ex. Most Excellent Use of Beyonce’s Voice As a Weapon of Terror), Books (Most Excellent Book I Finished), Blogging (Most Excellent Comment Involving Biblical References and Multiple Misspellings) and the Humanities. The last category is a catch-all, and it will collect such awards as Excellence in Bold-Faced Lying about the Gays, Excellence in Campaign Crying, and Excellence in Decorating a Home at which I Attended a Party.
Who decides the winners of the Golden Teddys?
I do. Duh.
What is your feeling about campaigning for an award?
I’m all for it. As the Supreme Court has said, money is speech. Feel free to send bribes, as well as suggestions for award categories. Also, liquor is accepted as long as it is top shelf.
When will you announce the winners of the Golden Teddys?
Here’s the schedule:
- Television — December 22
- Film — December 23
- Books — December 24 26
- Music — December 26 27
- Blogging — December 27 28
- Humanities — December 28 29
Stay tuned!
[UPDATE: Not to be confused with Joe Klein's Teddy Awards, which are named after Teddy Roosevelt. Not me. So they suck. Hat tip, Mom.]
Read MoreAbout Me
I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and I am writing my dissertation on the subjectivities of HIV+ men who have sex with men and use crystal meth. I am also the film critic for San Diego LGBT Weekly. I like cats.
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