There's a tree in Irving Park with a string of white paper notes hanging in between two of its limbs that might catch your eye as you're walking by. When I spotted it the other day the first note I turned over read You Are Loved, which is incredibly trite, but exactly what I needed to believe this dark time of year when it takes me an hour to get out of bed and I seem to always have Weather.com open in one tab and Google Flights in another. I'm missing folks and sometimes it seems there's nothing to fill the missing places, but then there's love. And you are loved even if you're not seeing anyone and there's Valentine's shit in every store and the couple on the bench in the park is leaned in close together against the cold and you don't think you'll ever get there. Remember the people you love and who love you and remember to love them and love yourself and take good care of yourself, especially if no one else does, and take good care of each other, and be generous with your love, and when you get there I hope you remember to leave nice notes in the park for the rest of us.
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Report: Some 2011 MacBook Pros with AMD GPUs experiencing hardware failures
Some owners of 15- and 17-inch 2011 MacBook Pros are experiencing problems with their AMD HD 6000-series graphics chips, according to a report from MacRumors. Users on the MacRumors and Apple Support Communities forums have complained of distorted images and colors, as well as random reboots. Graphically intense activities like gaming and photo and video editing are more likely to trigger the problems.
By themselves, these scattered reports of GPU problems wouldn't merit much examination. Apple Support Communities and MacRumors threads exist for basically every problem under the sun, and it's difficult to isolate cause and effect. However, back in August Apple initiated a replacement program for some 2011 iMacs with similar HD 6000-series GPUs from AMD. The affected iMacs exhibited graphical corruption issues much like the MacBook Pros are experiencing now.
The 2011 MacBook Pros were sold between February of 2011 and June of 2012, with a slight spec bump in October of 2011. All 15- and 17-inch models included Sandy Bridge processors from Intel, and the laptops will switch between the CPU-integrated HD 3000 GPU and the dedicated AMD GPUs depending on your workload. That the problems reportedly crop up more often under graphical load suggests the issue is with the dedicated GPU, not the integrated one. The 13-inch laptops all used integrated graphics and don't appear to be affected.
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New Seasons Market officially endorses marriage equality
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submitted by jaypeejay [link] [39 comments] |
Noh-Varr No More: Saying Goodbye To Marvel's First Male Pin-Up
Young Avengers has gone away again. It’s a state of affairs that fans of the book are used to. Series writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie have set off to create a new book about super-teens, The Wicked & The Divine, and Young Avengers fans are left hoping someone else will pick up the baton.
Pending any announcements this convention season, that means a lot of fan favorite characters now go back into mothballs, including Marvel’s premier gay teen couple, Wiccan and Hulkling, and breakout fashion icon Miss America. But the one I’ll miss the most? Marvel’s first male pin-up; Marvel Boy.
Marvel Boy, aka Noh-Varr, was introduced to Young Avengers readers in the first issue of the series with a scene that made an explicit statement about the team’s resident spaceboy. Dancing around in black square-cut boxer shorts to “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes, he put himself on display for the benefit of both fellow hero Kate Bishop and the audience. It was sexy, but not calculated, at least not by him. Like a thousand female superheroes before him, happenstance conspired to strip him down and make him gyrate.
Jamie McKelvie & Matthew Wilson
On Gillen and McKelvie’s part, it was very calculated. Putting a male sex symbol in a superhero comic sends a clear message to the audience: “We’re not going to sell you the same old thing. We’re not going to pander to the usual crowd.”
In a book whose audience might be expected to skew unusually female and unusually gay (thanks in both regards to that gay couple at its heart), it was a smart move.
Jamie McKelvie & Matthew Wilson
Noh-Varr hit all the usual beats of the comics sex symbol. He found more than one reason to take his clothes off. He played with his look. He showed us his butt. Yet Noh-Varr wasn’t quite like all those thousand female heroes. Noh-Varr wasn’t only there to be sexy. He got to both kick some ass and experience some angst. He had his crowning moment of awesome…
Jamie McKelvie & Matthew Wilson
And his crowning moment of douche.
Jamie McKelvie & Matthew Wilson
He had plot. Personality. Agency. Gillen and McKelvie weren’t setting out to replicate the mistakes that are made with female sex symbols. They upped the game for sex symbols everywhere. Sexy can be important…
But a sexy character should not be interchangeable with a sexy lamp. To quote Kelly-Sue DeConnick: “[I]f you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.” (That’s the clean version. The dirty version utilizes the phrase “f—ing hack”.)
Gillen and McKelvie didn’t invent Marvel Boy, and they didn’t invent his sexy; they just gave him his sexy back. Marvel Boy was made to be sexy, in the 2000′s Marvel Boy by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones.
J.G. Jones
Noh-Varr was young, dumb and full of… sexuality, from his first appearance. Created because Morrison thought comics weren’t being “sexy enough,” Noh-Varr was a pouty bad boy in tight, tight shorts whose nemesis was an assassin in a dominatrix outfit. “Sexy” is his motif in the same way that “spider” is Peter Parker’s.
Annie Wu
That’s not to say there haven’t been other sexy male comic characters at Marvel. Namor, Daken, Nightcrawler and Gambit are all characters whose sexuality has played a part in their stories. (I’d struggle to name four more.) Most of the big name superheroes have had their sexy moments, even if only in the old Marvel Swimsuit Specials. (And even then, the sexy sometimes veered wildly off-course towards awkward or… terrifying.)
Joe Quesada
And it’s always only sexy moments. It’s not the default setting. Noh-Varr doesn’t have sexy moments. He’s like Catwoman; his every day is sexy. And yet he’s a dude! It’s a glorious new idea for superhero comics.
Last time Marvel Boy got reshuffled into the Marvel deck his status as an unambiguous male sex symbol got a little… lost.
John Romita Jr.
Yes you are, Noh-Varr. Tight shorts. A razor. Some ’60s girl group pop.
Becky Cloonan
Like I said, a hero designed to appeal to the guys and gals who like to look at hot guys is a new idea. It takes a little getting used to. Now that “Noh-Varr-as-sex-symbol” has spent a whole year in the spotlight (dancing; shirtless; the spotlight glistening off his abs), there are two lessons we can take from it. They’re lessons you may have heard me outline before.
Sexy in comics is good and fun, but (1) men can be sexy too, and (2) women can be things other than sexy.
Let’s all take that lesson to heart.
Jamie McKelvie & Matthew Wilson
Come back soon, Noh-Varr.
Who's going to replace Steven Moffat as Doctor Who showrunner?
firehoseio9's money is on Toby Whithouse, who's done some of the more jolly romps of 11th's tenure and has prior hit-running experience (No Angels, Being Human).
Gatiss (de-facto co-runner with Moffat, and Moffat's Sherlock co-creator) is a runner-up, and if BBC is happy with the show, he's the likely choice.
Howard Overman (Misfits, Dirk Gently) is the outsider choice, but he's running another show (Atlantis) that just got a re-order.
Neil Cross is the fantasy pick, but no fucking way is he taking on that workload when he's already got his hands full of hits (Luther, bunches of Del Toro projects) and lives in New Zealand.
Chris Chibnall is the nightmare pick, for fear that Broadchurch's success has redeemed the last several years of crap he's cranked out (plodding episodes like Cold Blood/Hungry Earth, Power of Three, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, _eight fucking episodes of Torchwood_ and especially Cyberwoman).
Because someone at io9 had to hit a word count, apparently, Neil Gaiman and J. Michael Straczynski pad out the list.
The thing nobody wants to talk about is how even if Moffat is no longer showrunner, you know whoever takes the seat is going to bring his ass back for at least one episode a season.
Steven Moffat's been in charge of Doctor Who's storytelling since 2010, and he's probably nearing the end of his tenure. So everybody's wondering who could take over this insanely demanding job, when the show regenerates next time. Let's break down seven prospects, in order of most likely to least likely.
    
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Newswire: HBO is totally cool with you sharing your HBO Go password
firehose"We’re in the business of creating addicts,” Plepler said, echoing all the cool drug dealers you know.
HBO—your cable friend who just wants to stay up all night with you, trading swear words and showing you boobs—is apparently as cool about you sharing your HBO Go password as it is about everything else. “It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, it just has no impact on the business,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler says in this video interview for Buzzfeed, in which Plepler doesn’t even wear a necktie. Neckties, after all, are for uptight squares who care about things like subscribers sharing passwords with their friends who aren’t, and Plepler is pretty whatever about that. In fact, he sees it as a smart marketing move that just creates more and more HBO viewers. “We’re in the business of creating addicts,” Plepler said, echoing all the cool drug dealers you know.
Of course, as cool as HBO is, everyone still agrees that it would be a lot ...
Portland's 'Unipiper' Brian Kidd on Jimmy Kimmel Live
firehosevia saucie
Brian Kidd, the local street performer who’s made a name for himself (“The Unipiper,” to be precise) by providing his own soundtrack for the one-wheeled vehicle he claims to have found in a Dumpster, stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live for last night’s show.
It’s nothing lots of Portlanders haven’t seen before — Kidd’s bagpiping, unicycling, geekily costumed setup is a fairly common site around the central city in the summer — but it’s always nice to see a local lover of cycling fun making good. Earlier this month, he was featured in a profile on BoingBoing.net.
I was dubious about Kidd’s origin story (what Portlander would leave a working unicycle in a Dumpster?) until I found out that the Dumpster was at the University of Virginia, where he went to school. The story he tells Kimmel of where to get a set of firebreathing bagpipes, however, sounded much more authentic.
"You have a good buddy who’s into fire," Kidd explained for last night’s show.
Now that’s the Portland I know and love. See you around, Brian
Classic Cookbooks, Free of Charge | Garden and Gun
In 1824, Mary Randolph published The Virginia House-Wife and set off a torrent of cookbooks that would help to define Southern food as we know it today. Their copyrights expired, many of those cookbooks are now in the public domain, free to any enterprising chef or history buff who fancies a recipe for antebellum pineapple beer or turn-of-the-century succotash. Dive deep into Southern history with these five classics.
Courtesy of Internet Archive
The Virginia House-Wife, 1824.
Mary Randolph was a well-to-do socialite in nineteenth-century Richmond, Virginia, before her husband was pushed out of his government job by his cousin and political rival Thomas Jefferson. Known for her hospitality and prowess in the kitchen, she opened a boarding house to help make ends meet. And toward the end of her life, she poured the sum of her culinary knowledge into this influential cookbook, which contains early recipes for gumbo and cornbread and the first recipe for macaroni and cheese ever published in the United States.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, 1878.
Marion Fontaine Cabell Tyree, granddaughter of Founding Father and onetime Virginia governor Patrick Henry, assembled this collection of recipes and household tips from 250 prominent families in Virginia and the surrounding states. In addition to chapters on Old Dominion favorites such as buttermilk biscuits and Brunswick stew, this book contains a fascinating collection of remedies including a whiskey-and-cherry-bark cure for jaundice and mysterious “Chill Pills” made with strychnine and arsenic.
What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, 1881.
In the years following the Civil War, a thirty-something former slave from Mobile, Alabama, named Abby Fisher migrated west to San Francisco, where she found success as a caterer and cook. Though Fisher was illiterate, friends in California transcribed this collection of her recipes. Alongside the popular dishes of the day are instructions for preparing dozens of pickles and preserves—Fisher’s specialties—and a long list of cakes and pies. This was believed to have been the first cookbook written by an African-American woman until scholars unearthed a short pamphlet published in Paw Paw, Michigan, in 1866. Nonetheless, it was groundbreaking and provides an unmatched look at the foods of the plantation South.
La Cuisine Créole, 1885.
With this foundational text of Creole cooking, an anonymous author (almost universally believed to have been Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-Irish writer who later made his name reporting from Japan under the pen name Koizumi Yakumo) captured a swirl of dishes from Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, and Louisiana just as they began to coalesce into the colorful cuisine that we recognize today. Chefs and housewives from all over New Orleans contributed their favorite recipes, throwing “Gombo file,” “Jambolaya,” and “Bouille-abaisse” into a national pot then mostly unseasoned by those Creole standards.
The Unrivalled Cook-Book and Housekeeper’s Guide, 1885.
The mysterious “Mrs. Washington” chose her pseudonym, she writes in the introduction to her cookbook, in honor of the father of our country. But though her identity may be vague, the book is anything but. Stocked with recipes adapted from older European texts and the archives of an anonymous New Orleans family, it contains careful instructions for preparing everything from Russian beet soup to a classic bisque à la Creole flavored with “a peck of fat crawfish.”
The REAL ‘Lone Ranger’ Was An African American Lawman Who Lived With Native American Indians : Political Blind Spot
The real “Lone Ranger,” it turns out, was an African American man named Bass Reeves, who the legend was based upon. Perhaps not surprisingly, many aspects of his life were written out of the story, including his ethnicity. The basics remained the same: a lawman hunting bad guys, accompanied by a Native American, riding on a white horse, and with a silver trademark.
Historians of the American West have also, until recently, ignored the fact that this man was African American, a free black man who headed West to find himself less subject to the racist structure of the established Eastern and Southern states.
While historians have largely overlooked Reeves, there have been a few notable works on him. Vaunda Michaux Nelson’s book, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal, won the 2010 Coretta Scott King Award for best author. Arthur Burton released an overview of the man’s life a few years ago. Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves recounts that Reeves was born into a life of slavery in 1838. His slave-keeper brought him along as another personal servant when he went off to fight with the Confederate Army, during the Civil War.
Reeves took the chaos that ensued during the war to escape for freedom, after beating his “master” within an inch of his life, or according to some sources, to death. Perhaps the most intruiging thing about this escape was that Reeves only beat his enslaver after the latter lost sorely at a game of cards with Reeves and attacked him.
After successfully defending himself from this attack, he knew that there was no way he would be allowed to live if he stuck around.
Reeves fled to the then Indian Territory of today’s Oklahoma and lived harmoniously among the Seminole and Creek Nations of Native American Indians.
After the Civil War finally concluded, he married and eventually fathered ten children, making his living as a Deputy U.S. Marshall in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. If this surprises you, it should, as Reeves was the first African American to ever hold such a position.
Burton explains that it was at this point that the Lone Ranger story comes in to play. Reeves was described as a “master of disguises”. He used these disguises to track down wanted criminals, even adopting similar ways of dressing and mannerisms to meet and fit in with the fugitives, in order to identify them.
Reeves kept and gave out silver coins as a personal trademark of sorts, just like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets. Of course, the recent Disney adaptation of the Lone Ranger devised a clever and meaningful explanation for the silver bullets in the classic tales. For the new Lone Ranger, the purposes was to not wantonly expend ammunition and in so doing devalue human life. But in the original series, there was never an explanation given, as this was simply something originally adapted from Reeves’ personal life and trademarking of himself. For Reeves, it had a very different meaning, he would give out the valuable coins to ingratiate himself to the people wherever he found himself working, collecting bounties. In this way, a visit from the real “Lone Ranger” meant only good fortune for the town: a criminal off the street and perhaps a lucky silver coin.
Like the Lone Ranger, Reeves was also expert crack shot with a gun. According to legend, shooting competitions had an informal ban on allowing him to enter. Like the Lone Ranger, Reeves rode a white horse throughout almost all of his career, at one point riding a light grey one as well.
Like the famed Lone Ranger legend Reeves had his own close friend like Tonto. Reeves’ companion was a Native American posse man and tracker who he often rode with, when he was out capturing bad guys. In all, there were close to 3000 of such criminals they apprehended, making them a legendary duo in many regions.
The final proof that this legend of Bass Reeves directly inspired into the story of the Lone Ranger can be found in the fact that a large number of those criminals were sent to federal prison in Detroit. The Lone Ranger radio show originated and was broadcast to the public in 1933 on WXYZ in Detroit where the legend of Reeves was famous only two years earlier.
Of course, WXYZ and the later TV and movie adaptions weren’t about to make the Lone Ranger an African American who began his career by beating a slave-keeper to death. But now you know. Spread the word and let people know the real legend of the Lone Ranger.
(Article by Micah Naziri)
lenperalta: I’m in the midst of my Geek A Week Year Two Five...
firehoseKelly Sue DeConnick + Rob Ryan = implausibly TAL
I’m in the midst of my Geek A Week Year Two Five Kickstarter campaign. I’m just working ahead like the project is going to succeed. Staying positive and all. In the meantime, here is a shot of a WIP. Kelly Sue DeConnick’s card for the project. Kelly blogged about it earlier here.
Take a look at the project. If you like it, please consider becoming a backer.
Thanks!
The Sober Man Behind Iron Man: Matt Fraction | The Fix
firehoseMatt Fraction interview about how and why he got sober
Eastman Sells "Heavy Metal" To New Management
An Illustrated Account Of The Great Maple Syrup Heist
The Tech Industry Loves White-People Hands
Great Job, Internet!: Bronytunes, a 7,000-track library of songs about My Little Pony, is a real thing
firehose"Lest this seem like a weird web anomaly, it’s worth noting that there is also an all-Brony video streaming site, live radio shows, podcasts, a Brony dating site, and a Brony healthcare site."
Bronies—male fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic—are a weird bunch. They’ve developed an elaborate and convoluted subculture, one that’s always been a little hard to really understand. Now, though, there’s a way to check out at least one part of their pony-driven party. Bronytunes 2.0 is a web and Apple app that allows fans to stream 7,000 different fan-written tracks inspired by My Little Pony. The app was founded by a 21-year-old student and features tracks from bands like the Beatle Bronies, a Beatles cover band that’s recorded an entire Brony-themed Abbey Road parody record called Apple Road. The app also features charts and highlights current hit singles among the community, including current hits “Apples To The Core,” “Hearts As Strong As Horses,” and “Brony Polka (Weird Al Style Medley).”
Lest this seem like a weird web anomaly, it’s worth ...
Newswire: Eve (the rapper, not the biblical woman) is developing a sitcom for ABC
Eve is developing a new sitcom for ABC. The former Ruff Ryder will also star in the semi-autobiographical comedy, which is said to be loosely based on her interracial relationship with her rich, British fiancé Maximillion Cooper. Eve would also act as a non-writing producer on the show that's being developed in tandem with Kaplan Entertainment, the company behind You, Me And Dupree.
As Vin Diesel or UPN fans know, should the show go to production, it won’t be the first time Eve has tried her hand at acting. The rapper appeared in xXx with Diesel, and played a fashion designer—also named Eve—for three seasons of UPN’s Eve. She’s also appeared in both Barbershop and Barbershop 2, as well as in The Cookout and The Woodsman.
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/CXpsohd.jpg){kind=link}
That time BP’s chief executive fled Russia after poison was found in his blood
Bob Dudley, now CEO of BP, believed he was being poisoned during his stint working in Russia, and fled when he heard he was under imminent threat of arrest. This is according to a very good profile (paywall) in the latest issue of the New Yorker of Len Blavatnik, a billionaire oligarch who was a partner in a BP oil venture there.
If true (BP has declined to comment), the story explains an abiding mystery of BP’s mostly dark, so-far 17-year-long experience in Russia: that is, why did Dudley abruptly scamper out of Russia in 2008, and go into hiding?
The extraordinary episode occurred while Dudley was CEO of TNK-BP, a Moscow-based joint venture with four Russian oligarchs including Blavatnik. Extraordinary because even in the turbulent world of oil, you do not often get a senior executive going underground.
At the time, BP and its Russian partners were at war. The indications were that each side was seeking to push the other out of the company, or at least gain advantage in their working relationship. Always, the Kremlin seemed to be siding with the oligarchs. A Wikileaks cable from the period describes break-ins at Dudley’s Moscow apartment by intruders who left behind summonses to court hearings where the fleet-footed oligarchs were raising yet another complaint.
With that as a backdrop, according to the New Yorker account, Dudley began to feel ill, and poison was subsequently found in his blood. His condition improved once he stopped eating food provided by TNK-BP.
But on July 24, Dudley got word that police would detain him the next morning. That was when he left his apartment and flew out of the country.
Last year, both sides sold their holdings to Rosneft for a total of $55 billion in cash and shares—for its part, BP ended up with a 19.75% share of Rosneft, keeping it in the Russian orbit despite the nightmare.
Much of BP’s misery was its own fault—company executives who thought they knew how to manage an enterprise in Russia instead were continually outwitted, tripped-up and bamboozled. But the oligarchs themselves often seemed too gleeful, conduct that helped to deepen Russia’s and their own tarnished investment profile abroad.
Two Fans Broke onto the Set of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ to Film a Homemade Documentary in 1988
On March 10th, 1988, two Star Trek: The Next Generation fans broke onto the Paramount lot at night, wandering through the Enterprise sets and attempting to film a homemade documentary. Captain Stone of the “Stage 9 Interlopers” appears on camera dressed in a makeshift Starfleet uniform, and at one point during the adventure he accidentally breaks a sickbay prop.
video via moe47988
Denham Psycho, A British Hipster Parody of ‘American Psycho’
firehose"The video was created by London creative agency Flickering Wall for clothing brand Denham."
big surprise, ad agencies love American Psycho
British hipsters discuss the finer points of Japanese denim and Indonesian civet coffee in “Denham Psycho,” a spoof of the 2000 crime drama American Psycho. The short video includes hilarious remakes of two famous scenes from the film, the business card scene and the Huey Lewis and the News murder scene. The video was created by London creative agency Flickering Wall for clothing brand Denham.
video via Denham
via reddit, The High Definite
Paul Revere could have been caught if the British crown collected metadata
This morning, President Barack Obama kicked off his speech on NSA surveillance reform with a reference to Paul Revere, the famous patriot of the American Revolution who warned that the British were coming. President Obama held up Revere as a symbol of the importance of US surveillance:
At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the "The Sons of Liberty" was established in Boston. The group's members included Paul Revere, and at night they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots.
Ironically, if the British crown had the same surveillance powers in 1775 that the United States does today, Paul Revere would probably have been languishing in a prison cell instead of making his midnight ride. In June, Duke University sociology professor Kieran Healy cleverly explained how metadata alone could have led to Revere's arrest. Simply by mapping out the relationships between known members of seven different Boston social clubs that existed at the time, you find Paul Revere at the center.
Here's a close-up:
While this only proves that Revere was a highly connected individual, a bridge between various social circles, that would have made him a person of interest at the very least, and all the crown needed was a little bit of metadata to know precisely who to target for a deeper investigation. With today's technology and bulk data collection, computers could be programmed to highlight such individuals automatically, so it's not hard to imagine why critics aren't satisfied that the US government doesn't actually listen to telephone calls or read the contents of email. Just knowing who is connected to who is a very powerful tool. Metadata matters.
- Via The Washington Post
- Source Kieran Healy
- Image Credit Sharon Mollerus (Flickr)
- Related Items barack obama patriotism president obama surveillance paul revere sons of liberty midnight ride
Death threats and denial for woman who showed college athletes struggle to read
firehosevia Russian Otters
The death threats, Mary Willingham expected. More shocking was the denial from the University of North Carolina.
sports, women in the public sphere, etc.
Femslash Friday: Kim/Lindsay on Freaks and Geeks and “Lesbian Jawline”
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Courtney
shared this story
from  The ToastThe Toast:
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| Mine was named Jessie, from ages 11-13 we were the very best friends. |
Almost every gay(ish) woman has a Kim Kelly in her past. You met in adolescence; probably in middle or high school, possibly in college but certainly no later. Your lives were deeply and intimately intertwined — although you may or may not have had an overtly romantic relationship, everyone who knew the two of you knew that for good or for ill that you were one another’s top priorities. Your Kim almost certainly smoked cigarettes and you almost certainly did not. You knew everything about her and you hated her boyfriend and you arranged your class schedules together and you drew on one another’s wrists in ballpoint pen and sometimes you couldn’t stand the sight of her. Your Kim was mouthy and wore dirty jackets and you were the only person she’d be gentle for.
My Kim Kelly was named Shannon. She had long dirty blonde hair that she slicked back into a ponytail and wore the exact same outfit every day (men’s cargo pants, a white V-neck T-shirt, and one of those little metal ball choker necklaces that I don’t know what they’re called). She moved to town in eighth grade from Las Vegas. At the end of the year she moved right back. I still have a note from her explaining that I am her “second best friend after Alice,” a distinction I treasured at the time (I never thought to compete with Alice; Alice wore her hair in dreadlocks and played the guitar; I had only recently quit the school band and wore long-sleeved sweaters from the Limited Too), and listing all of her favorite Eminem songs. She was my sun and stars.
I have attempted many times to categorize the ineffable gay appeal of Busy Phillips — particularly Busy Phillips as Kim Kelly on the short-lived Freaks and Geeks – and the closest thing I have been able to come up with is this: “Lesbian jawline.” Exhibit A:
And Exhibit B:
I honestly don’t know what else to say about it. It isn’t that she has a masculine jaw, exactly; there’s just something about it that makes lesbians and bisexuals sit up a little straighter and take notice. Not all lesbians have lesbian jawline, but every woman with lesbian jawline is guaranteed a small but vocal and loyal group of lesbian fans for the rest of her life (see: Cobie Smulders, Kristen Stewart, Katee Sackoff). What I’m trying to say, I think, is that both Lindsay and Kim ping, and ping hard. It’s not just the army jackets and the slouching and the sulking and the bold eyebrows (although those help); their lesbian swagger is more than the sum of their gay-seeming parts. I just want to live in a world where Judd Apatow directed a short-lived teen drama with two long-haired, broad-shouldered girls wearing giant army jackets and little to no makeup and sneakers made out in each other’s bedrooms, is what I’m saying. Just one episode where Lindsey bites Kim’s puka-shell necklace off.
Everything about the development of their relationship fits seamlessly into a Lesbian Aesthetic, too: their first encounters are explosive and riddled with deliciously hurt feelings. Kim is a bitch to everyone around her in a way that speaks to me deeply. She’s the kind of asshole whose horrible words make you want to be around her more, not less; I wish to master this kind of witchcraft, as I have very little hope of ever becoming genuinely kind in this lifetime. There’s an entire episode dedicated to their developing relationship — “Kim Kelly Is My Friend” — that twists up my lungs every time I watch it.
Lindsay goes to Kim’s house for the first time, under the pretext that they might as well try to be friends if they’re going to be in the same group. You’ve almost certainly had this experience, if you were a particular type of Midwestern teenager from a relatively happy, stable home, when you realize that someone who goes to school with you every day lives a life so completely unlike your own that they might as well live on the moon. Kim’s house is missing a few walls. Her brother is erratic and exhausted; her parents yell at each other in front of her. She has a car, and she has Daniel; those are the only things that are hers and hers only, and she’s more than happy to run people over (sometimes literally) to keep them that way.
How many times have you seen a teenage girl who’s poor and angry and loud and confrontational and vulnerable and lovable on TV? Yeah, me too. That’s why I love Kim Kelly. And I love Kim Kelly with Lindsay. When she’s with Daniel she’s angry and wild and sometimes hot for him, but that’s about it; he never brings out the best in her. There are moments with Lindsay when Kim takes on a touch of wry courtesy, when she is almost a gentleman. That’s Kim at her best. And Lindsay’s face opens up when she’s with Kim. (Kim would never pull half the shit Nick tries to pull with Lindsay. Go ahead and try to imagine her smothering Lindsay with affection. Lindsay would learn to value a punch on the arm and the occasional head nod the way miners value diamonds.)
Even the series finale seems as tailor-made for Femslash Friday as a non-Xena series finale can get. Both Lindsay and Kim have left their respective boyfriends (I feel a little guilty; this is the second entry where we’ve taken a woman ["taken a woman"] away from Jason Segel. Sorry, Jason Segel) and take off on a road trip together to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. They run into each other’s arms (the good stuff starts at around 2:30). It’s as close to Thelma & Louise as a series ending ever got.
There is a certain way in which a certain type of young woman can lean against a car or a wall that is transcendently hot. I cannot explain it. Very few women can achieve it without appearing deeply mannered. Busy Phillips pulls it off here. Watching her face light up in a genuine smile when she sees Lindsay get off the bus — watching Kim take off her “school” coat and back into that stupid beautiful damn green army jacket — watching them walk towards each other, Kim’s mouth twisted dryly, Lindsay breathing a bit more quickly than usual and trying to manage her smile — seeing them crawl into the back of a van together and take off for concerts unknown — that’s an ending I can get behind.
Read more Femslash Friday: Kim/Lindsay on Freaks and Geeks and “Lesbian Jawline” at The Toast.