Pages

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Pretty Fun

Sunday Desktop Clean Up

1. One of these days I'm going to apply myself to Photoshop.
 Meanwhile... "The Creation of Kirk" by Mr. Snapper



This doesn't make any sense (the Gorn's not a creator), but it's pretty fun.

2. British Make Do and Mend, 1943


3.  "Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."

Speaking of women warriors in alternative universes (Mad Max: Fury Road), I am reminded of Les Guérillères (quote above from, 1969) by Monique Wittig.
I actually saw Wittig speak at a conference on Feminism in Literature at the UW-Madison when I was sixteen--my mother was running the office of the new (!) Women's Studies Dept. there. 
(Amazing how if you live long enough, you accumulate these bits of history, like the shells of decorator crabs do, though not for the sake of camouflage.) 

Wittig was radical in several directions, but her most radical position, perhaps, was that children should have political power--they should have the vote.
Hearing her say that when I was sixteen shocked and thrilled me, and to this day, I've never heard anyone else even talk about it.


(I don't think those are Adidas she's wearing... are they?)

 4. And speaking of history...

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Puppy Nap

Time for a little restorative. Thank you, Tintorera!


Tintorera also links to the less restful post, "About that new Sarah Connor poster". Speaking of women action heroes, looks like this one's lost ground, judging by the poster.

Friday, May 29, 2015

"Hey Girl", Again

In the new Mad Max: Fury Road, which Mz says is a chick-flick, I'm thrilled that young women get this great pair of movie heroes (Max (Tom Hardy) and Charlize Theron's character, Furiosa), where the guy is the sidekick.

But I got really angry and sad yesterday that this is (still) unusual. It's like back in 1979 when we were so excited about Sigourney Weaver in Alien and thought this was the beginning of a new norm.
Thirty-six years later, we're having the same conversations all over again.

Except... now on the Internet, which is buzzing.

I'd just posted a Feminist Ryan Gosling last week, and now Mz shows me the new Feminist Mad Max Tumblr, with the same "Hey Girl" tag.

Not many up yet, but they're choice.

[Other Tumblrs tagged with Mad Max: Fury Road 
(I'm glad to see some conversation about how white it is...

Also this one about Max & Furiosa's non-sexual physical intimacy).] 


This movie is making me claim feminism again. 
Because, not only am I disgusted that I'm feeling grateful for a lead hero who's a woman, I can hardly believe that some men are complaining about her hijacking "their" franchise.   (I'm not even dignifying this with a link.)

                Guys. 90% of the action heroes already look like you,
could you just STFU for once?

It's like white people complaining about affirmative action. 
Let me turn to Louis CK, again:

Thursday, May 28, 2015

I Skyped with dirty hair!

I have now been initiated into Skypedom--thank you, Krista!

After all my fears, I'm pleased to report it's easy and, I think, maybe nicer than the phone. There is a slight lag time, though, which is challenging for the likes of me:
I have to consciously remember to employ "talking stick" style (no interrupting), not Italian style (everyone talk at once).

But the benefits of seeing the person's face makes up for that. 
And the picture's a wee bit fuzzy too, so you can't really tell how clean someone's hair is.

Dirty hair's the norm after the apocalypse. 


I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road again with Marz last night (my 2nd, her 5th time), and I liked it even better.  
I thought seeing all the car chases again would be boring, but it wasn't---there's so much great stuff to look at. I read that they some of the stunt people are from Cirque du Soleil, and it's a wild show. 



The movie's basically a normal dystopian, post-apocalyptic road movie---there's nothing particularly innovative in the story itself. 
It's white, with traditional views of men and women (women are nurturing, men are ... not so much), no gender bending, and a familiar moral world: good is good, and bad is bad, and you can tell which is which... (This is not Apocalypse Now.)

Except the main hero is a woman, and that is unusual.Sad to say, it's still considered a game changer.

You'll have met the plot before, from Riddley Walker to oh... let's see, Canticle for Leibowitz, the Wasteland (T S Eliot), Waterworld (the only Kevin Costner movie I've liked), any number of Westerns (the name of one of the maternal figures sounds like Miss Kitty (Gunsmoke), tho in the credits it's spelled Miss Giddy), 
and--oh, gollygee--is that you, Billy Jack, playing the old you-get-to-abhor-violence-at-the-same-time-you-enjoy-it trick, because "When people are mean to puppies, I. Just. Go. Berserk"?

(NOTE: There are no puppies in this Mad Max, but there is in the first one of 30 years ago. Warning: that dog dies.)

These echoes of other stories are the opposite of a problem---it's fun to play mix-and-match--and anyway, there's nothing new under the sun.

What are innovative, though, are the fabulous off-the-charts IMAGINATIVE  visuals. Some are familiar (Bosch, Star Wars, I even ... this is a stretch, but I even thought of Waiting for Godot during the lone tree scene and Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” for  back tattooing). 
But it's really its own thing. 

Hm. Maybe I should just say I have not seen it before, but then, I don't play video games and the like--maybe this is familiar to people who do? Though I wonder if they show a guy clipping another guy's toenails.
Either way, it's a lot of fun.

The movie is also funny (I even laughed a second time), and, basically, optimistic, à la  Wall-E  > 
(there's even a sprouting plant).

Finally, it's got my favorite kind of romance, which I'm always going on about: the romance of people who come to love each other through shared work.

Work?

That reminds me... I'm supposed to be working! Back to it.

Bacon, Feminism, Marriage

Re GARBAGE

Louis CK on Littering in New York City   (1:36) and Environmentalists and Christians (2:44)

God: What do you need food for? Why didn't you eat the stuff I left you?

Human: . . .Yeah, but it doesn't have, like, bacon around it.
___________ 

Speaking of people being ignoramuses, why are people calling the new Mad Max feminist? Because it has women characters who do stuff?

I used to roll my eyes at the bumper sticker, "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people," but now I'm afraid it's true; it is just that simple.  

Men in action movies = people

Women in action movies = OMG! Feminists!

Yes, it's a little pathetic how far we've not come.

Louis CK, again:

(But who is this "we" you speak of Louis? I would say, "Women didn't win the vote until 1920".)
_____________________

On the cheery side: Ireland voted for gay marriage!


When I was biking around Ireland in 1986, the entire country was gearing up to vote on legalizing divorce, which they then voted down. (Divorce didn't become legal in Ireland for another ten years.)


I have read no analysis of the Irish vote on same-sex marriage, but as a Catholic (sort of), I would say this makes sense:
marriage is a sacrament, one of the holy things God set up for folks.

If you believe this, and you believe in equality, it's not too hard to do the math.
 

I think sometimes some of us forget, marriage is a conservative social institution: everyone settle down, now, and register your relationship with the state (and you will get goodies).

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Movies That Are Better Than Books, I

Poodletail asked what movies I thought surpassed the books they were based on.

The very first one that popped into my mind was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).


That's almost an unfair example:  
a movie by a painter vs. a book by a paralyzed writer (Jean-Dominique Bauby) who has to blink his one remaining eye to select a letter. 
But then, art, like life, is unfair. 

Images can tell (some) stories better than words, and Schnabel is a visual filmmaker.

Some movies are better because their book told a good story but wasn't well written, like the Harry Potter series.

Full disclosure: I'd probably think (almost) any movie with Alan Rickman was better than a book.

Sometimes a movie just nails it, even though the book is also excellent. I'd rewatch To Kill a Mockingbird before I'd reread it, even though it's a good book. (Actually, I'm a little reluctant to rewatch it, fearing it won't hold up...)

Still, those opening shots, at least, remain perfect: I can hear the sound of the objects in the box--(Hollywood-style moviemaking relies way too much on movie music instead of sound).

Some futuristic/ alternative world stuff is hard to write (read) without getting bogged down in description and can be far better on screen, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (or--this is debatable--but I prefer Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a movie) or Blade Runner:


I just saw the new Mad Max (Fury Road), and a book could be a better vehicle to convey the inner life of the characters, but you sure couldn't get better vehicles.

Charlize Theron and her rig

I want to think more about this, but I've got to write an index.

* *  * Can you think of a movie that is better than the book?

Sunday, May 24, 2015

I washed my hair so I could Skype.

Skype 

Well, darn. 
I was going to Skype for the first time ever this morning, with a dear old friend who relies on Skype--I even washed my hair last night so I would look presentable--but due to time confusion, the call's not happening today.

I've always dreaded Skype––it mixes two things I'm nervous about: the phone + being presentable at home––and I'd geared myself up to do it, so I feel let down and am sorry to miss catching up with my friend. 

But since I dreaded it, I'm also a little relieved.

Bluing 

Speaking of hair, if you've got yellows in your grays, as I do, here's an old trick:
rinse with bluing.


After spending $20 on shampoo + conditioner that didn't do much (except clean my hair), I bought a $2.99 bottle of Mrs. Stewart's Bluing in the laundry section of the grocery store
--it's for whitening whites (made from a very fine blue iron powder, bluing is gentler on fabrics than bleach)--
added a few drops to a clean milk carton of water, and after 4 rinses, the blue had color-righted most of the yellow. 

It darkens the remaining dark hair too, but if you use too much, it also turns it blue.

Pencils

Speaking of old fashioned things, here's a funny mention of pencils in Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, which I finished last night. He's talking about going to high school (in the early '60s):
"I brought home good grades at first. They were a fraud––I copied other kids' homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn't bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C's instead of A's, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself.

All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much."

I see there's a movie of the book, but I'm not particularly interested. It's not the story that makes this book good, it's the words.

And now me and my clean hair are off the the Farmers Market.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Bag, Boy, Begonia, Bocadillo, Bike

1. In my garbage research, these embroidered plastic bags from the corner store are the coolest things yet. Thanks, bink, for the link!

From "El Barrio Bodega"(series), 2013, by artist Nicoletta Darita de la Brown.


2. I reluctantly picked up Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life from a Little Free Library box. Reluctant because I've already read so many memoirs of hard childhoods; but I'd heard many times that it was good. And it was free. So...

OMG, is it ever good!  An example, about TW going to his first confession in the Catholic Church. Earlier he has written, "I was subject to fits of feeling myself unworthy, somehow deeply at fault."

Preparing what to say to the priest...
"I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line."

I had to stop after reading that and just sit there. And the book's full of that sort of thing--all in simple ("simple") English. 

3. There'll be no new apartment:
the apt. management company stuck to their requirements that we each qualify separately; that is, that we each make 3 x the entire rent. 

Not all companies are so stringent, but many are. We'll just stay here for now.
 
I'm a little relieved: my resentment had flared up at the building owners' greed and inflexibility. As much as I worry about my capacity for resentment, it just recently occurred to me it is on my side, even if it's annoying, and it can be a trustworthy indicator of the likelihood of future happiness. 

Our landlords here are not greedy: 
they're pals of mine from the hippie collective restaurant I worked at when I was 19, and it's only because they rent out part of this house that they can afford to own it and live here themselves. 

They charge us as little as they can. 
Alas, this means they don't put any $$ into fixing the place up, but I talked to them yesterday and said that at least the windows must be glazed this summer, or the panes are going to fall out, and they agreed.

4. Then I went to the nearby K-Mart and bought two hanging baskets of bright begonias for the little porch, and I set up my two sand chairs out there.
I usually do that as soon as it's warm enough, but I hadn't this year. When you stop putting energy into a place, it gets grim.

Now we have another room in the nice weather. 
I'm going to go to the nearby Mexican panaderia and buy little loaves, and Mz is going to pick up tuna fish canned in olive oil from the co-op, and we'll sit there and eat Camino-style bocadillos (sandwiches on long, not sliced, bread).

Me and E. eating bocadillos in Spain (2011), by bink, from her blog post "Bocadillos... again" >

I feel better, too, because the next-door neighbors have been quiet after one loud night. 
The caretaker next door told me they'd gotten a warning. If they're sane enough to quiet down in response, they aren't like the previous neighbors who were barking mad. 
Fingers crossed. 

So, I'm feeling OK about staying here. It'd be nice to have a quiet, well-kept up place, but this is not bad, and maybe if I get a full-time job we'll look again. 
Until then, I'm going to make the best of what it is.

5. And finally I took my bike in for an overdue overhaul and some replacement parts, including a whole new drive train.

The young woman who took my order said, "You're going to have a new bike!" 
For $200.
Hallelujah. 

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Apply Myself

^ From Street Art on Melrose
I applied for a job yesterday.

I haven't really been looking for work, but I guess apartment hunting triggered some internal Search Mode.

I went online and checked the county's job site, and there was a communications job that actually sounds like fun--writing weekly newsletters, designing fliers and invitations, stuff like that, for Public Works.

Public Works?
That's Bikes & Garbage!
My heroes.


No doubt Public Works is as dysfunctional as any other gov't department, but at least they're not advertising crap.

[I walked into Target the other day and almost had an out-of-body experience: the entire contents of the store appeared to me as garbage. And within a few weeks, that is where most of it will be--in the garbage.

Hey, I just searched "bikes & garbage" and see that in in Northampton, MA, you can hire Pedal People >
to haul your trash, all year round.]  

Anyway, the salary scale starts at $38,000––normal for some, but riches to me. 
(Even if I'd worked in Activities full-time, it'd have paid only $22,000.)

The county job only requires a few years of writing/editing experience, so I imagine there'll be lots of other applicants?
I'm not getting my hopes up high, but it's encouraging to apply for something I'd kinda like to do.

It was even fun to apply: 
I could list lots of the wandery, free things I've done, such as photographing a community garden throughout 2013 for my neighborhood's annual calendar.

And I wouldn't mind working full time, I don't think.

I've already done a lot of stuff that's best done when one's knees are young, inspired (when I was fifteen) by Cary Grant's speech in Holiday:

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

WHATCHA THINKIN BOUT, SULU?







____________________________________________

Thanks to Julia for putting me onto Vintage Chinese Posters of Babies in Space.
One has a version of the toy rocket I'd posted yesterday, and the perfect pose for a "WHATCHA THINKIN BOUT" meme too.

Btw, Star Trek's Sulu is Japanese, not Chinese, but by the 23rd century Earthkind is one big happy family.

Monday, May 18, 2015

From My Desktop


I spent the weekend apartment hunting, which is time consuming and nerve wracking--rental companies want you to earn 3x the rent, which of course I don't, but I also have zero ($0) debt and no car (so no car expenses)--will they take that into account?

We shall see...

Meanwhile, I've neglected the book proposal I'd hoped to have done today--I'm going to see if I can crank it out now.

So for today's blog, I'm just going to put in three pictures I've had on my desktop for a while.

1. I'd left Glenda Jackson off my round up of women who impressed me in the 70s---she definitely was one. I learned most of my English history from her Elizabeth I (as well as The Six Wives of Henry VIII).

Maybe her most impressive role is her speech in parliament after Margaret Thatcher's death about MT's “heinous social, economic and spiritual damage”. 



2. Pronouns are the latest frontier in the gender/sex universe, right?

I love the way people are bending them, and I appreciate a little levity in my freedom fighters, like the academic blogger of Feminist Ryan Gosling.



3. L'astronave is Italian for "spaceship," you know; I'm always on the lookout for midcentury spaceship kitsch like this. 


Saturday, May 16, 2015

Time to go a-hunting?

I've always said I'd rather have time than money. And for most of my adult life, that choice has served me well: 
I've had tons of time for the things I love, like making art, blogging, reading, watching movies, going out for coffee with friends, volunteering, sleeping, and thinkin' about stuffs


But is this still what I want?
 

I don't know. At midlife, I feel that all that wandering around thinkin' has granted me powers that I could put to good use in some kind of work.
Work that pays decent money. 

I really don't know, though... I've never pursued money. But now I feel it would be nice and really useful to have some more of it.
Just lately, for instance, I've been thinking about moving somewhere nicer, since the slumlord of the house next door keeps renting to nocturnal people with anger issues. 

Also, my apt. is falling apart. I've lived here 13 years, and the landlords, who are lovely people and my pals, have repaired almost nothing. They don't repair their part of the house either, so it's not personal or anything.
But it would be such a treat to live with windows that aren't falling out of their casements!
Radiators that get hot!
Stoves that don't give off a mysterious gassy odor that the gas co. insists is safe!
Taps that don't drip!
A fridge that seals!
Etc.

But the thing is, my crummy little apt is insanely cheap. I'm almost embarrassed to say. ($475. For everything, even wi-fi and laundry. And I split that with  Marz. )

This is important because I've barely made any money in the past dozen years. Besides preferring time to money, I can see, looking back, that my life force was pretty low for a long time after my mother killed herself. (Huh.)
So, even supplementing my earnings with money I've inherited (thank you, relatives), I've hovered at or under the poverty line

The other night when the neighbors were yelling at each other, I thought, I don't want to live this way.

It scares me to think that way, though, because it really has worked so well for so long. But I looked online for apartments to rent--they mostly cost almost twice as much, but they look so nice. I'm actually going to look at one tomorrow. 
May as well look. 

I also looked at jobs. 
The ads mystify me though. 
Could I be "a cross-functional team leader fully capable of initiating, creating and executing global campaigns across multiple channels"?
Maybe? (I don't actually know what that means.)

So, I don't know, don't know, don't know...  

But it seems desire is pushing me toward change, one way or another...
Desire may be the root of suffering, in one sense, but in another sense, it's the fire that gets watery people like me to move.
__________________________________ 


 This is more what I think of when I think of going to get work:

Bye, baby bunting,
Father's gone a-hunting,
Mother's gone a-milking,
Sister's gone a-silking,
Brother's gone to buy a skin
To wrap the baby bunting in.
 




Friday, May 15, 2015

Garbage Art: Dogs and Beachcombers

Thank goodness---I woke up this morning eager to get going on the proposal. Sometimes (but not always) it goes this way: just when I feel most mired in procrastination, my energy pops back up.

Here are a couple neat pieces of art about garbage:


I. I like this one because of the rag-picker's dogs, who, unlike the woman, look like they're in good health. I suppose they gets lots of juicy garbage to eat?


"Arrested Rag-Pickers in City Hall Park, New York, sketched by C.G. Bush", Harper's Weekly,  July 6, 1867
---from the Library of Congress


II. These bits of rulers cast up by the sea are as beautiful in their way as beach glass.

Above: "28 Objects that Measured the World," by artist Steve McPherson

From the Anchorage Museum's exhibit "Gyre: The Plastic Ocean":

"Steve...combines and arranges found objects from his local coast, with a summary text that gives a potential identity and history to the collated flotsam and jetsam." 

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Parrots & Procrastination

Do you save images and then forget where you found them?

I try to keep track, but I don't remember where this little budgie-type parrot with its fetching cap came from, but it makes me smile.
Which I need: 
working at home again, I'm feeling a bit anxious. More accurately, I'm feeling a bit anxious about not working.
That is, I'm supposed to be putting together the book proposal-outline, and I am... but at glacial speed.

On top of feeling anxious about it, I'm also feeling disappointed that I'm feeling that way, so it's one of those emotional traffic jams when one emotion stalls and others pile into it (dismay, chagrin, etc.).

I do miss having to go somewhere to attend to work that must be done right then and there. But though it's hard, I'm 100% glad to be back writing at home, and I don't regret leaving health care at all. (I know I could go back to it, but when I think of it, I cringe.)
It's just that I'd hoped my powers of procrastination had magically dried up and blown away while I was gone, and that's not the case.

Oh, well. I know I'm not alone, which is kind of cheering. Procrastination is totally common, and I've only got a middling case of it, in fact, since while it feels crummy, it's never so strong that I don't eventually get rolling, and that feels great. 
I just wish I could do it with less resistance.

At least I can't stall by watching any more Sherlock, because I have now rewatched all nine episodes (in three days), and there won't be any more until next spring. (Whew.)

Sherlock is a parrot: a clever bird that becomes a menace if it's bored.

Though I'm not a Sherlock type––I'm OK being bored (or, rather, I'm not bored if I have nothing to do), I become a menace if I'm overworked––the show cheers me up because the characters are full of anxiety about work. 

And it's another love story based on work, which I enjoy. 
(It was smart of the show's creators to make John's new wife part of his (and Sherlock's) work, and not just a domestic/sex partner.)

I like how John & Sherlock sit around together a lot. Here's another sitting picture--(fuzzy 'cause I screencapped it off Netflix).


And now I am going to sit (-up straight) and stare at my proposal, and probably even grind out a line or two.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Cops on Cars, Detectives in Chairs

Give cops a car, and they will perch on it, irrespective of gender.

 
The first female cop-buddy show, Cagney and Lacey ^ (1981–1988), which I liked at the time but have never watched since. 
___________________________
This week I'm rewatching the BBC Sherlock, which is even better on second viewing. Sherlock & Watson don't have a car, but there's lots of good perching (and sitting and slouching and lying around). 


A post on on S & W and their chairs: "A Study in Chairs".

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Some Women in Seventies Film, Part I

I've been thinking about what it was like growing up female, from nine years old to nineteen, in the Seventies, and what my influences were.  So here I'm only listing films I actually saw in that decade, plus one on either end, that made a big impact on me. I was a little surprised at what a long list it is.  

1969: Kim Darby, True Grit (w/ John Wayne)
"She reminds me of me," Wayne's character says.

1971: Ruth Gordon, Harold and Maude (w/ Bud Cort)
I wanted to grow up to be like Maude. At some point I realized I sort of have grown along those lines. I mean, I also wanted to grow up to be cool and remote, but instead I've become much more comfortable making an ass of myself. A much better direction for me.
 
This movie was so important to me in high school that it was only when Marz pointed out the movie's flaws a few years ago that I even saw them. They are many. I still don't care.

1971: Elaine May, A New Leaf (dir. Elaine May) (w/ Walter Matthau)
I don't know why this movie isn't more famous, Elaine May is such a comic genius. I also loved her famous flop Ishtar (1987), after which she never directed again. The New Yorker's film critic Brody calls this "one of the great tragedies of cinema history, comparable in significance to the premature end of the directorial career of Erich von Stroheim and the scattering of Orson Welles’s. "


1972: Liza Minelli, Cabaret 

What a ditz. But all is forgiven by her final performance of "Cabaret". (Hm, kinda like the ending of  A Star Is Born.)

1972: Diane Keaton, Play It Again Sam
"Linda" is similar to Keaton's Annie Hall character, who I didn't like (talk about a ditz), but Linda and the Allen/Allan character in Play It Again are friends (mostly), not lovers, and their relationship is based on their compassionate support of each other's neuroses.  

A similar humorous exchange about meds ("Have you ever had lithium and tomato juice?") will show up again in Silver Linings Playbook (2012).


1973: Barbra Streisand, The Way We Were
A bad movie, but in one amazing scene, Katie (Barbara Streisand) defends Eleanor Roosevelt even at the expense of her marriage to the Robert Redford character.


1974: Cicely Tyson, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
1976: Tatum O'Neal, The Bad News Bears (w/ Walter Matthau)
1976, Sissie Spacek, Carrie
This poster is the other side of the usual image of Carrie covered in blood. I felt just like this in high school. When I hear of violence perpetrated by people who feel powerless, I think of how satisfied I felt when Carrie burned down the school gym.


1977: Jody Foster, Taxi Driver (w/ Robert DeNiro)



1978: Veronica Cartwright, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (w/ Donald Sutherland)

Brooke Adams is the main heroine in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I love Cartwright: she shows how utterly terrifying the situation is, but manages to come through anyway (almost).

1979: Veronica Cartwright & Sigourney Weaver, Alien
1979: Sally Field, Norma Rae (w/
Ron Leibman)

Besides telling a great story, Norma Rae is a rare female/male example of the Romance of Working Together: 
an attraction built on the closeness and respect that comes from sharing meaningful work. When the characters are male/female, this usually resolves itself in sex. 

The tension of it not being resolved is a source of slash: Kirk/Spock, Starsky/Hutch, Sherlock/John... Is it "slash" if it's male/female, like Mulder/Scully?
Norma Rae is one of the few fictional instances of a male/female attraction ending with nothing more than a handshake.

1979: Judy Davis, My Brilliant Career (Australia, dir. Gillian Armstrong)










I was disappointed to rewatch My Brilliant Career--it's pretty preachy and dated. But it was shocking at the time that the character chooses a life of writing over the handsome Sam Neill.

1980: Gena Rowlands, Gloria
Gloria's shooting down mobsters to defend this kid who gets left on her doorstep, but she's no sentimental mother.
_______________

I see I've left out Faye Dunaway, Ellen Burstyn, Gilda Radner, Madeline Kahn, etc. etc. Maybe I'll have to put together a Part II.
GLENDA JACKSON!