Depending on the subject, and my (lack of) interest in it, I spent whole timetables of my schooldays illustrating classroom textbooks with ink-stained superheroes wrestling parallelograms, isosceles triangles, and the redundant gerund. I considered myself as a fraternal pen-pal to Nigel Molesworth of the Lower Third, filling in the gaps of my education the teachers seemed determined to leave out.

Some of these doodles are wonderful, others less so. But where I’ve always thought of the abandoned doodle as something to be drawn and then left for another generation to discover, erase, amend, and (hopefully) enjoy, today’s doodles are preserved by smart ‘phone and shared on-line. Personally, I prefer the anonymity, transience, and even the surprise of finding smudged, thumbnail sketches carefully hidden in the pages of old textbooks.
 

 

 
More textbook drawings, after the jump…
 
Via hamusoku
 

 
Keiko Fuji, famed Japanese singer of sentimental folk (“enka”) songs, threw herself off her Tokyo apartment building in an apparent suicide yesterday morning. Fuji, the mother of J-pop superstar Hikaru Utada, was thought of as the Joan Baez of Japan and was famous for playing a white guitar.

From Japan Daily Press:

It was around 7AM when the body of Fuji was found on the street where she lived. She was living with a male friend, who claimed to be sleeping at the time of incident. Only a pair of slippers was left on the railing of her apartment’s balcony. As no suicide note was left, the police haven’t ruled out the possibility of foul play and are still making investigations.

The 62-year old Keiko Fuji, whose real name was Junko Utada, was a famous enka singer and actress in the 1970s. She made her singing debut in 1969 and had her debut album titled Shinjuku no Onna (“Woman in Shinjuku”) a year later. The album spent 20 weeks at the Oricon chart. Fuji, a native of Iwate Prefecture, ended her singing career in 1979 and went to the United States, where she lived for a time. She gave birth to her only child, Hikaru, in 1983 in New York.

Keiko Fuji’s biggest hit was “Keiko no Yume wa Yoru Hiraku” (“Keiko’s dreams blossom at night”). It’s about a prostitute who dreams of a better life while she services her clients.
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!

 
In 1976 Scott Jacobs and Valjean McLenighan decided to do a video documentary of life in Las Vegas, and the resultant 29-minute movie was made with the title The Las Vegas Tapes. To accomplish their goal they chose the simplest strategy imaginable—they simply went around with a video camera and asked people questions.

And what a fruitful idea that would prove to be! The resultant slice-of-life footage is pretty darn engrossing. A guy with a huge cigar wins at a slot machine, and as he scoops up his quarters predictably credits the video crew with bringing him good luck. But the secret lies elsewhere: “I believe that I’m going to win, so I’m going to do it! ... Thought creates reality. Let’s do it again!” Exactly! Because Vegas is all about mind over matter. He invented “The Secret” you might say.

Says one woman, in what might serve as a permanent slogan for Las Vegas, “I came in a Cadillac, and now I’m going back on the Greyhound Bus.” You get a glimpse of some Hare Krishnas (where have they all gone?) and a young magician purveying his trade for anyone who’ll watch—he calls magic “a con game.” A paramedic talks about a woman he just picked up, saying that she was suffering from “casino syndrome”—people forget to sleep, eat, take their meds and so they collapse.

A middle-aged woman on the street talks of working with Ann-Margret at The Dunes before she was famous, and sending her to George Burns to boost her career, as he had previously done with Bobby Darin.

There are no great revelations herein, merely a pungent documentation of Fremont Street before it became the “other” strip in Las Vegas, which today is dominated by Caesar’s Palace and the Luxor and that huge neon Paris balloon.
 
Watch the video after the jump…

 
I was thrilled to see Allan Sheahen’s important essay on the BIG idea of the “Basic Income Guarantee” concept make it to the front page of Huffington Post recently, and I am pleased to be able to share it here with Allan’s blessing. I’ve long been a fan of the “Basic Income Guarantee” concept (which I was introduced to by Robert Anton Wilson) and this is as succinct an explanation of it as I have read anywhere. No surprise that it was shared so many times by Huffington Post readers.

That’s really saying somethin’, but I’ll let Allan explain…

Jobs Are Not the Answer

The current unemployment rate of 7.5 percent means close to 20 million Americans remain unemployed or underemployed.

Nobody states the obvious truth: that the marketplace has changed and there will never again be enough jobs for everyone who wants one—no matter who is in the White House or in Congress.

Fifty years ago, economists predicted that automation and technology would displace thousands of workers a year. Now we even have robots doing human work.

Job losses will only get worse as the 21st century progresses. Global capital will continue to move jobs to places on the planet that have the lowest labor costs. Technology will continue to improve, eliminating countless jobs.

There is no evidence to back up the claim that we can create jobs for everyone who wants one. To rely on jobs and economic growth does not work. We have to get rid of the myth that “welfare-to-work” will solve the problems of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness.

“Work” and jobs are not the answer to ending poverty. This has been the hardest concept for us to understand. It’s the hardest concept to sell to citizens and policy makers. To end poverty and to achieve true economic freedom, we need to break the link between work and income.

Job creation is a completely wrong approach because the world doesn’t need everyone to have a job in order to produce what is needed for us to live a decent, comfortable life.

We need to re-think the whole concept of having a job.

When we say we need more jobs, what we really mean is we need is more money to live on.
 

 
Basic Income Guarantee

One answer is to establish a basic income guarantee (BIG), enough at least to get by on—just above the poverty level—for everyone. Each of us could then try to find work to earn more.

A basic income would provide economic freedom and income security to everyone. We’d have the freedom to work less if we wanted to, or work the same amount and save or spend that money.

It would provide a direct stimulus to the economy, which would help create more jobs.

In 1972, Democratic presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern knew the economy was changing. He proposed a $1000 annual “demogrant” for every American. The grant would act as a kind of cushion against the loss of a job or other misfortune.

We could pay for a Basic Income Guarantee by eliminating most of the 20th-century programs like unemployment insurance, welfare, Social Security, Section 8 housing, etc., and by having the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.

Billionaire Warren Buffett admits he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Mitt Romney said he paid only 13.9 percent in federal income tax in 2010, despite earning $22 million. Average-income Americans pay about 20 percent.

A BIG would be cheaper than a jobs program. President Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan promised to create 3 to 4 million jobs at a cost of $862 billion. That’s over $200,000 per job.

Such a basic income would recognize that with productivity as high as it is today, too many workers get in each other’s way. Those who don’t have to work shouldn’t be required to do so. Instead, they can create, do volunteer service, or work at low-paying jobs which are still socially needed, such as teaching or the arts.

Think of it as the opposite of trickle-down economics, where we give huge tax breaks to the rich in the false hope that something will trickle down to the rest of us.
 

Try telling a conservative blow-hard that their hero Milton Friedman was the architect of the most successful social welfare program in US history and they’ll often simply refuse to believe you! When offered proof, it seems to infuriate them.

Not a New Idea

Basic income is not a new idea. It’s been debated among policymakers in several nations since the 1970s. Economist Milton Friedman said: “We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash—a negative income tax.”

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “I am convinced that the simplest solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a guaranteed income.”

BIG’s most recent American advocate is welfare critic Charles Murray. In his book: In Our Hands, Murray agrees with Friedman and King, and proposes a $10,000 yearly grant paid to every adult. Murray and others argue it would save money. There would be no bureaucracy to support and no red tape to manage.

Opponents claim we shouldn’t pay people not to work. But the duty to pursue work is based on the mistaken assumption that there is work to be had.

In the post-industrial age, the USA will provide ever fewer opportunities for low-skilled workers. Policies in pursuit of full employment make no sense.
 

 
Basic Income Can Work

In 1982, the state of Alaska began distributing money from state oil revenues to every resident. The Alaska Permanent Fund gives about $1000 to $2000 each year to every man, woman, and child in the state. In 2012, the amount fell to $878. There are no work requirements. The grant has reduced poverty and the inequality of income in Alaska.

A 10-year, 7800-family, U.S. government test of a basic income in the 1970s found that most people would continue to work, even when their incomes were guaranteed. A test in Manitoba, Canada produced similar results.

In 2005, Brazil created a basic income for the most needy. When fully implemented, the plan will ensure that all Brazilians, regardless of their origin, race, sex, age, social or economic status, will have a monetary income enough to meet their basic needs.

A two-year, basic income pilot program just concluded in Otjivero, Namibia. Each of 930 villagers received 1000 Namibian dollars (US$12.40) each month. Malnutritition rates of children under five fell from 42 percent to zero. Droupout rates at the school fell from 40 percent to almost zero. It led to an increase in small businesses.

Most Americans are six months from poverty. Middle-class people who worked all their lives, then lost their jobs and saw their unemployment benefits expire, are now sleeping in parks and under bridges.

America hasn’t seen full employment in decades. Even a full-time job at the minimum wage can’t lift a family of three from poverty. Millions of Americans—children, the aged, the disabled—are unable to work.

A basic income guarantee would be like an insurance policy. It would give each of us the assurance that, no matter what happened, we and our families wouldn’t starve.
 

 
This has been a guest editorial courtesy of Allan Sheahen, committee member of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG) and author of the recently published book Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security .

Below, Allan Sheahen discusses the guaranteed income bill with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television’s Bottom Line.

 
Dudes who use public toilets with poor aim who live in the Chinese city of Shenzen could face fines upwards of 100 yuan ($16) by authorities if they, er, miss their mark.

According to Australia Network News, “Draft regulations reportedly don’t specify a minimum quantity of spillage required to be classed as a violation.”

Obviously this decision has been met with criticism by folks who don’t aim to please:

- “A number of new civil servant positions will be created. There will be a supervisor behind every urinating person to see whether the pee is straight.”

“Very good measures. I expect they can create 20 jobs on average for every public toilet.”

I, for one, am okay with this. I’d totally hire one of these “pee supervisors” to monitor my hubby.

Via Arbroath

 
Pioneering female rocker Suzi Quatro was on tour in the U.S. in 1974 when the call came.

She was touring to promote Suzi Quatro, her debut album for Mickie Most’s RAK Records in the U.K., which had been produced by the unparalleled, fabulous, evil-genius songwriting team of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn the year before. The album contained the well crafted Chinnichap compositions “48 Crash,” “Primitive Love,” and “Can the Can” but also included a cover of “All Shook Up,” chosen as the third single. Quatro had loved and emulated Elvis Presley – strikingly in her trademark black leather – since seeing him on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 when she was six years old. From that moment, unlike other little girls who went nuts upon seeing him for the first time, she wanted to be Elvis.

She was in a Memphis hotel room when she received a call from Elvis’ “people.” And, bless her heart, she had a panic attack. Talk about being “all shook up”!

Suzi said in a BBC interview this year:

I was on tour in Memphis and he had heard my version of “All Shook Up.” His people got in touch with me in the hotel room. Then he came on the line [open-mouthed shock] and he invited me to Graceland. He said, “Your version is the best since my own. How would you like to come to Graceland?” And I said I was very busy, no thank you.

The situation was, as BBC producer Mark Hagen later described it, complicated. Elvis was once again a bachelor, but Suzi was already romantically involved with her guitarist and songwriting partner, Len Tuckey (Surely a one-time pass could have been granted so that Suzi could hang out with the King?!)

Suzi discovered that she had been given the part of Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days on the day that Elvis died, August 16, 1977. She was devastated that she had turned down his invitation and would never have another chance to meet him. The regret has haunted her ever since.

During her memorable seven-episode stint on Happy Days from 1977 to 1979, Suzi sang “All Shook Up” and “Heartbreak Hotel” on the show, wearing a $2000 fawn jumpsuit made by Ukrainian “rodeo tailor” to the stars (including Hank Williams, Porter Wagoner, Gram Parsons, and Elvis), Nuta Kotlyarenko, a.k.a. “Nudie” Cohn. Her trademark jumpsuits were actually Mickie Mosts’s idea, not a tribute to Elvis.

[Mickie] came up with the jumpsuit idea, which I thought was a great idea. I wanted leather, without a doubt… I swear to God, I had no idea it was going to be sexy… It didn’t occur to me. I remember saying to him, “Oh, that’s really sensible. I can jump around and nothing will come out and I don’t have to iron it.” And then when I saw the pictures back, I went, “Ohhhhh.”

In 2009 Suzi finally made it to Graceland, when Mark Hagen made the documentary Suzi Quatro’s Elvis for BBC Radio 2. Suzi visited Elvis’ birthplace, all of his homes, talked to many of his childhood friends, and stopped in at Sun Studios on Union Ave in Memphis. It was already an emotional experience before she even reached the front gate of Graceland.

Suzi said:

I was in tears many times as I traced the footsteps of Elvis Presley who was, and is, the reason I do what I do.

She added her name to the stone wall filled with fans’ tributes running along the front of Graceland, thirty-five years late.

Suzi Quatro outside Graceland, below:

 
After the jump ‘Leather Tuscadaro’ gets her Elvis on…

 
In 2009, as part of its “Smooth Originals” campaign, Belgian beer purveyor Stella Artois released three short “classic French movies” that had secretly served as the inspiration for the 1988 classic Die Hard (or actually 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance), the 2002 hip-hop drama film 8 Mile, and the Bush-era TV series 24, respectively.

The tagline is “The films Hollywood didn’t want you to see.” The idea’s supposed to be that all good things were really French first—or Belgian! We aren’t really sure. The movies are a lot of fun though, and have been executed brilliantly, in the manner of dudes like Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and so on. It’s quite a bit as if the people behind Italian Spiderman had decided to turn their attention to skewering Godard’s Breathless (although perhaps after taking some Quaaludes).

8 Mile is transformed into 8 Kilomètres (purportedly une Séléction Officielle at the 1961 Côte d’Azur Film Festival), but instead of a bunch of Detroit homeys swapping rhymes, it’s two affected French beatnik types playing the dozens in a smoky Monte Carlo jazz bistro. The best of the bunch might be Vingt-Quatre Heures (Séléction Officielle, 1964 Côte d’Azur Film Festival), in which the Jack Bauer substitute is a sleepy fellow named Jacques who, informed that “millions of people are going to die” within 24 hours, prefers to peruse Camus’ L’Étranger in his bathrobe rather than save them, because after all, “sauvez le monde, c’est tellement ... bourgeois” (”... saving the world, it’s so ... bourgeois”).

In Dial Hard (Séléction Officielle at the 1963 Festival de Monte Carlo), a foxy chick named “Simone” leads suave “Inspector MeQlain” all over town with telephoned riddles in a deadly game of “Simone Says” (this is the plot of Die Hard with a Vengeance), but the ever-capable MeQlain, who can finish both a novel and a chess game within the same two minutes, decides to make a play for her instead. 
 

 
The full videos and posters for Vingt-Quatre Heures and 8 Kilomètres after the jump…

 
Bilbo’s Pizza in Kalamazoo, Michigan is a small locally-owned pizzeria that has somehow managed to avoid being sued by the Tolkien estate for its use of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit character names. Even their logo is the tree that was inside the pavilion at Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, misidentified on their website as “the singular and unusual (to Hobbits) existence of the Mallorn tree in Hobbiton that became the centerpiece for the grand birthday party that Bilbo threw for himself that signaled the beginning of the adventure of the War of the Ring.” (Mallorn trees grew in Lothlórien.) The business was started in 1976 by two friends and Tolkien fans, John Hindman and Charlie Konett. They chose the name Bilbo’s “because of the enduring nature of the character by that name.” 

The generosity of diversity in Tolkien’s character development allowed us to have a lot of fun with this world. The richness endemic to fantasy characters presented as they were as part of a history gives rise to to fleeting notions that such beings might well have preceded us here and that flight is buttressed from time to time by references in the work. Hobbits, for example, are said to be able to pass unnoticed by most if they wished to and elves would probably have been considered to be some half remembered day dream if any of us had happened upon them unawares. So we feel remotely tied to them and their world. In the early years there were groups of people, whether Tolkien Society or Society for Creative Anachronism members who engaged us in debates about our depictions of characters. 

It was pointed out by one that Hobbits did not have facial hair and that our rendition of Bilbo was therefore inaccurate. Our response was that there was a remote division of Hobbits, the Stoors, who indeed did sometimes grow facial hair and that Bilbo was certainly a descendant of this line. There was a group of people who had developed their own costumes with elaborate masks and accouterments who, upon arrangement, would visit our dining room and display themselves in full regalia. Patrons of Bilbo’s were treated to fairy-like creatures crouching next to their table as if avoiding some greater threat from something otherwise unseen by ordinary men and women. Before anyone could gather themselves enough to break the spell, the visitors were gone.

There is an “Elven Favorite” pizza (pepperoni, mushroom, ham and green pepper) on the menu, but the list of sandwiches has the most Tolkien references:  The choice of “Master Sam,” “The Old Guy lived 130 years and he NEVER tasted anything this good!,” “It took 13 strong young dwarves to carry this,” “The Elves of the world recommend,” “Brought forth on the ships of the ancient sea king,” and “Old Fatty, whose wise nose led him here.”

Dennis Miller was so bummed about Obama winning his first term that the day following the election, Miller restricted listeners’ calls on his radio show to the subject of sandwiches. Some weird guy from Michigan called in and mentioned the “Fatty Lumpkin” from Bilbo’s but would not answer the simple question of what was on the sandwich (sliced breast of turkey, choice roast beef, Monterrey jack cheese, shredded lettuce, fresh tomato and mayo on seven-grain bread), and Miller hung up on him. 

One of Bilbo’s locations now has its own craft beer as well, “Sledgehammer Wizard Wheat Dragon Red Ale.” I can hear the dwarven drinking songs now.
 

 
A peek inside Bilbo’s Pizza, below:

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
 
The video below is an excerpt from the 1970 documentary, Finally Got the News. The film tells the story of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, a radical organization of black auto workers from Detroit. Throughout the 60s, many working class black youth of Detroit began to radicalize in response to unemployment, police brutality and underfunded schools and housing. Culminating in the violent 1967 Detroit Riot, the growing civil unrest of black Detroit was quickly repressed by authorities (Mitt Romney’s father, Governor George W. Romney, sent in the Michigan National Guard, while LBJ sent in the US Army). The League was formed to fight back.

In his book, A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit, Michael Hamlin recounts his first-hand experiences as one of the leaders of the movement. Hamlin was one of the prime movers behind both the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

“As the League was organized, we realized that to organize people in the community we would need many communication tools.  Two major goals of the “Black Manifesto” were to raise money to establish black printing and film operations.  We had started a newspaper and Black Star Publishing was working on two books.  We were speaking in the community, writing articles and giving interviews to radical magazines but our audience was small.  John Watson was interested in making films that could be widely distributed.  We established Black Star Productions.

Obviously the group was media savvy. Like the Black Panthers, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were primarily informed by Marx and Lenin. Unlike the Panthers, the LRBW actually focused their militancy on labor, and seizing the means of production in the workplace. Their concerns were largely ignored by the United Auto Workers and its largely white leadership, in 1968 the LRBW organized a wildcat strike (a strike that doesn’t go through official union channels) alongside Polish women workers, to protest a speed increase on the assembly line. Most subsequent firings targeted black workers, though many were rehired.

The organization followed the trajectory of most radical groups on the American left—splits, splinters, rebirths, disbands, reformations, etc—and no longer exists, but with Detroit in perpetual free-fall, it’s damn near impossible to organize labor when there are no jobs. Regardless, they remain an inspiring moment in radical history and an insightful voice of radical ideology.
 

 
You can see Finally Got the News in its entirety here.
 

 
The great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu was an acknowledged master of the pillow shot. It sounds … a little dirty, doesn’t it? What could it mean? Can you guess? I would bet that if you don’t already know, you won’t guess what a pillow shot is or why it’s called that.
 

 
Recently I’ve become fascinated by them. It’s a technique that stands right at the border between narrative and non-narrative cinema. Being Ozu, of course, it’s in the quietest, most subtle way imaginable.
 

 
A “pillow shot” is a cutaway, for no obvious narrative reason, to a visual element, often a landscape or an empty room, that is held for a significant time (five or six seconds). It can be at the start of a scene or during a scene. At a minimum, in Ozu’s work, these pillow shots inject a sense of calm and serenity and contribute to the elegant and stately pacing of his movies. But they may mean quite a bit more.
 

 
The term “pillow shot” was coined in connection with Ozu’s work by the critic Noël Burch in his book To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema: “I call these images pillow-shots, proposing a loose analogy with the ‘pillow-word’ of classical poetry.” In a note, Burch cites Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner thus: “Makurakotoba or pillow-word: a conventional epithet or attribute for a word; it usually occupies a short, five-syllable line and modifies a word, usually the first, in the next line. Some pillow-words are unclear in meaning; those whose meanings are known function rhetorically to raise the tone and to some degree also function as images.” So (by analogy) a pillow shot serves as a visual “nonsense-syllable” or non sequitur that creates a different expectation for the next scene.
 

 
In researching pillow shots, I found myself asking what the difference is between a pillow shot and an establishing shot. Indeed, some observers have decided that the differences are elusive: Luke McGrath, in his “Bullet Review” of Late Spring, also the movie of Ozu’s most known for his use of pillow shots, even says that “many of Ozu’s quasi-establishing shots can also been seen as ‘pillow’ shots.”
 

 
As to the function of these pillow shots, Time Out (UK) wrote in their “bluffers’ guide” to the films of Ozu, “Far from diluting our emotional response, this intensifies it by giving us time to share the feelings unfolding on screen.” That’s one aspect.
 

 
But to get the potential complexity of the pillow shot, check out this bit of prose from the Wikipedia writeup on the most famous pillow shot of them all, the “vase scene” from Late Spring:

Abé Mark Nornes, in an essay entitled “The Riddle of the Vase: Ozu Yasujirō‘s Late Spring (1949),” observes: “Nothing in all of Ozu’s films has sparked such conflicting explanations; everyone seems compelled to weigh in on this scene, invoking it as a key example in their arguments.” Nornes speculates that the reason for this is the scene’s “emotional power and its unusual construction. The vase is clearly essential to the scene. The director not only shows it twice, but he lets both shots run for what would be an inordinate amount of time by the measure of most filmmakers.” To one commentator, the vase represents “stasis,” and is thus “an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent.” Another critic describes the vase and other Ozu “still lifes” as “containers for our emotions.” Yet another specifically disputes this interpretation, identifying the vase as “a non-narrative element wedged into the action.” A fourth scholar sees it as an instance of the filmmaker’s deliberate use of “false POV” (point-of-view), since Noriko is never shown actually looking at the vase the audience sees. A fifth asserts that the vase is “a classic feminine symbol.” And yet another suggests several alternative interpretations, including the vase as “a symbol of traditional Japanese culture,” and as an indicator of Noriko’s “sense that . . . [her] relationship with her father has been changed.”

Whew! That’s quite a lot of weight to be putting on a single static shot. But far from saying all of those “conflicting explanations” are wrong, I’m inclined to think they’re all pretty much correct. Are they mutually exclusive? I don’t see how.

The reference to such shots representing a “permanent, transcendent” element is interesting. The directorial gaze is a nonhuman one, somehow, isn’t it? As anything truly objective is? By holding such shots, Ozu emphasizes the irrelevance of human activity to nature.

Given that regular establishing shots do serve narrative purposes, what of the claim that the vase is “a non-narrative element”? Time here seems to be the key factor. A shot of that sort lasting a single second not only doesn’t alter the nature of the narrative, it can’t function as a pillow shot, i.e. do any thematic work at all. But the same shot held for ten minutes very much changes the nature of the narrative—it changes a narrative movie into an experimental movie, as Andy Warhol well knew.

I did a few searches on American instances of pillow shots, and I came up with basically nothing. But I did think of a clear example of a pillow shot in American cinema: the periodic umotivated cutaways to a lonely traffic light at night in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks:
 

 
(In Twin Peaks, at several junctures the camera holds the shot of the traffic light for no narrative reason.)

So help me out here: can anyone point out some American examples of pillow shots in American movies? They’ve got to be there somewhere.

But the main reason I wanted to write about pillow shots is that they’re pretty. So here: enjoy this becalming supercut of Ozu pillow shots.
 

 
(Thanks to the indispensable website ozu-san.com, from which come the images used in this post.)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Akira Kurosawa: The Music Video
Akira Kurosawa: The Bollywood dance number