Transitions

I'm sure by that title you're thinking this is one of those serious "I'm going through a life-changing event" posts. Well it isn't and I'm not.

By transitions i mean moving from one thing to another, a trick you need to learn when you're a DJ or your show will suck. So I try not to jar people by bridging two wildly different pieces of music. I will definitely switch from country to country or style to style (following, say a Brazilian samba with a warm bit of French jazz) but I try not to follow a high-energy dance track with, for example, an Irish war ballad. I will go from uptempo to midtempo, but not uptempo to downtempo. It's just a quirk of mine.

And I appreciate it when others who are in the position of programming transitions also do the same. Which was why I was amused to see the TCM schedule for tonight. They're in the process of showing five movies by Japanese master director, Akira Kurosawa. The last film will be Donzoko (English title The Lower Depths). The film is based on a story by Maxim Gorky. When you combine a director as artistically serious as Kurosawa and a writer as depressing as Gorky, you know you've got something of a dark masterpiece on your hands. Not a lot of laughs. It's apparently about a group of thieves and prostitutes living in squalor in a flop house, reflecting on the miseries that brought them there.

And then they're following this particular bit of Japanese misery with Meet the People, a lighthearted musical starring Lucille Ball and Dick Powell.

How in the world do you go from Kurosowa to Lucille Ball? That is one seriously odd transition.