Eclecticism

Yesterday I downloaded songs by The Smiths, 50 Cent, The White Stripes, and country singer Melinda Lambert. I enjoy decadent coffee, particularly from my Italian experiences, but I'm okay subsisting on truck stop swill. And I love good cinema while still keeping a warm place in my heart for Cutthroat Island.

My tastes are all over the map, both in variety and quality. I get in a medieval headspace by listening to opera, despite having plenty of actual medieval music at hand. I also love contemporary music, and in a nation of high culture my Italian friends laugh at my tastes in local pop.

I'm an easy audience, and I tend to judge a work of art by seeing the goal more than the result. I like to laugh, and tend to do so at anything that doesn't actively insult me (and sometimes then, too). I have a vivid imagination, and find it easy to construct the fourth wall.

All this said, I do have a short attention span. I like to go to movie theaters and plays because they force me to watch the entire show, otherwise I'm on the phone or out the door after about 20 minutes. I leave a lot of books unfinished, putting them down and simply never picking them back up. In nonfiction this is a particular problem: I feel that most nonfiction books would make better essays, and that after the first third or so they get repetitive and wasteful of my time. In fiction I have a similar problem with certain authors, where I want to know the story but not the details, and I find that reading every second or third page can give me all the spoilers I could want without bogging me down. George RR Martin, I'm talking to you.

In other words, I'm all over the map. Although I have varied tastes, I do still have standards. They're just not always the ones that people expect.