height of the craft

26 May, 2026

Somewhat of an addendum to what I like in a person.

Today at work I'm listening to Nina Simone's Montreux Years. Her performances in Montreal, particularly the one in 1976, are widely regarded as some of the greatest jazz performances of all time. They're loaded with emotional highs and lows, passion and pain that can only stem from a life as difficult yet fantastic as hers. I find myself listening to albums while I work for basically the entire day, front to back, a big change from my usual habits of single songs and playlists. I think taking in music in it's proper form, so to speak, makes me feel a little more like I'm an active part of it rather than just picking and choosing what I like from the periphery. Having a little art in my day has been my saving grace of the summer so far.

Last night, I was watching the Habs at Hurricanes game while on the phone chatting away, and it clicked a little for me why I love watching certain sports so much when every other interest of mine isn't related in the slightest (besides the obvious point that it's an inherited interest from my dad), which lead to a greater dissection of what I like in, well, anything.

I'm not picky at all about my media, at least genre-wise. Here's a few factors that I find are necessary across all of the media I consume, from the Habs game last night (horrible, lost in overtime..), to the Giselle ballet¹, to the monstrous pile of albums I've listened to in the last few weeks:

• Passion and honesty. You can tell. This is absolutely not to make sweeping statements of the current state of pop affairs, but you can definitely tell when an album was made with the 8-vinyl-variant rollout in mind versus one made for the purpose of actually telling a story.
• Excellence, in terms of skill. This one I find goes for literally anything. It's why I find baseball, to a slightly lesser extent hockey, and theatrical arts (including dance ie. ballet) fascinating. It takes an entire life of intense training and dedication to reach the world stage of whatever performing skill someone practices. I'm lumping major league sports in as performing skills because it's undeniable that those games are half shows and half actual sport. I think what excites me most about this is the factor that I'm watching something that I definitely could never do, let alone 95% of the population. The Olympic factor. How lucky is it that we all have the chance to see people excel on a worldwide stage?
• Audacity. I've likened this factor, at least musically, to the thrill of not being able to guess how a song will progress second by second. I've grown bored of the cliches of the famous 4 pop chords, of predicting the twists and turns of a story by the 3rd minute. I need an element of surprise, and few are brave enough to create things that achieve that for me.

Here's what I get extra thrilled at:

• Mess. I love mess, although not in the Marie Kondo way. A live recording with redos, cursing and errors. Fights on the playing field. A swing or two, in the tone of a song or bend of a knuckle.
• Intimacy. I love knowing just a little too much about the person I'm paying attention to. If something hooks me deep enough, I often go down interview and review rabbit holes for every morsel of extra info I can find. It's already exciting when you can decipher an artist's story pretty clearly through the source media, even more so when they open themselves to interpretation and further discussion after the fact.

The reason why I'm calling this an addendum to my previous post is that I think these factors could just as well apply to people as they do art. It's undeniable that those with the traits that I'm listing off, especially the mess, also tend to be artists. Funny how things are cyclical like that. If I had to limit it to one sentence, perhaps it would be that I'm looking for the comprehensive experience. In art, in life.

Those are my boredom-induced work ramblings for the day!

#internet journal