I suppose it's a bit irreverent to bring this up especially since it's about two days before the seventeenth anniversary of his death, but Mr. Thunder's post on music and physical beauty below brings to mind the great (and notoriously difficult) conductor, Herbert von Karajan. Rather, I should say, his hair.

At the very tender age of twenty-one, I was exposed to his recording (immaculate, I might add) of Tchaikovsky 4, 5, and 6. Although the recording was amazing, I couldn't get my mind around his hair. Indeed, I am a petty, petty individual, but to be quite honest, it's really distracting -- like he's come straight off the set of some insane movie, and hasn't had time to change. Further research on my part revealed that his hair was not only amazingly distracting this particular recording, but was over top most of the time, and furthermore changed in style depending on mood. As far as I can tell, a partial catalogue of all of Mr. Karajan's hair styles can be seen here.

To a certain extent, I must admint, it makes sense -- the melodrama, the theater, and, I'll grant you, passion that is involved with the music Mr. Karajan's trying to portray somehow comes to form in his own person. Thus, we can also rantionalize away the various states of agony and ecstasy in which we find Leonard Bernstein (Lenny) on Sony's relatively recent "Bernstein Century". But, try as I might, I find myself oddly detached from the music at this level -- or, should I say, not as attached as either Herb or Lenny seem to be. To be honst, it is concieveable that this creates, for some, a sense of awe. But, I should also point out that for others, this is a source of distraction.

It goes the other way too that looks are used as an excuse for poor performances -- especially with CD's. I, of course, agree with Mr. Thunder that the music should be held separate from appearance, but in practice that it's quite a bit harder to separate the two. This is precisely the trap set by less than adequate musicians CD's, who make up for deficiencies with sex. Wolfgang Holzmair is a prime example, who, although he is obviously very pleased with how he looks -- and to be quite honest, he's not bad looking at all -- is perhaps one of the least accomplished performers of the art form out there. As an interesting correlation, most of his solo CD's (with exception, of course) have some sort of portrait of himself on the front. Notably, Hillary Hahn and Joshua Bell seem to have taken to parading themselves around in various states of undress or passionate pose to sell their CD's. Compare this to the vocally magnificent Thomas Quasthoff, who has only recently starting taking pictures of his whole body for publication. Or consider also the vocally sublime Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau, whose portrait rarely appears on any of his modern solo recordings, and was even less frequent on his early recordings.

As a general rule in this CD world, sexy pictures are meant to distract from inferior musical ability. There are, of course, exceptions. Indeed, Leif Ove Andsnes and Ian Bostridge are a really good coupling for leider (although I know a not insignificant few who would disagree), and also make for a not-so-bad looking CD cover, with a generally dark, brooding Andsnes, and an almost stereotypically British-looking Bostridge. The much older Thomas Hamspon does much the same. Indeed, Cecilia Bartoli and Renee Fleming both make me blush just a little from both the CD cover and CD itself.

But, to be sure, when the hour of reckoning approaches (I think I agree with Mr. Thunder here) and I am sitting in the crowded and expensive opera seats having heard that the Sigfried I was expecting has suddenly fallen ill and will not be performing, I will be praying for the awesome, gale-like voice of an eye-sore if it means trading the inadequate performance of a virtual Nordic God....although, to be quite honest, there is no doubt in my mind that the latter would result in far less seats left empty in the house.

The plan for Friday night was to see Johann Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Royal Opera, here in London. For a variety of reasons, I wasn’t able to make it, and now the production’s run has finished. As a matter of music, I’m not too bothered. I find Strauss dreadfully boring. And my back-up plan of a Mozart concert at the Barbican followed by Peter Grimes back at the Royal Opera on Sunday suited me fine – the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields is never better than when confronting the late 18th century master, while Canadian tenor Ben Heppner has been getting justified raves as the lead character of Benjamin Britten’s pensive wartime drama. Nonetheless, I had desperately wanted to see Ariadne, mostly because that particular show had been the subject of a major league kerfuffle in the international press. The original prima donna, you see, had been Deborah Voigt, a soprano of considerable reputation. Unfortunately for Ms. Voigt, however, her girth exceeded her fame, and when the producer commissioned a very particular little black dress for the part, the voluptuous Ms. Voigt was immediately sacrificed on the altar of aesthetic delight. The story eventually receded into the twilight, with the scorned diva clutching a hefty severance payment, but the question has been nagging me for a while. How much should physical appearance matter in the performing arts?

To some extent, I’m tempted to say that it shouldn’t matter at all. First, we no longer have to depend on opera, or on public accommodation at all, for our mild titillations. There are beautiful women and handsome men running about unfettered everywhere – and that’s even before you turn on the TV. In fact, I’d say our 19th century ancestors had much more to gain from casting various beauties in the opera. In a world of Victorian concealment, the opera provides a welcome venue where you can see at least some symbolic ravishings. But today, we should really just be after the music – we can get hotties all over the place. Second, I’m not really sure how much all this worrying about appearance really matters. I was sitting in my seat before the Mozart, and flipped through the free program to find a conservatively lewd vision of Ms. Janine Jansen, suit sultrily open at the chest. She’s admittedly sort of cute. But even so, I just can’t imagine ever being inclined to stay at home on Saturday night, and then thinking to myself, “No, I had better go to that concert. After all, there was a quarter of a breast on the advertisement”. Anyway, my sense is that there’s no reason for world class violinists to be especially good at being cute - I’m sure there are other people who can do that job much more efficiently than Ms. Jansen.

On the other hand, there is some sort of argument for the consideration of physical beauty. At a performance of Don Giovanni, for example, if you’re waiting for the sexiest man in all opera to make an appearance, and on hurtles a three hundred pound mastodon looking more like an overstuffed pillowcase with shoes than the chief seducer of European womanhood, you might have a problem. Few are going to believe that the tubby fellow with hair coming out of only one nostril has cut such a swathe through Spain and Italy that he’s got a manservant listing his conquests over a multiple minute aria, no matter how sparkling his voice or steady his tone. Opera, the argument goes, isn't just standing about and shouting. That’s called oratorio. Rather, it’s a form of musical theatre, and the acting is important. Singing without acting is like running a restaurant with bad service.

In the end, though, I remain unpersuaded. I'll suspend my disbelief for the corpulent Don Giovanni if he can sing, and if Ms. Voigt was actually good, she should have been unleashed on London's audiences, straining black dress or not. I simply don't think that the marginal aesthetic benefits of a better looking singer make much sense to focus on, and find the whole debate kind of silly. But maybe I'm missing something very obvious, or worthy, or important. I'd sure like to know.

Terry Teachout's excellent (and odd) blog turns 1 today. He has some unsurprisingly articulate reflections about the matter here and here. Reading them, I came across his "Notes on Blogging," which are really quite fascinating. A few thoughts on them (despite the fact that I will be commenting in interspersed text, this is not at all a "fisking", a distinction that has eluded every non-blogger I've tried to explain the term to):

1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That's the mark of a true innovation.

I owe my apartment this summer to a Friend of Crescat who I have never actually met. Trying to explain this to my current roommates ("Oh, how do you know D.? From school? From California? From law school? Then, uh, how did you meet?") has been comedy. ("You met on the ... internet?")

2. I know very few people over fifty, and scarcely any over sixty, who "get" blogging.

3. Blogs without links aren’t blogs. Blogs without blogrolls aren’t blogs. Blogs without mailboxes aren’t blogs.

Essentialist claims like this one are suspect ("Blogs without comments aren't blogs," Eszter Hargattai would shoot back), especially given the existence of Lileks, where links are scant and blogroll scanter. That said, it is true that interaction (with readers and other blogs) is critical to blogging (this is what links, mailboxes, and even comments accomplish), although Julian Sanchez can hold forth on this much more eloquently (and pretentiously) than I can.

4. The blogosphere is a pure market—but one in which no money changes hands. If you can afford the bandwidth and your ego is strong enough, it doesn’t matter whether anybody wants to read what you have to say. But the more you care about how many people are reading your blog, the more your blogging will be shaped by their approval, whether you get paid or not.

Too true. I once tried to write about the difference between writing to write and writing to be read. The results were incomprehensible, but the transformations or partial transformations that most blogs go through as they become more popular illustrate the point better than I could.

5. Politicians and celebrities rarely make good bloggers. They’re not interested enough in what other people are thinking.

6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That’s why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it.

True, from my limited experience.

7. The whole point of a blog is that its author controls its content. That’s why no major newspaper will ever be successful at running in-house blogs: the editors won’t allow it. The smart ones will encourage their best writers to blog on their own time—and at their own risk. The dumb ones will refuse to let any of their writers blog, on or off the job.

Given my current relationship to The New Republic's blogs, no comment on this, except to agree that an institution that forbids off-job blogging is indeed "dumb", and note that it's at least theoretically possible for a publication to edit a blog only for style and not for content.

8. For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case—but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere.

Bloggers must be careful not to overstate this. True, there are areas, like op-ed pages, where a blog takeover seems quite plausible. (See below). But there are also areas-- like credible reporting of facts, especially from anonymous sources-- where the print media will never become obsolete. In between, is a whole lot of other stuff, like movie reviews, food writing, where the future of the relationship is still very unclear. [Note also that the print media is much more likely to become unimportant to the blogosphere the more it makes the choice-- which may well be a profit-maximizing choice, I don't know-- to charge for web content.]

9. Within a decade, blogs will replace op-ed pages.

Dare to dream.

10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.

11. Blogs are what online magazines were supposed to be.

Again, I shouldn't really comment this summer, but I'll note that TNR and Slate seem to be aiming for much different things than Volokh or Teachout.

12. Art blogging will never be as popular as war blogging. More people care about politics than the arts.

Readers may have noticed that while politics and law abound here, that the best Crescat posts are about the least partisan things. Posts that rehash for the thousandth time why Libertarianism is theoretically bankrupt, why Bush is a liar, or why free trade makes everybody better off, add trivially to the sum of human knowledge (and often almost as little to the sum of human enjoyment). There's plenty of important and useful political blogging (see: replacing op-ed pages, criticizing and fact-checking major media, and much more, but arts blogging has its advantages. Its unpopularity may function as noise control.

13. Blogging is inherently undemocratic in one important way: it privileges literacy. Like e-mail, it is dividing the world into two unequal classes: people who feel comfortable expressing themselves through the written word and people who don’t.

More importantly, it also privileges those who write damn well over those whose writing is tiresome, those who have interesting things to say over those who have none, and more (although, to be sure, there are plenty of "market failures"-- blogs popular or unpopular in great disproportion to the amount of enjoyment or knowledge they produce.) C.F. Tom Stoppard:

What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a knock, it might ... TRAVEL ...

(picks up script) Now what we’ve got here is a lump of wood roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting “Ouch!” with your hands stuck into your armpits.

(indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels off the field. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on.

14. If you want to be noticed, you have to blog every day.

...or participate on a blog with new content every day. Jacob Levy gets noticed too. C.F. Group-blogging.

15. An impersonal blog is a contradiction in terms.

True enough. Different Crescatters choose a different amount of autobiography in their posts, but some is always there, even if we confine it to our "quotes of the day" and "poems of the night".

I'm currently wading through Mr. Crick's (of Watson-Crick-Wilkins-Franklin DNA fame) The Astonishing Hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul.

Where, in all creation, to begin? I guess at the title of this entry. It's no secret in the scientific community (at least to the extent that I understand it) that things which aren't sexy are somehow made sexy for funding, and general interest purposes. This, after all, is how Stephen J. Gould and Jacob Boronowski made their public name, while -- I argue -- the real geniuses of evolutionary biology (Martin Kreitman, Manyuan Long, etc.) have remained somewhat in the background, at least in the eye of the general public. This "sexification" is pretty prevalent, and generally not a huge stretch -- thus, as an example, Dawkins's work on the nature of self-preservation gets a little make-up and a perm., and is called The Selfish Gene, or, as I quoted before, the threat of Bioterrorism often gets ballooned way out of proportion for the sake of questionable political agenda and schmaltzy, at very best, Hollywood operanda.

But there's something a bit offensive about Crick's title and even the first few chapters of his book (the extent of my foray into the work so far) -- something morally and socially akin to slapping a wig and eye-liner on John Lovitz in an attempt to make Halle Berry (no offense, of course, to those two fine stars of the screen, and any devoted fans therein).

I guess I should explain before the angry e-mails start rolling in: as far as I can tell, Crick is interested in the cellular, yea, molecular basis of consciousness -- although I would argue that he's really interested in understanding the cellular and molecular basis of behavior, not necessarily consciousness (a line fuzzy enough that he should have taken more time to explicate). Scientific merits aside, it concerns me that he draws the far-reaching line between the consciousness and "the soul." Indeed, he only spends the lesser part of two pages discussing what the soul may or may not be, and any conclusions he draws (rather, may not draw) are, in my humble -- yet strangely critical -- opinion, shaky at the very best.

Perhaps what offends me most about this entire ordeal is his insistence that this entire work is scientific. After all, in the Aristotelian/Scientific method, what can you ask about the human soul? What hypotheses can you draw? What methods could you possibly use? What data could you possibly expect? And, perhaps most importantly, what purpose can you ascribe? That is, to be quite frank about it, how is it justifiable to use funding for the search for the human soul over, say, a search for the cure to (insert your favorite disease/world problem here -- keeping in mind, indeed, that chronic soul-less-ness does not count)...

...all questions which are curiously absent in his attempt to doll up his recent work...