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Hi, and thank you for joining me for this episode of the blogcast that addresses the question of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz, a midtwentieth century “musician” (please note the ironic air quotation marks) from central Virginia. That question has been most eloquently and succinctly articulated by Dietz’s brother Nehemiah C. as a strangled “Why? Just why?” Nehemiah C. has also on occasion followed that question with what is arguably its most reasonable answer. His response is Zenlike both in its profundity and in its frustrating simplicity, and he typically frames it in the following manner: he gazes into the distance, nods his head briefly, and then shakes his head and looks at the ground. He looks back at the horizon, sucks air into his mouth through the gap between his front teeth, exhales, and shakes his head again before he says, with an air of resignation, “Because you just never know.”
I am not a musician. Musicians are a species apart, towering above us ordinary folk: giants bestride the age, like Colossi or Colossuses, depending on whether you are educated or American, or like Ozymandias, the before picture (although you might want to heed Shelley’s poetic image if you happen to be both American and attached to the idea of manifest destiny). If you profess to be an educated observer in this, the Age of Ultra, you know how manifestly farcical that phrase is. No, I am a simple ethnomusicologist, and I am devoting my dotage to the Dietz question.
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The peculiar dungball of the Dietz question which we will consider today is the song, “Down at the Seven-Eleven Store.” Despite the banality of its construction; the nonsensical inanity of its lyrics; and the despicable un-wokeness of its narrator; or perhaps through them, the song provides insight into Dietz and his creative process. And remember what I have said about ironic air quotation marks.
Any consideration of the Blind Squirrel question is incomplete without understanding that he abhors audience participation. Perhaps it is due to a steady diet of hootenannies and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” during his formative years. He has written that, even today, he suffers a visceral reaction when a performer says, “Come on, put your hands together,” and he further notes that he would happily put his hands together, even if, or particularly if, the performer’s neck got in the way. And since this introduction has veered toward manifesto, I will add that Dietz asserts that the fourth wall was placed there for the mutual protection of performer and audience, and that its sanctity is not to be violated. If God had wanted everyone to be a performer, Dietz writes, He would have endowed us all with single names, like Cher, or Bono, or even Sting, and finally, “If I wanted you to sing along with the music playing on my sound system, I would have bought your CD instead of that one by Steppenwolf.”
Let us finally consider etymology, to wit, the aud- in audience. Aud to hear. We might go as far as ‘applaudience,’ but to venture any farther would be to challenge the natural order of things without having a clear appreciation for the consequences.
This may appear to be a non-sequiturial admonition, but you will hear in a moment that it is indeed not only sequiturial but directly contradictory because Dietz, a man for whom four walls are typically just the beginning, and for whom various constabularies have often gone to the trouble of reinforcing those four walls, not to mention their floors and ceilings (and I have also heard that Dietz attempted to contact none other than Stephen Hawking to discuss construction of walls five through twenty-four in other dimensions, “as long as Steve was going to go there, anyway,”) has written a tune that requires audience participation. When I was preparing this piece for my lecture/demonstration series, I saw very quickly that as Dietz had painted his little picture, he had also painted himself into a corner. His approach to his lyrics and rhythms results in an overlap that makes it impossible for one person to sing both verse and chorus. So the ethnomusicological question becomes: how best to resolve this paradox? On this concern and its implications Dietz is silent, either oblivious or clueless, leaving it to the solitary student of his work to posit a reasonable, practical solution; and I have concluded, after extensive research and considerable thought, that it must fall to others to provide the refrain. Simple though the solution may appear to be, the shattering of that wall has profound, and profoundly unnerving, implications. There will be chaos.
And it is not enough that there will be chaos, it will necessarily be guided chaos, chaos with the patina of management, as is the current global vogue, so when I am forced to present this work, I resort to asking reluctant confederates to join me in this exercise that puts the y-o-u in futility. (Voices less burdened by diplomacy or vocabulary have proposed that it puts the f-u in futility, but I leave those judgments to the more objective and, I trust, kinder angels of posterity.) These confederates have on occasion acquiesced to participating, but only under assumed names, so that their reputations may remain relatively intact. I do not permit them to put bags over their heads, although contemporary social media encourages a similar process whereby contributors cover their heads with metaphorical paper bags that have no eyeholes, but which they have made with oral orifices much larger than necessary for the quality of the thoughts (and I remind you once again about air quotation marks) that pass through them.
It is worth noting, as a footnote to this footnote, that Dietz has also considered wall 4 (partition a) – the wall between the performer and his stage persona (Bruce Springsteen having proclaimed, publicly and repeatedly, in his recent sold-out Broadway show that his blue-collar schtick is just that, which is like discovering that Woody Guthrie’s given name was Plywoody Guthrie or even Pressedwoody Guthrie; and wall 4 (partition b) – the wall between the audience as individuals and the audience as a mass (or, as both Dietz and H. L. Mencken have complained, “a mob.”) His attention span being what it is, he hasn’t gotten much farther than those brief, marginal scribblings, and physicists and dramatic philosophy departments are not on high alert yet.
The postscript to this podcast will illustrate the adage, “One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare.” Ever barging past his presumed areas of competence as though those traffic cones and the yellow caution tape were intended for someone else, Dietz has dreamed of a video to accompany this song. But first, the subject of today’s podcast, preceded by the inevitable disclaimers: this song will not be popular with the #MeToo movement; in fact, the song may well inspire the #7-11Too movement.
As for the conceptual reconstruction you are about to hear, you may note a few interpretive liberties that I feel not only to be justified but necessary, given the fatal flaw in the song’s major premise. I have recorded the song with roughly seven parts that Dietz cannot play at all, much less at the same time.
Down at the 7-11 Store
Postscript
In postscript I will first flog what may by now be an obvious, and obviously dead, horse: Dietz will steal remorselessly from those he feels are endowed as he is with the visionary spirit. He perceives them to be comrades, and he considers his theft merely his expression of support of a free trade agreement of sorts, although to this point he has been that agreement’s sole beneficiary. In the unlikely event that any of the involuntary participants in the agreement ever return the favor and borrow something of his, Dietz will be happy to find a lawyer to remind them of their debt to his creative endeavors and to recommend a repayment schedule.
His notes state near the top that his dream video is an ‘homage’ to Kevin Smith’s first film, “Clerks,” with the implication that the word ‘homage,’ being stolen from a foreign language, gives him license by association to steal anything else in the world he wants. The video will be shot, therefore, on a smartphone and in washed out black and white to approximate the cheap, desolate feel of a New Jersey winter.
The video will be filmed in one broad shot, and the action will take place against the backdrop of the single-story brick side wall of a convenience store. A dumpster, with flames coming out its top, protrudes into the scene from off stage right, with bathroom doors also stage right. During the video an employee, who will look suspiciously like our nation’s forty-fifth president, will amble through the scene to dump trash into the burning dumpster, and someone may use a bathroom.
The band will sit on the edge of the roof, with their legs hanging over the ledge. The singer will have a mic and stand, ground level, center stage left.
Four or five Latina skate girls (skin head, neon hair, leather jackets, gum, etc.,) will enter upstage left with a boom box. They will turn the boom box on, and the first eight bars of the song will be lo-fi, as though they were coming from the boom box speakers. As the body of the song kicks in, the sound quality improves.
The girls lean against the building’s brick wall, center stage. They are aggressively bored. They must be Latina. White girls know that there’s a mommy and daddy somewhere; and black girls know that shit can get real in an instant and they will have no advocate, so there’s always a bit of fear behind their demeanors; but Latina girls have lived la vida loca on their own for so many generations that they exude “There is nothing you can do to make me give a shit.” They do not engage in the song. They do their business, expressionless, until they must sing their back-up parts: “Down at the 7-11 store,” which they do almost unwillingly. They perform a similarly disaffected dance step during the groove section of the song, and then they step back to their positions on the wall as though nothing has happened.
At the end of the song, everybody leaves, and without interaction or eye contact. The girls don’t pick up the boom box, but as they walk past the singer, each girl holds out her downstage hand. The singer reaches into his pocket and pulls out a crumpled wad of twenty-dollar bills; he gives one bill to each girl. As she reaches for her cash, one of the girls affects a pose that mimics their dance step; the girl behind her gives her a shove, and they both grin sarcastically. After the stage is empty (and here is where the dream takes flight), Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) peer furtively from one of the bathrooms and scurry across stage to exit stage left, picking up the boom box and taking it with them.
Thank you for listening all the way through this podcast. If you have two or three thousand dollars that you want to contribute to this cause, or if you know Kevin Smith or Jason Mewes, you can help Blind Squirrel Dietz’s dream come true, get a production credit and be part of a group photo (with a paper bag over your head, naturally) that will be inserted at the end of the video, and, in some small way, speed the collapse of civilization.
Please do not forward your contribution directly to Dietz. Speaking as someone, albeit a mere ethnomusicologist, with extensive and expensive practical experience, I can assure you that you would be better served by withdrawing your intended contribution from your bank in small denominations, and then spreading the bills across the roof of your car and simply driving away. At least then you might have some chance of recovering some of your money while looking foolish and putting yourself in imminent danger, both of which are likely outcomes any time one puts money and Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz in the same sentence, much less in the same room.
Again, thanks for listening to this podcast. Please feel free to pass it along, if you know someone who likes train wreck play-by-play commentary, or if you know someone who knows Kevin Smith, or who knows someone who thinks he or she might know Kevin Smith and who has the kind of comprehensive hubris that leads to skydiving, being in train wrecks for which someone is providing play-by-play commentary, or investing in the Fyre festival. If you’d rather share the tune without the commentary, you can find it at blindsquirrel.bandcamp.com. As a student of megalomaniacal charlatanry, I must add before I close that if Dietz had ambition to match his own hubris, his example would cause the young entrepreneur responsible for the recent Fyre festival debacle to feel chagrin – no doubt an alien emotion for the fellow for his lack of visionary spirit.
Until the next one.
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