listen to the story
When the conversation turns to Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz, even if the first words in that conversation are not, “Look out!”, there is little that can be said to surprise me. In fact, I often find myself empathizing with jaded justices of the peace who, when awakened from their slumbers to address a trivial, yet urgent, complaint, wish for nothing more than that it be something they haven’t heard before. Lately, even those who characterize themselves as being in hot pursuit of a certain nefarious hooligan have had nothing substantial to add to my inventory of his offenses.
But I am not a jurist. Jurists are, or were, a species apart, towering above us ordinary folk, giants bestride the Age, peering down through the clouds over Parnassus, rather than working in the gig economy in this, the Age of Ultra, as courtesans for a modern Ozymandias. No, I am but a mere, highly trained and thoroughly credentialed ethnomusicologist, and yet this song is a mystery to me. Given the abundance of ways in which we are polar opposites, I find it surprising that Dietz and I share a fondness for Shakespeare’s Juliet. Dietz has written a song from the point of view of someone who I find to be one of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters – and it is a very crowded field. Juliet is a girl who, even at the beginning of the play in which she only gets second billing, is already three dimensional – she is revealed very early on to be old beyond her years, dare I say cynical, and adept at playing the obedient daughter, and she grows during the play – witness her soliloquy in Act IV, in which she comes to grips with the very real, mortal consequences of her actions in the service of romantic love, and then does not back away from them. I can only attribute Dietz’s interest in Juliet to successive infatuations with Olivia Hussey and Claire Danes. He can surely be forgiven those crushes, unless he was the guy Miss Danes had to get a restraining order for.
Until the next one.