Blog No. 1
In my first blog about the life and works of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel Dietz” I share two of his more revealing thoughts, thoughts that he may prefer be kept private, although he threw that privilege away along with the notebook that he hurled at his brother, Nehemiah C., one afternoon during a conversation about cigarettes and being “in no damned condition, thank you very much” to walk to a local convenience store. The first quote is one with which most who have any acquaintance with Dietz will immediately agree:
“Musicians are a very special breed; I, on the other hand, am a jackass that has learned to walk upright.”
The second is more troubling:
“I have determined that life is a shit sandwich and it is my job to look for condiments.”
And lest you comfort yourselves by admiring his figurative, if derivative, language, I must assure you, as a professional with an all-too-intimate knowledge of my subject, that there is at least a fifty-fifty chance that he did not intend either of the above observations metaphorically.
Blog No. 2
Tax Day
Ottoman “Blind Squirrel’ Dietz has expressed himself both in print and through his exploits on the matter of taxation, if only by the thinnest thread of association, but that is the essence of my trade, and, as an expert on the Dietz question, of my calling.
First, he has reserved a peculiar scorn for the honorable founding father Benjamin Franklin, who once said that nothing is certain except death and taxes. I have concluded that Dietz’s dislike for this venerable gentleman is the result of competitive resentment over what Dietz saw as a doughy, fat, balding old man who wore bifocals and was nevertheless fawned over by foreign chicks. “Poor Richard, indeed,” he wrote, before going on to list other men’s names that Franklin might also have considered as being sly titular references to his prominence. In that same paragraph, he asked, referring quite possibly to Franklin’s reputation as an international Casanova: “… early to bed, sure, but with whom?”
Not to mention – but I must, on a day such as this – that Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz has declared himself a sovereign nation, and therefore exempt from the tyranny of taxation. A companion reported that shortly after his proclamation, made early in the Reagan administration and more particularly during happy hour at Augie Jr.’s Golden Horseshoe Lounge, located conveniently off I-95 in Ft. Lee, Virginia, Dietz attempted to establish most favored nation relations with a neighboring state, which rebuffed his advances, and her ally, invoking what Dietz later complained had been a treaty that was hitherto undeclared and therefore totally unexpected and which probably would not have been recognized in international court, delivered a preemptive nuclear strike, after which Dietz left the field of battle for the men’s room and a wet paper towel to put on his eye, bemoaning the loss of global diplomacy in the post-modern era.
Dietz is also on record as never having met a Social Security number he didn’t like. In fact, sometimes he can’t restrain himself to nine digits and drifts on into ten, or even eleven. He has explained to curious officials, with mixed success, that it is the price he pays for being born with the visionary spirit. He does not tell them that he hopes to be repaid abundantly when he files for benefits under his several numerical aliases.
Finally, it occurs to me, vis-à-vis Ben Franklin’s famous quote about death and taxes, that come this evening we’ll only have one thing left to look forward to.
Blog No. 3
The Story of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz
There has been a clamoring – faint, to be sure, but discernible to trained, professional ethnomusicologists – for a print iteration of the story of OBSD, which has only been available hitherto in audio format. The more diligent among you will discover elements of that story peppered throughout this website. More will be revealed, as time and the ability to suppress the gag reflex permit.
Blog No. 4
Many of you may already have heard that I am neither musician nor writer. No, I am a simple ethnomusicologist, charged with recording the works of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz. My job is primarily that of transcription, which is challenge enough, when one’s subject’s penmanship has been compared unfavorably with cuneiform.
Dietz has described himself as both musician and writer, although when I utter a sentence that includes his name and either or both of those exalted dispositions I find that air quotation marks appear mysteriously around them.
Needless to say, the opinions that follow are not those of the management.
PEOPLE I HATE
It’s not so much that I hate packaging; in fact, I don’t hate packaging at all. I understand that the necessities of life in the Age of Ultra must travel thousands of miles from their points of inception to the shelves from which they beckon us. And I also understand that the swaddlings for those items must be equipped to deal with us, and by ‘us,’ I mean petty thieves and hooligans – people who will happily steal stuff if it is not utterly inconvenient and, if faced with what appears to be utter inconvenience, will while away the playful hours trying to figure out how to reduce or, preferably, remove that obstacle, as George Mallory famously said, “Because it’s there.” Then there are the hooligans, who will say, “Hey! Here’s a pointy stick!” or, “What’s this? A Bic lighter that’s burning a hole in my pants pocket?” followed shortly by, “Let’s see if this pointy stick will penetrate this attractive nuisance, or if my mini-flame thrower can set it on fire!”
So I understand why there must be packaging, and why it must be designed to give pause. But here’s the thing: there are people who do the packaging, who operate the machinery that packages. They, in their own small ways, exert personal control over the final interpretation of the original packaging design. And they take full advantage of their tiny and final role: a tad too much glue here, a skosh too little there; let’s see what happens if we increase the thread tension a half-ounce, or reduce it just a lick. And I hate them.
We all know the bags that hold large quantities of granular things – oats, bird seed, cat litter, dog food, for example – and we have all faced the task of opening them, and the ends that are sewn together and are supposed to swing open at the slightest encouragement, like a college freshman after a couple of drinks (not that I know, personally, because I’m not that kind of guy, but I’ve heard talk). Well, I imagine the life of the fellow who spends his entire day sewing those bags shut, at the cat litter factory, say, and I imagine, if it were me, dreading dinner because every evening my loving spouse will smile across our TV trays and ask, with exaggerated innocence, “How was your day, honey?”
From what I can tell, and this is after years and years of experience, and it has gotten to the point that I approach each new bag of cat litter with familiar resignation, the guy’s solitary professional joy comes from sewing the bag shut so that the consumer (me) must finally and in utter frustration rip the bag open. And that’s where I meet the guy who made the paper bag: the guy who made the bag so that the bag, when it is faced with an infinitude of options after the integrity of its sewn end has proven itself, will inevitably rip in an uncontrollable diagonal across the front, so that I will either have to try to tape the grievously wounded bag closed (and here is where I meet the fellow whose job it is to feed adhesive tape onto the tape dispenser so that when you finally find the end of the tape, it is technically impossible to free it all at once, even if you have not already chewed your fingernails to the quick) or simply go out to the shed for the shovel and one of those extra-large lawn trash bags. That’s where I meet the guy who makes the trash bags so that Houdini reincarnate could not find his way into one of them. So I hate these people, but I understand their sorry little lives, especially when they have to explain their jobs to their kids, and to their kids’ classmates, when they face “My Daddy Is a …” day at school.
And we all know the guy who says, “Here; let me show you how,” after we have confided our misadventures with cat litter, tape, or trash bags. He’s the one I hate most of all.
Blog No. 5
I shared this Dietz essay recently on Facebook, in support of Steve Earle’s comments about the Confederate flag, and think it bears repeating.
RE: THE FLAG OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
The recent, determined and belligerent foolishness in defense of the Confederate flag compels me to add my own foolishness in the opposite direction.
I was born in the long shadow of the capital of the Confederacy, in the county from which Mildred and Richard Loving challenged the proper order of things, and miscegenation laws in particular, I grew up under the watchful eye of “Aunt Bessy,” our colored housekeeper. I followed my father’s plow through our fields, looking for mini balls. I marveled at the Confederate money in the steamer trunk in our basement and played in the trenches of Cold Harbor. I rode my bike to Yellow Tavern, where Jeb Stuart died (it is family legend that my great-grandfather rode with Stuart’s cavalry), and every Sunday I attended the Episcopal church of General Robert E. Lee, his pew marked with a bronze plaque. The heroes of the south lined Monument Avenue. I walked without thought through doors labelled “White Only” and sat at the kitchen table while my parents discussed Governor Almond’s promise to close Virginia’s public schools rather than comply with the order for their integration.
These things were neither right nor wrong: they simply were, and they were all part of one thing: our creed as Virginians. Although we saw ourselves as the most exalted of all southerners, we did not parse our lives. We didn’t separate their components and analyze their individual meanings. We embraced them whole, more fundamentally, even, than we acknowledged our religious affiliations.
Later, I attended a high school named for General Lee and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. The buildings on our campus were named for Confederate generals, and we were “The Confederates.” I played in the school’s marching band for a while, and every week we dressed in our grey, double-breasted military uniforms, put our Johnny Reb caps on our heads, and followed our banner, the stars and bars, out onto the field or into the stands, where we played “Dixie,” the school fight song, over and over again, to celebrate or to exhort.
And there were black kids who attended classes with me: black kids who were expected to call themselves Confederates, too, and to cheer when we waved our flag, and to sing “Dixie” along with the rest of us. And they had to do this, not because they believed in any of it, but to get an education, a foundation of the democracy proposed by Thomas Jefferson, also a Virginian. They never raised a word of complaint about the indignity, the irony of their presence, and none of the rest of us noticed, much less apologized. But it was wrong, even in the context of the time, and I am ashamed both because of my complicity in their treatment and because it took me so long to recognize it.
And while I continue to be proud of my state, its heroes, my family, its heritage, and my little high school, I will not support the banner of the Confederate States of America. Please, feel free to wave that banner: it’s the American way. But many of the rest of us Americans will not share your enthusiasm for the system that led that banner to be raised in the first place.
As a parenthetical postscript I will add that none of my African-American classmates attend our high school reunions.
Further postscript, from the archivist: I serve under the banner of Truth, and must report once again that a lie festers at the center of Dietz’s memoir. Granted, his sentiments are touching, but he didn’t attend Lee-Davis High School. He went to Midlothian, on the other side of the James River and Richmond.
Blog No. 6
Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz has been known to dabble in photography, noting that “… it’s easier than thinking and it can mean whatever you want it to.”
Here is one he has titled “Your Daily Dose of Zen #1,” from the collection Nature and Stuff.
Your Daily Dose of zen #1
Blog No. 7
I found this on a crusty thumb drive, labelled “Halloween.” Once again, I have no idea what the man is talking about: this effort can be described most aptly as ‘cryptic.’ If you have 57 seconds and no better way to spend them, click on the red YouTube arrow in the center of the screen below. The video is only 56 seconds long, but to get the full effect (and as long as you’re going this far, why not?) use that additional second to crank your volume and go to full screen.
Skeery.
Blog No. 8
The following specimen surfaced recently. Although it is dated ‘1997,’ sentiments expressed at this time of the year tend toward the timeless. And it was written decades before the current administration.
Christmas Eve update: Recent reports from law enforcement officials at the Treasury secretary’s home offer some evidence that the Blind Squirrel is in California and has larger pets.
THE HOLIDAY GIFT
Yesterday was the day my little darlin’ and I had reserved for our young holiday traditions – decorating our apartment, wrapping gifts for our friends and relatives, trimming our Charlie Brown Christmas tree – a scrawny, free-range fir that we had recently liberated from its forest prison and dragged toward its destiny with ever-dwindling enthusiasm over several miles of neglected trail – but before we decked our home in cheer we thought we would do well to clean a bit. Nothing major, just passing a broom and a vacuum cleaner over the floors, removing dishes from the drainer – a little tidying around the edges. We were nearly done when, on the front porch, my sweety discovered some unfinished tidying from the past: a plastic grocery bag of kitty litter, now frozen, that we had somehow passed over on our way to the dump – several times, from the looks of it. But that wasn’t all. There, on the porch next to the bag of turds, was a smallish cardboard box filled with styrofoam packing peanuts. A situation, you might say, not requiring inspiration; a situation waiting only for the hand of action. We said very much the same thing. The perfect holiday gift for that oh, so special someone. We were, after all, on the cusp of tradition. And we tried, too. We examined insults real and imagined, bouts of bad luck and worse timing, and the whole miserable state of the world as we know it. We even thought about friends and relatives who might themselves be feeling outraged and in need of an anonymous Christmas vigilante. But try as we might, we couldn’t think of anyone we knew who would benefit from this holiday gift.
Surely this is conclusive evidence that we have had a great year. Or maybe it was just the holiday spirit run amok in our new home. In any case, if you receive a smallish cardboard box this Christmas and it’s filled with styrofoam peanuts and cat shit, it didn’t come from us. Not this year.
Blog No. 9
I found the attached photo among a recent crop of Dietz’s papers presented to me surreptitiously, as is our tradition, by his brother, Nehemiah C. The snapshot is reputed to be of the studio audience anticipating the first Mickey Mouse Club meeting in 1955.
If the tale that accompanied my receipt of the photo is to be believed, Dietz has used it lately in an attempt to crowd-source funding to send masks similar to those in the shot to all members of both houses of Congress along with the request that they wear the masks during the upcoming State of the Union address. Nehemiah C. reports that the official response has been negligible, except for the fact that over the years Dietz has established enough of a reputation that his efforts brought him once again to the attention of federal authorities, in the form of an apologetic visit from two representatives of the Department of Homeland Security. They said they had been told that Dietz needed “looking into,” but that the FBI had passed the matter to them, and that when they had tried, in turn, to pass it along to the postal service, the mail lady said she was much too busy, and besides, all he ever got in the mail were AARP invitations and threats of legal action. I am told that his visitors did, however, assure him that an amendment to an upcoming bill was being written, and with some likelihood not only of being passed but of re-establishing bipartisan camaraderie and passage of the heretofore more contentious rest of the bill, that will fund the gerrymandering of the southern border wall so that wherever Dietz is, he will be on the other side of it. Nehemiah C. said that his brother’s response was, first, that since he was no longer eligible for a passport he had nearly given up the dream of vacationing in a foreign land, and second, that he was looking forward to visiting a place where the legal system was more forgiving than the one in which he is currently trapped.
While I was surprised to discover the photo’s connection to Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz, it was not the first time I had seen it. A paper presented several years ago at the annual conference of the BRotherhood of International Ethnomusicologists (a recurring ‘inside’ joke among some of the younger members is that “It’s cheesy, but it’s classy cheese”) asserted that its research had determined that there is an 82.7% probability that the photo is responsible for the Insane Clown Posse, by way of the Juggalos. They based their assertion on their survey of original Juggalos found in a field just outside Thornville, Ohio, in which respondents identified family members when shown the photograph and assured the researchers that they had “been hanging out in this field for years, just waiting for somebody to bring on some hard tunes and more Faygo, man.” It did not go unremarked that a high percentage of those who participated in the Thornville survey identified themselves in the photo. Undaunted, the researchers also attempted to substantiate a rumor connecting the snapshot to Jackson Browne’s song, “Doctor, My Eyes.” Both points are controversial among the more conservative bloc of the association — those who believe that the only worthy subjects for proper ethnomusicologists have nicknames that by custom include a disability and a fruit, vegetable, small animal, or religious affiliation — because the Juggalos are all moniker and no name, while Mr. Browne is all name and no moniker.
And as I am on the subject of names, I will add in trivial postscript that in my ongoing research I have been delving into the public record as regards the entirety of the Dietz clan. I was particularly curious about Nehemiah C.’s middle name, since it is never elaborated, and in reviewing his birth certificate I found that the period is applied after the ‘C’ erroneously. The original clearly shows a question mark, making his full, legal name ‘Nehemiah C? Dietz.’
The first Mickey Mouse Club meeting, 1955
Blog No. 10
On a snowy day in the mountains when the bird bath is frozen and the teasings of spring reflect the dreary bluster of the current administration, the tired ethnomusicologist draws a sheaf of scribblings onto his lap and wishes for something that will break, or at least bend, this dismal tedium.
I should know better. Once again, the macrocosms are in agreement, and there is little to do but ponder the Stoics and hope, although the attitude is in itself reckless, that one’s anger and resentment will recede into something like acceptance.
All this frames the piece that faces me this morning. it is Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz’s first, and, as far as the record shows, only attempt at the Japanese form called “haiku.” Among the courses I attended at Ethnomusicology College, one of the more arcane was titled “Forms and Formulae, Familiar and Foreign: Twelve Bars and Beyond.” The purpose of the course was to alert the student to possible stylistic variations in lyrics and to open our eyes to the notion that there were, indeed, valid traditions that extended farther back than our American centuries and farther out than our American shores. I remember little more than that haiku is required to take up three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively, and that its meaning is inherently inscrutable. Even so, I have no idea what Dietz is trying to get at here. It seems unnecessarily elaborate to be a fire safety PSA.
THE HEART OF THE HEARTH OF THE HEART
Embers glow below
living relics of dead flames.
Careful. They still burn.
The only other examples of Dietz’s attempts at poetry are his translations of Cuban songs that he smuggled back to the U.S. mainland along with himself after he discovered that he had gotten himself smuggled onto the island at a time when most folks were trying to get themselves smuggled off it. See below for a more complete description of the debacle.
HASTA LA BUENA VISTA DAYS
After migrating to Florida, Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz appears to have visited Cuba at least once, and to have explored amateur ethnomusicology (or at least its lesser relation, ethnomusicography) during his visit, if the translations of several indigenous folk songs that I have come across are any indication. He gets the lilt of the language, but his work probably would have benefitted from a Spanish dictionary. In addition, the audience is likely to note that some, if not all, of the references found in these poems seem dated, relics of a kinder, gentler time – a time before cultural appropriation. And while questions of cultural appropriation might nonetheless reasonably come into play had these translations been attempted by a more competent scholar, I can find nothing in these lines to suggest anything appropriate about them. I have my concerns about their culture, or, to speak more frankly, the lack thereof, as well.
Judging from his subject matter and the dates and locations of his notes, he may have insinuated himself as part of Ry Cooder’s entourage when Cooder went to Havana to record “The Buena Vista Social Club,” but Cooder does not list him in the album credits. In fact, Cooder goes to great lengths to avoid mentioning him at all. It is worth mentioning that Cooder did not return my phone calls, even after the restraining order had expired. I will share several of the more coherent (and I take some linguistic liberty in applying the term) of Dietz’s works from his travels.
“Wedding Day”
Wedding, yes!
Kiss me, my love.
No, not there.
Touch the fine velour of my vest
Smuggled from the Southwest United States
In a bale of contraband.
Wedding time!
Once again, we get to stay up,
Later, even, this time,
Than when Uncle Fidel speaks to us
On the soccer field.
All day,
All day,
All day,
And well into the night he speaks,
But he is old
And his teeth are bad
And we have little understanding of his words.
Yes, we do not understand him.
But today is the day of the wedding,
Let us wear finery and parade ourselves
So that anyone who is watching us will smile.
Yes, let us dance in our own dusty back yards
And let our happiness dance into the streets
And then back again
Yes, let our happiness dance into the dirty streets
And back again
Into our arms
Into our arms
Just like you
Just like you
On this wedding day.
“Ay, Geraldo!”
Ay, Geraldo,
Ay, ay, Geraldo
You give the velar fricative ‘g’
A bad name.
Ay, Geraldo,
If I could afford a dog
(if only I could afford a dog)
I would name him Geraldo
And then I would kick him.
Is it not bad enough that Al Capone
Has left Havana
And Ernest Hemingway, too?
And with them, the money?
And with them, the money?
Leaving us only our mothers
The hookers
Only our mothers the hookers
And even if we had the money
It would be way too oogy.
Pick on some other people, Geraldo,
Our lives are hard enough as it is
(yes, our lives are hard enough)
Without you, already.
Oh, and speaking of dogs, Geraldo,
Take that little mutt from the Taco Bell commercials
With you.
“O, Tia”
Oh, Auntie, please,
Oh, old auntie, please
Please put on your sombrero and tell us again the story
The story of the time
Of the time you nearly spoke to Tom Mix
(whoever he is)
While we kick each other
While we kick one another
Under the table to keep from laughing.
Oh, Auntie, please,
Oh, old auntie, please,
Please tell us the story of the olden times
We are but the poor peasants
We are but the poor and simple peasants
Under the dominion of the communistas
And as such
We cannot afford anything really funny
So old auntie, please,
Please tell us the story of the olden times
So that later we may laugh until the sangria
Laugh until the sangria
Laugh until the sangria
Burns our sinuses.
“The Seasons”
They dance, these two lovers
They dance together at the change of days.
And tonight they will lie asleep
Wrapped in one another’s arms and legs
As well as in their small coverlets
Kept warm in their body heat
And their breath will mingle like fog,
Will appear like the mist, like the clouds,
And the cat that is theirs, too, will lie at their feet
Stretching and picking at itself
By turns
Until the woman becomes muy annoyed
And turns the cat out into the chill dark alone.
“Beisbol”
In our song
In our poor peasant song
We call for the third base
Hear us as we call for the third base.
We are but poor peasants from the countryside
And we love our beisbol
We love our beisbol
But we are no good
We are no good at all at the playing of our beisbol
Not like our neighbors in Puerto Rico grown rich and fat
Through that magic thing
Rich and fat because of the magic
The magic of free agency.
And now the communistas
Once more the communistas
Again the communistas
They have taken our third base
And we the poor peasants of the countryside
We can do nothing.
No, we the poor peasants have no recourse
No recourse against the hard hand of our fate
And so we call for our third base.
Hear us call.
It is difficult
Oh yes it is not an easy thing
These days to make Uncle Fidel look good
At the plate or in the field
Of our beloved beisbol.
Uncle Fidel does not look good easily
In the field of our beloved beisbol.
Uncle Fidel, he cannot move,
No, Uncle Fidel, he cannot move,
He cannot move to his left for a grounder
Not to save his life.
And so the communistas
Once more the communistas
Again the communistas
They have taken our third base.
I continue to hope that the macrocosms reveal their complementary senses of humor sometime soon when the Special Counsel releases his report, along with a flurry of indictments, on the first day of Spring, to the accompaniment of “Here Comes the Sun.”
Perhaps I just don’t have the makings of a Stoic.
Blog No. 11
Among the things that Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz, the subject of my many ethnomusicological travails, has taken issue with is the metaphor “polishing a turd,” observing with some logic that if one polishes thoroughly enough, the result should be the disappearance of the object of one’s efforts.
I try not to think about the implications, particular as regards the attention I pay to Dietz and to his remarkable ability to prevail in spite of my labors, and I have attached evidence — his song, “Bend in the River” — that further refutes his implied assertion. I have spent some months trying to polish this turd until it evaporates, and even with the application of elbow grease and modern technology it still hasn’t disappeared. It is reprehensibly misogynistic, even by Dietz’s standards, which is not a phrase generally associated with a turd, but I may never get the smell out of my nostrils.
On a brighter note, it only lasts 3:15, at the outside.
Bend in the River
Blog No. 12
From the journals of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz. There is quite possibly some urgency in sharing this.
Lying in bed one night, I heard a distant pistol shot. Naturally, my first thought was, “What if everything until this moment has been preparation and warm-up, and that was the Starting Gun?” Moments later I heard another, louder shot, and I worried that someone had shot the Starter. I was relieved when I heard a report that sounded like the first gun, and thought, “Good. The Starter is returning fire,” followed immediately by, “Poor fellow, he doesn’t stand a chance. All he has is his starter’s pistol, and it shoots blanks.”
For once, Dietz may be on to something, but regrettably, the entry is not dated, so we have no way of knowing when the race began.
As an ethnomusicologist, I have been trained to be attuned to the greater leitmotifs, and I must point out that Pink Floyd seems to have been wrong about this one thing, at least so far as Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz and those of us with access to his journals are concerned: we haven’t missed the starting gun after all, at least not until recently.
And finally, in the spirit of full disclosure I confess that I delayed publishing this post for several hours to assure my head start. Those subscribing to this blog need not fear overly, however. The news has not yet been embraced by international media, which should give you the time you need to accumulate the paraphernalia necessary for your journey and to get your own head start on everyone else.
Blog No. 13
Blog number 13 is, to all appearances, a lot like the last email you received from these offices, except that this has been updated and enhanced with an eye toward integrity and fidelity, two words that were coaxed onto this page after much discussion about their reputations.
You will find, on clicking on or cutting and pasting the link below, depending on how the link has been preserved in this email, Nene Concertini, parts 1 – 4: The Love Cycle of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz (abridged), newly mixed and saved in wav. format under the Music header on this very website. And if that weren’t enough, there’s also one of Dietz’s perplexing photos.
Nene Concertini Part 1: It Might Be Love
Nene Concertini Part 2: I Burn For You
Nene Concertini Part 3: Watching TV With the Dead
Nene Concertini Part 4: By the Waters of Zebulon