Forums, Blogs, Rags, Mostly White Men With Too Much Time on Their Hands, the Fossilization of Old Grudges, assorted Gaffs and the Reasoning behind things mostly Unreasonable.

I thought Craigslist was abysmally inane and completely a slugfest of disparate people who use the anonymity of the Internet to lash out at anything moving not in their direction AND a great place to find gear and to meet musicians. I did find myself on the "musicians" "community," parenthetically separated because community, I though, was a designation of commonality; musicians/players with new media to use/Mad Human infected like the cow thing flaggers are about as differentiated from honest posters as vegetables and nails.

Often I'd go there to lounge in the navels of individuals. I feasted on their abstractions: The I'Ching and Harmonic Principals of The V Chord, Heavy Metal Band Looking for Naked 18 Year Old Female Tuba Player, Kiss Tribute Band Looking for Creative Pro, these statements were obsessions of weird people like me I suppose but I am careful with my word and concept combinations. What is creative about tribute band and what is a pro? Can I gain some insight into all of this? I actually was very, very curious and in my grave stupidity I wanted to know. You know it is stupid to ask any questions to a David Lynch character from "Twin Peaks."

"Kenny's Naval seeks Wall or Door player for Shoegaze." Of course I am using poetic license as there is a musical saw player looking for students and kids fresh out of Guitar Hero looking to play, but Shoegaze is a genre and maybe someone makes money playing this so the first question could be answered logically; "a pro is someone who makes money." I didn't know what the genre required beyond the stance in playing was to look at ones shoes out of shame or shame and lack of interest assuming an almost new take on "I don't give a shit." I put out a friendly question to be answered by Shoegazers. As a fake cultural anthropologist I was duty bound to inquire. It appears that Shoegazing's foundation is looking at ones shoes and making accompanying sounds with, probably, the electric guitar or Portable Casio Love Machine. What I assumed was correct, but no, Shoegazing was far more benign and possibly took less interaction with an instrument than one could imagine as a musician. It was the other drug Ravers who hated Post-Disco that did Shoegaze. They didn't like the Neo-Disco thing. You could also say that Shoegaze was part of the romantic stripe, no different than "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and Kurt Corbain.

Now I am an older man, and I should have known better than to continue my quest into the new ideals of youth's music because I am not a youth anymore and it, at times, seems very primitive to me, tribal it was, and pop music has always been. I have experienced a lot of hate towards my beliefs in politics, art and music/guitar as if I had a belief rather than clear information for me to carry on. On the Internet information is a pure creation like Fox "news" sometimes and I love good fiction. Let me cast myself into a new way and swim in the youth's music. I have an electric guitar and I can also play appropriately on it. Let me start a band even! Yes, that's it! The Sports Utility Vampires would be good, the SUVs, with high gas prices and all. I could change my name to Slim Price or Spike Spikeman.

Oh, woe unto them who dare ask a pertinent question like a scientist, dispassionate to anything that is social and with a very dry lack of reverence. There is never a question asked in this musician's community, anywhere in the blogosphere, Acoustic Guitar's Forum, Craigslist, Delcamp, Guitarsite, to all of these inane sub-phylum-o-worship-fest-crack head-hammer on-seven fingered-classical snoot superiority, that doesn't have an answer already before it was asked. I was no different in some ways, but as some of us are looking for someone to fall flat on their faces in their philosophical expose, I asked. What is creative about a tribute band and what constitutes a pro?

Soon, a weekend warrior, a lawyer, answered the pro question in some part for me. He spoke to me respectfully, with great language and with the conviction that he was a pro because he sometimes derived pay from his weekend excursions with 40's tie and Ray Bans with the guitar. This gentleman, an intelligent man, immediately enlightened me but he was as stupid as anyone I've met about the plethora of musical "tribes" and how "information" is relative. He informed me that I was wrong about my career and the careers of all the people I thought were professional, you see, the truncated version of the word professional had a different meaning it seemed! So could I call Christopher Parkening a professional and not a pro? Would I be demeaning him using the pro designation? I had to have answers because I was truly confused but I also had my answer to everything under the sun like other people do. By then, and I've examined the Guitar Internet quite extensively for the last fourteen years and before then I had my answers about the guitar communities and their tribe at war characteristics. I used to be at war with Flamenco but have since related this to my distaste of charlatan flamenco masters teaching classical guitar like a construction crew would teach impressionist painting.

In the meantime, the question: is tribute band performing creative work (?) was being answered with bad words, accusations, "who the frick are you," shut up, go to various places, sink various things up my where the sun don't shine, go do the impossible and have sex with myself where the sun don't shine, and so forth, by people other than this one gentleman. Again, this was on Craigslist and I began to experiment in very crafty responses involving skirting the realm of decency, and making suggestions that I was fully capable of having sex with a woman.

Soon my website was visited, as I will state my name because I am saying this and not pussyclassical@AOL.com. Soon my email was swamped with various suggestions as above, my car was egged because my address was stated on my website (I now live somewhere else but have left my old address, the house has sold, so please, don't bother the new residents), and I kept it quiet because I didn't want to alarm my wacky Warner Brother's Cartoon Family.

The question is: What happened to the teenager that played in a band and grew up to work at a Safeway laying out exotic onions at 56? Nothing, in the short, in the long he grew a beard because his chin was not resplendent of the teenager he still sees himself as, he has replaced all of his LPs with CDs but has not involved himself in any music beyond what he knew as a teenager, he has married and infected his son with the same desire to perform mindlessly the same things he performed, he's haunted Guitar Center and bought the gear he couldn't afford when he was a teenager, he's sought out his own kind on Craigslist and played once at a local bar thus he now has the designation of pro. That's fine I have no problem with this what so ever even the designation "pro" is his for appropriation but it won't stop me from talking about the pedestrian philosophical implications. It doesn't bother me because it is well known that faggot was a person that gathered sticks and now it takes on a completely different meaning more nasty then the original; this is evolution? (See South Park's Biker episode)

I had learned my lesson completely. In order to let off a little steam on Craigslist I invented the tribute band, The Dave Clark 6 with two refugees from an imaginary Middle Eastern place called Nazlandistan. They were Schwo and Sultan. Schwo was a world classed zammedere player (also imaginary) and Sultan owned a string of liquor stores around the poor parts of the Bay Area. Schwo argued with a person, on Craigslist, and said he could get a perfectly good zammedere from Best Buy and it was not necessary to get it at Zone Music in Cotati (now closed) at a higher price. Sultan asked for a secondary singer and was delighted to enlist Skippy Wang the coloratura. Sultan was the Dave Clark professing, "I sing, I stan' and play drum." They were desperately looking for either a Door or a Floor player. They posted in broken English and professed that in Nazlandistan, Dave Clark was a national hero. I also listed for a drummer for Ra Khan Band of Youth--old men need not apply and some really serious stupid ass contacted and said that old men could play quite well and I should respect my elders. I intrigued my audience with the Harmonic System of Strip Poker with Pamela Anderson. I posted The Republican Women's Meditation Group is looking for a meditation banjo player who graduated from the Banjo Institute of Technology, payment in BBQ. Divorce Guitarist; Let that Settlement be small because music doth soothe the savage beast. I went nuts, I had fun, some people were laughing with me, some were offended at the lack of seriousness that I exhibited in that popular music was Holy and a sacrosanct realm of super heroes and post comic book dreams. Golly, I'm a serious guy but need to let it out in a cheap and sweeping manner sometimes.

Then came The Flag Master's Castle, an opera sponsored by Sultan's Liquor to employ a sad customer. You see; Craigslist is self-policed. If maybe two, or some magical number of great wisdom, designated by Craig the Wise, is offended or thinks inappropriate the post of some unwise person, they can flag the post and it goes away! Gotta love The Craig! Some people were enraged when their posts were flagged. Myself, I invented the Flag Master's Castle, an opera starring some fat, smelly, unkempt, post-forty, unemployed greasy guy who lives in his mother's basement, whose life is devoted to flagging things on Craigslist for surreal attention and power. His mother, buying Lays potato chips by the case, wants him gone from clogged arteries and encourages his strict chip diet. You see, that's the thing with blogs and Online forum communities; POWER. You can anonymously cause people trouble, piss them off, lie and be as big or actually bigger than the average young musician or old fart working for Safeway and brandishing a Stratocaster once a month at Church. I mean it, professed good Christians dump vile language anonymously on Craigslist, and Acoustic Guitar, and Classical Guitar and Bass Buttocks and at Delcamp, the funniest one, some English guy, be-speckled and anal to the core will delete it and send you an email outlying his reasoning beyond the real reason of accruing POWER; the police of the mind you could say.

So here I am minding my own business, I've got an orchestral piece I composed to do with processed guitar with the Contra Costa Chamber Orchestra on February 2010, trying to get my computer to process my guitar after years of being a wood guy long after even messing with a blog of any kind, and I do my yearly search of the name "Larry Cooperman" Online because Larry Cooperman just wants to know. Up comes Acoustic Guitar blog. I had, many years ago, posted there and sure enough the language got ugly and I just went away. People just hate a scientist with no reverence for anything like picking and grinning. I promise you that I never start bad language, but when a slacker begins to speak to me in a certain way, I will eventually use the same demeaning language that is directed at me and I am really good at it. I enjoy it too but will never start it. When some "gentleman" does passive/aggressive to me I drop the passive part. I NEVER START+NEVER+NEVER START BECAUSE I HAVE LANGUAGE OTHER THAN THIS KIND AND INHERENT RESPECT FOR EVEN GUITAR LOWLIFE. Amen. I am literate and I am a stinkin' sailor as most of the people I respect are. Drink with a serious classical guitarist and you will know what I mean and you will also find out that they stay away from forums. I am different in this respect. You decide if I am worth a crapper.

Someone, on the Acoustic Guitar Forum, had posted some version of a Craigslist post concerning my assessments of tribute bands. It was flagged from Craigslist in 2008 but appeared in a bass forum according to the poster in Acoustic Guitar's "Classical Corner" (brilliant alliteration). Slap forehead . . . It appeared on the first page of a Google search of Larry Cooperman. I was intrigued. Soon enough I am talking to the guy who originally posted it asking, in my most lawyerly way, "How do you know I said this?" Of course he had no answer. Says I "take this down or else." The kind moderators at The Classical Corner obliged and another great episode in the annals of The Great Internet Gentlemanly Discussion About Anything Guys Worships thus ended and off of the forums I went for the most part.

But it never ends. The Internet has provided a Petri dish of profound bacterial interaction, self-promotion mixed with delusion, serious narcissism and hallucinations of band glory, egg headed perceptions of working against nature in music that defies you to even think in its presence with social statements of young know-it-alls pissing on everything not going their way.

This Internet thing is too twisted because the world is horribly twisted; I spend way too much time on it looking and at times most of it sucks; a new guitarist is doing that thing THAT IS ALL IMPORTANT beyond the capabilities of modern mortals wants attention; an Ad man for GE Singapore is giving fake attributions to his $240 Chinese Gregory Smallman type guitar he calls a "copy." Trash talking goes on at DelCamp and a really, really anal "gentleman" is deciding what is good to say and what is not. Can I say For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge them and still be a gentleman?

Oh hell, it's May 21st and I am getting ready to go teach my Indian, Persian and WASP kids the guitar. According to another person hallucinating on the Internet and radio the world is supposed to end in a really strange housekeeping exercise by the God of Abraham. I am Jewish so I guess "no flies on me" to coin an old saying from Frank Zappa. I used to use the men's bathroom at California Institute of the Arts and The Black Page was pasted above the urinal. When Frank died the whole school closed. Now that's something, ain't it?

What do you wear at the end of the world? Is it a formal affair? How about a bolo tie? I get the feeling that The God of Abraham is kind of non-formal, like the god in The Simpsons. Formal decrees and such can be done from a pool hall. God shoots pool. Ante Christ! I saw You his soul and raised you mine! Jesus plays poker.