My friend and musical co-conspirator shows up at my job today. we spend a couple of hours wandering around SoHo, Chinatown, the Village, and Washington Square Park. We notice at the park the large amount of cops and small amount of freaks.

Admittedly, it was cold today, especially for late April. But i'm thinking back to the Saturdays of my youth, really not so long ago, when the freak ratio seemed higher.

In 1994, some friends and i played at being performance artists, becoming living statuary on a triangle on 6th Ave north of 8th street. Today, there's a Pizzeria Uno and a Starbuck's down the block, and some upscale restaurant where a dirty old pizza place once was. The vibe wasn't there.. or was it just not visible to my eyes, clouded by seven years of cynicism?

We talked about the state of music these days (common enough fodder for struggling musicians, at any rate). The deaths of Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia, we thought, sealed the tomb of good music, or at least crippled it for a while. The deaths also came in the wrong order, said we, since if Garcia had died first, the happy freaks might have become angry freaks and turned to the angrier music of the other subculture, but there was little chance of the angry freaks getting happy and tripping out to the Dead.

The assassination of John Lennon was also a fateful blow to music, but it recovered. It took time, but it recovered. Who is left now, we wondered? So little music has the feel, the anymore...

Or maybe that was just the ramblings of two bitter musicians, released out into the world at the wrong time, angry at all that seems to have passed us by, scared of the future and depressed about the past.

But the world doesn't always seem as bright as it used to these days.