The Discovering Columbus (aka The Columbus Circle Living Room) public art installation (pictured above), MellowHype bringing that LA Odd Future flava to New Yawk, Wyclef Jean's new New York restaurant, the CCW convention, a nod to Brooklyn including some of entertaining bygone era Bensonhurst nicknames, Fear's classic's "New York's Alright," and the musical Annie returning to Broadway are among the items covered in this eight installment in the New York State of Mind Amoeblog series on music and other entertainment and happenings in the Big Apple. 

The wonderful group that is the Public Art Fund, who have been responsible for some truly inspired creative art installations around NYC parks and other public spaces, have outdone themselves with their latest presentation: Tatzu Nishi's Discovering Columbus exhibition which is simply amazing!. Also known as The Columbus Circle Living Room and located at Columbus Circle on the South West corner of Central Park, near 59th Street, this exhibit is surreal. It is a temporary living room that the Japanese artist carefully constructed around the iconic monument of Christopher Columbus.  When you go it not only feels like you are in someone's furnished living room with windows - albeit with the 13 foot high, 120 year old marble statue in the middle of it, but it also offers an amazing view of Central Park - from six flights of stairs up to the exhibit.

As an artist the multi-talented Prince has always marched to his own beat. Of the many unique and unprecedented things he has done in his long and illustrious career was two decades ago when he changed his name a newly created symbol. 1993 was when he officially changed his name to that unpronounceable symbol that was dubbed "Love Symbol #2" since it coincided with the copyrighted title/symbol of the Prince and The New Power Generation's 1992 album of the same name/symbol (the symbol was engraved into the actual CD case in gold on the outside and silver on the inside of case cover).

As well as being the work of a tirelessly creative mind it was also Prince's way of getting a dig in at his record label (Warner Brothers) who he made it well known he was quite unhappy with. Disgruntled with his contract and wanting to get out of it, he was further aggravated when he discovered that he could not do so. However when he realized he could contractually change his name, this he did as a sort of revenge act. Prince used that symbol, which was a combination the symbols for female (♀) and for male (♂), up until he finally got out of his Warner contract seven years later.

However the change from word to unheard of (and unpronounceable) symbol presented a headache for his label and a problem for many at the time including radio DJs, record store clerks, and journalists who did not have this unique character on their keyboard in their computer. Hence his label's publicity department sent out floppy disks (like the one pictured below) with a custom font of the unique symbol attached. However most journalists ignored using it altogether as it was troublesome for use in most computers at the time. Instead they called it "Love Symbol" or "Love Symbol #2" - as in the 1992 album that the symbol first appeared on.

First up, check the YouTube clip below video-taped and uploaded Tuesday afternoon by the NY MTA (New York's Mass Transit Authority). It shows the devastation caused to two of the downtown Manhattan subway stations (Ferry Plaza and Whitehall Street - two of the seven subway stations with severe flooding) and will give you an idea of the intensity of the flooding caused by Sandy. While the NYC buses are back in service today, the subway system remains down and may not be back and running in full service for several days due to the damage caused by the salt water to the electrical system on the tracks. Additionally,  all the water has to be pumped out of flooded stations like the ones in the video. However the MTA did announce that limited subway service would resume on November 1st at 6am but not below 34th Street or from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Upon hearing the news earlier this week of the recent passing in Finland of Kim Brown of the incredibly talented and way underrated Birmingham, England formed garage rock or "freakbeat punk" rock band The Renegades (as seen in video above doing their raw & inspired version of Bill Haley & The Comets' "Thirteen Women" - which has long been a favorite of my man Evan "Funk" Davies on WFMU) I've been going back and listening to that wonderful 1960's North American rock subegenre, that borrowed from the British blues rock bands who ironically in turn had borrowed from American blues artists, of garage rock which at the time wasn't even considered a separate form of rock. That happened after the fact in the seventies when it got dubbed "garage rock" or "60s garage" as well as such later tags as "beat," "psychedelic" or "psych," and "freakbeat" or "freakbeat punk" as in the above Renegades clip.

It was also in retrospect that I first came upon this wonderful music that many consider a precursor to punk because of its raw amateurish, albeit impassioned, adrenaline fueled basic rock energy/presentation with lots of distorted sounds and typically screamed, aggressive lyrics - just like punk rock. Like many other music fans, I first got introduced to garage rock courtesy of the wonderful Nuggets compilation (available at Amoeba) and the series it spawned (over a dozen Nuggets collections in all). Over the years there have been countless other garage compilations released such as the recent year release Who Needs Tomorrow? American 60s Garage Bands: 20 Rare Gems Compiled by The Bevis Frond which has a lot of unheard of under the radar gems from the 60's.  Like rap or soul or punk of bygone decades, garage rock was a prolific sub-genre that featured more talented bands that never made the charts than ones who did get some type of mainstream attention - if only fleetingly. Hence a lot of the music fell way under the radar (good because it never got watered down for mainstream acceptance) which is why there are not too many film/video clips available of most of this music.