Wild At Heart
Hope everyone had a good weekend. A lot of fun sports with NFL play-offs and college basketball and hockey. One nice thing about where I am is that there are a lot of local colleges where you can get cheap or free access to sports. I caught some RIT men’s and women’s basketball this weekend as they beat the crap out of Bard and got schooled by Vassar. I also went to a Razorshark game, which is a lower level of professional basketball, and capped it all off with 2 RIT women’s hockey games against Buffalo State hopefully allowing RIT to remain at #2 in the country. I tried to get some good pics but my camera doesn’t always allow great distance shots with a lot of movement. My clear pictures were pretty bland and my action shots were blurry though I did get this:
Hope that works for you, and yes, this is an awesome woman’s team. They hosted the tournament last year and lost in the finals. They are fast and exciting. The best play this weekend was in the second game when they were up 2-1 and Buffalo had them in a 5-4 power play. We got the puck on their side of the blue line, pulled our goalie for a 5-on-5 with an open net and scored a goal to go up 3-1. Watching these girls play proves that the girls are just as good as the guys sometimes. The main difference is fewer fights and body checks, not to say they don’t happen. In the 2 games, there was one big fight and two body checks that stopped the game for a bit.
RIT is in itself a nice campus which is fun to walk around with various art galleries, displays of famous alumni and their inventions/contributions (it is a very high technology oriented school) and they have a lot of events the public can enjoy. The school is also one of the premiere schools for the deaf having. It is not uncommon to walk around and see big groups of students using sign language and the even have one art gallery dedicated mostly to the work of hearing-impaired artists. This month the upstairs was dedicated to various hearing-impaired students while the downstairs has an exhibit dedicated to Francis Marion Tuttle. Tuttle (1839-1911) lived is the Geneva, NY area and became deaf either at birth or at a very young age. He painted mostly landscapes and portraits and commanded a good price for his work at the times, having paintings selling for up to $1,000 a piece which was very good at that time period. While mostly unknown today, RIT can permission from the Geneva historical society to display his work in the first ever exhibition of his work outside his hometown of Geneva. I am not a huge fan of portrait art but I did enjoy many of the landscapes. If you know anyone who is hearing-impaired, or if you are yourself, this is a great area that is very supportive and has a level of culture around artists with similar traits. I am always amazed by some of the work that comes out of that college. If you ever get in this area, it is something to check out.
Not much else going on. Here are a few concerts to recommend, esp the Ann Arbor Folk Festival this Friday and Saturday which I really enjoyed the last three years I was in Detroit:
Tuesday (1/24) - Carrie Rodriquez @ the Ark
Thursday (1/26) - Swellers @ Pike Room
Friday (1/27) - Ryan Adams @ Hill Auditorium (Ann Arbor Folk Festival)
Saturday (1/28) - Emmylou Harris @ Hill Auditorium (Ann Arbor Folk Festival), Joe Reilly @ Varner Recital Hall (Oakland University), Sponge @ Emerald Theatre, Morris Day & the Time @ Andiamo's Celebrity Showroom (Warren)
Monday (1/30) - Raphael Saadiq opens for Lenny Kravitz @ Fillmore Theatre, Augustana @ Blind Pig
I’ll leave you with a video by Raphael Saadiq, a lively artist that should be seen. I saw him at the theatre in Hockeytown and he blew me away with the richness of his voice and the energy he has onstage.