the list VALLEY

GEHMAN

The Allentown Art Museum is exhibiting black-and-white photographs by Larry Fink and Judith Joy Ross, masters of gray emotions. Ross, a longtime Bethlehemite, specializes in tight, misty, settled portraits of people staring softly at her camera. Congress members; Vietnam memorial visitors, bathing-suited kids holding popsicles—they’re all detached yet attached messengers of innocence, power and memory.

Fink, a longtime Martins Creeker, specializes in spacious, bold, slightly unsettled portraits of people ignoring his camera. Malcolm X listeners,

Coretta Scott King at an anti-poverty march, a Harlem kid resting his head on a shotgun barrel—they’re all detached yet attached messengers of revolution, restitution and recovery.

(Timestamp” through April 16, 31 N. 5th St.; 610-432-4333; allentownartmuseum.org)

Hockey is a sportier spectator sport at the PPL Center, the popular home of the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, farm team of the very popular Philadelphia Flyers. The 8,500-seat-plus arena is surprisingly intimate, which shrinks the rink, which pumps up the action. Slap shots ring louder. Bodies crash harder. Fast breaks zoom faster. This brutal ballet registers best from chairs on the concourse; imagine middleclass luxury boxes without walls, waiters and absurd prices. The atmosphere sizzles even when the hockey sucks. Timeouts feature salutes to soldiers, goofy contests, ice-smoothing machines masquerading as advertiser mascots. An infectious buzz is generated by families with an undying devotion to the crappy Flyers, who last won the Stanley Cup in 1975. These eternally optimistic fans swarm merchandise booths; concession stands selling decent foods (gourmet

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Geoff Gehman is a former arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown and the author of five books, including Planet Mom: Keeping an Aging Parent from Aging, The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the LongLost Hamptons, and Fast Women and Slow Horses: The (mis)Adventures of a Bar, Betting and Barbecue Man (with William Mayberry) He lives in Bethlehem. geoffgehman@verizon.net