Put Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Stevie Wonder, The Beatles and Pink Floyd all into a tiny room, strip away all their charisma, take away the good equipment, bring down their level of talent a bunch of notches and kidnap the good sound director, and you’ll have last Saturday night at Castaways.

The three performing bands — Dirac, Solstice and Revision — all name these greats as their influences on their respective MySpace pages, but I’m sure, somewhere, John Lennon’s cremated pieces have reassembled to roll in his metaphorical grave.

Ithaca College’s Emerson Suites overflowed with flannel shirts, tight-fitting jeans and a healthy helping of enthusiasm on Friday night, as students from across the city converged to see John Darnielle take the stage.

As lead singer of the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has developed a cult-like following since the band formed in 1991. No doubt his Ithaca fans were out in full force to support him during his solo performance.

After taking the stage, Darnielle seemed nervous and shaky as all of the attention focused in on him. Hoots and hollers from the crowd were quieted as he began his performance.

It’ll be hipster heaven on Friday as The Mountain Goats — lo-fi strummers extradonaire and progenitors of Bright Eyes and the like — descend on Emerson Suites at Ithaca College for an intimate night of singing, swooning and sharing.

Started by John Darnielle in the early ’90s — and still, as far as anyone’s concerned, his band — The Mountain Goats occupy a special niche in the indie rock stratosphere, mixing the high-brow lyricism of outfits from The Velvet Underground to The Decemberists with the beautifully earnest, slightly deranged harmonies of Neutral Milk Hotel or Daniel Johnston.

Fresh off a 3-1 showing against Columbia over the weekend to clinch the Ivy League South Division title, the softball team stays home tomorrow for a 3:30 p.m. twin bill vs. local rival Ithaca College. The Bombers (22-10) are coming off of a 10-2, 9-0 doubleheader sweep of Oneonta yesterday afternoon to run their winning streak to nine. Sophomore catcher Kerry Barger went 5-for-7 on the day, while junior first baseman Caitlin Ryan also recorded five hits, including a 3-for-3 performance in Game 2 with two RBIs. Classmate Brittany Lillie notched three extra-base hits in six at-bats, including a home run in both games –– good for a team-high seven RBIs between the two ends of the doubleheader.

Just as far above Cayuga’s waters and with an arguably more glorious view, Ithaca College students have often felt a world away from their East Hill counterparts despite being separated by only two miles. But with the recent success of Ivy, an MTV-style faux reality series produced by IC’s student-run television station ICTV, that gap could very well be narrowing.

The Ithaca College Invitational on Saturday marks the first race of the semester for both the men’s and women’s rowing teams. After intense training during their midseason break, the teams hope to start off the spring season strong and will use this race as an indicator of where the crews stand since their last meet in the fall.

Four schools will be competing in both the men’s and women’s races. The men will face Ithaca College, Marist and Hobart College and the women will go up against Ithaca College, Marist and William Smith College.

Opera inhabits the larger-than-life world of illusion and fairy-tale; we go expecting sheer fantasias of darkling grandeurs and flights of lovelorn paroxysms. But like Freudian dreamwork, the experience of opera-going may not be to elude reality so much as to enable us to digest the unforetold consequences of a reality that has leached into the mythic shapes of our shadowy under-thoughts.

Ithaca College has chosen two early twentieth century operettas based on fairy-tales for its annual opera production, Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon and Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilges. The two productions on the bill, however, could not be more different.

Sunday afternoon, several Brazilian-influenced ensembles regaled Barnes Hall with the sounds of the Brazilian night in the Music Department’s Noite Brasileira. The audience, out perilously close to Superbowl kickoff, filled the whole of Barnes Hall, and by general consensus, I’d say they got their money’s worth (more than, actually, since the concert cost a wallet-breaking zero dollars).

A throng of spectators crowded the aisles and blocked the entrances to the Klingenstein Lounge in Egbert Hall at Ithaca College last night to hear A.O. Scott, the famed film critic from The New York Times, lecture about the evolving world of critical journalism. Scott’s lecture, entitled “Criticism as a Way of Life,” focused heavily on the new fad of fast-speed electronic criticism, known to the Internet-savvy as blogging.

Scott opened his lecture by evaluating blogging and questioning the critics who are fading away.

“What happened? Where are the great critics of yesteryear? You look around and you think, ‘Things are so bad now. What happened to the golden age of criticism?’” Scott said.

It seems that Cornell has received its fair 15 minutes of television fame lately, what with Dwight’s Cornell-centric Office antics a few weeks ago. But Andy Bernard ’95 is only one fictional alumnus of our humble university. On Monday, Ithaca College TV debuted a new show, Ivy, which stars all of us—in a way.

The show, according to co-producer Rachel Hastings, an Ithaca sophomore, is “kind of a faux-reality show, like Laguna Beach, but written as a dry comedy and set at Cornell.” Aided by co-producer Ed Pietzak, a senior at I.C., Hastings wrote a script over the summer and set out to produce a truly unique project.