There was something missing in Buffalo’s otherwise jam-packed festival calendar. About midway between Gay Pride in early June and Curtain Up! in mid September, there was a hole—which for the past two years has been filled by the Buffalo Infringement Festival. This year, Buffalo Infringement Festival’s 11- day schedule runs from July 26 through August 5 and again focuses its doings along Allen Street and satellites at a handful of locations along Elmwood and downtown. Of course, the Buffalo Infringement Festival has more purpose than to take up space and to plug up a couple of unused summer weekends.

So you still think there’s little opportunity to hear hip, original music in Buffalo? Visit this year’s Infringement Festival and prove yourself wrong.

Making recommendations seems out of keeping with the “take a chance” spirit of the Buffalo Infringement Festival. Still, I do try to steer myself toward good theater experiences, so I might as well share my decision-making process. With so many offerings, I will certainly see particular shows, while deciding to pass on others. To a certain extent, my viewing is governed by scheduling, but that is certainly not the overriding factor.

If the point of the Infringement Festival is to be a sort of artistic, utopian critical response to what can be described as the “oppressive neoliberal worldview”—the commercialization, and therefore depoliticization, of people and the “fringe” movement—then it’s surprising that there are only four literary events planned for Buffalo’s upcoming Infringement Festival. Literature, after all, ha traditionally been one of the most democratic, subversive and empowering forms of art—accessible to nearly everyone. That said, those four events are certainly worth attending, and, in the uncritical, democratic spirit of the Infringement Festival, they run the gamut from an exhibition of scholarly papers to the rhythmic floetry of a poet-turned-rapper. Here’s a run-down of what to expect:

In navigating the hodgepodge of Infringement-related events in the coming week and a half, festival-goers would be wise to take a somewhat cavalier attitude. The main problem with the sort of over-stimulation a multi-media occasion like this brings is that there’s so much happening, everyone is bound to miss something. The more “in-your-face” each event or performance is, the more likely spectators are to notice it—whether they appreciate it artistically or not. So, in the interests of the more subtle presentations, such as art exhibits, painting demonstrations, film screenings, etc., we’ve compiled what is intended to be a handy guide to what’s on the wall during this mostly off-the-wall extravaganza.

Could be I’m afflicted with attention deficit disorder. Maybe I don’t like to make choices. Or I just want more more more. In any case, I’m drawn to the performances whose architects describe their work with words like “multimedia,” or “genre-defying,” or some more current shorthand that says neither fish nor fowl, or fish and fowl and everything else.