Almost Summer

The Buffalo Place Thursday at the Square summer concert schedule is out and people are rightly blown away by the acts that are booked for this year. This may be the best lineup yet. I’m always impressed with the quality of acts that they can bring downtown. I love how the lineup always comes out at the last minute, too. It adds so much to the drama, as if they just finalized it at the very last minute, which apparently they did. Courtesy of Buffalo Rising Online:

"I thought we had it all set three days ago... then we got a couple last minute call-ins and had to scramble. There's so much competition for booking these acts, but Thursday at the Square has made a name for itself so there are a lot of bands that want to play and will remember Buffalo when scheduling their summer tours. Thursday at the Square brings tens of thousands of people downtown, and the spinoff generates four and a half million dollars of economic impact, 3.2 million of that directly impacts the downtown core."

Son Volt and The Old 97’s are the two jaw-dropping bands on the list, but the Violent Femmes are returning again this year, and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is playing later in the summer. Moe is good and Soul Asylum is perfectly respectable. I can’t get excited about the Dropkick Murphy’s, though. All the current Irish Rock bands sound to me like they are more Pogues-inspired in terms of the drinking rather than the songwriting.

I bought a Dirty Dozen Brass Band cassette when I was in high school because I had heard them on a Grateful Dead bootleg and saw that they had recorded a number with Elvis Costello. Not sure where that tape went, but it was The New Orleans Album.

I saw a commercial for Chemistry dot com during The Office last night, and I misinterpreted the ad I saw yesterday. Apparently people with profiles on eHarmony can get notices that no one else’s profile matches up with theirs and therefore they can’t be set up on a match. In other words, “Rejected by eHarmony.” I don’t know what I was thinking yesterday. How could there be an online dating site that caters to unhip people? They would probably sooner market Mountain Dew to non-extreme teenagers.

I know that it’s pointless to rail against American Idol, but I just have to say that the whole thing is utterly glum and depressing. The hausfraus can have it as far as I’m concerned, but every time I hear a guy talking about watching it I actually get depressed. Any guy who is discussing American Idol doesn’t have it on in the background because his wife is watching it. He is into it. American Idol is utterly soulless. It’s professional karaoke. And if you flip around your FM dial on the way into work, as a matter of course every radio station is talking about what happened the night before. Identical comments, identical calls from listeners, in every city in the country. Nobody has ever had a different opinion about anything relating to that show. Anything at all with any value or depth will generate different reactions from people. I have never heard anyone have a debate about the merits of any of the karaoke singers on Idol, but how could they? It’s like debating whether you like the burger at Fridays or the burger at Applebee’s. You can’t debate sameness. This is my idea of hell. If Chris Moltisanti is in hell right now and it truly is an Irish bar where every day is St. Patrick’s Day, I will gladly trade hells with him. I will spend eternity at Rocky Sullivan’s on St. Patrick’s Day and he can listen to the gang on Buzz radio riff on American Idol.