ON THE SCENE! With my assistant Marisha.

Hi everyone, it's me, Sherman's assistant Marisha. It's been pretty busy here on the Armitage Heights music "scene" (love those parentheses), but truthfully, I haven't been to as many shows recently as I might have. I'm serving on the new novelist laureate committee, plus I'm trying to wrap up my thesis at the University for next semester. And other things have been going on, as well.

If you want, I've set up a MySpace page at www.myspace.com/assistantmarisha. There's not much there yet, but I'll flesh it out when I have a chance. You can send me information there about any upcoming shows, albums, music news or anything else. Please note that this isn't my private MySpace profile. My private MySpace profile isn't viewable by the public at large at this time.

Anyway, the biggest news lately is the October Revolutionists have signed with Capitol Records, who will be putting out their new record next month. The Revs were also featured on the cover of SPIN Magazine this month, who called their new album "a fascinating melange of old-time genre music and late-model hipster cynicism," so everyone's pretty excited about that. Personally, I think their new work is more cynical than good, and it's a really tired formula that they've been flaying for a long time -- ooh, here's a reference to a Victorian book, sung like Gordon Gano over a bunch of accordians and glockenspiels. But, who am I to say anything. If you look at the comments from yesterday, the legendarily cranky novelist Kimball Burin put it rather pithily, even though I wish Sherman wouldn't approve every insane comment that floats by. Particularly when it's about me, which all of them seem to be lately.

Regardless, that's the news. There's some good shows coming up, including the Red Queen Principle at the Lakesider Tavern this Friday, local noise-rockers the Gold Journal are playing a record release show for their new album We Study Magical Destruction at Don's Liquors on Saturday, and finally, you can see Société Nationale play with the Four-Chambered Heart and Frost Creep next Tuesday at Spike's. All of those bands are pretty good, except for one, but Sherman asked me to stop saying "non-positive" things about local bands. So you'll have to go see for yourself which one I mean. I think it will be pretty obvious -- the answer will probably sneak up on you in the cold, so to speak.