11:11

Heavy EP rotation at the L.A. Times: In my latest Astral Weeks column, I review Matt Kindt's graphic novel Revolver. I end it with a shout-out to my favorite Beatles book, Devin McKinney's Magic Circles:

As I read "Revolver," I couldn't help thinking of the more famous "Revolver," the Beatles' landmark 1966 album. Devin McKinney's description of it, in "Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History," as a sort of pop schizophrenia, seems not irrelevant to the subject at hand. "Revolver" is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings… By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming.

I also look at Alice Sola Kim's short story "The Other Graces," which is in the latest (July 2010) issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. I just happened to look through the mag at B&N and the first few lines grabbed me...I bought the issue, finished the story, shoehorned it into the column!