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"Essays drawn from across Timberg's career, including profiles of artists and writers, as well as investigations of the challenges facing America's creative class"--]cProvided by publisher.
List of contents
Introduction
Eye on Cool
Being Spike Jonze
Unwanted Thoughts
The Romantic Egotist
Indie Angst
High-Tone Talk
Hitting a Nerve
Mars in Apogee
The Cult of Glenn Gould
His Back Pages
Music on the Edge
Retooling Form and Function
Boom Times for the End of the World
Drawn to a Dark Side
Highbrow. Lowbrow. No Brow. Now What?
The Novel That Predicted Portland
Will Any Band Ever Break Up?
Can Unions Save the Creative Class?
Chasing Musical Legends in Joshua Tree National Park
How the Village Voice and Other Alt-Weeklies Lost Their Voice
Down We Go Together
Leaving Los Angeles
Searching for a Great American Rock Show
The Revenge of Monoculture
How Music Has Responded to a Decade of Economic Inequality
After a Decade, Will Gustavo Dudamel Stay at the LA Phil or Leave on a High Note?
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the author
Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the
LA Weekly and the
Los Angeles Times, wrote on music and culture and was a contributor to
Salon, the
New York Times, and
Vox. He was an award-winning journalist, a blogger on West Coast culture, and an adjunct writing professor. His previous book,
Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. Richard Brody of the
New Yorker called
Culture Crash “a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life,” and Ben Downing, writing in the
Wall Street Journal, said, “Mr. Timberg succeeds in assembling a large, coherent, and troubling mosaic … weaving all manner of information and opinion into a fluent narrative of cultural decline.” Timberg died by his own hand on December 10, 2019, in Pasadena, California. He was fifty years old.
Ted Gioia is a music historian and the author of eleven books, including
Music: A Subversive History and
How to Listen to Jazz. His three books on the social history of music—
Work Songs, Healing Songs, and
Love Songs—have each been honored with the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Gioia's wide-ranging activities as a critic, scholar, performer, and educator have established him as a leading global guide to music past, present, and future.
Summary
A rich banquet at the cutting edge of the arts, rooted in California’s eclectic cultural gumbo, by one of America’s most gifted critics, who died young in 2019.
"A perfect journalistic valediction from one of LA’s finest commentators."—Richard Thompson
"Timberg, who loved Los Angeles and culture journalism with an intense passion, was among the essential chroniclers of the city […] Boom Times is both a celebration of a prodigious talent and a valediction for a lost soul." —Los Angeles Times
The late Scott Timberg championed artists earnestly and relentlessly, with empathy and persistence. He was a vocal and widely admired advocate for working artists, one of the first to sound the alarm on the escalating economic challenges that have faced creative workers in the twenty-first century. The twenty-six reflections in this book form a valuable window onto many cultural shifts that have upended the country’s creative traditions and expectations. They are, by turns, surprising, wide-ranging, passionate, and fun. Timberg’s perceptive and enthusiastic profiles on the arts extend to West Coast jazz and Gustavo Dudamel’s LA Philharmonic, the fiction of Ray Bradbury and John Rechy, the early films of Spike Jonze and Christopher Nolan, the comics of Los Bros Hernandez and Adrian Tomine, and many more musicians, novelists, filmmakers, architects, and impresarios. Timberg had a knack, as Ted Gioia writes in his introduction, for “finding the best in the cultural scene on the dream coast.” This is an indispensable volume that showcases the author’s endless curiosity, as well as his passion and love for California—especially that confounding and complex metropolis Los Angeles.
