Boom Times for the End of the World

by Scott Timberg

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597145985
Publisher:	Heyday
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

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 UniversityPress. 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.

Read an Excerpt

FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY TED GIOIA, AUTHOR OF MUSIC: A SUBVERSIVE HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF JAZZ

For many of us, Scott’s death revealed uncanny and disturbing connections with his professional life over the last decade, when he emerged as our leading chronicler and champion of creative professionals who had been squeezed and displaced in the “culture business.” This large and growing demographic included, as he saw it, everyone from journalists like himself all the way to the film lover who once worked at the local video rental store (before it closed) or the minimum-wage clerk at the defunct indie bookstore.

They had all been part of a healthy cultural ecosystem, and he had watched it collapse over the course of just a few years.

And then it happened to him too.

But at first there were successes. After working for The Day in Connecticut and the alt-weekly New Times in SoCal, Scott got hired by the Los Angeles Times. This was the ideal job for him, and again and again he delivered remarkable articles on tight deadline, never losing his enthusiasm for the next concert, the latest art exhibition, the forthcoming book, the hot new film, and anything else that came his way.

Scott had a knack for finding the best in the cultural scene on the dream coast. We would have long, rambling conversations about California—which for him was a rich tapestry in which the threads, on any given day, might include West Coast jazz, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries, Spike Jonze’s movies, Ed Ruscha’s pop art, Robinson Jeffers’s Hawk Tower, sci-fi from Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick, La La Land, L.A. Confidential, the California history books of Kevin Starr, the photos of William Claxton, or Gustavo Dudamel’s latest performance. Some of those turned up as subjects in his published writings, but the surviving articles and essays only begin to sketch out his endless curiosity and passion for his adopted home state.

He saw the challenges he faced echoed in the lives of so many others, and he cared deeply about all those who suffered in the same way he did. The notion that his abbreviated life might serve as a rallying point for the compassion owed to those squeezed by our culture shift would have given Scott a small bit of gratification. I know it provides me with some consolation.

But Scott would also want people to remember the joy and exhilaration he felt in pursuing his chosen vocation. His selected writings do just that. Here he still survives in the role he played best: the passionate and earnest culture writer who loved his misread city. I only wish it had loved him half as much in return.

Table 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

Editorial Reviews

Ranked Among the Best Books About LA by L.A. Taco

Praise for Boom Times for the End of the World:

"To read Scott Timberg's newly published collection of essays, Boom Times for the End of the World, is to experience both a rush of cultural stimulation and an overwhelming sense of sadness. 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." —Chris Vognar, Los Angeles Times

"Timberg proves himself an authority on [Los Angeles] and its enthrallment to 'fantasy, boosterism, and magical thinking.' This is a fitting testament to a skilled cultural critic." —Publishers Weekly

"Boom Times’ 26 pieces spanning 16 years […] report on the characters and scenes that made Los Angeles an endless source of fascination for Scott Timberg. […] For Scott, journalism really was the literature of civic life, and what mattered most to him was the conversation between the public and the culture; that conversation was Scott’s lifeblood." —Joe Donnelly, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Scott was a polymath. He could write knowledgeably, and passionately, about a variety of topics: from literature to rock music, from popular culture to film to visual art. For another journalist, that might have been a stretch. For Scott, it was all part of the job. Just look at the pieces in Boom Times." —David Ulin, Alta Journal

"Boom Times for the End of the World is Timberg’s posthumous collection of essays and reflections from the last two decades, written with verve, curiosity, and refreshing sincerity. [...] At its most vulnerable, Timberg’s collection feels like a journal from a society’s last days, dispatches from some distant outpost right up until the signal went dead. [...] Timberg’s work in Boom Times rarely indulges the despair. His dedication to art’s role in society never wavers." —Marius Sosnowski, ZYZZYVA

"For over two decades, Scott Timberg was one of Los Angeles's most prolific journalists championing artists, musicians, writers, architects and filmmakers. [...] The twenty-six essays in this posthumous collection showcase his prescient eye, omnivorous mind and the deep longing behind his words." —Mike Sonksen, L.A. Taco

"A perfect journalistic valediction from one of LA’s finest commentators." —Richard Thompson, singer-songwriter, author of Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967–1975

"Scott knew many things; to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, he was a fox, not a hedgehog, and this collection is the proof." —Dean Wareham, founder of Galaxie 500 and Luna, author of Black Postcards: A Memoir

"There was no one else on the West Coast quite like Scott Timberg—the most versatile and free-wheeling culture critic of his generation. Boom Times for the End of the World is the insightful, entertaining, and excruciating chronicle of America's cultural crash." —Dana Gioia, former California Poet Laureate, author of Meet Me at The Lighthouse

"In an era of edgy hot takes and glib quick-hits, there is something soul satisfying in hearing Scott's erudite voice again. A ravenous researcher, deep thinker and elegant wordsmith, Scott put his full heart into everything. Sitting next to Scott for years in the newsroom, I always looked forward to hearing his first-draft reflections of what he had just seen, heard, or walked through. He was drafting even before he sat down in his chair, connecting the dots, eager to get his thoughts down, to share it with us all. It's such a gift to finally have some of his finest observations and meditations collected between two covers." —Lynell George, author of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky

Praise for Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class by Scott Timberg (Yale UniversityPress, 2015):

"Timberg—himself a culture journalist who was a victim of one of the Los Angeles Times’s seemingly endless series of layoffs—makes a good case that, as Bob Dylan once put it, 'something there’s been lost.'" —Ben Yagoda, New York Times Book Review

"A quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life." —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Mr. Timberg succeeds in assembling a large, coherent and troubling mosaic. He writes lucidly but with passion and a kind of bitter wit. And he is impressively well-read . … He shows himself to be a gifted synthesizer, weaving all manner of information and opinion into a fluent narrative of cultural decline." —Ben Downing, The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher