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Boom Times for the End of the World
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This insightful compendium brings together highlights from the career of Los Angeles Times reporter Timberg (Culture Crash), who died in 2019. Los Angeles culture serves as the through line for most of these pieces, which include a profile of L.A. Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel; an ode to photographer William Claxton, who captured the major players of the L.A. jazz scene in the 1950s; and a consideration of how a rancorous 2001 panel about an exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art reflected the fractured state of public discourse in the city. Timberg had a talent for finding global themes, such as in "Leaving Los Angeles," where he uses his 2008 layoff from the Los Angeles Times to explore the financial damages wrought by the Great Recession. The selections attest to the richness of Timberg's analysis and demonstrate that the author was as comfortable dissecting the legacy of pianist Glenn Gould and the stories of Ray Bradbury as he was Spike Jonze films and lyrics by rap group the Coup. Though readers' mileage may vary based on their interest in Los Angeles, Timberg proves himself an authority on the city and its enthrallment to "fantasy, boosterism, and magical thinking." This is a fitting testament to a skilled cultural critic.