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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Chasing Women with James Ellroy

March 27, 2009 by Scott Timberg


OVER the last year or so i’ve been lucky enough to hang out with james ellroy, self-proclaimed demon dog of american crime fiction, including a bizarre/memorable dinner at taylor’s steakhose at which the author insisted i bring along some good looking women.

because he always seems to be on camera — barking like a dog, offering off-color anecdotes and ethnic jokes, and generally acting out — it was intriguing to follow him last week when an actual camera crew was on him.

ellroy was walking around LA’s old-money hancock park neighborhood — his teenage ‘hood — for a video doc playboy will post on its website… the video, like his new memoir/essay in playboy, gets at how the murder of his mother sent him on a tailspin and shaped his relationships with women. (the “relationships” in the hancock park chapter mostly involved stealing underwear and watching girls undress through windows.)
you can read all about it in my latest LATIMES piece. and it’s playboy’s april issue you want.
i remember moving to LA in 1997, the summer before the film “LA confidential” came out… everyone i knew — film people, music people, book people — was talking about the movie and how good it was. that sent me and a lot of other people into a fascination with the mad dog’s work. 
here is a piece i wrote last year about the weird inability of hollywood to match LA Conf with another good adaptation. ellroy’s next novel is due this fall.
i welcome comments, especially, from anyone who’s read the playboy stuff.

Filed Under: books, ellroy, Los Angeles, noir, playboy

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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