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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

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Archives for August 2010

The New Yorker’s Young West Coast Writers

August 31, 2010 by Scott Timberg

THE New Yorker recently announced its 20 Under 40 list of American writers, running some of them in their summer fiction issue and others since. Two of the bunch – Daniel Alarcon and Yiyun Li – were fairly recent profile subjects of mine, and I’ve enjoyed, without surprise, watching their rise. Both are foreign-born writers who’ve settled in the Bay Area and show the ability – despite nativist … [Read more...]

Remembering the Go-Betweens

August 26, 2010 by Scott Timberg

The Believer's Music Issue, out this summer, has a substantial interview with Robert Forster, co-founder of one of my all-time favorite bands, The Go-Betweens. Robert Christgau's Q&A, while offering no major surprises, captures one of the most literate men in rock music with all his aloofness intact.This is a band I think about a lot -- they were part of my childhood in the '80s before breaking up … [Read more...]

Jonathan Lethem Comes to California

August 23, 2010 by Scott Timberg

JONATHAN Lethem is well known to readers of The Misread City one of the most consistently fascinating American novelists. Nearly all the writers we celebrate here are West Coast figures – Dick, Le Guin, Chabon, Chandler, Ross MacDonald – and Lethem has stood out as a kind of token Brooklyner. But Lethem, whose most recent novel was the Upper East Side-set Chronic City, has finally seen the light. … [Read more...]

John Lautner House Imperiled

August 20, 2010 by Scott Timberg

AN EARLY and long overlooked Beverly Hills house by architect John Lautner -- celebrated by fans as an "organic modernist" -- may soon be history. That's the situation a new story of mine, which runs in Saturday's LA Times, describes. The house, which has fallen into serious disrepair, has been owned for 23 years by a couple, originally from Chile, who have lost patience with the place. … [Read more...]

First-ever Philip K. Dick Festival

August 20, 2010 by Scott Timberg

JUST a few days ago in Colorado, scholars, fans and various oddballs gathered in honor of Philip K. Dick, the eccentric visionary who is a major presence on The Misread City. Your humble blogger was not able to attend, but David Gill, the San Francisco-based savant behind the Total Dick-Head blog chronicled the gathering -- the first of its kind in the US -- for groovy sci-fi/futurism site … [Read more...]

Ray Bradbury, Still Going at 90

August 18, 2010 by Scott Timberg

THIS Sunday marks the 90th birthday of the first Los Angeles writer I ever read. I can still remember some of the images and moods in his story collection The October Country. And the yearning lyricism and use of The Red Planet as a metaphor for the American West makes The Martian Chronicles, some days, one of my 10 favorite works of fiction.Critic Ted Gioia has a wide-ranging tribute to Bradbury … [Read more...]

The Return of Levon Helm

August 16, 2010 by Scott Timberg

LAST night I was lucky enough to catch Levon Helm, former drummer for The Band and one of the great comeback stories in rock music. The show was about as stirring as any I've seen lately, and ended as a kind of celebration of American roots music in its many guises and -- especially thanks to an appearance by Steve Earle -- made explicit Helm's role as a father figure to the alt-country … [Read more...]

"California Crackup"

August 11, 2010 by Scott Timberg

Anyone living in California right now knows how hard the state is straining, with unemployment above 12 percent and well over that in some inland areas, schools slicing teachers and firing librarians, the infrastructure rotting, and very little faith in our action-hero governor.Joe Mathews was one of the many talented investigative journalists at the LAT Times when I arrived, and like many he … [Read more...]

The Beatles Come to Hamburg (Again)

August 9, 2010 by Scott Timberg

Almost exactly 50 years ago, the Beatles came to Hamburg's tawdry Reeperbahn district and, dressed mostly in black leather, transformed themselves into the best rock band in the world. Later this month, a group of American indie rockers will play the band's old club, the Indra, to commemorate the raw, fast, very early Beatles.Named for an X-rated movie theater where the Liverpudlians stayed when … [Read more...]

R.E.M., Britfolk and White Bicycles

August 5, 2010 by Scott Timberg

A lot of us are excited that Fables of the Reconstruction -- R.E.M.'s most poetic and mysterious album -- has just gotten a deluxe reissue complete with remaster and new material. Much of the weird, echoey Southern Gothic mojo on that 1985 album came from Britfolk producer Joe Boyd, and I'm reminded how great Boyd's memoir of the '60s and early '70s, White Bicycles, is.In fact. I will second the … [Read more...]

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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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