• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

You are here: Home / 2015 / Archives for March 2015

Archives for March 2015

Revisiting the Music of Elliott Smith

March 30, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="pSiNhPLxRicBfP3m18tXkhFjYiIy7Uxc"] THE other day I almost froze as I heard a song coming out of the radio that sounded both fresh and eerily familiar. It turned out to be a song from the new Elliott Smith tribute by Seth Avett -- guitarist for the rustic, North Carolina-based Avett Brothers -- and the indie singer-songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield. The song -- … [Read more...]

Guest Columnist: Has Our Inner Child Won?

March 26, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="ZZ6HZnil37V095gDDTpaRNbulixzlHOn"] Here's the latest from our sometime guest columnist. This one will make some noise, I expect. With no further ado: WHAT PRICE SAFETY? By Lawrence Christon A mad, obsessive ship’s captain destroys everyone on board, save one, in his vengeful mission to kill a whale. An unhinged barber slits the throats of his patrons and … [Read more...]

What Makes a City Beautiful ?

March 25, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="krjjjXo4RZIvrWEAQUieiD1G6Y9vbRUb"] IT'S all just a matter of opinion, isn't it? Nobody can agree on aesthetics, right? The Anglo-Swiss writer Alain de Botton demolishes these myths and others in a video on "How to Make an Attractive City." Slate has a fascinating story on the topic, and breaks out the writer's six criteria for urban beauty. By the part that … [Read more...]

The Horatio Alger Myth: Amanda Palmer

March 20, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="81zgKnkFndNWR6ZZyt0SEf1pDSPSHyWh"] DO musicians and artists need an equitable structure around them, or can they make it by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps? The latter point of view has been promoted -- perhaps incessantly -- by onetime Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer, a talented musician and canny businesswoman who has become a Horatio Alger hero for the … [Read more...]

“In Praise of Difficulty”

March 18, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="b8rJJnGCXKiH3M8zWOVGbX2BXfYXXJBs"] DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I've been hearing for most of my life -- I came of age in the '80s -- that we don't. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you called a snob. But a very fine, reasonably long … [Read more...]

Dueling With the Dean: Rock Crit Robert Christgau

March 8, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="yBD4c5vb8BM1hc18kDjMHHcBiA2hrCio"] ON the occasion of his new memoir, Going Into the City, which chronicles the roots of a rock critic and in some ways an entire generation of American pop-culture journalists, I spoke to Christgau about childhood, politics, fellow scribe Ellen Willis, pop, and the lost promise of the '60s. He's the author of immortal line, in his … [Read more...]

Does Quality Exist? Does it Matter?

March 6, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="wQDbiK53WLrcRyDIHLNO7bs9fTuwmnMY"] THE novelist Rick Moody tracked me down recently and asked me to go back and forth with him over the issue of aesthetic quality. He -- as an emissary of the literary blog The Rumpus -- was especially interested in the notion of art that was "born to be bad." We chewed on this issue for a while -- connecting the argument of my … [Read more...]

Six Questions: Where Do We Go Fom Here?

March 5, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1whRNQEaMtG6Y3rKjMLHRzTEwdTzdym6"] THE American Scholar magazine recently asked me to lay out some of the questions I was left with upon completing my book, Culture Crash. I was glad they asked me for questions rather than answers; the plight of the arts, humanism, the middle class, and art for art's sake seem so complex and impacted that it's a lot harder to solve … [Read more...]

Pop Songs and the Novel: Against Vanguardism

March 5, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="a7mJx7Xejr8thGfyDNDHndexoDBA5XUC"] THE writer and critic Nick Hornby, who has a new novel out, wrote this a few years back in discussing the songs of Ben Folds: There is an argument that says pop music, like the novel, has found its ideal form, and in the case of pop music it’s the three- or four-minute verse/chorus/verse song. And if this is the case, then we … [Read more...]

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...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
March 2015
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Feb   Apr »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in