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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

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Tribune Corp, 2010

October 6, 2010 by Scott Timberg

IN the spring of 2008 I was called into the office of the editor who was supposedly running my section, Calendar. He said good things about my previous year of output and how much he was looking forward to what I’d turn out next. (Nearly every day I had a story in the paper, he came by my desk with a smile to tell me how much he liked it.)The LA Times building after its bombing 100 years agoHe … [Read more...]

California Vs. The Great Plains

July 12, 2010 by Scott Timberg

The writer and urbanist Joel Kotkin has a fascinating piece in a recent Newsweek called "The Great Great Plains," which looks at the way cities like Fargo and Bismarck -- as well as most of Texas -- are booming while much of the rest of the country languishes in a dead economy.It got us here at the Misread City wondering: What are Omaha and Dallas doing right that Los Angeles and other West Coast … [Read more...]

Shocked and Appalled at UCLA

May 27, 2010 by Scott Timberg

David Sefton -- generally the most intriguing and unpredictable of Los Angeles' arts showmen -- has resigned from his post running the UCLA Live series that takes place at Royce Hall and other venues. Sefton, a native of Liverpool, is being coy about this, but it's hard not to imagine that someone as passionate about his programming, and about his particularly fervent niche of high and low, … [Read more...]

Eagle Rock and Small Business

January 14, 2010 by Scott Timberg

TONIGHT I go to a wake of sorts for Paper, a shop on Eagle Rock's Colorado Boulevard. The shop sold cool books, smart gifts, letterpress printed cards, and leather journals -- exactly the kind of combination that signals the arrival of a neighborhood into bobo heaven.The closing of the store -- done in by the recession, of course -- is especially poignant because owner Shannon Bedell lost another … [Read more...]

Newspaper Layoffs and "The Disposable American"

October 20, 2009 by Scott Timberg

IN 2007, a mean-spirited robber baron bought an important american media company with money that wasnt his, in a deal that no responsible anti-trust division would have permitted. over the next two years, hundreds of journalists were laid off from the LA Times and other newspapers. in october, i became one of them. departing with me were the deeply talented writer lynell george, the best editor … [Read more...]

Birth of a Wine Shop

April 17, 2009 by Scott Timberg

ANYONE interested in wine, or how a small business gets off the ground, should check out this series of youtube videos about the birth of colorado wine company -- conceived as the dream of a restless young couple in brooklyn who left everything they had in new york to drive to eagle rock, LA, to build it from the ground up.HERE is the first of the four little segments of the show "radical … [Read more...]

Seamus Heaney on Recession and Heroism

April 16, 2009 by Scott Timberg

MONDAY marked seamus heaney's 70th birthday. i know this blog is in danger of drowning in a sea of green -- between morrissey and john lennon, both of irish descent, oscar wilde's poll position, and st. patrick's day, i am flying the celtic flag high.but let me discuss the nobel-winning irishman for a second. i am sympathetic to the argument that heaney ceased being a great poet when he became, in … [Read more...]

Eagle Rock and Bourgeois Bohemia Imperiled

February 26, 2009 by Scott Timberg

ON a crisp winter day, with snow glinting on the san gabriel mountains, air cleansed by a recent rain, and mighty oak trees looming over the quiet streets above colorado blvd, eagle rock can seem like the kind of place '60s bands used to write songs about. but these days, people aren't singing -- or if they are, it's in a bittersweet key.over the last few years northeast LA has become a kind of … [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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