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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

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“Dido” and “Bluebeard” at LA Opera

November 3, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="AkwrwxM6eGKNL3GVzj0NAKOSml0rfK6D"] YOUR humble blogger came out of a performance of Duke Bluebeard's Castle yesterday reminded of what a bloody genius Bela Bartok was -- and I mean that just about literally. The production at Los Angeles Opera is brutally sharp, filled with sexual menace. The swelling, at times astringent music itself offered a dark kind of beauty to … [Read more...]

Massenet’s “Thais” at LA Opera

June 4, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="GYlAzT4O3lEomZ10GqKrQmACXiv7ZjHE"] WHAT kind of love is the truest and most enduring, spiritual or erotic? That’s a theme that echoes through the opera I saw the other day. My experience with Massenet is limited, so I have little sense of what to expect. But Thais, which stars Placido Domingo as an earnest and confused fourth-century monk seeking out an Alexandrian … [Read more...]

The Journey of a Soprano

February 8, 2012 by Scott Timberg

THIS week my Influences column looks at opera soprano Ana Maria Martinez, who started out as a West Side Story loving kid in Puerto Rico and became a star who sings all over the world. (She's also won a Latin Grammy and been dubbed "the most beautiful voice in Latin America."HERE is my conversation with Martinez, who had a fortuitous early meeting with Placido Domingo, who would go on to become a … [Read more...]

Long Beach Opera on the Edge

March 13, 2011 by Scott Timberg

WHEN you do what I do, you hear a lot of arts advocates and administrators talk about "reaching out," finding "new audiences," "making connections," and so on, and it gets tiresome. In part that's because it seems so calculated, in part because it usually means watering down programming to make it safer and more familiar.LBO's next opera: Philip Glass's "Akhnaten"But Andreas Mitisek, the Austrian … [Read more...]

The Germans are Coming

June 21, 2010 by Scott Timberg

IN the years just before, during and after WWII, the flow of exiles and emigres from fascist Germany to Los Angeles became so strong that an injection of wit and decadence transformed parts of the city. I wrote about this period -- and a present where German culture exists mostly in dispersed form -- in Sunday's LA Times. Here is my piece, which looks at both the era where Marlene Dietrich, Thomas … [Read more...]

Wagner’s Ring Cycle vs. The Gods

March 13, 2009 by Scott Timberg

ON wednesday night -- that's wotan's day to those of you who speak norse -- i caught "das rheingold," the los angeles opera's take on the first of wagner's ring cycle. it's directed by the avant-german achim freyer and has received quite mixed reviews in my circle. i found it intriguing in parts, hard to fathom in others; my former colleague mark swed mostly admired the production, here. and my … [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...]

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