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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

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David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks”

October 5, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="KUST1tJRtgkRnoQOLlZRPbrZOASSJtA8"] I'M not sure there's a novelist alive whose work I look forward to more than David Mitchell's. I say this even while sharing some mixed feelings about his new novel. The parts of this that work -- four and a half of its six parts -- are simply spectacular. In fact, I can't think of two many writers of any kind whose storytelling is … [Read more...]

Artists in the Digital Age, and Falling in Love with Technology

February 24, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="qC3vge9cgA87c22YRZr5Mjkjf9EcoUPy"] HOW will the digital age shape the livelihood of artists, writers and musicians? There’s a new story in The New York Times that everyone who cares about the subject should read. It’s by Robert H. Frank, one of my favorite economists and the sharpest observer of the winner-take-all phenomenon, which may seem to have little to do with … [Read more...]

The Past and Future of Jazz, and “Writing From California”

February 19, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="5JaPY4EuOTgKJQzRDmJq9iKTEWZtZtT7"] SHE's not just my favorite new jazz singer in many moons, but someone who points the way forward for the music. That's the sense I've gotten from the young, classically trained vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant, who played the other night at Catalina's and whose album, WomanChild, is a knockout. Part of what I like about her is the … [Read more...]

RIP Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

June 6, 2012 by Scott Timberg

TODAY The Misread City mourns the death of Ray Bradbury. He was the first science-fiction writer, and the first Los Angeles writer, many people read. I still remember devouring the stories from The October Country and The Martian Chronicles in elementary school.In a rush of emotion and recollection, I wrote my first piece for Zocalo Public Square on Bradbury's complicated relationship with Los … [Read more...]

Imagining Mars

March 12, 2012 by Scott Timberg

WHATEVER the faults of John Carter, the new film based on the early work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we're happy to have the chance to head back to Mars. Given the way NASA funding is going, this may be our only chance.As a species, we've been fascinated with the Red Planet for a long time -- the film is only the latest of a long line. Why does it draw us to it, and how has our thinking about Mars … [Read more...]

Novelist Neal Stephenson

October 20, 2011 by Scott Timberg

ONE of the smartest, as well as the toughest, writers I've ever encountered in Neal Stephenson, who is somewhere between a cyberpunk writer, a science-fiction novelist and a cultural historian.I met Stephenson, who has a new novel out, in his hometown of Seattle just before the publication of Anathem. HERE is my interview with the author of Snow Crash and The Baroque Triology.One of Anathem's … [Read more...]

Philip K. Dick at the Movies

March 3, 2011 by Scott Timberg

Tomorrow a new film based on a Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau, opens. I’ve not yet seen the Matt Damon/Emily Blunt film yet, but the PKD fans I know are not impressed with it and don’t think it’s true to the author’s vision and thinks it's been skewed too much in a conventional-romantic direction. (Here is a mostly approving review by the NYT's Manohla Dargis.)The film is based on a … [Read more...]

Philip K. Dick in Marin Co.

November 22, 2010 by Scott Timberg

RECENTLY your humble blogger ventured to Point Reyes Station, a beautiful little town on the Marin Coast, where Philip K. Dick spent several reclusive and very productive years. They were also perhaps his greatest period, during which he wrote The Man in the High Castle and began The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich.The result is this New York Times story, which runs Tuesday and looks at a … [Read more...]

The Past Envisions the Future

November 15, 2010 by Scott Timberg

LOOKING back at mid-century optimism is always both fascinating and depressing. All the labor-saving devices and exotic holidays -- weekends on the moon! -- we were going to get by now.The science-fiction writer Gregory Benford, who teaches at UC/Irvine, and the editors of Popular Mechanics have put together hundreds of these predictions, from asbestos dresses to personal jetpacks, along with the … [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...]

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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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