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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

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The Shallowness of “Mad Men”

May 21, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="qq4k2gwK5FqCbEAvppoCYx8tAgWoXajG"] HERE at CultureCrash, we are split on the advertising chronicle Mad Men. Mostly, I think the early seasons were among the best television ever, even if recent seasons have become mere Age of Aquarius soap operas. Our guest columnist Lawrence Christon has no love for the show, early or late. Here is his response to the program's … [Read more...]

When Humor Misfires: Warren Buffett Edition

May 13, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="lgir0rOvQFYZoxYQdc3socyTbOjSL7EA"] Gang, I've been AWOL from the blog lately because of my new job at Salon and a trip last week to Toronto for Canadian Music Week, where I spoke on artists' rights. I expect to have some fresh, uh, content for CultureCrash one of these days. For now, here is new piece by our steady guest columnist, who like me writes about the … [Read more...]

Louis C.K. and the War Against Smugness

April 14, 2015 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Af28w71jYaGhUSvBJL3VamJOvXqLnshM"] HOW do you respond when someone handsome and callow cuts you off? Our guest columnist Lawrence Christon goes on a tear here about how we've gone wrong. With no further ado. A FEW THINGS I WISH HE’D SAID By Lawrence Christon Though spoken in a TV show, it’s one of those crystalline moments, like “Rosebud,” or “I’ll have what … [Read more...]

Farewell to Clive James

November 16, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Af3WnbX7JuSvdi2C0uLj0Xwv9IxmV5r4"] HOW much longer will the beleaguered polymath last? No one knows. But my friend and guest columnist Lawrence Christon has penned an appreciation of the great Australian-born writer. With no further ado: "THE LONG GOODBYE,"  By Lawrence Christon At 75, Clive James is close to the end of a battle with a form of leukemia that’s … [Read more...]

Who Broke Hollywood?

September 22, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="aA6rMNBdTA1u43J91OGEfmvqLnJK7cWf"] WITH an awful and low-yielding summer movie season recently concluded, I've been meaning to try to make sense of the continued decline of grownup film, independent and otherwise. Two LA Times stories get at the problem, which is both economic and aesthetic. The first story, by Josh Rottenberg, takes the point of view of … [Read more...]

Endgame: Culture and Suicide

August 22, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="3jo4huPHGtmGS71JRG98EimGVUeNIngq"] HOW has Western literary culture dealt with the ending of life? How do we see it now? Today guest columnist Lawrence Christon looks at a bundle of complex and painful issues, as recent as the death of Robin Williams and as old as the work of Albert Camus and perhaps Shakespeare. This one is not for the faint of heart. "ENDGAME," … [Read more...]

What Can the Music Business Learn from TV?

August 6, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="ovgvpF5mVNWQ4VA6t0cWS8RxeXKTS2uP"] THE contrast is hard to miss: the great surge in television -- especially on cable -- as the music industry collapses. Culture writer Ted Gioia has written a short provocative post trying to make sense of the mismatch. He's also asking how music can replicate some of the success of HBO, Showtime and the others. Generally, Ted is … [Read more...]

Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers”

July 14, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="MrCO2VFKSM6GvoqcLDS6xaupSfsgna7y"] RECENTLY I spoke to the author of the novel HBO has adapted into a Sunday-night series. Both the novel and the show concern a small town from which a small but significant number of people have mysteriously vanished; most of the storytelling concern the way people deal in various -- and variously conflicting ways -- with the loss. … [Read more...]

Irony’s Dead End: Guest Columnist

June 4, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="8qHfyQW4oDysZVU6d4MJpCUZbSLYZHgf"] DOES irony leads us anywhere valuable? How does cultural postmodernism fit in? These are questions guest columnist Lawrence Christon gets into today, extending a much-discussed essay by David Foster Wallace (pictured). Despite being a child of Letterman, novelists like Pynchon, and the indie-rock'90s, I'm increasingly agreeing … [Read more...]

Art Critic Kenneth Clark: Savior or Snob?

May 23, 2014 by Scott Timberg

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="2JRpGl1G6WEGCmBeZpJ8hGQwTyo0KCNg"] IT'S always easy to look back at cultural figures from earlier eras and denounce them as "elitists," and that's clearly what's happened to the great British art critic and interpreter Kenneth Clark. Through books on landscape and the nude, and his BBC television documentary series from 1969, Civilisation, Clark exposed an enormous … [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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