Boom Times for the End of the World

A rich banquet at the cutting edge of the arts, rooted in California’s eclectic cultural gumbo, by one of America’s most gifted critics, who died young in 2019.

＂A perfect journalistic valediction from one of LA’s finest commentators.＂--Richard Thompson

＂Timberg, who loved Los Angeles and culture journalism with an intense passion, was among the essential chroniclers of the city [...] Boom Times is both a celebration of a prodigious talent and a valediction for a lost soul.＂ --Los Angeles Times

The late Scott Timberg championed artists earnestly and relentlessly, with empathy and persistence. He was a vocal and widely admired advocate for working artists, one of the first to sound the alarm on the escalating economic challenges that have faced creative workers in the twenty-first century. The twenty-six reflections in this book form a valuable window onto many cultural shifts that have upended the country’s creative traditions and expectations. They are, by turns, surprising, wide-ranging, passionate, and fun. Timberg’s perceptive and enthusiastic profiles on the arts extend to West Coast jazz and Gustavo Dudamel’s LA Philharmonic, the fiction of Ray Bradbury and John Rechy, the early films of Spike Jonze and Christopher Nolan, the comics of Los Bros Hernandez and Adrian Tomine, and many more musicians, novelists, filmmakers, architects, and impresarios. Timberg had a knack, as Ted Gioia writes in his introduction, for ＂finding the best in the cultural scene on the dream coast.＂ This is an indispensable volume that showcases the author’s endless curiosity, as well as his passion and love for California--especially that confounding and complex metropolis Los Angeles.

Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, wrote on music and culture and was a contributor to Salon, the New York Times, and Vox. He was an award-winning journalist, a blogger on West Coast culture, and an adjunct writing professor. His previous book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. Richard Brody of the New Yorker called Culture Crash ＂a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life,＂ and Ben Downing, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said, ＂Mr. Timberg succeeds in assembling a large, coherent, and troubling mosaic ... weaving all manner of information and opinion into a fluent narrative of cultural decline.＂ Timberg died by his own hand on December 10, 2019, in Pasadena, California. He was fifty years old.