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.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
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.
Ted Gioia is a music historian and the author of eleven books, including Music: A Subversive History and How to Listen to Jazz. His three books on the social history of music--Work Songs, Healing Songs, and Love Songs--have each been honored with the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Gioia's wide-ranging activities as a critic, scholar, performer, and educator have established him as a leading global guide to music past, present, and future.
Praise for Boom Times for the End of the World:
"Timberg proves himself an authority on [Los Angeles] and its enthrallment to 'fantasy, boosterism, and magical thinking.' This is a fitting testament to a skilled cultural critic." --Publishers Weekly
"A perfect journalistic valediction from one of LA's finest commentators." --Richard Thompson, singer-songwriter, author of Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975
"Scott knew many things; to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, he was a fox, not a hedgehog, and this collection is the proof." --Dean Wareham, founder of Galaxie 500 and Luna, author of Black Postcards: A Memoir
"There was no one else on the West Coast quite like Scott Timberg--the most versatile and free-wheeling culture critic of his generation. Boom Times for the End of the World is the insightful, entertaining, and excruciating chronicle of America's cultural crash." --Dana Gioia, former California Poet Laureate, author of Meet Me at The Lighthouse
"In an era of edgy hot takes and glib quick-hits, there is something soul satisfying in hearing Scott's erudite voice again. A ravenous researcher, deep thinker and elegant wordsmith, Scott put his full heart into everything. Sitting next to Scott for years in the newsroom, I always looked forward to hearing his first-draft reflections of what he had just seen, heard, or walked through. He was drafting even before he sat down in his chair, connecting the dots, eager to get his thoughts down, to share it with us all. It's such a gift to finally have some of his finest observations and meditations collected between two covers." --Lynell George, author of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky
Praise for Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class by Scott Timberg (Yale University Press, 2015):
"Timberg--himself a culture journalist who was a victim of one of the Los Angeles Times's seemingly endless series of layoffs--makes a good case that, as Bob Dylan once put it, 'something there's been lost.'" --Ben Yagoda, New York Times Book Review
"A quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life." --Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"Mr. Timberg succeeds in assembling a large, coherent and troubling mosaic. He writes lucidly but with passion and a kind of bitter wit. And he is impressively well-read . ... He shows himself to be a gifted synthesizer, weaving all manner of information and opinion into a fluent narrative of cultural decline." --Ben Downing, The Wall Street Journal
