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
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.
