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

The late Scott Timberg championed artists earnestly and relentlessly, with empathy and persistence. An award-winning writer for the Los Angeles Times and many other publications, he was one of the first to sound the alarm on the escalating economic challenges that have faced creative workers in the twenty-first century. He ultimately became a victim of the “culture crash” he chronicled, but his own words form a valuable window onto the cultural shifts that have upended creative traditions and expectations.

Timberg had a knack, as Ted Gioia writes in his introduction, for “finding the best in the cultural scene on the dream coast.” Drawn from across his career, the passionate and wide-ranging reflections in this book span West Coast jazz and Gustavo Dudamel’s LA Philharmonic, the early films of Spike Jonze and Christopher Nolan, the comics of Los Bros Hernandez and Adrian Tomine, and many more musicians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and impresarios.