The Passionate Conversationalist: On Scott Timberg’s “Boom Times for the End of the World”

ALTHOUGH IT RIGHTFULLY should be read as a celebration of his life and work, for those who knew and loved Scott Timberg, or just appreciated what he did and stood for, there is no separating Boom Times for the End of the World (2023) from the context of his death. The title of Scott’s posthumous collection of essays, profiles, and feature pieces acknowledges as much; it’s taken from his 2007 Los Angeles Times essay on the increasingly apocalyptic leanings of highbrow literature and film. It’s also a sly shot-across-the-bow comment on the current state of Los Angeles letters.

The irony, of course, is that while we may or may not be at the end of the world, these are not boom times for the type of deeply reported, luxuriously discursive investigations of culture and consequences Scott practiced as a journalist and which are collected here. So much for the irony. On the other hand, worlds did end when Scott took his life on December 10, 2019. Among them, the worlds he inhabited with his family, friends, and the community of writers, including this one, who are still jarred by the loss of one of our linchpins. Thus, the book can’t help but serve as a reminder of our diminished capacity to sustain that community—a problem with consequences that include but are not limited to the writer’s death.

First and foremost, though, the book is compelling on its own merits, showcasing the work of a highly talented, civic-minded journalist who loved the city he covered. Someday, and for a long time, it will be read on those merits. But that time has yet to come for me, a friend and former colleague. The same will probably hold true for many readers of this publication who are likely to also receive this collection as something of a lament, and a provocation to consider again how we can reinvigorate the community of which Scott was such an integral part, as well as how we can revalue the type of writing and reporting that distinguishes Boom Times.

The pieces collected in Boom Times arrive from many places—New Times Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, Salon, Vox, and more. The variety of venues reminds us that it was not that long ago when times boomed enough around these parts to support multiple publications that allotted thousands of ink-on-paper words, and that paid writers to write them, even for profiles on subterranean figures such as William Claxton, Errol Morris, and John Rechy. These are among the first subjects we encounter in Boom Times’ 26 pieces spanning 16 years, with reporting on the characters and scenes that made Los Angeles an endless source of fascination for Scott. The final entry, published by Los Angeles magazine just months before his suicide, is a profile of Gustavo Dudamel, the charismatic music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In between, Scott considers the legacy of Ray Bradbury, investigates the cult of Glenn Gould, runs around with Benedikt Taschen, and gets a close-up with influential graphic novelist Gilbert Hernandez.

Here’s how he starts us out in “The Romantic Egotist,” his encounter with an animated Rechy, first published in February 2000 in New Times Los Angeles: “When most novelists go to parties, they don’t have to worry about being threatened, challenged, or decked.”  Of Dudamel, he writes, “Within the world of orchestral music, and even in the jaded precincts of the press, Dudamel is sometimes characterized a bit like that line from The Manchurian Candidate: the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

The collection is abundant with similarly low-key, insightful passages in which Scott deploys his deft highbrow-lowbrow, culture-jamming touch. He uses it in service of making even the most esoteric subjects feel relatable to readers from all walks of life. That a collection is as well versed in Rechy as it is in Dudamel tells you a lot about the writer, as well as about the time and place in which he was writing. For Scott, journalism really was the literature of civic life, and what mattered most to him was the conversation between the public and the culture; that conversation was Scott’s lifeblood.

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This will be the first, and probably the last, time I quote Kierkegaard, who said, “You live life looking forward. You understand life looking backward.” Looking back, Boom Times starts with Scott’s first job in Los Angeles at the now-defunct alternative newspaper, New Times LA, where Scott arrived “one summer near the end of the century,” from “dreary” New England.

He tells us this in “Leaving Los Angeles,” the most personal and pointed of Boom Times’ essays. The essay, and much of the book, speaks to a different Los Angeles than that which an ambitious, aspiring writer arriving in the city might find today. Scott’s Los Angeles had a superpower that was peaking just as his career started to take flight: it was the most interesting and affordable city in the world. One reason was that cultural (and soon political) power had been migrating from the patrician Westside to the cooler, more cosmopolitan Eastside, ushering in a less institutionalized, more inclusive era of style, taste, and cultural currency.

In other words, things were popping off back in the 1990s. Better still, you didn’t have to earn in the upper tax brackets to partake. Rents were cheap, especially compared to cities like New York and San Francisco, and the creative life of Los Angeles was found on the streets among its denizens. It had not yet been interred in billion-dollar, East Coast–aping mausoleums, nor yet processed through and for social media.

When thick and juicy alternative publications such as the Los Angeles Reader and subsequently New Times Los Angeles and the LA Weekly, or glossies such as Glue, Buzz, Detour, L.A. Style, or (fill-in-the-blank) hit the newsstands with generous feature wells, people ran out to get them. They weren’t all great, but they had their moments. As important, they nurtured and sustained a healthy population of middle-class writers who could make a living writing the stories of the city without needing the prior consent of an executive class of gatekeepers.

In the setup for “Leaving Los Angeles,” Scott conveys the giddy rush of discovery he felt upon landing here. He writes about a “head-spinning LACMA show on video artist Bill Viola [that] made [him] rethink what art could be” and how Boogie Nights had him wondering whether he’d arrived at some “baffling mix of retro fantasy and urban Gomorrah.” He echoes my own feelings about warming to a city I had also settled in after much playing of the field: “Like others I spoke with, I felt I’d found a long-lost home.”

As Boom Times shows, Scott wrote about that long-lost home passionately and prolifically. At first, his passion ran just a bit ahead of his craft. The early-career pieces come on a bit like breathless accounts of great nights out on the town. “Eye on Cool,” for example, first published by New Times LA in February 1999, kicks things off with Scott in the company of iconic jazz photographer William Claxton. It’s written at length and with fervor, and it reminds me of working with Scott at New Times, how smitten he was with this city and its subcultures. As with other early-career profiles of novelist Rechy and iconoclastic documentarian Morris, the Claxton piece is bustling with anecdotes, scenes, and dialogue, revealing Scott from the jump to be a keen observer and a committed reporter. He also shows off a knack for piercing personas to reveal the humans behind them. The enigmatic Claxton is “slightly absentminded, and sometimes politely mischievous,” for example.

Scott’s command of narrative, though, is still developing—a lot happens in the early pieces, but the stories don’t always come into focus. One of the pleasures of Boom Times is reading through the collection and witnessing Scott’s writing mature to be as assured as his reporting. In this way, Boom Times is also an homage to a time when writers were afforded the space to grow into themselves. The book invites us to roam around the expansive geography of Scott’s interests. Among them, impresario/curator Paul Holdengräber, bespoke book publisher Taschen, cult novel Ecotopia, and criminally underappreciated indie rock band the Feelies. Highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow? Scott’s tastes were far-ranging and his literacy boundless. By the time he tracks down the ghost of Glenn Gould, the innovative classical pianist who had become an obsession for a new generation of musicians and artists decades after his death, Scott had become as much of a guide to the city’s treasures as an explorer of them.

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Scott and I briefly worked together at New Times LA before we moved on in the fall of 2002 to bigger gigs. Scott went to the Los Angeles Times, and I went to the LA Weekly. New Times folded soon after our departures, though not entirely because of them. I think Scott, hailing from a family of accomplished journalists, relished being anointed by and having the platform of the regional paper of record. One might think that toiling for such a solidly mainstream enterprise would stymie Scott’s left-of-the-dial sensibilities, but that wasn’t the case. If anything, writing with fewer column inches for a broader audience sharpened his craft. The L.A. Times pieces in the collection are more honed conceptually and less impressionistic than the earlier work—as explanatory as they are experiential. For example, writing for the Times, Scott posits Ray Bradbury as Kevin Starr’s brother from another mother. The USC graduates and chamber music group the Calder Quartet are rendered as kindred spirits of indie rock legends Guided by Voices.

The eponymous essay, also for the Times, tracks the now-ubiquitous trend toward the apocalyptic in film and literature. First published in 2008, shortly before his tenure at the Times ended abruptly, “Highbrow. Lowbrow. No Brow. Now What?” takes to task the idea that such distinctions were even relevant amid the joyous cultural anarchy that this book captures, before economic polarization stripped the landscape of much of its vibrancy. These were the boom times for Scott, and it’s both harrowing and redeeming to revisit them, to hear his voice gaining strength even as we know those times soon would be ending.

Scott was laid off by the Los Angeles Times in 2008, along with many other fine reporters and editors—casualties of highly suspect stewardship and complex economic convulsions. The scythe swung for me and others at the LA Weekly the same year. For similar and somewhat different reasons, Scott and I lost our jobs, homes, and big pieces of our identities all at once. We weren’t the only ones in our circle to feel it, but the dimming of his light just as it was really starting to shine hit Scott hard. Scratching out a living as a freelance writer had become nearly impossible. There were fewer outlets and increasingly less remuneration. In many respects, the local writing life started to resemble gentleman farming—a calling that didn’t pay for itself.

Not long before he killed himself, I asked Scott to participate in a package of stories I was editing for a hopeful but short-lived new publication trying to gain purchase in the by-now-fallow fields of regional publishing. I agreed to the gig because the publishers were willing to pay my writers 50 cents a word. That was my bottom, down precipitously, say, from the mid-aughts at the LA Weekly, when the paper attracted enough revenue to maintain a robust staff, support a roster of top-notch freelance talent with a living wage, and still clear 20-percent profit margins.

The package focused on the threat posed to Los Angeles by the hollowing out of its middle and working classes. Scott’s 2015 book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, has a lot to say about that. I am sure my thesis—that the city’s soul is draining in direct correlation to its diminishing capacity to support even the most modest dreams of refugees and poets alike—was informed by Scott’s book. “Down We Go Together,” a cornerstone of Culture Crash, is included in Boom Times. It’s a harrowing account of dimming prospects: a coastal analogue to the more heralded heartland tales of malevolent macroeconomic forces and failing civics.

Here’s a passage in which Scott confronts the prospect of foreclosure and freelancing:

As my family limped through the next few years—I kept writing, but for less and less money—I found myself telling my five-year-old son over dinner one night that we’d be leaving the house he’d been raised in, but we didn’t know when, we didn’t know where we would go, and we couldn’t really explain to him why. “But then,” he said, looking up from a Scandinavian high chair purchased in better times, “we’ll come back, right?”

I can’t read “Down We Go Together,” or Scott’s piercing “Leaving Los Angeles,” which was published in Los Angeles magazine the same year, without trembling. Not just for Scott, but for the many who have been slingshot by an increasingly unaffordable city and silenced by the things that ultimately proved too much for Scott to bear. Do those things matter to the twentysomething social-media influencers living in lofts on Vine Street? Should this book make them matter? Are these even the right questions?

I don’t know, but I do know Scott was a friend and a fellow traveler. We had different tastes but similar concerns, and we kept in touch over the years, though not enough. He always invited me to jam in his garage, but I knew I wasn’t good enough to keep up. Scott kept getting better at the guitar, and I play the same as I did 30 years ago. Conversation was Scott’s oxygen, though, and Los Angeles was his favorite subject. When I had called him about contributing to the package on the middle class, he sounded exhausted, taxed. He had said so much already, and he had said it so well. But it wasn’t paying off.

Or maybe it was. Maybe this book is the proof of how much it was, how much it mattered. It matters to me, obviously, and I’m not over it yet. I’m still sad and angry and can’t help but read Boom Times as a memorial to a brother who fought for the soul of Los Angeles. That will change, though, and the book will be waiting for me when it does, when I’m ready to put it in the context where it ultimately belongs: alongside Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, David Ulin, Luis J. Rodriguez, D. J. Waldie, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Lynell George, and other great chroniclers of Los Angeles throughout its boom times and end times.

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Joe Donnelly is an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor who is currently visiting assistant professor of English and journalism at Whittier College and the editor of Red Canary Magazine. His latest collection, So Cal: Dispatches from the End of the World, came out in 2022 from Punk Hostage Press.