September 17, 2002
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Stories, Rants and Anecdotes, an evening with brilliant humorist Sandra Tsing Loh, comes to UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Sandra Tsing Loh
- Stories, Rants and Anecdotes
- Best-selling author of A Year in Van Nuys
- Frequent public radio commentator on KCRW, This American Life and Marketplace
- Monday, October 14
- 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $15, UCSB students $10
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh, perhaps best known for her witty “The Loh Life” segments on KCRW radio and “The Loh Down” commentary on NPR’s Marketplace, will present Stories, Rants and Anecdotes on Monday, October 14 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Loh is an endlessly amusing chronicler of Los Angeles, especially the group of Angelenos she identifies with the most, “young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: ‘dumpies.’” Her most recent book A Year in Van Nuys both lampoons and loves life in the Valley. She is also the author of the well-received Depth Takes a Holiday and If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now. She has won raves for her one-woman off-Broadway shows Aliens in America and Bad Sex with Bud Kemp. Ira Glass, who has often run Loh’s work on his standout public radio series This American Life, says, “Sandra’s great on the radio and a wonderful writer but seeing her live onstage makes you realize just how small and stupid and limiting radio and print are as vehicles for human self-expression, and how much more powerful and fun and charming a performer can be in person. She’s like a great rock band whose full power is only revealed in concert.”
Loh’s background belies her image as the epitome of a self-obsessed, Southern California slacker. She has a physics degree from Caltech, is a classically trained pianist and won a 1995 Pushcart Prize for Fiction for her short story “My Father’s Chinese Wives.” Several of her piano-based performance art pieces from the 1980s achieved cult status, including playing a Steinway on a flatbed truck cruising the Harbor Freeway at rush hour and serenading the Malibu grunion run with a midnight concerto accompanied by the 35-piece Topanga Symphony. She composed and performed the score for Jessica Yu’s 1997 Oscar-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien.
Her greatest acclaim has come as a writer and performer, humorously skewering middle class, middlebrow obsessions. Loh is keenly attuned to how delicate all our egos are, and is more than willing to admit how she can’t help but define her self-worth by pop-culture trifles. When things go well, she can exclaim to herself, “It is I who wears the gold lamé pants!” but when things take a turn for the worse, she can also lament, “My face is collapsing at an alarming rate! I look like Lincoln!” Writer T.C. Boyle has said, “Sandra Tsing Loh is a master of the excruciating moment. She is very, very funny, her eye is appropriately jaundiced, and she has a real gift for showing us just how stupid our stupid lives really are. I wept with laughter.” A sampling of Loh’s segments for Marketplace can be heard on their website.
Stories, Rants and Anecdotes is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by KCRW, Borders Books and KEYT 1250 Radio. Courtesy of Borders, books by Sandra Tsing Loh will be available for purchase and signing.
Tickets for Sandra Tsing Loh are $15 for the general public and $10 for UCSB students.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.