Still angry after all these years

Radio artist and playwright Joe Frank teamed up with Sandra Tsing Loh in an anti-Ruth Seymour stage performance back on April 9, and he vents on his website about his abrupt departure from the KCRW airwaves two years ago. He explains that Seymour angrily fired him in a coffee shop meeting (after 15 years on the station) when he got out of the hospital for treatment of a stomach obstruction. In the lengthy post, he Frankishly rues not getting the kind of high-profile heave-ho that briefly made Loh a media darling.

Sandra's Tsing Loh's firing has been brilliant. One four-letter expletive has provided the energy to light an entire city. She has appeared on radio, television, in the press. It is rumored she will soon host Saturday Night Live and Nike plans to come out with a new Loh Line of women's running shoes, called "Fuck off." Ruth announced Sandra's firing, but she failed to do me the same service. For this I can never forgive her. I was denied the gift of a public execution and the celebrity that might have followed. Consequently, where Sandra has been rewarded for the wrong committed against her, I faded from view. Without my radio program, I became a ship without a rudder, a rowboat without oars, a man without a compass. I lost my appetite and gained weight. I lay in the sun and grew pale. The more I exercised, the more fragile I felt.

Much more at the site. Frank's shows of dark commentary and wit will soon be available in streaming audio, he says.

(Pointer from Joyrides Without Maps)

12:09 AM Monday, April 26 2004 • Link
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So . . . . the brilliant Joe Frank faded from public view like a three-legged dog with an Indian peasant -- with hope, not for very much longer, thanks to Cathy Siepp's fierce overflowing PR efforts on Sandra Loh's behalf. Ha.

The turtle and the hare race is long; true talent will triumph.

And yet there's nothing new under the sun in the politics of radio. A cautionary tale for all the Joes and Sandras in the bombed-out villages of explosive alternative radio: Take a good look at these once brilliant casualties still angry after all these years.

(Ruth Seymour may be losing the few management sympathizers she had -- soon enough, it seems ironically possible, she could be her own worst brilliant casualty "with problems," an estimable PR triumph.)

Posted by: Stephanie at April 26, 2004 12:22 PM

Late onset dyslexia is not a good thing in formerly compulsive former editors: That is, of course, Ms. Seipp, not Siepp.

Posted by: Stephanie at April 28, 2004 01:18 PM
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