An evening of transatlantic words, pictures, mix tapes and zines with the acclaimed New Yorker writer and memoirist Hua Hsu and a screening of LA My Hometown, hosted by Travis Elborough.
LA My Hometown shot in 1976 and during America’s bicentennial celebrations, finds one-hit wonder British Invasion rocker Ian Whitcomb searching for roots in the City of Angels. Encountering just some of the 350,000 members of the British expat community then living in Southern California, he presents an irreverent potted tour of Hollywood landmarks and Anglo-American relations. Record producer Pete Asher, former tinseltown movie star turned nude male photographer Roy Dean and glamour model Suze Randall are on hand to offer sage advice on living as a resident alien in America. The subject of Filth and Fury-style tabloid headlines on its first broadcast on British television in 1977, it remains a thoroughly entertaining survey of the sun-kissed city of swimming pools and endless freeways when the car was king and hamburgers still a slightly exotic delicacy to its English inhabitants
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and former columnist for revered British music monthly The Wire and the author of Stay True – an acclaimed coming-of-age memoir that brings music, memory, identity, and grief into a mid-1990s tableau of indie-pop mixtapes, Comet Gain concerts in San Francisco and sleepless nights spent haunting Bay Area record stores and assembling xeroxed zines.
The child of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, Hsu was to form an improbably deep friendship at UC Berkeley with Ken, a Japanese-American whose passion for Dave Matthew-style rock and frat boy Abercrombie & Fitch clothing represented everything he has defined himself against. But over freewheeling conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life, Hua and Ken were to bond over the common sense that American culture didn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But almost three year to the day since they first met Ken was murdered. Driven by the need to keep the memory of those days and the all too brief time they spent together alive, Stay True is a peerless and fearless exploration of growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging
In this one-off visit to the UK Hsu will read and then be in conversation with the writer Travis Elborough
Copies of a special edition of his zine, Suspended in Time, will be on sale on the night.
Book here tickets just £7.00
Travis Elborough 