Sept. 16 USA/TEXAS: Executioner as muse----Langford takes a multimedia stand against death penalty Jon Langford isn't the 1st person you'd think of inviting to a film festival. But then, he does have a good track record when it comes to squeezing from one field of artistic endeavor into a seemingly unrelated one. There was the time in the '80s, for instance, when the Welsh rock 'n' roller and his punk band the Mekons decided to make a country record. They may have raised eyebrows, but they foreshadowed the alt-country movement and paved the way for Langford to become one of its most active heroes, eventually founding the Waco Brothers to rail against the sorry state of contemporary country music. Or, speaking of country music, how about the way this art-school trained painter became a star in galleries like Austin's Yard Dog - places that usually turn their noses up at anything resembling an official art education? Langford has become a South By Southwest fixture over the years, with Yard Dog exhibitions that pay tribute to Bob Wills and Hank Williams - via scratched-up portraits on wood that are sometimes adorned with little laments for the music's long-gone golden days. Yard Dog is opening a new show of Langford's work Saturday to commemorate his latest transformation: Tonight at the Carver Cultural Center, Langford will stage "The Executioner's Last Songs," a multimedia show that, if it doesn't tie all the artist's projects up in a bow, at least aims to make some sense of them. Speaking to the American-Statesman over the weekend, Langford says the project, which debuted this April in Milwaukee, was commissioned "as an attempt to bring all the plates I juggle down into one dishwasher." Langford plays with a full band and performs some spoken-word material while his "VJ" (video-jockey) Barry Mills deploys an assortment of Langford's visual work as a backdrop. "Barry mixes and mashes them up live, using the very latest hip-hop software," he says. "There's photos, paintings, video and animations - I appear in a canoe floating in a bathroom sink at one point . . ." The show's title comes from a couple of records Langford made - on which he and many guests sang tales of crime and punishment - as a protest against America's death penalty laws. Putting those songs in a theatrical setting, evidently, caused the singer to look back on his evolving relationship with American culture. "It was certainly an attempt to tie up some loose ends," he explains. "In Wales I was a socialist, but so was everyone else! Over here I seemed to have slipped far from the mainstream without moving an inch myself. I was shocked by the lack of debate over something as important as the death penalty (which doesn't exist in Europe or most of the rest of the world), the sad state of country music and the totalitarian tendencies in American culture. I had to include a bit of my history (in the show) to make sense of these themes, but it's not my autobiography - that's gonna be much racier!" So how does it feel to bring the show to a state known for its enthusiasm toward capital punishment? "Obviously it's great to pop down and spit righteous liberal bile at y'all - but Austin always seems like such a pleasant and enlightened place I doubt we'll cause too much of a stir." "The show really isn't a protest as such - I'm talking about a lot of different things and the 'Executioner' title might be a bit misleading. If I was gonna stand up and do some sort of worthy agit-prop about why the death penalty is wrong, I would seriously advise people not to attend! It's actually meant to be entertaining - there are even (flatulence) jokes and fake kung fu dance routines." (source: Austin American-Statesman)
