Where Are They Now? Dept

Ex-Mekon, Cowboy Painter puts on Milwaukee multimedia show to benefit anti-death penalty efforts. Tony Maimone and Sally Timms providing an assist.

Excerpt from review:

With the backdrop of a screen manned by friend and collaborator Barry Mills, Langford was able to display huge projections of his paintings and prints, with their sense of the near-religious iconography of country-music greats such as Bob Wills and Johnny Cash.

Using those songs, those paintings, detailed anecdotes, polemics and a few jokes, Langford sketched a bold self-portrait of the young man as an art student, the art student as a punk rocker, the punk rocker as a major-label slave . . . and, eventually, the older and wiser man as a commercially but not artistically marginal cultural figure.

While the presentation had technical glitches and rough spots, "The Executioner's Last Songs" was infrequently strident, rarely pretentious and never dull. Timms and violinist Jean Cook spoke and sang in counterpoint to Langford's end of the tale, while Mills - also a TV writer and producer - alternated Langford's art with his wit. Langford can give a variety of answers to "Who are you?" and Saturday he gave them in manner both entertaining and enlightening.