Word: langs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...argued his case by talking about his life, appearing to discuss candidly the rootlessness of his life, the deterioration of his marriage to first wife Debra Spivey and his affair with Leigh Ann Lang. The only child of parents in the Air Force, Barton worked as a manual laborer and drifted briefly through one college before settling at the University of South Carolina, where he graduated with a chemistry degree in 1979. That same year, he married Spivey, a fellow student he had met while working as night auditor at a local hotel. After living in Atlanta, where Barton tested...
What Ehren Kruger's script doesn't do so well is suspensefully build Faraday's suspicions about his new neighbors, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), and their creepy kids. There's always something eerie about Robbins' geniality--in his screen persona he's never been a guy from whom a sensible person would buy a used car--and almost from the outset you agree with Faraday that he and his kin are surely up to something distinctly antisocial. One-two-three, Faraday acquires the evidence suggesting that Oliver has taken over another man's identity...
...divine decadence of Weimar Berlin! Brecht and Weill making acerbic music; Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau creating film metaphors for Germany in chaos; famous artists like Grosz and Ernst--and a failed painter named Hitler. It was all so exciting, also grim. But amid the ferment, a buoyant sound could be heard: the impish artistry of the Comedian Harmonists. From 1928 until it was banned and disbanded by the Nazis in 1934, this male sextet brought smiles to Berliners in the political and economic dumps. One could almost believe the sentiment behind its hit tune Wochenend und Sonnenschein: Happy days...
...What Lang needs to learn is modulation and moderation. Instead of barreling through his songs like there's no tomorrow, he should vary the force with which he punches into each tune. He certainly is capable of variation, as he proves in his first album, where the soulful ballads are balanced by funky tracks and all-out rock grooves. His second effort, Wander this World, is an unsteady foray into the mainstream. Even that word mainstream connotes a Spam product which inevitably sullies the unique with the base. This shift in focus is what was displayed at the live show...
...night was when I was finally able to escape into the quiet streets of Boston to assuage the ringing in my poor assaulted ears. Thanks to a street musician who plucked a bare tune on his banjo and soothed me with his baritone, I was relieved. Jonny Lang is no flash in the pan as a musician, but his flashy stage presence definitely needs some lubrication...