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A Great Day in Hammond
A Dispatch from the 9th Annual Spoo Willoughby Hoedown & Cornboil
A warm and sunny late-September afternoon. And a great day for a Cornboil in Hammond, Indiana.
In the parking lot out back of Paul Henry’s Art Gallery, proprietor David J. Mueller’s boiling corn was hot, sweet and locally grown by Smits Farms of nearby Chicago Heights, Illinois. Spoo Willoughby’s lineup of performers was joyous anarchistic splendor. We even briefly evoked the virtues and pitfalls of Kropotkin and Bakunin there in the moment as he wrestled with his own management of the performance schedule for the 9th Annual Spoo Willoughby Hoedown & Cornboil.
“Of course,” said Vernon Tonges (alias, Spoo Willoughby), a few days removed from the event, “Mr. Mueller is the kingpin crank visionary behind the whole event, transforming his ancestor’s circa 1905 hardware store into a community arts incubator.”
Our cultural history is filled with examples of scenes populated by creative and rebellious freaks and weirdos; from punks on back to hippies, folkies, Beats and Transcendentalists. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Haight-Ashbury, the history of human cultural civilization is full of scenes that attracted artists of various disciplines, creating cultural spaces and producing enduring works that serve as touchstones for ethics, values and aspirations while…