David J. Mueller On Paul Henry’s Art Gallery

Statement by David J. Mueller, Paul Henry's Art Gallery (Sept. 30, 2021)

It was 2010 and we had been open for two years as an art gallery and things weren't looking so good. A couple of our early patrons suggested having performance art, an open mic in particular. It was mildly successful to start.  We revised the format to make it fully acoustic with no sound system and added a potluck.  By the 5th Jam Night we had decided to offer it every week on Thursday because people were confusing the weeks.  Around the 6th or 7th Jam a guy from Illinois who called himself Spoo Willoughby came to play.  He became an immediate favorite of the crowd.  No one had seen a performer like him before.  Our crowds began to build.  Spoo returned and brought his friend, Rich Krueger, along. Other more accomplished artists began to populate the performance list.  Fifteen weeks in we got a piano and by that time we typically had 12 to 20 performers each week and audiences of 25 to 50. I can't say that Spoo was entirely responsible for the growth of the popularity of our Jam Night but he certainly was a contributor. 

 After a year we decided to give Spoo his own dedicated event, the Hoe Down and Corn Boil.  We recognized that he knew quite a number of performers from the Illinois side of the line and could draw a top-flight guest artist to play with him at the Corn Boil who would be a fresh face for our Indiana audience and a known attraction for their own Illinois crowd, perhaps bringing a few visitors from across the line.  Guest artists in the past have been Mark Anderson, Rich Krueger, Robin Bieneman, David Druzan, Meredith Judd, John Colson, Brian Cutean, Matt Miller and Dennis Leise. 

Having had some success with Jam Night in 2010 we managed to fend off the wolf at the door by mixing more performance art with visual art.  A monthly Jazz Jam was added to our offerings along with dedicated concert events and even an occasional Punk Rock show.  We also opened the gallery space to host all sorts of activities including a rumba percussion group, a literary reading series, poetry slams, recording sessions, charity fundraisers, protest marches, invited speakers on specific issues, political fundraisers and many personal events from birthdays, showers (baby and wedding), memorials and even weddings among others.  Through this diversification phase we continued to host a regular schedule of visual art shows and receptions, both solo and group formats.

 As more people came to the gallery for many reasons it became apparent we were attracting interest from a wide scope of the community at large and that group was extending its range as we moved along.  It was common to welcome visitors from as far away as Wisconsin and Michigan and even further out than that.  We received major help from print, broadcast and internet media to reach those who had never heard of us.

 We call them Friends of Paul Henry's, loosely defined as visitors to the gallery for one reason or another, in person or on the internet. Some are one-timers, some darken the doorway intermittently and some are true harbingers of just about everything we do and attend as many of our events as they are able.  This is our community.  We value this community and we care about them by trying to offer activities of high interest that may not be readily available locally or in a casual setting like ours.

 Paul Henry's has been an art gallery since October of 2008.  We joined an art community in Hammond that existed before us and has struggled to maintain momentum through the intervening years until now.  Galleries have come and gone.  Art organizations have formed and disbanded.  It has not been easy for any of us including Paul Henry's. The pandemic has not helped. Several other art venues in the north end of Lake County, IN have held on, including our immediate neighbors, the Towle Theater.  EAT, just around the corner, will be a multi-use venue when it fully opens, restaurant and visual and performing arts.

 Hammond has adopted a new Downtown Plan which will dramatically add to the neighborhood while maintaining its historical integrity. Major investment is expected and new projects have already begun and others are set to begin in the next few months.  We are also expecting to have a Downtown Hammond Station on the new north-south spur of the South Shore rail line which will connect us more closely to all points from Chicago to South Bend.               

It is ironic that we are teetering between the continued effects of the pandemic and exciting long-awaited progress in the revitalization of Downtown Hammond.  Our community of gallery friends has been very supportive through the past 18 months to help us survive until now.  We just hosted our first event since March of 2020 this past weekend, the Spoo Willoughby Hoedown and Cornboil.  We felt that we should establish COVID protocols on the group event to protect our clientele as much as possible, and the community at large.  We will do what we can to try to contribute to the elimination of COVID 19 for the benefit of our gallery community and the larger community around us.  We certainly would like to return to a normal routine of bringing joy and fervor to those around us!

"If You Will It, It Is No Dream"

I am still a Zionist. “If you will it, it is no dream,” Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, said. But with Israel’s gradual yet effective turn toward the Revisionist over the past 40 or so years, the thought enters my mind that Herzl's dream has become a nightmare. 

Zionism was and remains a movement with a worthy ultimate goal. Namely, the political, economic and cultural reintegration of the Jewish people in its native region with all the national dignity it deserves.

By now, Israel has grown into a walled garrison state, verging on an apartheid society. Under governments dominated by the Likud Party and its right wing offshoots and satellites, Israel has more recently cultivated alliances with resurgent nationalist and unrepentant fascist regimes in Hungary, India and the Philippines -- even joining the chorus of antisemitic tropes leveled against Open Society Foundation's George Soros by Hungary's Viktor Orban and US President Donald Trump. 

While European fascism reaps populist gains demonizing refugees from Syria and elsewhere across an unstable Middle East, Netanyahu's Likud Party won its most recent opportunity to lead the Israeli government on an eleventh-hour Election Day warning that "Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves."

If Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, are as hopelessly committed to the destruction of Jewish national self-determination, as advertised by the Israeli right wing and diaspora lobbyists like AIPAC, then what was the point in setting up shop in the old neighborhood to begin with?

Hezbollah With Beer Guts

Anti-Defamation League Seeks Variance

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) took a stand for defamation this week, crossing the line into terminal self-denial and issuing a statement opposing the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic Center on the site the old Burlington Coat Factory building in Manhattan, a couple of blocks away from where the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11.

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

Cordoba House is a project of the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA).  The Cordoba Initiative takes its name from the medieval Spanish city, seeking to renew its "atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago."  ASMA Executive Director Daisy Khan and Cordoba Initiative Chairman Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf envision a 15-story building with a performing arts center, culinary school, child care facilities and a swimming pool.  Cordoba House would also include a prayer center, but this would not constitute a mosque which would otherwise prohibit the serving of food and the playing of music that are to be integral features among the activities of the center.  Nevertheless, opposition has rallied around its characterization as the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque." 


"It's a house of worship, but we are at war with al-Qaeda," said Representative Peter King (R-NY), ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee.


"There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.


Meanwhile, elements among local Jewish leadership have assisted and expressed support for the Cordoba House development, as reported in the New York Jewish Week.

Khan and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, both said they have received assistance from the JCC [Jewish Community Center] as they draw up plans for their center, comments confirmed by Rabbi Joy Levitt, the JCC’s executive director.

“They came to us because they felt the values we represented — diversity, dialogue, the education of children — were values they wanted to espouse,” Rabbi Levitt said. “They have the same kind of diversity in their community that we have in ours, and they were looking for strategies to bring [those different segments] together.”

[...]

“I have no illusions about anything,” said [Yehezkel] Landau, a faculty member at the Hartford Seminary who, for many years, lived in Israel. “We have enemies. ... But Daisy Khan and Imam Feisal are not enemies of anyone.”

In raising "a question of what is right," the ADL could have stood by its own charter, "to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens."  Instead it shamelessly caved to cynical demagoguery and mob rule.

Talking Point

Even as Republican congressional leadership maintains a hold on Pres. Obama's TSA administrator appointment and votes in lockstep against DHS funding for TSA explosive detection systems and other aviation security measures, the GOP nevertheless has the stones to claim national security supremacy against the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, Republicans and conservative media celebrities claim security superiority with a particularly broad stroke against Muslims:

Rep. Peter King (R-NY):  "100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim, and that is our main enemy today."

Steven Emerson, FoxNews analyst and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism:  "One hundred percent of all the terrorist attacks against the U.S. last year were carried out by Muslim jihadists."

With the standard set by this talking point, shouldn't someone argue that since 100% of all murderers of OB/GYN surgeons who perform abortions are fundamentalist Christians, medical facilities ought to start profiling Christians?  Or would that be too "politically incorrect"?

Strange Fruit

Minnesota Republican Congressperson Michele Bachmann has been making a national name for herself by openly resisting 2010 US census efforts, warning the countryside from her split screen at FoxNews about the evil designs of the US Census Bureau.

BACHMANN: "If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up."

Got that?  She's not sayin', she's just sayin'.  And now this weasely populist demagoguery has likely gotten a good man killed.

The FBI is investigating whether anti-government sentiment led to the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to his government job or to anti-government sentiment....

Any bets about how that investigation turns out?  This much we know. One cannot present dark conspiracy theories about census bureau field workers in particular, or our federal government in general, from a platform like FoxNews and expect to be considered a productive public servant, let alone a responsible legislator.

This was Bill Sparkman --

Georgia On My Mind

As Tea Party conservatives passionately demand their country "back," it remains a relatively abstract and unclear point to many others.

Meanwhile, amid the historical revisionism and fevered conspiracy theories emanating from these rallies we also find alot of flags including, but hardly limited to, our Stars and Stripes.  For example, the marginally familiar yellow Gadsden flag with its snake graphic and "Don't Tread On Me" motto and the slightly more familiar Confederate battle flag.

Considering the latter and the controversy it has continued to generate, it is well worth remembering that as recently as the turn of the century Georgia's state flag included the Confederate battle flag in its design.

The state ultimately acquiesced to concerns over the display of such a potent and polarizing symbol of historic violent separatism by adopting a new and improved flag design...

 

...which will not look at all like the more familiar Confederate battle flag to the casual consumer of historical trivia.  But it strongly resembles the original Confederate flag nevertheless.

Say what you will about these latter day separatists, they know their history and they know how to use it.