Years
ago, my mom was a very locally-active poet and artist. She had a lot of friends in the industry in Northport (where she
used to live), and had been featured in
multiple poetry publications and art review sites. At
some point, she got involved with the Northport Arts Coalition, a nonprofit that was intended to sponsor the arts
in my home town. And though she wasn't aware of
it, the heads of NAC were very much what we on the
Kiwi Farm would consider so-called SJWs: rich, white,
professional victims who painted themselves as societal
outcasts, latching parasiticially onto otherwise-good
causes not for actually wanting to help them, but for
being able to exploit them to their ends. Sound familiar?
According to mom, a lot of them used many, if not
identical tactics of the so-called SJWs - you can't criticize
them, they're gay/trans/etc, even if that has nothing to
do with why they were being criticized.
My mom, true to form, was, in contrast, an embittered
old-school activist who marched for civil rights, so to say
these people would eventually fuck with the wrong lady is a bit of an understatement. But I'm getting ahead of
myself. Mom, once on NAC, had a great idea after talking
with people at Northport's courthouse/city hall/police
station: There was a hell of a lot of unused wall space in
the primary court room at the town hall, and this could
be a great venue for getting community artists and the
like involved with the community. What she proposed
was
Artists Celebrate Northport, which everyone
else on NAC's board thought was an absolutely terrible
idea, but mom went and did anyway on her own dime,
dragging me along for the ride, because - fuck it, I'm
down for giving a bunch of old women a metaphorical
finger. So mom managed to get a huge turnout - tons of
artists from all over the Northport-East Northport area
wanted in, and the only demand for the art we put up
was that it had something to do with Northport itself. The works we had were fantastic - photography works
showing Northport from the 1800s, paintings of clammers
in the harbor, even a really cute picture painted of the
geese in the park. The event was monumentally
successful, and Mom was asked to rotate in another set
of pictures the following month, more than making back
the limited money she had spent on the event via
community goodwill alone.
NAC was fucking
pissed. They'd been shown up by
some little Janey-Come-Lately upstart who actually
succeeded at their mission statement whilst they'd been
content to sit around and circlejerk. The next few times
mom ran the event, NAC had to get involved, having a
few of their own board members contribute works, or
helping to support the event now that mom had already
gotten the damned thing off the ground. Mom remained
in charge, however, and she would routinely thwart
them. Many times, they demanded a piece be in the
courtroom show - and mom disallowed it for having
nothing to do with Northport. There eventually came a
point where NAC had finally had enough of this, and
began to essentially wage a war-in-secret on my mom.
It was as inept as could be - attempts to conflate the
actions of their own kids (who did such monumentally
stupid shit as skateboarding on the front steps of a
fucking
police station for example) as being
something I had done coming most readily to mind, which
likely would have been very successful if ours wasn't a
town of under 20,000
where literally everyone knows
one another.
It didn't stop with shit like that, either - they called mom
to try to threaten and harass her into supporting artists
they wanted. Mom let them have it - she was tough as
balls, and would never back off. Unfortunately, mom
also had unstable hypertension and couldn't afford to get
angry to this degree repeatedly - something many on
NAC's board were apparently sort of counting on, but
mom kept going anyway. They accused her of being a
homophobe, which likely would have gone someplace if
mom didn't have a gay relative she was actively helping.
They accused her of being transphobic, which would
have also likely gone someplace if the person in question
had any signs whatsoever of even having anything to do
with being transgender. My personal favorite was when
one of NAC's headliners yelled at me for touching the
piano at the library, screaming loudly that like someone
as lowbrow as me could never understand things like
musical instruments, when I
then proceeded to play the opening
segment from Turkish Rondo, as my mom
explained that I grew up in a house with a piano.
Good
times.
It's amazing how a bunch of rich white people who
essentially have more free time than OPL can be this
incompetent, but there you have it, I s'pose.
It all came to a head for the first time when NAC wanted
to give multiple slots in Artists Celebrate Northport to
one Ron Valerio. Ron was an.... Interesting and quite-
probably fucked-up artist who drew bizarre, surrealist
paintings of shit like naked aliens. For the uninitiated, I
barely know how to describe it to you - his art essentially
looks like Moleman9000's, with psychodelic colors, full-
frontal nudity, and wonky proportions clearly spawned
from an unsound mind. Ron Valerio was a major donor to
NAC's coffers in the past, and NAC wanted him in the
show. Mom outright refused, since (A) his shit had bugger
all to do with Northport, (B) Would piss off the village
board, and (C) Showed a clear fucking conflict-of-
interest, since Ron was financially supporting several
members of NAC's board. Mom fought it tooth and claw,
but ultimately was outvoted, and one of Ron Valerio's
naked alien paintings wound up in the show. Mom had
been smart - many of the other artists involved in the
show this session were ones that NAC couldn't really
afford to piss off. The writing was on the wall, though -
NAC was going to do anything it could to get rid of mom
at this point. Mom, for all her toughness, had been
ground down by this point - she'd happily have, in the
words of Jace, finished the fight, but between her
unstable hypertension and the fact that NAC was
planning to essentially blacklist her outright, mom
decided it was time to fuck off. And so she did, without
too much fuss.
This is actually the single least-surreal work of Valerio's I've seen, if you can believe it.
The following months feature a show entirely starring people NAC wanted, and the community feedback was harsh. The month after featured a show entirely devoted to Ron Valerio, and NAC was never allowed to do the event again. Apparently an entire room full of psychedelic naked alien pictures was deemed not really great for a community town hall setting where court proceedings were held. Northport's
village council kicked their asses out and now, fittingly enough,
runs the event on their own.
In many ways, to hear my mom tell it, the commonalities between NAC and the Anti-GGers were disturbingly similar.
Both featured a huge group of rich, white, professional victims who were big on attaching themselves to otherwise-
benevolent things (gay rights, transgender rights, etc) and
using them as launching points to further their careers and
browbeating anyone who disagreed. Once actually in NAC,
and once NAC was financed by a grant, none of them had an
actual interest in doing much with it - it was all about
enriching themselves and their associates, needs of the
greater community be damned. For me the biggest
commonality is that they considered themselves the sole
custodians of culture, and, like the so-called SJWs, were
absolute fucking ideologues when it came to identity. Only
we are able to say what's good art and what
isn't, to hear them put it. And what is often ever-so-
coinicidentally happened to be what filled the coffers at the
time.
