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.
