by Cindy Barber
For the past couple years, Frank Green has lived in a nursing home not far from the Beachland so I’ve been able to go pick him up fairly frequently and bring him to a concert or Sunday brunch, which became one of his favorite outings. He knew the whole staff and would look forward to hugging our mutual friends’ daughter Alaska, who buses tables. After he died last week, Barb, who had waited on him dozens of time as he loudly ordered both coffee and a Bloody Mary at the same time, said “I saw an old picture of Frank on Facebook. I had no idea that was the same Frank I knew years ago in Tremont.”
His transformation was indeed profound, but the rotund patient with the Marge Simpson voice who called me incessantly to come get him, was still Frank Green, my artist friend and more importantly a writer. But it’s been a long time since I was the editor of the Free Times and Frank was one of my star writers, tackling tough cover stories about gay issues or carefully crafting art criticism. This week I went digging in the attic in search of old issues to find the other Frank.
I found random pieces and remembered how much Frank knew about art history and how he used that to make his points, always favoring art that made statements. In November of 1995, he wrote a smart cover piece about SPACES’ Radical Ink show featuring an assortment of underground cartoonists, including local visual radicals derf, Gary Dumm and Clay Parker, and contrasted them to the era of ‘60s pop culture: “Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Peter Saul dressed down the white walls of the art world with comic book paintings in the 1960s, but they weren’t populists. They weren’t made for reproduction, or marketed at prices affordable to the masses. They were special cartoonists, anointed by elitist curators and critics, fine wine sippers slumming in private clubs decorated to look like the beer taverns of popular culture.”
Being gay and HIV positive, he also had unflinching opinions on that world. When reviewing the AIDS film comedy Jeffrey, he wrote, “Laughter, the saying goes, is the best medicine. I’m incurably sick of the maudlin sentimentality, morbid fatality and clinical morality infesting the genre of the AIDS movie. Jeffrey is a much-needed tonic, palliative and pain-killer. The fact that it’s not afraid to revel in gay stereotypes is a side effect that, unlike the toxicity of AZT, may do more good than harm.”
This was time when the cocktail drug was just starting to save lives and to Frank it was a personal war he was fighting. But Frank Green was always charming in his battles with me. He smartly pitched this editor for space in our alternative newspaper weeks ahead of the other writers, and fearlessly requested cover-story status for an art story, when the powers-that-be were demanding investigative sleuthing we couldn’t afford.
I haven’t gotten through the giant stack of weekly remnants of that time in the ‘90s when Frank was a cultural force in this town: writing for the Free Times, creating his own art for SPACES, taking the stage at CPT for the Performance Art Festival. But I found one little piece that has made me both smile and cry. In writing about French Canadian photographer Genevieve Cadieux’s show at Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (now MOCA) in 1995, Frank saw the work and then went to San Francisco on a trip but still wrote his piece. He wrote himself into the piece of course, pondered his own memory of her work.
“It reflects the gulf we have to cross every time we gaze at an image, or at the face of our beloved. The absence of the subject only makes it more present. I can’t look again; my memory blurs. And in that moment, I begin to see.”
Cindy Barber, owner of the Beachland Ballroom, was editor of the Cleveland Free Times from 1992-98
The family are planning a service, at the Unitarian Church West and an afternoon or evening memorial will be held at the Beachland – both to happen at the end of February or beginning of March, when brother Jason can get home.
There will be an exhibit of Frank Green materials at the next Tremont Art Walk Fri 2/8 at the Tremont West Development Corp where Frank once worked.
Also read the remembrance by Jordan Davis here.
Also read the remembrance by Cindy Penter here.
Cleveland, OH 44110
Cleveland, OH 44113