Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories (Canons)

Product Information

Mueller is a compulsive chronicler of her times and a fond observer of whatever curved balls get sent her way. Not unlike the autobiographical stories of Hollywood raconteur Eve Babitz, hers put a whimsical spin on experiences that are no laughing matter (addiction, rape, the AIDS crisis). Mueller rarely focuses on her internalized experience of challenging or traumatic situations, and when she does, it’s parodic: “I was so wildly miserable I was projectile-vomiting at the very thought of facing another morning,” she writes of a fresh breakup in “The Stone of New Orleans.” In this story, which features a spontaneous trip to Louisiana with Nan Goldin, the pain of heartbreak becomes an excuse to try something new, in this case Haitian witchcraft (“some gris-gris stuff,” Goldin clarifies, as they enquire about love spells to Creole street dancers in the French Quarter of New Orleans). “Why not?” Mueller concludes. “I’d tried everything else.” Mueller was an It Girl, discovered by John Waters for his film “ Multiple Maniacs” in 1970. When Mueller met Waters, she writes, “I felt like I was meeting my new family.” After learning the cult filmmaker was born prematurely, “I envisioned him as an infant, compact like a pound cake, lying in a clear plastic preemie life support box ... already rococo and bursting his bunting wrapper with his dreams and plans of film scenarios.” She was also prophetic. She featured Jean-Michel Basquiat in her very first column for the magazine, and accurately predicted that one day the East Village art scene would be studied in art history classes.

The first time I saw a photograph of Cookie Mueller, it was the portrait Nan Goldin had taken of her in her casket. Shimmering in gold, like a mosquito encased in amber, Mueller lay supine, arms crossed in front of her like an Egyptian pharaoh. Bonetti, David (November 23, 1992). "How I bought 2 Nan Goldins at auction". San Francisco Examiner. p.Part Z-B4 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. She took a small job at a Baltimore men's department store and saved enough funds to head to Haight-Ashbury, where she continued the hippie lifestyle. Mueller traveled across the country, living with groups of vagrants, and settled in places such as Provincetown, Massachusetts; British Columbia; San Francisco; Pennsylvania; Jamaica; and Sicily. Baltimore doesn’t last long, as Mueller is “always leaving.” All she shares with her family of origin are “a few inherited chromosomes, the identical last name, and the same bathroom.” She finds her way to Haight-Ashbury in 1967, living not for the last time with upwards of ten people. There, a single day involves almost meeting Charles Manson, definitely meeting Anton LaVey, being harassed in a church, getting raped at gunpoint, and being on LSD for most of it—but her most acute complaint is that the recording of her amphetamine rap session sounds “foolishly cyclical” the day after.Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/20 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. After months of thinking the loss over very carefully she came to know why she had lost this part of her body,” she writes. “In the last fifteen years she had lost a lot, beginning with her virginity. She had lost two husbands, countless girlfriends, passports, bank books, wallets, one apartment, plants, a car, a dog, valuable jewelry; there were so many things. This was nothing new, only slightly different. She had lost so much it was just something else to mourn over for a bit. She took it in stride. There is a great art to handling losses with nonchalance.” It’s a mixture of Possum’s Run Amok, Patti Smith essence, Girl Interrupted, Funny Weather by Olivia Liang, wild, sensational, wisdom and humor. A lot of people got tattoos that summer. Some got hooked,” she wrote. “That following winter, in Provincetown, tattoo fever overtook the town… It was better than hanging in a bar, more sociable than Canasta, more exciting than Monopoly, as challenging as Scrabble, and cheaper than gambling at poker. In the old traditional New England way, it was an arty masochist’s version of a sewing bee.” We have Mueller to thank—or blame—for the cottage industry of Brooklyn handpoke artists. It’s not just the stories that are exciting, it’s the revelation they contain—that we might allow such wildness to stumble on to our own paths, even just for an afternoon. I love her for reminding me, with gentle pressure between the lines, to go out tonight, to see what happens, to live a little harder.”

Cookie Mueller (1949–1989), née Dorothy Karen Mueller, played leading roles in John Waters's Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and Multiple Maniacs. She wrote for the East Village Eye and Details magazine, performed in a series of plays by Gary Indiana, and wrote numerous stories that would only be published posthumously. She died in New York City of AIDS-related complications at age 40. Piecing her stories together, readers will be hard-pressed to solve the riddle of her character, when most of her time, from Baltimore to Berlin, is spent in conducting “socio-behavioral studies,” a pastime she shared with Waters. Among the many things she has seen are Vogue cover models queueing in line with the down-and-low for a heroin fix, the night crowds that make the Berlin Film Festival “much more fun” than Cannes, the fuss that one anonymous but incredibly well-connected MFA graduate will make by OD’ing at his own birthday party. Her stories exemplify what creative writing lecturers may be at pains to teach about the link between point of view and characterization: If you want to evoke the idea of who someone really is, start by showing us what they see.

Success!

Recounting the snarling pain of being in labor with no epidural, Mueller grumbles, “Even the usually silent plants on the windowsill, benevolently doing their miraculous carbon monoxide to oxygen exchange, were wheezing with asthmatic photosynthesis… If this was the way it was going to be, then it better be worth it.” (She decides the birth is worthwhile after the nurses give her son an Elvis pompadour in his hospital photos.) Female trouble,” she responds, a catch-all phrase which she admits the film director finds “so funny it became the title for his next movie.” Cookie Mueller wrote like a lunatic Uncle Remus—spinning little stories from Hell that will make any reader laugh out loud. She was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl.

After her underground film status had faded, she moved to New York and became a writer, journalist, and columnist. [2] [3] Author [ edit ] Nan Goldin created and widely exhibited The Cookie Portfolio 1976–1989, a series of 15 portraits, after Mueller's death. One photograph, "Cookie and Vittorio's Wedding" (1986), documents Mueller's wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, an Italian artist and jewelry designer from Naples who died of AIDS just seven weeks before Mueller. [6] Another of Goldin's photographs, "Cookie at Vittorio's Casket, NYC, September 1989," was called a "magnificent portrait ... a great image. Devastating but great," by the San Francisco Examiner's art critic David Bonetti. [7]Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

A series of autobiographical pieces by a countercultural icon, actress, author, model for artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. Cookie Mueller’s writings are the legacy of a memorable woman whose short life was an attempt to exist on her own terms even when the price for living freely was an exorbitant one. Mueller may have been born in the 1940s and grown up in the repressive atmosphere of 1950s’ America but she consistently refused to conform. Her stories serve up in small, beautifully-realised fragments scenes from her experiences. These pieces are sometimes disturbing, sometimes bleakly funny, sometimes blatantly offensive but always irreverent and laced with copious amounts of drugs, sex and alcohol: a teenager in suburbia equally infatuated with an older, dissolute boy and her high-school girlfriend; a traveller in 1960s' San Francisco who narrowly escapes an encounter with Charles Manson and becoming a sacrifice for a local satanic cult; working as one of John Waters’s Dreamland actors; a stint as a go-go dancer whose biggest fan may be a serial killer. The last of Mueller's quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death: When Scarpati’s lungs collapsed, many blamed the particles (and the many cigarettes) he had inhaled as a sculptor and restorative artist. But it was AIDS. In one of her last columns for Details magazine, Mueller wrote that Scarpati had been finally driven to create his own art when he was in the hospital. “Did he need to be physically tied down to finally do his important work?” she asks. “Vittorio has learned that like a flood of sunlight, hope can vanquish gloom ... I hope he comes home soon.” Mueller's unflappability, her refusal of stasis and self-pity, her hunger for beauty, her readiness to find it where few else would look—all of it adds up into a singular code for living, in which the worst thing a person could do is flinch. Griffin, Chloé; Waters, John; Stole, Mink; Indiana, Gary (September 30, 2014). Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller. Bbooks Verlag. ISBN 978-3-942214-20-9.The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition. It's not just the stories that are exciting, it's the revelation they contain—that we might allow such wildness to stumble on to our own paths, even just for an afternoon. I love her for reminding me, with gentle pressure between the lines, to go out tonight, to see what happens, to live a little harder. Boch, Richard (2017). The Mudd Club. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. pp.144–145. ISBN 978-1-62731-051-2. OCLC 972429558. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year ( link) In 1959, with eyes the same size, I got to see some of America traveling in the old green Plymouth with my parents, who couldn't stand each other, and my brother and sister, who loved everyone. [Cookie's brother Michael actually died in an accident on March 20, 1955.] I remember the Erie Canal on a dismal day, the Maine coastline in a storm, Georgia willow trees in the rain, and the Luray Caverns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where the stalagmites and -tites were poorly lit. I appreciated -- in fact, felt inspired by -- Cookie's lavishly dégagé attitude toward life. Hers is the kind of nonchalant style of describing ridiculous events that lesser writers, like myself, try to emulate but fail to even touch. She treats rape in several points in the book as a kind of fact of life -- something awful, yes, but also as something she can exploit to turn the tables on her rapists and abuse them in the best way she possibly could: through her writing, with sharp, eviscerating humor. The story of her road trip abduction in the South was the best one, and the funniest one, in my opinion. Overall, Cookie was empowered, drunk with empowerment even. It's upsetting how young she died.