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

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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. Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/3 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. But as much as Mueller and her work may be seen as these examples of embodiment and self-actualization, her writing has its dissociative and escapist tendencies, too. She asks, “How does one forget? How do you empty yourself?” In a fable about a girl who drank only water and never ate anything, “She was convinced that since she would be only water she could disappear at will.” In another fictional story about two people convinced the world is going to end on September 3rd, “the world looked to them like it was going to go on for another few million years. Looking at the lights of Newark, New Jersey through world-weary eyes, Alex and Joanna were incredibly depressed.” Dorothy Karen " Cookie" Mueller (March 2, 1949 – November 10, 1989) was an American actress, writer, and Dreamlander who starred in many of filmmaker John Waters' early films, including Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. Waters’ cool, collected manner, as well as his taste in depravity and melodrama, come into focus in his brief exchange with a bed-bound Mueller.

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.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.” 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.” Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except that you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.” 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] When she was 18, Mueller moved to San Francisco. There, she spent drug-fueled days bumping shoulders with the likes of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and going on adventures that seem almost too insane to be true, as if Hunter S. Thompson had written Joan Didion’s seminal essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

People fall in love with Cookie when they read her stories (I loved her first!). As she did, the stories move through different worlds, from heavy drug use to writing a health column (at the same time); from go-go dancing to art criticism to film and theater acting, from boyfriends and girlfriends to S&M and marriage, etc., etc., etc. With Cookie there was no boundary between hersef and her writings. Which isn't to say she didn't work hard on her stories—she did, the same way she worked on her hair. She was a matchless beautician of the word. Olivia Laing is the author of Crudo, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, and The Lonely City, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and translated into fifteen languages. After her underground film status had faded, she moved to New York and became a writer, journalist, and columnist. [2] [3] Author [ edit ]urn:lcp:walkingthroughcl0000muel:epub:9e90a343-9d21-41c1-9434-fcd5a9c3720e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier walkingthroughcl0000muel Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s23d0m23p09 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0936756616 Lccn 2002514450 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9181 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA403203 Openlibrary_edition The last of Mueller's quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death: MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.

Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/5 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. 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.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. 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.” But the garland is never as lustrous. This is the first book in Semiotext(e)'s "Native Agents" series. It's selective and rare and just like that I'm a first edition hound again. And you know, slightly (totally) manically trying to get my hands on all I can find from the glamorous doomed dead blonde, the junkie bombshell. You don't have to judge. Just because you started wearing a beat-to-hell punk tee with sharp heels doesn't mean you invented high-low. We've all been there.

Mueller, Cookie (1988). Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls. New York: Hanuman Books. ISBN 0-937815-14-4. 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.” 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.”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.” What these writers also have in common is an unfiltered, pre-internet relationship to the world. Widespread use of social media has created an intensified culture of social mirroring and self-consciousness that these writers didn't experience, and this immediacy with the world is reflected in their prose. While there can be a particular detachment and ambiguity found in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, there is a certain electricity in this work from the late 20th century that perhaps comes from the way the writing itself hews so closely to the intimacy of experience. The quips are brief, the humor is mordant, and the insights are sharp, clarifying flashes of light. There seems to be no distance between the thing which is felt and the crisp articulation of it. In advice to her lonely single girlfriends, Mueller writes: