Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, an oral history of Mueller's life, was published in 2014. [8] Bibliography [ 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 Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/4 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. 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. Her chronicles of the last days of American countercultural life New York’s downtown scene bursts with energy.”

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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. 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)

After several trips to Italy, Mueller fell in love with an artist named Vittorio Scarpati. The two were married in New York in 1986. At the time, she was writing “Ask Dr. Mueller” for the East Village Eye, offering health advice without any professional qualifications. The column begins with queries about cellulite and apple cider vinegar. Then, in a response to one correspondent who complains of a small penis, Mueller abruptly writes, “I’m not going to talk about AIDS ... I’ve had too many beloved friends die lately from diseases contracted when the immune system breaks down. I’m tired of going to wakes. I miss these people.” Mueller died from AIDS-related pneumonia on November 10, 1989, at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City, aged 40. [4] Her ashes are interred in multiple locations: on the beach near Provincetown; in the flowerbed of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village; alongside those of Vittorio and her dog Beauty in the Scarpati family crypt in Sorrento, Italy; under the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; in the South Bronx; and in the holy waters of the Ganges River. She was survived by her son, Max Wolfe Mueller, who appeared in Pink Flamingos. 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. 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 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.”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. 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.

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. 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. The reissue is a gift to Mueller’s longtime fans who have hungrily consumed every piece of her published writing to date, as well as newcomers looking for an entry point into her vast oeuvre. In an era dominated by the cult of personality that is often so hyper-curated it becomes sterile, Mueller’s refreshingly gritty and uncensored approach to documenting her life is more relevant than ever. “I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely,” she writes. The original version was published as a memoir in 1990 after Mueller died of AIDS-related complications, but subsequently fell out of print and became a hard-sought cult classic. The new edition of Walking Through Clear Water is almost three times the size of the original, and includes unpublished work. Divided up by the places she lived—Baltimore, Provincetown, and New York—the book chronicles Mueller’s life, her fiction, and the impact of her columns “Ask Dr. Mueller” and “Art and About.” 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.”Mueller was married to Vittorio Scarpati, who died of AIDS in September 1989. [4] [5] Death and legacy [ edit ] Her chronicles of the last days of American countercultural life New York's downtown scene bursts with energy. 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.” 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 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. Still, it’s hard to imagine where Mueller might fit in during this current era; she would be 73 if she hadn’t died of AIDS-related pneumonia at age 40. She likely would have had thoughts on the current health crisis. Prior to her own diagnosis, Mueller used her column–where she is illustrated as a bombshell with a stethoscope–to urge readers with AIDS to try homeopathic methods. “Like some bizarre sci-fi CIA plot the [American Medical Association] seems to be trying, albeit unwittingly, to obliterate the following groups: queers, voodooers, drug fiends, hemophiliacs who need transfusions often, and straights who share Sabrett hotdogs with gays,” she wrote. “I’m tired of going to wakes. I miss these people.” Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/5 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. Goldin photographed Mueller standing in front of Vittorio’s casket. “I’d always believed that if I photographed anything or anyone enough, I would never lose them,” Goldin wrote in her 1998 book “Couples and Loneliness.” “With the death of seven or eight of my closest friends and dozens and dozens of my acquaintances, I realize there is so much the photograph doesn’t preserve. ... It doesn’t preserve a life.”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. 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.