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

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

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

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In her art review column for Details, the independent downtown culture magazine, Mueller didn’t review art as much as she lamented about the state of the art world, and waxed poetic whenever she was moved to do so. “You have to have opinions while looking for art or searching out the other forms of divinity in daily life,” she succinctly says in her May 1987 essay as she rereads her most recent column. The smaller scale of personal visibility in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, produced a kind of alacrity toward the world that isn’t as common in contemporary writing. Mueller's appetite for life was impressive for any decade and her storytelling is as immersive and exciting as her life was. Through her writing, we travel with Mueller as she hitchhikes across the US, tries most of the drugs that come her way, and gallivants to far-flung locales with no plan. On one occasion, recounted in her essay “The Italian Remedy–1983,” she simply stayed with a man who worked at the train station of the train she came in on. Because of her writing style, we get to join Mueller in the way she fully occupied the present. In these moments with her, we get a taste of what it’s like to live in her embodied instant. We get to experience the unrestrained perspective of someone who, when she was a waitress, found the customers so miserable to deal with that she wound up throwing food at them. She looked for thrills and intrigue wherever she could find it, and took on hardship with a sense of grace. In one of her fables she wrote about a woman losing her toe, who after much inner turmoil acquiesces: “There is a great art to handling losses with nonchalance.” Mueller felt it all, processed her experiences, and kept moving. With a swath of pivotal events in Mueller's life—including her brother's death at age 14, the result of climbing a dead tree, which collapsed on him in the woods near their home—she went on to pursue her writing, and in high school hung out with the hippie crowd. One of Mueller's idiosyncrasies as a teen was that she constantly dyed her hair: "'Whenever you're depressed, just change your hair color,' she [her mother] always told me, years later, when I was a teenager: I was never denied a bottle of hair bleach or dye. In my closet there weren't many clothes, but there were tons of bottles." 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. Mueller was living on borrowed time too. While Scarpati was in the hospital, she and her friend, artist Scott Covert, went to Provincetown, Mass. “She had this card that I found,” Covert remembers in Chloe Griffin’s oral biography of Mueller, “Edgewise.” “It had something she would repeat to herself, for some kind of visualization, like a mantra: ‘I will live long enough to write my novel — one year, two years ... .’ I don’t know what the novel was about; maybe her life. She wanted to dedicate it to her son.”

Her chronicles of the last days of American countercultural life New York’s downtown scene bursts with energy.” Mueller, Cookie (1988). Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls. New York: Hanuman Books. ISBN 0-937815-14-4.

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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.”

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.” You have to have opinions while looking for art or searching out the other forms of divinity in daily life.” Soderberg, Brandon (October 22, 2014). "Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller". The Baltimore Sun. p.T55 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. 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.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.” Mueller, Cookie (1997). Scholder, Amy (ed.). Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller. New York: Serpent's Tail High Risk Books. ISBN 1-85242-331-5. 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. 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.)



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