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

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Mueller was married to Vittorio Scarpati, who died of AIDS in September 1989. [4] [5] Death and legacy [ edit ] 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. 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.” 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.”

Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/20 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. The last of Mueller's quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death: Her chronicles of the last days of American countercultural life New York's downtown scene bursts with energy. 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.” a b "Cookie Mueller Dead; Actress and Writer, 40". The New York Times. November 15, 1989. p.B 28. ProQuest 110155682 . Retrieved November 8, 2020– via ProQuest.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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.” Soderberg, Brandon (October 22, 2014). "Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller". The Baltimore Sun. p.T55 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com.It’s a mixture of Possum’s Run Amok, Patti Smith essence, Girl Interrupted, Funny Weather by Olivia Liang, wild, sensational, wisdom and humor. 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.”

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. 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 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. 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.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. 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." 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 Mueller, Cookie (1988). Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls. New York: Hanuman Books. ISBN 0-937815-14-4.