Cookie Fever Forever

Personal icon and international should-be legend Cookie Mueller is best known for her roles in several John Waters films, but she was so much more than Concetta with a knife in her pocketbook in Female Trouble -- after working with Waters she went on to have an estimable writing career, being a proto-hipster (that term would probably make her skin crawl) and writing superb and funny Downtown NYC scenester essays for the East Village Eye and art criticism for early Details magazine all through the 1980s. Her work was collected into a couple of books that have since been out-of-print and hard-as-fuck to find, but the fine people at Semiotext(e) have today rectified that situation, at least when it comes to her best known work, and reprinted the fabulous posthumous 1990 collection Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black -- you can buy a copy today right at this link! 

I recommend you read that and you also pick up a copy of the Cookie biography called Edgewise from a few years back if you haven't read that (see my previous posts about that one here) -- of course, as with the earlier books, Edgewise appears to be out of print right now and is already super-expensive. Oh, the price of being hip! Just go steal a copy from some asshole -- that's what Cookie would have recommended. Anyway in related news -- and how wonderful to have more Cookie info to share than just one thing! -- the Metrograph movie theater here in NYC is doing a Cookie film series! She wasn't only a Dreamlander for John Waters -- she was in several other movies as well, and they're screening a bunch! I don't have a direct link for tickets yet or a full schedule, but the series begins on May 6th and here's their press release:

Stumbling Onto Wildness: Cookie Mueller On Film

Dorothy “Cookie” Mueller was born in Baltimore in 1949, and she died 40 years later in New York City; in the short time that she spent on this planet, she unfailingly sniffed out where the action was, and got herself involved with whatever was worth being involved with. A founding member of fellow Charm City native John Waters’s Dreamlanders ensemble, once Cookie made it to New York she became a muse and key collaborator to artists including Nan Goldin, Gary Indiana, and Bette Gordon—and she also became an extraordinary writer, developing a jocular, unsentimental, and hilariously brazen voice. You can encounter that voice in Semiotext(e)’s reprinting of Cookie’s posthumously published 1990 memoir, the riotous Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which we’ll be celebrating the reappearance of at the Metrograph Bookstore, and in this series of films featuring Mueller, which just happens to include some of the wildest stuff American independent cinema had to offer over the course of two decades.

Titles include A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, Subway Riders, Desperate Living, Multiple Maniacs, Polyester, Variety, and more.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Female Trouble (1974)

Concetta: Just get your hair done. 

That's what I always do when I get depressed. 

It's strange that IMDb has Cookie Mueller's birthday as August 1st while Wikipedia has it as today (they both say 1949 is the year) but I'm gonna believe it's today, March 2nd, since the Facebook page for Edgewise, the book about Cookie's life is celebrating today and I feel like they're the experts. Did I mention the book about Cookie? Once again I repeat for the 50th time, you should read the book about Cookie Mueller. It's a fabulous and engrossing read about a fabulous and engrossing person.

Free Cookie

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Dan got me a VINCENT PRICE signed Gas Company check from 1973 for Christmas -- literally the BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT EVER!!!!! #vincentprice

A photo posted by Jason Adams (@jasonaadams) on Dec 25, 2016 at 10:41am PST

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My boyfriend deserves a shout-out for giving me some fine Xmas presents this year - that Vincent Price signed check seen above would be enough to buy my love for maybe even several months even (I ain't cheap) but he went above and beyond and also got me a book by Miss Cookie Mueller that I have been clamoring for for ages and ages. It's a collection of her writings called Ask Dr. Meuller that was published in 1996, seven years after she had died of AIDS.

Mueller, if you don't know - and you should know! - was an actress and bon vivant; I know her from several of John Waters movies, but her life was A LIFE beyond that. A fantastic biography of her called Edgewise from the people who knew her best was recently released that I pushed on you people at the time - it is highly recommended.

Anyway after I read that I wanted to read some of her writing - she did columns for a bunch of downtown papers and magazines in the 80s while living her nutty life - but a lot of it is hard to come by. Ask Dr. Mueller collects the best of it, but the book is out of print and goes for upwards of 90 bucks on Amazon. So I probably never would have spent that on myself, but as a gift I will gobble it right up.

I do have a point here besides rubbing in how good I have it, though - this morning I was reading the book on the train on my way to work and there was a chapter titled "A Last Letter" that moved me to tears (especially knowing that AIDS would take her several years after she wrote down this piece) and I thought to myself that the internet needs to have this, and with the book being so prohibitively expensive it's a shame not a lot of people will get to read it. So I have it for you! It's only three pages but I'm too lazy to transcribe the whole damn thing so I took pictures, click 'em to embiggen.

"A Last Letter" by Cookie Mueller

All About Cookie

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I'm only about a third of the way through Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, the just-released biography of the actress best known for her work with John Waters, and I know I've pushed it on you a couple of times already, but man you guys this book is awesome. If you're at all interested in the back-story of the Dreamlanders so far this is reading like an oral history of the scene from an angle on it that hasn't been told before, and Cookie couldn't be more fascinating a character. Read it!

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In Remembrance of Cookie

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It took me ages because my reading habits have gone to hell ever since I got an iPad (why read a book when you can flip through Instagram that hour before you fall asleep instead?) but I finally finished Edgewise, the biography of Cookie Mueller I told y'all about awhile back, and I just wanna say - READ THIS BOOK, you guys. Have any of you read it yet? It's wonderful, absolutely wonderful - I don't think I expected, after all the funny weird stories that it tells about this funny weird woman, for the end to pack such an emotional whallop, but man does it - the weight of those years, which were before my time but not enough before not to haunt all the same, is there in full force; this is hardly "an AIDS book" (my scare quotes) but in showing us the singularity of this bright lady, the sense of all we lost, all the creative minds that AIDS tore away from us, sneaks up and smacks you something hard.

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