Mizu presents … Cookie Mueller Day *

* (restored)
—-

 

Filmography:

Variety (1983)

 

Smithereens (1982)

 

Downtown 81 (1981)

 

Polyester (1981)

 

Subway Riders (1981)

 

Underground U.S.A. (1980)

 

Seduction of Patrick (1979)

 

Final Reward (1978)

 

Desperate Living (1977)

 

Female Trouble (1974)

 

Pink Flamingos (1972)

 

Multiple Maniacs (1970)

 

Books and Stories:

1. How To Get Rid Of Pimples: The Actual Cure

2. Garden Of Ashes

3. Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls

4. Putti’s Pudding (w/ Vittorio Scarpati)

5. Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

6. Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings Of Cookie Mueller (anthology)

7. Drugs (w/ Glenn O’Brien)

 

Tribute Sites:

 

Dreamland Girl
www.angelfire.com/md/cookiemueller/home.html

Courage, Bread and Roses: A Tribute to Cookie Mueller
http://www3.sympatico.ca/brooksdr/jw/cookie/main.htm

Quotes About Cookie:

 

1) “Cookie Mueller 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.” — John Waters, 1996

2) “The first time I saw Cookie she was having a yard sale on her front porch in Provincetown. She was a cross between a Tobacco Road outlaw and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen….

Cookie was a social light, a diva, a beauty, my idol. Over the years she became a writer, a critic, my best friend, my sister. We lived throught the peaks and the dread together in Provincetown, New York, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Positano.

… in 1988 Cookie got sick. …in August 1989 the effects of AIDS had robbed her of her voice… On September 14th her husband Vittorio Scarpati died from an AIDS-related illness and after that Cookie kind of gave up. She died on November 10th in the hospice of the Cabrini Medical Center.” — Nan Goldin, 1990

3) Any time she walked out the door, her life was a story. I mean, everything she did. I mean, she’d say ‘I’m going to go get the milk’ and something lunatic would happen to her. So her life was like that all the time.

 

Cookie in her own Words / Quotes and Passages from her stories:

1) Yeah, life is tough in the real world. Actors wait on tables, ballet dancers work as topless go-go girls, artists wash dishes, and that’s not even the worst part. Someday you might bring your garbage on the subway, someday you might even shit in your own bank. (“Another Boring Day”)

2) A few weeks later, I accidentally got a job working two days a week as a housekeeper. The house was spacious and warm with all kinds of stuff to make work easier…. The only real problem was Wendy, the woman who lived there with her husband, Chris.

She was there most of the time, so I couldn’t totally relax when I cleaned. She stayed in bed though, all day, lying in her flab…

I didn’t blame her for lying in bed. She couldn’t walk. She was crippled from an accident in Mexico when her husband Chris haphazardly ran over her legs with the Volkswagon camper.

I felt sorry for her. Had it been me I would have divorced and sued this Chris person. He kept insisting that the reason she couldn’t walk was a psychological disturbance. He sounded like that misogynist idiot Sigmund Freud….

I cleaned around her.

One day I found some wild photos of Wendy and Chris. I think one of them left them out especially for me. There was a picture of Wendy spread-eagled, inserting huge bowling pins into her vagina. There was a picture of Chris trying to stick silver balls up his ass. There were pictures of the two of them and some other girl. She was tied up and they were all over her….

Because of these snapshots, I was prepared for anything, and sure enough, the day after… Wendy called me up to her bedroom….

“Cookie,” she said, “you might as well know that Chris and I aren’t getting along very well.”
“Oh?”
“I think it’s my legs. They’re not really pretty anymore…. Anyway, I want you to help us put our marriage back together again. You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, sure, whatever I can do to help,” I said, and thought oh no.

“Well, I’d like you to come over here tonight, around 2 in the morning, and get in bed with Chris. I’ll be sitting in that chair over there, and I’ll just watch. We’ll play it by ear, okay?”

“I don’t know, Wendy…” I said. Wild horses couldn’t drag me into bed with that husband of hers.
“Please, it would really help out,” she said.

I went back downstairs and stood there for a couple of minutes. Was she joking? I hated threesomes. Somebody was always getting left out. I didn’t want to fuck her husband, I didn’t want to fuck her. I didn’t want to be an upstairs maid!

…I went back upstairs.
“Look, I don’t think that’s my cup of tea,” I said.
“I thought you were wild,” she said.
Why does everyone think I’m so wild? I’m not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.
“You’re supposed to be so wild,” she almost screamed.
“Well, I’m all finished for today,” I changed the subject. “I relined the stove with tin foil, and…”

She sighed, “Oh, go away.”

I did. I went home and didn’t go back… Too bad. I needed that money for Christmas. I wanted to buy everybody something special. Oh well.
(“Provincetown—1970”)

3) “The worst part is there’s no flattery involved in rape; I mean, it doesn’t much matter what the females look like; it doesn’t even seem to matter either if they have four legs instead of two. Dairy farmers have raped their own cows even.
‘It’s great to fuck a cow,’ they say, ‘you can fit everything in… the balls… everything.’
So I guess it just depends on your genital plumbing as to how you see the following story.
(“Abduction & Rape—Highway 31, Elkton, Maryland, 1969”)

4) “I accidentally burned a friend’s house to the ground once. The friend didn’t approve.”
(“British Columbia—1972)

5) “Aren’t you supposed to do some scene where you get fucked by a chicken?” Divine asked me.
“Fucked by a real chicken?” Mink asked me.
“How?” asked Bonnie.
“In the script it says Crackers cuts off the head of a chicken and he fucks me with the stump,” I said.
“Oh that sounds easy,” Divine said.
“Yeah, that’s pretty easy compared with what you have to do,” I said to Divine.
“Chickens scratch pretty bad,” David said. “Even without their heads.”
“Bird wounds can be dangerous,” Van said.

I thought about Hitchcock’s The Birds, but those were seagulls and I knew just how powerful seagulls could be. Compared to them, chickens were jellyfish.

“I’m not worried about some little scratches,” I said.
(“Pink Flamingos”)

6) I met all the German film stars, people I’d always wanted to have beers with: Udo Kier, Bruno Ganz, Klaus Kinski, and the German filmmakers (Fassbinder, Herzog, Schroeder). I was in Aryan heaven.
(“The Berlin Film Festival—1981”)

7) Biography and Education: I received most of my education traveling and working various inane jobs such as: clothing designer, racehorse hot walker, drug dealer, go-go dancer, underground film actress (otherwise known as independent feature actress), playwright, theater director, performance artist, house cleaner, fish packer, credit clerk, barmaid, sailor, high seas cook, film script doctor, herbal therapist, unwed welfare mother, film extra, leg model, watercolorist, and briefly as a bar mitzvah entertainer, although I’m not even Jewish.

I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely. I wrote a novel when I was twelve and put it in cardboard and Saran Wrap, took it to the library and put it on the shelves in the correct alphabetical order. When I was eighteen, I left college for Haight-Ashbury and wound up a drug casualty, not unlike a bag lady. I learned a lot in the mental hospital, where I had shock therapy that didn’t work except for eradicating from my memory all the contents from novels I had read in the last twelve years.

A few of the films I appeared in have attained a cult status and I am told that I have a fan club in Los Angeles.

I have a twelve-year old son, who I believe has taught me the most.

I used to write poetry, but now I feel that poetry is archaic unless written specifically as song lyrics. I believe that my short stories are novels for people with short attention spans.

I live with my son in Manhattan and pay the rent as a journalist.
(“Cookie Mueller, born 1949, Baltimore, Maryland”)

 

Photos:

 

Clips

Cookie Mueller in film and video at 356 Mission

Sylvia Miles, Ronee Blakley, Cookie Mueller at The Chelsea Hotel

Cookie meets Edie the Egglady

cookie mueller “secrets of the skinny”

COOKIE- a new film by Liz Rosenfeld

Justin Vivian Bond Reads Cookie Mueller at Low Life

Dreamlander: The Legend of Cookie Mueller (Opening Sequence)

People remember actress and writer Cookie Mueller

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. So the p.s. and I are back just for this one day. This afternoon I head to Glasgow to co-host a screening there of PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT tomorrow night, and I’ll get back to Paris on Friday. Thus, for the next two days, you’ll get p.s.-less restored posts, but everything, p.s./me included, will be back to normal again starting on Saturday. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes re: your unfinished faves, and of course I have to add Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’. That Jacob Collier guy is everywhere right now, or his algorithm seems to have staked a claim in my newsfeed at least. ** Misanthrope, Glad you dug it, bud. Sequel-itis is pretty gross, yeah. I don’t mind so much with horror movies for some reason. I wonder why. It’s always madness in the Wines household, god love you crazy guys. ** Sypha, Yeah, my FB newsfeed was a GoT fan feed there for a couple of days, and may still be. It’s nice to have something there that makes people so collectively excited and basically non-argumentative. ** Nate Dorr, Hi, Nate! Thank you so very much for showing PGL. Zac Farley and I are just thrilled. Oh, wow, that’s ultra-cool about the related radio soundtrack! Thank you. I’ll stream it on my way to the airport. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with anything. Everyone, Nate Dorr who’s behind Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn where PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT will be screening four times starting tomorrow night, has created a related soundtrack that’s a collage of such things as, in his words, ‘Coil & Lee Ranaldo’s score for Frisk, songs that play during the action of Guide and Try’ that you can now hear on Spectacle’s mixcloud radio program by clicking this. That’s so cool of you, sir. Thank you once again for everything! ** Dominik, Hi, D! The Cherbourg avant-premiere was pretty good. People seemed to like the film, and every single person stayed all the way to the end of the Q&A, which is super rare. Beautiful and telling and inspiring thoughts on your gender discovery. It’s not really the same thing, but I’ve always been like that about being gay in the sense of the label and being categorised and pre-determined by other people due to generalising notions of what ‘gay’ says about a person who happens to fall in that realm. I have no interest in notions of collective identity, although I know many others do and find them useful, and I always bristle against generalisations across the board, even when I lazily make them myself unthinkingly for expediency. I try to think of everyone as an original and start there and let what I learn from that person fill in my understanding of them. Or something. Yeah, the 16+ rating is a real problem. It’s even negatively affecting the film’s release in Paris, it turns out. It’s just ridiculous, but we’re stuck there. No, I wish we could go to NYC for the screenings, but we have a ton do here re: the upcoming PGL French release and, yes, the TV script of course. Have a really fantastic rest of your week, D! ** Steve Erickson, In order to make the already time-consuming building of the escort and slave posts doable, I limit my search to guys 25 years old and younger. If I opened the search up to guys of any age, I would literally spend half my time on those posts. Yes, about the rating. To try to put a positive spin on it,I guess it means the ratings board thinks the film is dangerously effective, even if they misunderstand what it’s doing. I haven’t heard the Alvin Curran, but I will, thanks! ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. One time, a long time ago, I found a slave who had tailored his profile to try to get me to choose him for inclusion in my blog posts. And I did, of course. Otherwise, no, I think they’re oblivious to my doings, even though, yes, it does sometimes seem like they’re custom-made. Ha ha, well, we shot the film in Cherbourg, so we’re pretty familiar with the place. Maybe some day PGL will overtake ‘Umbrellas’ as the city’s popular identifier when hell freezes over. ** _Black_Acrylic, So great about the website’s near-birth! Oh, shit, feel tons better quickly, Ben. And I hope I’ll get to see you tomorrow evening. ** Okay. Today’s restored post is a super old one made by a once longtime d.l. Mizu, who later became Mieze. Enjoy her introduction to the great cookie Mueller. The blog will see you tomorrow and Friday, as per usual, and I’ll be back here on Saturday.